southern Italy) would swing around the British left and hit the Germans from the west. The ground units would receive support from naval guns, artillery, and air strikes. By then, however, Kesselring had stopped worrying that he could not contain the landing.18
The 1st Armored Division attacked on 30 January. Here was Lucas’s strongest punch. The worst mud since the disaster at Medjez el Bab kept the armor road-bound, and the tankers fought much of the day just to reach their planned line of departure. The next day, the combat command—weakened by a requirement to loan a medium tank battalion to the British—tried again. It gained only a thousand yards. The division retired to the pine woods and dug in. The tanks would spend much of the next few months with nothing but their turrets exposed, firing artillery missions.19
The British 1st Infantry Division made better progress and in three days punched through the German main line of resistance and captured Campoleone. Early on 30 January, Sergeant Dixon of Company C, 894th Tank Destroyer Battalion, set of with a patrol of fifteen British riflemen to scout for gun positions that the TDs could use during the day’s planned advance. German troops spotted the patrol, opened fire, and killed every man except for Dixon and a British sergeant. The two men crawled forward and shot the crew of a German machine gun. When another MG opened up and killed the British sergeant, Dixon fell to the ground and pretended to be dead. A German soldier approached and fired his pistol into the ground beside Dixon. Satisfied, he took the American sergeant’s helmet, carbine, and pipe. Dixon lay still for forty-five minutes while German soldiers stood nearby talking. Finally, he saw his chance and crawled back to his M10.
The advance kicked off at 0630, when TDs carrying Tommies from the Irish Guards moved out. The M10s provided close support and engaged infantry and panzers that were carefully camouflaged and hard to spot beyond nearly point-blank range. One M10 KO’d a Volkswagen by driving over it. About 1530 hours, a hidden AT gun put four rounds through both sides of Sergeant Dixon’s M10, killing him and wounding two crewmen. Sergeant Clark, who witnessed the action from five hundred yards distance, put four rounds of HE into the offending gun. Two other Company C TDs were damaged during the fighting.20
The 3d Infantry Division, meanwhile, launched an assault toward Cisterna that in three bloody days would gain no more than three miles before burning out in exhaustion. Tank destroyers from the 601st again provided close support and engaged German guns, machine-gun nests, and armored vehicles from ranges as close as fifty yards. The tank killers claimed four panzers during the last two days of January, one a Tiger KO’d with three rounds of AP in the turret at one thousand yards. Recon troops were as usual far forward; 3d Platoon of Recon Company on 31 January beat off a counterattack with the help of their M8s, which at one point were firing pointblank with their 37mm guns.
The battalion CO, LtCol Walter Tardy, quickly concluded that his M10s were poorly suited to the close- support role. Commanders were highly vulnerable to small-arms fire, and he argued that the vehicles needed a sponson-mounted .30- or .50-caliber machine gun. Both the M10 and the M8 proved unable to move cross-country on the soupy ground. Other battalions quickly reached the same conclusions.21
The German Tide Rises
On 2 February, Alexander and Clark ordered Lucas to go over to the defensive. They told him to build a strong defensive line and to keep a powerful force in reserve to handle the German counterattack they expected at any time. The command also sent Lucas the First Special Service Force—a mixed American-Canadian outfit—and the British 56th Infantry Division, which would arrive in stages over the next two weeks.
As anticipated, the Germans struck the British sector of the line late on 3 February. A battalion of the Irish Guards and elements of the 894th Tank Destroyer Battalion were cut off during fierce night fighting. Platoon Sgt John Shoun led three Company C destroyers through the ring of German tanks and circled through the enemy rear. The M10s raced across an open field—the commanders madly firing the .50-cals—and roared back toward Allied lines over the heads of German infantrymen huddled in their foxholes. They made it out, but at least seven TD men were captured in the initial German assault.22
The next morning, Sgt Leo Dobson—whose crew, along with those of three other TDs, had also escaped encirclement the night before—found the battle situation extremely unclear. The Irish Guards sector had devolved into dozens of separate small-unit engagements, and heavy clouds, mist, and rain kept the air support away. Dobson spotted a Tiger tank backing out of one of the concrete houses. The huge tank had driven through the back wall and had been firing out through a window. The Mark VI was headed directly toward Dobson’s M10 when it turned aside about six hundred yards away. The M10 gunner, Cpl Tom Perry, missed with his first shot, but the second caught the panzer broadside, and it caught fire so quickly that no crewmen escaped.
Some time later, an SP gun that had been trying unsuccessfully to hit Dobson’s M10 pulled from a grove of trees, presumably to get a better angle. Perry fired rapidly, and the shells caved in the armor plate.23
Over the next week, repeated assaults drove the badly depleted British 1st Infantry Division back from Campoleone and the Factory at Aprilia. The TD crews from the 894th were constantly in the thick of the fighting and made heavy use of their .50-caliber AA machine guns against attacking infantry. M10s covered the final withdrawal from the Factory, and grateful Scots Guards dubbed the crews the “fighting tankbusters.” Once again, a platoon of Company B became completely surrounded and had to dash three miles back to friendly lines. The crews waged a running battle using tommyguns, carbines, and grenades against the German infantry who barred the way.24
Lucas had to decrease the British frontage, and on 10 April he committed his two reserve regiments from the 45th Infantry Division to part of the British sector. The Americans tried to retake the Factory, but failed.
An uneasy lull settled over the Anzio beachhead.25
Companies A and C of the 701st disembarked at Anzio on 10 February and joined the 1st Armored Division; the rest of the battalion would trickle in over the next two weeks. The TD men were strafed as soon as they arrived at their assembly area, and air attacks were an almost daily occurrence for some time. Indeed, on 14 February, German planes attacked company gun positions five times during the day. The TDs joined division artillery in executing indirect fire missions.26
During the night of 15 February, 2/157th Infantry, 45th Infantry Division, moved into positions three thousand yards in front of a huge incomplete concrete highway overpass (sometimes called the “flyover”) that would become the center of much of the fighting in the coming days. The men moved into the holes dug by British troops and the 504th Parachute Battalion. The ground in front of the doughs was flat and open, and the Factory was to their right.27 The Albano–Anzio highway at the overpass now formed the border between the American and British sectors.
At dawn on 16 February, the men of the 45th Infantry Division underwent the heaviest artillery barrage they had yet experienced. The shelling ceased, and German tanks supported by infantry advanced through a concealing fog down the Albano-Anzio road toward the American line. Although attacks also struck the positions of the American 3d and British 56th Infantry divisions to the right and left, respectively, this was the main assault.
The Germans put the tanks with the thickest front armor— Mark VI Tigers and newly arrived Mark V Panthers—at the point of each column.28 The Panther was arguably the best tank fielded by any army during the war. The 45-ton panzer had 80mm (more than three inches) of well-sloped frontal armor and 40mm on the sides and rear. It was capable of reaching 30 miles per hour on roads—as fast as the much lighter Sherman tank. The Mark V carried a powerful high-velocity 75mm cannon that was the envy of American tankers, as well as a coaxial and hull-mounted machine guns.29 It was prone to mechanical problems, however.
In the area held by the 157th Infantry, Company E was supported by a single M10 from the 645th Tank Destroyer Battalion—probably that commanded by Sgt John Kirk from Company C’s 2d platoon. Panzers overran the left flank, but this exposed them to fire from the TD, which quickly destroyed two of the German tanks. Kirk identified the first of the two panzers he KO’d that day as a heavily armored Ferdinand SP gun (which carried an 88mm cannon protected by 200mm—eight inches!—of frontal armor on a rejected model of Tiger chassis). The
