The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  Visitors to the magnificent rebuilt structure will immediately be impressed by how completely the abbey dominates the hilltop, which in turn dominates the Liri Valley. It was effectively doomed as soon as Kesselring chose it as the hinge of the Gustav Line, which a glance at the landscape from the top of the hill looking south shows was unavoidable. Churchill could never understand why Cassino could not simply be outflanked, and why three divisions had to ‘break their teeth’ on a front only 3 miles wide, and it is indeed difficult to comprehend on two-dimensional maps. The folds of the land, the overlaps of the rivers, above all the heights of the mountains protecting the Liri Valley are best studied in situ, and make the tactical difficulties instantly comprehensible. As for Monte Cassino itself, Harding believed that ‘It was necessary to bomb it from the point of view of the morale and the confidence of the troops. Everybody thought the Germans were using it for military purposes… It’s part of my military philosophy that you must not put troops into battle without giving them all possible physical and military support to give them the best chance for getting a success.’29 The political price of attacking the abbey without first having flattened it was felt to be too high, especially in New Zealand, whose troops were to form the first wave, and Freyberg, Clark and Alexander all approved its destruction. Of course it was paradoxical that, in the crusade for civilization against Nazi barbarism, a prominent jewel of that very civilization should have been destroyed by the Allies, but such was the nature of the Total War unleashed by Hitler, who must therefore bear ultimate responsibility for the aesthetic and cultural tragedy.

  By the end of January, the French Mountain Corps had made considerable advances between Monte Cairo and Monte Cassino, and the US 34th ‘Red Bulls’ Division had reached Point 593 behind the monastery hill. Snake’s Head Ridge, of which Point 593 was a part, saw bitterly contested fighting, reminiscent of the Great War, as the Allies attempted to outflank Cassino from the north; indeed as many men fell there as in the full-frontal assaults up Monastery Hill itself.

  The four battles of Monte Cassino were fought by Germans, Americans, British, French, Poles, Australians, Canadians, Indians, Nepalis, Sikhs, Maltese and New Zealanders, although not by the Italians themselves, the majority of whom had by now largely adopted a che sera, sera attitude to their national fate, apart from (mainly Communist-dominated) partisans who fought against the Germans further north. ‘We do not want Germans or Americans,’ one representative piece of Italian graffito read. ‘Let us weep in peace.’30 The four battles have been likened to the Somme: at the first battle after 12 February, for example, the Fifth Army suffered 16,000 casualties, above all in the 34th Division. In the second battle between 15 and 18 February it was the New Zealanders who suffered, and between 15 and 23 March further losses were sustained in the third.

  The Luftwaffe barely made it into the air for routine reconnaissance during the struggle for the Gustav Line, such was the Allies’ preponderance, and in late 1943 it had only 430 aircraft in the whole of Italy.31

  In the Vatican, meanwhile, the British Ambassador to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, reported to the Foreign Office on 26 January 1944 that ‘The Cardinal Secretary of State sent for me today to say that the Pope hoped that no Allied coloured troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation. He hastened to add that the Holy See did not draw the colour line but it was hoped that it would be possible to meet the request.’32 The role of Pius xii in the Second World War remains highly controversial, because he took the deliberate decision not to denounce publicly the Nazis’ war against the Jews, despite having detailed information about its nature and extent (and indeed that of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland). This decision was based on his belief – proved well founded with regard to the Protestant Church in Holland – that the Germans would viciously punish ecclesiastical authorities who spoke up for the Jews, thereby lessening their opportunities to help in other, more clandestine ways. (The Pope himself harboured thousands of Jews at his own properties in Rome and at Castel Gandolfo outside the city.) Yet although it would not have derailed or perhaps even slowed down the Holocaust, which by its nature was not undertaken by genuinely pious people, it was in retrospect of course part of the Pope’s moral duty to draw global attention to what was taking place. It is quite untrue, as has been alleged, that the Pope himself was anti-Semitic or held any brief for the Nazis or that he was in any way, as the title of one book has it, ‘Hitler’s Pope’.33

