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

Anzio was meant to be a shortcut. 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 on a coastal plain overlooked by the Alban Hills.²

Who won the Battle of Anzio and why?

The Allies, in the end, but not as planned. They landed unopposed and held the beachhead against every German counterattack, yet could not break out for four months. The deadlock ended only in May, when the Gustav Line broke at Cassino and VI Corps attacked out of the beachhead, opening the road to Rome.³

A landing behind the Gustav Line

By the end of 1943 the Allied armies in Italy were stuck in front of the German winter defenses between Naples and Rome. A landing near Anzio, behind the German right flank, was planned from November as a short hook, to be launched only when the Fifth Army had advanced close enough to join hands with it within days. When that advance stalled in front of Cassino, General Mark Clark recommended canceling the landing, and in late December it was dropped.⁴

Winston Churchill revived it. At a conference near Tunis on Christmas Day, and again at Marrakesh on 7 and 8 January 1944, where he was recovering from pneumonia, he pressed for a bigger landing of two divisions that would go in whether or not the main front had moved. The operation, code-named Shingle, would put the U.S. VI Corps ashore at Anzio, a resort town about 30 miles south of Rome in the U.S. Army history's figure, 37 by road in Morison's.⁵

Assault shipping decided its size. Most of the tank landing ships in the Mediterranean were due to leave for Britain and the invasion of Normandy, and Roosevelt agreed to keep 56 of them back only on the understanding that Normandy remained the paramount operation. The British official history concludes that the size of the force was set by the ships available rather than by any estimate of what the task required, and that the operation was fathered by wishful strategic thinking without a searching tactical analysis.⁶

Orders that pointed two ways

The plan was vague about its aim. General Harold Alexander's instructions of 12 January set the object as cutting the enemy's main communications in the Alban Hills, the Colli Laziali, southeast of Rome. Clark's order to Lucas, issued the same day, asked him to seize and secure a beachhead near Anzio and only then to advance on the hills. Morison calls the difference important: Lucas understood that he was not being forced to push on at the risk of sacrificing his corps.⁷

Lucas went with little hope. In his diary he called the venture a desperate one in which he could never see much chance. His force was the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division and the British 1st Infantry Division, with three Ranger battalions, Commandos and parachute troops. Morison judged the job one for a full army or none: to attempt it with two divisions, he wrote, was to send a boy on a man's errand.⁸

The Germans were ready on paper. Kesselring had worked out plans for meeting a landing at several points along the coast, Anzio among them, and units earmarked under the code name Richard were held at a few hours' notice to move. Further divisions were to come from France, Germany and Yugoslavia if the Allies landed.⁹

Total surprise

The Fifth Army opened its attacks on the Gustav Line in mid-January. The British crossed the Garigliano with heavy loss, and the U.S. II Corps attack across the Rapido on 20 January was thrown back after two days. These battles drew German reserves south from around Rome, so the coast at Anzio was almost empty when the convoys arrived.¹⁰

Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry's task force sailed from the Bay of Naples on 21 January, and the landings began at 2 a.m. on 22 January: Colonel William O. Darby's Rangers at Anzio itself, the British 1st Division on beaches to the northwest and the U.S. 3rd Division east of Nettuno. There was almost no resistance, and the small port of Anzio was taken almost intact, a prize the planners had hoped for because it eased the problem of supplying the force over open beaches. Allied aircraft flew more than 1,200 sorties that day. By midnight some 36,000 men and more than 3,000 vehicles were ashore, about 90 percent of the assault convoy, for 13 men killed, 97 wounded and 44 missing or captured.¹¹

A week of caution

Lucas spent the next week bringing in men and supplies and pushing out his perimeter before attacking. Critics then and since have argued that a flying column could have reached the Alban Hills, or even Rome, in the first days, and Churchill wrote that he had hoped to hurl a wildcat onto the shore, but all he got was a stranded whale. Morison, who blamed Clark's directive and Alexander as much as Lucas, concluded that consolidation was sound tactical sense and that a commander who stuck his neck out would probably have lost it, and the beachhead too.¹²

Kesselring moved faster than the Allies expected. From the morning of 22 January troops were rushed to Anzio from the rest of Italy and from France, Yugoslavia and Germany, and General Eberhard von Mackensen's Fourteenth Army took command around the beachhead on 25 January.¹³

The Luftwaffe struck at the ships offshore with bombs, aerial torpedoes and new radio-guided bombs. The destroyer HMS Janus was sunk on 23 January, the British hospital ship St. David on the evening of 24 January, and the cruiser HMS Spartan on 29 January.¹⁴

