Rome wasn’t built in a day

“Rome wasn’t built in a day” or “benefits of thinking outside the square”

While it’s true that Rome wasn’t built in a day, the battle to capture Rome during WWII took not much longer; which was surprising.

The Italian campaign up to that point was full of names like “Mt Cassino” where months of frontal assaults are best known for their casualties and for the demolition of monasteries and surrounding villages.

As quoted from The Day of battle by Rick Atkinson (2007)

“Few of the troops … had mountain training. Most lacked ‘the born hill­man’s eye for the best way up, down, or across a mountain;’ as the official British history would conclude. Instead, ‘the major tactics of the Allies became, willy-nilly, a head-on battering’”.

At the end of May 1944, there was finally just one more mountain range to go and the Allies would be in sight of Rome. The parties lined themselves up for one more slugfest.

Many project managers of larger projects may be familiar with the feeling.

But this time it was to be different. This time, Major General Fred Walker (36^th division commander; reservist who was a Mining Engineer for his day job) had been brought into the line and had a plan.

The following story of what happened next is taken mostly from “The Day of battle” by Rick Atkinson (2007).

“When Walker studied the blue icons on the map showing VI Corps dispositions, he could only wonder: was this how Lee would have fought the battle? … Now the new man was determined to find an alternative to bludgeoning an entrenched army who held the high ground.”

He identified that an apparent goat track shown on aerial reconnaissance photos leading to the mountain heights and forming a temporary gap between two German divisions had actually once been an old logging road. Not really suitable for tanks, as was recognised by the commanders on both sides – that is, apart from Walker, who was a Mining Engineer in his day job.

The plan was formed; it took a day for approvals and to gather resources. Rick Atkinson takes up the story as the division advances up the goat track towards the heights:

“Behind the column came the bulldozers, ‘roaring and rearing’ along a strip of white engineering tape that demarked the route, three dozers at first, and eventually fifteen, each adding another foot in width to the graded road. …

“On the steepest grades, small dozers were hauled up with snatch block and cable, then slashed their way down while soldiers with shovels manicured the verges. …

“Through the night and the following day they toiled, scraping and grading, until a one way boulevard led to Artemisio’s crest [behind the enemy front line]. Behind them came the tanks, self-propelled guns, and artillery observers with optics and field phones, chortling at the vista from the high ground that was finally theirs. The 143^rd Infantry reported so many observers flocking to the heights that they resembled ‘crows on a telephone line’. …

“By dawn on June 1, Velletri [German headquarters behind major German defensive line] was surrounded and American scouts stood on the highest peaks in the Colli Laziali, staring down on lake Nemi and at Castel Gandolfo, on the far shore of Lake Albano; through the haze on the northern horizon floated the domes and spires of Rome. Only eleven 36^th Division soldiers had been killed. ..

[Later that day] “as 250 dazed German prisoners emerged beneath white flags, Truscott drove up to find Walker again scrutinizing the landscape with his Engineer’s squint. ‘You can go in now, General’, Walker said. ‘The town is yours.”

Standard result for a bit of good Project Engineering you might think.

Exploiting this Engineer enabled victory, the Allies marched into Rome pretty much unopposed a couple of days later on 4 June 1944. They were front page news around the world on 5 June, only to be replaced by another battle elsewhere which started on 6 June 1944.

If you look at the history books today, you will find that the battles around Mt Casino can fill chapters. Yet who has heard of the Battle for Rome? The greatest achievements in Engineering often do not make headlines or feature prominently in history books. Sometimes they are achievements for that very reason.

In project delivery phase “It just worked” is an outcome often undervalued, and the $1 spent on the Engineer Consultant is well spent.