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Whicker’s War and Journey of a Lifetime
Alan Whicker


Whicker’s War and Journey of a Lifetime in one ebook for the first time.Alan Whicker joined the Army Film and Photo Unit as an 18-year-old army officer, following the Allied advance through Italy, from Sicily to Venice. He filmed the troops on the front line, met Montgomery, and other military luminaries, filmed the battered body of Mussolini after his execution and accepted the surrender of the SS in Milan. This is remarkable account of the Italian campaign of 1943 and 1944 as he retraces of his steps over sixty years later. Beautifully written, poignant with humour and pathos, Whicker’s War is a masterful book by one of the 20th centuries greatest TV journalists.Journey of a Lifetime is the end product of a very personal journey. Whicker retraces his steps, catching up with some past interviewees and reflecting on how the world has changed - for good and bad - over the passing of time. Journey of a Lifetime is lyrical, uplifting and peppered with our favourite globetrotter's brand of subtle satire.









ALAN WHICKER

WHICKER’S WAR and JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME










CONTENTS


Cover (#u160aa121-5167-50bd-aa0f-32928194aaa4)

Title Page (#u993d937c-e610-5caf-bc18-4d8139b50271)

Whicker’s War (#u993d937c-e610-5caf-bc18-4d8139b50271)

Journey of a Lifetime (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




ALAN WHICKER

WHICKER’S WAR










DEDICATION (#ulink_886b1f72-96dd-5f84-9cbb-eef1823082e8)


Dedicated to the men of

the Army Film and Photo Unit

who marched with me through Italy …




CONTENTS


Title Page (#u993d937c-e610-5caf-bc18-4d8139b50271)

Dedication (#ulink_60958200-b804-502f-b8dc-1afc0cac2f70)

That early summer dawn in Sicily … (#ulink_ddba3867-6f2d-522c-a24f-45ca56533f2f)

Being shot was for another day … (#ulink_ee45a30c-e8a8-520b-9423-fb8452f7ce94)

A long life was not in the script … (#ulink_6c0dc03d-eaaf-5a82-9fd7-4b88a0cfddfe)

His Majesty got a wrong number … (#ulink_4bf92e0e-ad19-596b-b871-751fe2612243)

They asked for it – and they will now get it … (#ulink_fc6a55b2-7d9f-558d-b673-e6f55c06a731)

They enlisted the Godfather … (#ulink_9f66d13b-1033-5ba1-a8f4-d3aed09548cb)

I still feel rather guilty about that … (#ulink_7d226572-0133-5e1c-bcd8-9fb9636ad978)

Very bad jokes indeed … (#ulink_53d6f2b8-99eb-5daf-89d0-4ba96f46aa4e)

A passing glance at Paradise … (#ulink_f93fa4cb-36bd-5a98-b3fe-62a73632a7e1)

Struggling to get tickets for the first Casualty List … (#ulink_a7eb83b6-14fa-5c3b-8274-27f7e7a2a80f)

They died without anyone even knowing their names … (#ulink_43a5e624-30b5-5ba3-bb1b-1fb599a16794)

I’m afraid we’re not quite ready for you yet … (#litres_trial_promo)

You should have heard him screaming … (#litres_trial_promo)

Hitler would have had him shot … (#litres_trial_promo)

A beautiful woman with her teeth knocked out … (#litres_trial_promo)

Out-gunned on one side, out-screamed on the other … (#litres_trial_promo)

I have come to rescue you … (#litres_trial_promo)

The call-back seemed worse than the call-up … (#litres_trial_promo)

Whatever happened to Time Marching On …? (#litres_trial_promo)

The Saga of The D-Day Dodgers … (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Picture Credits (#litres_trial_promo)










THAT EARLY SUMMER DAWN IN SICILY… (#ulink_1a0540b1-d847-5b8d-8bcd-aa17c44424e1)









One man’s war … a return to the invasion beaches and battlefields of Italy. A sentimental pilgrimage, I suppose, to places where I expected to die. Also a salute to those I marched alongside 60 years ago while growing up watching the world explode before the viewfinders of Army Film Unit battle-cameramen. In two years of savage warfare they gave a lot; some of them, everything.

As a teenage subaltern I’d volunteered for a new role in a new Army, and found myself out of the infantry but in to far more assault landings and battles than I’d expected. My belief that war could be anything except boring went unchallenged because our cameramen closely followed the action, indeed sometimes led Italian – though that was usually just poor map-reading …

I was part of the first great seaborne invasion. The Eighth Army was learning how to do it – and so, unfortunately, were the Germans.

The Italian campaign – one of the most desperate and bloody of World War II – was 660 days of fear and exhilaration. Churchill called it the Third Front. Life was strangely intense and sharp-focussed, yet every dramatic experience vanished like an exploding shell as we moved cheerfully along the cutting edge of war towards the next violent day.

The defence of Italy cost the Axis 556,000 casualties. The Allies lost 312,000 killed and wounded – and remember, this was The Overshadowed War. After Rome the Second Front captured our headlines and at Westminster, Lady Astor won the Hollow Laugh Award by calling us ‘the D-Day Dodgers’.

As in the Great War, we subalterns had short sharp life expectations. Like those 19-year-old Battle of Britain pilots we learned to cope with this dismal forecast by being flip and jokey, but alert. It seemed to work for me – though more than half our camera crews were killed or damaged in some way while earning their Medals and Mentions.

As part of a massive Allied war fleet we joined this first great invasion of 2,700 ships and landing craft and on July 10 ’43 struggled ashore on to Pachino beach at the bottom right-hand corner of Mussolini’s island, expecting the worst. Around me on that early summer dawn in Sicily, 80,000 Eighth Army troops were also landing, and looking for a fight.

Our cameramen embedded in frontline units faced bitter warfare that I suspect few of today’s young soldiers – let alone young civilians – could envisage in their worst nightmares. Among the perils in our path lay Churchill’s gamble that failed, doomed by uncertain planning and leadership: the Anzio Bridgehead, where we all ceased to be young, where 250,000 soldiers were locked into a series of battles unique in the history of World War II. There in a few weeks of savage siege warfare 43,000 of us would be blown into history: 7,000 dead, 36,000 wounded or missing-in-action – but as we fought through Sicily such horrors lay ahead, unsuspected.

I stayed with Montgomery’s desert army as it crossed the Straits of Messina to attack the Italian mainland. Then after Salerno went with the British/US Fifth Army to land 80 miles behind German lines, at Anzio. Our orders were to outflank Monte Cassino, cut Kesselring’s supply lines, destroy his Tenth and Fourteenth armies and liberate Rome. That’s all – in the afternoon we’d go to the cinema …

Breaking out of the bridgehead after 18 desperate weeks, the Fifth Army finally liberated Rome, though our war was lengthened by almost a year and many lives lost by the vanity of one insubordinate Allied General.

The Eighth fought on through the Apennines and the Gothic Line before sweeping down into the Po Valley to reach the Alps – and victory. Italy’s Dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were then hunted down and killed by their communist countrymen.

Those who doubted the strategic significance of our role in tying down 25 German divisions in Italy for two years – and the 55 divisions deployed around the Mediterranean – would have been heartened by Adolf Hitler’s reaction. As we invaded Sicily and so pinned down one-fifth of Germany’s military strength, he was controlling his wars from the Wolfschanze, his headquarters in East Prussia. He told his Generals that Citadel, the planned offensive against the Russians at Kursk, would be called off immediately. Their troops would go instead to the Italian front. That decision certainly did not make our task any lighter, but helping the Red Army was in fact our first victory – before firing a shot.

When we waded ashore on Sicily there were 2½ German divisions in Italy. Next year, as the Second Front opened, there were 24 – with three more on the way. We had made a difference. Even I made a small difference to the German SS by capturing several hundred of them, plus their General; I was also given a hidden fortune of many millions in hard currency – and then went to live in Venice. As Churchill said of our broader Mediterranean canvas: there have been few campaigns with a finer culmination!

Sixty years later I returned to Pachino to watch the sun rise over beaches where I had waded ashore up to the waist in warm Mediterranean and taken my first soggy steps on the long slog towards the Alps. I was then approaching two years of the worst – and a few of the very best – experiences of my life, when just staying alive was a celebration.




BEING SHOT WAS FOR ANOTHER DAY… (#ulink_36f19a14-3ca8-52a5-9e95-301d9df747a9)









This Odyssey began before the war with a Certificate A from the Officers’ Training Corps at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School, Hampstead where, alarmed by the growing shadow of Hitler, we played at soldiering one night a week, went to summer camps and struggled with our exasperating puttees.

Came the war and I enlisted and was brushed by glory and instant power when made a Local Acting Unpaid Lance Corporal. Sewing on the lone stripe was a significant moment, rather like the ecstatic sight of that first bicycle. (I can still see mine leaning against the garden fence, all chrome and gleam. Compared with such utter bliss the sight of my first Bentley was as of dust).

I joined-up at the vast Ordnance Depot of Chilwell, outside Nottingham, and was selected as possible infantry officer material, which was worrying enough. The war had not been going well for us, and a moment’s reflection would have warned me that if I wanted a long and happy life, the infantry was not the way to go.

In pursuit of that hazardous promotion, I drove north with my friend Harry Hamilton. He had a Ford Anglia and a hoarded petrol ration. Along almost deserted wartime roads we headed for Carlisle Castle and a Border Regiment training course which would find out whether we were the right kind of cannon fodder. With a hundred potential officers we shivered through an icy January in two vast Crimean barrack rooms, sleeping on iron bedsteads and queuing to unfreeze a couple of taps. The wind whistled against cracked windows in a scene Florence Nightingale could have drifted through, the Lady with the Lamp looking concerned about her poor boys.

Ham struck a considerable blow for comfort and the conservation of life by chatting-up to some effect a girl who owned a downtown snack bar. There behind gloriously steamy windows we repaired for warmth and consolation from Army life which seemed exactly the way it was in those boys’ adventure books: cheerful, but horrible.

As we were shivering on parade one day the Sergeant’s arm came down between Ham and me – and his half of the squad turned left and marched towards the Officer Cadet Training Unit at Dunbar in Scotland. The rest of us turned right and headed for 164 OCTU at Barmouth, North Wales. We did not meet again until after the war, when he was married (‘I thought I was going to be killed and I wanted someone to be sorry’) and I was godfather to his first son. From then on our lives diverged even more as he kept marrying, and I kept not.

In the months of tough training which followed, the natural splendour of Merioneth never got through to me. A mountain merely meant something to run up with full pack, or stumble around cursing on a night exercise. A river was to wade through, a sun-dappled rocky chasm a place to cross while balancing on a rope, white with fear. It was not until I returned to Dolgellau and Cader Idris after the war that I realised I had lived, head down and fists clenched, amid scenic magnificence.

Among Army skills which remained with me for life … was how to avoid riding a motorcycle. I tried to manoeuvre my powerful beast up a one-in-two cliff path outside Harlech while the instructor insisted I stall the monster at the steepest point and then restart without losing equilibrium. That heart-bursting morning on a Welsh hillside wrestling a ton of vicious machinery to the ground put me off motorbikes for life. I have never ridden again. This must have spared me countless broken collarbones and torn ligaments. No experience is all bad.

As officer cadets, we were lorded-over on parade by the regulation Coldstream Guards regimental sergeant major straight from Central Casting: an enormous, bristling ramrod with foghorn voice. On our esplanade parade ground he spread terror and doubled platoons smartly into the sea and out again, sodden. Every day I tried to convince myself that, beneath it all, he was a dear old thing who loved his mother – but it wasn’t easy. He put me on several charges for being lazy, unsoldierly and dreaming on parade. All these heinous offences were justified, though none was pursued or I might have suffered the ultimate disgrace of being RTU’d (Returned to Unit – who said the BBC invented initials?)

I also relished one unexpected moment of glory which redirected and established my military future. I had foolishly allowed myself to be badgered into volunteering to represent my Company at boxing – a lunatic decision deeply regretted at leisure. On the night of the execution I climbed reluctantly into the floodlights of Barmouth’s packed town hall and glumly noted in the opposite corner a glowering opponent the size of a gorilla. This was a light-heavyweight? Around the ring – a place of blood and tears – sat the massed ranks, and the Unit’s excited ATS girls. They were probably knitting.

I considered how to avoid total disgrace before the brass watching from the surrounding darkness who could make or break my military career. I had to forget all that stylish and gentlemanly dancing around, the Queensberry finesse and keeping-your-guard-up I had been taught in the school gym, but to tear into him regardless and go down swinging. At least he would finish me off quickly – and I might even save disgrace by getting a crafty one in, on the way down.

So at the bell I leapt from my corner and hurled myself desperately at the gorilla in a frenzy of hopeless determination, arms going like a windmill. It was the least scientific approach in boxing history. Within ten seconds of our violent clash in the centre of that brilliant ring, my enormous opponent was lying unconscious at my feet. Never again in an uninspired sporting career was I to feel such surprise, or receive such applause.

When I recovered from my amazement I was suitably modest – as though that sort of thing happened all the time. The gorilla was brought round with difficulty and carried away through the ropes with impatient disdain, towards some tumbril. The ATS didn’t even bother to look up.

You can achieve quite a lot in ten seconds, and my reputation as a quiet killer with fists of iron spread through the unit. The Commanding Officer called me in to take a thoughtful look at this unexpected whirlwind in his midst. The girls in the Mess hall giggled at their mean street fighter and gave me larger portions, for Barmouth was a tiny coastal town miles from any excitement. Even the drill sergeants spoke to me approvingly – and that’s unnatural. The RSM shouted no deafening threats for several days, and the rest of the Company ‘D’ backed away politely when I approached the tea urn.

However, retribution was not to be avoided: the Finals were already being advertised. Next Saturday night my aggressive bluff would be called. I was about to blow my reputation on the biggest night of the sporting season before Judges measuring me as possible Officer material. I briefly considered desertion, but finally and with growing concern went reluctantly back to the town hall wondering which ferocious man-mountain would emerge to wreak terrible revenge upon an upstart pretending to be a boxer.

My seconds bravely urged their champion to Go In and Kill Him, whoever he was. They only had me to lose, and there were plenty more where I came from. Once again I climbed glumly through the ropes and towards the scaffold, into a brilliance where no secrets could be hidden. I knew that this time my tactics would be no surprise. I should have to dance-around like a pro, and box. There was a price to pay for all that limelight. I resolved to sell my life as dearly and quickly as possible, and then step back into the shadows again. Barmouth had an efficient little hospital.

I looked around anxiously for my nemesis. The stool opposite was empty – a stage-managed delay, no doubt, to increase the suspense. We waited. It stayed empty. The pitiless ATS, hungry for more blood, were getting restless.

It slowly dawned upon me that I had underestimated my own publicity. My opponent, evidently a man who believed what he heard, had Gone Sick. His strategic withdrawal on medical grounds gave me a walkover. I received another ovation even more undeserved than the first and instantly retired from boxing forever, undefeated. Quit fast, is my theory, while you’re ahead and uninjured.

I remain convinced the reason I walked through OCTU with high marks and emerged as a teenage officer was due, not to conscientious study or aptitude, not to all that square-bashing, sweat and effort – but to one lucky Saturday night punch that connected.

Since my Father’s family came from Devon I was commissioned into ‘The Bloody Eleventh’ of the Line, the Devonshire Regiment. Feeling chipper and dashing in my service dress and gleaming Sam Browne, with that hard-won Pip on my shoulder, I’d stride through Mayfair, acknowledge a few salutes and be perfectly happy with my lot. Being shot was for another day.

Uplifted, I left my first-class Great Western carriage and reported for duty to the regimental Adjutant at Plymouth’s Crownhill Barracks. To my disappointment he was not a fearsome Regular polo player with rows of brave ribbons, but a burbling beery ex-Territorial from Fleet Street, of all places. I felt he was the wrong sort of High Priest, playing in the wrong game. There may be nothing lower than a Second Lieutenant, but every volunteer needs a dashing role model.

However when I returned to my quarters, a batman had unpacked my kit, laid out the service dress, repolished buttons and Sam Browne, and run my bath. I had recently been living the roles of bored Lance Corporal, then weary Cadet. Now I had become overnight an Officer and a Gentleman. A little glory, with no visible risk. The war was never as good as that again, ever.

I savoured the moment. It seemed that running up all those mountains had been time well spent – despite the current prospect, as an infantry platoon commander, of the Army’s shortest lifespan. I went for a snifter with the other chaps in the Mess, as we always say.

Soon after those triumphant moments in Plymouth, I prepared to pay the piper: Movement orders came through and I was suddenly a reinforcement, reporting to an unknown regiment in training at a remote place called Alloa. This had an undulating hula-hula lilt about it, like a magical posting to some romantic Polynesian isle. Could Whicker’s Luck be holding?

No, it could not. Alloa turned out to be, not an exotic South Seas greeting but a grey and mournful Scottish industrial town in Clackmannanshire. The Battalion of East Surreys billeted in its sad empty houses was route-marched through the rain around Stirling. The Mess was a damp pub, the senior officers Regular wafflers, the NCOs morose, the men despairing. As one of the newer Crusaders, I found the atmosphere unjolly.

Depression grew. The solitary bright spot was my mandatory embarkation leave, after which our troopship would sail out across the Irish Sea to face the mines and submarines that were decimating Britain’s remaining fleets and then, if we survived, the German army. We would be last seen steaming, it was believed, to Africa.

Before leaving Home and Mother for ever I was anxious to get a little mileage on the social scene out of my brand new service dress and lone pip. The journey back to London in a dark freezing wartime train offered standard depression, but next day came a welcome invitation to a farewell lunch at 67 Lombard Street given for me by an uncle, a City banker with Glyn Mills, to celebrate my elevation to elegant cannon-fodder. It was a pleasant meal. It also probably saved my life.

The other guest happened to be a Whitehall Warrior, a daunting blaze of red tabs and crowns and ribbons from the War Office who, over the port and Stilton, mentioned that one of his brand new units was looking for a young officer with news sense to join the Army’s first properly-organized combat Film Unit which was about to leave for some hazardous secret landing in enemy territory. Could I, he wondered, could I direct sergeant-cameramen in battle? There would be a lot of action.

It took me a nanosecond to volunteer for this unknown experience, anywhere at any time. It sounded like adventurous suicide – but it was stylish.

I returned to poor grey Alloa and its sullen soldiers, clutching a glimmer of hope amid their mass dejection. Next day the War Office offered me the posting. It was a decisive redirection, and an escape. I would be going into action before the East Surreys, but not with them. If I had to go and fight an enemy, I did at least want to get along with my own side.




A LONG LIFE WAS NOT IN THE SCRIPT… (#ulink_00960dca-eeb6-5ff1-9d80-d9b6186001af)









So Whicker’s War started prosaically in a black cab driving through empty streets towards the Hotel Great Central at Marylebone Station, then the London District Transit Camp. It was the first of many millions of travel miles around Whicker’s World, though this time I was heading hopefully into the unknown and wondering what the hell was about to hit me.

At the reception desk I asked for AFPU. The corporal clerk checked his long list. ‘Army Field Punishment Unit, Sir?’

