Truscott replaces Lucas

On 22 February 1944, exactly a month after the landing at Anzio, the commander of the US Fifth Army, General Mark Clark, came to the beachhead and informed Major General John Lucas that he was relieving him of command of VI Corps. His successor was Major General Lucian Truscott, until then commander of the 3rd Infantry Division and for the past few days Lucas’s deputy. The change came two days after Operation Fischfang, the most dangerous German assault on the beachhead, had petered out, and it was more a reckoning for the whole month than a punishment for that battle – which the beachhead under Lucas’s command had, after all, withstood.

The date of 22 February is the right one: that was the day Lucas was told of the decision. According to some accounts Truscott took over actual command the next day, 23 February, while Lucas formally became deputy commander of the Fifth Army.

A month in the beachhead

The landing at Anzio – Operation Shingle – was meant to outflank the Gustav Line from the sea, force the Germans to retreat from Cassino and open the road to Rome. The landing on 22 January took the enemy completely by surprise, but Lucas, in keeping with his own understanding of his orders and Clark’s warnings not to take risks, first consolidated the beachhead and built up his forces. In the meantime Field Marshal Albert Kesselring managed to bring divisions to Anzio from all over Italy and from France, Yugoslavia and Germany. When VI Corps finally advanced on Campoleone and Cisterna on 30 January, the attack collapsed and two Ranger battalions were almost completely destroyed.

In February the initiative passed to the Germans. General Eberhard von Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army retook Campoleone and Aprilia, and on 16 February launched Operation Fischfang – a thrust along the Anzio–Albano road intended to cut the beachhead in half and drive the Allies into the sea. For four days the defence hung by a thread; on 18 February the commander of the British 1st Division, Major General Ronald Penney, was badly wounded, and offshore a German submarine sank the cruiser Penelope. The beachhead was saved, however, by artillery, naval gunfire and air power, and on 19 February a counter-attack by the corps reserves forced the Germans to halt their offensive.

Pressure from above

Lucas, a 54-year-old artilleryman, had not believed in the operation from the start. “This whole affair has a strong odor of Gallipoli,” he wrote in his diary even before the landing, and in mid-February he added that the people “at the top” were disappointed that he had not driven the Germans out of Italy, although there had been no military reason why he should have succeeded. His superiors saw things differently. Winston Churchill, the chief advocate of the landing, had for weeks been prodding General Harold Alexander, commander of the Allied forces in Italy, and said bitterly of Anzio that he had hoped to hurl a wildcat ashore but had got a stranded whale instead.

According to Martin Blumenson’s US Army official history, in mid-February Alexander wrote to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, that he was disappointed by the “negative” leadership in the beachhead, its lack of drive and enthusiasm, and that someone like “a thruster like George Patton” was needed there. On 16 February, the day Fischfang began and when the attack at Cassino had failed to break through after the bombing of the abbey, Alexander told Clark bluntly that Lucas was “physically and mentally old”, tired and not in touch with the details of the situation. Clark – himself not particularly happy with the way Lucas was handling the beachhead – agreed to a change, but stipulated that he would not allow Lucas to be hurt.

An interim solution was agreed: VI Corps was given two deputy commanders – an American who would later take over the corps, and a Briton to coordinate the operations of the British divisions. The American was Truscott, the Briton Major General Vyvyan Evelegh. On 17 February, in a conversation with Clark at his headquarters, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean theatre, General Jacob Devers, took the same view: Lucas was utterly exhausted and should go, but without damage to his reputation. When Lucas learned of the appointments, he noted: “I think this means my relief.” It was decided, however, to wait until the battle then under way was over.

22 February

On 18 February Clark visited the beachhead and judged Lucas “tired, very tired”. The next day he wrote to the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, General Henry Maitland Wilson, that an attempt to take the Alban Hills no longer made sense – the Germans had concentrated too great a force at Anzio. On 22 February he was in Nettuno again. He told Lucas that he was not relieving him for failing to take the hills, but because Alexander considered him defeated, Devers considered him tired, and he himself considered him exhausted. He admitted that he “could no longer resist the pressure” from Alexander and Devers.

Lucas was shaken, though not entirely surprised. He wrote in his diary that what hurt most was that he had thought he had just won something of a victory. Clark, according to his own notes, at bottom agreed with him: he believed that Lucas could have reached the Alban Hills in the first few days but would not have been able to hold them. The change was therefore carried out “without prejudice”: for three weeks Lucas remained Clark’s deputy, then returned to the United States, where he became deputy commander and then commander of the Fourth Army in Texas. On the way, in London, he met General Dwight Eisenhower and – as Blumenson relates – did not criticise his superiors, presenting himself as a “simple soldier” who had carried out orders even though he disagreed with them.

The new commander

Truscott was 49 and one of the youngest corps commanders in the US Army. A former schoolteacher from Oklahoma and a cavalryman, in 1942 he helped to create the US Army Rangers and observed the Dieppe Raid; in November of that year he commanded the landing at Port-Lyautey in Operation Torch, and from March 1943 the 3rd Infantry Division, which he led through Sicily, the Volturno and the mountains of the Winter Line to Anzio. He was known for his demanding training, his hoarse voice, his white scarf and his leather jacket. He was respected both by the Americans and by the British, who valued his composure and sober judgement. The 3rd Division was taken over from him on 17 February by his deputy, Brigadier General John O’Daniel.

According to the official history, from his very first days Truscott changed the atmosphere in the beachhead, where a gloom bordering on despair prevailed. He moved the corps command post up from the dismal wine cellars and tunnels of Nettuno to the surface, improved cooperation between all arms, above all the artillery, and was often seen in the front line. He had no more troops than Lucas, but he gave the soldiers and the staffs a sense that things would get better.

Significance

The test came quickly. On 29 February Mackensen attacked for the last time, this time from the direction of Cisterna, against the 3rd Division’s sector. The attack, made without surprise and in appalling weather, collapsed within a few days, and at the beginning of March Kesselring convinced Hitler that further attacks were pointless. For more than two months the beachhead froze into trench warfare under the fire of German artillery in the Alban Hills. Only in May 1944, as part of the great offensive against the Gustav Line, did Truscott’s VI Corps break out of the beachhead; on 25 May Clark ordered it to turn towards Rome instead of cutting off the retreat of the German Tenth Army at Valmontone – a decision that historians still judge very critically. In August Truscott led VI Corps in the landings in Provence, and in December he succeeded Clark in command of the Fifth Army.

Lucas’s dismissal became one of the most frequently cited controversies of the Italian campaign. For Churchill and Alexander he was the commander who had squandered the opportunity of the first days. His defenders, among them Blumenson, point out that two divisions could not simultaneously hold the beach and the hills more than 30 kilometres away, that German reinforcements were pouring in from every direction, and that Lucas’s caution allowed the beachhead to survive Fischfang. At Anzio he paid the price for a plan in which he himself did not believe and for which he had been given too few troops. Truscott, who held him in esteem, took over command at a moment when the worst was already behind the beachhead – and was able to lead the corps from that position into a victorious offensive.