Lucian Truscott Saved Anzio. Mark Clark Flew In for the Photos.

The colonel was hunched over a field radio in a farmhouse south of Cesterna. Outside, the flat Italian marshland was still dark, the air cold and thick with the smell of standing water and turned earth. A kerosene lamp threw shadows across the rough stone walls. Inside, the static crackled with voices he recognized.

 Voices that were getting more desperate by the minute. It was January 30, 1944, and Colonel William Darby was listening to his rangers die. 767 men from the first and third Ranger battalions had set out hours earlier, waiting waste deep through an irrigation ditch that ran alongside the Mussolini Canal.

 Their mission was to infiltrate behind German lines under cover of darkness and seized the town of Sisterna before dawn. They moved in column formation, a long vulnerable line of men struggling through freezing water with weapons held above their heads, unable to deploy, unable to maneuver. Nobody had told them that Cesterna was not a sleepy rear area town.

 It was an assembly point for German reserve divisions, including tanks from the Herman Guring Panzer Division and infantry from the 715th Division. At least 17 Panzer 4 tanks were positioned in the fields around the town, along with self-propelled guns and dug and machine gun positions covering every approach.

 A Polish conscript who had deserted to American lines tried to warn of the buildup, but the intelligence never reached the Rangers in time. At first light, still 800 yardds short of their objective, the Rangers climbed out of the ditch onto open ground. Within minutes, they were surrounded. German machine guns opened up from three directions simultaneously.

 Tanks rolled forward into pointblank range, their main guns firing canister rounds into clusters of infantry. Some Rangers fought back with bazookas and sticky grenades, destroying tanks at the cost of their own lives. Others hurled themselves onto the vehicles bodily, detonating explosives that killed the crews and themselves together.

 The rest were cut down in the open without cover. Darby monitored the catastrophe from his farmhouse. Hearing his men’s radio calls grow more frantic and then fall silent one by one. His last transmission to the first battalion has been preserved. He told them to stick together, use their heads, do what was best.

 He said he was there and they were here and he could not help them. But whatever happened, God blessed them. When the radio finally went dead, Darby asked his staff to leave the room. He put his head in his hands and wept. Of those 767 Rangers, six came back to Allied lines. 12 were confirmed dead, 36 were wounded, 743 were captured.

 The first and third Ranger battalions ceased to exist as fighting units. The fourth Ranger Battalion, attempting a relief attack, lost another 30 killed and 58 wounded without breaking through. The Ranger Force was permanently disbanded. Its survivors distributed to the first Special Service Force. Darby himself, one of the most promising combat leaders in the army, would be killed in action on April 30, 1945, just 2 days before the German surrender in Italy.

 And the man who had authorized the mission that destroyed the Rangers, Major General John Lucas, commanding the Sixth Corps at Anzio, had just demonstrated what everyone from Churchill to Eisenhower was starting to suspect. The Anzio beach head was in serious trouble. The general in charge was not the man to fix it.

This is the story of how a virtually unopposed amphibious landing turned into a four-month death trap. How one general froze after achieving total surprise, another general took over and clawed his way to a breakout, and a third general deliberately sabotaged that breakout to get his picture taken in Rome.

 The cost was staggering. 29,200 Allied combat casualties, 37,000 non-combat casualties from disease, exposure, and psychological breakdown. And at the end of it, seven German divisions that should have been destroyed walked away to fight another year because one American lieutenant general cared more about headlines than military strategy.

Eight days before the Ranger disaster, things had looked very different. The Enzio landings on January 22nd, 1944 achieved what the official army history calls one of the most complete surprises in history. At zero 200 hours, 36,000 troops from the Sixth Corps hit the beaches in three assault sectors south of Rome.

 The British First Infantry Division under Major General Penny landed at Peter Beach, 6 milesi northwest of Anzio, supported by the 46th Royal Tank Regiment and Commandos of the Second Special Service Brigade. Colonel William Darby’s 6615 Ranger Force, including the first, third, and fourth Ranger Battalions along with the 509 Parachute Infantry Battalion landed at Yellow Beach directly in Anzio Port.

and the US third infantry division under Major General Lucian Truscott landed at X-ray beach east of Nuno. A single German company defended nine miles of coastline. German Admiral Wilhelm Canerys had visited Kessle Ring’s headquarters at Frescotti days earlier and assured him he could sleep easy. By midnight of the first day, 36,000 soldiers and 3,200 vehicles were ashore.

