Supreme Commander (45 page)

On the morning of September 7 Taylor and Gardiner traveled by PT boat to the Italian coast, splashed some water on their uniforms to give the appearance of aviators shot down and rescued from the sea, and rode by automobile to Rome, passing German troops along the way. They reached the city at nightfall and entered into a series of discussions with lower-ranking Italian Army officers. All the Italians seemed apprehensive. The American force coming into Rome was too small to hold the city; the Italians could not hold the airfields for them; they could not supply material, as promised, for the 82d; final preparations had not been made; the Allied landings at Salerno were too weak and too far south and would do the Italians no good at all. As one officer put it to Taylor, “If the Italians declare an armistice, the Germans will occupy Rome, and the Italians can do little to prevent it.” They wanted GIANT II, code name for the 82d’s move to Rome, canceled and the armistice announcement and AVALANCHE postponed.

Taylor demanded to see Badoglio. Around midnight he got to Badoglio’s villa and found that Badoglio was just as frightened as his subordinates. Like them, he wanted the whole operation postponed. Taylor argued to no avail. As the official American historians put it, in a grand understatement, “Badoglio’s bland disregard of the terms signed by his accredited representative, Castellano, and his unwillingness to oppose the Germans were extremely disconcerting.…”
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Taylor finally gave up, and Badoglio wrote a message to Eisenhower. Badoglio said that “due to changes in the situation … it is no longer possible to accept an immediate armistice,” since it would provoke the Germans. The 82d’s move to Rome “is no longer possible because of lack of forces to guarantee the airfields.” Taylor wrote a message of his own recommending that GIANT II be abandoned.
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Both messages had to be encoded, transmitted, and decoded. The process took hours. GIANT II was scheduled to take off from Sicily at 6:30
P.M
., September 8. Around noon of that day Taylor, anxious to make sure GIANT II was canceled, sent a two-word message, “Situation innocuous.” That evening he and Gardiner returned to Sicily on an Italian airplane.
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On the morning of September 8 Eisenhower had wakened early, dictated some messages, and then left Algiers to go to Amilcar, his advance command post near Tunis. Shortly after he left Badoglio’s message renouncing the armistice came in and was decoded. It threw Smith off
balance. After sending a copy to Eisenhower at Amilcar, Smith sent a message to the CCS asking whether or not to proceed with the armistice announcement.
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Eisenhower was enraged. His annoyance with Smith for having referred the problem to the CCS was almost as great as his anger at Badoglio for backing down. He grasped a pencil, broke it, and began dictating a message to Badoglio. When he was finished he had Castellano, who was in Bizerte, brought to Amilcar.

The stage managing was excellent. Eisenhower had Castellano wait in a courtyard for half an hour, with officers of all ranks scurrying past, paying no attention at all to Castellano. Eisenhower then had Castellano ushered by armed guards into his office. Eisenhower sat at a table, flanked by Alexander and Cunningham, and with other awe-inspiring Allied officers to the right and left. Castellano came to attention and saluted. No one returned it. He felt as if he were at his own court-martial.

Eisenhower read to Castellano his message to Badoglio, which was then being encoded for transmission. “I intend to broadcast the existence of the armistice at the hour originally planned,” Eisenhower’s message began, and that hour was 6:30
P.M
., that day, less than twelve hours away. “If you or any part of your armed forces fail to cooperate as previously agreed I will publish to the world the full record of this affair.” Eisenhower refused to “accept” Badoglio’s message postponing the armistice, pointed out that an accredited representative had signed it, and warned: “The sole hope of Italy is bound up in your adherence to that agreement.” Athough Eisenhower was sure that the Italians had sufficient troops near Rome to hold the city, on Badoglio’s “earnest representation” he was canceling GIANT II.

