The British attack on the key railway station at Campoleone failed. Major-General W. R. C. Penney’s 1st Infantry Division began its assault on 28 January, badly delayed because of an ambush of some key Grenadier Guards officers. Only one man, from the 2nd Battalion, the Sherwood Foresters, got across the railway line, but he was subsequently killed, along with 244 other comrades from his regiment in the space of only ten minutes. Campoleone was not to fall for over three months. In all, 23,860 American and 9,203 British Commonwealth casualties had to be taken off the beaches in the Anzio operation, apart from around 7,000 who had been killed there. The life expectancy of a forward observation officer was a mere six weeks.43 Those who fought at Anzio saw the full horrors of the Second World War close up. An army surgeon called James A. Ross, who later became president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, recalled the scene in a casualty clearing station inside the Anzio perimeter:
The wounded lay in two rows, mostly British but some American as well in their sodden filthy clothes… soaked, caked, buried in mud and blood; with ghastly pale faces, shuddering, shivering with the cold of the February night and their great wounds… some (too many; far too many) were carried in dying, with gross combinations of shattered limbs, protrusions of intestines and brain from great holes in their poor frames torn by 88-millimetre shells, mortar and anti-personnel bombs.44
By 7 February 1944 it was clear that the British War Cabinet had severe reservations about the way the Italian campaign – especially at Anzio – was progressing. ‘The battle in Italy is approaching its climax,’ Churchill reported, according to the notes of the War Cabinet Secretariat:
Two weeks ago we had high hopes of a military success – now we still have hopes of an uphill slogging match, which may nevertheless succeed… The 5th Army not yet delivered its attack – force not yet engaged and may at any moment advance on enemy’s front – Enemy troops stretched, no relief. No reason to suppose possibility of decisive victory has faded away. But the strategic principles on which the operations were founded are sound and persist in bringing their rewards in spite of tactical disappointments. The German attempt to crush the bridgehead failed… Advisers not alarmed… We have a front engaging 19 divisions of the enemy. Hitler evidently on impulse had 6 or 7 divisions sent down. Our duty is to fight and engage all our forces with the enemy. Hitler does not want all his forces engaged on the peninsula. Our battle must be nourished. Disappointing not to gain tactical success.45
Churchill then said something that Lawrence Burgis took down as ‘US asked us for an appreciation… In US may say Eisenhower removed.’ This is capable of the interpretation that Eisenhower’s job would on the line in the United States if victory was not won in Italy, and when the Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin said that he should send Alexander a message of encouragement, Churchill said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ which was hardly a ringing endorsement.
The great German counter-attack, Operation Fischfang (Catch Fish), came on 16 February, with Mackensen’s intention to drive down the via Anziate to Anzio and throw the Allies back into the sea. Supported by a 452-gun bombardment, Mackensen flung his 125,000 troops against the Allies’ 100,000, but Allied artillery and naval guns fired no fewer than 65,000 rounds on the first day alone. Fierce engagements developed at the road’s flyover at Campo di Carne on 18 February, with craters formed, mines laid and concrete-laden lorries blocking the underpass below. ‘Cooks, drivers and clerks fought side by side with infantry,’ records the battle’s historian as the Germans reached what was ominously designated ‘the Final Beach-head Line’.46 Close co-operation between the Allied artillery and infantry – it is estimated that they fired around fifteen times more shells during the battle than the Wehrmacht – made all the difference in a struggle where the air forces could not operate because of the low visibility. Light reconnaissance aircraft were used, however, to devastating effect. In all at Anzio, 10 per cent of German losses were due to Allied infantry, 15 per cent to aerial bombardment, but no less than 75 per cent to the artillery – figures which, as the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst historian Lloyd Clark has pointed out, are virtually identical to the statistics for the Western Front in the Great War.47
