Happy Ant-Heap (3 page)

A month later, while on an official visit to the
carabinieri
headquarters in Naples, I met de Lucca, an engaging man who described this experience, which he had never quite recovered from, in person. ‘I stopped trying to count all the ships,’ he said. ‘They were spread out for miles. I thought: what can they be doing? There’s nothing for them here.’ Presently lights twinkled among this grey confusion. This de Lucca interpreted as naval gunfire, and turning his attention as if by instinct to the profile of mountains over the beach, he saw a house plucked from a distant village like a tooth from an old jaw.

He went back and awakened his friends. ‘I think we’re being invaded,’ he told them.

At 5.30 a.m. on the day when de Lucca had watched the ships take shape in the mist, ten British Intelligence Corps members, including myself, were studying the details of the distant Italian coast from one of them. We had sailed from Algeria in the
Duchess of Bedford,
carrying the entire HQ staff of the American Fifth Army, and had dropped anchor some ten minutes by landing craft from Paestum beach. Our ignorance of what awaited us there matched de Lucca’s as to the reason for our coming. We had been told of the armistice, but otherwise all was hazard and conjecture. Supposedly the Italians were out of the war, but where were the Germans? Were they still present in southern Italy—and if so, in what strength? A lecture delivered by the fleet’s Chief Intelligence Officer the previous evening had ended with the startling admission, ‘We know virtually nothing.’ This confession did nothing to inspire confidence in the outcome of what awaited us. In addition it was known that the Fifth Army was composed largely of troops who had not seen action and was led by generals whose first taste of battle this was to be. The majority of the officers had taken comfort in a belief that the landing would be carried out without opposition, but this illusion was hastily jettisoned when the first landing craft to approach the shore came under heavy fire. For those of us still on the ship, waiting to climb into a boat, Paestum lit by the first rays of the rising sun appeared as a scene from antiquity: three Greek temples sparkled distantly among pinewoods backed by a low crenellation of mountains. Over these a slender column of smoke arose from a village that had attracted speculative fire from the ships.

Twelve hours passed before we were finally put ashore among American soldiers by the thousand, wandering without direction in aimless, bewildered groups. There was an unnatural silence about these men drifting through the shadows, broken rarely by the low murmur of voices. An MP jeep on the lookout for wanderers or men who had lost themselves crawled softly by, its tyres crunching on the sand. A single shot spread sharp echoes and startled movement. It was a scene imprinted with fear.

For us it was an occasion not wholly free from risk. We had been warned on the ship that our British uniforms might seem strange and even alarming to young soldiers exposed to foreign surroundings for the first time, and we had been advised to have ourselves kitted out by the quartermaster as soon as we were ashore. There was the matter of the password, too. Here and there sentries had been posted and one suddenly sprang out of a bush, rifle aimed, to demand a password, of which we knew nothing. It came close to being a lucky escape, and at this point the essential problem seemed to be to eliminate the hazards of our first night on Italian soil. We therefore chose a dense wood in the vicinity, burrowed deep into the underbrush and almost instantly fell asleep. Some time later I was awakened by movements through the bushes. Listening, I picked up a low mutter of voices, among which I could clearly distinguish German words, forming the opinion in a drowsily relaxed fashion that these could only belong to the enemy, on the lookout, as we had been, for a place to pass an undisturbed night. Soon the voices died away, and I slept again.

Early next morning we reported for duty at what was pointed out to us as the Fifty Army HQ’s staff tent. We were carrying papers addressed to the Staff Officer (Intelligence) describing the urgency and importance of our mission, but we discovered that neither this officer nor any other senior member of the HQ staff was present, and after diplomatic questions put to the captain who saw us, we learned that the whole staff from General Mark Clark down were still aboard the
Ancona,
‘where there was more space’. According to our briefing in Oran, we were to instruct senior officers, who in many cases would be seeing action for the first time, in the relevance and importance of security. Our suggestion was that we might be taken out to the
Ancona
to contact the Intelligence Officer there without delay. The captain’s reception of this request reflected both harassment and boredom. ‘We’re under pressure here, as you can see,’ he said. ‘You want to be of use right now, maybe you should give a hand unloading supplies.’

