Book Review - Five Stars
Anzio, a little known quiet coastal town that marked a turning point of WWII, got caught in the cross hairs of time.
My uncle Lawrence Grimsrud, rifle in hand, somehow survived this deadliest of allied landings but sustained mental scars that plagued him his entire life.
This moving story helped me put a human face on this blood bath.
Excerpts:
Anzio had gained a reputation for being one of the most dangerous places on earth. Troops arrived not expecting ever to leave.
The war correspondent Eric Sevareid entered the town soon after it had fallen and was shocked by the utter destruction that he found there. There was no longer any pattern to the streets, merely broken walls, brick dust and thousands of spent cartridge cases. In the wake of the tumult Cisterna had taken on an eerie stillness. Sevareid wrote: In the little park the palm trees lay blackened and uprooted. Over them a shining white victory statue stood erect on a pedestal. It was the figure of a woman holding aloft a torch in a gesture of triumph. Though her marble head and her torch were gone, in its present attitude of shocked surprise the statue seemed the only vital, living thing within the town.
Operation Overlord was to be the beginning of the end of the war against Germany for the Western Allies, not Operation Diadem. The price of this pyrrhic Italian victory had been too high, with 44,000 Fifteenth Army Group casualties since 11 May, whilst a large proportion of Tenth Army had managed to escape to fight another day. Rome had always been of limited military value, and few people, apart from Mark Clark and the Italians, got overly excited about its capture. For most, Allies and German alike, the events of 5 June were to merely usher in a new phase of the war in Italy. In a remarkable case of strategic myopia, Clark had been blinded by the Eternal City.
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