Ballad of Anzio

DESCRIPTION: "When the M.G.s stop their chatter And the cannons stop their roar... When the small talk is all over... You can stop the lot by telling Of the fight at Anzio." Other battles don't compare. The veterans should drink to those who fought with them there
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1947 (Henderson-BalladsOfWorldWarII)
KEYWORDS: soldier battle | Anzio
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Jan 22, 1944 - the Anzio landing
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Henderson-BalladsOfWorldWarII, XX, "Ballad of Anzio" (1 text)
Palmer-WhatALovelyWar, pp. 176-177, "Ballad of Anzio" (1 text, tune referenced)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Lachlan Tigers" (tune, according to Palmer-WhatALovelyWar)
NOTES [4734 words]: The fiasco of the Anzio landing arose out of a combination of incompetence in the Allied high command, the difficult terrain in Italy, and Winston Churchill's incurable tendency to meddle.
After the Allies had captured North Africa, they had to figure out what to do. They could have pulled back their troops to prepare for the invasion of Normandy -- but it would be most of a year before they could be ready, and in that time, they wouldn't be fighting the Germans at all. Stalin would be very upset, and the Allies themselves weren't any too happy with the idea. So they invaded Sicily. (For background on this, see "Banks of Sicily (The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily).")
Taking Sicily was, I think, a reasonable choice; it truly cleared the Mediterranean for Allied operations. But once it was taken, the Allies were in the same boat: they had to figure out what to do next. At this stage, I think most authorities agree that they should have concentrated on invading France, either across the English Channel or from the south. But, with Sicily secure, they were just across the Straits of Messina from the southern tip of the Italian mainland. So they invaded Italy proper. And once they had invaded Italy, the temptation was to keep trying to capture more and more of it.
The longer the Italian campaign went on, the more it became clear they were on the wrong track. The Allies had caused the Italians to overthrow Mussolini, but the Germans had occupied Italy; Mussolini's fall had done the Allies no good. And the possession of Sicily neutralized Italy; the Germans weren't going to conduct any offensive operations from there.
And Italy, with the Apennines running down the center of the peninsula, was terrible country for an offensive. Armor was mostly useless; taking the territory required infantry to slog up the peninsula, attacking strong defensive positions the whole way. The Italian campaign was slow and dreadful, with high casualties for low results; for this, see the notes to "The D-Day Dodgers."
And the Allies came up against the almost-unbreakable Gustav Line around Cassino, Italy just as a lot of their best officers -- Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Bernard Law Montgomery, and Admiral Andrew B. Cunningham -- were called back to Britain to run the Normandy invasion (D'Este, pp. 68-69). The American forces on the west side of Italy ("Fifth Army") were left in the hands of publicity-hunting, Britain-hating Mark W. Clark. The worn-down British Eighth Army on the east side of the Apennines went to the uninspired Oliver Leese.
Earlier on, when the Allied generals had expected to make more progress, they considered a landing at Anzio (the Roman "Antium," the birthplace of the Emperor Nero; Morison, p. 335), right behind where they thought the front lines would be. These short "end runs" had worked well in Sicily, but they depended on being able to land close to the front line. When the Allied advance stalled, the Anzio landing lost its point, plus the generals who dreamed it up seem to have looked at the logistics and given up (Wheal/Pope, p. 21); on December 22, 1943, the Allies canceled it (Morison, p. 324).
At this point, any general with any strategic sense would have said, "Let's stop. We'll hold what we have, and let the Germans hold the rest of Italy while we prepare to invade France." Churchill was not a sensible general. He was clever and original, but he was stubborn as a mule. The Italian front was stalled, but he wasn't willing to accept "We've won" for an answer, so he kept casting around for another approach. His bright idea was to brin gback "Operation Shingle." Churchill revived the idea the very day after it was cancelled (Atkinson, p. 323; Morison, p. 324).
The original idea was to land a single division behind enemy lines -- basically an invitation for the Germans to swallow it whole. Eventually this evolved into a plan for a two-division landing (Atkinson, p. 324). It was still too small to do much good, and shipping was a perpetual problem for the Allies (they were particularly short of Landing Ship Tanks, or LSTs, which were the key to any landing; D'Este, p. 72), but Franklin Roosevelt went along (D'Este, p. 78).
The American commander in Italy, Mark Clark, thought at least three divisions were needed, and felt that it should be composed of one nationality for logistic reasons (Atkinson, pp. 324-325). Clark had more ego than brains, but in this he was surely right. But, for political reasons, the invasion was planned to consist of of one British and one American division, and the Navy intended to land them with one week's supplies and made no plans to bring more. Basically, the landing force was expected to break through to the Allied lines south of them -- or else (Atkinson, p. 325).
The area around Anzio was chosen because the land was relatively flat; there was no rough ground overlooking it where the Germans could build defenses. (Though that very flatness meant that, when the Germans mounted their artillery above the field, they could see, and hit, anything and everything; D'Este, p. 150.) But it was sixty miles from the Allies lines at Cassino, closer to Rome than to any Allied force; the two Allied forces were not mutually supporting, and one or the other would have to break through the fortified German lines to allow them to reunite (Atkinson, p. 326). (The alternative was that the Anzio force could try to reach Rome, which was relatively nearby, but there really weren't enough troops for that!) Moreover, as D'Este, p. 403, points out, the initial landing force had no armored units; it was an infantry landing. Which meant that it couldn't break out of the beach position if it wanted to!
The assignment was impossible as given. It was a terrible risk, but Churchill pushed his generals to accept it -- Atkinson says "Churchill had prevailed through intimidation, endurance, and imaginative panache, wearing them down" (Atkinson, p. 326).
Clark's forces to the south were supposed to attack the main German line to force them to commit their reserves (D'Este, p. 79); also, a deception campaign was mounted to try to make the Germans think something else was going on (Morison, pp. 329-330). The German commander Albert Kesselring did send a couple of divisions to strengthen the lines around Cassino, but he kept enough forces in reserve to deal with fleabites like the Anzio landing (Morison, p. 344). A bombing campaign tried to cut German communications (Morison, p. 331). None of it did any good; bombing was never as effective as its backers claimed, the main German lines were strong enough that they didn't need their reserves, and Kesselring had already planned for all sorts of contingencies and wasn't going to move until one of them actually happened. Kesselring had out-generaled the Allies without even knowing what they were doing! And he never reacted without thinking (D'Este, p. 132, says that "Kesselring excelled at the art of improvisation, , and Anzio may well have been his finest hour").
Clark made the peculiar decision to appoint an "elderly and unproven general," John P. Lucas (1890-1949) to command the Anzio expedition (Boatner, p. 327). And although he had wanted at least three divisions, only two were assigned to the initial landing.
A noteworthy feature of this part of Italy was that there were only two significant north-south roads on the west side of the central spine: Highway 6, well inland, and Highway 7, the old Appian Way, nearer the coast (D'Este, p. 67). If these roads could be cut, the Germans to the south would be cut off. Even just cutting Highway 7 would put them in severe logistic difficulties. But Lucas's orders did not tell him to go after Highway 7.
In the end, the British 1st Division and the American 3rd division were chosen to be the initial landing force. with some American Ranger and British Commando units in between. The British landed in the north; the Americans to the south; the Rangers in the middle, being responsible for the town of Anzio itself; the largest town in the area, Nettuno, was on the boundary between the Rangers and the 3rd Division. (There is a map on p. 358 of Atkinson.) Because British divisions were getting thin by this time, Atkinson, p. 363, says that the British landed 9,000 men on the first day, the Americans 27,000. The whole was designated VI Corps, even though Lucas would have difficulties coordinating two divisions from two different nations. There were some reinforcements available at sea, but the initial force was barely a corps.
As Morison, p. 336, says, "This was the fundamental weakness of Operation Shingle. Either it was a job for a full army, or it was no job at all; to attempt it with only two divisions was to send a boy on a man's errand."
