The bloody Rapido River crossing

On the evening of 20 January 1944 two regiments of the American 36th Infantry Division began crossing a narrow, swollen river in central Italy, a few kilometres south of the town of Cassino. The Americans called it the Rapido, although on this stretch it was really the Gari, a short river that further down joins the Liri to form the Garigliano. For two nights and two days the soldiers from Texas crossed in folding boats and over footbridges to a bank where the German 15th Panzergrenadier Division lay in wait. On the evening of 22 January the divisional commander ordered the attack to be called off. According to the American official history, in 48 hours the division lost 1,681 men: 143 killed, 663 wounded and 875 missing, most of them taken prisoner. The Germans, by their own reports, lost 64 killed and 179 wounded. No bridgehead was won.

The battle on the Rapido became one of the American army’s heaviest defeats of the Second World War and one of the most controversial decisions of General Mark Clark. After the war the division’s veterans demanded a congressional investigation. Historians still argue over whether the attack was a necessary sacrifice or a blunder against which the divisional commander had warned.

The Gustav Line and Clark’s plan

At the turn of 1943 and 1944 the Allies in Italy came to a halt before the Germans’ main defensive position, the Gustav Line. In the autumn Clark’s US Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army had fought their way through successive mountain ranges and rivers. In November and December the assault on the Winter Line cost them thousands of soldiers. In December the 36th Division had taken the village of San Pietro Infine, suffering heavy losses in the process. Beyond the Gustav Line opened the valley of the Liri, the best route to Rome, and its entrance was dominated by the hill of Monte Cassino with its Benedictine abbey.

The commander of the Allied forces in Italy, General Harold Alexander, and Clark decided to outflank the Gustav Line with a landing. General John Lucas’s US VI Corps was to land at Anzio, about 55 kilometres south of Rome, in an operation code-named Shingle. A few days earlier the Fifth Army was to attack along the whole front of the Gustav Line in order to draw the German reserves there and, if it broke through, to advance up the Liri valley and link up with the landing force.

The plan called for three attacks. On the right wing General Alphonse Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps had been attacking in the mountains north of Cassino since 12 January. On the left wing British X Corps was to cross the lower Garigliano. In the centre General Geoffrey Keyes’s US II Corps was to get the 36th Division across the Gari near the village of Sant’Angelo in Theodice, build bridges and push the 1st Armored Division into the Liri valley. The British crossed the Garigliano during the night of 17–18 January and seized bridgeheads that the commander of the Tenth Army, Heinrich von Vietinghoff, considered dangerous. Albert Kesselring sent there from the Rome area two panzergrenadier divisions, the 29th and 90th, which he had previously held in reserve in case of a landing. The British 46th Division, which was to cross the Garigliano just below the mouth of the Gari during the night of 19–20 January and cover the Americans’ left flank, failed to do so. The swift current swept the boats away, and only one company reached the far bank; it was later withdrawn. The 36th Division would therefore have to attack with its flank uncovered.

Walker against his orders

The commander of the 36th Division, made up of soldiers of the Texas National Guard, was Major General Fred L. Walker, a 56-year-old veteran of the First World War. In July 1918, in the Second Battle of the Marne, he had commanded a battalion of the US 3rd Infantry Division that threw back Germans crossing the river. Now he was looking at the same situation from the other side, and he had no illusions. At the crossing point the river was a dozen or so metres wide and about three metres deep, with an icy, fast current and steep banks. On the eastern bank, over which the Americans had to approach, stretched flat, waterlogged meadows without any cover, mined by the Germans. The western bank and the village of Sant’Angelo on its bluff were fortified with bunkers, machine-gun nests and barbed wire. Behind them rose the slopes of Monte Cassino and Monte Cairo, from which German artillery observers could see the whole valley.