‘No,’ I said, doubtfully. Surely the General had not tricked me? ‘At least – I hope not.’

All was well. AFPU was assembling and preparing for embarkation. As far as I was concerned, there was no hurry – the West End would do fine for a few weeks, or more. Then we’d see about Africa or wherever.

One of my first Army Film and Photo Unit duties seemed close enough to Field Punishment. As the newest, youngest and greenest officer, I was instructed to give the whole unit an illustrated lecture on venereal disease and the dangers of illicit sex in foreign climes, a subject on which I was not then fully informed. The order that someone had to lay an Awful Warning on the Unit before it went to war had come amid masses of bumf from Headquarters and been passed down the line to be side-stepped with a hearty laugh by every available officer … before stopping at the least significant.

A callow youth, but aging fast, I faced that parade of world-weary 35-year-old family men who seemed like knowing and experienced uncles. There were a few grizzled Regulars who at various postings around the world had obviously looked into the whole subject quite closely. It was not an easy moment. However, I gave them the benefit of my inexperience and they were most tolerant, listening as though I was telling them something new. Well, it was new to me.

The Great Central was plush and comfortable, after field kitchens and empty billets in Cumbria. I passed some mornings drilling our assorted band of cameramen in Dorset Square, NW1. Fresh from the ministrations and ferocity of a Guards RSM at OCTU, I was quite shocked by their casual and unmilitary bearing – and they didn’t much care for mine, either. However I shouted a lot, and they fell into some sort of shape.

I was told to take them on a route march. I always found this a boring and pointless exercise so led them, not round and round Regents Park, but through such wartime bright lights as remained in the West End. Down Edgware Road to Marble Arch, where traffic waited while we crossed haughtily into Park Lane, then left for Piccadilly, up the hill, past the Ritz and left again into Bond Street. Such a route brightened the tedium of the march for us all; at least we could look into the shop windows as we strode past.

It would have been ideal for Christmas shopping, had the shops anything to sell and my Army pay been better than a few shillings a week. We were doubtless contravening a stack of regulations but even wartime Oxford Street was more visually entertaining than the country lanes around Dolgellau.

We were commanded by Major Hugh St Clair Stewart, a large gawky and humorous man who after the war, returned, quite suitably, to Pinewood to direct Morecambe and Wise and Norman Wisdom film comedies. Some of our sergeants were professional cameramen, others bus drivers and insurance clerks, salesmen and theatrical agents. All had been through Army basic training. ‘I’d rather have soldiers being cameramen,’ said Major Stewart, ‘than cameramen trying to be soldiers, because one day they may have to put down their cameras and pick up rifles.’ So they did.

At the start of World War II in the autumn of 1939, the War Office had sent one solitary accredited cameraman to cover the activities of the British Expeditionary Force in France. The powerful propaganda lessons of Dr Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl had not been learned, so few pictures and no films emerged from that first unhappy battlefront. Neither the Guards’ stand at Calais nor the desperate rescue from Dunkirk was covered pictorially – just a few haphazard shots, to be shown again and again. The Government had not awoken to the power of a picture to tell a truth or disguise a defeat, and the Treasury refused to find money to equip a film unit. Public relations still meant bald communiqués handed down from HQ, and parades when inspecting Royalty asked something unintelligible.

Two years later the power of Nazi propaganda upon morale at home and among neutral nations had begun to permeate Whitehall. After questions in Parliament, the War Office was finally permitted to provide some pictorial coverage for newspapers and newsreels and, equally important, for the Imperial War Museum and History. This belated reply to the Nazis’ triumphant publicity was a grudging concession: the formation of a small active and responsible film unit. Its budget did not run to colour film which the Americans used, of course. Ours was to be a black-and-white war.

The Treasury also refused to pay for recording equipment, so we shall never hear the true sound of Montgomery leading the Eighth Army into battle, nor the fearful might of Anzio Annie, nor Churchill addressing the victorious First Army at Carthage.

The original Army Film Unit, 146 strong, had been sent to Cairo to cover the Middle East – then regarded as extending from Malta to Persia. It had 60 cameramen, half always to be on duty in the Western Desert. Their pictures of the Eighth Army in action began to filter home. They remain classic, as does their first feature film for the cinema, Desert Victory, edited at Pinewood from their collected footage. Churchill was proud to present a copy to President Roosevelt. Later there was Tunisian Victory. In this respect at least, the Treasury was edging slowly and reluctantly into the 20th century and becoming aware of the power of propaganda to influence the thoughts, decisions and spirit of nations.

War, we now know, is the most difficult event in the world to photograph – even with today’s brilliant technology and miniaturisation. Audiences have grown accustomed to John Mills ice cold in Alex and John Wayne capturing a plaster Guadalcanal in close up and artificial sweat while smoke bursts go off over his shoulder and are dubbed afterwards in death-defying stereo. Just watch Tom Hanks storming Normandy. Terrifying. So viewers are not impressed by a tank in middle distance and a couple of soldiers hugging the dirt in foreground – even though at that moment real men may be shedding real blood.

Reality can be dull, unreality cannot afford to be; yet should a cameraman get close enough to war to make his pictures look real he is soon, more often than not, a dead cameraman.

The second film unit, which I was joining, was formed to cover the new southern warfront in North Africa and the threatened battlefields of Europe. To provide Britain and the world with an idea of the life and death of our armies at war, the No 2 Army Film and Photo Unit eventually took 200,000 black-and-white stills and shot well over half-a-million feet of film. We were busy enough.

To get those pictures, eight of the little band of 40 officers and sergeant-cameramen were killed and 13 badly wounded. They earned two Military Crosses, an MBE, three Military Medals, 11 Mentions in Despatches – and, eventually, a CBE. Today, any picture you see of the Eighth, Fifth or First Armies in action was certainly taken by these men.

The sergeant-cameramen worked under a Director – a Captain or Lieutenant – and travelled the war zones in pairs, with jeep and driver. Their cine footage and still pictures were collected as shot and returned to base for development, and transmission back to London. By today’s standards their equipment was pathetic – any weekend enthusiast would be scornful. Each stills photographer was issued with a Super Ikonta – a Zeiss Ikon with 2.8 lens, yellow filter and lens hood. Each cine man covering for newsreels, films and television-to-be had an American De Vry camera in its box – a sort of king-size sardine tin – with 35mm, 2” and 6” lens. No zoom, no powerful telephoto lens, no sound equipment; effects would be dubbed in afterwards – usually to stirring or irritating music, with commentary written in London.

To get a picture of a shell exploding the cameraman needed to will one to land nearby as he waited, Ikonta cocked. If it had not been fatally close, he would shoot when smoke and dust allowed, otherwise the explosion which could have killed him would be invisible on film. A German tank had to be close and centre-frame before he could take a reasonable shot – by which time the tank might well take one too, more forcibly. A long life was not in the script. So, ill-equipped but confident, we went to war.




HIS MAJESTY GOT A WRONG NUMBER… (#ulink_865340ba-2612-5087-976e-c106e2cc3490)









It certainly began badly for Britain. In 1940 France surrendered and we were driven out of Europe. Hitler ruled the Continent, Italy and Japan declared war upon us. Only in Africa did we eventually taste victory, at El Alamein and Tunis. But now in ’43 we were starting our return journey to Europe in gathering strength alongside our new American ally.

The Army Film Unit approached the recapture of Europe by a rather circuitous route, it seemed. Small enough to start with, it had been split into even tinier segments as we went to war alone, or in pairs, and approached Hitler’s European fortress surreptitiously. We knew that convoy sailings were top secret, and at our Marylebone hotel faces now familiar would suddenly disappear without a word. There were no Going-Away parties.

When it came to my turn, I sailed from the Clyde one bleak January night in the 10,000-ton Chattanooga City, with a shipful of strangers. We still did not know where we were going, but it had to be towards warmer waters to the south. Our convoy formed up and we joined a mass of other merchantmen and a few escorting frigates and destroyers, heading out towards the Atlantic and the threatening Bay of Biscay at the sedate pace of the slowest ship.

This did not seem reassuring, since the U-boats were still winning the Battle of the Atlantic. We had a lot of safety drills, though felt rather fatalistic about them. Convoys would never stop to pick up survivors after a ship had been torpedoed. The escorts would not even slow down – so why bother with life jackets? The outlook was grey, all round.

There must have been 30 ships in our convoy, but only a couple were torpedoed during the voyage. Both were outsiders, steaming at the end of their line – so seemingly easier targets, less well-protected. The U-boats attacked at night – the most alarming time – yet the convoy sailed on at the same slow steady speed as though nothing had happened. Our escorts were frantic – and the sea shuddered with depth charges as we sailed serenely into the night. Two shiploads of men had been left to their wretched fate in the darkness.

Our ship was basic transport, with temporary troop-carrying accommodation built within its decks. The Officers’ Mess – one long table – was surrounded by bunks in cubicles. Meals, though not very good, were at least different, and plentiful. Most of the officers were American, so we passed much of the following days and nights playing poker. This was a useful education.

When we reached the Bay it was relatively peaceful, though with a heavy swell. On the blacked-out deck I clung-on and watched the moonlit horizon descend from the sky and disappear below the deck. After a pause it reappeared and climbed towards the sky again. I was stationary, but the horizon was performing very strangely.

We passed our first landfall at night – the breathtaking hulk of Gibraltar – without really believing we could fool the Axis telescopes spying from the Spanish coast and taking down our details. By now we knew we were heading for the exotic destination of Algiers. Its agreeable odour of herbs, spices and warm Casbah wafted out to sea to greet us.

In Algiers I rounded up our drivers and we collected the Unit’s transport: Austin PUs – more than 20 of them. These ‘personal utilities’ were like small underpowered delivery vans, but comfortable enough for two. They saw us through the war until America’s more warlike jeeps drove to the rescue. I had been told to deliver this motorcade to AFPU in a small town in the next country: Beja, in Tunisia, where we were becoming a Unit again.

I thought that having come all this way I ought to take a look at Sidi-Bel-Abbès to check-out the HQ of the Foreign Legion, but it was on the Moroccan side of Algeria, and the Legionnaires still uncertain whether they were fighting for us or against us. In Algiers I consoled myself in the cavernous Aletti bar with other officers heading for the war. Then we set off for Stif and Constantine. It was a lovely mountain drive on good roads in cool sunshine, with the enemy miles away.

The journey to recapture Europe was taking the new First Army longer than expected. Our push towards the Mediterranean ports of Tunisia, from where we planned to attack Europe, had been halted. Hitler was supporting the fading Afrika Korps to keep us away from his new frontiers. The enemy was now being reinforced every day by 1,000 fresh German troops from Italy. They flew in to El Aouina Airport at Tunis and joined the tired remainder of the Afrika Korps arriving across the Libyan Desert, just ahead of the Eighth Army.

At Beja we unloaded the supplies we had been carrying in our PUs and joined the rest of the Unit awaiting us in a small decrepit hotel. I had been carrying one particularly valued memento of peaceful days. It says something for the progress of technology when I reveal that this was a small portable handwound gramophone with a horn, as in His Master’s Voice. It now seems laughably Twenties and charleston, but in those days there were no such things as miniature radios, of course, and great chunky wireless sets required heavy accumulators.

Unfortunately, the accompanying gramophone records I brought had not coped with the stressful voyage. The solitary survivor was good old Fats Waller singing My Very Good Friend the Milkman. On the flip side: Your Feets Too Big. We played this treasure endlessly, then passed him on to the Sergeants’ Mess for the few cameramen still not placed with Army units. When they could stand him no longer he was joyfully received by the drivers. Fortunately Fats Waller’s voice was not so delicate or finely-tuned an instrument that it lost much quality from constant repetition. I always hoped that one day I would be able to tell him how much one recording did for the morale of a small unit stranded amid the sand and scrub of North Africa.

The First Army had earlier been expected to occupy Tunis and Bizerte without difficulty, but instead lost Longstop Hill and was almost pushed back from Medjez-el-Bab. A major attack was planned to make good that defeat and capture the remaining enemy forces in North Africa. Leading the thrust for Tunis would be two armoured divisions. I went to join a photogenic squadron of Churchill tanks, awaiting action.

The Churchill was our first serious tank, developed before the war. It weighed 39 tons and with a 350hp engine could reach 15mph, on a good day. It originally had a two-pounder gun, which must have seemed like a peashooter poking out of all that steel. Then in ’42 its manufacturer Vauxhall Motors installed a six-pounder. In ’43 this was replaced by a 75mm, making it at last a serious contender – though the German Tiger we were yet to meet weighed 57 tons and had an 88mm. Throughout the entire war German armour was always just ahead of us. We never met on equal terms. However, we had heard how Montgomery had run the Panzers out of Libya, so were optimistic about our chances before Tunis.

For my cine-cameraman partner I asked Sergeant Radford to join me. Back in our old Marylebone days Radford had been the main protester against marching and drilling with the rest of the Unit in Dorset Square. He always seemed a bit of a barrack-room lawyer, so I thought I should carry the load rather than push him into partnership with some less stroppy sergeant. With a precise, fastidious and pedantic manner – before the war I believe he had been in Insurance – Radford was a great dotter of i’s and crosser of t’s, but I suspected where it mattered he was a good man. In fact on the battlefront and away from Dorset Square we soon came to terms. He was a splendid and enthusiastic cameraman, and would go after his pictures like a terrier.

On our first battle outside Tunis, some Churchills suffered the mechanical problems they inherited from the original 100 Churchills remaining in the Army after Dunkirk, and broke down. The day did not go well.

You don’t remember events too clearly, after a battle. It’s all too fast and fierce and frightening – but I do recall seeing Radford going forward clinging on to the back of a tank, as though riding a stallion into the fray.

Being on the outside looking in, is never a wise position in war. Nevertheless after a busy day on Tunisian hillsides, we both found ourselves on the lower slopes of Longstop Hill when the final attack was called off. I was mightily relieved to see him again, exhausted but in good shape.

Next day the Commanding Officer drew me aside. He was a smiling Quorn countryman who would have been happier riding to hounds. Our enthusiasm, he said, had been ‘a good show’. That was a relief, since I gathered we had been seen as a bit long-haired and effete. At least the Regiment’s worst suspicions had not been confirmed … To be complimented by a CO of such style and panache was accolade enough; then he added that when life calmed down he was going to put us both in for gongs. That seemed a satisfactory way for a Film Unit to start its war and a reminder that we were not there to take pictures of parades.

When the battle for Tunis resumed next dawn German gunners concentrated upon our lead tank. The CO was the first man to be killed.

The elusive quality of battlefield behaviour is well-known: bravery unnoticed, medals unawarded … because no one was there to see. Yet Radford’s behaviour in the face of the enemy had been seen by a senior officer who, when we had asked permission to join his tanks, thought we might be a nuisance. At least on our first day in battle we had not let down that most gallant gentleman.

Yet in truth, we were not in the hero business. Our CO regularly reminded us that no ephemeral picture was worth a death or an injury. This did not stop the braver cameramen risking their lives. (The General who led the British forces in a later war in the Gulf, Sir Peter de la Billiere, has reminded us, ‘The word “hero” has become devalued. Nowadays it’s applied to footballers and film stars, which does a disservice to people who have risked their lives for others.’)

So we covered the slow advance through Tunisia. It was our first experience of fighting alongside the Americans. Totally unblooded, they were quite unequal even to General Rommel’s beaten army at Kairouan and the Kasserine Pass, suffering 6,000 battle casualties and a demoralizing major defeat in their first engagement of the war. The Germans were amazed at the quantity and quality of the US equipment they captured intact.

In April ’43, after observing the battle for Tunisia, the Allied Commander, General Sir Harold Alexander, found the US troops ‘soft, green and quite untrained’. He reported to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke: ‘There are millions of them elsewhere who must be living in a fool’s paradise. If this handful of divisions here are their best, the value of the rest may be imagined.’

Anglo-American relations became even more strained following a brusque signal from the Allied Tactical Air Commander, Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, to Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr, concerning close air support. It told the pugnacious American that his II Corps was not battle-worthy. That did it.

The Allied Air Commander-in-Chief Sir Arthur Tedder averted a major crisis by sending Coningham to apologize personally to Patton, however accurate his assessment. I have never been able to discover details of that interesting meeting. At AFHQ the incident was seen as so serious that the Allied Commander-in-Chief General Eisenhower prepared to resign.

Relations could only get better, as indicated by the later effective emergence of the explosive Patton, pearl-handled revolvers, polished helmet and all – hence ‘Gorgeous George’. This aggressive cavalryman became the Allies’ most effective commander of armoured formations.

After their victory at Kairouan the German advance threatened AFPU’s new billet at Sedjenane. This was in the local brothel – by then out of action. Its only remaining attraction was a fine double bed, and when our cameramen joined the US Army in their tactical withdrawal they were anxious to retain this newfound luxury with its comforting peacetime aura. Unfortunately AFPU’s available transport by then was one motorcycle.

The local Arab population was impressed, and a solemn procession carried the bed along the only street to a safer billet – which next day was destroyed by an enemy shell. This however was a hardy bed which had obviously seen a lot of action; it survived and was moved yet again into the safest place around: a deep mine.

When the German advance continued the bed had to be sacrificed as a spoil of war. Later Sedjenane was recaptured – and there stood the long-suffering AFPU double bed, none the worse for recent German occupation apart from a slight green mould. Yet somehow its erotic appeal had diminished …

Tunis was the first major city to be liberated by the Allies during the war, the first streets full of deliriously happy people when men proffered hoarded champagne and pretty girls their all – a scene to be repeated many times in the freed cities of Europe. The crowd around us in the Avenue Jules Ferry was so jammed and ecstatic we could not move. I was standing on the bonnet of my car filming laughing faces and toasting ‘Vive la France’ when I saw Sidney Bernstein, even then a cinema mogul. He had arrived from the Ministry of Information bringing In Which We Serve and other gallant war films to show the liberated people, and now faced a different sort of film fan: ‘How do I get the French out of my car?’ he grumbled.

One of my cameramen apologised in his dope sheet for the quality of his pictures: ‘I have been kissed so many times by both women and men that it really is difficult to concentrate …’ War can be hell.

On May 12, ’43, the enemy armies in Africa capitulated; 250,415 Germans and Italians laid down their arms at Cap Bon. General von Arnim surrendered to a Lieutenant Colonel of the Gurkhas, explaining that his officers were ‘most anxious’ to surrender only to the British. We took pictures of thousands of Afrika Korpsmen driving themselves happily into captivity past one of their oompah-pah brass bands playing ‘Roll out the barrel’ inside a crowded prison cage.

For a Victory celebration at a time when the British Army was noticeably short of victories, Prime Minister Churchill flew into El Aouina airport outside Tunis and drove straight to the first Roman amphitheatre at Carthage to congratulate his First Army, then preparing for its next target – presumably Italy.

To cover this historic celebration we posted photographers all over the amphitheatre. Captain Harry Rignold, our most experienced cameraman, was up on the top tier with our lone Newman Sinclair camera and the unit’s pride: a 17-inch telephoto lens. We also needed close-up stills of Churchill, so I was sitting on the large rocks right in front of the stage – in the orchestra stalls – feeling rather exposed before that military mass. Indeed the task proved more difficult than expected.

