From Rome to ...

Rome was taken, and Rome was barely scarred. To most of the world these were the important facts about the capture of the first European capital retaken from the Germans. But General Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander and his conquering troops were busy with another, further fact: Kesselring's Army, battered, tired and in retreat, could still be destroyed. Alexander's troops surged through and around Rome and pressed the pursuit northward.*

Beyond Rome the three main highways leading north were clogged with German motor equipment. Alexander's tactical air force tore savagely into them with guns and bombs. In the hills and fields, German foot soldiers backed northward, fighting stubbornly while the main bodies sped away from trouble. Allied units pressed closely. At one point they lost contact entirely with the retreating enemy, closed up fast to regain it.

It was no time to stop and throw hats in the air, as the populace in Rome was doing. For military men there was a parallel in the fall of Richmond in 1865. Lee had pulled out and swung away from the city when his resistance faltered. Grant followed, drove him to the end at Appomattox. Thus Harold Alexander hoped to finish off his foe.

Pattern of Defeat. Technically, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's Tenth and Fourteenth Armies were still in one piece. But they had been fearfully cut up. Since the drive began on May 11 they had had around 60,000 casualties; more than 20,000 had been captured; at least five of their 18 divisions had ceased to function.

Said Alexander's Fifth Army commander, Lieut. General Mark Clark: "One of Kesselring's two armies will never fight again." It was about all he had time to say. He was in charge of the pursuit north from Rome. On his right, British General Sir Oliver Leese pressed forward with his polyglot Eighth. He, too, was trying for the great breakthrough, the disorganization that can be brought even to the best of troops.

The Eternal City. It was Trinity Sunday and, through all the last stages of the advance on Rome, U.S. and Canadian soldiers could hear the church bells summoning the faithful to Mass. TIME Correspondent Will Lang had spent the night in a dugout under fire. At dawn he piled out and headed up in a jeep toward the sound of firing on Via Casilina. He cabled:

"Within a mile we caught up with a column of eight tanks. . . . [Their] backs were loaded with troops. Some had parachute silk kerchiefs knotted around their heads, and some wore bandannas. They were armed to the teeth. Sitting carelessly atop the tanks, unshaven and sweaty, they looked like pirates.

"There were three pistol shots from somewhere. The tanks stopped and I saw one of the infantrymen pointing his gun down a side road. There a helmetless German stumbled out into the open, hands in the air. His right wrist had been shattered by a bullet and from his upraised arm the hand dangled by a few bloody shreds of raw flesh. A civilian came up, searched him. Our troops waved him to the rear, went on.

"We passed two German officers headed along to our prison stockade, passed a column of young dandies on bicycles, a young Italian bridal couple, the bride trim and shapely in a grey suit adorned by a bright nosegay."

The Fight at the Sign. The city limits, marked by a highway sign "Roma," were just ahead. A German shell crashed into the first tank as it crossed the line into the city. It burst into flame. A machine gun began to chatter from the side. The infantry piled off and disappeared into nearby ditches and backyard bushes. The tanks pulled off to the side. It was the last German roadblock on Via Casilina.

There was a sharp, four-hour fight. Civilians, not comprehending what was going on, walked time & again through the middle of it and some were hit. One young Italian boy cycling down the road was hit in the head by a German sniper's bullet, lay dead beside his wheel while bullets cracked above him. Suddenly the fight was over.

The tanks, followed by infantry, piled into the city. For a few hours there were sporadic skirmishes. But by sundown the last relic of that kind of fighting -- a burned-out German car -- lay blackened and dead almost in the shadow of Trajan's Column. The Allied troops pressed on. They passed the Colosseum, slogged through the Piazza Venezia where Mussolini once harangued his people. They marched and motored over ground that had been trod by Caesars and the Gracchi, by Alaric and St. Paul. But there was no time to think of history. They and their enemy were making it.

Performance of a General. With some notable exceptions, "Smiling Albert" Kesselring had done a workmanlike job. His chief mistake was that he was caught off balance when the drive began on May 11. His chief disadvantage at that time: the Allied air power had chewed up his rear-area communications so that he could be sure of no steady stream of supply when the attack came.

The blow had been struck. Kesselring staked his armies' fate and the fate of Rome on the line from Valmontone to the Tyrrhenian. A stout stand there would 1 ) keep Mark Clark's Fifth out of Rome; 2) act as a sort of a derrick by which to draw up the troops in danger of encirclement farther south in the Cassino area.

There were no great encirclements. The great hauls of German prisoners were taken in smaller traps. But the bright dream of keeping Rome was ended when U.S. troops captured Velletri, keypoint of the Rome defense line.

The Withdrawal. After that there was nothing for Smiling Albert to do but pull out.

Where he now intended to stop, (if he were not destroyed in the meantime), probably no U.S. soldier knew for certain.

There was one obvious position short of the broad valley of the Po. It was the Arno River line, from Pisa to Rimini on the Adriatic. It had high ground beyond the river, a clear field of fire on the enemy, good communications. Kessel ring might make it, might try to stop there. But at the rate he was going he would probably need prepared positions and some help from the north to be sure of being able to turn and fight.

Holiday. While the battle boiled northward, Rome made holiday. Italian partisans with hammer-&-sickle arm bands paraded with red flags. Crowds tossed flowers at U.S. troops, cried "Why were you so long in coming?" Mostly the troops grinned as they passed through, but one officer said: "I'll bet there are enough Fascist party badges in the Tiber today to make the fish sick."

In the first few hours of occupation there was still some uproar. On Piazza Venezia, Italian irregulars broke into Fascist headquarters, did some shooting and threw some hand grenades in a noisy search for rapscallions. A crowd gathered in the Piazza, but it quickly found a new and better attraction. It was Private John Vita. He got up on Mussolini's old balcony and delivered himself of a rip-roaring speech in Italian.

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