World Battlefronts: ... Damn Hard!

Lanky Lieut. General Mark Clark of the British-American Fifth Army rode his familiar jeep up to the front again. The Italian autumn rains had eased a bit. The spongy volcanic soil of the Volturno meadows firmed rapidly; it was possible now to drive off the roads. From a forward post the General peered across a calm, river-and ditch-ribbed valley to the German positions.

"There's no place in the world as quiet as a battlefield before a battle," he mused aloud. Later, riding back, he met some field officers. "Hit 'em hard, boys," he said, "damn hard!" His jeep passed a signpost giving the kilometers to Rome: 192 (120 mi.). "That's not so far," he commented. "I remember seeing the first sign to Naples after landing at Salerno. It read 105 kilometers. We made it all right. Just as the boys of the Fifth Army will make Rome."*

Frontal Assault. One hour after midnight the Battle of the Volturno began. From the river's south bank, on both sides of Capua, the Fifth's artillery laid down the heaviest barrage of the Italian campaign. In thinner volume the German guns spoke back. A bright moon silvered the darkness. Under it, shellfire flashed red, tracers brushed glowing orbits, mortars chopped the river into a watery hell.

Two a.m. was zero hour. Down to the bank hurried British and American infantry. They waded, swam, paddled and chugged across. Those who got over and clawed up the steep north bank, and those who fell by the way, had taken their hardest punishment since Salerno. They had given punishment, too, and behind them the tough engineers could now thrust bridges for jeeps, tanks and big guns.

The bloodiest fighting surged through Capua itself. Just before the Allied zero hour, the Germans thrust a column across the Volturno into the old town. Momentarily the Fifth staggered. Then Allied troops counterattacked. The Germans quickly turned, splashed back across the river. Northeast of Capua, General Clark's Yanks seized a clump of scrubby brown hills dominating the surrounding valley.

The weary Fifth's infantry had fought across one of Italy's most famous battlegrounds. Here, in the damp autumn of 1860, bearded Giuseppe Garibaldi, poncho-clad and kerchief around his brow, had walked among his ragged redshirts, crying, "Courage! Courage!" Here, on the Capuan plain, he had beaten the Bourbon King of Naples and advanced Italy a long step toward liberation and unity.

To the Appian Way. Powerful Allied blows hit the German flanks. A British amphibian force struck north of the Volturno's mouth, from the Tyrrhenian Sea. German artillery lay in wait. But that did not stop the Tommies. From American-type, bow-opening craft they landed, dug in. Offshore, the British destroyers Laforey and Lookout and The Netherlands gunboat Flores shelled the German defenses. The action was fierce, costly. But the bridgehead was won.

The Fifth was on the route of the Via Appia, most famous of the ancients' great highways to Rome.