The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War
Page 47
Although Clark showed personal bravery on the beach-head at Salerno, nonetheless in the words of Anzio’s historian, ‘He had a momentary wobble and had to be dissuaded from re-embarking VI Corps,’ although Clark denied this in his memoirs.13 With German artillery observation points in the hills surrounding the beach-heads, and attacks from no fewer than six German divisions, it took the dropping of three battalions of the US 82nd Airborne almost on the water’s edge, the bombardment of German positions by strategic bombers from the North-west African Air Force, and close supporting fire from the 15-inch naval guns of specially diverted naval forces, but above all the grim determination of the Fifth Army on the beach-heads, to stay in place. ‘If the Germans had pushed on to the sea’, Alexander commented with characteristic sangfroid, ‘their arrival might have caused us some embarrassment.’14 The position was not secured until 16 September, and it was only four days later – once the Germans had successfully extricated their forces from the south of Italy – that the attacks abated, and a further eleven days after that before the Allies could enter an abandoned Naples. By then the Fifth Army had got 170,000 troops and 200 tanks ashore, and Montgomery was coming up from the south. The Salerno operation in all had cost 15,000 Allied casualties against 8,000 German, and it is hard to take issue with the historian who concludes that ‘The outstanding feature of the battle had been the foresight, skill and initiative of Kesselring, and the efficiency of his troops.’15 It was a phenomenon that was to be repeated as the fighting moved northwards up the peninsula.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Italy, the 1st Canadian Division of the Eighth Army took the Foggia airfields on 27 September and reached the Adriatic Sea on 3 October. From those flat plains, General Ira C. Eaker’s Mediterranean Allied Air Forces could then dominate the air war in the south of Europe. Within three weeks the USAAF Fifteenth Air Force was roaming at will all over southern Germany, Austria and the Balkans, and in particular they could bomb the Romanian oilfields of Ploesti, from where much of the Reich’s fuel flowed. The US 12th Air Support Command bombed the German forces in Italy itself, forcing them to move largely at night. From the spring of 1944, the Allies had more than ten times as many warplanes in Italy – at 4,500 – as the Luftwaffe.16
The situation in Naples was appalling, with bread riots, typhus, Mafia crime, water shortages, totally corrupt local authorities, prostitution-for-food (special military VD hospitals had to be set up) and a general breakdown in law, order and morality. Even the papal legate’s car was found to be driving on stolen tyres.17 Most serious for future operations further north, the German scorched-earth policy had devastated the docks. Allied military experts, engineers, police and administrators moved in en masse under the auspices of the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, but it was to be months before anything approaching normality or decency could return to the stricken city.
With Rome the next major objective – more for political and morale than for military reasons, since it was designated a demilitarized open city by both sides – the Allies had to fight their way northwards, taking booby-trapped and sharply contested towns and villages, crossing rivers whose bridges had been destroyed and driving down roads expertly laid with Tellermines, mushroom-shaped circular metal boxes a foot in diameter which packed a 12-pound charge of TNT. The terrible weather in the autumn of 1943, combined with the topographical opportunities for defence provided by the 840-mile-long, 80-mile-wide Apennine mountain range with its 4,000-foot peaks, meant that Vietinghoff had myriad opportunities for tenacious rearguard actions, with the effect of Allied air superiority often negated. Churchill had injudiciously likened Europe to a crocodile, with the Mediterranean as its ‘soft underbelly’. As Mark Clark told the TV programme The World at War, ‘I often thought what a tough old gut it was instead of the soft belly that he had led us to believe.’18 Montgomery agreed. ‘I don’t think we can get any spectacular results,’ he reported to Brooke, ‘so long as it goes on raining; the whole country becomes a sea of mud and nothing on wheels can move off the roads.’19 The rain, sleet and frequent blizzards during the winter of 1943/4 led to pneumonia, dysentery, respiratory diseases, fevers, jaundice and the debilitating fungal infection called trench foot, which arises from wet socks that are not removed for days on end. As well as Fifth Army’s 40,000 battle casualties by the end of 1943, there were 50,000 non-combat casualties and perhaps as many as 20,000 deserters.20
The first meeting of what became known as the Big Three – Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill – took place at the Teheran Conference (codenamed Eureka) from 28 November to 1 December 1943. Roosevelt was under the mistaken but surprisingly widespread impression that personal intercourse could mollify Stalin, and he deliberately set out to try to charm the Russian dictator, if necessary by making Churchill the butt of his teasing. For his part Stalin insisted on the invalid Roosevelt flying halfway around the world to meet in the Iranian capital, and placing him in the Russian Legation as his guest, thus separating him from Churchill. On Stalin’s insistence, Chiang Kai-shek was also excluded from the conference altogether, so as not to ruffle the sensibilities of the Japanese, with whom the USSR had a non-aggression pact. In the first session of the Teheran Conference, however, Stalin announced his willingness to declare war against Japan after Germany had surrendered, which was greeted with undisguised pleasure by the Western Allies.
Less happy was the reception given to Churchill’s strategy of using Italy as a springboard from which to attack the Germans in south-eastern France and Austria and Hungary via Yugoslavia. Not wishing to see a powerful Allied force in his south-eastern European backyard, Stalin opposed the scheme, and was supported by Roosevelt, so it fell through, much to Churchill’s chagrin. Although Stalin would have preferred to see an earlier date for the cross-Channel invasion, he accepted that it would take place on 1 May 1944. (It later had to be put back five weeks for lack of landing craft after fighting in Italy went on for longer than planned.)
Other discussions on the eastern border of Poland, which was to be compensated with German territory for the loss of land to the USSR to its east, ran directly contrary to the promise made in the Atlantic Charter for ‘no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’, but at least Stalin agreed to the outlines of a United Nations Organization with vetoes for Britain, Russia, the United States and China. There was also agreement on Yugoslavia, where Marshal Tito’s Communist partisans would be given support rather than the pro-monarchist Chetniks, because it was clear from Ultra decrypts that the Chetniks were in league with the Italians, and the Germans feared the partisans much more than the Chetniks. Meanwhile, also at Teheran, on Stalin’s insistence it was decided that Germany was not to be split up into five autonomous countries, as Roosevelt and Churchill had envisaged. Teheran saw the high-water mark of Allied co-operation in the war, and was hard fought though generally good natured. Roosevelt’s overt keenness to charm Stalin, however, allowed the Marshal to spot a gap between the two democracies that he was to seek to exploit over the coming months. Nothing got past him. Each of the Big Three left Teheran with something he wanted, but each had to give up something too, although it is hard to escape the conclusion that Churchill was forced to give up the most.
‘The army’s advance up the spine of Italy,’ wrote John Harris in his novel Swordpoint,
had been that of a bull, wearied yet still willing, butting its way head-down in assault after assault. The pattern had rarely changed. Plains were few and far between and no sooner had one river or mountain been crossed than another barred the route. They’d battled across the Creti, but behind the Creti was the Agri, and behind the Agri was the Sele, and behind the Sele was the Volturno… The whole country, every river, every town, every hill, had shown them how useless machines could be when climate and terrain conspired to make them so. ‘Oh yes,’ the current joke ran, ‘the Germans are retreating all right. Unfortunately, they’re taking the last ridge with ’e
m.’21
The terrain has been described as one ‘that goats would find difficult to negotiate’.22
The Fifth Army crossed the swollen Volturno river, whose bridges the Germans had destroyed, in mid-October, after which Alexander ordered a short rest for regrouping and recuperation. The way ahead, over seemingly endless mountain passes through atrocious weather, could not but depress the most enthusiastic spirits. As the Germans withdrew, they adopted a scorched-earth policy against all types of food supplies and public utilities. This was only intensified when the Badoglio Government, ruling from the safety of Bari having judiciously fled Rome, declared war on Germany on 13 October.
With the Eighth Army – commanded by Montgomery’s protégé Oliver Leese after 1 January 1944 – to the east of the Apennines, and Clark’s Fifth Army to the west, there was precious little meaningful mutual support. As the Germans retreated northwards, they provided their countrymen with as much time as possible to perfect the Bernhard, Barbara, Winter and especially the Gustav Lines of defence. The last stretched right across Italy from the Gulf of Gaeta in the Tyrrhenian Sea to just south of Ortona in the Adriatic.
