World Battlefronts: Beyond the Bridgehead

(See Cover)

Lieut. General Mark Wayne Clark of the Fifth Army sprawled on the dusty Italian earth. An artillery observer lay prone beside him at the forward observation post. The valley ahead rolled gently like background for a Raphael canvas, touched with hedge-rimmed farms and tiny rivulets under a deep blue sky. Far off, snug against a spiny, pine-covered ridge, rose the white and red buildings of a village on the hard road from Salerno to Naples. There the Germans were stubbornly but thinly entrenched. Allied shells whipped across the classic landscape, scuffed up geysers of smoke.

On his long belly the General watched.

“Damned rear guard holding up a whole division,” he said. “Where are our troops?” He swung his binoculars north. “Oh, yeh. I see three of them. Crossing an open field. Why the hell don’t they take cover?” A few minutes later he crawled over to a slit-trench phone, talked to a regimental commander. “Of course, your battalion commander knows more about the situation than I do,” he said smoothly. “But maybe we ought to get in there fast and exploit this barrage.” Back at the outpost, he commented: “We’re going to attack in half an hour.” But he did not wait. He was off to other forward units, riding with one long leg astride a fender of his jeep.

The Immediate Job. It was a busy and critical week for Mark Clark and the Fifth. He called his sallies to the front “ringside” visits. His men, getting used to the lanky figure in paratrooper boots, gold-braided overseas cap or three-starred helmet, called him “the front-line general.”

One day, under German mortar fire, he picked a careful way behind stone walls up the limestone and pumice heights of the Sorrentine peninsula. From the ridge the patches of chestnut forest tumbled into the brown Campania plain. The General looked in the direction of the ashen ruins of Pompeii, the lava-scarred cone of Vesuvius. Beyond the volcano rose a huge shroud of smoke over the port of Naples. In that city of 900,000, rising in tourist times like a white amphitheater from the blue sea, the Germans were dynamiting and burning. It was clear proof that the Wehrmacht had lost the Battle of Salerno, had now begun an earth-scorching evacuation of southern Italy’s greatest port.

It was time for General Clark to confer with General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery of Britain’s dashing Eighth Army. Below the Sorrentine heights, perhaps in General Clark’s office-truck headquarters, the American and Briton met.

The first phase of the Battle of Italy had ended. Between them, the Fifth, pinning down the main German force in the lower peninsula, and the Eighth,* pounding up the toe, heel and shank, had consolidated the first bridgehead on main land Europe. Now the second phase could begin.

North and east from Salerno, the Fifth moved forward, battered at the mountain gateways to the flatlands around Naples.

The Germans fell back in order, leaving hasty graves, dead tanks, blocked roads, vicious mine fields. The Eighth raced up inland and along the Adriatic, approach ing the big road, rail and air junction at Foggia. The envelopment of Naples was under way.

The Ultimate Job. The bruising melee on the beaches of Salerno had been hell for the men of the Fifth. It had been touch & go, as Winston Churchill said, “from day three to day seven.” But hell for the men was a school for the generals.

Without benefit of surprise, at the fag end of vital fighter-plane range, they had come ashore, skillfully coordinated their sea, air and land power, taken stiff punish ment, given harder blows back. If the Fifth had failed at Salerno, the Eighth would have had a much tougher job. And Mark Clark’s reputation would have suffered an eclipse.

But from the first big landing in Europe, where did the road lead? In the official Army opinion, the road ahead will not be easy. Said Lieut.General Joseph T. McNarney, U.S. Deputy Chief of Staff, at a conference in Washington last week:

“In Sicily the Germans had three and one half divisions. … It took the two best Armies of the U.S. and Great Britain, containing a total of 13 divisions, five weeks to overcome the bitter defense of an enemy whose air cover had been removed and whose supply lines were paralyzed. . . . Today in Italy we are faced with nearly 20 German divisions; beyond Italy are the Alps, a formidable natural defense line, and many more German divisions. At the present time, Germany is capable of opposing any attack on a vital portion of her European defense with at least ten times the German forces defeated in Sicily. . .”