The practice for the landing had been disastrous (Morison, p. 332). Yet the main show went fine. The landing force arrived just after midnight on January 22, 1944 and went ashore a few hours later. There was almost no opposition; many of the soldiers never even got their feet wet (Atkinson, pp. 360-361. This was especially true for the Americans; the British encountered unswept sea and land mines and rougher territory; Morison, p. 339). The landing forces were free to go where they wished; only 13 Allied troops were killed in the initial landing, with 97 wounded and 44 missing. The navy losses were higher, though still fairly light (Morison, p. 343). But Lucas didn't make any attempt to push them out to Highway 7 to cut off Axis supply lines.
The German commander in Italy, Kesselring, was shocked -- intelligence services thought the Allies would not be able to make another amphibious landing for at least six weeks. This had caused him to send off the closest reinforcements to deal with the threats to his primary line (Atkinson, p. 364). But he had done his staff work; he had plans for most contingencies -- and activated the relevant one at once. Within three hours of his learning of the landing, he had made his plans; within six hours, he had issued orders for all or part of eleven divisions to head to Anzio; the first units were on the way in less than half a day. Indeed, the first units started to reach the front in less than 24 hours (Atkinson, p. 365). Although they weren't numerous at first, they were generally quality troops -- paratroops and panzergrenadiers (D'Este, p. 125; "panzergrenadiers" was the German name for mechanized infantry).
Kesselring also ordered air attacks, which sank a destroyer, a hospital ship, and some lesser vessels. Morison, pp. 395-397, lists the naval forces involved in the Anzio landing. If I read it correctly, it included one seaplane tender as flagship, one American and three British light cruisers, eight American and fourteen British destroyers, and a couple of American destroyer escorts. (By January 26, as the front lines moved away from the shore, and more Axis aircraft attacked the fleet, the local naval commander requested something heavier -- a heavy cruiser or monitor that could fire heavier shells at longer distances. The request was denied; Morison, p. 350. It didn't help that air/sea coordination was very poor; Morison, p. 351).
Two cruisers and three destroyers, all British, were eventually lost -- though it should be noted that the British light cruisers were much smaller than the American ships of that type; they were hardly more than destroyers). There were also some losses to mines (Atkinson, pp. 368-369).
Pretty soon, the Germans were in place and it was the Allies who were in trouble: caught on a beach with no shelter and no defensive prospects, with the Germans able to pound on them from three directions. By the beginning of February, the Germans had 71,000 troops in place confronting something like 41,000 Allied (D'Este, p. 146). Plus the Allies having only limited capacity to bring in reinforcements or supplies (Atkinson, p. 367). Making Lucas even more cautious was the way enemy reinforcements were arriving: Because of the roads and such, often only part of a German unit would be in place, but once any part of a unit was present, Lucas assumed it was all there. His superiors had better information but were forbidden to share it (D'Este, p. 145). This naturally made Lucas cautious.
An attempt on January 30 to expand the perimeter was a disastrous, bloody failure, with many of the best troops taken prisoner. One Ranger battalion lost all but six of 767 men, killed or captured -- a loss rate of more than 99% (D'Este, p. 167).
Although troops continued to arrive, eventually reaching a total of more than 90,000, the Anzio beachhead had become a defensive perimeter, with the troops digging in (Atkinson, pp. 412-414). The idea of capturing Rome on their own was long gone. It was simply a place where troops that could have been useful somewhere else sat in a bottle and suffered casualties. Not even the hospitals were safe; they were too close to the front lines, and there was no rear for them to retreat to. By February 4, it was the Germans who were attacking (Atkinson, p. 416). Although new troops were coming in, during this period, VI corps was losing men faster than they were replaced (D'Este, p. 205, says losses averaged 800 men per day, with only 500 replacements arriving, and those replacements would generally not be as effective as the men they replaced anyway). Fighting around the planned community of Aprilia, commonly known as "The Factory" after one of the buildings (which looked like a tower), was particularly intense (Atkinson, p. 419); the site is mentioned in the song. (The Allies seem to have liked giving these sorts of names to places on the battlefield; Trevelyan, pp. 216-127, mentions places such as "The Factory," "The Bowling Alley," "The Embankment, "The Elbow," "The Starfish," "The Lobster's Claw," "The Boot," and "The Culvert.")
