Lloyd Clark appears to be yet another good British military historian. I hadn’t read anything by him before – most of his works have been on WWI. That makes Anzio appropriate, since the battle was as close to Western Front trench fighting as anything in the Second World War.


If you happen to be unfamiliar with the Italian campaign, the Allies initially landed at the toe and heel of the boot, then at the instep (Salerno). Progress was excruciating slow, as the terrain and weather heavily favored the defense, and the German commander, Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, was a master at defensive fighting, withdrawing to a succession of previously prepared defensive lines. The American high command was anxious to end the Italian campaign, and considered simply going on the defensive themselves while withdrawing troops and amphibious assets to prepare for OVERLORD (one thing I hadn’t realized is ANVIL, the invasion of southern France, was originally intended to take place before, not after, OVERLORD). Churchill, however, was of the opinion that further action in Italy was “promising” and eventually persuaded Roosevelt and Marshall to leave the amphibious craft in the Mediterranean a little longer and use them to land forces behind the Gustav Line and trap the German armies.


What actually happened is that the forces landed at Anzio (Operation SHINGLE) were too weak to do everything expected of them. The operation ended up reminiscent of Gallipoli, with the landing force sitting on the beachhead instead of pressing inland in the face of weak to nonexistent enemy forces. Kesselring quickly brought up reinforcements and Anzio became what Nazi propagandists described as “the world’s largest self-sustaining POW camp”. Fortunately for our side, Hitler insisted on attempting to reduce the bridgehead rather than just containing it, and the Germans spent themselves in a series of bloody attacks against British and American troops. Forces at Anzio were built up, and eventually attacked outward in conjunction with an offensive against the Gustav Line. The armies linked up, and Rome fell to the Allies; the Germans, however, were able to retreat to yet another preplanned defensive line and the Italian campaign dragged on.


Clark is pretty frank about Allied military commanders. Patton and Montgomery are “narcissists” and Mark Clark is a “publicity hound” who diverted the eventual attack out of the pocket so he could be photographed entering Rome. Alexander, the Mediterranean theater commander, is not firm enough, making suggestions rather than giving orders – particularly in the case of Mark Clark. John Lucas, the initial commander at Anzio, is too genial and cautious. The only general officers Clark is fond of are Lucian Truscott, who eventually took over at Anzio, and Albert Kesselring; Colonel William Darby of the U.S. Rangers gets a nod as well; Clark does not blame him for losing three Ranger battalions at Anzio, since he was given impossible orders.


Based on the information presented, Clark’s assessments seem to be correct. Astonishingly, Mark Clark seems to have given orders that the US Fifth Army engage the British Eighth Army in combat rather than let them get to Rome first. I’m inclined to be a little more charitable to Lucas; he was given conflicting orders to “be aggressive” but not to “stick his neck out”. He could have easily reached Rome in the first few days after the landing – in fact, both American jeep patrols and British Bren carrier patrols did exactly that – but just didn’t have the strength to hold that much terrain and would have been quickly cut off and annihilated if he had tried. However, he could have expanded the beachhead a little further – in particular to cut a couple of highways that latter allowed the Germans to move troops up to Anzio and maintain a withdrawal route for the Gustav Line. I’m also inclined to agree with Clark – and many of the military at the time – that the whole thing was a mistake. The invasion was undertaken with troops that were “too few to fight but too many to die” – the initial landing was two divisions, one British and one American – plus an assortment of independent units. Many of the independent troops involved were specialists – the American Rangers, the British Special Service Force (Commandos), and American independent parachute battalions – that ended up being squandered as line infantry in horrific fighting conditions. It’s not clear that the regular divisions would have made much difference along the Gustav Line, but the specialist troops could have been employed in various small airborne or amphibious outflanking movements (British Commandos had done exactly that some weeks earlier to unhinge the German line from the Adriatic Sea).


Clark devotes a lot of space to various eyewitness reports – all from relatively low ranks, since officers from WWII are getting rather thin on the ground now. Initially, the British and Americans didn’t get along very well, but eventually the two sides earned each other’s respect (Clark recounts a private in the Gordon Highlanders who was somewhat critical of a Yanks who cadged a couple bottles of beer from him; things changed when the American returned latter with a bottle of whiskey, noting that being a beer drinker he didn’t much care for the stuff). The Germans tended to be respectful of both sides but were especially put off by the Rangers and Paratroopers throat-cutting tactics when on patrol, and the preponderance of Allied air power and (eventually) artillery.


Excellent maps – they show terrain and make it clear why the Alban Hills were so important for the battle (and also that the hills are volcanic). A minor flaw is that the maps are sometimes inserted at odd places in relation to the text, and that the map of the breakout from Anzio does not show the corresponding actions by Fifth and Eighth Army at the Gustav Line. This is especially annoying since one of Clark’s theses is that the breakout should have turned north, to trap German armies in the Gustav Line, rather than northwest to take Rome; it would have helped if the map showed where the Gustav line was in relation to Anzio.


Recommended and I’ll have to read some more of Clark’s books. ( )

To my mind this is a long-overdue account of operations in Sicily and Southern Italy. Clark gives some superb details and analysis of the strategic situation and the culture of the allied armies/commanders involved, before going into detail on the operations to land in Sicily and then in Italy proper. I'm impressed with the amount of work that's gone into this, he's obviously done his work in the archives, both Axis and Allied. ( )