In the brilliant African sun Churchill climbed on stage and with hands dug into pockets in his best bulldog style, faced 3,000 of his troops. Next to him stood the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the ultimate red-tabs: General Sir Alan Brooke, CIGS, with the victorious First Army Commander, Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson. Their only prop was a small wooden table covered by a Union Jack. It was not Riefenstahl’s stage-managed Nuremberg and would win no awards, but it was at least naturally splendid.

The troops roared their welcome. Churchill seemed surprised and delighted at a reception made even more dramatic by perfect Roman acoustics. ‘Get a picture of that,’ he said, spotting me in the stalls busily focusing on him. He waved towards the amphitheatre behind me. ‘Don’t take me – take that.’

I wanted to explain that several of our cameramen were at that moment filming the cheering mass as he stood at its heart, that he was the star and a picture of a lot of soldiers without him was not new or significant … when once more that famous voice ordered, ‘Get a picture of that.’ He was clearly not used to saying things twice – certainly not to young lieutenants. For a moment I wavered. General Anderson, breathing heavily, took a step forward and my court martial flashed before me. ‘Take a picture of that!’he snapped.

I took a picture of that.

I had to wait until Churchill was well into his panegyric before I could turn and sneak my shot of him amidst his victorious army. Afterwards he walked out to his car, took off his pith helmet and waved it from the top of his stick, gave the V sign and drove away with his Generals. That bit of our war had been won.

There was a brief pause while the armies digested their victory and prepared for the next invasion, and at the beginning of May ’43 our life became almost social. It was spring and, what’s more, we were still alive. We requisitioned a villa at Sidi Bou Saïd, near Carthage. It overlooked the Bay of Tunis and had indoor sanitation, to which we had grown unaccustomed.

My Austin utility was still bent from the weight of jubilant Tunisiennes, so to support our celebrations I had liberated a splendid German staff car, an Opel Kapitan in Wehrmacht camouflage. We were not supposed to use unauthorised transport, so along the German bonnet we craftily painted some imaginary but official-looking numbers – my home telephone number, if you must know.






The start of it all … Directing our first picture sequence in the murky back streets of wartime Holborn, before we sailed for the Mediterranean. This assignment from Pinewood Studios was to film church bells ringing a Victory peal. They were a couple of years early – but it worked out all right in the end …






Ready to go! Identity Card picture.











Invading Italy!






We are shepherded onto the landing beaches by the Royal Navy.






The Landing Ship Tank was the star of every invasion beach around the world …






War! What approaching death must look like to an unlucky soldier: the final German shell explodes …






Infantrymen clear a village, covered by a Bren gunner and a couple of riflemen.






The Royal Artillery’s 155mm gun goes into action.






Throughout the length of Italy German engineers delayed our advance by blowing every bridge in our path.






The Royal Engineers’ first solution sometimes looked slightly insecure …






Briefing AFPU cameramen on how we’ll cover the next battle. The regulation De Vry cine-camera, next to water bottle.






Sergeant Radford had been filming a Regiment of Churchill tanks in action. His film stock is replenished …






… and the footage he has shot is taken by dispatch rider back to the Developing Section at base.






We were issued with Super Ikontas, inadequate cameras without telephoto lenses.






Celebrating our Sicilian victory at Casa Cuseni in Taormina, while awaiting the invasion of Italy. We even had time to perfect the Unit’s ‘Silly Walks’ – some 30 years before Monty Python.






I can’t remember the reason for this outburst of warrior’s relaxation. (It was in the morning, so demon vino was no excuse). Excessive exuberance, perhaps.






The Mess dining room, 60 years ago. Today, unchanged, even the pictures are the same …






… as is the terrace. In those days …






… and now.

I thought we had got away with it until my contraband car was admired at embarrassing length – by King George VI. As I stood to attention before His Majesty, it seemed cruel that the only finger of suspicion should be Regal.

The King had just arrived in Tunis at the start of his Mediterranean tour with Sir James Grigg and Sir Archibald Sinclair. In the welcoming cortège at the airport he spotted my unusual Afrika Korps convertible and pointed it out to General Alexander: ‘That’s a fine car,’ said His Majesty. ‘Very fine.’ The General, compact and elegant, studied it for what seemed a long time. Following his eyeline, all I could see was my phone number growing larger under Royal inspection.

‘Yes Sir,’ he said, finally. ‘A German staff car captured near here by this young officer, I should imagine.’ He gave me a thoughtful look – then they all drove away in a flurry of flags and celebration. I took the phoney car in the opposite direction, quite fast.

It transported me in comfort for some happy weeks until, parked one afternoon outside the office of the Eighth Army News in Tunis it was stolen by – I discovered years later – a brother officer from the Royal Engineers. Stealing captured transport from your own side has to be a war crime.

The King sailed to Malta in the cruiser Aurora, and we scrambled to reach Tripoli by road in time to cover his reception there. The Libyan capital was a cheerless contrast to exuberant Tunis, where they loved us. Streets had to be cleared of sullen Tripolitanians who evidently much preferred Italian occupation. I waited for the arrival ceremony in an open-air café and for the first time heard the wartime anthem ‘Lili Marlene’, played for British officers by a bad-tempered band. It felt strange to be unwelcome – after all, we were liberators.

The immaculate King was greeted by General Montgomery, who as usual dressed down for the occasion: smart casual – shirt, slacks, black Tank Corps beret, long horsehair flywhisk.

Filming with us was our new commanding officer, Major Geoffrey Keating, who became a close friend until his death in 1981. Keating had cut a brave figure in the desert; his photographs and those of his cameramen first made the unusual and unknown Montgomery a national hero. In truth, with high-pitched voice and uneasy birdlike delivery, he was a man with little charm or charisma. He seemed unable to relate to his troops, though on occasion he would try – proffering packets of cigarettes abruptly from his open Humber. However, he was a winner – and because of AFPU was the only publicly recognisable face in the whole Eighth Army.

Montgomery would never start a battle he was not sure of winning, so his men – who had suffered more than their ration of losing Generals – followed him cheerfully. His main military principle was that Army commanders should plan battles – not staff officers and certainly not politicians. Unsurprisingly he was not too popular with his Commander, Winston Churchill, who since Gallipoli and South Africa had longed to control troops in action.

On top of all his achievements, Churchill had a lifetime yearning to become a warrior-hero. He did not hide this improbable dream. An early biographer wrote, ‘He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle, triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed with thunder, his Legions looking to him for victory – and not looking in vain. He thinks of Napoleon; he thinks of his great ancestor the Duke of Marlborough …’

After the Gallipoli disaster in the Great War he did achieve a few months of frontline battle as a Lieutenant Colonel commanding a Rifle battalion in France. Ever afterwards he looked for another commanding role on some dramatic battlefront. At last Anzio emerged – the assault landing no one wanted. We who went there soon understood why.

Keating had flown to London with his victorious General and returned with the news that, as expected, we were about to assault Italy. The Eighth Army, the US Seventh Army and the 1st Canadian Corps would first attack Sicily, that hinge on the door to Europe, and then pursue the enemy north towards the Alps.

Invasion forces for Operation Husky were gathering at Mediterranean ports from Alexandria to Gibraltar, so I left hateful Tripoli with a convoy of new AFPU jeeps just off a ship from the States and headed flat-out across the desert back to Sousse, from where our invasion fleet would sail.

At the Libyan border we slipped off Mussolini’s tarmac road on to the sandy track through Tunisia. This had been deliberately left in poor condition by the French to slow Mussolini’s armoured columns – or that was their excuse. Through Medenine and the Mareth Line the hot desert which had so recently been a desperate battlefield and seen the last hurrah of the Afrika Korps now stood quiet and empty. It was dotted with the hulks of tanks and armoured cars, and the occasional rough wooden cross: a few sad square feet of Britain or America, Italy or Germany.

Sousse was bustling as XIII Corps got ready to fight again. We placed cameramen with the battalions which were to lead the invasion. I was to land with the famous 51st Highland Division which had battled 2,000 miles across North Africa from El Alamein. The Scots are rather useful people to have on your side if you’re expecting to get into a fight, and I was promised a noisy time.

Before the armada sailed I dashed back to Sidi Bou Saïd with secret film we had taken of the invasion preparations for dispatch to London. Coated with sand and exhausted, I arrived at our requisitioned hillside villa to find a scene of enviable tranquillity: on the elegant terrace overlooking the Bay, AFPU’s new Adjutant was giving a dinner party.

At a long table under the trees sat John Gunther, the Inside Europe author then representing the Blue radio network of America, Ted Gilling of the Exchange Telegraph news agency who was later to become my first Fleet Street Editor, and other Correspondents. In the hush of the African dusk, the whole scene looked like Hollywood.

After a bath I joined them on the patio as the sun slipped behind the mountains, drinking the red wine of Carthage and listening to cicadas in the olive groves. In a day or two I was to land on a hostile shore, somewhere. Would life ever again be as tranquil and contented and normal? Would I be appreciating it-or Resting in Peace?

Watching the moon rise over a calm scene of good fellowship, it was hard not to be envious of this rear-echelon going about its duties far from any danger and without dread of what might happen in the coming assault landing. Dinner would be on the table tomorrow night as usual, and bed would be cool and inviting. I had chosen military excitement – but forgotten that in the Army the hurly-burly of battle always excluded comfort and well-ordered certainty. I took another glass or two of Tunisian red.

Back in Sousse next day, envy forgotten, I boarded my LST-the Landing Ship Tank. This was the first use of the British-designed American-built amphibious craft that was to be the star of every invasion across the world. A strange monster with huge jaws – a bow that opened wide and a tongue that came down slowly to make a drawbridge. Only 328 feet in length, powered by two great diesels, it could carry more than 2,000-tons of armour or supplies through rough seas and with shallow draught, ride right up a beach, vomit its load onto the shore, and go astern. Disembarking troops or armour was the most dangerous part of any landing, so was always fast. Sometimes, frantic.

Anchored side by side this great fleet of LSTs filled the harbour. Once aboard I wandered around sizing-up my fellow passengers. They were all a bit subdued, that evening. An assault landing against our toughest enemy was rather like awaiting your execution in the morning; there was not much spare time for trivial thoughts or chatter.

We were in the first wave, and the approaching experience would surely be overwhelming enough, even if we lived through it. During that soft African twilight there was little shared laughter.




THEY ASKED FOR IT – AND THEY WILL NOW GET IT… (#ulink_520d3398-c415-59be-a838-d7cfc3039f51)









The fleet sailed at dusk on July 9, ’43, setting off in single file, then coming up into six lines. The senior officer on each ship paraded his troops and briefed them on the coming assault landing. We were to go in at Pachino, the fulcrum of the landing beaches at the bottom right-hand corner of Sicily.

Back in the wardroom our Brigadier briefed his officers. Then, traditionally, we took a few pink gins. The intention now was to knock Italy out of the war. We were off to kill a lot of people we did not know, and who we might not dislike if we did meet; and of course, we would try to stop them killing us. ‘Could be a thoroughly sticky landing chaps,’ he said, awkwardly.

I have often wondered whether scriptwriters and novelists imitate life, or do we just read the book, see the movie – and copy them, learning how we ought to react in dramatic and unusual situations? Noël Coward showed us, with In Which We Serve; no upper lip was ever stiffer. Ealing Studios followed. Even Hollywood, in a bizarre way, looked at Gunga Din and the Bengal Lancers. We all knew about Action! but in Sicily, in real life, no one was going to shout Cut!

The armada sailed on, blacked-out and silent but for the softly swishing sea. Then the desperate night upon which so much depended changed its mind and blew up a sudden Mediterranean storm so severe (we learned later) that it convinced the enemy we could not invade next morning – but which surprisingly I do not remember at all. When you are braced for battle it does wipe away lesser worries – like being seasick, or drowning.

The storm blew itself out as abruptly as it had arrived, and I went back on deck to find we were surrounded by other shadowy craft with new and strange silhouettes which had assembled during the night. Ships had been converging from most ports in the Mediterranean, from Oran to Alex, to carry this Allied army to the enemy coast.

In the moonlight I tried to sleep on unsympathetic steel, fully dressed and sweating, lifebelt handy. Then around 4am the troops came cursing and coughing up out of the fug below decks into the grey dawn, buckling equipment and queuing for the rum ration.

Some took a last baffled glance at an unexpected Army pamphlet just distributed: ‘A Soldier’s Guide to Sicily’. Hard to keep a straight face. It was full of useful hints, like the opening hours of cathedrals, how to introduce yourself, and why you should not invade on early-closing day. It could have been a cut-price package cruise of the Med if the food had been more generous and we had not been preparing to break into Hitler’s fortress.

The Army Commander, General Montgomery, brought us back to reality. It is now easy to mock his resonant ‘good-hunting!’ calls to action, but they were penned more than sixty years ago, pre-television when reality had not begun to intrude upon Ealing Studios’ rhetoric.

Montgomery told us: ‘The Italian overseas Empire has been exterminated; we will now deal with the home country. The Eighth Army has been given the great honour of representing the British Empire in the Allied force which is now to carry out this task. Together we will set about the Italians in their own country in no uncertain way; they came into this war to suit themselves and they must now take the consequences; they asked for it, and they will now get it…’

He concluded: ‘The eyes of our families and in fact of the whole Empire will be on us once the battle starts. We will see they get good news and plenty of it. Good luck and good hunting in the home country of Italy.’

Wandering around the decks, I saw no one showing anxiety, no animosity, no heroics. There was too much to think about. Fear is born and grows in comfort and security, which were not available at that moment in the Med. Or perhaps we were all acting?

Action! was at first light on July 10 ’43 when British troops returned to Europe, wading ashore on to the sandy triangular rock that is Sicily. It was the first great invasion. Cut! came two years later, and was untidy.

The Eighth Army had 4½ divisions, the US Seventh Army 2½ Along the coast to our left the Americans and 1st Canadian Division were landing. The 231 Independent Brigade from Malta, the 50th and the 5th Divisions hit the beaches in an arc north towards Syracuse. Some 750 ships put 16,000 men ashore, followed by 600 tanks and 14,000 vehicles. We were covered, they assured us, by 4,000 aircraft. I saw very few – and most of those were Luftwaffe. I presumed, and hoped, that the RAF and the USAAF were busy attacking enemy installations and airfields elsewhere, to ease our way ashore.

While driving the enemy out of Africa the Eighth Army had settled the conflict in Tunisia by capturing the last quarter-of-a-million men of the Afrika Korps. Many could have escaped to Sicily had Hitler not ordered another fight to the death. At the end most were sensible, and surrendered – including General von Arnim with his 5th Panzer Army.

The triumphant conclusion of the North African campaign left the Allies with powerful armies poised for their next great offensive. President Roosevelt, unhappy on the sidelines, was determined to get his troops into action somewhere, and Italy provided the best targets available while building-up forces and experience for the Second Front. Despite their African victory the Allies were not yet dominant nor confident enough to invade France – certainly not the Americans, with little or no battle experience.

So at Churchill’s insistence we were to attack ‘the soft underbelly of Fortress Europe’. That’s what he called it. In the event, it was not as soft as advertised; indeed, it grew almost too hard to resist. After only just avoiding being pushed back into the sea a couple of times, we became resigned to Churchill’s brave optimism.

The strategic intention was to knock Italy out of the war and to tie down the 25 German occupying divisions – 55 in the whole Mediterranean area – which could otherwise have changed the balance of power on Russian battlefields or turned the coming Second Front in Normandy into a catastrophe.

The Germans were now compelled to withdraw units from their armies around Europe to reinforce the Italian front: the Hermann Goering Division from France, the 20th Luftwaffe Field Division from Denmark, the 42nd Jäger and 162nd Turkoman Divisions from the Balkans, the 10th Luftwaffe Field Division from Belgium … were the first to leave their positions and head for Italy. By drawing some of the Wehrmacht’s finest units into battle, we supported Germany’s hard-pressed enemies everywhere.

Mussolini’s Fascist regime had already been demoralised by the loss of its African empire and army, and if we could now drive Italy out of the war our frontier would be the Alps, and the Mediterranean route to the Middle and Far East secure. To defend Sicily with its 600 miles of coastline, the Italian General Alfredo Guzzoni had twelve divisions – ten Italian and only two German: 350,000 men, including 75,000 Germans. With Kesselring’s instant reaction, by the end of August seven fully equipped German divisions were attacking us in Sicily.

To clear our sea route to this battlefield and obtain a useful airfield, the Allies had first attacked Pantelleria, a tiny volcanic island 60 miles south of Sicily. It surrendered without a shot being fired on June 11 after severe bombing, and was found to have a garrison of 11,000 troops – a ready-made prisoner-of-war camp and an indication that Mussolini’s strategic planning could be haphazard. The only British casualty during this invasion was one soldier bitten by a mule.

Though the Allies dropped 6,570 tons of bombs on that Mediterranean rock the garrison suffered few casualties and only two of its 54 gun batteries were knocked out. Such pathetic results did not lead Allied High Command to question the efficacy of future saturation bombing.

Our landing in Sicily was also preceded by the first Allied airborne operation of any size. A parachute regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division and a British Glider Brigade were flown from Kairouan, Tunisia, in some 400 transport aircraft and 137 gliders. This daring night operation was the first ever attempted. It was not a success.

Poorly-trained pilots had to face dangerously high winds, so only twelve gliders landed near their objective, and 47 crashed into the sea; they had been cast off too early by their American towing aircraft. The fact that our aerial armada was fired-on by Allied naval vessels did not help. The 75 Dakotas also dropped the US paratroops far from their target of Gela, scattering them across Sicily.

The survivors of the Glider Force saved their part of the operation from complete disaster by causing some chaos among the defences around the Ponte Grande across the River Anapo. These elite troops removed all demolition charges from the bridge, enabling the 5th Division to drive straight across, head for Syracuse and occupy it that night with port installations little damaged.

So Sicily was a curtain-raiser for Europe’s major airborne landing at Arnhem in September ’44 – which was equally unwise and unsuccessful.

Otherwise the first great invasion was going well. Only four of our great fleet of some 3,000 ships in convoy had been torpedoed. Kesselring did not seem to have noticed our arrival. We learned later there was frenzy at the Field Marshal’s HQ – but this did not show.

At Pachino our LST came to anchor offshore. A few enemy miss-and-run spotter aircraft roared over, too high for pictures. When it grew light we needed to get closer in, so with Sgt Radford, I thumbed a lift on a smaller Landing Craft Infantry. We slipped from that into the Med, struggling armpit-deep through the gentle breakers and holding our cameras high. The LCI Captain, a young Australian Lieutenant with whom during the tense dawn I had been considering life, the future and everything, this Ozzie very decently jumped into the sea and waded behind me, holding my back-pack full of unexposed film up out of the Med.

On the continent of Europe I took my first sodden steps on the long march towards the Alps. So far, so surprisingly good.

At that stage of the war nobody knew much about assault landings, about storming ashore and facing mines on the beaches and machine guns in pillboxes backed by mortars and artillery and bombers. Despite hesitant or invisible opposition, there was a new naked sensation. Standing tense on that soft warm beach and gazing around I was ready to burrow into the sand for protection. I felt exposed and enormous – a perfect target. I could sense a million angry eyes were watching me over hidden gun barrels, trigger-fingers tightening. Who would fire first?

We had been prepared for everything – except an invisible enemy, and silence.

Before any hostility arrived, we scrambled off the beach, moving between white tapes the Royal Engineers were already putting down to show where mines had been cleared. Then we set about filming the landings.

On our beach, landing troops tried to dry out in the early sun; then formed up and pressed inland through the fields, interrupted occasionally by Italians who wanted to surrender to somebody – please!

Beachmasters were already in control. Tank Landing Craft disgorged enormous self-propelled guns, armoured bulldozers and Sherman tanks. RAF liaison officers talked to their radios. The Navy flagged craft into landing positions. One LST was on a sandbank, another churning the sea and trying to tow it off. Three-ton amphibious DUKWS – great topless trucks that swim – purred purposefully between ships and shore. The first prisoners arrived back on the beach, and wounded were carried into regimental aid posts. Royal Engineers were clearing mines and Pioneers laying wire netting road strips. Military police came ashore and began to control landing traffic. Bofors crews took up defensive positions and dug in. Fresh drinking water was pumped from LST tanks into canvas reservoirs. Petrol, ammunition and food dumps were started. A de-waterproofing area for trucks was marked out. Pioneers started to build and improve tracks and work on Pachino airstrip, which had been well ploughed by the Italians; by midday it was ready for use. All that was what the months of planning had been about.

We filmed the Eighth Army getting set to go places – and so far, to our relief and amazement, few shots had been fired in anger. XIII Corps took a thousand prisoners, that first day. I saw some of our invading troops with tough NCOs actually marching smartly up the enemy-held beach in columns of three – not a scene you expect to see on the first day of the re-conquest of Europe. What – no bearskins?

We had been braced to face the fury of the Wehrmacht. In fact, all we faced were a few peasants and goats, and the usual hit-and-run Luftwaffe dive-bombers. It was quite a relaxed way to start an invasion. So far we had on our side most of the military strength and all the surprise, and as the troops came ashore some of our hesitant Italian enemies – local farm workers – waved and smiled. It’s always comforting to have the audience on your side.

Towards the evening of D-Day I rounded up a few sergeant-cameramen who had landed nearby with other units and we settled in a field for our first European brew-up. On went the tea in its regulation sooty billycan and the bacon sizzled, supported by our first trophy of war: fat Sicilian tomatoes. A few Messerschmidts came over and did what they could, bombing ships and strafing beaches, but I don’t think my new Scottish friends of the 51st Division suffered many casualties. Our surprise had been total.

At dusk, finding our blankets were still somewhere at sea, we settled down on the damp rocky soil of the tomato grove and in an unnatural silence, slept uneasily.

Such lack of enemy opposition was unexpected – and so of course was the hidden fact that, after this first easy day, it was going to take another 665 days to fight our way up the length of Italy, from Pachino to the Swiss frontier by way of Catania, Messina, Salerno, Naples, Anzio, Rome, Florence, through the Gothic Line and out into the Po Valley, to Milan and Venice … and victory?

I did not know that I faced 22 months of battle that was going to provide some of the worst experiences of my life – and a few of the best.




THEY ENLISTED THE GODFATHER… (#ulink_715a1436-7e62-52dd-9670-d380aa72218d)









The stunning thud of bombs shook us awake. The lurid nightscape was bright as day. We jumped up in alarm, our shadows stretching out before us. The Germans had finally reacted.

Their night bombers were dropping flares and hunting targets. They had plenty. We covered the coastline and were impossible to miss. Attempting to hold them off, thousands of glowing Bofors shells climbed up slowly in lazy arcs through the night sky and into the darkness above the flares. They were pretty enough and encouraged us, but did not seem to worry the Luftwaffe. The invasion fleet and the beaches were bombed all night.

There may be no justice in life, but in battle the percentages go even more out of synch. For instance, my batman-driver Fred Talbot was a regulation cheery Cockney sparrer and peacetime bus driver. We saw a lot of war together, without a cross word.

During the planning for the invasion he had been much relieved to learn that, while I was directing our team and carrying my camera along with the first wave of infantry ashore, when I could reasonably expect to get my head knocked-off … there would be no room for him. He would have to stay behind with our loaded jeep and sail across in the relative comfort of a larger, safer transport ship. This would land with some dignity a day or two later, when hopefully the shot ‘n’ shell would have moved on. It was just his good luck, and he was duly thankful.

However on invasion day my first wave went in, as I said, to mystifying silence. The worst we got was wet. Meanwhile, Driver Talbot’s ship, preparing to follow the fleet to Sicily and proceeding through the night at a leisurely pace from Sousse towards Sfax and well behind the armada … hit a mine and sank immediately.

Talbot spent some hours in the dark sea before being picked up, and another ten hours in a lifeboat. He was one of the few survivors.

When he caught up with us some days later he was rather rueful about the injustice of it all. I passed a few unnecessary remarks about life sometimes being safer at the sharp end, but understandably Talbot was not amused.

My relief at his return was clouded by the knowledge that our jeep, loaded with everything we possessed, was at the bottom of the Med. Down there in the deep lay the Service Dress and gleaming Sam Browne I had worked so hard to achieve and only worn a few times. Now I had nothing resplendent and should have to attend what I anticipated would be the vibrant social scenes in Rome and Florence in my invasion rig – a bit basic and underdressed for any hospitable Contessa’s welcoming party … War can be cruel.

Then there was my religiously-kept wartime diary. Had those notes brimming with excitement, dates, facts and figures not become an early casualty of war … had that mine not destroyed my tenuous literary patience at a time when life was becoming too busy to sit and think and remember and write … had that ship not sunk – you could have suffered a version of this book half-a-century ago!

Strangely, having lost everything but my life, I felt curiously light-hearted – free and fast-moving. I would recommend travelling light to any Liberator. You sometimes approach this silly carefree mood when an airline has lost your luggage in some unfamiliar city and suddenly you have nothing to carry, or wear, or worry about.

Talbot and I met only once after the war, late one night going home on the District Line, Inner Circle. He was in good shape and told me he was working in Norwich as a ladies’ hairdresser.

Next day, still curiously carefree, I watched General Montgomery and Lord Mountbatten land from their Command ship – the Brass setting foot upon Europe. Our piece of their global war was getting under way and, apart from the bombing, we’d met little opposition – certainly not from the crack Parachute and Panzer Grenadier Divisions we were expecting to attack. We moved inland cautiously.

The Italian defences in our sector seemed admirably sited. Their pillboxes commanded excellent fields of fire, were strongly constructed and most had underground chambers full of ammunition. In main positions were six-inch guns, some made in 1907. All sites were deserted; their crews had melted away.

A handful of small Italian tanks did attempt a few brave sorties but their 37mm guns had no chance against Shermans with 75s and heavy armour.

Fifteen miles from the landing beaches, our first capture on the road north to Syracuse and Catania was Noto, once capital of the region and Sicily’s finest baroque town. Thankfully it was absolutely untouched by war, and bisected by one tree-lined avenue which climbed from the plain up towards the town square and down the other side. We did not know whether this approach had been cleared of enemy and mines, so advanced carefully.

The population emerged equally cautiously, and lined the road. Then they started, hesitantly, to clap – a ripple of applause that followed us into their town.

You clap if you’re approving, without being enthusiastic. Nobody cheered – the welcome was restrained. We were not kissed once – nothing so abandoned. It seemed they didn’t quite know how to handle being conquered.

Like almost every other village and town we were to reach, Noto’s old walls were covered with Fascist slogans. Credere! Obbedire! Combattere! – Believe! Obey! Fight! – was popular, though few of the locals seemed to have got its message. Another which never ceased to irritate me was Il Duce ha sempre ragione – The Leader is always right! Shades of Big Brother to come. Hard to think of a less-accurate statement; we were in Sicily to point out the error in that argument.

Another even less-imaginative piece of propaganda graffiti was just ‘DUCE’, painted on all visible surfaces. As a hill town came in to focus every wall facing the road would be covered with Duces. Such scattergun publicity was a propaganda tribute to Mussolini, the Dictator who by then had already become the victim of his own impotent fantasies. To me he always appeared more a clown than a threat. To his prisoners he was no joke.

In Noto the baroque Town Hall and Cathedral faced each other, giving us a taste of what war-in-Italy was to become: it would be like fighting through a museum.

We filmed one small unexpected ceremony with a carabinieri officer who had discovered a copy of a 1940 speech to the Italians by Churchill. From the steps of the Casa del Fascio he read it out with many a verbal flourish; an intent audience nodded thoughtfully. Churchill had been promoted from ogre to statesman overnight.

Then three British officers arrived and marched up to the town’s War Memorial, where after a respectful silence they gave a formal salute to the commemorated townsfolk who had fallen as our Allies in the Great War. That sensitive and sensible gesture went down very well, and for the first time the applause was real. You could see the Sicilians thinking, ‘Maybe they’re going to be all right, after all!’

Observing both sides in action, I had by now seen enough of the war and the military to appreciate that if you had to be in the army, a film unit was the place to be. It offered as much excitement as you could handle – in some cases, rather more – but also a degree of independence, and even an unmilitary acknowledgement which cut through rank.

We’re all susceptible to cameras, though we may pretend to be disinterested and impatient. (Surely you don’t want to take my picture?) In truth, everyone from General Montgomery down was delighted to be photographed. I spent some time with him during the war and always, as soon as he saw me, he’d start pointing at nothing in particular, but in a most commanding manner. It was his way and it seemed to work; half-a-century ago he had television-style fame, before television.

People do straighten up and pull-in their stomachs when a camera appears. It’s an instant reflex – like beauty queens, for instance. As soon as they see a camera, they smile and wave.

Senior army officers were certainly not given to waving but, not quite understanding what we were doing, tended to approach us with impatient exasperation or amused confusion. Usually when they saw we were quite professional they would submit to direction or just leave us alone – which for a junior officer, was ideal.

We drove north and found the 7th Green Howards had captured a large Italian coastal defence position of 12-inch gun-howitzers which could throw a 6101b shell 20 miles. They were pointing towards our carefree arrival route and positioned to do terrible damage to any invader, but were only as good as their crews – who fortunately were not working that day.

We noticed with some bitterness towards international Arms Kings that they had been manufactured by British Vickers-Armstrong. Our 74th Field Regiment got them firing on German positions outside Catania, the biggest guns the Eighth Army had ever operated – so I suppose it worked out all right in the end.

Another capture worked out equally well, and Sergeant S.A. Gladstone got some expressive pictures of happy troops liberating cellars containing 7,000 gallons of good red wine. As trophies go, this was vintage and generally accepted as even better booty than tomatoes.

After our carefree advance from the beach, resistance had toughened in front of the Eighth Army. German paratroops had been flown in from France and the Hermann Goering Division replaced the timid and apathetic Italians. After tough fighting on the beaches, the Americans enjoyed an easier run through east and central Sicily, then followed the Germans around the giant sentinel of Mount Etna as they pulled back and prepared to retreat to the mainland.

As for our enemies, we soon discovered that the Italians in their rickety little tanks were anxious to become our prisoners, and the Germans in their enormous 57-ton Tiger tanks were anxious to kill us – so at least we knew where we were …

Sergeant Radford and I set off across the island to be in at the capture of Palermo by General Patton’s army. That pugnacious American General had just been in deep trouble after visiting a hospital where he slapped and abused two privates he believed were malingering. The soldiers were said to be suffering, like the rest of us, from ‘battle fatigue’. They had no wounds though one was found to have mild dysentery, yet they seriously affected the war. Patton’s exasperation was demonstrated in front of an accompanying War Correspondent, and the resultant Stateside publicity put the General’s career on hold for a year – and in due course provided a tragic death-knell for Churchill’s Anzio campaign, which needed Patton’s drive and leadership.

As we drove through remote and untouched mountain villages, we were the first Allied soldiers they had seen. Wine was pressed upon us and haircuts (including a friction) cost a couple of cigarettes. Even the almost unsmokable ‘V’ cigarettes made for the Eighth Army in India were eagerly bartered.

In Palermo householders peeped timidly around their curtains, wondering whether our dust-covered khaki was field-grey? The city was peaceful – blue trams were running and the police with swords and tricornes drifted about, as well dressed as Napoleonic officers.

After an RAF visit, the harbour was full of half-sunken gunboats, each surrounded by shoals of large fish. We caught a few by hitting them with stones. Izaac Walton must have been spinning.

Posters showed a monstrous John Bull, the world his rounded stomach as he swallowed more lands. Another was of a grinning skeleton in a British steel helmet. I took pictures of them while passers-by hurried on, fearful lest I turn and blame them.

We returned across Sicily to the Eighth Army HQ on the malarial Lentini plain – indeed a large number of our casualties were from mosquitoes. During the night we felt huge shuddering explosions outside Catania and watched sheets of flame light the sky. The Germans were blowing-up their ammunition dumps – so they were about to start their escape to the mainland.

A new officer had arrived to join us: Lieutenant A.Q. McLaren who, captured in the desert by Rommel’s Afrika Korps while using two cameras, had refused to hand one over because it was personal property and demanded a receipt for the War Office Ikonta. He later escaped, still carrying the receipt.

As we were meeting, an operational message came in saying that Catania was about to fall. We scrambled off to get the pictures. McLaren was driving ahead of me, standing up in the cab of his truck watching for enemy aircraft, as we all had to. This gave a few seconds’ warning if the Luftwaffe swooped down to strafe the road.

We drove in column around the diversion at reeking Dead Horse Corner. In the dust ahead lay a German mine. McLaren’s warning scream came too late. It was his first day in Sicily.

The patient infantry plodding past us moved on silently towards the city. They had seen another violent death and perhaps they too would soon stop a bullet or a shellburst. In an hour or so some of them would also be dead, and they knew it.

The whole direction of their lives now was to reach some unknown place and, if possible, kill any unknown Germans they found there. In battle, death is always present and usually unemotional, and when it approaches, inches can mean the march goes on – or you are still and resting, for ever.

However its proximity does wipe away life’s other problems. Those plodding figures passing Dead Horse Corner and McLaren’s body were not worrying about unpaid bills or promotion or nagging wives or even sergeant majors. Getting through the day alive was achievement enough.

It took the population of Catania some time to realise that the Germans had gone. Then they came out into the streets to cheer and show their relief, carrying flowers, fruit, wine … It was hard to see them as enemies. Our pictures showed Italian nurses tending the wounded of the Durham Light Infantry.

At this point Sergeants Herbert and Travis arrived and unintentionally captured Catania’s entire police force. This was not in the shot-list. They had left their jeep behind a blown bridge on the road into town and were filming on foot when a civilian car came out of the city towards them. Surprised by such an apparition in a war zone, they commandeered it and ordered the driver to turn round and take them into Catania.

Speeding ahead of the Army, he whizzed excitedly along back streets and finally through two huge gates into a palace courtyard full of armed carabinieri. As the gates slammed behind them and they looked around at massed uniforms … suspicion dawned that now they might be the prisoners.

Then the Commandant in an elegant uniform arrived, saluted, and asked for their orders. That was better. They ventured that they were just a couple of photographers who did not really want a police force, not just then. However, they did want transport.

They were instantly ushered into a large garage crammed with every type of vehicle, their choice was filled with petrol and the ignition key presented with a flourish. Amid salutes, the conquering sergeants drove out through the massive gates, at speed. Honour had been satisfied on all sides.

The object of much planning-ahead during the final fighting through Sicily was not the capture of Messina, straddling the enemy’s escape route and well-protected by Kesselring’s massed anti-aircraft guns, but of Taormina, an hour’s drive to its south. This charming honeymoon-village of the Twenties climbs the rocky coast in the shadow of Mount Etna’s 11,000 feet. Like Capri, its flowers, pretty villas and bright social life gave it a sort of Noël Coward appeal. It was untouched by war, of course, as all armies protect places they might wish to use as headquarters, or billets.

It was a placid scene, as we arrived. Out in the bay a British gunboat lay peacefully at anchor, while a number of anxious Italian soldiers were standing on the beach trying to surrender to it. They would probably have been almost as satisfied if anyone else had paused to capture them – even a passing Film Unit – but by this time we had all become rather blasé about Italian prisoners. They had lost their scarcity value.

My CO Geoffrey Keating and our War Artist friend Edward Ardizzone had reached Taormina ahead of the army patrols. I was surprised poor old Ted could climb the mountainside because he seemed to be overweight and getting on a bit – he was at least 40. However he struggled up the 800 feet from the seashore – not as elegantly as Noël arriving at the beginning of Act 2 but in time for them to requisition, breathlessly, the Casa Cuseni. This splendid little villa built of golden stone was owned before the war by an expatriate British artist. Its garden was heady with the exotic scent of orange blossom, its library equally heady with pornography.

Despite those distractions, the defeat of the Germans in Sicily meant that we at last had time to be happy, even as we prepared for the coming invasion of the mainland. Every evening we relaxed with a Sicilian white in the hush of the garden terrace as the sun set behind Mount Etna. This was war at its best…

The 10,000 square miles of Sicily had been captured in 38 days, during which the Allies suffered 31,158 casualties. The Wehrmacht had lost 37,000 men, the Italians 130,000 – most of them, of course, prisoners getting out of the war alive.

In its successful strategic withdrawal, the German army corps had little air and no naval support, yet its 60,000 men stood up to two Allied armies of 450,000 men – and finally some 55,000 of them escaped across the Straits of Messina to Italy to fight another day. They took with them 10,000 vehicles and 50 tanks. Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring – the troops called him ‘Laughing Albert’ – had enough to laugh about at this Dunkirk victory.

Our last pictures of the Sicilian campaign showed Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery staring symbolically through field glasses out across the Straits of Messina towards the toe of Italy, and the enemy. That was to be our next step towards the end of the war. Behind them in Sicily, an Allied military government was being established, though in fact control of the island was falling back through the years into the hands of the island’s secret army – the Mafia.

Our victory was darkened by the fact that behind the scenes – and with the very best of intentions, you understand – the Americans were handing Sicily back to its former masters. In a misguided military decision, they enlisted the Godfather!

From his prison cell in New York State, Lucky Luciano, then Capo di tutti Capi, arranged Mafia support and guidance for the Allies in Sicily – in return of course for various business concessions. So it was that Lucky was released from prison and flown-back to his homeland to ‘facilitate the invasion’ – and on the side, to set-up the Mafia’s new narcotics empire. Vito Genovese, well-known New York hoodlum wanted for murder and various crimes in America, turned up in uniform in Sicily as a liaison officer attached to the US Army. Through threats and graft and skill, their contingent soon out-manoeuvred our unworldly do-gooding AMGOT, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory. We had our card marked by gangsters.

Thus the victors helped destroy Mussolini’s rare achievement; he had held the Mafia down and all-but destroyed its power. Now in their rush to pacify an island already peaceful, the Americans resuscitated another convicted Mafiosi, Don Calò Vizzini, and put him in control of the island’s civil Administration with military vehicles and supplies at his disposal. The Mafia was born again, fully grown.

