The Battle of Cisterna

Before dawn on 30 January 1944 two battalions of American Rangers left the Anzio beachhead and began to creep along a drainage ditch towards the small town of Cisterna. They were to take it by surprise and hold it until the main body of the 3rd Infantry Division arrived. At first light, on open fields in front of the town, they ran into strong German forces with tanks. After several hours of fighting, six of the 767 Rangers made it back to their own lines. The rest were killed or – in the great majority of cases – taken prisoner. The defeat at Cisterna was the heaviest blow in the history of the American Rangers and came to symbolise the failure of the first attempt to break out of the beachhead.

Contrary to a frequently repeated shorthand according to which 6 out of 767 men came back from one of four battalions, the figure of 767 covers two battalions together – the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions. A third, the 4th, attacked behind them and also suffered heavy losses, and the whole of the American 3rd Division went into the attack alongside it.

A belated offensive

A week after the landing at Anzio, Major General John Lucas’s VI Corps was still sitting on the beachhead. In line with his own understanding of his orders, Lucas first built up his strength: by 29 January the American 45th Infantry Division and part of the 1st Armored Division had reached the beachhead. Under pressure from General Mark Clark and from the commander of Allied forces in Italy, General Harold Alexander, he set the attack for 30 January. The British 1st Infantry Division, supported by American tanks, was to strike north along the road from Anzio towards the station at Campoleone (PL) and on into the Alban Hills. Major General Lucian Truscott’s American 3rd Infantry Division was to capture Cisterna and cut Highway 7 – the ancient Via Appia, one of the supply routes of the German forces on the Gustav Line.

The attack, however, came too late. The Germans already had more than 70,000 men around the beachhead – more than the Allies – and the headquarters of General Eberhard von Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army was preparing a counter-offensive of its own. The Cisterna area had been chosen as the assembly area for the German reserves. American intelligence, relying on reconnaissance several days old, believed that there were only weak outposts in front of the town and that the main line of defence lay behind it.

The ambush

Colonel William Darby’s Rangers were a special-purpose formation, trained for raids, night operations and the seizure of ports and coastal batteries. From North Africa through Sicily to Salerno they had built themselves a legend. At Anzio, however, where they had taken the port on 22 January, they were increasingly being used as ordinary infantry. Losses had been made good with recruits who lacked the veterans’ experience, weakening the units in exactly the skill in which they were meant to excel – slipping silently through enemy lines.

Major Jack Dobson’s 1st Battalion and Major Alvah Miller’s 3rd Battalion, 767 men in all, set off at around one o’clock on the night of 29–30 January. They moved in column along the drainage canal, bypassing German positions, sometimes at a distance of only a few dozen metres. According to accounts cited in American studies, before the attack a Polish conscript in the Wehrmacht had crossed over to the American lines and warned of a concentration of troops near Cisterna, but his warning did not get through in time.

At dawn the Rangers were still about a kilometre short of the town and had to cross open ground. There they were attacked by troops of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the 715th Infantry Division, supported by tanks and self-propelled guns. According to the American official history, the Germans had most probably detected the approach march and laid an ambush. The lightly armed Rangers, without heavy anti-tank weapons, defended themselves from ditches and houses. They knocked out several tanks, with grenades and bazooka rounds among other things, but surrounded on flat terrain they stood no chance. Miller was killed early in the fighting. Around midday, as the Germans drove captured Rangers ahead of their tanks and called on the rest to surrender, resistance began to collapse. Darby, listening over the radio to his men’s last reports, was powerless to help them.

Major Roy Murray’s 4th Ranger Battalion and regiments of the 3rd Division set out to relieve them. The attack ran into heavy fire and failed to break through to the encircled men, and the 4th Battalion suffered heavy losses in the process. Of the 767 soldiers of the 1st and 3rd Battalions, six returned to their own lines; 761 were killed, wounded, missing or captured – the great majority, more than 700 men, ended up in German prisoner-of-war camps.

Cisterna and Campoleone

The main attack of the 3rd Division, supported by the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, went on until 1 February. The Americans advanced about 5 kilometres on a front some 11 kilometres wide, but did not take Cisterna – the town remained in German hands until May. The 3rd Division suffered heavy losses during these days. German counter-attacks on 1 and 2 February, carried out by the Hermann Göring Division and the 71st Infantry Division, achieved little either and cost the Germans dearly.

At the same time, further north along the road from Anzio, the British 1st Division was attacking. The British infantry – first the Guards, then the 3rd Brigade – drove a wedge right up to Campoleone station but could not take it. The American tanks of the 1st Armored Division, which were to outflank the station from the west, bogged down in sodden ground cut by gullies. The British were left at the tip of a long, narrow salient, exposed to fire from three sides – in February this salient became the first target of the German counter-offensive.

For Kesselring and Mackensen the Anglo-American attack did nevertheless have some effect: it absorbed part of the forces earmarked for the counter-offensive and delayed it by several days. For the Allies it meant the end of any hope of a quick breakout from the beachhead. From then on VI Corps had to fight on the defensive.

Prisoners on the streets of Rome

The Germans exploited the prisoners taken at Cisterna and in the first battles at Anzio for propaganda. In February 1944 columns of American and British soldiers were marched through the streets of Rome, which the Germans had occupied in September 1943, past the Colosseum among other places. Photographs and newsreels were meant to show the Italians and the world that the invasion had failed. Some onlookers – mainly Fascists – jeered at the prisoners and threw things at them; others showed them sympathy. The 1929 Geneva Convention prohibited exposing prisoners to public curiosity. After the war an American military commission convicted the German commandant of Rome, General Kurt Mälzer, for the parade.

Place in the war

The Battle of Cisterna was the first and last attempt to break out of the Anzio beachhead before the spring of 1944. Its failure ensured that the landing, conceived as a swift outflanking of the Gustav Line, turned into a long siege. In the first days of February the Germans went over to the counter-offensive, and on 16–20 February Operation Fischfang brought the beachhead to the brink of collapse. Lucas, blamed for his slowness after the landing and for sending the lightly armed Rangers at the head of the attack, lost command of VI Corps to Truscott on 22 February. Cisterna fell only on 25 May 1944, when the 3rd Division, breaking out of the beachhead, took it house by house.

For the Rangers this was the end of the first chapter of their history. The battalions destroyed at Cisterna were not re-formed in Italy; the survivors were sent home or assigned as replacements to the American-Canadian 1st Special Service Force, which was fighting on the beachhead. Darby later commanded a regiment of the 45th Division at Anzio, and in 1945, as assistant commander of the 10th Mountain Division, he was killed in northern Italy a few days before the German surrender in Italy; he was posthumously promoted to brigadier general. Other Ranger battalions, the 2nd and 5th, were training in Britain at the time; in June 1944 they landed in Normandy, where their part in the capture of Pointe du Hoc became the formation’s new legend. The lesson of Cisterna – that light units trained for special tasks must not be used as the spearhead of an ordinary attack – remained in American manuals for a long time.