We looked down upon the long, thin trail of humanity wandering like ants through the sand dunes down to the water to pick up their burdens and return. Sergeant-Major Dashwood explained the urgency with which 312 Field Security Section had been brought up, at the insistence of General Clark himself, from the depths of Algeria to provide safeguards essential to the opening of the Italian campaign, but listening to him the captain’s expression changed to hardly concealed hostility. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you are free to come and go as you please, and to occupy yourselves as you think fit.’ It was the last we saw of him, and we accepted the fact that we were now on our own. Nevertheless, perhaps out of habit we were unable to stifle an interest in what was going on. The Fifth Army HQ troops fixed up field kitchens, knocked together rudimentary sleeping quarters for officers and other ranks, dug latrines and unloaded boats. A mammoth pile of typewriters and filing cabinets began to accumulate, but no weaponry, artillery, ack-ack guns, mortars or even rolls of barbed wire were reaching us from a marine horizon glutted with uncountable ships. But above all—and far more alarmingly—where were the tanks?

Despite the limitless chaos, D-Day at Paestum had gone as well as expected, but two miles or so to the south on what was called Blue Beach the situation was less promising. A landing in the face of machine-gun and mortar fire had produced a number of casualties and a master-sergeant to whom I chatted was taking a number of corpses back to one of the ships. They had been laid out in the bottom of a boat, their faces covered with clean napkins, arms fully extended and thumbs along trouser creases, as if in preparation for an inspection by Death. This boat, like all the others in the vicinity, had come in laden with office equipment, which now formed high piles all along the waterfront. Once again, the boat had brought with it no weapons.

The German presence in the area was now guaranteed, although there was still no precise information as to where they would be dug in, awaiting the Fifth Army’s advertised attack. As there was nothing better to occupy me, I took one of the section’s motorcycles and rode some three miles along the beach in a northerly direction, through fine coastal scenery, past tamarisks growing under ancient Mediterranean oaks, with a single glimpse of a water-buffalo of the race imported by the Greeks, knee-deep in a swamp.

I stopped briefly to inspect the empty seaside house which, from my subsequent conversation with de Lucca, was clearly the one occupied by his friends on the night of our invasion, and then again at the point where the Sele River runs into the sea. Shortly before my arrival a squad of engineers had blown up a bridge a hundred yards away carrying both the north-south road and railway line over the river; at the moment I drew up they were finishing off boxes of K-rations and taking snapshots of each other. I asked the engineers why they had blown up the bridge and was told that it was to hold up any kraut advance. My friend the master-sergeant had given me a rough map of the bridgehead which included this area. ‘But it’s the British sector,’ I said. ‘What would the krauts be doing here?’

‘Search me,’ was the reply.

I showed one of the engineers the master-sergeant’s map. ‘Going north as far as you can see is British,’ I said. ‘All the way to Salerno.’

‘I wasn’t told that. I guess the guy who gave me the order didn’t know, either. So maybe there’s no one here. Maybe it’s empty. I guess the British were waiting for us to do something about it and we were waiting for them.’

‘Let’s hope the enemy hasn’t heard anything about this,’ I said.

On the second day, in the hope of making our stay more comfortable, we moved into one of the small farmhouses abandoned in the vicinity. The symbols of panic seemed more poignant in these humble surroundings. The first huge crashing salvoes from the fleet had demolished the carefully calculated order of this shrine of domesticity. A single window had been blown out, a child snatched from its cot had dropped a doll, and a pair of crushed spectacles lay on the floor. Country people with lives organised to defend this low level of prosperity were known in these parts as
famiglie di una vacca—
one-cow families—and in this case, sure enough, the sole cow had been sacrificed to the invaders’ hunger for fresh meat, and it lay within sight of the back door, a haunch hacked away.

We returned to camp in time for the first alarm call to reluctant battle as a German plane broke like a shining white splinter from behind the cliff and curved, in a manoeuvre appearing calm, leisurely and even beautiful, to drop a single bomb among the ships. Through our master-sergeant friend we learned that a landing strip had already been cut to enable our fighters to fly in from Sicily and take on the intruders. Unfortunately the first of these, a Spitfire, fell victim to friendly fire while attempting to land later that day.

