General Walkers Strategy
One of War's Smartest Tricks
Says AP Writer Dixon

Some day war students at West Point will study the strategy which brought the Fifth Army roaring into Rome right on schedule, quotes Correspondent Kenneth L. Dixon, AP writer in a recent article that appeared in the Dallas Morning News.

And these future students, all imbued with the traditions of the Military Academy, may be somewhat taken back to discover that the man who called the signals never went to West Point.

It was poetic justice that these toughened veterans of bloody Salerno, San Pietro and Rapido River crossing should be the ones to crack the Velletri line and start the final break-through to Rome.
It was equally just that their General should be given a free rein to map an infiltration move which already had been tagged as one of the smartest tricks of the war.

The Division’s faith in this quiet, grim faced General is a thing that shakes you down to your shoe’s soles. Time was running out [with] Rome still twenty miles away, so the 36th was set for another head-on assault when General Walker laid his plan on the high headquarters table. This time it was infiltration but basically the same old Stonewall Jackson strategy—circle and strike from the flanks and the rear. If it failed at least a regiment would be trapped behind German lines.

Two hours before time to move up on the night of Memorial Day they scrapped the other plan and gave Walker the green light.

Headed by the crack Second Battalion, a regiment slipped through the lines to the right of Velletri that night without firing a shot. Others followed and by noon next strong elements of other regiments were in the Alban Hills three miles or more behind Velletri and the German lines. They circled the hills and captured the town, other outfits poured through the gap and the race to Rome was on.

Compared to the size of the job they had done their casualties could be even officially listed as surprisingly small.