On 17 January Walker wrote in his diary that it looked as though the German defeat on the Marne on 15 July 1918 was about to be repeated, only in reverse, on the Rapido in January 1944. He proposed attacking further north, where the ground was easier, or waiting until the French and British had taken the hills above the valley. Keyes and Clark rejected these proposals. The timing was dictated by the Anzio landing, and the Fifth Army command believed that a strong attack in the Liri valley was necessary to prevent the Germans from moving forces to the coast. Of his superiors Walker wrote in his diary: “They do not understand the problems and do not know what I am talking about.”

The first night – 20–21 January

The attack began on the evening of 20 January after an artillery preparation in which American guns fired tens of thousands of shells onto the western bank. They destroyed little, as the Germans were sheltering in fortified dugouts. The 143rd Infantry Regiment was to cross south of Sant’Angelo and the 141st north of the village. The division’s third regiment, the 142nd, was kept in reserve.

Everything went wrong from the very start. Thick fog rose over the valley, thickened by smoke from the American screens. The infantry had to carry heavy pontoon boats and footbridge sections across several kilometres of sodden meadows. The engineers had cleared only narrow lanes through the minefields and marked them with white tape, but in the darkness and fog units lost their way and walked onto mines. The German artillery and mortars, which knew the range to every point in the valley, shelled the approaches to the river before the infantry reached it. Many boats were holed or destroyed, others were carried away by the current, and some units abandoned them along the way.

Even so, at around 5 a.m. on 21 January the 1st Battalion of the 143rd Regiment was on the western bank. In the morning, as the fog began to lift, it found itself under German fire from three sides and without communications with the rest of the division. The regimental commander allowed it to withdraw. In the 141st Regiment’s sector part of the 1st Battalion got across the river. The footbridges were destroyed, and contact with these men was lost. When day broke, cut-off American groups were defending themselves in shell holes a few dozen metres from the river.

The second attempt – 21 and 22 January

On the morning of 21 January Keyes and the Fifth Army command ordered the attack to be renewed. Walker thought it pointless but obeyed. Preparations took the whole day, as new boats had to be collected. In the afternoon, under cover of smoke, the 143rd Regiment got its 3rd Battalion and part of the 2nd across south of Sant’Angelo. In the evening and during the night two battalions of the 141st Regiment also crossed the river. The engineers built several footbridges for the infantry, but the fire was so heavy that they could not build bridges for tanks. Pontoon bridges and prefabricated Bailey bridges were to have eased the 1st Armored Division’s entry into the Liri valley, but they never materialised.

Without tanks or heavy weapons, and with ammunition ferried across in boats under fire, the American infantry on the western bank could not hold on. The German panzergrenadiers, supported by assault guns, counter-attacked from their bunkers and from the ruins of Sant’Angelo. On the morning of 22 January the footbridges in the 141st Regiment’s sector were destroyed and its battalions were cut off. In the afternoon the men of the 143rd Regiment, who had suffered heavy losses in their small bridgehead, were ordered back to the eastern bank. Walker did not commit the 142nd Regiment, judging that it would merely waste more soldiers. On the evening of 22 January Keyes agreed to call off the attack. On the western bank the Germans wiped out the remnants of the 141st Regiment and took several hundred Americans prisoner. Only a few dozen soldiers from the 141st Regiment’s battalions made it back across the river, swimming or in the last boats.

For the Germans it was a routine defence of their sector. The 15th Panzergrenadier Division of General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin’s XIV Panzer Corps reported that it had repulsed a strong attack and taken prisoners. The figures of 64 killed and 179 wounded on the German side against more than 1,600 American killed, wounded and missing show how greatly the ground and the fortifications favoured the defenders. One of the company commanders of the 143rd Regiment later said, in an account quoted by historians: “I had 184 men. After 48 hours I had 17.”

