The Second World War

by John Keegan

  A crisis in Allied strategy

  Having failed to take Rome both via the Liri valley and via Anzio, General Mark Clark now found himself confronted by the necessity to smash his way forward past the great fortress monastery of Cassino which dominated Highway 6. It had been chosen by St Benedict 1400 years earlier as a place of impregnable refuge for his contemplative monks; the monks remained, assailed on three sides by the clamour of war; the monastery was as impregnable as ever. Its immediate environs were garrisoned by the 1st Parachute Division, one of the best in the Wehrmacht. Frido von Senger und Etterlin, the local corps commander and a lay member of St Benedict’s Order, would not allow them to use the monastery buildings for defence; but the crags and re-entrants of the mountain provided all the defences they needed to hold the Allies at bay.

  Four times in the next three months, between 12 February and 17 May, Allied troops came forward to the assault and three times they were repulsed. In the First Battle of Cassino the US 34th Division merely learned the painful lesson of how naturally strong and how strongly defended the Cassino position was. In the Second Battle the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Division, commanded by Bernard Freyberg, the veteran of Crete, assaulted the monastery and the town at its foot between 15 and 18 February; their attack was preceded by the bombing of the monastery by 135 Flying Fortresses which reduced it to ruins, but both bombers and troops failed to dislodge the German parachutists from their positions. In the Third Battle, 15-23 March, Freyberg’s divisions tried again, with even heavier air support. Again the attack failed, leaving the Cassino position still more impregnable than it had been at the outset: constant bombing and shelling had tumbled the monastery and the town below into a heap of ruins, into which the German parachutists burrowed to form tunnels and bunkers.

  By April the conduct of Allied strategy in Italy was almost in crisis. Churchill had become openly scathing at the lack of progress. Hitler exulted in the success of the Tenth and Fourteenth Armies; although vast sectors of the Eastern Front were falling to Russian attack and German cities rocked nightly under Bomber Command’s assault, in Italy his Anglo-American enemies had advanced only seventy miles in eight months. Mark Clark, perhaps the most egocentric Allied general of the Second World War, feared for his career, his temperamental antipathy to the British having been fed by their double failure at Cassino. Alexander, the theatre commander since Eisenhower’s assumption of the Supreme Allied Command in Britain in January, could see no way forward, and even Churchill, who revered him as the model of the military aristocrat, had begun to doubt his will and capacity to unlock the stalemate. What was needed was a plan and a new impetus to relaunch Allied Armies Italy on to the path of victory.

  Behind the locked front the Allied air forces were playing their part. They were commanded by Ira C. Eaker, who had been transferred from Britain, where he had directed the first (unsuccessful) stage of the American strategic bombing attack on Germany. From March onwards, they had been prosecuting Operation Strangle, designed to destroy the logistic network which supplied the Tenth and Fourteenth Armies at Anzio and in the Winter Position. Although the terrain precluded successful ground-attack missions against units in the front line, the Italian roads and railways presented profitable strategic targets for aircraft. Eaker’s interdiction plan was a model of military logic; then, in April, Alexander’s chief of staff, John Harding, began to construct an equally logical plan to exploit the Allied capacity for manoeuvre on the ground.

  Since the end of the previous year Allied Armies Italy had been significantly reinforced. The Polish II Corps was now present in its full strength. The Eighth Army (commanded by Oliver Leese after Montgomery’s departure to England for Overlord in late December) had been joined by an additional Indian division, a South African armoured division and another hard-fighting Canadian formation, the 5th Armoured Division. Truscott’s corps in the Anzio bridgehead had doubled in size. Further, a French Expeditionary Force, formed largely of Moroccan hill tribesmen to whom mountain warfare was second nature, had taken over the sector between Cassino and the coastal plain. These reinforcements largely compensated for the withdrawal to Britain, in preparation for Overlord, of the six experienced British and American divisions which had fought the Italian campaign thus far. Out of their disparate but complementary qualities, Harding began to construct an operational plan (Diadem) designed to turn the Cassino position, open up the Liri valley and draw in the Anzio force, with the object of encircling the Germans south of Rome and delivering the city into Allied hands.