Since then even Italian Prime Ministers have been found to enjoy such connections and support. For example, the 113-mile Palermo to Messina autostrada was finally inaugurated after 35 years by Silvio Berlusconi in December 2004. It cost £500 million and was partly funded by Brussels and the European Investment Bank. Work had begun in 1969 and, following the regular siphoning-off of materials and funds by the Mafia, proceeded at a rate of three miles a year.

Fortunately for our lively sense of mission, we simple soldiers in our shining armour knew nothing of the Mafia’s rebirth, nor could we foresee it. We had no time to occupy ourselves with the future crime and corruption that was to inherit our victory. We were busy fighting a war and preparing for an attack on Italy’s mainland.

So the Allies left five million Sicilians to a future often controlled by the Mafia, and a resigned tourist industry which in the peacetime-to-come would advertise: ‘Invade Sicily – everyone else has …’

At the end of August, the only Germans left in Sicily were the 7,000 ruminating behind barbed wire. General Montgomery’s headquarters in the San Domenico, former convent and now the grandest hotel in Taormina, prepared for the first visit of the Allied Commander of the Mediterranean Theatre, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then almost unknown outside the US – and little-known within it.

An American Supreme Commander with all those stars was something quite new to us, so he was accorded the full military razzle-dazzle and then some, as only the British Army knows how to lay on.

He had flown into Catania with a sparkle of five American Generals and a fighter escort. They drove up the coast road to Taormina. The Highland Division – the men with whom I had invaded Sicily – were now much better-dressed and pressed, and turned out their most impressive Parade of Honour: pipe band, swirling kilts, white blanco, stamping feet, loads of swank … They marched about, then crashed to attention and Presented Arms. We waited for the Commander-in-Chief’s soldierly appraisal. ‘Say’ he said at last, ‘some swell outfit.’

It seemed a fair comment.




I STILL FEEL RATHER GUILTY ABOUT THAT… (#ulink_aa729229-c680-58ef-80d4-dc0c708fab8f)









During our serene sessions on the terrace of the Casa Cuseni we even had time to take silly shots for home consumption of ourselves larking about – ‘red-hots’, we called them.

I can’t remember the reason for such warriors’ relaxation. The photographs were taken in the morning, so demon vino was no excuse. Why then do grown men behave in such a way? I think we should be told.

I suspect dear old Alfred Black may have instigated the pictorial fooling around; son of George Black, the impresario who ran the Palladium and other theatres in London and Blackpool, he probably directed our light-hearted romps. The pictures were taken, I suspect, for the lovely Roma Beaumont, one of Ivor Novello’s leading ladies from The Dancing Years and such, who was also Alf’s wife. This was the only occasion I can recall during the war when we had the time or the taste for jolly frolics.

More seriously, we considered future picture-coverage of the war on the Italian mainland, which was going to mean splitting our Unit. First it had to be decided whether Captain Harry Rignold or I should lead our cameramen across the Straits at Réggio Calabria to cover the Eighth Army’s opening assault upon Italy.

The other would return to Africa to join the more militarily significant operation Buttress, the landing a week later up the coast near Salerno by the new and American-controlled Fifth Army. That bay, thirty-five miles south of Naples, was at the extreme limit of our vital air cover.

Rignold, my senior, had the choice of course. We had spent some days together driving and filming through central Sicily, and I had come to like and much admire him. Small and soft-spoken, he was a most unmilitary figure, but brave and eager. He had caught the excitement of an assault landing while filming at Narvik in Norway, May 1940. That landing was a combined operation and, like Dieppe, a considerable defeat – but for Harry a splendid photo opportunity. So he chose Salerno, the bigger story – and was killed on the beach. I went across the Straits of Messina with the 2nd Inniskilling Fusiliers – the ferocious ‘Skins’ – and landed safely. I had drawn another lucky card.

Taormina had been too good to last. Very soon we were reminded there was a war to be won, and our serenity each twilight had been a sort of mirage.

So we dispersed and set off to fight once again. Harry Rignold left for Africa with his cameramen, and on the evening of September 3 ’43 my sergeants and I boarded our LCIs in Catania docks. We were back at war as a sort of decoy invasion, hoping to lure German divisions down south and away from the coming Salerno landing.

As we settled in, the massed invasion fleet due to sail that night was attacked by German fighter-bombers. So much, we thought, for surprise. They already had the unwelcome mat out…

On the fourth anniversary of Britain’s entry into the war we sailed from the comforting shores of Sicily, where by now we felt we were at home among friends. The fleet assembled off the coast, and at dawn our silent armada approached the dark mountains and narrow beaches of Italy’s toe.

The Straits of Messina are less than three miles wide. Should we get into any trouble, I felt we could swim across, backwards or forwards. We were to land along a five-mile stretch of beach north of Réggio. It reminded me of our invasion of Sicily, but through a golden mist across a smoother sea. Already I was feeling like an assured veteran: been there, invaded that…

During our peaceful days in Taormina the Royal Artillery had drawn up all its biggest guns around Messina and now set about pinpointing and silencing any enemy batteries across the Straits.

As we neared our landing beach the massed gunners behind us used up the Royal Artillery’s Sicilian reserves of ammunition, supported by the rocket-firing devil-ships which were sailing alongside us. These were landing craft packed with launchers firing 800 five-inch rockets in 30 seconds. Each contained 301b of TNT. They tore open the sky with an insane howling madness that filled all men – friends and foe – with shock and fear.

There was no reply from the enemy artillery – and it was easy to understand why! Some shells crashed around us into the sea. They were ours, falling short – but even so, were not welcome. Friendly fire can hurt just as much. Still no answer from the enemy coast.

At 5.30am we hit the beach and ran inland to escape any German fire. It did not arrive. The Luftwaffe flew in to strafe and bomb, but otherwise the Eighth Army once again walked ashore almost unopposed. It seemed in the last few days the Wehrmacht had withdrawn to man its next defensive line across Italy – or perhaps had picked-up warning Intelligence about the coming landing at Salerno. We had fired 400 tons of HE at empty hillsides.

Encouraged by the absence of resistance, Driver Talbot and I set off to chase the enemy inland – but cautiously. We drove past huge Italian coastal guns near Pellaro, also made by Vickers in 1930, also unmanned. It was like a holiday drive, through lovely scenery.

Then, rounding a bend in the mountain road, we were confronted by an approaching column of a couple of hundred Italian soldiers bound for the invasion beach, all belligerently armed and evidently ready to resist our attack upon their homeland.

As Talbot froze in horror, it dawned upon me that my .38 Smith and Wesson revolver – our only armament – was still beneath my reissued kit at the bottom of my new kitbag. My old kitbag was still at the bottom of the Med. I was not a fearsome figure.

In that instant I realised, with regret, that I had been thinking too much about pictures when war is for fighting. In a film unit preoccupied with observation, it was all too easy to fall into the role of detached spectator – you can’t shoot me, Jerry, I’m just watching – when everyone else has taken sides and is trying to kill you.

At OCTU back in Barmouth I had absorbed the military dictum that Attack is the Best Form of Defence, so I leapt smartly from the jeep, using strong language and brandishing my camera. It was, at that moment, all I had to brandish.

To my surprise it was most effective. No one shot me – indeed, the massed Italians were delighted. Guns were put down, combs appeared, buttons done up, and the whole troop gathered around me manoeuvring for position, flashing eager smiles and showing their best sides for the picture. Look at me, Ma, I’m surrendering!

They were all going home, they told me, for the war was over between our nations and peace had been declared. This was quite inaccurate but at 200 to 2, I was not about to argue. Anything that made them happy was all right by me. I took loads of pictures and warmly commended them to our nearest fighting unit just a few miles down the road, regretting that I was unable to accept prisoners – or even co-belligerents – however amiable. In my experience this is not a ploy that works with the German Army.

During the whole jolly surrender I was earnestly hoping that the successful and invasion-happy Eighth Army would not suddenly come bursting around the corner in our footsteps, all guns blazing. Fortunately it was too far behind.

We parted with mutual expressions of relief and regard. Their eager surrender to the following infantry was, unfortunately, a little premature. Italy did not capitulate for another five days during which they all went, not home but towards the start of a journey to a POW camp in Africa, as its final prisoners.

They didn’t even get their prints. I still feel rather guilty about that…




VERY BAD JOKES INDEED… (#ulink_c570889d-ba19-5092-8034-56951f27123a)









After our peaceful, almost gentlemanly invasion of Réggio Calabria, the Eighth Army advanced 100 miles in five days. It was the only week in the whole Italian campaign that could be described as Easy. Afterwards the Germans, the terrain and the weather combined against us.

Hoping not to attract any more would-be prisoners, Talbot and I drove north up the big toe of Italy. Just past the coastal bunion at Vibo Valéntia, we took over a house in the small town of Nicastro – and there made a new friend.

He was a small brown mongrel with large appealing eyes who instantly grew accustomed to our faces, and our army rations. By the time we were ready to move on towards Cosenza, we had become inseparable and he was part of AFPU, keeping an eye on things. He rode between us in the jeep, bright and alert, answering to his new and natural name: Nic. Pleasant to have a dog about the place – makes you feel more like a family.

We three set out one bright clear morning, planning to go as far north as we could, until the Germans reacted. After an hour or so we picked a sunny spot for lunch, and lay around enjoying the calm and the scenery. Then suddenly across the valley behind us we saw a familiar threatening scene approaching, fast: a convoy of RASC trucks following our road to the front and throwing up the usual dense dust-clouds.

This was the torment of all unsurfaced country roads in summer. Find yourself off-tarmac and amid traffic and within minutes your jeep and you would be a living statue, thick-coated by a pea-souper of choking dust.

Panic! We had to get away before the convoy arrived or we should be eating their dust and driving slowly through their clouds for hours.

We slung the remains of our picnic into the back of the jeep, along with ration boxes and everything we had unloaded for the siesta. We got moving as the first truck rounded the nearby bend, trailing its white cloud and heading implacably towards us. I gunned the jeep and we sailed away, just in front of the choking clouds. Phew.

We easily out-ran the convoy and were alert also to the survival warning of the Army’s inescapable sign: Dust Brings Shells. It must have been an hour later when I was hunting through the disordered jeep for my maps when we suddenly remembered … Where’s Nic?

In the frenzy to get away through clear air, we had left the poor little chap finishing his lunch … and about to be engulfed in a maelstrom of trucks and noise and dust.

We waited for the convoy to pass, then for their dust to settle, then drove back to hunt around our picnic location, calling his name. No echo of that cheerful bark. No wagging tail, no excited recognition. Perhaps he had struck off across country towards Nicastro for the unexpired portion of his day’s rations? Perhaps he had been picked up by someone in that convoy? Stricken, we never risked our affections again. Goodbye Nic, young Italian charmer lost in action.

Heading on through the mountains, we paused to relieve an internment camp, full of civilians of various nationalities. You would think detainees who had been imprisoned for many months would have been delighted to see Allies in liberating-mode, riding to their rescue? Not a bit of it.

Their guards had run away, and now some 50 of Mussolini’s prisoners, having raided the camp kitchen, were enjoying a family picnic under the trees. They were a well-dressed group lazing around in a scene of contentment.

Then some of the younger male detainees took me aside and mentioned that by freeing them I was not doing them any favours: they’d had a cushy billet with regular meals and no worries, living a peaceful country life with other friendly families, many of whom had pretty young daughters. They were quite content to escape wartime worries outside the wire, with nothing to do all day except lie around in the long grass and be charming. Furthermore, their sex lives had never been so good.

Unamused, I offered to lock them up again and throw away the key. On reflection they reluctantly decided to accept the worrisome freedom I had thrust upon them. Their cheerful group did contrive to make my war seem rather pointless.

I left them to their bucolic pursuits and got back on the road north, chasing reality. This soon became all too apparent when on the west coast of Italy three Allied Divisions of the Fifth Army steamed in from Africa and attempted a landing near Salerno – to face the most savage resistance of the war, led by the 16th Panzer Division.

Another easy landing had been expected after the dismissal of Mussolini and Italy’s surrender, but this was no longer the musical-comedy bella figura battle – just going through the motions – that the Italians had undertaken without the equipment or the will to fight. These were fierce and determined counter-attacks by crack German divisions which had been expecting – even rehearsing for – our landing. The Fifth Army, exposed and vulnerable, seemed about to be destroyed before even gaining a toehold on Italy.

AFPU had four officers and eleven sergeant-cameramen covering this different sort of assault landing. As they sailed in, one landing craft was hit by 20 enemy shells. Others exploded as they struck mines or were strafed by the Luftwaffe squadrons which were out in strength. In the chaos some craft put in to wrong beaches. The precise invasion timetable disintegrated.

Sergeant R.P. Lambert, our smallest photographer, was in an LCI heading for the beach, standing behind a tall infantryman of the Queen’s Regiment. The tense silence was broken when a soldier leaned down and whispered, ‘If that guy steps into the sea and disappears, Sarge, you ain’t half gonna get wet.’

Such a cheery routine exactly followed those morale-boosting war movies. From officers came similar flip Ealing comedy throwaways about seeing Naples and dying. These soon proved to be very bad jokes indeed.

Harry Rignold, my opposite number, had landed from an LCI and was moving across the beach when a shell burst in the sand in front of his jeep. His right hand was blown off. Sergeant Penman and their driver were also injured.

Harry walked calmly to the sea wall, carrying his camera in his remaining hand. Putting it down carefully he said, ‘I’m going to the RAP to get my arm fixed.’

He was lying on a stretcher at the regimental aid post awaiting evacuation by ship when another shell fell amid the wounded and killed that gentle and excellent man. He died without knowing he had been awarded the Military Cross.






The Italians’ coastal defence guns (made in Britain) could have done our invasion great damage – had they been manned by grown-ups …






General Montgomery landed in Reggio in an amphibious DUKW instead of his usual Humber, to be greeted by pipers of the 51


Highland Division.






When he saw a camera Monty would always point at something, in a most commanding way.






I went with him for his first meeting with General Mark Clark, whose Fifth Army had landed behind enemy lines. The beleaguered Clark welcomes Monty to his Beachhead.






Monty goes to explain to Clark and his Chief-of-Staff Major General Gruenther how the Eighth Army will help the Fifth. (His Officer-in-Attendance is the regulation two paces behind).






The Americans did not receive the usual Liberation-welcome in Naples, where the population was still stunned by bombing and German destruction.






My opposite number in AFPU, the brave and gentle Captain Harry Rignold, was killed during the landing on Salerno beach.






For months the German positions holding up our advance around Monte Cassino resisted all Allied attacks …






… despite powerful support by artillery, from 4.2” mortars, and up…






… and by Sherman Tanks …






… so finally 239 Flying Fortresses flew in to destroy the Benedictine Monastery which had stood amid the wild peaks of the Abruzzi for 1,400 years.






Some of the 453½ tons of bombs that fell on Cassino in the first aerial attack.






The ancient citadel of art and learning, after the bombing.






After our triumphant assault landing at Anzio, this was as close to Rome as we got for almost five months: the Flyover. Later, when the Germans launched three major attacks to throw us back into the sea, this was as far as they got.






Infantrymen under attack in the wadis. Even a small ditch seemed secure and reassuring.






A German view of the battle, as they occupied their side of the Flyover.






An enemy 15cm armoured Infantry Howitzer in firing position amid the ruins of Carroceto.






Captured American troops are marched through Rome, under armed guard.






Other German soldiers are less dominant. Held at gunpoint after capture by New Zealand troops during the Battle of Cassino.






On the road to Rome an Italian cyclist voices his opinion of the German Army – by then safely disarmed and marching to the stockade.






Taking pictures in a POW camp, one face seemed to me to symbolize the end of Teutonic dreams of conquest. I called this portrait ‘The Master Race’. Next to that tragic figure, a young German POW appreciated that, for him at least, the war was over.

Along the beach Sergeant J. Huggett had also just got ashore. Ahead of him some Commandos were holding a small promontory against heavy German counter-attacks. Huggett, tall and game, set off up the hill to get pictures of the action. Near the top an angry voice ordered, ‘This way! This way!’ It was the Commando officer.

‘You took your bloody time, Sergeant,’ he shouted. ‘Where the hell are your men?’ Huggett admitted that he had come alone, to get pictures. ‘What?’ cried the officer, after an emotional silence, ‘I called for reinforcements, not a fucking photographer.’

One understands exactly how he felt; there are times when you just don’t want your picture taken – even though it may well be your last…

The Luftwaffe flew in close-support for Kesselring’s 15 divisions; for the first time we were outnumbered and clinging-on desperately. After two days the landing was going so badly that the Allied Commander, the American General Mark Clark, prepared plans for re-embarkation. He seemed ready to pack up and go home. His Army had only one escape route – by sea. It was unnerving to learn that our own Commander had even considered running back to the ships and sailing away.

He was eventually discouraged by tougher minds among senior American and British officers like Rear Admiral Tom Troubridge who could see that an attempted re-embarkation on beaches dominated by German artillery in the overlooking hills would be a massacre. They bullied and finally persuaded him against the possibility of retreat, but for indecisive days the Allies faced their first major defeat.

The crisis on the beaches followed a flawed invasion plan drawn up by inexperienced officers in which two of our three assault divisions had been given defensive missions. The third, the 46th Division, carried the lone offensive role – but was landed too far from Salerno for its execution. The result was a desperate battle to establish the beachhead by three separate and un-cooperating forces. There was also a seven-mile gap between our X Corps and the US VI Corps. No wonder General Clark despaired.

Back at AFHQ Eisenhower had heard that his friend was planning re-embarkation, and worried that he might have lost his nerve. He told his USN ADC that Clark should show the spirit of a naval Captain and if necessary, go down with his ship. This seemed unlikely.

One echo of the desperation on the beaches survives in Salerno today: in a tidy but little-visited monumental garden in town stands a very small memorial. You need to crouch down to read its inscription. Few passers-by would notice its anguished cry – the thoughts and reactions of the men of the American 45th Infantry Division which put ashore two regimental combat teams under Major General Troy Middleton. Their scorn and bitterness is conveyed by two quotations inscribed on this stone, this memory of desperation.

General Mark Clark US Fifth Army Commander: ‘Prepare to evacuate the beach.’ Underneath, the words of his subordinate, Major General Middleton: ‘Leave the water and the ammo on the beach. The 45th Division is here to stay.’

It is rare indeed for a division to castigate publicly its Army Commander for considering sailing away from the battle. Rarer still, President Roosevelt later awarded Clark the Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry at Salerno.

Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark – Wayne to his friends – graduated from West Point in 1917, 109th in a class of 135, and was afterwards a Captain for 16 years. His career took-off with the war and the friendship of General Eisenhower, with whom he shared an apartment in London. At 46 he became the youngest Lieutenant General the US Army had ever known, with a passion for publicity already well established. As Fifth Army Commander in Italy he refused to stay in the Royal Palace in Naples, explaining humbly to the Press that he felt lost in a big city. He had been raised in Chicago.

