[AnAmericanMother]

My dad told me that the Texans REALLY hated Mark Clark because he ordered a Texas NG unit to ford the Rapido River while it was in flood, and most of them drowned.

He said that Clark could never go to Texas, he would have been hanged to the nearest tree.

[Zman516]

My dad told me that the Texans REALLY hated Mark Clark because he ordered a Texas NG unit to ford the Rapido River while it was in flood, and most of them drowned. He said that Clark could never go to Texas, he would have been hanged to the nearest tree.

Yes, that was just one of his bad decisions.

Undoubtably, Clark was getting a lot of pressure from his superiors to take the Gustav line, so in all fairness, it probably was not all his fault. He was in a very inferior tactical position. Clark was a vain man, however, and a darling of the presscorps. He wanted desperately to win a big victory at Cassino. So he used the old WWI French tactic of "let's charge the machine guns until we're all dead".