With the vision of the German FW 190 skimming over the cliff-top above us, all illusions entertained about this battle were at an end. Wild talk of Naples in four days and Rome by the beginning of the month was silenced and in its place defeatism began to spread. Two or three old soldiers, who had seen action in North Africa and found themselves among these raw beginners from Kansas and Wisconsin, realised that any Allied attack when launched would meet with the resistance of one of the best-armed, most sophisticated and tenacious forces in the West. There were even pessimists ready to suggest that far from the predicted military walkover, the Fifth Army might find itself involved in a defensive battle. These doubts strengthened later in the day when attacks by a single plane were replaced by those carried out by a five-plane squadron arriving overhead punctually at intervals of one and a half hours.

The Germans’ obvious takeover of an airfield left no doubt that an immediate counter-attack was likely. No attempt had been made by the Americans to secure the heights overlooking the beach-head, and in the absence of this precaution it seemed more than likely that the enemy would do just that. Altavilla, some six miles away, dominated this area and as a precautionary measure, since no Germans were there, General Clark called for a naval bombardment which left this mountain village in ruins, with substantial loss of life. This was opposed by his own staff, and General Walker later wrote, ‘I did not see how the destruction of buildings and killing of civilians in Altavilla was going to help our situation.’

Infantry units were now called upon to begin limited advances into the encircling hills, but since at this stage no armoured or artillery support was available, some clashes with the 16th Panzer Division’s Mark IV tanks were catastrophic. Blue Beach to the south now came under enemy artillery fire, and the attempt to land the first of the Fifth Army’s tanks here was frustrated. There was a day’s delay before the tanks could be brought ashore on Red Beach, within sight of our farmhouse at Albanella.

The mediocre performance of the first two days ashore was responsible for the growth of something like a military inferiority complex. The FW 190s came and went at will, and any hopes of discouraging them faded after a second and third Spitfire from Sicily succumbed to friendly fire. Rumours were an important part of the Intelligence Corps’ stock-in-trade and an ideal place to collect them was in the evening chow-line, through which they flowed like a ceaseless current. Pessimism was general, but it was of an informed character and bolstered by fact. General Clark, still out of sight on the
Ancona,
was fighting his first battle command, which was considered a bad start for those who served under him. The soldiers knew that Clark was at loggerheads with his subordinate generals, Dawlish and Walker, and that was a bad thing, too. Among the many rumours, most damaging was the one that Clark was already contemplating withdrawal and would approach the British Navy for their support. Attempting to trace the source of such rumours, it became evident that high-ranking officers on the
Ancona
talked with extraordinary freedom in the presence of the staff who served them in the mess. The Commander-in-Chief, a showman with a propensity for bullying his inferiors in public, was deeply unpopular with the troops. The sergeants expressing their views freely in the chow-line were of the opinion that Clark had done whatever he could to postpone ‘Operation Avalanche’ until Montgomery’s Eighth Army, coming up from Sicily, was in the vicinity, and preferred even now to defer an advance.

Minor probes into hilly country by infantry unprotected by tanks and without air-cover came to nothing when they ran into opposition, although Altavilla, devastated by the naval guns, was found to be empty. Clark and his staff now left the
Ancona
in search of ample accommodation for his headquarters ashore. It was inevitable that he should be shown the grandiose abandoned mansion known as the Villa Rossa, a folly full of statuary and old masters—inevitable, too, that he should have decided to move in. Thus, after the huge effort to bring a mountain of HQ equipment ashore and stack it, protected from the weather in a safe position, it now had to be humped by office staff and off-duty soldiers up to the villa, which was only accessible by narrow tracks.

In the old days aristocratic visitors to the Villa Rossa from Rome would have been dropped off at Albanella, within walking distance of our farmhouse. At the time of our arrival the village had been abandoned, with the exception of a shop selling sour white wine and an aphrodisiac cheese famous throughout southern Italy, made from the milk of local buffaloes mixed, it was said, with dried and ground-up flies.