Total casualties were 13 killed, 97 wounded, 44 missing against an expected blood bath on the scale of Serno 5 months earlier. Lucas himself wrote in his diary that the Germans were caught off base and there was practically no opposition to the landing. The plan camed operation shingle was Winston Churchill’s personal creation.

 He had conceived it in December 1943 while recovering from pneumonia in Marrakesh. Convinced that an amphibious hook behind the stalled Gustaf line would break open the Italian campaign and threaten Rome, his physician, Lord Moran, recorded that the prime minister had a bright idea and was organizing an operation all on his own.

 Churchill personally badgered Roosevelt to retain enough landing ships in the Mediterranean for two divisions, going so far as to accuse his own generals of not wanting to fight, but being interested only in drawing pay and eating rations. Carlo Desta writes in fatal decision that to suggest Churchill reveled in this role would be to understate the truth.

 Lucas wanted nothing to do with it. His diary is one of the most extraordinary primary source documents of the war, a running confession of doubt and dread from a commander who believed he was being sacrificed for a political operation. In early January, learning of Shingle, he wrote that unless they could get what they wanted in landing vessels, the operation was such a desperate undertaking that it should not be attempted, otherwise a crack on the chin was certain.

 Around January 10th, he added that the whole affair had a strong odor of Gallipoli, and that apparently the same amateur was still on the coach’s bench. That was a direct shot at Churchill, architect of both operations. After meeting Churchill himself around the same time, Lucas recorded the prime minister declaring the operation would astonish the world and would certainly frighten Kessler.

 Then Lucas wrote privately that he felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter, but thought he was entitled to one bleet. He registered a protest against the target date as it gave him too little time for rehearsal. He was overruled, as he knew he would be. The real reasons, he wrote, cannot be military.

 On his 54th birthday, January 14, 8 days before the invasion, he wrote that the army had gone nuts again, that they would end up putting him ashore with inadequate forces and getting him in a serious jam. And then, who would take the blame? A British soldier observed that Lucas seemed 10 years older than Father Christmas. After a disastrous final rehearsal on January 19 when the third division lost 40 amphibious trucks and 10 howitzers in rough seas, Admiral Cunningham told Lucas the odds were 70 to30 that by the time they reached Anzio, the Germans

would already be north of Rome. Lucas wrote that apparently everyone was in on the secret of the German intentions except him. I think Lucas gets more sympathy than he deserves from some historians, but I also think he was set up to fail in important ways. His orders from Mark Clark told him to seize and secure a beach head, then advance on the Alburn Hills 20 mi inland.

 But Clark’s final revised orders changed the language from advance and secure to simply advance on, giving Lucas enormous latitude on timing. Clark himself privately warned Lucas not to stick his neck out. He had overextended at Solerno and nearly been thrown back into the sea. He did not want to repeat. The ambiguity in those orders is critical.

Clark wanted the option to blame Lucas if things went wrong while taking credit if they went right. If you’re finding this valuable, subscribing genuinely helps. It tells the algorithm this kind of deep research is worth showing to more people. Now, back to Anzio. So, Lucas consolidated. He dug in. He expanded the beach head to 7 mi deep and 15 mi wide, then stopped.

 And the Germans, who had been caught completely flatfooted, used every hour he gave them to rush reinforcements south from all over Italy. According to Brigadier General Zigfrieded Westfall, Kesslearing’s chief of staff, there had been no significant German units between Anzio and Rome on the day of the landing.

 An imaginative, bold strike by enterprising forces could easily have penetrated into the interior. Naval historian Samuel Elliot Morrison offered a more sympathetic view of Lucas’s caution, calling the operation either a job for a full army or no job at all, and arguing that to attempt it with only two divisions was to send a boy on a man’s errand.

 Rick Atkinson in the day of battle ultimately comes down somewhere in between. He writes that more than 60 years after the Allied predition at Anzio, Lucas’s caution seems sensible and even inevitable given Clark’s woolly instructions and Alexander’s hail fellow appribation. By January 25, General Eberhard von Mackinson arrived to command the newly activated German 14th Army, establishing a twocore structure with the first parachute corps and the 76th Panzer Corps.

 By January 29, 71,500 German troops faced 69,000 allies. The beach head measured roughly 18 miles long by 9 miles deep, and every inch of it was visible from German observation posts on the Alban Hills, the remnants of a long dead volcano 20 m inland. There was no rear area, no safe zone. Ernie Pile, who covered Anzio for the wire services, wrote that this was a new kind of warfare, that the whole beach head was the front line.

