Battle of Anzio, 1944: the landing that was meant to open the road to Rome

Anzio was meant to be a short cut. It became one of the most argued over battles of the Italian campaign, a landing that caught the Germans completely off guard and then spent four months fighting for its life within sight of the Alban Hills.²

A landing behind the Gustav Line

By the end of 1943 the Allied armies in Italy were stuck in front of the Gustav Line, roughly halfway between Salerno and Rome. A landing behind it was the obvious answer, and Kesselring feared one throughout the campaign. The problem was shipping: most of the landing craft in the Mediterranean were due to leave for Britain and the invasion of Normandy. General Mark Clark recommended cancelling the operation on 18 December, and General Harold Alexander agreed.³

Winston Churchill revived it. Recovering from pneumonia in Tunis, he threw his weight behind the plan and persuaded Roosevelt to keep the tank landing ships in the Mediterranean into February. The operation, code named Shingle, would put the U.S. VI Corps ashore at Anzio, a resort town about 35 miles south of Rome, far behind the Gustav Line, while Clark's Fifth Army attacked the line itself.⁴

Its aim was never clear. Early plans had VI Corps seize the Alban Hills, about 20 miles inland, and cut the roads that supplied the German front. Clark feared that would leave the corps overextended, so his orders only asked Lucas to "advance on" the hills. The force was two reinforced divisions, the U.S. 3rd and the British 1st. The naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison later wrote that the job needed a full army or nothing, and that two divisions meant sending a boy on a man's errand, as the Naval History and Heritage Command account quotes him.⁵

Total surprise

The supporting offensive failed before the landing began: the attacks across the Garigliano and the Rapido at Cassino were thrown back between 17 and 22 January. They did, however, pull two German divisions away from the coast, so Shingle hit a stretch held by two worn out battalions.⁶

Task Force 81 under Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry sailed from Naples on 21 January and the landings began at 2 a.m. on 22 January. Resistance ashore was almost nothing. Anzio and Nettuno were taken intact, and by nightfall more than 36,000 men and 3,000 vehicles were ashore with light losses. The roads to the Alban Hills, and to Rome, were open.⁷

A week of caution

Lucas did not use the opening. He did not believe in the operation, thought his force too small and expected an immediate counterattack, and Clark had warned him not to stick his neck out. While he built up the beachhead, Kesselring and Hitler moved faster. Troops came from northern Italy, France, Germany and Yugoslavia, and within twenty four hours the Germans had a thin but complete ring around the beachhead; by the fourth day parts of eight divisions were on the perimeter.⁸

The Luftwaffe struck at the ships offshore with bombs, torpedoes and new radio guided weapons. The destroyer HMS Janus was sunk on 23 January and the cruiser HMS Spartan on 29 January; according to the Naval History and Heritage Command, the British hospital ship St. David was sunk on 24 January.⁹

Lucas attacked only on 30 January, with about 70,000 men. By then the Germans matched him. The British reached Campoleone but could not hold it, and two battalions of U.S. Rangers who tried to infiltrate Cisterna along an irrigation ditch were ambushed; according to John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org only six of the 767 Rangers got back.¹⁰

The German counterattacks

General Eberhard von Mackensen's Fourteenth Army now tried to cut the beachhead in two along the road from Albano to Anzio. The attacks began on 3 February, retook Aprilia, which the troops called the Factory, and peaked on 16 February with, in Rickard's figures, about 125,000 Germans against some 100,000 Allied troops. Pushed back almost to its last line, the U.S. 45th Division held, helped by heavy artillery, naval gunfire and hundreds of air sorties a day. A last attack at the end of February also failed.¹¹

On 22 February Clark replaced Lucas with Major General Lucian Truscott of the 3rd Division. The Navy history calls Lucas a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the operation.¹²

Siege and breakout

For three months the beachhead lived under German guns, including two 280 mm railroad guns the soldiers called Anzio Annie and the Anzio Express. There was no rear area; even the field hospitals were hit. The sea kept it alive: trucks loaded in Naples rolled on and off landing ships, and more than 500,000 tons of supplies reached Anzio, about 4,000 tons a day.¹³

The deadlock broke at Cassino. In May the Allies cracked the Gustav Line, and on 25 May troops from the main front met the Anzio garrison. Alexander wanted Truscott to drive on Valmontone and trap the German Tenth Army; Clark sent most of the force toward Rome instead, one of the most debated decisions of the campaign. U.S. troops entered Rome on 4 June 1944, two days before the landings in Normandy took the headlines.¹⁴

Shingle cost more than 23,000 British and American combat casualties, about 4,400 of them killed, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command. It never opened the road to Rome as planned, but it drew German divisions away from Cassino and France, and its troops took part in the final drive on the capital.¹⁵