The attack of 30 January

Lucas attacked on 30 January. On the left the British drove up the Albano road toward Campoleone but were stopped short of it, and on the right the U.S. 3rd Division was halted before Cisterna. Two Ranger battalions, sent ahead before dawn to slip into Cisterna along a drainage ditch, ran into German troops waiting for them and were surrounded. The U.S. Army history counts six men escaping out of 767; Morison puts the loss at 761.¹⁵

The German counteroffensive

Then the Germans struck. Mackensen's army attacked the British salient toward Campoleone on the night of 3 February and forced it back, and in the following days it took Aprilia, a modern farm settlement the soldiers called the Factory, and the neighboring village of Carroceto.¹⁶

Hitler wanted the beachhead destroyed, whatever the cost, and the Germans brought new weapons to the attack, among them the Goliath, a small tracked vehicle packed with explosives and steered by remote control through a cable.¹⁷

The main blow came on 16 February, down the road from Albano to Anzio. Fourteenth Army had at least 120,000 troops under command on 12 February by the U.S. Army history's count, though Morison puts the Germans in the battle area at nearly 92,000. The attack drove a wedge some four miles deep into the Allied line, and on 18 and 19 February it came close to the beachhead's final line of defense.¹⁸

The line held. The Germans cut off a battalion of the U.S. 157th Infantry astride the Albano road, but the gap they drove into the line could not be widened into a breakthrough. On 19 and 20 February counterattacks by the U.S. 1st Armored and 45th Divisions, backed by massed artillery, naval gunfire and air attack, brought the German offensive to a halt.¹⁹

In the aftermath Clark replaced Lucas with Major General Lucian Truscott of the 3rd Division, on 22 February according to Morison and the British official history, on 23 February according to the U.S. Army history. A last German attack against the 3rd Division near Cisterna, from 29 February to 3 March, also failed, and Kesselring ordered his army to dig in.²⁰

Life in the beachhead

For the next two and a half months neither side could move the other. The beachhead was so small that German guns could reach any part of it, from 88 mm guns to giant 280 mm railroad guns, one of which the soldiers called the Anzio Express or Anzio Annie, first reported in action on 24 March; they shelled both towns and the anchorage. There was no safe rear area, and even the field hospitals were within range.²¹

The sea kept the beachhead alive. Trucks were loaded at Naples, driven onto tank landing ships and driven straight off at Anzio; from 28 January a convoy of six such ships sailed daily, each with fifty loaded trucks. Supplies also came in by landing craft and Liberty ships, and the sick and wounded went back the same way to the hospitals at Naples.²²

Breakout and the road to Rome

The deadlock broke at Cassino. On the night of 11 to 12 May the Fifth and Eighth Armies opened their spring offensive against the Gustav Line. By then VI Corps had grown to seven divisions. It attacked out of the beachhead on 23 May, took Cisterna, and at 7:31 on the morning of 25 May its engineers met American troops advancing from the south: Anzio was a beachhead no longer.²³

The beachhead plan, code-named Buffalo, was to drive through the Velletri gap to Valmontone and cut Highway 6, the main supply route of the German Tenth Army. Soon after Cisterna fell, Clark shifted the weight of the attack northwest toward Rome. Truscott was dismayed and believed that the change let the Tenth Army escape destruction; it remains one of the most argued-over decisions of the campaign. U.S. troops entered Rome on 4 June 1944, two days before the landings in Normandy took the headlines.²⁴

Counting the losses

No exact count exists. The U.S. Army history puts VI Corps' combat casualties to 22 May at about 30,000, including at least 4,400 killed and 18,000 wounded, with 6,800 men reported captured by the Germans; it adds more than 37,000 noncombat casualties from sickness, injury and exhaustion. Churchill, writing to Stalin in June 1944 as Morison quotes him, put the losses of the defensive battle at 25,000 Allied against 30,000 German.²⁵

German losses are just as uncertain. The U.S. Army history estimates that Fourteenth Army lost 28,000 to 30,000 men in its operations against the beachhead, at least 5,500 of them killed, while Kesselring said in 1947, according to Morison, that his total casualties were 40,000, of whom 5,000 were killed.²⁶

Was Anzio worth it?

Opinions divided from the start. Eisenhower called the beachhead a draining sore but judged that in the end the operation paid off, because it led Hitler to send more divisions to Italy. Morison was harsher: its main object had been to free Rome quickly, which was not done, and as a diversion it drained the attacker as much as the defender. The British official history blames the plan rather than the men: an operation of extraordinary importance, launched without a searching tactical analysis.²⁷

What is not in doubt is what it asked of those who held it. For four months the soldiers and sailors at Anzio lived under shellfire and air attack, within range of German guns wherever they stood, and they held.²⁸