Informed via Ultra of Hitler’s decision of 4 October to support Kesselring’s plans to fight south of Rome, Eisenhower and the 15th Army Group commander Harold Alexander concocted a plan that would use the Fifth and the Eighth Armies in unison to take Rome. The Eighth Army would capture Pescara and swing westwards, while the Fifth Army advanced up the Liri Valley, aided by a bold amphibious landing just south of Rome at Anzio that would take reserves off the Gustav Line and draw away any strategic reserves further north. Although Alexander had eleven divisions in Italy by December 1943, Kesselring had nine south of Rome, and another eight in reserve to the north. Whereas the Wehrmacht was an homogeneous army in Italy, no fewer than sixteen nationalities fought on the Allied side, including Poles, New Zealanders, Algerians, South Africans, Moroccans, a Jewish contingent and even a Brazilian expeditionary force – many of them speaking different languages and using different weapons and ammunition. Moreover, the Anglo-American rivalries that had been seen in the ‘race’ to capture Messina in Sicily – convincingly ‘won’ by Patton – resurfaced and multiplied in the bid to capture the Eternal City. In general the British, exhausted after the North African and Sicilian campaigns, seemed slow and over-cautious to the Americans. On the reverse side of the same coin, some of the fresh American units seemed raw and naive to the British. There were undoubted tensions between the senior officers, though fewer among the other ranks. Mark Clark in particular became obsessed with the glory of being the general who marched into the first Axis capital, as Alexander’s chief of staff Major-General John Harding later stated: ‘If I may put it diplomatically, I think General Clark was overwhelmed by the wish to be the first into Rome, which he would have [been] anyhow.’23
Clark made a key error in not moving straight on to the nearby Gustav Line as soon as the Winter Line was broken in mid-December 1944. Instead the Fifth Army only reached the Sangro, Rapido and Garigliano rivers and the Gustav Line between 5 and 15 January 1944. The Germans were thus given almost another month to prepare the (already formidable) defences of the Gustav Line after the fall of Mounts Camino and Lungo and the medieval town of San Pietro Infine. These had been formidable obstacles, and the scars of the house-by-house fighting in San Pietro, in three separate assaults by the 36th Texas National Guard Division against the 15th Panzergrenadiers, can still be seen today, in the town which has been kept just as it was in 1944. ‘The name of San Pietro will be remembered in military history,’ reads the Operations Report of the 143rd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Division, which finally took the town from the rear on 18 December 1943 after two previous attacks had been flung back.
We picked our way through fields ripped by mortars and shells and the still bodies of doughboys [GIs] who fell in the bloody, savage fighting… [in] this gray little town overlooking the valley approaches to Cassino. The soldiers call it Death Valley because death was on the rampage… as they stormed this enemy fortress ringed by fortifications, dug into terraced slopes commanding the Liri valley.
The German garrison of San Pietro could not merely be bypassed, isolated and hemmed in, as the Fifth Army moved on towards the Gustav Line, because their observation posts in the town would have directed incessant and accurate artillery fire on to the advancing forces and their logistical support. Just as with Camino, Lungo and the great monastery hill of Monte Cassino itself, there was no alternative to holding the high ground.
Between the attack on Camino on 6 December and the Germans finally being expelled from San Pietro on the 18th, the fierce fighting left the Fifth Army spent, and the driving sleet and hail further blunted enthusiasm for an assault on the Gustav Line during the shortest days of the year. The snow and low clouds also meant that little air support could be expected in the period before planes could land by instrumentation alone. The hiatus before the renewed Allied offensive therefore allowed Senger a vital month in which to dig in, bring up reinforcements from Rome, reposition his forces and make his contingency plans. The (anti-Nazi) Senger had commanded the withdrawal of German troops from Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and was a master of the rearguard action. The Winter Line was only ever an outpost, a delaying position in front of the Gustav Line, just as the Hitler Line was yet another one behind it.
Since it was deemed impossible for troops untrained in mountain warfare to operate to the east of the 5,000-foot Mount Cairo, where there was a continuous range of peaks right across the centre of the peninsula, the attack on Cassino had to take place from the west and south of the town. Then, as now, the town formed a horseshoe around the 1,700-foot-high hill on the peak of which the abbey rests. Founded in the early sixth century by St Benedict himself, it was the mother church of the Benedictine Order. Cassino was the strongest part of the Gustav Line, nestling under Mount Cairo. ‘There was something titanic about the scene,’ wrote Harris, ‘frightening in its vastness, sombre under the low cloud and drizzling rain that blurred outlines and gave the slopes a menacing appearance of evil.’24 By the time the Allies reached it, the Gustav Line bristled with deep, reinforced concrete bunkers, anti-tank ditches, tunnels, barbed wire, minefields, hidden gun emplacements, 60,000 defenders and scores of secret observation posts from which withering artillery fire could be directed. Not for nothing did N. C. Phillips, the official historian of the New Zealand forces in Italy, point out that ‘On its military merits alone, no competent soldier would have chosen to assault Cassino in March 1944. He would have looked askance at the very notion of trying to carry by storm the strongest fortress in Europe at the dead of winter by a single Corps unsupported by diversionary operations.’25 Yet considering the forces at hand, the lack of geographical alternatives and the pressing need to take Rome before the Normandy landings, that was what had to happen.