Caserta, 30 miles to the north, was the Allied forces headquarters during the war. This enormous mid-18th century palace had been built by the Bourbon King Charles IV to outdo Versailles, but General Clark still found no suitable accommodation within its 1200 rooms, so set up a trailer, a converted truck, in the formal gardens behind the Palace – which as he explained in resultant publicity, was no place for an American cowboy.

The fate of the Salerno landing hung in the balance for some two weeks. A major factor in the outcome was the supporting firepower of the big naval cruisers offshore, and the dropping into the Beachhead on two successive nights of two regimental combat teams from the tough US 82nd Airborne Division. This operation, though sadly delayed, was probably the most successful airborne operation of the war, and swung the battle.

At a time when most things were going wrong, the British army faced that most unusual and wretched event: a mutiny, in which British NCOs were sentenced to death.

Some 700 reinforcement troops had arrived by LST from Naples. They sat down on the beach and refused to report to their new units. All were desert veterans of the 50th Northumbrian and 51st Highland Division who had learned they were going straight back into the line to fight – and not with old comrades and officers they respected, but with new divisions. Worse, some Scots were going to non-Scottish regiments. They all believed they had been promised home rotation with their original units.

It was not until the Commander of X Corps, the popular Lieutenant General Richard McCreery, went to the beach that the majority were persuaded to obey orders, though 192 still refused and were later court-martialled. The NCOs who led the rebellion were sentenced to death, but were soon given the chance to redeem themselves by returning to duty in Italy, with suspended sentences. They did not suffer the ultimate penalty. However, the Salerno mutiny remained a permanent stain on the honour of the Army, and is not mentioned in the Official War History.

All this time I was with the Eighth Army as it moved up the Calabrian toe of Italy. There were two coastal roads, both so narrow there was little room for the two divisions in action – the 5th up the west coast, the 1st Canadian to the east. Only one brigade at a time – sometimes one battalion – could get into the front line of the toe, to fight. It was a geographical gift for German demolition experts; one blown bridge could hold up an army for as long as its ruins could be defended.

After facing the 16th Panzer Division north of Termoli, the Eighth captured the vital Foggia airfield complex, which opened-up southern Europe to Allied bombers and allowed close air support within minutes. At the River Sangro, General Montgomery issued another of his calls to action which always sounded to me like an invitation to cricket: ‘We will now deal the enemy a colossal whack…’ It was his last battle before he returned to England to prepare for the Second Front.

Some Russian officers under General Vasiliev were visiting the Front and, surprisingly, were familiar with Monty’s terminology, but old Eighth Army hands were unprepared for Major General Solodovnic. He had last been seen in Africa in the more casual uniform of a War Correspondent reporting for the TASS news agency. He was not bemused by Monty’s sporting appeals – indeed had a habit of putting haughty Brigade Majors on the defensive: ‘I suppose you’re one of the Upper Classes?’

On September 8 ’43, the day before the Salerno landing, Italy had capitulated and become a co-belligerent, ostensibly on our side. The conquest of Sicily had knocked Mussolini off his perch, and Italy out of the war. Having as a neutral enjoyed the flattering attentions of both sides, the Duce had delayed his declaration of war too long to claim any significant share of Hitler’s blitzkrieg spoils. The Germans overran France so quickly, the Italians contributed so little – and Mussolini had waited 280 days, until June 10 ’40, before declaring war. He could make few appeals at the armistice table. His demand for Nice, Tunis and Corsica received little sympathy from Hitler, who had once complained bitterly: ‘The Italians never lose a war. No matter what happens, they always end up on the winning side.’ He was right again – but the chastened Mussolini saw it another way: ‘Nobody likes a neutral.’

After the surrender of Sicily the Italian King and Government had been anxious to get rid of their Duce. He was eager to show it was not his fault that Fascism and much of Sicily were in ruins, with more to come. In an attempt to avoid the war spreading north through Italy, the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III – who had brought Mussolini to power in 1922 – belatedly demanded his resignation and replaced him by Marshal Badoglio. After that bloodless coup the Duce, more confused than angry, accepted his dismissal, and they parted amicably.

A few months later he was rescued from house arrest at Gran Sasso on the highest peak of the Apennines by glider-borne paratroops led by Hitler’s personal commando, Colonel Otto Skorzeny. Mussolini was then reinstated by the Führer for a brief spell in the twilight zone of doomed Dictators.

Negotiating a change of sides for Italy during the war had been trickier than surrendering. A secret armistice negotiated by the captured British General Carton de Wiart had been signed, but the Italian Field Command was not informed. It did not know what to do so ended up, in the Italian way, by doing nothing.

Unfortunately at that moment Allied command was also indecisive and at Salerno, almost overwhelmed. Instead of ordering the Italian Army to turn and fight the Germans as planned and dropping a division of paratroops on Rome Airport, the Allies threw up their hands, ignored the new situation, cancelled the airdrop – and continued slogging up Italy as though nothing had happened.

For weeks the Germans had been expecting their ally to defect, so with their usual fast reaction seized Rome and rounded up the 600,000 obedient Italian soldiers who had remained in their camps and not gone home and changed into civvies. Instead, they went into cattle trucks and off to German labour camps.

Curiously, Whitehall now reacted in an Italianate way. When their prison camp guards packed up and went home most British POWs had planned to scatter and take to the mountains, but a War Office Brigadier, a Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, ordered them not to break-out of their camps. So within 48 hours half the British POWs in Italy also found themselves under German guard and on their way to prison camps in Germany.

The only decisive action in the whole theatre was taken by Vesuvius, which erupted for the first time in 38 years and then grumbled on for weeks under giant incandescent candles and angry plumes of fire and rock. The naval Commander-in-Chief issued an admiring statement: ‘The Naples group of ports is now discharging at a rate of 12 million tons a year. Vesuvius is estimated to be doing 30 million tons a day. We cannot but admire this gesture of the Gods.’

Suddenly I received a gesture from a military god: I was ordered to drive urgently through the mountains to the west coast and go to a small beach south of Salerno. Purpose and location: top secret. There I boarded a waiting torpedo boat, rakish and sinister. It was there to carry General Montgomery to his first meeting with the beleaguered General Mark Clark, behind enemy lines and on the other side of the Salerno beachhead. It was just the two of us, at sea with a Royal Navy crew from Malta.

We set off flat-out, engines roaring, in a big arc around the enemy-held coast, watching for German E-boats which I was told we could probably out-run. I was comforted by my belief that nobody was going to risk the life of Britain’s only victorious General, without a very good reason.

After four hours pounding through a calm sea without sighting another craft we came in to shore, transferred to a waiting DUKW – and there on the beach was Mark Clark, tall and gaunt, with Major General Gruenther and his staff. ‘Mighty pleased to see you, General,’ he told Monty – and as Fifth Army seemed about to be thrown back into the sea, we could believe he meant it.

His headquarter tents were alongside a rough airstrip hacked out of the scrub where fighters continually took-off and landed. Signs by the road said: ‘Aircraft Have Right Of Way.’

After his discussion with General Clark for a couple of hours, General Montgomery and I returned to our torpedo boat to race south for another four hours, hoping the E-boats had not yet been alerted.

Helping the Fifth Army to get established on shore and out of trouble, was to be General Montgomery’s Italian swansong before he left to prepare for the Second Front in Normandy.

I sat with him as we bounced through the Tyrrhenian Sea, hoping we were unheard and invisible. In fact this ultimate torpedo boat had a resonant roar that filled the dark sky, and a churning wash that fell back, pounding, towards the horizon. It seemed determined to advertise its presence.

As we ate ‘the unexpired portion of the day’s ration’ I began to appreciate how American senior officers with little or no battle experience found Monty impossible. He always knew he was right – and indeed he usually was, though diplomacy and tact were virtues with which he was unfamiliar. He did not work with people, he told them what to do. He was fond of his boss Field Marshal Alexander, but found him a limited and weak Commander: ‘The higher art of war is beyond him. I’m under no delusions whatsoever as to his ability to conduct large-scale operations in the field. He knows nothing about it. He’s not a strong Commander and is incapable of giving firm and clear decisions as to what he wants. In fact no one ever knows what he does want, least of all his staff. He doesn’t know himself. The whole truth of the matter is that Alexander has got a definitely limited brain, and doesn’t understand the business.’

A less straightforward observer would not have been as honest about his ‘very great friend’ and Commanding Officer.

I remembered that in Sicily General Patton’s Seventh Army was fighting alongside our Eighth as we landed, but during the campaign the Generals never met – which might explain why each ran his own private war. This Alexander accepted. The Eighth was struggling up the east coast against newly-arrived German divisions while Patton’s army ushered the Germans into a happy escape around Etna. Both Commanders were prima donnas – though after that it was hard to detect any similarity in thought or action.

In the Mediterranean and later in France, even the affable Supreme Commander General Eisenhower – who had never commanded men in battle – usually found Monty’s infallibility hard to take.

As shipmates running the E-boat gauntlet for eight hours, Monty and I got along happily. This I believe was mainly because I told him what he wanted to hear. My thoughtful contribution was usually ‘Yes, Sir.’ That always went down well.

Although he was not chatty, and too correct to go into details, it was apparent Monty, like Alexander, was not much impressed by his new allies. The confusion on the Salerno beaches, the near-shambles when plans began to go wrong, the lack of aggressive spirit shown by Headquarters staff … few recent experiences had escaped the cold eye of the British perfectionist.

After sandwich, bun and apple, he went aft to stare at the waves whipping by – and doubtless to plan future battles; I went for’ard to watch out for the black silhouettes of hungry E-boats intent upon the war’s biggest prize.

We arrived at the quiet beach we had left twelve hours earlier; the whole hazardous operation had been completed by the RN without a shot or a torpedo being fired, and Monty + 1 were both safe. After that adventure, our careers diverged. He went on to liberate western Europe, to be created a Viscount and a Field Marshal with a chestful of honours. I went on to capture the HQ of the German SS and get Mentioned in Despatches; small beer – but at least we both lived through it all…

Stimulated by the concern of Generals, the advance guard of the Eighth Army fought its way some 200 miles north in 13 days to relieve the hard-pressed Fifth, allowing them to push-on towards Naples – which General Clark was anxious to be seen liberating. Against weakening German resistance, commandos and paratroops stormed the mountains to the northwest of Vietri which commanded the defile through to Naples. The enemy withdrew, the beaches were saved, the bridgehead secure – so far.

The fact that some of our best Generals were being taken away from the theatre and returned to England in preparation for Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, may have had something to do with our apparent lack of direction. Generals Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley and Air Chief Marshal Tedder left for London, along with several veteran British and American formations.

Remaining in Italy, General Alexander then had seven Eighth Army divisions and thirteen Fifth Army divisions: five American, five British, two French and one Polish. Kesselring had 18 divisions.

The Italian surrender brought total confusion to Government offices from Rome to Brindisi – the temporary capital. Calls to the Italian War Office from military headquarters all over the country asked whether they should fight the Germans or not? They were answered by junior staff: ‘Sorry – there’s no one here.’

Very soon there was someone there: the German army. Within a week it had disarmed 56 Italian divisions, partially disarmed 29 others, and captured those 600,000 soldiers.

A supporting army fighting behind the lines would have made an enormous difference to the balance of the war but the Italians, never anxious for battle, received no orders or encouragement from us.

Their Navy, always professional, swiftly sailed away from Italy to escape the Germans, as agreed in the armistice terms. Four battleships and six cruisers surrendered in Malta and were greeted with full military honours by the Royal Navy. The Luftwaffe expressed its fury by bombing and sinking the Admiral’s flagship, the cruiser Roma, with the loss of 1400 men.

On July 19 the US Air Force had hit the Rome railway marshalling yards. The decision to drop 1,000 bombs on the outskirts of the Eternal City was taken by the combined Chiefs of Staff because the two vast yards were the hub of all rail movement between north and south Italy. This Allied attack spread considerable public panic. The USAAF bombed Rome again on August 13, and next day the Italian Government declared Rome an Open City. Three weeks later Italy surrendered, and two days after that the German Army occupied Rome – Open or Closed.

King Emmanuel’s Government was transferred to Salerno. In Feb ’44 the Allies returned authority for the whole of southern Italy to the Italian administration. There were then three Italys: Southern Italy, occupied by the Allies; Central Italy, which remained under German rule until the summer of ’44; and Northern Italy which until April ’45 was the theatre of the struggle by Allies and partisans against the Fascists of the Salò Republic, and the Germans.

The role of Italians in this confused struggle for liberation is usually dismissed. In fact from September 9 until the end of the war, 72,500 military and civilians were killed and 40,000 wounded. There were believed to be some 360,000 partisans and patriots fighting with little direction, but most of them on our side.

Definitely on our side, thank goodness, were the Goumiers – a little-known group with considerable impact. Our armies were well-equipped in almost every way, with one surprising omission: apart from the Gurkhas of the Indian divisions, we had no troops trained in mountain warfare – unlike the Germans, who had an LI Mountain Corps.

An odd exclusion this, as we were fighting our way up a chain of 800 miles of Apennines, from the Straits of Messina to the Alps, by way of everywhere. This great mass of mountains bisecting the centre of Italy always seemed to cut through the heart of our battle lines of fighting soldiers – some of whom had probably never seen a mountain until they faced a towering range soaring up to 9,000 feet. Putting townsfolk to fight through such majestic scenery must have slowed our advance – certainly it made supplying troops dug into the skyline a task sometimes even beyond mules.

General Alphonse Juin, commanding the Corps Expéditionnaire Français in the international Fifth Army, trumped everyone by introducing the Goumiers – 12,000 formidable fighters recruited from the Berber tribes of North Africa’s Atlas mountains, with French officers and NCOs. He launched them across the trackless peaks and savage hills west from Ausonia. Preferring mules to jeeps, knives to rifles, and used to far more serious mountains, they saw the Apennines as foothills through which they moved as to the manner born.

I remember standing in front of vast wall maps at VI Corps headquarters in the catacombs of Nettuno, checking to see if there was any movement on the Front around Cassino. On a long horizontal map of Italy’s boot, sideways, there was a vertical line across Italy showing exactly how far the Fifth and Eighth had got in their struggle to advance. The Intelligence officer briefing me then turned and walked a few paces to one lone dot on the map miles ahead of the static front line. ‘That’s the Goums’ he said.

They were fighting alone, having left every other unit standing. These skilled and fearless tribesmen had one considerable disadvantage to outsiders – sometimes even to their own officers: an instinctive and barely controlled savagery. Goums would descend upon a friendly or an enemy village and rape everyone in sight: women, men, children, animals … Often they formed queues.

All this was standard – but not as we knew it. Italian peasants in villages through which they fought said they suffered far more in 24 hours of Goumier occupation than during eight months under the Germans.

They were a military success – though not if you were living in their path. Neighbouring units much preferred the old-style steady plod through the mountains; they admired the Goums’ natural skills, but few were at ease with them. Even on our side, they were not easy to like.




A PASSING GLANCE AT PARADISE… (#ulink_4a3b4786-09ed-59da-867c-653f91d5726d)









Capri lies three miles from the Italian mainland with a magnificent view of the Bay of Salerno and so a ringside seat at the war’s toughest and most dramatic assault landing. This dominant position was pointless because the island was just not interested in conflict. Apart from a couple of dormant antiaircraft batteries and a German radio station, it ignored any fighting anywhere, following a tradition of escapism established at the time of the Roman Empire.

For a passing glance at paradise, we landed by ferry at the Marina. A scramble of tourist-touts descended offering the regulation peacetime excursions around their miniscule haven, two-miles-by-four. The Blue Grotto? Up to Anacapri? The villa where Emperor Tiberius enjoyed various antisocial vices? The more innocent home of Gracie Fields?

Inland, the tiny Piazzetta remained brilliant and ridiculously theatrical, its little tables filling at noon with the surviving international smart-set, wartime edition, lured by the seductions of the island. Among such elegance were far more gaily-dressed women than men – who were younger and even smoother, with smaller wristwatches. It was the Roman Emperor Augustus who had first noticed the ‘sweet idleness’ of Capri, and it would take more than a world war to affect that balmy attitude among this blend of races untroubled by national ties.

The café chatter was full of happy laughter, though one subject was never approached: the War. I sensed it would be bad form to bring it up. There was a mild preoccupation with the shortage of bread which had to be brought across from the mainland, but at least there was plenty of cake, beautifully presented. Marie Antoinette would have appreciated the situation perfectly.

With some Correspondent friends I dined at the lovely home of a French resident. We had heard that an announcement of vital importance was to be broadcast from Radio Rome that evening, and were concerned. We were playing truant for a couple of days in paradise when we should have been at war, so were displeased that our cover was about to be blown. The prospect of some big story breaking while our backs were turned made us feel even more guilty. We waited anxiously.

Finally after much martial music the radio announced: ‘The Government of Marshal Badoglio … has declared war on Germany!’

‘My God’ cried our hostess, exasperated, ‘Is that all?’ She switched back to dance music. That was Capri in October ’43.

Later that night we again passed through the Piazzetta on our way back to reality. It was crammed with socialising Caprese, still refusing to pay any attention to the war, however close. They had chosen not to notice that a few miles north even their sort of civilisation was being saved by men in landing craft fighting and dying across the muddy Volturno River under a chill grey October sky.

* * *

As we all know, the Italians are a delightful race: good company, extremely stylish and rightly proud of their ancestors and their gorgeous country; but not even their greatest admirers would say that they were successful soldiers, these days. Even Mussolini noticed. After their surrender in Libya his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, told him, ‘With an Army like ours we can only declare war on Peru.’ Unaccustomed to the truth, Mussolini stored that away.

In Rome, King Emmanuel had called a meeting of the Grand Council in July ’43 to remove Mussolini and replace him with Marshal Badoglio. Count Ciano was one of those who supported this dismissal. Six months later, after his rescue from hotel-arrest at Gran Sasso, a resurrected Mussolini did not choose to spare his favourite daughter’s husband when he was tried by a Tribunal in Verona and sentenced to death for ‘attempting to destroy the independence of the State … and giving aid and comfort … to the enemy.’ Ciano was executed by firing squad at Fort Procolo, outside Verona. He died bravely.

After waiting until June 10 1940 to declare war on the Allies in a belated scramble for spoils, Mussolini, the man who (as we always said) made the trains run on time and drained the Pontine Marshes, the Duce’s speeches brandished Italy’s eight million bayonets. This was the usual bellicose nonsense from the balcony of Rome’s Palazzo Venezia.

In fact the Italian Army boasted about 79 divisions, though only nineteen were complete with men and arms, and most of the rifles were made in 1891 – even older than ours. Much of their equipment was imaginary, though they did have 1900 antiquated aircraft, and 400 3½-ton tanks. The German Tiger tank, at 57 tons, weighed more than 40 Rolls-Royces; the Italian pocket tank, a few Minis. No wonder Hitler was unimpressed. It was bad enough on our side of the scales: Shermans only weighed 35 tons.

Facing us when we landed in Sicily had been a massive Italian army – somewhere. In truth we hardly noticed it, for all its ranks were deeply nervous, had no idea why they were fighting and just wanted to go home and forget the whole uncomfortable business.