Mackensen’s offensive, broken up by artillery bombardment and tenacious resistance on the ground, failed to reach further than 7 miles from Anzio, and petered out by the evening of 19 February. It had cost the Fourteenth Army 5,400 casualties, against VI Corps’ 3,500. From then on there were nearly three months of almost continuous fighting in what were known by the British Army as the wadis, the sunken marshlands and mosquito-ridden tributaries of the upper Moletta river. Although the front lines were broadly static in the areas nicknamed Starfish, the Bloody Boot, North Lobster Claw, South Lobster Claw, Shell Farm, Mortar Farm and Oh God Wadi, there were constant costly trench raids and counter-attacks. Battalions typically spent six days in and eight days out of the line. In his superb diary of the wadi fighting entitled The Fortress, the twenty-year-old subaltern in the Green Howards, Raleigh Trevelyan, recorded the experience of his battalion being surrounded by the Germans on three sides:
I find it bewildering the way our own and the Jerries’ positions are so interwoven. There is no hard and fast straight line as the front between us… The men keep asking why we don’t press forward and drive the enemy back – any risk is better than our present conditions. The answer is that there are more wadis beyond, and at the expense of much blood we would only be in exactly the same predicament, but with lengthier lines of communication.48
Walking the wadis today – it is advisable to do so only with a guide as there is still some unexploded ordnance there – one can see how close-quarter the fighting was, with trenches less than 50 yards from one another along waterlogged ditches, and man-sized holes dug out in the side of mud-banks for protection and makeshift accommodation. The 1st Battalion, Irish Guards took 94 per cent casualties in the wadis in only five days serving there, while the 2nd Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters was reduced from 250 officers and men down to a mere thirty in a similar period.49 Yet the Germans failed to break through either there or at the nearby Flyover.
‘I had hoped that we were hurling a wild cat on to the shore,’ Churchill complained to the Chiefs of Staff on 31 January, ‘but all we got was a stranded whale.’50 It was true that the Anzio operation had not succeeded in its objectives, largely owing to the German capacity for counter-attack. In his novel of Anzio, Seven Steps Down, the war correspondent John Sears Barker describes the Ranger attack on Cisterna on the night of 29 February, carried out along one of the main drainage ditches of the Mussolini Canal that came close to the town:
The Rangers considered it a sheltered alley… That 800 yards would be over unprotected open land but the Rangers, advancing through the early morning shadows, counted on surprise. What they didn’t count on was the Hermann Göring Division, which had set up a three-point ambush. Machine gun emplacements, mortars, anti-tank guns, depressed anti-aircraft guns, and Tiger tanks, hidden in farmhouses, ditches and haystacks, rimmed the ditch on all sides.51
The attack was disastrous: of the 767 men of the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions who took part, twelve were killed, thirty-six wounded and almost all of the rest were captured.
In the event, instead of VI Corps saving X Corps trapped on the Gustav Line, it turned out to be X Corps breaking through the Line in Operation Diadem in mid-May that finally opened up the oppor tunity to save the trapped VI Corps. With a proportion of Eighth Army brought back across the Apennines in support, Diadem saw Allied superiority of three to one, and an opening barrage of 1,500 guns at 23.00 hours on Thursday, 11 May 1944.52 General Alphonse Juin’s Free French Corps performed impressive feats of specialist mountain soldiering in turning the German flank. Meanwhile, II Corps of Fifth Army made good progress, and on 16 May Alexander could finally report to a hugely relieved Brooke that the Gustav Line had ‘definitely’ been breached. After initial rebuffs, XIII Corps of Eighth Army broke through
, and it turned out to be the Polish II Corps which took Monastery Hill on 18 May. (Their charismatic commander, General Władysław Anders, died in exile in 1970, and his grave can be seen among those of his comrades at the Polish cemetery there.)
As the Tenth Army reeled back from the Gustav Line, and tried to defend the Hitler and Caesar Lines behind it, the opportunity arrived for Alexander to use VI Corps at Anzio to cut off the Germans’ retreat. Having missed capturing large numbers of the Wehrmacht in Sicily and Salerno, here was a third chance to put a great many German soldiers, then streaming up Highway 6 towards Valmontone, ‘in the bag’, as had happened in Tunisia. Yet at a press conference at 20.00 hours on Monday, 22 May Clark told reporters: ‘I intend to take Rome, and to take it soon – nothing will stand in my way.’53 It was assumed at the time that he was just referring to the Germans. When the very next day, Alexander – informed of enemy intentions via Ultra – ordered Clark to break out of the Anzio pocket, cross the Alban Hills and swing his Fifth Army eastwards, thereby trapping the retreating Tenth Army at Valmontone as it tried to escape northwards, his subordinate was in no mood to comply.
