Mark W. Clark

Mark Clark commanded the Fifth Army in Italy and took Rome four days before the Normandy landings, in a decision that is still argued about. He is not William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition, who died in 1838. He was the youngest lieutenant general in the American army, a protege of Eisenhower, and he landed at Salerno in September 1943 in the first Allied assault on the European mainland, where the beachhead came close to being pushed back into the sea. The Italian campaign that followed was fought up a narrow mountainous peninsula against a defender who held every ridge, and it produced Monte Cassino, where the abbey was bombed to rubble on the assumption that Germans were inside it and they were not, and Anzio, a landing behind the line that was contained for four months. In May 1944, with the German Tenth Army retreating and orders from Alexander to cut it off at Valmontone, Clark turned the bulk of his force towards Rome. He entered the city on 4 June to photographers. Something like seven German divisions escaped north and fought on the Gothic Line for another year. His defenders argue the orders were ambiguous and the ground bad; his critics that he wanted the capital and the headlines. He later commanded in Korea and signed the armistice, saying he was the first American general to sign one without victory. The Italian campaign is the one theatre where the Allies attacked into the defender's best ground for two years, and it tied down German divisions that were not in France, which is the strategic case for it. Clark's own men included the Nisei of the 442nd, Moroccan goumiers, Poles, Indians, Brazilians and a South African division. He was Chief of Staff of the Army for a time and then president of The Citadel for a decade.

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