Naples had fallen on October 1 amid a clamour of urchins shouting at our armoured cars for food and hungry women offering themselves for a packet of biscuits. Following our bombings and German demolition, it seemed a dead city of shuttered shops. Even the high-pressure Neapolitan salesmen were out of action. The wide harbour was clogged by the wrecks of 130 ships, and the retreating Germans had blown-up and booby-trapped the city’s sewage and water systems. Typhus arrived instantly.

Naples has always had a tenuous and insecure grasp upon health and hygiene. Thirty years later, a cholera outbreak in 1973 was to reveal that the city had no sewers, yet was living contentedly around its beautiful but poisoned bay. The popular saying, ‘See Naples and die’ was meant to summon visitors to enjoy its ramshackle charms, but took on a forbidding significance with every passing plague.

General Mark Clark was displeased because he had planned a grand entry into the city when he would acknowledge the plaudits of welcoming crowds – a sort of curtain-raiser for Rome. He wrote in his Memoirs that there was little triumph in his journey through the deserted streets of ‘a city of ghosts’. He gave a Liberation celebration, but nobody showed.

The always surprising stoicism of the Neapolitans soon surfaced and the shops began to open for business, though with little on display. Neapolitan shopkeepers were of course cannier than those in other towns who, before remembering to put up their prices, sold their remaining stocks to eager Allied soldiers enjoying the benevolent rate of exchange. In Naples they waited weeks or months before emptying the storeroom and adding zeros to the price tags.

A few good harbourside restaurants around the famous Zit Theresa opened, with costly menus. They offered a good four-course meal with wine for 140 lire, or seven shillings. Only the military – or black marketeers – could afford such outrageous prices.

One private enterprise flourished as never before. Naples had long been known as the capital of major and minor thievery, a lifestyle stimulated by war. Now beneficent Allied merchant ships arrived daily with food and army supplies, their crews not geared to deal with mass and well-organised criminality which in a hungry lawless land had become woven into every life. It was calculated that one third of all supplies landed at this major port was instantly stolen, to reappear in the black market. So it was Christmas every day for the gangsters of the Camorra.

The emerging shopkeepers of the Via Roma were followed by the friendly Neapolitan signorinas. So effusive was their more private welcome that notices soon went up along roads into the city: ‘Dangerous type of VD in this area.’ We never discovered where the safe type was.

Public Relations settled happily into the Villa Ruffo on Posillipo Hill, a stately mansion overlooking the bay, with Vesuvius – the terror and the pride of the city – smoking peacefully in the distance. This was a spectacular setting of style and comfort amid the tarnished splendour of Naples, though our billet became unkindly known as Villa Rough-it. I would happily have roughed-it indefinitely, but needed to return to the Eighth Army, still trying to push north up the east coast of Italy, 140 miles away.

An unopposed landing by the 1st Airborne Division at Taranto had been followed by the liberation of Brindisi and then the major port on the ankle of Italy, Bari, a Fascist stronghold.

The ironies of life at a warfront when you’re living on a razor’s-edge between stiff-upper-lip badinage, and death – the injustice, the unfairness of it all – was underlined for me in this Adriatic port. We arrived in Bari just after the Italian surrender and found it untouched and, like Capri, quite indifferent to war.

We were particularly irritated by the many Italian Army officers in ornate uniforms strutting about the boulevards wearing their revolvers, and lounging in pavement cafés like the cast of a Drury Lane musical. We – the victors – had been fighting the Germans, sleeping in ditches and unable to bathe; now it was infuriating to find ourselves patronised and dismissed by defeated posturing pseudo-soldiers in this unscathed city, who had never heard a gun fire. What’s more, they also had to live-down a worse record than the Germans in their treatment of prisoners.

Much boorishness survived. The posh Hotel Imperiale refused to give a room to the Allied Tactical Air Commander in Italy, Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham. This was unwise. The irate New Zealander promptly commandeered an entire floor for the RAF.

On the plus side, the shops in their city were still stuffed with goods that at our victor’s exchange-rate seemed encouragingly cheap: a pair of rare silk stockings and a bottle of Asti Spumante to go with them, 4s.6d each. Chanel No 5 as a going-away present – 15s. The rate at the top local brothel was seven lire – then less than tuppence and, I was told, usually worth every penny. None of these bargains survived the frantic inflation which arrived soon after as Italians chased the rate of exchange, and won.

Disregarding, in the main, such inexpensive distractions, the Eighth pushed forward up the east coast of Italy, attempting to relieve the pressure on the desperate Fifth.

A popular silver-haired public relations officer, Captain Sir Gerald Boles, reminded us how our warfront lives were ruled by luck. We would sometimes find ourselves working alongside our brother War Correspondents – civilians in uniform who were taken around in the Humber Pullmans of Public Relations by Conducting Officers. They were usually subalterns recovering from wounds or officers regarded as dispensable by their units. One was Sir Gerald and he, to put a fine point upon it, was allergic to lead. He was deeply anxious not to be killed – injured, even. In a charming and patrician manner he would shy away from the most distant explosion.

While escorting Correspondents around the Front in search of their stories, he refused to go anywhere near the fighting. ‘Might get the Humber damaged,’ he would explain, apologetically. ‘War Department property, you know.’

It was true that PR only had a few Pullmans left from the desert, and that some Correspondents were quite content to go along with his careful timidity and fight-the-good-fight only upon their portable typewriters; but the more gung-ho reporters would not be fobbed off by the gentility of ‘Sir Gerald and Lady Boles’, as Ted Gilling called him scornfully. They were missing all the action and the subsequent stories. After indignant protests from the Press it was decided that Sir Gerald had to go.

He was too endearing a man to humiliate by RTUing, by returning to his unit, so his seniors cast around for an acceptably safe job away from the Front where Sir Gerald could pursue a gentler life undisturbed by explosives. They finally decided to send him back to Bari. This port was then miles behind the Front, but a sufficient number of Correspondents were passing through on their way to Yugoslavia and the Balkans to justify the posting.

With touching relief he turned his back on the war, leaving his brother officers to get on with what could be quite a dangerous role – without, as it transpired, further casualties. Sir Gerald drove south and settled into a sea view suite in a comfortable harbourside hotel to sit-out the rest of the war peacefully in that tranquil unscathed city.

In a surprise Luftwaffe raid a few nights after his arrival, an ammunition ship anchored in the harbour outside his hotel suffered a direct hit. It exploded and sank, taking sixteen other ships with it. The blast was felt for 20 miles. Sir Gerald was blown through several walls, and into eternity.

I always enjoyed the ‘Sign Wars’ which could relieve the monotony of any journey. There were the useful warnings: ‘Dust Brings Shells’, the rather laboured, ‘If you go any further, take a Cross with you.’ Even the decisive, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool.’ Should you pass one saying ‘Achtung! Strasse liegt unter Feuer!’ it meant, roughly translated, You’ve come too far – turn round and get the Hell out of here.’

In another category there were those which gave units a chance to publicise their achievements, or get their own back. All Americans were keen on public relations – drivers were always being ‘Welcomed’ to some village or river crossing ‘by courtesy of’ a US Infantry regiment which was just doing its job. Often it seemed we were on Route 66 and would soon be offered a giant hamburger.

On one mountain road where as usual the Germans had blown every bridge, the first replacement had a large sign saying proudly, You are Crossing this Bridge by Courtesy of the US Fifth Army Engineers who Built it in 3 Days 14 Hours and 26 Minutes!’

At the next blown river-crossing the familiar British Bailey bridge had a small notice: ‘This Bridge was built by the REs in 9 Hours 42 Minutes’. Underneath in brackets and small print: (‘There is nothing unusual about this bridge’). They must have been the Sappers who invented Cool.

There was also the tantalising problem of naming defensive Lines – and the enemy had plenty. To infantrymen the war in Italy was one fortified German Line after another. Break through one and there was always the next, just ahead. Ford a river – and there’s its twin, behind an identical mountain. We had the Attila Line, the Caesar Line, the Bernhard Line, the Trasimene Line, the Barbara Line, the Olga and Lydia Lines, the Paola and Mädchen Lines … As the battle moved north it seemed the Germans were thinking more of home and the wife, even amid the big-time Gothic and Gustav Lines built for the Todt organisation by Italian prisoners.

A name had to be resonant, defiant, gallant and worth fighting for. So to restore the billing it was obvious that a major line should have been named after the Führer – heads were due to roll. The Adolf Hitler Line needed to be the most brave and steadfast of them all. This would please everyone back at Command in Berlin.

So fortunately when the formidable Gustav Line was breached, the Germans had just established a deeper defence running across the Liri Valley, near Pontecorvo and Aquino – at last, the Hitler Line!

This blocked any Allied movement along Highway 6 and up the valley. It was even more substantial than the Gustav and featured permanent concrete works, the turrets of Panther tanks buried in the ground at key points, and 75mm guns. Every defensive position was, as usual, cleverly sited.

Then suddenly in January ’44 the significant Adolf Hitler Line was renamed the Senger Line, after the Commander of the 14th Panzer Corps responsible for the defence of Monte Cassino, Lieutenant General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin.

The reason for that urgent name change was not too subtle. Someone had read the runes – and the future was uncertain. A defensive line liable to be humiliatingly breached by Allied armies – or even worse, ignored (remember the Maginot Line?) could not be allowed to go down under the name of the Führer. Generals had been executed for less. Fridolin would doubtless be more amenable, so he was in the charts for a few weeks. He must have been thoughtful and accommodating for he tried to save the Abbey of Monte Cassino, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and reportedly disliked Hitler.

That name change was fortunate for some, and just in time. The Senger Line crumbled – indeed General Clark became concerned lest its quick penetration by the Eighth might lead to a sudden dash to Rome. He would much rather see his own Fifth Army held down and savaged than have the Eighth triumphant on his Road to Rome …

I missed much of the fun and games of Naples and Bari because in that bleak winter the Army was being decimated, not by Germans but by jaundice.

This spread through all ranks and did far more damage than high explosives. First it made you feel like death, while you still looked fine. Then you turned bright yellow and felt fine, while looking like death. It was a confusing and unpleasant plague.

I was carried by ambulance many uncomfortable miles from the snow-covered mountains of central Italy, south to Bari – to experience the first flight of my life. It was not stylish. I was in the middle of a stack of stretchers in a packed Red Cross DC3 which flew back to Catania in Sicily, then on to Tunis. After this an ambulance train took me across the border to Constantine in Algeria and finally, a truck on to hospital to start treatment. By then I was almost well again.

Strange that the first of the many millions of airborne miles I was to cover around Whicker’s World during my lifetime should have been endured lying flat on my back. Now of course you pay extra to travel like that.




STRUGGLING TO GET TICKETS FOR THE FIRST CASUALTY LIST… (#ulink_79e38e96-ec1f-56e4-9196-3550469d749f)









The Anzio Experience has remained with me, mainly because I never expected to live through it. One retains a proprietorial attitude towards any hazardous expedition experienced totally, from planning to victory. Having invaded Sicily and then the mainland of Italy, I’d had two lucky invasions and was hoping the next assault landing would complete my quota: Third Time still Lucky.

I had worked my way back to the Front line from the hospital in Algeria, three or four countries away, and rejoined AFPU on the east coast of Italy just in time for the unit Christmas party. This was as jolly as could be, considering our billet: the Vasto Theological College.

On that Adriatic sector I joined one of the best divisions in the Eighth Army, the 78th ‘Battleaxe’ Division which had fought its way here from Medjez-el-Bab in Tunisia and was now being replaced in the line by an old partner, the tough 1st Canadian Division. To capture the gaunt mountain town of Ortona they faced the entrenched 1st Parachute Division, most disciplined and feared of Kesselring’s armies. It was the battle of champions.

The Canadians took over the Front on the evening of December 20 to fight amid the freezing ruins. In bitter struggles lone houses were captured and surrendered and recaptured. Only the piles of dead were changed. They were still fighting there on Christmas Day. The Paras brought up flame-throwers with a 60-yard range which they used in attack and defence through the ruined town.

The Canadian answer was to call in Sherman tanks as close-support wherever the narrow streets allowed, and six-pounder anti-tank guns that shot through or demolished ancient stone walls.

In this grotesque Christmas battle with its stark backdrop, it took the Canadians eight desperate days to capture Ortona. By then both sides were exhausted. The last Paras were finally cleared out on December 28, though for days afterwards Canadians were killed or maimed by the mines and booby-traps they had buried in the ruined homes of that desolate mountain town.

The capture brought that offensive to an end. The Army was tired, weakened by losses and could see no military objective ahead except – on the other coast – the major prize of Rome, but that was in the path of the Fifth Army. On the Adriatic we had fought ourselves to a winter stalemate.

Then an urgent message from AFHQ sent me jeeping through the mountains to Naples yet again – following the action. There I learned I was to command cameramen covering the landing of 50,000 British and American troops behind enemy lines, south of Rome. The intention was to cut Highway 6 and the railway supply-lines to the Monte Cassino front where German paratroops were still resisting strongly, to trap Kesselring’s Tenth and Fourteenth Armies, and finally to liberate Rome.

With Geoffrey Keating I drove out to Castellammare, the port across the bay from Naples where most of the armada was assembling, to place sergeant-cameramen with units in the first wave of our assault. We had to negotiate with the senior officer commanding the loading of the invasion fleet, because as usual there was not space for everyone who needed to go, and although we saw our role as important it was hard to compete against fighting units, gunners or ambulances.

To jolly the Colonel along, Keating suggested that I take a few personal pictures of him in action – gentle harmless flattery. Pleased with such attention he became more amenable, and subsequently agreed to most of our requests for space and accommodation.

It was curious to be so eager to join an expedition that offered applicants the probability of injury or death as the reward for success. It felt like struggling to get tickets for a First Night, when the winners would probably end up in the first casualty list of permanent Losers.

Afterwards Geoffrey said he would get my pictures developed. I explained that, as usual, I had no film in the camera. We could not take pictures of everyone we met, and it was doubtful whether we would ever see the Colonel again. This was a bit naughty, but practical; we could not burden our hard-pressed Developing Section with social shots not for publication. ‘Red-hots,’ we called them, and they never amused our shy colleague Len Puttnam – father of Lord Puttnam-to-be – who ran the developers and coped manfully with our output.

Geoffrey, more experienced than I, said ‘Fatal mistake. Now you’re going to run into that Colonel everywhere, for the rest of the war. You’ll always be making excuses.’ He was right – so I never did that again.

On January 21 ’44 an armada of 374 ships sailed out to sea, then turned to starboard and steamed north. This was Operation Shingle. We had a fair idea where we might be going because Neapolitan spivs on the Via Roma and around the docks had been selling postcards of Anzio, a place of which I had then never heard.

The weather was perfect, the sea smooth – but we knew German radio had been discussing an Allied landing behind their lines. We prepared for another Salerno bloodbath.

At nightfall troops on our ship wrapped themselves in blankets and tried to sleep on deck. In the wardroom, officers played poker for ridiculously high stakes, trying to get rid of cash. Just when there was no need for money I could not stop winning, of course – so landed with pockets bulging with lire which took months to spend. It was the first (and last) time I have faced that problem.

Our vast armada came to anchor off the small resort and port of Anzio – just as the Neapolitans had forecast. As we dropped anchor in a crisp dawn, braced for enemy reaction, I went below decks for my guide book, to learn that Anzio had been a flourishing commercial city in 490 BC and was the birthplace of the Emperor Nero and the home of Caligula. I do like to know where I’m invading.

Viewed from the deck of our LST at dawn it seemed a pleasant little fishing port bordered by low-rise blocks and villas along the coast, and some substantial patrician homes amid the pines and sand dunes. It had already been damaged by our supporting fire – and much worse was to come.

Along the coast, neighbouring Nettuno looked older, with wine caves at its heart – soon to be taken over by VI Corps as a secure HQ, with life-saving cellars attached. Caligula had wanted to turn Anzio into the capital of the Roman Empire, and Popes and nobles followed his enthusiasms. The fall of the Roman Empire led to Anzio’s decline for centuries, until the 1700s when Cardinal Antonio Pignatelli, returning by sea from Naples to Rome, sheltered from a storm in Nero’s old port and believed his life had been spared. He promised if he became Pope he would rebuild the place – and was a man of his word.

So Anzio had its ups and downs. Unfortunately, I arrived in time for a major Down. After our landing the port area was shelled and bombed by the Germans, night and day for four months. At least it became famous, once again.

To get here during the night our massive fleet had sailed past the Gustav Line and in the distance, Monte Cassino, which now lay 80 miles behind us. The harbour was suddenly busy with warships. Barrage balloons tethered to the larger craft floated protectively above our armada. Destroyers cut through the fleet, laying thick black smokescreens. Further out to sea big cruisers moved ponderously around in semi-circles, rocking as their thunderous broadsides supported our landing.

Red air raid warning flags flew almost permanently – yet we had some 2,000 aircraft in the theatre, the Luftwaffe only 350. Sometimes the RAF or the USAAF held off the attackers, but usually they got through to drop their bombs and hurtle away, low over the water.

The two Navies staged a useful diversion by bombarding Rome’s seaport, Civitavecchia, 75 miles further north. There they carried-out a fake landing so impressive that Kesselring ordered that all harbour facilities should be demolished immediately.

I went in with the 1st ‘White Triangle’ Division on to Peter Beach, just north of Anzio, a broad sandy expanse between sea and dunes stretching towards Ostia and the enticing target of Rome, a mere 33 miles away. The platoon I was landing with that sunny morning was confident and cheerful. The light return-fire had been spasmodic. They were all businesslike and, like me, beginning to feel they had done it all before and knew their way around a landing beach.

What they did not know, of course, was that during the next months at Anzio their division would lose 100 officers and more than 1,000 other ranks. Another 400 officers and 8,000 men would be casualties, or missing.

After our cheerful landing the division would lose 60 per cent of its officers, 50 per cent of its men, but as the warm water and soft clean sand of Peter Beach splashed up to meet our feet such a terrible future was, fortunately, unthinkable.

The US 3rd Division was landing on X-Ray Beach, south of Nettuno, where resistance was also light: the usual 88mm shells and air raids. Most of our early casualties were from wooden box mines hidden in the sand, which fooled the Royal Engineers’ metal-detectors.

I never lost my horror of mines, nor my admiration for the courage of the REs who went ahead and defused them by the thousand. The thought of sudden death springing up from the sand to grab and remove my vitals was an ever-present nightmare, as was the memory of regimental aid posts trying to cope with men without feet or legs who minutes before had been slogging cheerfully up the beach.

General Eisenhower recalled once telling the Russian Army Commander, Marshal Zhukov, of the intricate and extravagant devices introduced by the allied armies to clear minefields – like those great flails on the front of some British tanks. The jolly little ruler of the Red armies – perhaps the greatest Field Commander of World War II – found all those elaborate precautions time-wasting and unnecessary. The quickest and most effective way of clearing a minefield, the Marshal explained, was to assemble a battalion of infantry and order them to march straight across it.

