World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ITALY: By Bits & Pieces

The stalled Fifth Army front suddenly crackled into action. Along a ten-mile line in the crags above the creek-laced Liri Valley of western Italy, General Mark Clark's Britons and Americans butted forward.

Through low, sleet-laden clouds, Invader (A36) attack-bombers dived on Nazi pillboxes. The Fifth's indefatigable artillery gouged the terrain. Alpine-trained U.S., and Canadian troops climbed snowy slopes where German guns lorded it over the valley floor and Highway 6, the old Via Casillina route to Rome. But the hardest assignment fell to the muddy, regular U.S. infantry.

Another Village. Through shell-scarred olive and fig groves on a terraced hillside, the Americans moved into San Vittore, a crescent-shaped village converted into a German fortress. For two days a bitter, bits-&-pieces battle tossed and tumbled from house to house, basement to basement. Every one of San Vittore's 200-odd buildings was wrecked. The Germans fired machine guns, machine pistols, rifles and rifle grenades from every window and balcony. The Americans answered with bazookas, grenades, quick-firing 37-mm. antitank guns. So close and confused was the melee that officers talking over field telephones had to hush their voices lest the enemy in the same or the next building overhear.

Just after noon on the second day a 20-year-old Austrian lieutenant stumbled from a cellar, surrendered the last organized remnant of Germans, exhausted, grimy, self-dubbed Kriegsverlängerer (war prolongers). From other, forgotten basements crawled pale, cadaverous, smelly, lice-ridden villagers. For weeks they had lived underground on popcorn, dried beans and water; now, amid the ruins of their homes, they cackled with hysterical relief.

The Americans moved on to the next fortress-village, San Giusta, less than a mile north. There they won another house-to-house battle, then struck for Cassino, where the valley broadens, where tanks may be used advantageously, and Highway 6 begins its last 70 miles to Rome.

Another Commander. To the east, three miles above captured Ortona (TIME, Jan. 10), the Eighth Army paused. A gale, whipping down from the Apennines, ripped away roof tiles, chilled men and mules, stalled movement. "Point 59," another pillboxed ridge, barred the nine miles yet to go to Pescara, Adriatic terminal of the shortest (125 mi.) trans-peninsular railroad and highway to Rome.

The waiting Britons, Canadians, New Zealanders and Indians of the Eighth had a new commander: giant (6 ft. 5 in.), young (49), brush-mustached, hard-driving Lieut. General Sir Oliver W. H. Leese, whom General Sir Bernard Montgomery was said to have chosen personally as his successor.

The Eighth's new chief has long worn the Crusader patch on his shoulder: he had led the Eighth's XXX Corps, its tank spearpoint, all the desert way from El Alamein to Tunis. Son of a Hertfordshire solicitor, product of Eton and the Coldstream Guards, Sir Oliver was thrice wounded in World War I. He fought with World War II's B.E.F. in Flanders, still has a score to pay for Dunkirk.