In this battle, more than half the British First Division seems to have been lost (D'Este, p. 218. How Churchill the Imperialist was supposed to hold down the Empire when he was destroying his best troops is beyond me.) Lucas spent the time hidden in his headquarters; he never really examined the front lines or the situation the British were in (D'Este, p. 220). This is probably the single strongest knock on his behavior at Anzio.
On February 16, at Hitler's insistance and against the better judgment of the generals in the field, the Germans put in a big attack at The Factory, which if it had succeeded would have split the British and American forces into separate pockets (Atkinson, pp. 421-423). The Allies were perhaps lucky that the Fourteenth Army that was attacking them was a scratch formation; although the first forces to arrive had been good troops, many of those which arrived later were pretty low-quality (D'Este, p. 187-188).
Lucas received bad news as the assaults went on. Lucian Truscott, the commander of the American 3rd Division, who was already Lucas's de facto second in command, was being bumped up to deputy commander of VI Corps (Atkinson, p. 426; D'Este, 270). Theoretically, American command structures called for every senior officer to have a deputy -- a strange system in an army that had too few experienced officers, given that the deputy's only real job was to take over if the boss was unable to perform. But Lucas perceived, correctly, that the high command was making the move so that they could put Truscott in charge if (or, more likely, when) they chose to fire Lucas.
By February 19, the fourth day of the battle, the German attacks were winding down, broken primarily by the heavy artillery in the Allied forces (Atkinson, p. 427). Both sides had suffered horribly -- about 40,000 casualties out of 200,000 total troops engaged (Atkinson, p. 428). It was too late for Lucas. On February 22, after much argument in the high command, Lucas was sacked and Truscott put in charge of VI Corps (Atkinson, p. 429).
The Germans attacked again on February 29, at Hitler's orders; this time, the Allied forces yielded no ground at all; their artillery had torn the attack to shreds. Even Hitler faced reality and ordered the German army to go on the defensive (Atkinson, pp. 430-432). But the Allies did not take advantage; there were now six divisions, and about 100,000 men, on the beachhead, but they were simply digging in and settling underground (Atkinson, p. 486).
The invaders certainly weren't making any friends. Truscott eventually ordered the entire civilian population of the beachhead evacuated; by early April, everyone was gone except a few Italian laborers (Atkinson, p. 488).
As the weather warmed, malaria mosquitoes came out; the region had once been a marsh that had been reclaimed by Mussolini. But after malaria had scourged the troops in Sicily and Italy the year before, the army was much more diligent at controlling the disease, so cases were relatively few (Atkinson, p. 493). Penicillin was also reaching the front line for the first time (although only in very limited quantities), so deaths from infection also dropped (Atkinson, pp. 493-494).
A spring approached, the Allies put together another plan, much of it the work of a Alexander's new Chief of Staff, John Harding. They rearranged the Fifth and Eighth armies, planning for the main armies to attack the Gustav Line and break through, while the Anzio force broke out to cut off the German retreat (D'Este, pp. 333-342). Harding made his plans extraordinarily well; the movements were so well concealed that the commander of the army guarding the Gustav Line, his main corps commander, his chief of staff, and Kesselring's chief of staff had all gone off on some sort of rest (D'Este, p. 343). For almost the first time in the campaign, the Allies had planned things right.
By May, the Allies had seven full divisions and some auxiliary units at Anzio -- enough troops to qualify as a small army -- and on May 23, they made a major attack -- three divisions and a special forces brigade in the front line, with two divisions in reserve and two more making demonstrations elsewhere along the line (Atkinson, pp. 536-541). Losses were very high -- but on May 24, they finally reached Highway 7, cutting one of the major German supply lines (Atkinson, p. 543). Over the next two days, more than two months after the Anzio landing, the two parts of the Fifth Army were finally reunited (Atkinson, pp. 544-545).