  After the second battle of Cassino in February 1944, the commander of its defence, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, reported to Hitler at the Berghof to receive the oak leaves to his Knight’s Cross, an honour that left him unimpressed ‘now that hundreds of people wore the decoration’. Senger was even less impressed by the sight of the Führer himself, which he found ‘utterly depressing’ and wondered what effect it would have on the other soldiers receiving medals that day. ‘He wore a yellow military blouse with a yellow tie, white collar and black trousers – hardly a becoming outfit!’ recorded the Roman Catholic Rhodes Scholar:

  His unprepossessing frame and short neck made him appear even less dignified than usual. His complexion was flabby, colourless and sickly. His large blue eyes, which evidently fascinated many people, were watery, possibly due to his constant use of stimulating drugs. His handshake was soft, his left arm hung limp and trembling by his side. Yet a striking feature, contrasting with his notorious screaming fits during speeches or fits of rage, was the quiet and modulated voice that almost inspired compassion since it barely concealed his despondency and weakness.34

  The trembling left hand has been put down to incipient Parkinson’s disease, from which it is thought that Hitler might have suffered. Even taking into account Senger’s anti-Nazism and the fact that this account was written long after the war, it seems that Hitler was ailing even before the Normandy landings in June, the assassination attempt on 20 July or the destruction of Army Group Centre in Russia later that month.

  On 15 March more than 1,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Cassino from 500 bombers, yet too often the USAAF, which flew two-thirds of the sorties and dropped 70 per cent of the bombs, failed to co-ordinate closely enough with the commanders on the ground, who often did not know when the raids were scheduled to end. This meant that, however heavy the bombardments, the Germans in the many arched cellars of the abbey always had time to take up positions in the rubble of the monastery before the assault waves moved in. ‘I had climbed every single hill that offered a long view,’ recalled Senger of his 50-mile-wide sector based at Cassino, ‘and this gave me a complete picture of the fissured mountain terrain. I could thus appreciate fluctuations in the situation from changes in artillery fire and air activity.’35 The Germans managed to avoid being outflanked in the first battle of Cassino in February, retaking Point 593, but the hill succumbed in subsequent engagements in February and March. Fighting between the 8th Indian Division and German Fallschirmjäger (paratroopers) was particularly harsh, and on the rocky outcrop known as Hangman’s Hill a company of Gurkhas somehow clung like limpets for ten days under constant German bombardment and sniping. To visit the spot is to appreciate both units’ extraordinary achievement and courage.

  ‘What exceeded all expectations was the fighting spirit of the troops,’ Senger later wrote of his 1st Parachute Rifle Division, which had relieved the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division on 15 March and was engaged against the New Zealanders in the town. ‘The soldiers crawled out of the shuttered cellars and bunkers to confront the enemy with the toughest resistance. Words can hardly do them justice. We had all reckoned that those who survived the hours of bombing and the casualties would be physically and morally shaken, but this was not so.’ He put this down to their being trained, as paratroopers, in fighting in isolated, surrounded areas of resistance. Senger particularly liked the way they didn’t bother to report the loss of small amounts of ground ‘because they hoped soon to recover it’.36
Visiting 3rd Paratroop Regiment at the divisional headquarters of General Richard Heidrich, the commander of I Parachute Corps, Senger recalled the ‘jarring explosion of shells, the whistling of splinters, the smell of freshly thrown-up earth, and the well-known mixture of smells from glowing iron and burnt powder’, which vividly reminded him of his time on the Somme. ‘Hitler was right when he told me that here was the only battlefield of this war that resembled those of the First,’ he wrote after the war. In fact there were plenty such battlefields, especially in Russia, but Führers are not on oath when awarding oak-leaf clusters to brave commanders.

