Lloyd Clark

My father served at Anzio.

He was part of the second wave of troop landings at Anzio in March 1944. Serving with the Green Howards, he found himself in an area of ground slightly to the north-west of Anzio itself, an area known as “The Fortress”, an area broken by many gullies where trench warfare more akin to that of the First War was the order of the day. Finally, in the breakout from the Anzio beachhead, he took part in the fighting that led to the liberation of Rome.

The fighting was show more hard, and although that was my father's only experience of actual combat, it was enough for him. He returned physically unscathed and with a repertoire of war stories that were often at the same time both funny and horrifying. He was mentioned in dispatches for his role in neutralising a German machine gun nest, and would have been decorated for it had his CO not been killed in action before writing up his commendation.

After Rome, my father was rotated out of the line and returned to the UK, to be placed in a holding battalion prior to commencing training to go with Tiger Force to the Far East for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. As we know, that never happened.

So this book was bound to be of interest to me. It sets the Anzio landings in their proper military and political context and draws out the animosity between American and British commanders, from Churchill downwards. Animosity between troops on the ground was a different matter – there was very little of that, the shared experience of combat making brothers-in-arms out of all.

And this book goes into considerable detail about the ferocity of the fighting in the Anzio beachhead. Although it says little about the area where my father was deployed, I recognised much from what he told me. This book has the ring of authenticity about it, as well as having the more analytical accounts of troop movements and tactical decisions.

Disputes between commanding officers also form a recurring strand in the account. The animosity between American and British commanders can perhaps be put down to American inter-service rivalry being applied across international lines. Lloyd Clark joins in the general criticism of Major General John Lucas for his overcautious approach to deployment of forces, though the conclusion offers explanations. Most of the criticism is reserved for Major General Mark Clark, who is depicted – fairly accurately, I gather – as a self-publicist, devoted to achieving glory and making certain the world knew about it through his own press corps, something at that time unknown in any military. Clark was determined to liberate Rome and to be hailed as the liberator of Rome, preferably before Overlord wiped that achievement off the newspaper front pages. He was happy to disobey orders to achieve that end, and issued orders that British troops attempting to enter Rome before him should be fired upon. (My father always commented that “we could have liberated Rome two days before Clark did”, though I doubt he was aware of Clark's order.)

There are some odd omissions. Although Lloyd Clark makes friction between US and British forces a recurring theme of the book, he does not mention the actions of Italian-American and Irish-American troops in earlier stages of the Italian campaign who made a point of portraying British troops to the local Italians as their real enemy. And given that the sector where my father was located was generally known as “The Fortress”, the book never uses that term, referring to it as “wadi country” throughout.

But these are minor points. The key thing about this text is the reported experience from the front line. So much of what my father talked about is in here – the squalor of the battlefield, the trench warfare, the uniforms taken away for de-lousing, Maconochie's tinned beef stew (which Dad always blamed for his ulcers in later life), friendly fire incidents and some of the fate of prisoners on both sides – all had me nodding in recognition.

Yes, there are accounts of prisoners being shot in cold blood. My father once recounted that he took two young Germans that had been captured to his CO in a foreword command post. “We can't keep prisoners here”, he was told. “Take them outside and shoot them.”

“Pardon, sir?” asked Dad, knowing that if the order was repeated, he would be under an obligation to carry it out. He didn't think either of the two young Germans spoke English, but what was going to happen was pretty obvious, he felt. Just then, a jeep arrived from HQ – the first for ages – and the CO snarled “Just get them out of my sight!”. Dad said that he'd never seen two blokes more pleased to be put under guard and taken away.

This book is full of human stories from the battle front; and it ends with a touching account of the author's contact with an Anzio veteran. It is a military history with a very real sense of what the sharp end really feels like. show less

Lloyd Clark appears to be yet another good British military historian. I hadn’t read anything by him before – most of his works have been on WWI. That makes Anzio appropriate, since the battle was as close to Western Front trench fighting as anything in the Second World War.


