The Last Commander Falls

By Michael Demarest

Mark Wayne Clark: 1896-1984

Rangy, brash and big-beaked, he was the "American eagle" to an admiring Winston Churchill. Though he took part in three wars, Mark Wayne Clark won his greatest renown as the World War II soldier who led the first army in history to fight all the way up the Italian boot from toe to top. In 1943, at 46, he was the nation's youngest three-star general when he was picked by Dwight Eisenhower to organize the U.S. Fifth Army in Africa. At his death last week of cancer in Charleston, S.C., General Clark, 87, was the last of the great wartime commanders.

Churchill had dubbed the Mediterranean "the soft underbelly of the Axis." Clark noted drily, "It was not so soft." The Italian campaign was the war's most grueling, taking 20 long months and some 300,000 Allied casualties. The forces under Clark faced a German army that for most of the bitter struggle was greatly superior in manpower, ammunition and equipment. The Allies were pitted as well against cruel weather and the narrow, mountainous Italian peninsula, whose terrain precluded sweeping armored advances. Clark had to fight equally frustrating vagaries of politics and strategy. Despite his bitter protest, many of his battle-seasoned troops were diverted after D-day to the invasion of Southern France, virtually halting Clark's advance. Many historians think it plausible that had he been allowed to drive to the Balkans, the Soviets would never have achieved their ensuing hegemony over Eastern Europe.

A West Pointer and third-generation soldier, Clark was wounded as a captain in France during World War I but did not see action again until the landing in Salerno in September 1943. He first piqued the nation's imagination a year earlier, when he was smuggled into Algeria by submarine on a mostly successful cloak-and-dagger mission to win French support for the imminent Allied invasion of North Africa. Known for his humor and daring, Clark was nearly killed on several occasions while leading his troops; he once personally spearheaded an attack on 18 German tanks. His polyglot force included 26 nationalities, as well as the first black American combat troops and a heroic Japanese-American contingent. Clark was a commander who cared about his men, tending to often tiny details of morale or special needs.

He seldom held his tongue when he disagreed with superiors. Eisenhower, a friend from West Point who knew him by his middle name, frequently had to soothe him: "Now, Wayne, keep your shirt on." Clark was often mired in controversy. His attempt to cross the heavily defended Rapido River failed dismally, costing 1,681 casualties in three days. Critics also faulted him for his drive on Rome, contending that he might have destroyed the German army if he had chased the foe instead of the glory of being the first Allied commander to enter the Eternal City. He was blamed as well for the destruction of the famed Benedictine monastery atop Monte Cassino, although he vehemently opposed its bombing.

From Italy, Clark went to occupied Austria as Allied High Commissioner and learned there that the only argument the Soviets respected was force. He faced even more obdurate Communists in Korea, where he became Far East commander in 1952 and had to negotiate "an armistice without victory." He retired in 1953 and until 1965 commanded the Citadel, the historic private military college in Charleston, S.C., where he was buried.

Notwithstanding the criticisms, Mark Clark was a soldier of brilliance and integrity. At the Italian campaign's lowest ebb, Eisenhower told him from London, "You are writing history that Americans will always read with pride." Ike's words were echoed by President Reagan last week: "We are free because of men like him. His professionalism and dedication will be the standard of every soldier who takes the oath to defend our nation."

--By Michael Demarest

EXPECTING. Caroline, 27, elder Princess of Monaco, and Stefano Casiraghi, 23, scion of a wealthy Milan industrialist: their first child; this summer. The palace announcement confirmed rumors fueled by their hastily arranged Dec. 29 wedding.

MARRIED. Colleen McCullough, 46, Australian meganovelist (The Thorn Birds) who for three years has lived on tiny Norfolk Island, 900 miles east of Brisbane; and Ric Robinson, 33, Norfolk Islander who two years ago painted her house to earn money for a palm plantation; she for the first time, he for the second; near Sydney.

RECUPERATING. Michael Jackson, 25, rock-soul superstar; from an 80-minute laser surgical procedure to remove a palm-size patch of scalp tissue scarred from burns received while he was making a TV commercial last January; in Culver City, Calif. Healthy, hair-growing tissue was drawn across the area and stitched in place.

RECUPERATING. Andrei Sakharov, 62, dissident Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace prizewinning human rights activist; from reportedly successful surgery to remove a blood clot in his leg after an attack of thrombophlebitis, from which he has suffered for several years; in Gorky, where he was exiled four years ago.

DIED. Dennis Keogh, 44, career U.S. State Department official, and Lieut. Colonel Kenneth Crabtree, 45; in a terrorist bomb explosion at a gas station just outside Oshakati, Namibia. Both were members of a U.S. liaison team monitoring the cease-fire in Namibia. South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) guerrillas were blamed by South African officials for the attack, but denied the charge.

DIED. Frank ("Machito") Grillo, 76, Cuban-born bandleader whose 1940s Afro-Cuban dance bands wedded advanced jazz harmonies, big-band instrumentation and pulsing Latin rhythms, helping create salsa and change the course of modern jazz; of a stroke; in London. After World War II, such bebop jazz artists as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker adapted his Afro-Cuban sound to small-group jazz and often performed and recorded with Machito.

DIED. Mabel Mercer, 84, reigning queen of cabaret singers for nearly 70 years, whose unsurpassed ability to turn even the most banal tune into a timeless vignette of love and loss delighted generations of supper-club audiences; of heart disease; in Pittsfield, Mass. Born in England of a white English mother and black American father, Mercer gained renown at Bricktop's Paris cafe in the 1930s and went to the U.S. in 1939. As her husky contralto began to fail, she honed her unique blend of cadenced speech and vocalizing, delivering such songs as Fly Me to the Moon and While We 're Young with consummate phrasing and timing. Said she: "It's all in the punctuation."