  The gradient of the Monastery Hill slope up to the abbey is 500 yards up for every thousand horizontal, that is 45 degrees, and the other places where the fighting was fiercest in the town – the Continental Hotel (which had a German tank concealed inside its foyer), Castle Hill, the botanical gardens and the railway station – sound like sites in a Baedeker guide, but they all saw vicious hand-to-hand combat. The fighting in the town of Cassino, recalled a veteran, ‘was at such close quarters that one floor of a building might be held by a defender while the next was occupied by the attackers. If the latter wished to use their artillery to soften up the building before storming it, they would have to evacuate this floor!’37

  ‘The Cassino front cost the Allies three whole months for an advance of 15 kilometres,’ boasted a proud Senger years afterwards. By early 1944 the Germans had twenty-three divisions in Italy, fifteen of which formed the Tenth Army holding the Gustav Line against Alexander’s by now eighteen divisions. If the Allies were able to make amphibious hops up the coast of Italy, ‘like a harvest bug’ in Churchill’s typically arresting simile, they needed to get behind the Germans’ east–west defensive lines. This was the thinking behind the attack on Anzio, Operation Shingle, although the need for landing craft – principally Landing Ships Tank (LSTs) – for the operation meant that the timing for the Normandy landings (codenamed Overlord) had to be postponed a month from the date of 1 May 1944 that had been agreed at the Trident Conference in Washington.

  The amphibious attacks on Anzio and Nettuno, small holiday ports on the west coast of Italy 30 miles south of Rome, by the US VI Corps under the corncob-pipe-smoking, fifty-three-year-old Major-General John Lucas, was intended to cut communications between Rome and Cassino, forcing the German Tenth Army to weaken or even abandon the western part of the Gustav Line, and outflank the Cassino position. Task Force 81 comprised 374 vessels and sailed the 100 miles from Naples under the overall command of Rear-Admiral Frank Lowry, with Rear-Admiral Thomas Troubridge commanding the Royal Navy element. As Ultra had suggested they would, the landings achieved complete surprise, and many Germans – nicknamed Teds by the Allies, a shortening of the Italian word for Germans, Tedeschi – were caught with their trousers down, in some cases literally so. ‘As our squad entered a gloomy narrow street,’ an American private later recalled, ‘I could see a pair of fleshy white buttocks wobbling in the opposite direction and I shouted “Halt!” as loud as I could. The man stopped, raised his hands and walked towards us… His thin legs were shivering below a great pot belly. It was my first encounter with the Master Race.’38

  Within two days of the first landings at 02.00 on Saturday, 22 January 1944, some 50,000 Allied troops and 5,200 vehicles were ashore, establishing a perimeter 3 miles deep. If Lucas had pushed inland to seize the towns of Aprilia (nicknamed the Factory), Campoleone and Cisterna, he could have cut both the main railway and Route 7, which ran southwards to the Gustav Line. Instead he waited for tanks and heavy artillery, and within seventy-two hours had lost the opportunity, which was not to recur for four pain-filled months. Whereas there were only a few thousand Germans in the area on 23 January, by the evening of the next day there were over 40,000. Lucas was the wrong man to command Shingle, not least because he believed, as he vouchsafed to his diary, that ‘The whole affair has a strong odour of Gallipoli and apparently the same amateur was still on the coach’s bench.’39 Intended by Churchill as a campaign-winning coup, the battle of Anzio turned into a drawn-out, costly failure. The German capacity for counter-attack was undimmed as Kesselring rushed troops from the Gustav Line, France, northern Italy and the Balkans to try to snuff out what Hitler described as an ‘abscess’. Since Ultra gave Clark good warning of this, Lucas was able to dig in on his beach-head, albeit under constant fire from the Alban Hills (Colli Laziali) and direct attack from the German Fourteenth Army under the aristocratic General Eberhard von Mackensen. Digging in at the beach-head was uncomfortable work: deep trenches were impossible because the water table was too high, and as one veteran recalled, ‘Dig a slit trench, leave it for an hour, and the bottom would be black with beetles trying to get out.’