Bernard Montgomery had bet six shillings that he would not be home by Christmas ; where he might be, he would not wager. Mark Clark had said: Naples, Rome and a liberated Italy. These, obviously, were immediate objectives. For every bridgehead must ultimately lead or contribute to the advance on the Nazi heartland, the German inner citadel.

Coming battles would show what place Italy held in the Allied High Command’s grand strategy; Winston Churchill seemed to think that the complete conquest of Italy would be a big job in itself. One thing was certain: Italy was the key to the whole plan in southern Europe.

>Italy is a road to the Reich. But it is a long road: 800 miles from Salerno to the Brenner Pass. The peninsula is wrinkled with mountains. As in Tunisia and Sicily, relatively small German units could hold the ridges, command the valleys and coastal defiles, give ground slowly and at a price.

>Above Naples the Germans might make a stand behind the Volturno River, where the old Romans posted a garrison and Garibaldi beat the Neapolitans. Above Rome, they might run a barricade along the Apennines, from La Spezia on the Ligurian Sea to Rimini on the Adriatic. Above that barrier the land sloped down to the Po Valley, and beyond towered the Alps. Napoleon once had hacked a way across that rampart of nature, via Tarvis and Klagenfurt, toward Vienna. But it was formidable. Rather than a direct road to Germany, Italy might be a flank for other bridgeheads. > Italy leads to southern France. Because the Alpine passes narrow and drop steeply on the Italian side of the border, it is a military axiom that France is not readily assaulted from Italy. But from ports on the peninsula’s west coast and from newly won Sardinia and Corsica (see p. 78), the Allies might strive for a bridgehead at theRhone’s mouth, thereby begin the liberation of France and a march to the Rhine. >Italy is a springboard to the Balkans, where the passes and valleys, although few and difficult, lead to the vital Danube basin, a possible junction with the Red Army, and the shaky Nazi back door. Last week Allied sea power, in the form of a flotilla of torpedo boats, raided Albanian waters, exchanged fire with shore batteries, sank two enemy merchantmen. Italy is a base of air attack on Germany —directly from airdromes in Italy, by shuttle to & from Great Britain.

The Weapons. To execute the plan in Italy, Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Sir Harold Alexander had chosen a tested weapon—Montgomery’s Eighth—and an untried weapon—Clark’s Fifth. The Fifth had distinctions of a kind: it was a U.S. Army, with important British units. It was the first U.S. Army of World War II activated abroad. It had trained long and earnestly for seven months in Africa, and some of its units had been tested in Sicily. It had received its final temper in seven days of shock and fire at Salerno. The Fifth had been organized in North Africa. As its Commander in Chief, Mark Clark had military jurisdiction over 225,000 sq. mi. of North African soil. He established headquarters in the vacated Ècole des Jeunes Filles at Oujda, in French Morocco, a town of 35,000 (less than half of whom are Europeans). Around Jay a sparsely-settled, varied terrain—mountain, desert, plain and seacoast—an excellent practice ground.

Mark Clark had learned to train men in the U.S., where he had been Lieut. General Lesley (“Whitey”) McNair’s Ground Force Commander’s Chief of Staff, and in Britain, where he had been General Eisenhower’s right hand. In North Africa his job was to build up forces for the attack on Italy. He and his staff, headed by small, fair-haired, mathematically minded Chief of Staff Alfred Maximilian (Continued on p. 32)

Gruenther, were in effect professors of invasion, learned in amphibious assault, airborne operations, tank destruction, battle discipline.

The Fifth’s schools sought to give each soldier versatility. Mark Clark did not believe in overdone ultraspecialization. The quality of his teachings attracted visitors. Many a soldier of Lieut. General George Patton’s Seventh Army got his final polish in General Clark’s classes. And when the Fifth embarked for the Salerno beaches, it had been graduated cum laude from the toughest of training camps.