  Harding’s plan was that, covered by an elaborate deception (Dunton) designed to persuade the Germans of the danger of another amphibious descent in their rear, nearer the Pisa-Rimini position which marked Kesselring’s ultimate line of retreat in the peninsula, the Poles would attack and seize Cassino in a Fourth Battle from the north, while the French infiltrated the mountains from the south. This move would open the Liri valley to the Canadian and South African armour, while the Americans on the west coast drove across the Garigliano to link up with the Anzio corps, which would break out from its bridgehead to block the Germans’ line of retreat to Rome. A major encirclement victory promised to stand in the offing.

  Much of the initiative for this plan came from General Alphonse Juin, commanding the French Expeditionary Force, who promised Harding and Alexander that his North Africans had the experience to find a way through the mountains to which Anglo-Saxons were blind. When Diadem opened on 11 May they were indeed able to do so. The Poles, opposed by the German 1st Parachute Division, at first failed to match the North Africans’ progress; but after Juin’s mountaineers, led by his Moroccan irregulars, had wriggled their way through into the entrance to the Liri valley by 17 May, the Poles carried Monte Cassino in a final and self-sacrificial assault. The mouth of the Liri valley and the coastal zone thus being opened, the American infantry and British armoured divisions started forward on 23 May, the same day on which Truscott’s VI Corps broke out of the Anzio bridgehead.

  Both the German Tenth Army and Rome now stood within the Allies’ grasp, the encirclement of the first inevitably determining the occupation of the second. Rome, declared an ‘open city’, and thronging with escaped Allied prisoners of war who circulated openly under the noses of the few Germans who remained, awaited liberation. The prospect of a triumphal entry overcame Clark’s strategic sense. Always impatient of Alexander, whose style of command was advisory rather than emphatic, and increasingly suspicious of what he conceived to be his British allies’ intention to rob him of the laurels of victory, he issued orders of his own on 26 May for his American troops to abandon their northward drive across the rear of the retreating Germans, thus surrendering the chance to encircle them, and drive directly into the capital. The realignment played directly into Kesselring’s hands. While his rearguards fought effective delaying actions at Valmontone and Velletri in the Alban hills south of Rome, he hurried the intact formations of the Tenth Army across the Tiber and made post-haste for the first of a series of defensive positions on the Gothic Line, which his engineers were fortifying between Rome and Rimini.

  Clark’s entry into Rome on 4 June proved, therefore, a hollow triumph. Even the crowds were absent; fearing a last-ditch stand by the departing Germans, the Romans kept behind locked doors, thus depriving the supremely publicity-conscious (and photogenic) ‘American Eagle’, as Churchill called him, of his lap of honour.

  Kesselring’s Tenth and Fourteenth Armies were nevertheless in retreat, and would conduct a fighting withdrawal as they made their way to the Pisa-Rimini Line, 150 miles to the north, which he had identified as the next most defensible position across the Italian peninsula. Allied Armies Italy followed as best they could; but the withdrawal of seven divisions – four out of the seven French divisions that had come from North Africa and the American 3rd, 36th and 45th – to mount the Operation Anvil/Dragoon landing in the south of France, scheduled for mid-August, prevented Clark from pressing the retreat. Kesselring suc
ceeded in fighting two delaying actions, first on the so-called Viterbo Line and then on the Trasimene Line, before safely reaching sanctuary on the Gothic Line in early August.

  The focus of action in the Mediterranean now shifted to the coast of southern France, defended by the German Nineteenth Army of Army Group G. It was already depleted by withdrawals of troops to Army Group B which was locked in struggle in Normandy, and, although initially it contained four good divisions, the eight divisions which remained were dispersed so widely between Nice and Marseille that they could not adequately deny the Allies landing places. Churchill had long opposed the operation as militarily valueless, but Marshall’s staff in Washington had insisted that Marseille was vital to the logistic support of the Anglo-American invasion of the north of France, while Roosevelt, sensitive to Alliance politics, had argued that it could not be cancelled without giving offence to Stalin. On 15 August, therefore, the newly constituted American Seventh Army under General Alexander Patch debarked between Cannes and Toulon, preceded by a brilliantly successful airborne landing, and supported by air and sea bombardment. The army, which had been collected from ports as far afield as Taranto, Naples, Corsica and Oran, got ashore with little loss and, though it had to fight hard for Toulon and Marseille, meanwhile launched a thrust up the valley of the Rhône which drove the mobile elements of the Nineteenth Army, including the 11th Panzer Division, pell-mell past Avignon, Orange and Montélimar towards Lyon and Dijon. As Army Group B was itself in full retreat by late August, the Nineteenth Army did not tarry. The spearheads of Patch’s Seventh and Patton’s Third Armies, the latter advancing from Normandy, met north of Dijon on 11 September, but by 14 September about half of the Nineteenth Army had found refuge in southern Alsace, where it stood ready to defend the approaches to Germany’s West Wall.