24 January – the attack shifts north

The defeat on the Gari did not end the fighting in the valley. Clark and Keyes decided to strike where Walker had proposed earlier: north of Cassino, on the upper Rapido. During the night of 24–25 January the US 34th Infantry Division attacked there towards the village of Caira and the German barracks on the slopes above the town. Juin’s French attacked alongside it in the mountains. Here too the Germans had prepared well. Dammed water had flooded the meadows in front of the river, tanks bogged down in the mud, and minefields and fire from the hills stopped the first attacks. Only after several days of heavy fighting did the 34th Division seize a bridgehead and begin climbing into the mountains above the monastery. The serious setback on the Gari is sometimes dated in chronologies to 24 January, but the 36th Division’s battle ended on the evening of 22 January. On 24 January there was no new defeat on the Gari; instead the weight of the attack shifted north of Cassino.

The exhausted 36th Division remained on the river in a defensive role. Its 142nd Regiment, which had not fought at Sant’Angelo, was soon attached to the 34th Division for the fighting north of Cassino. Many of the casualties of the crossing were newly arrived replacements who had not had time to get to know their units. The 141st and 143rd Regiments were out of action as fighting units for a long time.

The dispute over responsibility

The dispute began while the war was still on. In his notes and later memoirs Clark admitted that he had expected heavy losses but considered the attack necessary. He argued that the Germans had to be held at Cassino so that they could not throw all their forces against the troops landing at Anzio. He also blamed the 36th Division’s command for poor preparation of the crossing. Walker believed that the plan had been doomed from the start and that his objections had been ignored. In July 1944, after the capture of Rome, Clark replaced him with another commander. Walker took over as commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning.

Clark’s critics pointed out that the German reserves the attack was meant to draw in were already on their way to the Garigliano after the British crossing of 17–18 January, so the 36th Division’s attack made no difference to that aim. They also noted that the attack had been launched at the most strongly defended point in the valley, without flank cover and without first taking the hills that dominated it. Clark’s defenders replied that in January 1944 the Fifth Army command did not know precisely what the German reserves were doing, and that the Anzio landing required simultaneous pressure along the whole front.

In January 1946 a reunion of the 36th Division veterans’ association in Texas passed a resolution calling on Congress to investigate “one of the most colossal blunders” of the war. The veterans called Clark an “inefficient and inexperienced” officer who had needlessly sent their comrades to their deaths. The House Committee on Military Affairs held hearings. In his report the Secretary of War, Robert P. Patterson, concluded that the action to which the 36th Division had been committed “was necessary” and that Clark had “exercised sound judgment” in planning and ordering it. Congress took no action against the general. The dispute went on, however. American historians today usually regard the Rapido crossing as an example of a hastily planned operation in which deadlines set by another landing outweighed any assessment of the ground and the enemy’s strength.

Significance

The Rapido crossing was part of the first Battle of Monte Cassino, which lasted until mid-February. On the morning of 22 January, while the last fighting on the Gari was still going on, Lucas’s VI Corps landed at Anzio almost unopposed. Within a few days, however, Kesselring managed to assemble a strong force around the beachhead, and the Gustav Line held. Until May 1944 the Allies attacked at Cassino three more times. On 15 February they bombed the abbey on Monte Cassino, in March they destroyed the town, and in May the Polish II Corps took the monastery hill in the fourth battle. Only then, in Operation Diadem, did the Allies break through the Gustav Line and enter the Liri valley. In May 1944 the 36th Division, shipped by sea to the Anzio beachhead, took part in the breakout, captured Velletri and on 5 June entered Rome.

In American memory, and especially in Texas, the Rapido remained a symbol of senseless sacrifice. For decades the 36th Division’s veterans returned to the matter at their reunions. Military historians treat the battle as an example of how risky it is to force a river under the enemy’s eyes without superiority, surprise or flank cover. On the same night, 20 January, as the Texans moved through the fog towards the Gari, 769 RAF bombers were flying to Berlin. Both events showed that at the beginning of 1944 the Allies had material superiority but had not yet learned to turn it into a swift victory.