Cassino to the Alps - US Army Center Of Military History

THE ANZIO BEACHHEAD
dream of Italian agronomists. In the
decade immediately preceding the war
much of the area had been partially
drained and had become one of the
agricultural show places of Mussolini's
government.
A complex grid of drainage canals
and ditches cut the plain into a series of
compartments, severely restricting crosscountry
movement of military vehicles.
The most formidable of the barriers
were the 240-foot-wide Mussolini Canal
and the Colletore delle Acqua Medie,
or West Branch of the Mussolini Canal;
the former flowed generally from north
to south along the beachhead's right
flank and the latter flowed southeastward
from the direction of the Alban
Hills to join the Mussolini Canal about
seven miles from the coast. The
smooth, sloping banks of these canals
dropped into water that varied in depth
from ten to twenty feet. Most of the
smaller canals were from twenty to fifty
feet wide.
Approximately triangular in shape,
the Anzio beachhead encompassed
much of the plain west of the M ussolini
Canal, generally better drained than
that to the east of the canal. Except for
the few roads along the tops of dikes,
the region around Littoria, fifteen miles
east of Anzio, had reverted to its ancient
state, a virtually impassable marsh.
From Terracina, at the southeastern
edge of the plain, Highway 7 runs
northwest for thirty miles to the town
of Cisterna, fifteen miles inland and
northeast from the port of Anzio. A
section of the Naples-Rome railroad
parallels the highway for a short distance
before crossing the highway at
Cisterna. The Allied beachhead lay
109
southwest of both the highway and the
railroad.
The apex of the triangle, whose base
rested upon a 20-mile stretch of coastline,
pointed like an arrowhead toward
Cisterna. Around a large administrative
building in the center of Cisterna,
mostly in ruins as a result of months of
artillery fire, the Germans had built a
ring of mutually supporting strongpoints,
which had become the hinge of
their forward defensive lines.
Inland from Cisterna the coastal
plain narrows, rising to a gently rolling
corridor about three miles wide and
extending from Cisterna in a northnortheasterly
direction fourteen miles to
Valmontone on Highway 6, at the
upper end of the Sacco River, a tributary
of the Liri. Dotted with vineyards
and orchards and cut by occasional
wide, southward-running ravines, the
corridor offers terrain generally favorable
for military operations. Flanking to
the southeast are the steep-sided Lepini
Mountains, rising to heights of over
3,000 feet. In the vicinity of the ancient
fortress town of Cori, six miles northwest
of Cisterna, the slopes of the
mountains are covered by olive groves
which give way on the higher elevations
to bare rock and scrub oak. Footpaths
and cart trails similar to those encountered
by the II Corps in the Petrella
massif offer the only access to that
inhospitable region.
Northwest of the corridor are lhe
Alban Hills, whose highest summits are
somew hat lower than those of the Lepini
Mountains. Thousands of years
ago this circular hill mass had been
formed by a volcano. Two of the
highest hills are the Rocca di Papa and