It was Clark's big chance to cut off the entire German force south of Anzio, but Big Ego won over military sense. As Truscott prepared to head for Highway 6 and cut off the German forces, Clark gave orders to (in effect) make the entire force turn left and head for Rome. He wanted his army to get there before the British (Atkinson, pp. 546-547). In fact, he later claimed that he told Alexander he would order his troops to "fire on the Eighth Army" if the British tried to get in at the capture of Rome (Atkinson, p. 550; D'Este, p. 338. Alexander denied having been told this, but it still shows Clark's attitude -- he was frankly too insubordinate to be allowed to remain, but there was no one who could fire him).
Clark had came up with justifications to claim the Germans might escape him. But even if he is right, he was directly violating his orders (Atkinson, p. 549). And, besides, he could go to Rome by Highway 6 as easily as Highway 7. More easily, in fact, since he could take more supplies along two highways than one. To top everything off, Clark hadn't done any staff planning, so his decisions scrambled his logistics and left units trying to use the same roads; their movements were slow, resulting in higher casualties and much discomfort.
As it turned out, Clark's attempted breakout cost the Germans even more dearly than the Allies, but Kesselring held his lines together south of Rome (Atkinson, p. 554).
As D'Este says, p. 365, Clark had "deliberately committed what must rank as one of the most misguided blunders made by any Allied commander during World War II. About to win a stunning victory that would not only have gained him the glittering prize of Rome virtually without a fight but have earned him immortality as a great battlefield commander, Mark Clark suddenly dismembered Operation Buffalo [the operation to cut the German supply routes] and in the process sparked a controversy that continues to this day." Clark's behavior was so egregious that he actually circulated modified copies of his personal diary to cover up his behavior; only when the originals were revealed in 1989 was the truth known (D'Este, p. 368).
The Allies eventually entered Rome without a battle for the city, but that was because Hitler ordered it evacuated to preserve its history; Kesselring wanted to fight for it (Atkinson, p. 568), or at least blow up the bridges to slow the Allies down. Hitler forbade it (D'Este, p. 391), though Kesselring's rearguard gave the Allies a stiff fight on the outskirts of the city (D'Este, p. 394). The Anzio campaign was technically an Allied victory, but it was an extraordinarily expensive and inefficient one.
Churchill's comment was that "I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale" (Boatner, p. 327). The Nazi radio propagandist "Axis Sally" was even more blunt -- and arguably more accurate -- when she called the beachhead "the largest self-supporting prisoner-of-war camp in the world" (Atkinson, p. 494). Most of the soldiers were too young to remember another fancy-pants amphibious landing of 29 years before, but Churchill should have remembered: it was the Dardanelles all over again. Certainly the comparison occurred to Lucas; he told his diary, "This whole affair had a strong odor of Gallipoli and apparently the same amateur was on the coaches bench" (D'Este, p. 107; the "amateur" is Churchill).
Casualties were so high, and the stink of the battlefield so strong that Trevelyan, pp. 18-19, describes how British soldiers didn't even make any effort to clear out German corpses; they just stripped the bodies of valuables and shoved them into some out-of-the-way shrub or the like. Hard to believe the whole Allied army didn't dissolve into camp fevers.
D'Este, p. 2, gives the total Allied casualties as 4400 dead, 18000 wounded, 7000 captured, and 37000 who suffered "nonbattle casualties," which include "exhaustion, frostbite, trench foot, shell shock, and madness." Morison, p. 380, agrees with this number and adds sailors 526 killed and missing and 229 wounded, with more than two-thirds of the killed in the Royal Navy though the Americans suffered the bulk of the naval wounded. This presumably is because the British suffered more ship losses, which tends to result in sailors being killed rather than wounded. D'Este, p. 414, gives casualties for the whole of Fifth Army in the first five months of 1944: 15,789 killed, 65,021 injured, 13,677 missing. The British First Division, as mentioned, was almost wrecked, and the American Third Division, though it fought on, would end World War II with the highest rate of casualties of any American division (D'Este, p. 428), a lot of them at Anzio.
For no real gain. The Italian campaign was hardly the only strategic mistake of World War II (few choices were as bad as the French decision to bet everything on the Maginot Line, the British caving-in at Munich, or the German invasion of the Soviet Union!), but it was a bad one.