Personal Touch. The commander who drilled the Fifth is no martinet. He drove himself, as well as his troops, hard. But in a relaxed sort of way. He does not stomp or rage—or even smoke to ease his nerves. The tauter Mark Clark feels, the quieter he usually becomes. But what he says then in his resonant voice may have a steely edge, and his long legs may take longer, caged-lion strides. He does not have General Patton’s histrionic flair, or General Eisenhower’s command of expletives. Yet he can let off steam with a sharp “Ibbsob!” which merely means yellow-bellied s.o.b.

The men of the Fifth like what Mark Clark calls the “personal touch.” In Morocco, he flew from post to post in his own light plane, dubbed Sans Culotte. Once a ground strip below was blocked by softball players. When he came down and the soldiers saw who he was, they expected the worst. “What’s going on here?” were the General’s first words. Someone explained it was a game between headquarters officers and enlisted men. Mark Clark stretched to his full six-feet-two, proclaimed: “Well, I’m an officer of the Fifth Army Headquarters. I guess I can play, can’t I?” He did, at first base.

And the Fifth like the sign over his busy office door at Oujda: “Enter, don’t knock.”

Infantryman. Mark Clark loves the infantry. To him it is literally the “Queen of Battles.” The affection began all of the General’s 47 years ago. For he was born in an infantry camp, so to speak: at Madison Barracks, in upstate New York, a post near which onetime hard-drinker Ulysses S. Grant is said to have organized the Sons of Temperance. His father, the late Colonel C. C. Clark, was an infantryman, a career soldier and West Pointer, who exerted a large influence over the son.

Mark Clark’s years at West Point were not distinguished. He was nicknamed “Opie,” because one Sunday his classmates found him pining for his hometown comic papers, so he could follow the adventures of a character described as “Opie Dillydock.” The General has said that his main objective as a student was “graduating.” He did well in history and philosophy, not so well in mathematics. In the class of April 20, 1917, he stood in among 139. From commencement he entered the sterner school of World War I. He sailed for France as a captain of infantry. In action in the Vosges he received a shrapnel wound.

In the interlude between wars, Mark Clark was just another officer. He went through the advanced schools—Infantry, General Staff, War College. He played tennis and ping-pong, developed a taste for fishing in the Rockies and Puget Sound. In 1924 he married blonde Maurine Doran of Muncie, Ind. Mrs. Clark has confessed publicly that she met her husband “on a blind date” in Washington. There are two children: Ann, 17, who attends a high-school sculpture class in the national capital; and Will, 18, a plebe at West Point

When World War II began, Mark Clark, climbing the routine ladder of promotion, was a lieutenant colonel. He had won the confidence of the men who had the job of organizing the U.S. draft army that came into being in 1940. Under General McNair, Major General Clark flew more than 60,000 miles a year organizing the ground forces at home. He carried on the same task in the European Theater under General Eisenhower. Insiders said that the long-bodied General was a man to watch.

Cloak & Dagger Man. The public learned to watch him after his spectacular trip to North Africa in October 1942. He went by British submarine, made contact with French patriots who eased the way for the November landings, got away to sea again after a ducking in the surf that lost $18,000 in gold. After winning his three stars, at 46, he was one of the youngest U.S. lieutenant generals.

Now, in Italy, backed by the men of the Fifth, Mark Clark is getting his first full trial as a field general. He is still a man to watch.

*For the Eighth, a sharp reversal in roles since its last campaign. In Sicily Monty’s men had held the bloody hinge at Catania while the U.S. Seventh swept across and around the island. British and Canadian casualties had been 31,158, American 7,445. In southern Italy, the British presumably had suffered little. But in the first week at Salerno, the Americans had 3,497 killed, wounded or missing—low by Russian standards, high in proportion to the numbers involved.