 The soldiers developed a hunched over shuffle under constant observation. They called the Anzio Amble. They called the beach head itself the head. Axis Sally, the German propaganda broadcaster, called it the largest self-supporting prisoner of war camp in the world. When the beach head stalled, Churchill’s frustration produced one of the war’s most quoted lines.

 In his memoirs, he wrote that they had hoped to land a wild cat that would tear out the bowels of the enemy. Instead, they had stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water. On February 10, he wrote to Alexander complaining about logistics at the beach head, asking how many of their men were driving or looking after 18,000 vehicles in this narrow space.

 “We must have a great superiority of chauffeers,” he added. But that was just the beginning. Hitler ordered Kessler to lance the abscess south of Rome. The result was operation fish, meaning fish, launched at 0630 on February 16 with a massive barrage from 370 artillery pieces. Eight German divisions drove forward with a 3 to1 advantage at the point of attack down the Anzio to Albano Road, aimed at splitting the beach head in two.

 The brunt fell on the 45th Infantry Division’s 157th and 179th Infantry Regiments. By February 17th, the Germans had ripped a two-mile gash in the American front, overrunning forward positions and pushing through the area around a crucial terrain feature the soldiers called the flyover, an unfinished railroad overpass that had become the fulcrum of the fighting.

 By February 18th, they reached the final beach headline. The last prepared defensive positions less than seven miles from the sea. German troops could see the water. What stopped them was not brilliant general ship from the command post. It was the desperation of ordinary men.

 In an extraordinary moment, supply clerks, typists, mechanics, military police, sailors, steodors, truck drivers, engineers, chaplain, radio operators, and cooks grabbed whatever weapons they could find and fought as improvised infantry alongside the battered remnants of the 45th division. Allied artillery, outshooting the Germans by roughly 10 to1, smashed successive formations before they could exploit their gains.

 Captain Felix Sparks of the 45th Division called in artillery on his own position when German troops overran it. The US Army Center of Military History records that the Beach Head survived Fish Fang by the narrowest of margins. Allied battle casualties were roughly 3,500 against at least 5,389 German losses. A final German offensive on February 29, Operation Sight and Sprungrung cost another 3,500 German casualties and 30 tanks before Hitler was persuaded to abandon counterattacks on March 6th.

 The damage to Lucas was irreversible. After visiting the beach head on February 14th, General Harold Alexander wrote to London that he was disappointed with Sixth Corps headquarters, calling them negative and lacking the necessary drive and enthusiasm to get things done. On February 16th, Truscot was appointed deputy core commander, a clear signal to everyone on the beach head that Lucas’s days were numbered.

 Truscot himself observed a feeling of desperation, of hopelessness at the headquarters. On February 22nd, Clark returned and relieved Lucas, saying he had been worn out by the battle and lacked the dash required at Anzio. It was handled as a face-saving reassignment. Deputy commander of Fifth Army, then command of Fourth Army at Fort Sam Houston.

 Lucas blamed the British for influencing Clark. He died on December 24, 1949 at age 59. On his deathbed, according to his daughter, he kept repeating, “I did not do wrong. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.” You need to understand who Truscott was to understand why his arrival on February 23 changed everything.

 Lucian King Truscott Jr. was born January 9, 1895 in Chatfield, Texas. He never attended West Point. He never graduated from any college. He got a teaching certificate at 16 by lying about his age, taught school in Oklahoma for 6 years, and joined the army in 1917. His voice was a permanent rasp, the result of accidentally swallowing carbolic acid as a boy while playing in his physician father’s office.

 Life magazine correspondent Will Lang called it his rockc crusher voice. His appearance was unmistakable and deliberate. A battered brown leather jacket with bellow’s pockets. A white silk scarf from an airman’s escape kit printed with a map of whatever theater he was currently fighting in replaced each campaign. Pink cavalry bridges and fragile knee high cavalry boots he considered lucky.

According to Rick Atkinson, he bore a striking resemblance to George Patton. Both men believed that visible aggressive leadership from the front was the single most important quality a general could possess. Four Chinese American cooks tended him throughout the war, ensuring fresh flowers adorned his mess table even at the front.

