The link-up with the Anzio beachhead

At 7.31 a.m. on 25 May 1944, on a road across the Pontine Marshes near the hamlet of Borgo Grappa, south-east of the Anzio beachhead, a reconnaissance patrol from the beachhead met the spearheads of the US II Corps, which had come up along the coast from the Gustav Line by way of Terracina. Four months after the Anzio landing, the beachhead was no longer a cut-off enclave: the Fifth Army’s forces once again formed a single front. The same day the US 3rd Division took the ruins of Cisterna, and tanks of the 1st Armored Division stood a few kilometres from Valmontone and Highway 6, the road along which the German Tenth Army was retreating.

That very day, however, the commander of the Fifth Army, General Mark Clark, changed the direction of the attack. Instead of throwing the whole of VI Corps at Valmontone, as the plan of the commander of Allied forces in Italy, General Harold Alexander, required, he ordered General Lucian Truscott to swing his main force north-west, towards Rome. The Germans gained time, and the Tenth Army escaped encirclement and withdrew to the Caesar Line and further north. Clark’s decision has ever since been one of the most widely criticised command decisions taken by the Western Allies in the entire war.

The meeting at Borgo Grappa

The link-up came on the third day after VI Corps broke out of the beachhead. On 23 May Truscott had attacked Cisterna, while General Geoffrey Keyes’s II Corps, which after breaking the Gustav Line had passed through Fondi and taken Terracina on 24 May, pressed on across the Pontine Marshes, drained before the war. The Germans, facing encirclement, pulled their last covering units off the plain. On the morning of 25 May Force Brett, made up of a British reconnaissance regiment and a company of American engineers from the 36th Engineer Regiment, moved out on the right flank of the beachhead. According to participants’ accounts, at 7.31 a.m. its men made contact with the leading elements of the 91st Reconnaissance Squadron and II Corps engineers.

Clark arrived at the meeting point – at about 10.30 a.m., according to accounts – together with correspondents and photographers. According to many accounts the greeting was re-enacted especially for the cameras, and the photographs of handshakes went round the world as a symbol of the end of the siege of Anzio. From the start the Fifth Army commander had taken care that his army’s successes were well publicised in the American press – and that concern weighed on the decision he took the same day.

The meeting mattered both practically and symbolically. The beachhead, supplied since January solely by sea through the port of Anzio and the beaches near Nettuno, now had an overland link to the rest of the front, and the Fifth Army could move troops freely between the former beachhead and the southern front. Over the four months of the siege, according to American tallies, VI Corps’ battle casualties came to about 29,000 men, and some 37,000 more had been put out of action by sickness, injury and exhaustion.

The fall of Cisterna and the road to Valmontone

On the main axis of the attack VI Corps was advancing according to the Buffalo plan. For two days Brigadier General John O’Daniel’s 3rd Division had been closing the ring around Cisterna, held by men of the German 362nd Infantry Division. In accordance with their orders they did not withdraw from the town, and on the afternoon of 25 May, after fighting for every house and cellar, they ceased to exist as a unit; the survivors were taken prisoner. The town, which the Americans had already fought for in vain in January, was left in ruins. The 3rd Division moved on north-east towards Cori and the gap leading to Valmontone, while Major General Ernest Harmon’s 1st Armored Division got by evening to within about five kilometres of Valmontone and made contact with the first units of the Hermann Göring Parachute Panzer Division, being brought down from near Livorno.

Three days of attack had cost VI Corps more than 3,300 men, according to figures cited in the literature, but Truscott was convinced that a joint attack by the 1st Armored Division and the 3rd Division the next day would allow him to cut Highway 6 – the Via Casilina. Along this road and the side roads in the Sacco valley General Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s German Tenth Army was falling back from the Hitler Line. That same day its northern flank lost its last anchor – the Polish II Corps took Piedimonte San Germano, which, following the capture of Monte Cassino, finally ended the fighting on the Hitler Line, and the Canadians, having crossed the Melfa, were pushing up the Liri valley. The Eighth Army’s advance was slow, however: tens of thousands of vehicles jammed the valley’s few roads, and German rearguards made use of every river and hill.

Clark’s order

On 25 May, when Cisterna was already in American hands, the Fifth Army’s operations officer, Brigadier General Donald Brann, arrived at Truscott’s command post – in the afternoon or evening, according to most accounts – with a new order from Clark. VI Corps was to shift its main effort 90 degrees to the left and attack north-west, west of the Alban Hills, towards Lanuvio and Campoleone and on to Rome – in practice a switch to the Turtle variant. Only the 3rd Division, supported by the 1st Special Service Force, was to continue the attack on Valmontone, and the 1st Armored Division was being pulled off that axis to prepare for the pursuit along the new one.