If you happen to be unfamiliar with the Italian campaign, the Allies initially landed at the toe and heel of the boot, then at the instep (Salerno). Progress was excruciating slow, as the terrain and weather heavily show more favored the defense, and the German commander, Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, was a master at defensive fighting, withdrawing to a succession of previously prepared defensive lines. The American high command was anxious to end the Italian campaign, and considered simply going on the defensive themselves while withdrawing troops and amphibious assets to prepare for OVERLORD (one thing I hadn’t realized is ANVIL, the invasion of southern France, was originally intended to take place before, not after, OVERLORD). Churchill, however, was of the opinion that further action in Italy was “promising” and eventually persuaded Roosevelt and Marshall to leave the amphibious craft in the Mediterranean a little longer and use them to land forces behind the Gustav Line and trap the German armies.


What actually happened is that the forces landed at Anzio (Operation SHINGLE) were too weak to do everything expected of them. The operation ended up reminiscent of Gallipoli, with the landing force sitting on the beachhead instead of pressing inland in the face of weak to nonexistent enemy forces. Kesselring quickly brought up reinforcements and Anzio became what Nazi propagandists described as “the world’s largest self-sustaining POW camp”. Fortunately for our side, Hitler insisted on attempting to reduce the bridgehead rather than just containing it, and the Germans spent themselves in a series of bloody attacks against British and American troops. Forces at Anzio were built up, and eventually attacked outward in conjunction with an offensive against the Gustav Line. The armies linked up, and Rome fell to the Allies; the Germans, however, were able to retreat to yet another preplanned defensive line and the Italian campaign dragged on.


Clark is pretty frank about Allied military commanders. Patton and Montgomery are “narcissists” and Mark Clark is a “publicity hound” who diverted the eventual attack out of the pocket so he could be photographed entering Rome. Alexander, the Mediterranean theater commander, is not firm enough, making suggestions rather than giving orders – particularly in the case of Mark Clark. John Lucas, the initial commander at Anzio, is too genial and cautious. The only general officers Clark is fond of are Lucian Truscott, who eventually took over at Anzio, and Albert Kesselring; Colonel William Darby of the U.S. Rangers gets a nod as well; Clark does not blame him for losing three Ranger battalions at Anzio, since he was given impossible orders.


Based on the information presented, Clark’s assessments seem to be correct. Astonishingly, Mark Clark seems to have given orders that the US Fifth Army engage the British Eighth Army in combat rather than let them get to Rome first. I’m inclined to be a little more charitable to Lucas; he was given conflicting orders to “be aggressive” but not to “stick his neck out”. He could have easily reached Rome in the first few days after the landing – in fact, both American jeep patrols and British Bren carrier patrols did exactly that – but just didn’t have the strength to hold that much terrain and would have been quickly cut off and annihilated if he had tried. However, he could have expanded the beachhead a little further – in particular to cut a couple of highways that latter allowed the Germans to move troops up to Anzio and maintain a withdrawal route for the Gustav Line. I’m also inclined to agree with Clark – and many of the military at the time – that the whole thing was a mistake. The invasion was undertaken with troops that were “too few to fight but too many to die” – the initial landing was two divisions, one British and one American – plus an assortment of independent units. Many of the independent troops involved were specialists – the American Rangers, the British Special Service Force (Commandos), and American independent parachute battalions – that ended up being squandered as line infantry in horrific fighting conditions. It’s not clear that the regular divisions would have made much difference along the Gustav Line, but the specialist troops could have been employed in various small airborne or amphibious outflanking movements (British Commandos had done exactly that some weeks earlier to unhinge the German line from the Adriatic Sea).


Clark devotes a lot of space to various eyewitness reports – all from relatively low ranks, since officers from WWII are getting rather thin on the ground now. Initially, the British and Americans didn’t get along very well, but eventually the two sides earned each other’s respect (Clark recounts a private in the Gordon Highlanders who was somewhat critical of a Yanks who cadged a couple bottles of beer from him; things changed when the American returned latter with a bottle of whiskey, noting that being a beer drinker he didn’t much care for the stuff). The Germans tended to be respectful of both sides but were especially put off by the Rangers and Paratroopers throat-cutting tactics when on patrol, and the preponderance of Allied air power and (eventually) artillery.


Excellent maps – they show terrain and make it clear why the Alban Hills were so important for the battle (and also that the hills are volcanic). A minor flaw is that the maps are sometimes inserted at odd places in relation to the text, and that the map of the breakout from Anzio does not show the corresponding actions by Fifth and Eighth Army at the Gustav Line. This is especially annoying since one of Clark’s theses is that the breakout should have turned north, to trap German armies in the Gustav Line, rather than northwest to take Rome; it would have helped if the map showed where the Gustav line was in relation to Anzio.