  Anzio was where the Emperor Nero reputedly played the fiddle while Rome burned in AD 64. The German Commander-in-Chief South showed no such lassitude when the Allies began landing there in 1944. Kesselring had signalled the warning code ‘Case Richard’ to all units by 04.30 on 22 January, and forces started arriving fast. The Allies had slightly expanded their beach-head by 1 February on narrow and exposed fronts, but their further attacks were comprehensively repulsed at both Campoleone and Cisterna. Although soon after the landings Churchill had told Alexander, ‘Am very glad you are pegging out claims rather than digging in beach-heads,’ he had spoken too soon.40 Alexander and Clark both landed at Anzio at 09.00 on the first day, yet neither ordered Lucas to take Campoleone and Cisterna post-haste at all costs. (On visiting a 5th Battalion, Grenadier Guards anti-tank platoon, an 88mm shell-burst covered Alexander’s fur-lined jacket with earth. ‘He brushed off the soil as he would the drops of water having been caught in a shower of rain,’ recalled a guardsman, ‘and continued on his way chatting to his aide, who looked as though he’d seen a ghost.’) 41

  ‘Daddy’ Lucas, who was also known to his men by the hardly inspiring nickname Foxy Grandpa, set up VI Corps headquarters in underground cellars in the via Romana in Nettuno, close to where he had got off the boat. He then kept them there, far from the British sectors, and at one point a practice evacuation was even carried out. ‘Slow in movement and speech,’ records Anzio’s historian, ‘Shingle’s pilot was as far removed from a dynamic, charismatic leader as could be imagined.’42 The British war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas wrote that Lucas had ‘the round face and the greying moustache of a kindly country solicitor’. Lack of progress meant that Lucas was replaced on 23 February by the altogether more dashing Major-General Lucian Truscott, who wore a silk scarf around his neck that was part of an airman’s escape kit. Both Alexander and Clark, who rubber-stamped all Lucas’ decisions but escaped censure, were affected by what today is called legacy-thinking. They refought the battle of Salerno at Anzio, without taking into account the key differences between the two operations, the main one being that the latter had the inestimable advantage of total surprise. Alexander, who had to be a mediator as much as a commander with his multi-national force, ought to have set out far more specific objectives than he did, allowing both Clark and Lucas less leeway. They were nonetheless right not to have made a dash for the Alban Hills just south-east of Rome on landing, as some now argue they ought to have. With his forces strung out from Anzio to the mountains it would have been simple for the counter-attacking Germans to cut Lucas off, and the heights would have turned into the largest POW camp in Italy. Equally, had he pushed on northwards to Rome, he would have had, in his own picturesque phrase, ‘one night in Rome and eighteen months in PoW camps’. Dick Evans, the adjutant of the 1st Battalion King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, agreed wholeheartedly with this assessment: ‘In the first two days we could have driven straight into Rome. Then we would have been slaughtered.’

  The harbours of Anzio and Nettuno, and the armada needed to keep the beach-head resupplied, took a severe battering from the Germans once Kesselring put the aerial side of Case Richard into operation. In the ten days after the landings he summoned a force of 140 long-range bombers from outs
ide Italy, and sixty more from southern French bases. The ships supplying the Anzio beach-head had to face E-boat torpedoes, bombs and the terrifying new invention of radio-operated, rocket-powered glider bombs, although all the human torpedo attacks failed miserably. The cruiser Spartan, destroyers Janus, Jervis and Plunkett and minesweeper Prevail, as well as a hospital ship and troop transporter, were all lost. Nonetheless, over 68,000 men, 237 tanks and 508 guns came ashore in the first week, a great inter-Allied and inter-service achievement. In all, no less than half a million tons of supplies were landed at Anzio, which for a brief moment became the world’s fourth busiest port. Those who landed in that first week faced 71,500 Germans, including 7,000 crack troops from the 26th Panzer Division defending Cisterna.