Admittedly, breaking out of the Anzio perimeter was still no easy task. By the end of 23 May, 3rd US Infantry Division of VI Corps had lost 955 men, the largest number of any US division on any single day during the whole war.54 German losses were equally heavy, however. By the evening of Wednesday, 24 May, Truscott’s VI Corps was making good progress towards Valmontone, and the prospect beckoned of the Tenth Army being trapped in the valley on Route 6, with many forced to surrender. Contact was finally made between the two Allied forces at 07.30 on Thursday, 25 May, more than four months after the Anzio landings, and Cisterna also fell later that day.
Yet, instead of obeying his orders from Alexander, on Friday, 26 May Clark deliberately reduced the force Truscott needed to capture Valmontone – the true Schwerpunkt – with the result that the Germans were able to keep their retreat route open all the time between 26 May and 4 June, and so the Tenth Army escaped. Clark kept the greater part of his force to make a dash for Rome – which Kesselring had anyhow evacuated – taking it largely unopposed on 5 June, the day before D-Day and therefore just early enough for him to bask in global approbation for a full twenty-four hours before attention turned elsewhere. (He understandably kept a large Roma traffic sign, complete with a bullet hole, in his office as a souvenir.) ‘Alexander never gave orders not to take Rome,’ was Clark’s ex post facto rationalization, dripping with double negatives, special pleading and Anglophobia:
I know he was concerned about my maintaining my thrust to Valmontone, but hell when we were knocking on its door we had already destroyed as much of the German Tenth Army as we could ever have expected… One thing I knew was that I had to take Rome and that my American army was going to do it. So in all the circumstances I had to go for it before the British loused it up… We had earned it you understand.55
As a result of Clark’s orders on 26 May ‘to leave the 3rd Division and the Special Force to block Highway 6 and mount that assault… to the north as soon as you can’, the US 34th and 45th Divisions broke off their march to Valmontone and instead headed for Rome, covered by the 36th Division. Truscott was ‘dumbfounded’ and protested that ‘We should pour our maximum power into the Valmontone Gap to ensure the destruction of the retreating German army,’ but he was overruled.56 For the rest of his life he was convinced that, as he put it, ‘To be first in Rome was a poor compensation for this lost opportunity.’ Clark’s divisional commanders – especially Major-General Ernest N. Harmon of 1st US Armored Division and Brigadier John W. O’Daniel of 3rd Division – were equally angry about the change of plan, and Alexander himself was informed only after it had been made, when it was too late to countermand. Short of instantly replacing Clark with Truscott, there was little the commander of 15th Army Group could do, and he was reduced to asking Clark’s chief of staff, Major-General Alfred M. Gruenther, ‘I am sure the army commander will continue to push towards Valmontone, won’t he?’57 He would indeed, but not with anything like the force necessary to trap Vietinghoff, seven of whose divisions now managed to withdraw north-east of Rome.
Between the opening of Operation Diadem and the fall of Rome, 15th Army Group had lost 44,000 casualties, a sacrifice that might have been easier to justify if the German army had not been permitted to escape in relatively good order to continue the struggle in central and northern Italy, and especially on the Gothic Line. General von Vietinghoff himself had no doubts that ‘If the Allies, as in previous days, had directed their attack against Valmontone, the initially weak forces of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division would not have been able to prevent a breakthrough. The fall of Rome, the separation of both German armies, and the bottling up of the bulk of their units would have been unavoidable.’
