Eight Decades Ago, a Fateful Italian D-Day
The Allies landed a campaign to liberate Rome on January 22, 1944
On Saturday morning, we will put our troops on the shore and begin the process of liberating the city. This was not a battle edict issued yesterday, but rather a pivotal decision in a long-ago war. Who knows how many times such a plan has been hatched or how many beaches and cities have been stormed and won or lost due to such battle orders.
The Saturday I’m referencing is January 22, 1944. The place is the south-central coast of Italy. The city in question is Rome.
And the beachhead is Anzio, the site where my father landed with the troops of the First Special Service Force in what was to be a campaign drawn out for months. For my father, it was to be his last. The FSSF, known as the Force, arrived shortly after the first troops but were to serve a key role in the massive battle that ensued.
The initial landing—80 years ago this Monday—was the result of a joint American and British plan, really a scheme by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his team that was agreed to by the Americans, under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
This was another D-Day, and it went a lot more smoothly than the one to come at Normandy five months later. An armada of Allied ships dropped anchor in the Anzio waters minutes after midnight on Jan. 22, announcing their arrival with a brief, intense bombing campaign at 2 a.m. When that met with no response, they began to send the troops and their equipment ashore, and by dawn at 7:30 a.m., the beachfront towns of Anzio and Nettuno were in Allied hands, with very little resistance. The few German soldiers guarding the area were either rounded up as prisoners or escaped on the run.
What happened next has kept military strategists and historians busy debating for decades.
When the Allies met no beachfront resistance, they pushed inland, into the flat former marshlands turned into farm fields by Mussolini’s canal-building project, which drained the swamp and made the land usable. Miles of farmland fronted inland hill masses where Italian village culture had thrived for many centuries. Beyond that was Rome to the north and the grand mountainous spine of Italy, the Apennine range, running north-south. The few major roads in the area, including one that had been the historic Appian Way, led indeed to Rome. Along the western front of the Apennines, one major road connected Rome to Naples, a city already under Allied control.
The American and British troops surged inland from Anzio and Nettuno and beaches north. Again they encountered very few Germans and scant resistance. By nightfall on landing day, Allied troops were three to four miles inland. By midnight, more than 36,000 troops and 3,200 vehicles were ashore, representing 90 percent of the invasion force. The beachhead had been established with little resistance and few casualties.
The question went out, how far should the push go? How much advantage could be made with this surprise attack? Could they even push on toward their ultimate objective and take back Rome?
Such an aggressive approach was not to be. The operation’s commander, Major General John P. Lucas, deemed it too dangerous to push on, fearing that the advance troops could be surrounded and unable to be resupplied. He determined to pull back to the beach, marshal the reserves and supply chains, and then engage. And that was the fateful decision that historians still debate. It gave the Germans time to respond, which they did, swiftly and massively. There’s so much more to the situation, but I will shelve the college course. Suffice to say, the decision was to cause a massive troop buildup on both sides and a battlefield stalemate that would last for months and cost many thousands of lives.
As the Allies were storming Anzio, my father’s unit was recuperating from brutal winter mountain fighting along that road from Naples. The Force had been instrumental in punishing efforts that pushed the German forces back from their “Winter Line” of defense, but the road north to Rome was not yet free and clear. The Germans held the high ground further along the foothill towns, and on both sides of that key road.
In fact, the landing at Anzio was in part a diversion to weaken the hill town defenses by forcing the Nazis to fight on two fronts. Another significant reason for the Anzio campaign was to draw more German forces from battles farther north in Europe, thereby increasing the odds that a D-Day invasion in northern Europe, which would turn out to be Normandy, would have a better chance of success. Again, this describes just the tip of the strategy, but all the elements combined to make this one of the momentous European battles of WWII.
At the end of January, the Force’s marching orders came down. Ship out to Anzio. They put boots on the beach on February 2 and immediately were given the task of defending a significant section of the beachhead. Their job was to hold the enemy at the Mussolini Canal, from the seashore five kilometers inland. It was an active battle zone and they were stretched thin.
Further orders were to gather intel about enemy strength and positions on the other side of the canal. They were to cross the canal, make incursions into enemy territory and bring back prisoners for interrogation. It was work to be done under the cover of darkness. My father’s unit, the Force’s Second Regiment, got the job. That winter, the successful night raids would spawn the legend of the Black Devils of Anzio.
Some visuals from the Anzio movie trailer, and an oddly romantic theme song, sung by Jack Jones: