by John Keegan
This terrain and the onset of Italy’s autumn rains now ensured that Kesselring’s hold on northern Italy, if not the whole of the Gothic Line itself, could not be broken. Alexander, correctly assessing that the route towards the great open plain of the river Po was more easily negotiable on the right than on the left, secretly had transferred the bulk of the Eighth Army to the Adriatic coast during August. On 25 August it attacked, broke the Gothic Line and advanced to within ten miles of Rimini before being halted on the Couca river. While it paused to regroup, Vietinghoff, commanding the Fourteenth Army, rushed reinforcements along the Emilian Way to check its advance. The British renewed the offensive on 12 September but were fiercely opposed; the 1st Armoured Division lost so many of its tanks that it had to be withdrawn from offensive operations. In order to divert enemy strength from the British front, Alexander ordered Clark to open his own offensive on the opposite coast on 17 September, through the much less promising territory north of Pisa. So narrow is the coastal plain there, dominated by heights reminiscent of Cassino, that it made very slow progress. During October and into November, as rains turned the whole battlefield into a slough and raised rivers in unbridgeable spate, the campaign dragged on, while ground was won in miles and lives lost in thousands. The Eighth Army lost 14,000 killed and wounded in the autumn fighting on the Adriatic coast, the Canadians bearing the heaviest share, for they were in the forefront. The Canadian II Corps took Ravenna on 5 December and pushed onwards to reach the Senio river by 4 January 1945. The Fifth Army, attacking through the mountains of the centre, reached to within nine miles of Bologna by 23 October; but it had also lost very heavily – over 15,000 killed and wounded – and was confronted by terrain even more difficult than that on the Eighth Army’s front. So weakened was it that a surprise German offensive in December won back some of the ground it had captured in September north of Pisa.
Losses, terrain and winter weather determined that at Christmas 1944 the campaign in Italy came to a halt. It had been a gruelling passage of fighting, almost from the first optimistic weeks of landing and the easy advances south of Rome sixteen months earlier. The spectacular beauty of Italy, natural and man-made, its scenery of crags and mountain-top villages, ruined castles and fast-flowing rivers, threatened danger at every turn to soldiers bent on conquest. The painters whose landscapes had delighted European collectors had left warnings to any general with a sharp eye of how difficult an advance across the topography they depicted must be to an army, particularly a modern army encumbered with artillery and wheeled and tracked vehicles. Salvator Rosa’s savage mountain landscapes and battle scenes spoke for themselves. Claude Lorrain’s deceptively serene vistas of gentle plains and blue distances were equally imbued with menace; painted from points of dominance that an artillery officer would automatically choose as his observation post, they demonstrate at a glance how easily and regularly ground can be commanded by the defender in Italy and what a wealth of obstacles – streams, lakes, free-standing hills, mountain spurs and abrupt defiles – the countryside offers. The engineers were the consistent heroes of the campaign in Italy in 1943-4; it was they who rebuilt under fire the blown bridges the Allied armies encountered at five- or ten-mile intervals in the course of their advance up the peninsula, who dismantled the demolition charges and booby traps the Germans strewed in their wake, who bulldozed a way through the ruined towns which straddled the north-south roads, who cleared the harbours choked by the destruction of battle. The infantry too proved heroic: no campaign in the west cost the infantry more than Italy, in lives lost and wounds suffered in bitter small-scale fighting around strongpoints at the Winter Position, the Anzio perimeter and the Gothic Line. Such losses were shared equally by the Allies and the Germans, as were the natural hardships of the campaign, above all the bleakness of the Italian winter. As S. Bidwell and D. Graham put it in their history of the campaign: ‘A post on some craggy knife-edge would be held by four or five men . . . if one of them were wounded he would have to remain with the squad or find his own way down the mountain to an aid post . . . if he stayed he was a burden to his friends and would freeze to death or die from loss of blood. If he tried to find his way down the mountain it was all too easy . . . to rest in a sheltered spot . . . or lose his way . . . and die of exposure.’ Many of the Germans of the 1st Parachute Division who held Cassino so tenaciously must have come to such an end; many, too, of the Americans, British, Indians, South Africans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Poles, Frenchmen and (later) Brazilians who opposed them there and at the Gothic Line.
