Rome 1943-1944

THE BATTLE FOR ROME

Robert Katz

Simon & Schuster, $28, 418 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY PETER BRIDGES

The Allied campaign to take Italy in World War II has had less attention in recent years than the 1944 Normandy invasion or the great naval battles in the Pacific, although the Italian campaign was interesting — and difficult, and bloody, after the relatively easy conquest of Sicily and the lower part of the Italian boot.

Chester Carrs’ 1948 history “From Salerno to the Alps” reported that in the less than two years between the Allied landing at Salerno, south of Naples, in September 1943 and the final German defeat at the edge of the Alps in April 1945, there had been 189,000 Allied casualties, well over half of them Americans. These included two badly wounded young lieutenants who would later serve in the U.S. Senate, Robert Dole and Daniel Inouye.

Dead and missing Americans totaled 29,000 in those 29 months, or half the American losses during more than a decade of fighting in Vietnam. As Martin Blumenson wrote in the U.S. Army’s 1969 official history “Salerno to Cassino,” the Italian campaign “would develop into one of the most bitter military actions of World War II.”

The latest of several books on modern Italy by Robert Katz, “The Battle for Rome,” focuses on events inside the Eternal City in 1943-44, as the fighting moved slowly north toward Rome. There had been a great debate among Allied strategists over what to do in the Mediterranean, after the eventually successful Allied campaign in North Africa that began in November 1942.

Beyond Sicily, where the Allies landed in July 1943, the Americans favored taking Sardinia and Corsica and invading southern France, as a diversionary measure when the main effort was to be a cross-Channel attack from England; it seemed unlikely that a march up the Italian peninsula, after taking Sicily, would knock out Italy as a belligerent. The British wanted a focus farther east, on the Balkans and Greece and Turkey, but could also imagine Allied landings quite far up the Italian peninsula, to capture not just Naples but Rome.

Unexpectedly, Mussolini was voted down in late July 1943 by his own Fascist Grand Council, and was interned by order of the little King,Vittorio Emanuele III, whom the pompous Duce had scorned earlier. The new Italian government announced that Italy was leaving the war. The Allies crossed from Sicily onto the toe of the Italian boot, and began to move north. Rome, until now one of the three Axis capitals, was a main target. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized an air drop by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division to secure Rome. The deputy commander of the 82nd, Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor (later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), went secretly into Rome to see the new prime minister, Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The drop might have worked, but Badoglio said it was too late — and soon fled south with his king.

The Germans had managed to move 60,000 soldiers from Sicily to mainland Italy in a sort of smaller Dunkirk, and other German divisions began to come down from the north. The Allies encountered increasing difficulties on their way north overland toward Rome. Their German opponent was an able commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring.

In September 1943, the U.S. Fifth Army broke out from the German encirclement of its Salerno beachhead. Two weeks later the Allies took Naples, 100 miles south of Rome, but then were stopped for months by the Germans Gustav Line. This stretched from the Tyrrhenian Sea inland across the Apennines, low but steep mountains that today’s savvy hikers avoid in winter—a choice the Allies did not have in 1943. A young Canadian officer, Farley Mowat, wrote years later of the grim winter of 1943-44 in his “No Birds Sang.”

In January 1944 the Allies made a second landing, at Anzio, only 40 miles south of Rome — and found they were unopposed — and might conceivably have taken Rome but for the caution of the American commander, Maj. Gen. John Lucas, who as Mr. Katz says, “having seized brilliantly, kept on securing.”

Meanwhile, as Mr. Katz tells us in fascinating detail, much was happening inside Rome. His account focuses on two well-bred young Romans, Carla Capponi and Rosario Bentivegna, who became key members of the anti-Fascist, anti-German Resistance. Another key player is Peter Tompkins, an American who had spent his childhood in Rome and now returned secretly as an OSS officer. Still another is Pope Pius XII.

Robert Katz has no liking for Pius XII. He was sued years ago by members of the late pope’s family, after writing that Pius XII had done nothing on learning that the Germans intended to take horrendous reprisals for a Resistance attack in Rome that killed 30 SS men. But Mr. Katz (who won the court case) is only one of many writers who have criticized the wartime pope. British historian Piers Brendon said that the fact that Pius XII never, throughout the war, directly referred to the fate of Europe’s Jews was “the greatest sin of omission ever perpetrated by a successor of St. Peter.”

In his new book Mr. Katz brings out more evidence that, as he puts it, ” … reveals a pope of many silences with many variations.” Among the Papal silences was the one before SS deportation to Auschwitz of over 1,000 Roman Jews. The relationship between the Vatican and Rome’s German occupiers was, Mr. Katz says, a Faustian pact. The author however makes clear that some of Rome’s Jewish leaders, and indeed many members of the Jewish community, simply could not believe that they would suffer at German hands, and remained in the Ghetto until the Germans shipped them to Auschwitz. Mr. Katz also documents the attempt of some senior German officials in Rome to forestall the deportation.

Mr. Katz reports that in recent years Pope John Paul II intended to beatify his predecessor Pius XII, but because of the outcry against Pius XII beatified instead “the nineteenth-century tyrannical anti-Semite Pius IX.” Mr. Katz might have said a little more about Pius IX, who was not outstanding for anti-Semitism in a society that then and later discriminated against Jews. What distinguishes Pius IX is that just before his temporal reign ended when troops of the Kingdom of Italy occupied Rome in 1870, the pontiff fortified his spiritual reign through the Vatican Council that decreed Papal infallibility.

One of Mr. Katz’s heroes is a young member of the Rome Resistance named Franco Malfatti, who worked closely with the OSS and had fought earlier in the Spanish Civil War and in the French underground. This reviewer had the honor of knowing Malfatti four decades later, when he was the Secretary General of the Italian Foreign Ministry and still a good friend of Americans.

Robert Katz has written a well documented book about a wide range of people under war’s pressures — including a German diplomat with a penchant for saving Jews; a middle-aged Resistance leader, Sandro Pertini, who later, at the age of 81, would become Italy’s much admired president; a number of brave men who were cruelly tortured by Rome’s occupiers; and Rome’s populace as a whole, who were nearing starvation before the Allies liberated the capital in June 1944.

Forty years afterward, Rome’s liberation anniversary was marked by a 1984 ceremony attended by Italy’s top leaders as well as by American veterans including Sen. Robert Dole, Gen. John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had won a battlefield commission at Anzio, and that beloved battlefield cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose Stars and Stripes had taken over Rome’s main newspaper from the previous Fascist management. As we near the 60th anniversary, there are relatively few survivors of the drama and tragedy that was played out in wartime Rome. We are fortunate that Mr. Katz interviewed 18 of the key players over the last several decades. Their testimony helps make his book both eloquent and moving.

Peter Bridges served twice in the American Embassy in Rome. His first book, “Safirka: An American Envoy,” recounted his experiences there and as Ambassador to Somalia.