Recommended and I’ll have to read some more of Clark’s books. show less

My interest in this book stems from my father's participation in Operation Market Garden as a soldier in the 504th Parachute Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. Dad spoke about the famous crossing of the Waal River in small boats to secure the bridge at Nijmegen; a very harrowing tale. This book tells the story of Market Garden in great detail and also of Operation Varsity and Plunder -- the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945, which featured another airborne assault.

Market Garden was show more the brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery who believed that a dagger-like move through eastern Holland could achieve a breakout into the Ruhr region and, ultimately, a move on Berlin. Montgomery persuaded a reluctant Eisenhower who needed to placate the vainglorious Brit who had been creating difficult political tensions among the allies. A secondary factor behind the decision was to attempt a large-scale airborne action, something that the military leadership had been hoping to try. Montgomery is portrayed here, as in other histories, as an abrasive demanding egotist who was aggressively seeking to keep himself in the limelight over the American generals in the European theater.

The plan had serious flaws which doomed it to failure. It called for dropping parachutists and glider-borne infantry at three bridgeheads: at Eindhoven (the 101st division), at Nijmegen (the 82nd) and Arnhem (the 1st British) to secure the bridges while an armored column raced up a narrow causeway to pass over the bridges and finally across the Rhine into Germany. The flaws were principally two: a failure to recognize the intelligence reports that two Panzer division were in the region, and the difficulty in the face of opposition of the armored corps to proceed up the causeway. The road was bounded by marshy terrain that required the vehicles to stick to the road; any blocking action by opposing forces would stall the column (and did).

The two American divisions succeeded in achieving their objectives, although with significant casualties. The Brits landed too far from their planned drop zone and quickly encountered fierce opposition from German forces in the region. There was a belief among the allies that the Germans were fairly weak and dispirited and would quickly fold under allied pressure. This turned out not to be the case.

After more than a week of trying to break through to relieve the besieged paratroopers at Arnhem the allies had to withdraw. Some of the Brits at Arnhem managed to escape, but many were captured.

The result of Market Garden was to extend a stalemate in the northern sector of the front, not broken until 1945. The author notes that the decision to proceed with an operation before the Port at Antwerp was secured was another deficit as supplies could only reach the armies with difficulty.

Another use of airborne forces, one that is less well-known, occurred in March 1945. Again planned by Montgomery, this effort featured crossing the Rhine at Wesel with a large force, supported by a major airborne drop to secure the flanks of the infantry. In this instance, the utilization of the 17th airborne division, augmented by a regiment from the 101st, was much more modest in intent. Unlike Market Garden it did succeed, although by this point the German opposition was extremely weak.

This book tells of both campaigns in great depth. Like many close recountings of military actions, it is hard to follow the details as the reader is unfamiliar with the terrain and the chronology cannot be told in a linear fashion. Notwithstanding, the book excels in laying out the strategy and the personal/political dynamics of the leading generals. It also features many anecdotes from soldiers who experienced the action on the ground. These give the history a vividness of human perspective that makes it fascinating. show less

Blitzkrieg: Myth, Reality and Hitler's Lightning War is a compelling account of the Battle of France during the Second World War.

Popular accounts often make much of a German doctrine of Blitzkreig or Lightning War that the Nazi regime masterfully deployed against the Western powers during the opening stages of WW2. Clark compelling argues that no such doctrine existed before the Battle of France. In fact the picture is much more complicated, with a few elite Panzer divisions forming a show more spearhead, whilst being supported by non-mechanised infancty divisions who effectively pinned the Allied forces in the Low Countries. Conflict within the German heirarchy gave the Allies space to withdraw at Dunkirk; the German military command initially planned to repeat the strategies of WW1, but only changed tack after repeated pressure from Hitler; meanwhile, France lacked the political willpower to either lead a defence or respond to changes in technology.

In the final analysis - the German army was just better prepared, with a better esprit de corps, to overcome the opposition it faced. There was no Blitzkrieg. But that shouldn't detract from the remarkable victory won by the Nazi forces.

I'd highly recommend this volume as an account of the Battle of France. show less