 A small touch of civilized routine amid the chaos. Truscat had already made himself famous for the Truscat trot, a forced march pace of 5 mph for the first mile, then 4 mph sustained. That was double the standard army pace of 2 and a half mph. He had adopted it from the Rangers and commandos he helped train in Britain where he had personally named the first Ranger battalion and selected William Darby to command it in June of 1942.

Every battalion in his third infantry division could sustain this pace carrying full combat loads in Sicily. His training paid extraordinary dividends in mountainous terrain. Patton rated him fifth out of 155 general officers. Eisenhower later ranked him the sixth most valuable American officer in Europe and his most capable army commander after Patton.

 His blunt philosophy has been recorded in multiple sources. You play games to win, not lose. And you fight wars to win. That is spelled W I N. And every good commander has to have some son of a in him. If he does not, he is not a good commander. What Trescot did upon taking command was swift and symbolic. Within 24 hours, despite severe laryngitis, he visited every unit on the beach head, a practice he continued routinely under enemy fire for the next 3 months.

 Where Lucas had worked from a wine celler deep beneath the Borghazi villa in Natuno, Truscott lived and worked above ground like his men, sending a powerful signal that the days of bunker leadership were over. He hung an enlarged Bill Malden cartoon in his war room, showing two gis in a foxhole.

 The caption read, “The hell? This ain’t the most important hole in the world. I’m in it.” He reorganized artillery employment, summoning Major Walter Kerwin from the third division to implement mass fire techniques across the entire core. He invited British officers for regular drinks, rebuilding Allied trust that Lucas had allowed to atrophy.

 He projected absolute confidence in a place where, by his own observation, there had been a feeling of desperation and hopelessness. I believe this contrast between Lucas and Truscott is one of the clearest demonstrations in the entire war of what leadership means at the operational level. Same men, same terrain, same enemy, same logistical situation, different commander.

 The troops who had barely survived under Lucas became an offensive force under Truscott. That transformation was not about resources or strategy. It was about the man at the top. From March through May, the Beachhead settled into a grinding stalemate that soldiers compared to the Western Front of the First War.

 The Third Infantry Division, spent 67 consecutive days on the Cesterna Front without relief. 14,000 replacements arrived in March alone. The First Special Service Force, the Joint American Canadian Commando Unit, sometimes called the Devil’s Brigade, held 13 km of front with only 1,200 men, twice what was assigned to the entire Third Division.

 They fought 99 consecutive days without relief. Their aggressive night patrols with faces smeared in black boot polish earned them the Vermach nickname D Schwartzen tofl the Black Devils. A diary found on a dead German officer read that the Black Devils were all around them every time they came into the line and they never heard them coming.

 The commandos left calling cards on dead Germans bearing their unit insignia and the German words dust meaning the worst is yet to come. Two German crook K5 railway guns. The Allies called Anzio Annie and Anzio Express terrorized the beach head from tunnels on the Chino to Frescati rail line roughly 30 km away.

 Each gun fired 560lb shells that made an express train sound as they arked in. The crews would roll the guns out of the tunnel, fire up to 15 rounds per hour, then retreat inside before counter fire arrived. The guns were eventually recovered by the Allies in June. One is now displayed at Fort Greg Adams in Virginia inside a building that was literally constructed around the gun because it was too large to move through any door.

 But Truscott was planning obsessively. By midMay, reinforcements had built sixth core to approximately 150,000 troops and seven full divisions, including the newly arrived 36th Infantry Division. The German 14th Army opposite had been weakened. Its best mobile divisions pulled out as reserves. Truscot prepared four alternate breakout plans at Clark’s direction.

 Buffalo, a drive northeast through Cesterna to Valmenton. Turtle northwest up the Via Anziate. Grasshopper east toward Ltoria. And Craad northwest along the coast. The one that mattered was Buffalo. If Sixth Corps drove through Cesterna to the town of Alman and cut Highway 6, the main German supply and retreat route from the Casino front, the entire German 10th Army would be trapped between the beach head force and the Allied armies pushing north after finally breaking through at Casino in Operation Diadem.

 Alexander personally selected Buffalo on May 5th, calling it the only operation likely to produce worthwhile results. At 0545 on May 23, 1500 Allied artillery pieces opened the bombardment. After a 40-minute pause for close air support, seven divisions surged forward. The first armored division under Major General Ernest Harmon attacked on the left.

 The Third Infantry Division under Brigadier General John O’Daniel, known as Iron Mike, drove straight for Cernna. The First Special Service Force under Brigadier General Robert Frederick, pushed on the right. The 45th Infantry Division penetrated beyond Corano on the far left. The 34th Division held the base. The 36th waited in reserve. British First and Fifth Divisions conducted diversionary attacks on the coastal flank.