Losses and hardships were made the more difficult to bear, particularly by the Allies, because of the campaign’s marginality. The Germans knew that they were holding the enemy at arm’s length from the southern borders of the Reich. The Allies, after D-Day, were denied any sense of fighting a decisive campaign. At best they were sustaining the threat to the ‘soft underbelly’ (Churchill’s phrase) of Hitler’s Europe, at worst merely tying down enemy divisions. Mark Clark, commander of the Fifth Army and, under Alexander, of Allied Armies Italy, sustained his sense of personal mission throughout. Convinced of his greatness as a general, he drove his subordinates hard, and his frustration at the deliberation of British methods poisoned relations between the staffs of the Fifth and Eighth Armies – a deplorable but undeniable ingredient of the campaign. More junior commanders and the common soldiers were sustained, once the spirit of resistance to German occupation had taken root among the Italians, by the emotions of fighting a war of liberation. No great vision of victory drew them onward, however, as it did their comrades who landed in France. Their war was not a crusade but, in almost every respect, an old-fashioned one of strategic diversion on the maritime flank of a continental enemy, the ‘Peninsular War’ of 1939-45. That they were continuing to fight it so hard when winter brought the campaigning season to an end at Christmas 1944 was a tribute to their sense of purpose and stoutness of heart.
TWENTY
Overlord
Until November 1943 Hitler refused to concede to his generals or associates that the Greater Reich was threatened by the opening of a Second Front in the west. Although from the first weeks of Barbarossa Stalin had pinned his hopes on Britain’s rescuing the Soviet Union from defeat and, after December 1941, on an Anglo-American counter-invasion of western Europe, Hitler would have none of it. In June 1942 he told the staff of the army’s western headquarters that, having thrown the British out of the continent once, he no longer feared them, while he relished the opportunity, should it arise, of teaching the Americans a lesson. Moreover, on 19 August a major Allied reconnaissance-in-force raided the port of Dieppe in northern France, and only 2500 of the 6000 largely Canadian troops committed managed to return to Britain. This defeat reinforced Hitler’s confidence. Although the raid had been planned as an experiment to test how difficult it would be to seize a harbour for the opening of a Second Front, Hitler understandably chose to believe he had inflicted a severe blow that would deter the British and Americans from staging a full-scale invasion. In September, during the course of a three-hour speech to Goering, Albert Speer, his Armaments Minister, and Rundstedt, the Commander-in-Chief West (Oberbefehlshaber West – OB West), he told them that, if an invasion could be delayed beyond the spring of 1943, when the Atlantic Wall would be complete, ‘nothing can happen to us any longer’. He went on: ‘We have got over the worst of our foodstuffs shortage. By increased production of anti-aircraft guns and ammunition the home base will be protected against air raids. In the spring we shall march with our finest divisions down into Mesopotamia [Iraq] and then one day we shall force our enemies to make peace where and as we want.’
By November 1943 the bloom had gone off the apple. The dismissiveness expressed in 1942 had been rooted in reality. Then the British army was indeed still reeling from the shock of the defeat of 1940; the Americans were not yet hardened to the rigours of warfare against the Wehrmacht. His skilful penetration of the weak spots in an adversary’s position rightly co
nvinced him, even in the absence of objective evidence, that there would be no Second Front in 1942 and probably not in 1943 either. However, by the autumn of that year, his blithe minimisation of Germany’s difficulties no longer held good. The Anglo-American air offensive against the homeland was growing in weight. The German armies had been driven not only far from the approaches to Iraq but also out of the richest food-producing areas of western Russia (Kiev, capital of the ‘black earth’ region, fell to the Red Army on 6 November 1943). The British had regained and the Americans won their self-confidence as combat soldiers. Worst of all, the Atlantic Wall had not been completed, in many sectors not even built.
On 3 November 1943, therefore, Hitler issued Führer Directive No. 51, one of the half-dozen most important of his instructions to the Wehrmacht of the whole war.
The hard and costly struggle against Bolshevism has demanded extreme exertions. . . . The danger in the east remains, but a greater danger now appears in the west: an Anglo-Saxon landing. The vast extent of territory in the east makes it possible for us to lose ground, even on a large scale, without a fatal blow being struck to the nervous system of Germany. It is very different in the west. Should the enemy succeed in breaching our defences on a wide front here the immediate consequences would be unpredictable. Everything indicates that the enemy will launch an offensive against the Western Front of Europe, at the latest in the spring, perhaps even earlier. I can therefore no longer take responsibility for further weakening the west, in favour of other theatres of war. I have therefore decided to reinforce its defences, particularly those places from which long-range bombardment of England [with pilotless missiles] will begin.
Führer Directive No. 51 went on to specify the particular measures for strengthening OB West’s forces. They included the reinforcing of Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions in his zone of operations and a guarantee that no formation would be withdrawn from it except with Hitler’s personal approval. In November 1943 OB West (Rundstedt) commanded all German ground forces in Belgium and France, organised into the Fifteenth and Seventh Armies (Army Group B) and the First and Nineteenth Armies (Army Group G), from his headquarters at Saint-Germain near Paris. The boundary between the army groups ran west-east along the Loire, with the First Army defending the Biscay and the Nineteenth the Mediterranean coast, the Fifteenth Army in Belgium and northern France and the Seventh in Normandy. Unbeknown to all in Germany, it was in Normandy that the Allied stroke was destined to fall.