Truscott recalled that he was “dumbfounded”: he felt that this was no time to strike north-west, where the enemy was still strong, and that every available man should be thrown into the gap at Valmontone to destroy the retreating German army. He wanted to have it out with Clark in person, but – as he wrote – the Fifth Army commander was outside the beachhead and could not be reached even by radio. Brann told him the order was final, and Truscott carried it out. Years later he summed up in his memoirs: had Clark kept faithfully to Alexander’s instructions, the strategic aims of the Anzio operation would have been fully achieved, and being first into Rome was “poor compensation” for the lost opportunity.

Alexander was not consulted. Clark informed him of the change only late in the morning of 26 May, through his chief of staff, General Alfred Gruenther, when the regrouping was already a fait accompli. According to Gruenther’s account, Alexander replied only that he was sure the army commander would do everything to keep pressing towards Valmontone. He did not countermand Clark’s order or impose his own will on him – neither then nor in the days that followed.

Motives and the historians’ dispute

Clark never concealed that he wanted his Fifth Army to take Rome. In his memoirs he wrote that his soldiers not only desired that honour but had earned it, and that he wanted the people at home to know that the Fifth Army had done it and what price it had paid. His diary from those weeks returns again and again to the suspicion that the British wanted to rob the Americans of their triumph and bring the Eighth Army into Rome. Time mattered too: less than two weeks remained before the invasion of France, and Clark knew that after the Normandy landings the world’s attention would shift to the Channel.

He also justified his decision on military grounds, however. He argued that VI Corps was not strong enough to trap the whole Tenth Army at Valmontone, since it could withdraw by many routes through the mountains east of Highway 6; that the Hermann Göring Division was already approaching Valmontone; and that strong German forces west of the Alban Hills would threaten VI Corps’ left flank. Some historians accept that a complete encirclement of the Tenth Army was not assured, and that even an attack by the whole of VI Corps on Valmontone would not have closed every escape route.

Most scholars, however – British and American alike, among them Carlo D’Este in his book Fatal Decision – judge Clark’s decision harshly. In their view, a full-strength drive on Highway 6 at a moment when the German defence was shattered and the Tenth Army in retreat could have cut off a considerable part of it and at the same time opened the road to Rome faster than the attack to the north-west. They point out that Clark disobeyed his superior’s order, and that Alexander, mindful of coalition unity and aware of Clark’s standing with the Americans, could not bring himself to enforce it.

The Caesar Line

On the new axis the attack quickly bogged down. From 26 May the 1st Armored Division and the 34th and 45th Divisions attacked at Lanuvio and Campoleone, straight into the defences of the Caesar Line – a position that Kesselring had ordered built since March on the southern slopes of the Alban Hills and on through Valmontone deep into the Apennines towards the Adriatic. The Germans were thus not improvising a new position but occupying one prepared in advance: in the last days of May it was manned by the retreating units of General Eberhard von Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army and the right wing of the Tenth Army. At Velletri I Parachute Corps beat off attack after attack, and in the Valmontone gap Albert Kesselring committed elements of four divisions, which stopped the 3rd Division and the 1st Special Service Force at Artena. Highway 6 remained open until 30 May, and according to most accounts seven divisions of the Tenth Army managed to withdraw northwards.

Place in the war

The link-up at Borgo Grappa ended the battle for the Anzio beachhead as a separate engagement – the landing that in January was supposed to open the road to Rome quickly, and that for four months had tied down a considerable part of both sides’ forces in defence, finally fulfilled its role as the second arm of the spring offensive. At the same time, however, 25 May was the day on which the greatest chance of the whole Italian campaign to destroy a German army was thrown away.

The Caesar Line was not broken until the night of 30/31 May, by the 36th Division, which climbed the undefended Monte Artemisio massif and came out behind the Germans at Velletri. On 2 June the German defence south of Rome collapsed, Hitler forbade fighting in the city, and on 4 June the Americans entered Rome. Clark made his triumphal entry, but only two days later the Normandy landings pushed the capture of the Eternal City into the background.

The Tenth and Fourteenth Armies, though badly mauled, escaped destruction. Kesselring withdrew them via the line at Lake Trasimene to the Gothic Line in the Apennines, where they held the Allies through the winter of 1944/1945. The war in Italy went on for almost another year and ended only with the surrender of the German forces on 2 May 1945. Some historians believe that this long and bloody sequel was to a large extent the price of the decision taken on 25 May 1944 – and of the lack of resolve of Alexander, who did not reverse it.