That cruel order was not a comfortable recollection as we prepared to cover a hundred yards of smooth sand, and then the more threatening dunes. In any AFPU pictures of our troops landing on Peter Beach, I’m the one on tiptoe …

The first Germans we met on landing were the 200 who had been sent to Anzio to rest and recover from the fighting at Cassino. Most of them were asleep when they got a wake-up call from a different enemy. Once again we had achieved surprise. The Germans had expected an attack further north, where our feint went in. They were wrong again.

So were we. After a perfect landing in enemy territory, almost nothing went right. The roads to Rome and the commanding hills were open – but we did not choose to take them.

By the evening Major General John P. Lucas, Commander of VI Corps, had landed 36,000 of us, with 3,200 vehicles. He did not land himself until the next day, when he moved into his command cellar in Nettuno; and there he stayed.

I learned afterwards from Prince Stefano Borghese, whose Palace overlooked Anzio harbour, that the ominous approaching rumble of hundreds of ships’ engines out at sea had been heard long before our devastating support barrage began, but the German Harbourmaster thought it was his supply ships returning from Livorno.

After an hour ashore that invasion day my first courier left to carry back to Naples the exposed film we had shot. Our first mishap came when a bomb blew Sergeant Lambert off the quayside. He landed in the water still clutching his bag of film, but no serious harm was done. Just as in a battle zone when any aircraft landing you can walk away from is a good landing, so any naval episode you can swim away from is quite acceptable, in the circumstances.

We headed our preparatory dope sheets: ‘The Liberation of Rome’. Our cautious target was, Rome in ten days. I told my cameramen to hoard film stock for the excitement of bringing freedom to the first Axis capital. As soon as I could get my jeep ashore I started up the Via Anziate heading for Rome, with any luck, and those first triumphant pictures. We were some 60 miles ahead of the German army, which for some reason after all our backs-to-the-wall battles seemed rather hilarious. I resisted the euphoric desire to drive fast through the open countryside, singing.

The flat farmland seemed deserted, yet I could hear sounds of battle … After some miles I was beginning to suspect the Seven Hills of Rome must be just around the corner. Then at a road junction before the River Moletta some Sherman tanks were hull-down behind a fly-over, firing over it. The supporting 1st Battalion of the Loyals had been held up by enemy fire. Snipers’ bullets hissed past as we watched the shelling they had called down on to enemy-held houses.

That was to be the limit of our advance upon Rome. I did not foresee we had walked into a death trap and would be fighting for our lives for eighteen desperate weeks.

The Germans’ reaction had been swift and almost overwhelming. As usual, they were surprised but not panicked, though Hitler – always keen on other people fighting to the death – was taking our assault landing personally. He appreciated the propaganda impact of such an invasion and his reaction would resonate from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin to the beaches of Anzio.

Reserve divisions were rushed-in from around Italy and Yugoslavia, paratroops flown in from France. By midnight Kesselring had assembled 20,000 men around Anzio, with many more on the way. Artillery positions had been established 3,000 feet up in the Alban Hills, dominating beaches and port. This was not going to be another walkover for us – indeed it became one of the most desperate and costly campaigns of World War II, and a near-disaster.

Hitler, braced for the fall of Rome and cataclysmic battles in Russia, knew that for the Allies a bridgehead defeat would be a frightening reminder that the Wehrmacht could still prove invincible. It would show the world that an Allied Second Front could be thrown back into the English Channel. It could force the delay or even the cancellation of D-Day.

He repeated in his Order of the Day that there must be no surrender: ‘Fight with bitter hatred an enemy who conducts a ruthless war of annihilation against the German people …’ He was evidently determined that the Wehrmacht should defend Rome with the fatal obstinacy displayed at Stalingrad. ‘The Führer expects the bitterest struggle for every yard.’ This would threaten the destruction of the Eternal City.

If Hitler was displeased with the battle so far, it was as nothing compared to the carefully suppressed anger of Churchill when the initial success of the combined operation he had encouraged was frittered-away by inexperienced or timid Generals. The isolated Anzio pocket of the US VI Corps was not racing to relieve the Fifth Army at Cassino, as planned, or driving triumphantly up Rome’s Via Veneto, but was itself trapped, besieged and liable to be pushed back into the sea.

It was an ill-planned operation which Churchill had rescued from the official graveyard of discarded military adventures. He had secretly believed the bridgehead might exorcise the ghosts of another disastrous landing: Suvla Bay in Gallipoli, 1915, which cost him his portfolio at the Admiralty. He afterwards admitted, ‘Anzio was my worst moment of the war – and I had most to do with it. I did not want two Suvla Bays in one lifetime.’

That evening we were still held up at the flyover, so I went back to Peter Beach to look for my sergeants. As I arrived, another hit-and-run fighter-bomber came in. Suddenly out at sea the air shuddered and against the darkening sky a sheet of orange flame spread across the horizon. A bomb had hit the destroyer Janus, which exploded and sank in 20 minutes with the loss of 150 men. The flame died quickly, leaving only an angry glare against the night sky.

As one of the attacking aircraft roared away over our heads, Bofors shells hit its tail. Every man on the beach was cheering as it crashed and exploded – but it was poor exchange for a destroyer and so many lives.

We did not know it at the time, but the drive for Rome, the Alban Hills and Cassino had not even been contemplated by our Commander, a grizzled and amiable American known as Corncob Charlie. A bespectacled artilleryman who enjoyed the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, Major General John Lucas was 54 but seemed as old and benevolent as Father Christmas – though less active.

The Germans knew far more than we did about what was happening, because in a major stroke of luck one of their Allied prisoners was found to be carrying a copy of the entire Shingle Plan. This instantly confirmed Kesselring’s conviction that Lucas would not even attempt to cut his supply lines with Cassino.

He had ordered every unit to dig-in and consolidate – when they could have driven unopposed into the surrounding hills and cut Kesselring’s communications to the south. General Mark Clark cancelled the use of the US 504th Parachute Regiment along with the jump by an airborne division on to Rome Airport. The whole operation became stagnant, with commando raids discouraged and all effort concentrated upon defence. Fifty thousand troops were not enough for an attack, it seemed; we had to dig-in and await reinforcements. The Germans, meanwhile, had eighteen divisions south of Rome and were anxious to use them.

Lucas did not think of Rome, he thought of Gallipoli, Tobruk and Dunkirk, of desperate defeat. In the first 48 hours our initial Anzio victory was thrown-away. This is where we needed the fire-eating fast-moving General Patton.

During the planning for Shingle, General Lucas had confessed to his diary his nervousness about the Anzio operation, ‘This whole affair has a strong odour of Gallipoli, and apparently the same amateur (Churchill) is still on the coach’s bench.’ When he risked voicing that opinion to the Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, Admiral Sir John Cunningham, he got a sharp sailor’s reaction: ‘If that’s how you feel you’d better resign.’ He did not.

Even Lucas’s Commander, General Mark Clark, had warned him ‘not to stick his neck out’ the way he had (he said) at Salerno. He was telling Lucas to fight the battle as he saw fit, but it is incredible that such a cautious and unenterprising General should have been chosen to lead a daring operation demanding dash and drive. However, this advice may have been influenced by Clark’s determination to liberate Rome himself. He did not want some bemused subordinate arriving there first, after a lucky punch.

We had achieved surprise with our landing, so half the battle was won; but then the slow Allied exploitation and the intensity of the German reaction instantly recreated the equilibrium, and the attacking British and Americans fell back into the submissive posture of a besieged garrison.

The Germans were amazed we made no move; surely it was unthinkable that we should do nothing? With such cooperation they had little difficulty in containing us. Their reaction to our invasion became almost overwhelming: within days seven divisions had been rushed in to surround us, including Panzers with Tiger tanks.

British commanders were seething with frustration at their enforced inaction. Up in the front line I found Guardsmen brewing-up and their officers playing bridge, while awaiting orders. They should have been racing for Rome.

In Cairo, General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson (‘Jumbo’) who had just succeeded General Eisenhower as Allied Commander Mediterranean, made it clear to the Press – and to Kesselring – that he was going to defend, not attack. ‘If the Germans run true to style, as they always do’ he announced 48 hours after our landing, ‘they will counter-attack our beachhead.’ Thus he advertised our passive intentions to the enemy.

So all was not going well at Anzio. We had launched a major landing led by only two divisions, plus Commandos and US Rangers. At Salerno, with no surprise and no numerical dominance, we only just escaped being flung back into the sea, defeated. Clutching desperately at a landing beach an attacker initially needs total dominance, as General Montgomery well knew.

When Churchill first showed him the plan for Overlord, the Second Front in Normandy which he was to command when he left Italy, Montgomery’s immediate reaction was, ‘This will not do. I must have more in the initial punch.’ D-Day in Normandy was to be in four months’ time, and Churchill admitted, ‘After considerable argument a whole set of arrangements was made in consequence of his opinion, which proved right.’

Montgomery’s knowledge of the price we paid in Italy saved thousands of lives in Normandy. To escape such a stalemate the invasion planners could now demand greater strength for Overlord. They had learned the expensive lessons of Anzio.

From D + 1 even I could tell that if we were fortunate enough to hold on to our beachhead, we faced a long and desperate battle – so I requisitioned a large house overlooking the harbour. It was a substantial three-storey lump of a place and – I noted approvingly – strongly built. It stood high over the seashore in front of the coast road. The front line was only seven miles away. At a push we could drive – or swim – out of trouble.

From its wide terrace we would get excellent pictures of our shipping being shelled and bombed – and doubtless, sunk. It was an ideal place for a billet and tripod position – but on the other hand it was at the heart of the German artillery’s target area … I’d worry about that tomorrow.

From their observation posts in the Alban Hills enemy gunners could watch every inch of the beachhead, and look deep into our private lives. No man could move without being seen. Little wonder Corncob Charlie rarely left his HQ down in the caves of Nettuno.

In our barren seaside villa we too slept in the cellars until deciding that shells were preferable to rats, and moving back to the ground floor. Our rats were all fat and overconfident – and at a battlefront you knew exactly what they had been eating. Even upstairs I awoke one night to find an enormous rat staring at me across my feet. It was wondering what to do. I knew what to do. I reached for my bedside .38 and – hoping to miss my big toes – shot it.

That awoke the remainder of the unit who thought the Germans had landed. They were about to shoot-back through my door, just to be on the safe side …

Calm restored, Geoffrey Keating and I considered the drill, should the Germans ever come to call. We’d seen some tattered clothes in the garden shed and decided to wear these and head north for Rome, rather than attempt to get back to the Eighth Army through the German lines.

Major Keating, my CO, was a most unusual man. A devout Catholic and bon viveur, he had an extremely high threshold of pain, which could be disconcerting. He just did not seem to notice when violence or death was approaching. He had arrived in Egypt to run Montgomery’s Army Film Unit and, indifferent to General Rommel and the Afrika Korps, began cheerfully swanning around the desert as though gate-crashing other Units’ parties, blithely unconcerned about any battles going on around him. This of course meant he was never injured and survived to win an excellent Military Cross.

He never touched drink – though it might have sustained such a perilous lifestyle. One afternoon after the war Susie, a mutual friend, rang me at BBC Television Centre to say they had just got married … This was another surprise. I had a table at Prunier’s that evening so invited them along, if they had no plans.

Looking through the wine list for something interesting with which to toast his bride, Geoffrey settled for a cider, assuming it to be the softest of drinks and better with fish than a coke. After several country ciders he moved unsteadily towards the marriage bed, and from then on his life and social consumption changed direction. He never looked back – and his wife never forgave me.

At Anzio I went with him around our front-line positions and suddenly noticed that, while we were driving in his open jeep along an embankment, laughing and chatting, we were on the dreaded Lateral Road where nothing else moved. I remembered tanks rarely ventured along it in daylight because of heavy enemy artillery fire and German machine guns with sights locked-on to any movement.

We were looking for a Company HQ. There was no other traffic. Then I saw a few soldiers in the dugout positions below us. They were moving at a crouch or lying looking up at us as we drove happily along, an apparition in a no-go area. Just before the firing began, I realised we were not travelling sensibly.

Needless to say Geoffrey’s reaction to possible death and destruction was so indifferent and outrageous that we emerged unscathed and drove on, still finding something or other funny; doubtless my growing panic.

I found out afterwards that Geoffrey would go to sleep in his dentist’s chair during treatment. By then I had registered one firm Unit rule which saw me through the war: separate jeeps.

The bridgehead solidified along 16 miles of coast and about seven miles inland – say just over 100 square miles. I’ve known bigger farms. Some 20,000 Italian civilians had been shipped back to Naples, leaving Anzio a small and desperate military state and a throwback to the Great War days of static warfare, shelled all day and bombed all night. There was no hiding place at Anzio.

On most warfronts there is a calm secure area at the rear where the wounded can be taken, where units rest when they come out of the line and Generals may sleep comfortably. On the bridgehead there were no safe areas. You were never out of range.

Indeed soldiers at the front would sometimes refuse to report minor wounds which might mean they would be sent back to a field hospital – and so into the heavy artillery target area. Provided it was not a major battle they often felt more secure at the front, where the war was personal and the percentages could more easily be calculated.

Keating and I invited a number of friendly War Correspondents to escape from the barren Press camp next door and join us in our more substantial villa, which in our days of bombardment had already been recognised as Lucky. They included one of the Rabelaisian characters of our war, Reynolds Packard. In peaceful days he had been Rome Correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, and with his wife Eleanor had written a well-tided book on Mussolini, ‘Balcony Empire’. He was knowledgeable, sociable and excellent company but had, we discovered, one foible liable to render him untouchable – even in our Mess.

The villa’s sitting room, where we played poker and sometimes even worked, overlooked the sea and so faced away from arriving shells. It was always pleasantly crowded and noisy enough to discourage the rats, so this was where we set-up our camp beds each night. Reynolds, a portly funny figure, was a notable non-teetotaller and so able to sleep through most bombardments. His only lack of social grace was revealed when he woke in the night and needed to urinate. In the unfamiliar darkness he would struggle out of his bed – and pee wherever he stood.

He had been campaigning too long in open country, sleeping in too many fields without the benefit of indoor sanitation and his behaviour pattern had become lax, not to mention disgusting. Not too many people wanted the bed space next to him.

Such a reaction to a full bladder might be acceptable in a foxhole or on a beach, but was less welcome in our new Mess. After the deluge a chastened Packard would face fury in the morning. He could not deny the offence because the evidence was all too obvious. He was always horrified and full of remorse, blamed demon vino and swore it would never happen again. Next night, it would.

In the early hours we would awake to the sound of running water hitting the tiles. The first weary automatic move in the darkness was to lean down, rescue shoes, put them in the dry zone on the end of the bed, and go back to sleep. In the morning, an uproar of protest, another furious inquest and more craven apologies. The distasteful procedure was in danger of becoming normal.

Packard’s momentary forgetfulness in the darkness of a strange room was not excusable – though perhaps understandable to those living on a war front where the niceties of civilised life could fall away. After some months campaigning in the field and living basically I committed a graceless mistake myself, which still haunts me.

We had been advancing slowly through Tuscany and sleeping rough; but once Florence fell some old friends invited me to a welcome party in their magnificent apartment on the Lungarno, overlooking the river. During that elegant evening in the sunlit drawing room I remember needing to stub out my cigarette. Seeing no ashtrays in the salon, I dropped it on to the deep-pile carpet and punctiliously ground it out with my toe – as one would.

As I turned to continue the conversation I had an uneasy feeling something was not quite right … but could not recollect what it might be.

It was not until later that night when my hostess upbraided me – ‘I saw you’ – that I was struck by the vast distance between surviving on a hillside, and living amid glowing Renaissance treasures. I had become one of the brutal and licentious. I paid in flowers, shame and guilt.

The free spirit of Reynolds Packard was even less socially acceptable, but eventually threats of expulsion began to wear him down, or dry him up. After a couple of weeks struggling with him and with the strengthening Wehrmacht now surrounding us, we were becoming familiar with the death-defying routines of life in an encircled battlefield – the deep daily depression that appeared each dawn. So Geoffrey and I decided it was time to attempt to be more social and civilised. Some warriors’ relaxation would improve morale: we had mugs, a few glasses, we had whisky, gin and local vino; we even had American saltines and processed cheese. All told, our first party was indicated – the kind of promising social adventure that could make Anzio just endurable.

The one imperative for such a gathering was of course female – beyond price and almost impossible to discover in such a war zone. Almost, but not totally. The vast and impressive US 95th Evacuation Hospital had just established its dark green marquees with big red crosses, and the more secure stone squares covered with tarpaulins, along the coast-road to the south. It was decided that I should approach the Matron and offer her nurses the freedom of our Mess for one evening. Such an hospitable international gesture was the least we could do.

Making Matron see the good sense of this project was not easy, even at Anzio – particularly at Anzio – but fortunately even in those days celebrity had become a strong selling-point, and American War Correspondents were national names. Hollywood made films about them, wearing trench coats and Holding the Front Page and being gallant. Before the pleasantly businesslike Matron I dropped the famous names that were sleeping on our floor – though excluded Packard, just in case the word had got round. When I later drove triumphantly across to the hospital reception, there waited half-a-dozen jolly off-duty nurses and Red Cross girls evidently quite ready to raise our spirits and briefly escape their endless and harrowing lines of casualties.

They piled happily into the jeep and we returned to our Mess, to find it tidily rearranged, bottles opened expectantly – and the tough swaggering Correspondents surprisingly shy. We passed an excellent evening, discussed everything except the war, drank everything available, and much appreciated the company of pleasant young women in their fatigues and make-up who had made an effort to become glowing replicas of peacetime party-goers. During the evening the spasmodic shelling was so commonplace it hardly interrupted conversation. Packard was on his best behaviour, being suave in a world-weary WarCo way. You would never have guessed.

We planned future escapes for them, said our farewells affectionately, and I drove them back to the 95th Evac … where in stunned horror we confronted havoc and disaster. A damaged Luftwaffe aircraft about to crash-land had jettisoned five antipersonnel bombs across the hospital’s tented lines. These killed three nurses and a Red Cross girl in their Mess tent, along with 22 staff and patients, and wounded 60 others. The place became known as Hell’s Half Acre.




THEY DIED WITHOUT ANYONE EVEN KNOWING THEIR NAMES… (#ulink_35dbb036-7f38-51b8-a011-5a5f84dcd620)









Anzio and Cassino were planned as the twin military pinnacles of our Italian campaign; instead they became tragic examples of Allied Generalship at its most disastrous.

After the US VI Corps had enjoyed a classic and almost uncontested assault landing on the Anzio beaches, General Lucas decided that his 50,000 men – plus me – should dig-in and wait indefinitely for reinforcements, before considering any attack. This condemned us to a probable Dunkirk, or at best a struggle for survival amid the dead hopes of a Roman liberation. The Anzio landing had been intended to end the Cassino deadlock but instead of riding gallantly to their rescue, we now hoped someone would come and rescue us.

At the other end of this comatose Allied pincer movement, an even more disastrous international decision was taken by Field Marshal Alexander, supported by Generals Freyberg and Clark. In four hours, 239 heavy and medium bombers of Major General Nathan F. Twining’s Mediterranean Allied Strategic Air Force dropped 453½ tons of bombs on the glorious Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino. Each Flying Fortress carried twelve 5001b demolition bombs.




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