Whicker’s War
Alan Whicker is quite simply a legend. A visionary and master of his craft, his television shows from the fifties to the nineties almost single handed invented the language of travel television and earned him the status of one of the most foremost of British media icons.Yet throughout his forty years in TV he was steadfast in his belief that his programmes should not be about himself but about those people he encountered. Until this year when he was persuaded, as part of the 60th anniversary of the invasion of Italy, to tell his remarkable war experiences in two fabulously reviewed hour-long television pieces.This book uses these programmes as the starting point to tell the story of Alan Whicker's remarkable war.Alan Whicker joined the Army Film and Photo Unit as an 18-year-old army officer, following the Allied advance through Italy, from Sicily to Venice. He filmed the troops on the front line, met Montgomery, and other military luminaries, filmed the battered body of Mussolini after his execution and accepted the surrender of the SS in Milan. This is remarkable account of the Italian campaign of 1943 and 1944 as he retraces of his steps over sixty years later. Beautifully written, poignant with humour and pathos this is a masterful book by one of the 20th centuries greatest TV journalists.
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WHICKER’S WAR
ALAN WHICKER
CONTENTS
That early summer dawn in Sicily …
Being shot was for another day …
A long life was not in the script …
His Majesty got a wrong number …
They asked for it – and they will now get it …
I still feel rather guilty about that …
A passing glance at Paradise …
Struggling to get tickets for the first Casualty List …
They died without anyone even knowing their names …
I’m afraid we’re not quite ready for you yet …
You should have heard him screaming …
Hitler would have had him shot …
A beautiful woman with her teeth knocked out …
Out-gunned on one side, out-screamed on the other …
The call-back seemed worse than the call-up …
Whatever happened to Time Marching On …?
One man’s war … a return to the invasion beaches and battlefields of Italy. A sentimental pilgrimage, I suppose, to places where I expected to die. Also a salute to those I marched alongside 60 years ago while growing up watching the world explode before the viewfinders of Army Film Unit battle-cameramen. In two years of savage warfare they gave a lot; some of them, everything.
As a teenage subaltern I’d volunteered for a new role in a new Army, and found myself out of the infantry but in to far more assault landings and battles than I’d expected. My belief that war could be anything except boring went unchallenged because our cameramen closely followed the action, indeed sometimes led Italian – though that was usually just poor map-reading …
I was part of the first great seaborne invasion. The Eighth Army was learning how to do it – and so, unfortunately, were the Germans.
The Italian campaign – one of the most desperate and bloody of World War II – was 660 days of fear and exhilaration. Churchill called it the Third Front. Life was strangely intense and sharp-focussed, yet every dramatic experience vanished like an exploding shell as we moved cheerfully along the cutting edge of war towards the next violent day.
The defence of Italy cost the Axis 556,000 casualties. The Allies lost 312,000 killed and wounded – and remember, this was The Overshadowed War. After Rome the Second Front captured our headlines and at Westminster, Lady Astor won the Hollow Laugh Award by calling us ‘the D-Day Dodgers’.
As in the Great War, we subalterns had short sharp life expectations. Like those 19-year-old Battle of Britain pilots we learned to cope with this dismal forecast by being flip and jokey, but alert. It seemed to work for me – though more than half our camera crews were killed or damaged in some way while earning their Medals and Mentions.
As part of a massive Allied war fleet we joined this first great invasion of 2,700 ships and landing craft and on July 10 ’43 struggled ashore on to Pachino beach at the bottom right-hand corner of Mussolini’s island, expecting the worst. Around me on that early summer dawn in Sicily, 80,000 Eighth Army troops were also landing, and looking for a fight.
Our cameramen embedded in frontline units faced bitter warfare that I suspect few of today’s young soldiers – let alone young civilians – could envisage in their worst nightmares. Among the perils in our path lay Churchill’s gamble that failed, doomed by uncertain planning and leadership: the Anzio Bridgehead, where we all ceased to be young, where 250,000 soldiers were locked into a series of battles unique in the history of World War II. There in a few weeks of savage siege warfare 43,000 of us would be blown into history: 7,000 dead, 36,000 wounded or missing-in-action – but as we fought through Sicily such horrors lay ahead, unsuspected.
I stayed with Montgomery’s desert army as it crossed the Straits of Messina to attack the Italian mainland. Then after Salerno went with the British/US Fifth Army to land 80 miles behind German lines, at Anzio. Our orders were to outflank Monte Cassino, cut Kesselring’s supply lines, destroy his Tenth and Fourteenth armies and liberate Rome. That’s all – in the afternoon we’d go to the cinema …
Breaking out of the bridgehead after 18 desperate weeks, the Fifth Army finally liberated Rome, though our war was lengthened by almost a year and many lives lost by the vanity of one insubordinate Allied General.
The Eighth fought on through the Apennines and the Gothic Line before sweeping down into the Po Valley to reach the Alps – and victory. Italy’s Dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were then hunted down and killed by their communist countrymen.
Those who doubted the strategic significance of our role in tying down 25 German divisions in Italy for two years – and the 55 divisions deployed around the Mediterranean – would have been heartened by Adolf Hitler’s reaction. As we invaded Sicily and so pinned down one-fifth of Germany’s military strength, he was controlling his wars from the