  The loss of the south of France was not in itself significant in Hitler’s view; the course of the campaign in Italy, even though it had entailed the surrender of a broad band of territory, might actually be counted as strategically advantageous to the Germans, for it left the bulk of the Allied forces in Italy lodged against the strong defences of the Gothic Line, at a safe distance from the Italian industrial area and the Alpine approaches to the borders of the Greater Reich, while Anvil had actually diverted the Allies’ amphibious fleet and the bulk of their disposable reserve into an operationally vacant zone and away from the Balkans, which still bulked so large in importance for his conduct of the war.

  The Balkans

  British support for the resistance in Yugoslavia had thus far troubled the Wehrmacht little. Although up to thirty Axis divisions had been engaged in internal security operations in the Yugoslav mountains, including Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Croat (Ustashi) formations, only twelve were German, most of a military value too low to permit their employment on the major battlefronts. Even after the British had definitively transferred their sponsorship of Yugoslav resistance in December 1943 from the royalist Chetniks to Tito’s communist guerrillas, who then numbered over 100,000, the Germans were able to keep the resistance forces constantly on the move, forcing them to migrate from Bosnia to Montenegro and then back again during the campaigning season of 1943 and in the process inflicting 20,000 casualties on their troops, as well as untold suffering on the rural population. The capitulation of Italy in September 1943 had eased Tito’s situation. It brought him large quantities of surrendered arms and equipment and even allowed him to take control of much of the area relinquished by the Italians, including the Dalmatian coast and the Adriatic islands. However, as long as the Germans continued to isolate the Partisans from direct contact with external regular forces, the rules of guerrilla warfare applied: Tito had a strong nuisance value but an insignificant strategic effect on Germany’s lines of communication with Greece and the areas from which it drew essential supplies of minerals.

  In the autumn of 1944, however, Germany’s position in the Balkans began to weaken, so threatening to elevate Tito from the role of nuisance to menace. Hitler’s Balkan satellites, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, had been brought into the war on his side by a combination of threat and inducement. Hitler could no longer offer inducement, while the principal threat to these states’ welfare and sovereignty was now prescribed by the Red Army, which between March and August had reconquered the western Ukraine and advanced to the foothills of the Carpathians, southern Europe’s natural frontier with the Russian lands. Much earlier in the year the satellites had begun to think better of their alliance with Hitler. Antonescu, the ruler of Romania, had been in touch with the Western Allies since March; his Foreign Minister had even attempted to draw Mussolini into a scheme for making a separate peace as early as May 1943. Bulgaria – whose staunchly pro-German King Boris died by poisoning on 24 August 1943 – had made approaches to London and Washington in January 1944 and then placed its hopes in coming to an understanding with Stalin. Hungary, which had benefited so greatly at Romania’s expense by the Vienna Award of August 1940, was meanwhile playing its own game: Kallay, the Prime Minister, had made contact with the West in September 1943 with the aim of arranging through them a surrender to the Russians, while the chief of staff suggested to Keitel, head of OKW, that the Carpathians be defended by Hungarian troops only – a device intended to keep not so much German as Romanian troops off the national territory.

  Even while the German troops were in full retreat in Italy and the Russians were advancing irresistibly to the Carpathians, Hitler could deal with Hungary. He had easily put down a revolt in the puppet state of Slovakia, raised by dissident soldiers in July when they imminently but over-optimistically expected the arrival of the Red Army on their doorstep. In March he had quelled the Hungarians’ initial display of independence by requiring Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, to dismiss Kallay and grant Germany full control of the Hungarian economy and communications system and rights of free movement into and through the country by the Wehrmacht. Horthy’s dismissal of his pro-German cabinet on 29 August alerted Hitler to the revived danger of Hungary’s defection. When on 15 October, therefore, Horthy revealed to the German embassy in Budapest that he had signed an armistice with Russia, German sympathisers in Horthy’s Arrow Cross party and in the army were ready to take control of the government. Horthy was isolated in his residence, where he was persuaded to deliver himself into German hands after Skorzeny, the rescuer of Mussolini, had kidnapped his son as a hostage.