Alexander confined himself in his memoirs to the caustic comment that he could ‘only assume that the immediate lure of Rome for its publicity persuaded Mark Clark to switch the direction of his advance’, and Harding agreed, saying: ‘By diverting his axis to advance from almost due east to north-east he missed an opportunity of cutting off some forces, but he was attracted, I think, by the magnet of Rome.’58 To make matters worse, Clark actually informed Alexander that, if the British tried to approach Rome before the Americans, he would order ‘his troops to fire on the Eighth Army’, and once Rome had fallen – or rather was evacuated in relatively good order by the retreating Germans – American Military Police refused British units permission to enter the city.59 It was, Harding recalled, the nearest that the British ever got to ‘coming to blows’ with General Mark Clark.
Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin at the Teheran Conference of November 1943 that ‘He who holds Rome holds the title-deeds to Italy,’ but he was wrong. The fall of Rome proved to be just another step on the long and bloody journey up the peninsula. If Rome had fallen in the autumn of 1943 it might have been a significant moment in the history of the Second World War, but coming so late, and so soon before D-Day, it makes little more than a footnote. Thereafter the entire Italian campaign became a sideshow, kept alive by Churchill’s faith that victory there could open up opportunities in Yugoslavia, Austria and France, each of which was heavily discounted by Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Alexander’s pursuit of the Germans northwards, where the Gothic Line had been constructed between La Spezia and Pesaro, has been described as ‘wooden and hesitant’, leading one historian to state, with reference to North Africa as well as Italy, that ‘This failure in the pursuit was the most marked feature of the Western Allies in the Second World War.’60 It is true that the Germans managed to get their forces up to the Gothic Line without being overtaken, but Harding estimated that on 1 July 1944 the Germans had between eighteen and twenty-one divisions, against the Allies’ fourteen infantry and four armoured, and moreover they had mini-defensive lines such as the Albert Line behind Perugia and Chiusi, and lines in front of Arezzo and Siena, and the Arno Line centred on Florence and Bibbiena. All these had to be mastered before the Allies even reached the Gothic Line itself.
It was to be a phenomenally hard slog up the Apennines before reaching the plains of the Po Valley. Small wonder that the fellow officers of Coldstream Guards Lieutenant (later Professor Sir) Michael Howard, who won the Military Cross at Salerno, wondered whether the General Staff had used a map that featured contours when they had planned the campaign. Alexander’s chances of a glorious breakthrough of the Gothic Line were severely weakened when six divisions were withdrawn from his command in order to take part in the invasion of southern France on 15 August 1944, while Kesselring was simultaneously being reinforced. The Fifth Army crossed the Arno on 2 August, and the Eighth Army took Rimini on 21 September, but the focus of the Second World War had long since moved to north-west Europe, where the life or death of the Third Reich would be decided, rather than in northern Italy. By the time Romagna fell on 20 September 1944, Eighth Army had been fighting in the mountains of Ita
ly for a year, and the autumnal rain brought more dreadful weather conditions that would shock present-day visitors to Italy who confine their tours of Tuscany and Umbria to the summer months. Even once the Allies reached north-eastern Italy, there was a series of east–west-running rivers to cross if they were to achieve Alexander’s plan to destroy the twenty German divisions in front of the Alps. Even as late as December 1944, Hitler was capable of putting together a twenty-six-division surprise attack in the Ardennes without having to remove troops from Italy, although he did remove Kesselring in March 1945 to defend western Germany.
The last stage of the Allied campaign was easily its best tactically, with the Gothic Line breached with vigour and a pursuit of the Germans that has been described as ‘tactically superb’.61 Much of the credit for this must go to Clark, who commanded 15th Army Group, Truscott of the Fifth Army and Sir Richard McCreery, who in November 1944 had taken over command of the Eighth Army from Oliver Leese. Refusing Vietinghoff permission to retreat into the Alps, but instead ordering his troops to ‘Stand or die’, Hitler condemned the by then demoralized German forces to fight north of the Po, where they were comprehensively defeated between 14 and 20 April 1945. Vietinghoff surrendered German Army Group South-west to Alexander, who was by then supreme commander Mediterranean, on Wednesday, 2 May 1945.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 49