In his last paragraph, Eisenhower let out all the stops. “Plans have been made on the assumption that you were acting in good faith and we have been prepared to carry out future operations on that basis,” he declared. His voice rising, he continued to read to the quaking Castellano. “Failure now on your part to carry out the full obligations to the signed agreement will have the most serious consequences for your country. No future action of yours could then restore any confidence whatever in your good faith and consequently the dissolution of your government and nation would ensue.” Eisenhower then dismissed Castellano, sending him to Tunis with the hope that he could do something to bring Badoglio around. The whole explosive scene probably made Eisenhower and his deputies feel better, but it had little practical value, since Badoglio was
not there to see it. If Badoglio was to relent, Eisenhower’s message alone would have to persuade him.
³⁰

With the message on its way to Badoglio and Castellano properly terrified, the next step was to make sure GIANT II had been canceled. AFHQ had sent a message to the division headquarters in Sicily, but it would take so long to encode, transmit, and decode that a quicker method was needed. Eisenhower therefore sent Brigadier General Lyman Lemnitzer by plane to Sicily. The pilot got lost, and only when he almost crashed into Mount Etna was he able to identify his location. The 82d’s commander, Major General Matthew Ridgway, was meanwhile waiting near a radio. Eisenhower was scheduled to broadcast the armistice at 6:30
P.M
. and that broadcast was the 82d’s signal to go. Sixty-two of the 150 troop-carrying planes were already circling into formation to prepare to go to Rome when Lemnitzer landed. GIANT II was off.
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At 6:30
P.M
., on schedule, although no word had been received from Badoglio, Eisenhower went on the air on Radio Algiers. “This is General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander in Chief of the Allied forces,” he began. “The Italian government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally. As Allied Commander in Chief, I have granted a military armistice.” The terms had been approved by the Allied governments, he added, and “the Italian government has bound itself by these terms without reservation.” The armistice became effective “this instant. Hostilities between the armed forces of the United Nations and those of Italy terminate at once.” Finally, “Italians who now act to help eject the German aggressor from Italian soil will have the assistance and support of the United Nations.”

When Eisenhower finished, technicians at Amilcar quickly turned their dials to pick up Radio Rome. No announcement came from Badoglio. After waiting ten minutes, Eisenhower told the technicians to broadcast over Radio Algiers the text of Badoglio’s proclamation. This had been cleared earlier with Eisenhower and declared that an armistice was in effect. It ordered Italian soldiers to cease all acts of hostility against the Allies while urging them to “oppose attacks from any other quarter.”
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That finished it. There was nothing more Eisenhower could do. He had gambled heavily, and now he had entered the waiting period before an invasion, that maddening time when he could only sit and pray. Clark’s men were on their way to the beaches. The Germans were undoubtedly moving to take Rome, which would clear their transportation routes to get reinforcements down to Salerno. No one knew what Badoglio
was going to do or even where he was; presumably he and the King, along with other government officials, would flee Rome.

Eisenhower had always insisted on announcing the armistice before the invasion, hoping that this would induce the Italians to at least commit acts of sabotage against the Germans. He recognized, however, that the terms the Allies had insisted upon were hardly likely to induce the Italians to become wholehearted advocates of the Allied cause. All the Allies had given the Italians was a crushing set of terms depriving them of all authority, all independence, and even the basic means of defense. In return, the Allies would not even recognize them as co-belligerents. But except at Taranto, no plans for co-operation had been made.
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From the first, however, Eisenhower had not expected much positive help from the Italians. He had told Churchill all along that there was “no fury left in the Italian population.” What he absolutely had to have was passive neutrality. If the Italians chose to ignore the armistice announcement, pulled another double-cross, and fought beside the Germans, AVALANCHE would be a bloody failure. The situation was risky enough as it was, since Clark was invading with less than four divisions, while the Germans had almost twenty divisions on the mainland, and their ability to rush reinforcements to the Salerno area was greater than that of the Allies. It all hinged on Badoglio.