 The cost was immediate and enormous. The First Armored lost 100 tanks and armored vehicles on the first day. The Third Infantry Division suffered 955 casualties, the highest single day total for any US division in the entire war. But the Germans were cracking. The 362nd Infantry Division lost roughly half its fighting strength. according to the official history refused to withdraw and as a consequence had virtually ceased to exist.

 On May 24th, a patrol from the second corps heading north from Casino met sixth core engineers heading south, ending 125 days of beach head isolation. On May 25, Cesterna fell after brutal house-to-house fighting. Elements of the first armored division were within 3 mi of Elanton. 4838 German prisoners were taken in two days.

 Operation Buffalo was working exactly as planned. Here is where the decision becomes indefensible. On the evening of May 25th, with Valantone within reach and the German 10th Army streaming north toward the trap, Mark Clark sent his operations officer, Brigadier General Donald Bran, to deliver new orders to Truscot. Clark himself was conveniently at his command post on the southern front, not on the beach head.

 The order changed everything. Instead of continuing the drive on tone to cut highway six and trap the 10th army, the bulk of sixth corps, the first armored division, the 34th, 45th, and 36th infantry divisions, was to turn 90 degrees northwest toward Rome. Only the third infantry division and first special service force, an insufficient fraction of the core, would continue toward Highway 6.

 Truscott’s reaction is the most quoted passage of the Italian campaign. In his 1954 memoir, Command Missions, he wrote that he was dumbfounded. He protested that the conditions were not right, that this was no time to drive northwest where the enemy was still strong. They should pour maximum power into the Velment Gap to ensure the destruction of the retreating German army.

 He said he would not comply without first speaking to Clark in person, but Clark was not on the beach head and could not be reached even by radio. Written orders followed the next morning. Clark notified Alexander of the change late that same morning, by which time it was a fate, a complete. Alexander issued no countermanding order.

 The official US Army history notes that either Alexander was accepting with grace a virtual fate accomply or the Valmatone maneuver had lost its principal champion. I should note that the official record presents a complicating detail. Contemporary evidence suggests Truscott may have initially reacted somewhat more favorably to the shift than his memoir later claimed, objecting primarily to a frontal attack along Highway 7 rather than the overall change in direction.

His memoir, written a decade later, sharpens the criticism considerably. But regardless of the nuance in Trrescott’s initial reaction, the military consequences of Clark’s order were the same, and they were catastrophic. I believe this is the single worst command decision any American general made in the Mediterranean theater.

 And I think the evidence for Clark’s motive is beyond dispute. His own memoir, Calculated Risk, published in 1950, makes it explicit. He wrote that they not only wanted the honor of capturing Rome, but felt they more than deserved it. He cast himself as the first commander to take Rome from the south since the Bzantine General Beliserius in 536. over 1400 years earlier.

 He told Truscott Flatly on May 6th that the capture of Rome was the only important objective. According to official army historian Sydney Matthews, Clark wanted Rome because of the prestige, because he feared Alexander would let the British Eighth Army share in the triumph. Clark reportedly stationed military police at road junctions to refuse entry to British vehicles approaching the city.

The clock was ticking. Clark knew Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion, was scheduled for June 6. Rome had to fall before D-Day or his victory would vanish from the front pages. His race was not against the Germans. It was against the calendar. What happened next should have ended his career. Kessler through reserve divisions including the Herman Guring Panzer Division rushed 150 mi from Levoro into the Valantone gap to hold Highway 6 open.

 For 4 days, these forces fought the under strength third division to a standstill near Artina. Just three mi from the highway. Seven divisions of the German 10th Army withdrew north through the gap while the trap stood open. Meanwhile, on Clark’s chosen northwest axis, the main body of Sixth Corps slammed into the strongest German defenses on the entire front.

Three divisions of the first parachute corps were dug into the Caesar line. Two bloody, fruitless days of frontal attacks at Lenuvio and along the Anzio to Albino Road gained nothing. The breakthrough finally came not from Clark’s plan, but from an improvised flanking move by the 36th Infantry Division, which found an undefended gap at top Monte Armisio on May 30 and outflanked the entire Caesar line from above.