From Cassino to the Tyrrhenian Sea lies a succession of rivers, principally the Gari, the Garigliano and the aptly named Rapido, which provided major obstacles for the Allies. It was here, just as much as at Cassino, that the Fifth Army fought and bled trying to break the Gustav Line during the four months after January 1944. Between 17 and 21 January, X Corps tried to attack across the Garigliano, but was blocked by the Fourteenth Army’s reserves, although 46th Division’s assault caused Senger some concern. Meanwhile to the east, the US 36th Division was thrown back ignominiously from the fast-flowing, freezing Rapido, with such heavy losses that a Congressional inquiry was later held. The British 46th, US 56th and US 36th Divisions desperately attempted to establish a toe-hold on the northern side of these three rivers, but in vain. The sheer topographical majesty of Monte Cassino has overawed historians as much as today it continues to overawe tourists, but in fact the battles to the south and west were equally important and costly; since crossing the Volturno, Fifth Army had suffered 26,000 casualties. Had any bar been awarded for the Italy Star medal, it ought to have read ‘Garigliano’ rather than ‘Cassino’, for
all the iconic status that was awarded to the latter due to its geographical prominence.
The prize – either by crossing the rivers or by taking Cassino, or both – was the Liri Valley, a flat, wide and direct route straight through to Rome down which the Allied armour could drive at speed. (Once Cassino finally fell on 17 May, the Fifth Army was in Rome within three weeks.) It might be that the Allies put too much emphasis on the importance of armour in the advance on Rome, since their tanks – though more numerous – had been inferior to the Germans’ throughout the war so far. The Sherman tank was nicknamed the Ronson by the Allies because in the words of the contemporary advert ‘It lights first time, every time’, and the Tommy-cooker by the Germans because a hit from an 88mm shell tended to create enough kinetic energy to ignite its engine fuel. Until later in 1944, the Germans retained a lead over the Allies in creating tanks with a better combination of firepower, mobility and protection. Allied tanks often had such restricted vision that driving them was likened to driving a semi-detached house looking through its letterbox. If the Allies had been less fixated on the Liri Valley, they might have broken the Gustav Line elsewhere earlier.
On 11 December 1943 Kesselring assured the Vatican that the abbey of Monte Cassino would not be occupied by his forces, but most of its movable treasures were taken to Rome nonetheless (today they can be seen in the monastery’s museum). At 09.30 on Tuesday, 15 February 1944, the entire abbey was flattened by 239 bombers dropping 500 tons of bombs, destroying the immovable but art-historically important frescos in the process. This Allied vandalism was a propaganda coup for Dr Goebbels, although it was good for the morale of the troops preparing to attack the monastery, at least until they discovered that few Germans had died in the bombing and that rubble was almost as easily defended as entire buildings. ‘I say that the bombing of the Abbey was a mistake, and I say it with the full knowledge of the controversy that has raged round this episode,’ wrote Mark Clark in his autobiography Calculated Risk, in 1951. ‘Not only was the bombing an unnecessary psychological mistake in the field of propaganda, but it was a tactical military mistake of the first magnitude. It only made our job more difficult, more costly in terms of men, machines and time.’26 Though he later denied responsibility for it, in fact Clark had been personally involved in and approved of Alexander’s and Freyberg’s decision to destroy the abbey.27 Certainly the commander of the Cassino defenders, Senger, later claimed that ‘The bombing had the opposite effect of what was intended. Now we would occupy the abbey without scruple, especially as ruins are better for defence than intact buildings… Now Germany had a mighty, commanding strongpoint, which paid for itself in the subsequent fighting.’28 The defensive superiority of ruins over intact buildings had already been seen at Stalingrad, and was to be so again at Caen. Yet it is hard to believe that during the Allied attacks the Germans would not have abandoned their moral ‘scruple’ and defended the abbey room by room.