Some units were functionally destroyed. The British "Sherwood Foresters" battalion suffered the astounding fate of losing 100% of its men and 200% of its officers (D'Este, p. 300) -- a feat possible only because of reinforcements and promotions and injured soldiers returning to duty, but even taking that into account, such a unit would be permanently ruined -- and many of its men permanently traumatized.
There was, and remains, debate over whether Lucas could have done better or not (Atkinson, p. 371). It is certainly true that if he had advanced quickly and scattered his troops all over the countryside, he risked being overwhelmed. An advance would have risked utter defeat. But it was also the only way to cut the roads bringing in reinforcements, and the roads that supplied the German lines to the south. The point is, for the Anzio landing to accomplish anything, the force there had to be aggressive. Landing at Anzio in the first place was a high-risk strategy -- so high-risk that it probably wasn't worth doing. But once the troops were landed, they had to go out and try to cause trouble. And they didn't. Lucas simply didn't understand his role.
Lucas's war was functionally over; he did not serve in combat again. Instead, he was given a training command in San Antonio, Texas (Boatner, p. 327). Most of his better subordinates thought his removal was a good thing, but D'Este, pp. 404-405, quotes many of them, all saying that the assignment he was given was impossible: the Anzio landing simply could not have achieved Churchill's objectives with the forces provided. I think it safe to say that Lucas was a failure, but he was also the scapegoat of a far greater failure by those who gave him a impossible task.
The "Tedeschi" of the song comes from the Italian name for Germans, which the Allies in Italy for some reason started using as a sort of nickname.
I have found no reference anywhere to "Anzio Archie." I have to suspect this is an error for "Anzio Annie," or perhaps a conflation of "Anzio Annie" and "Anzio Express." These were two examples of a special class of extremely heavy artillery the Germans called "K5 guns." They were 28 cm. (11 inch) guns with 255 kg. shells -- guns almost as heavy as a battleship's guns, which made them very heavy for land-based artillery. (Indeed. they were mounted on railroad cars.) They could fire a shell almost 60 kilometers or 40 miles, meaning that they could fire at targets so far away that the Allies had no way to respond (Ford, p. 114).
Because shells for the K5 guns were relatively few and their rate of fire low, and they had to be hidden away after firing a few shells lest they be knocked out, they weren't really all that important for the damage they did. But apparently they had a strong psychological effect: They were big enough that they could sink almost any Allied ship in the vicinity, so they scared off the Allied navy whenever they went into action (D'Este, p. 255). Amazingly, even though Allied intelligence revealed their location, artillery and air attacks failed to take them out (D'Este, p. 455). Eventually, after the Anzio breakout, Anzio Express had to be abandoned. Anzio Annie managed to escape, but was found later in the year (D'Este, p. 391). The problem, according to D'Este, p. 456, was not that they were damaged (although Anzio Express had been damaged) but that the Italian railroads were so badly wrecked that the large trains needed to carry the guns could not leave the area.
The guns may not have done that much damage, but the troops were certainly aware of them; Trevelyan, p. 64, refers to the "grumble of distant artillery and the attentions of Anzio Annie" keeping the men on alert.
Henderson states that the author of this song was "an unknown member of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Scots Fusiliers." This unit did serve at Anzio, eventually -- but it it didn't reach there until March 1944; at the time of the Anzio landings, it was still fighting with the main Allied army along the Rapido (D'Este, pp. 461-462). Thus, although an Anzio unit, it did not suffer through the worst of the Anzio fighting around the end of January. Which perhaps helps account for its somewhat optimistic tone.
Interestingly, those same men -- the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and the unit to which they belonged -- had earlier fought along the Gustav Line; they were part of the forces used to distract the Germans during the Anzio Landing. We have a song about the 5th Division's fight along the Gustav Line: "The Streets of Minturo" (which see). Might they be by the same author? We have no way to tell, but it seems like a reasonable possibility.
Palmer-WhatALovelyWar states that the tune of this was "The Lachlan Tigers"/"The Knickerbocker Line." An interesting statement, since he claimed to have it from Henderson-BalladsOfWorldWarII, but Henderson-BalladsOfWorldWarII does not list a tune. Perhaps Palmer had private information from Hamish Henderson? - RBW
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