 The third division finally seized Velment on June 2, a full week too late to trap anything. The German 10th Army was long gone. General Mackinson was relieved of command of the 14th Army. Kessler declared Rome an open city on June 3. Carlo Deste calls Clark’s order as militarily stupid as it was insubordinate. Rick Atkinson says Clark acted with duplicity and bad faith.

Alexander’s post-war verdict was blunt. He could only assume that the immediate lure of Rome for its publicity value persuaded Clark to switch the direction of his advance. A revisionist minority led by historian James Holland argues that the German 10th Army actually retreated through parallel mountain valleys east of the Via Cazalina and could not have been trapped at Velment.

Regardless, I have read Holland’s argument carefully and I think it understates the chaos a full strength American corps sitting a stride Highway 6 would have inflicted on a retreating army whose logistics, artillery and vehicles depended on that road. Trrescott, who was there and who had designed the entire operation, believed total destruction was achievable.

 I find his judgment more persuasive than theories developed decades later. Clark entered Rome on June 4, 1944. His entourage of photographers accompanied him. According to multiple accounts, he insisted on being photographed only from his left profile, his good side. At the city’s edge, he stopped for a picture in front of a large Roma sign.

 Sniper fire struck the sign while he posed, a bullet hole visible beneath the letter O in surviving photographs. Brigadier General Robert Frederick of the First Special Service Force, standing nearby with wounds from two of his nine combat injuries, pointed at the incoming rounds when Clark demanded to know why his men were not advancing faster.

 Clark reportedly said he wanted the sign shipped to his office. On June 5, Clark held an impromptu press conference on the steps of the town hall on the capital line hill declaring Rome in American possession. Troops had marched past the coliseum and down the via of the imperial forms. Pope Pius I 12th addressed Gwy’s in St. Peter’s Square.

Clark’s subordinates called him Marcus Aurelius Clarkus behind his back. His glory lasted less than 48 hours. The Normandy landings on June 6 obliterated Rome from every front page in the world. Clark’s bitter reaction, according to those present, was that they had not even let him enjoy this for 2 days. British War correspondent Alan Wicker later wrote that Clark’s vanity had lengthened the war by many months and earned him the contempt of American and British generals alike.

 Those 48 hours of headlines were purchased at a specific, measurable price. Seven German divisions escaped north to the Gothic line and fought on for another 11 months until May of 1945. According to Atkinson, 312,000 Allied soldiers became casualties over 608 days of fighting in Italy, equivalent to 40% of Allied losses in the entire Northwest Europe campaign from Normandy onward.

 Among 750,000 Americans who served there, 23,51 were killed. Clark was never investigated or censured for the VMATone decision. Unlike the Rapito River crossing which triggered a congressional inquiry, the change of direction remained a matter of historical debate rather than official proceedings. Clark was promoted to four star general on March 10, 1945 at the age of 48.

 There is a scene that captures the real meaning of Anzio better than anything Clark ever staged for cameras. It happened a year after the battle. On Memorial Day 1945 at the American Military Cemetery at Natuno, Lucian Truscott was the featured speaker. Approximately 20,000 white crosses stood in rows behind him.

 An audience of dignitaries, senior officers, and sparkle-chested generals sat in folding chairs, waiting for the customary patriotic address about glory and sacrifice. According to Bill Malden, the cartoonist who had served at Anzio and was present that day. What happened instead was something no one expected. Truscot turned his back on the assembled dignitaries. He faced the graves.

 In his ruined gravel voice, he spoke directly to the dead. He apologized to them. He asked their forgiveness for any mistakes he had made that put them there. He promised he would never speak of the glorious dead because he saw no glory in having to die while still in your late teens or early 20s.

 Then he walked away without looking back. I think about those two images whenever I consider what Anzio really means. Clark posing for his good side in front of a road sign while snipers shot at him. Truscot turning his back on the living to apologize to the dead. One general wanted to be seen. The other wanted to be honest.

 One of them saved the beach head and had the victory stolen from his hands. The other flew in for the photographs. The battle produced 22 medals of honor, the most of any single engagement in the entire war. Seven were awarded for actions on a single day. May 23, 1944, Sergeant Sylvester Antilac of the Third Division charged 200 yards across flat ground near Sisterna.

 Was knocked down by bullets three times. Kept getting up with one shoulder gashed and his right arm shattered. Wedged his submachine gun under his good arm, killed two Germans, and forced 10 to surrender. He was killed in action shortly afterward. Those men did not die so that a lieutenant general could have his picture taken from his good side in front of a road sign.