While the landing craft plowed forward through the Mediterranean, carrying Clark’s men to their landing sites around Salerno, Eisenhower and his AFHQ staff sat beside a radio, waiting to hear whether Badoglio would broadcast over Radio Rome. Finally, at 7:45
P.M
., Badoglio came on and announced the armistice.
^*

Eisenhower grunted his satisfaction. He had “played a little poker,” as he put it, and won. By the time the Italians realized that the Allies had only a few divisions available for operations in Italy, it would be too late to back out.
^**
He had done everything he could. It was now up to Clark—really, the men of the British X and the American VI Corps—and there was nothing the commander in chief could do until the situation on the beach clarified. Eisenhower was getting better at these waiting periods. This time, instead of fidgeting, he went to sleep.
¹

When he awoke at 6:45
A.M
. the news was good. Clark’s first waves had gotten ashore successfully, even though the Germans had pinpointed
the general site of the landing. Secrecy was minimal because Salerno Bay was the only point between the toe and Naples with beaches that would support a landing, and the Germans knew that the Allied land-based fighter aircraft could not operate north of Naples. The enemy had assigned the 16th Panzer Division to the defense of the region. The defense was a mobile one, designed to hold up the Allies until the German divisions in the south of Italy could extricate themselves from combat with the Eighth Army and come to the aid of the 16th Division. Von Kesselring’s plan was to bring together every force he had and, on the third or fourth day of the invasion, drive the Allies into the sea.

Eisenhower hoped to upset Von Kesselring’s plan by putting pressure on him at so many different points that concentration of forces would be impossible. The Allies already had Eighth Army coming north from the toe, and Clark was ashore at Salerno. In addition, Eisenhower had directed the British 1st Airborne Division into Taranto as soon as Badoglio announced the armistice. By early morning on September 9 the 1st Airborne was on its way. The 82d Airborne’s operation at Rome had been a part of this over-all plan, but it of course had been abandoned. Still, on the morning of September 9, the situation looked bright.
²
An important factor was Italian neutrality, now insured thanks to Badoglio’s announcement. AFHQ could even begin to hope for active Italian assistance, which might be considerable, for even though the Italian Army was ill equipped, it did contain 1,700,000 men.

But the hope that something could be accomplished by the Italians soon died. After announcing the armistice, Badoglio, the King, and the leaders in the government spent the next few hours debating whether or not they should leave Rome. They had hoped that the Germans would accept the armistice, and some even dreamed of the Germans agreeing to an Italian demand that they lay down their arms. But when the Germans made it clear that they would fight their way into Rome if necessary, the government panicked. At 5
A.M
., as Clark’s men came ashore, the King, Badoglio, and the most important military leaders piled into private automobiles and fled the capital, headed for the south and safety under Allied protection. No one bothered to send any orders to units in the field, and for the most part the Germans merely disarmed the Italian soldiers. Within a matter of days the Italian Army ceased to exist and Italy was an occupied country.
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Much of this was already known to Eisenhower by noon of September 9, when he dictated a long situation report to the CCS. He said that information received from Castellano indicated that nothing could be
expected from the Italians. On the positive side, the Italian fleet had started out of Taranto and the British 1st Airborne had started in. Eisenhower was also rushing troops to Brindisi, for the Germans seemed to have no ground strength on the heel. Montgomery was making progress from the toe, but he was not moving fast enough to hold the Germans in the area, so Eisenhower expected them to turn up on Clark’s front shortly.

At the main point, Salerno, the initial success was already beginning to give way to disturbing developments. The British X Corps, to the north, had three separate beachheads, one at Maiori, eight miles west of Salerno, another at Salerno itself, and a third to the south. The American VI Corps had one beachhead, twenty-five miles to the southeast, around Paestum. Beach conditions had forced the dispersal of troops. The immediate object was to link up. Resistance everywhere was heavy, but it was especially marked on the VI Corps front. It was beginning to look as though the link-up would be difficult to achieve and once made difficult to hold. Clark wanted to rush the 82d Airborne into the beachhead, and Eisenhower was trying to find landing craft with which to to the job.

“I feel that AVALANCHE will be a matter of touch and go for the next few days,” Eisenhower told the CCS. If he had enough landing craft to put another division ashore immediately “the matter would be almost a foregone conclusion,” but as it was “we are in for some very tough fighting.” Eisenhower admitted that he looked for a “very bad time in the AVALANCHE area,” but declared that he believed that “the enemy is sufficiently confused by the events of the past 24 hours that it will be difficult for him to make up a definite plan.…”
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