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Gen Mark Clark in Italy july 1944.jpg

The USA Fifth Army

A Melting Pot of a Force


The U.S. Fifth Army led by Lt. Gen. Mark Clark, activated on January 5, 1943, in French Morocco, took as its badge the blue silhouette of a mosque as a fitting symbol of its place of origin. But the badge may have been a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. During its 602 days of sustained combat on the Italian peninsula, the Fifth Army—made up mostly of American armored and infantry divisions—was augmented by many troops from other nations, becoming a microcosm of today’s United Nations.
The first non-American unit attached to the Fifth Army was the British X Corps, which landed with Clark’s forces at Salerno in September 1943 and fought with the Americans that winter in Cassino. The following spring, the French Expeditionary Corps, led by Gen. Alphonse Pierre Juin, relieved the X Corps. Organized in North Africa, it consisted of a Free French infantry division and three divisions of infantry from Algeria and Morocco, including tribesmen called Goumiers. When the French Expeditionary Force broke through the enemy line in May 1944, Gen. Clark reported the following: “knife-wielding Goumiers swarmed over the hills … and General Juin’s entire force showed an aggressiveness hour after hour that the Germans could not withstand.”
In the summer of 1944, Clark received reinforcements from the Sixth South African Armored Division. Later that year, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, including three regimental combat teams and artillery, joined with the Fifth Army. By then, the U.S. Fifth Army, which had counted Native Americans among its members since its inception, had both African Americans and Japanese Americans in its ranks. As a multiethnic, multinational force, it had only the British Eighth Army, which included Canadians, Poles, Italians, South Africans, Indians, New Zealanders, and the Jewish Brigade, as a rival.

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