  The occupation of Hungary, though smoothly achieved, could not at that stage halt the unravelling of the Balkan skein. Hungary had ultimately been driven into opening negotiations with the Russians because it feared, quite correctly, that Romania might otherwise make its own deal with Stalin and secure the return of Transylvania, which it had been forced to cede to Horthy under the Vienna Award. However, it was Hungary that had been forestalled; as soon as the Red Army crossed the Dniester from the Ukraine on 20 August, King Michael had had Antonescu arrested, thus provoking Hitler to order the bombing of Bucharest on 23 August and so allowing Romania to declare war on Germany next day. This change of sides forced the German Sixth Army (reconstituted since Stalingrad) into precipitate retreat towards the passes of the Carpathians. Few of its 200,000 men escaped. Bulgaria, into which they might have fled southward, was now closed to them because on 5 September the government had opened negotiations with the Russians (with whom it had never been at war) and promptly turned its army against Hitler. In Romania, reported Friesner, the commander of the Sixth Army, ‘there’s no longer any general staff and nothing but chaos, everyone, from general to clerk, has got a rifle and is fighting to the last bullet.’

  The defection of Romania immediately entailed the loss of access to the Ploesti oilfields, fear of which had so deeply influenced Hitler’s strategic decision-making throughout the war. It was that fear which, in large measure, had driven him to take control of the Balkans in the first place, to contemplate the attack on Russia, and to hold the Crimea long after it was militarily sound to do so. Now that t
he synthetic oil plants which had subsequently come on stream within Germany had been brought under disabling attack by the US Eighth Air Force, the loss of Ploesti was doubly disastrous. However, Hitler could not hope to recover them by counter-attack, for not only did the Russian Ukrainian Fronts which entered Romania on its defection enormously outnumber his own local forces; the simultaneous defection of Bulgaria put the German forces in Greece at risk also and on 18 October they evacuated the country and began a difficult withdrawal through the Macedonian mountains into southern Yugoslavia. Tolbukhin, commanding the Third Ukrainian Front, entered Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, on 4 October, having made his way there through Romania and Bulgaria. The 350,000 Germans under the command of General Löhr’s Army Group E thus had to make their escape from Greece past the flank of a menacing Soviet concentration, through mountain valleys infested with Tito’s Partisans and overflown by the Allied air forces operating across the Adriatic from their bases in Italy.

  The security of the other German forces – Army Group F – in what remained to Hitler of his Balkan occupation area now closely depended upon Kesselring’s ability to defend northern Italy. Should it fall, Allied Armies Italy would be free both to strike eastward through the ‘gaps’, notably the Ljubljana gap which led into northern Yugoslavia and so towards Hungary, and also to launch major amphibious operations from the northern Italian ports across the Adriatic, as the commanders of Land Forces Adriatic, supported by the Balkan Air Force (established at Bari in June 1944), had already begun to do on a small scale. At a meeting with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill concluded a remarkable, if largely unenforceable, agreement advocating ‘proportions of influence’ between Russia and Britain in the Balkans. Unlike the Americans, Churchill continued to be fascinated by the opportunities that a Balkan venture offered. In the event it was not Allied scheming but German force allocation that decided the issue. By the time the Fifth and Eighth Armies reached the Gothic Line, their strength stood at only twenty-one divisions, while that of the German Tenth and Fourteenth, thanks to the transfer of five fresh formations and the manpower for three others, had increased to twenty-six. Although the Gothic Line was eighty miles longer than the Winter Position, it was backed by an excellent lateral road, the old Roman Emilian Way from Bologna to Rimini, which allowed reinforcements to be sped from one point of danger to the other, and on the Adriatic coast was backed by no fewer than thirteen rivers flowing to the sea, each of which formed a major military obstacle.