Rundstedt’s divisional strength stood at forty-six, soon to be raised to sixty, including ten Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions. Six of the armoured divisions were north of the Loire, four south. That was entirely appropriate. Jodl, Hitler’s operations officer, warned an assembly of the Nazi Party’s Gauleiters at the time Directive No. 51 was issued that ‘along a front of 2600 kilometres it is impossible to reinforce the coastal front with a system of fortification in depth at all points. . . . Hence it is essential to have strong mobile and specially well-equipped reserves in the west for the purpose of forming Schwerpunkte [centres of military effort].’ Strategic analysis revealed that the Allies’ own Schwerpunkte against the Westheer, even if reinforced by another in the Mediterranean, must be formed by forces assembling in Britain and lie on the Channel coast. Hence the Panzer concentration north of the Loire.
The Panzer concentration was critical because the rest of OB West’s divisions were barely mobile. The two parachute divisions stationed in Brittany and the army divisions with numbers in the 271-278 and 349-367 series were of high and adequate quality respectively, though lacking mechanised transport. The rest were not only of average to low quality but were wholly dependent on the French railway system if they were to leave their permanent bases for the invasion front. Their artillery and supply units were horse-drawn; their infantry units, except for bicycle reconnaissance companies, manoeuvred by marching at a speed no faster than Napoleon’s or, indeed, Charlemagne’s. Moreover, they would have to move under the threat of Allied airpower, which, he had already conceded on 29 September 1942, would be absolutely supreme. Railway and even road movement would be severely inhibited. It was therefore vital that the Panzer divisions, which alone had the capability for rapid, off-road movement, should be positioned close to the invasion zone, to hold a line until the infantry reinforcements arrived. The coast itself would be garrisoned by ‘ground-holding’ (bodenständige) divisions, unable to manoeuvre but protected from Allied air and naval bombardment by concrete fortifications. The beaches that their positions overlooked were to be mined, wired and entangled with obstacles; much of this defensive material was to be stripped from the Belgian fortified zone and the Maginot Line which had survived the onslaught of the Wehrmacht in 1940.
The Atlantic Wall scheme was excellent in theory. When complete it would go far to offset the feebleness in the west of the Luftwaffe, which at the end of 1943 deployed only 300 fighters in France (to hold in check Allied air forces whose strength would total 12,000 aircraft of all types on the day of the invasion); but on the day that Führer Directive No. 51 was issued the Atlantic Wall had still far to go before completion. During the two years when Hitler had discountenanced the invasion danger, the Westheer had led a bucolic life. Its commander, Gerd von Rundstedt, was not a firebrand. After his removal from the Eastern Front in December 1941 he had settled into a comfortable routine at Saint-Germain reading detective stories and allowing his staff officers to practise English conversation, a mark of the ‘aristocratic’ style that Wehrmacht traditionalists cultivated to differentiate themselves from the ‘Nazi’ generals Hitler favoured in the Ostheer. The lower ranks behaved accordingly. Life in France was agreeable. Live and let live characterised relations with the population, which, if not actively collaborationist, lent little support to the embryo resistance movement. Forced labour (service du travail obligatoire), introduced in 1942, was unpopular because it conscripted young Frenchmen to factories in Germany, to join the million French prisoners of war still held there in 1943; so, too, was la Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary police force, which punished the contempt of fellow countrymen by exceeding its powers. The cost of occupation rankled; the German levy on the French treasury, exacted at a 50 per cent overvaluation of the mark, not only forced France to pay for the indignity of having a German army in its territory but allowed the Reichsbank to make a profit on the transaction. However, these were aspects of defeat which did not affect the French people at large. Most accepted the presence of the (‘very correct’) German soldiers with resignation; the Germans, more than content to be posted to the only easy billet in the Wehrmacht’s zone of operations, gathered roses while they might, ate butter and cream, and worked no harder than their officers drove them.
The cosy life ended with the arrival of Rommel in December 1943, first to inspect the defences, then to take command of Army Group B. Since his invaliding from Tunisia in March he had held an undemanding post in northern Italy, but on the promulgation of Directive No. 51 he was selected by Hitler to put fire and steel into the western defences. According to his biographer, Desmond Young, ‘to the snug staffs of the coastal sectors [he] blew in like an icy and unwelcome wind off the North Sea.’ Rommel found that since 1941 only 1.7 million mines had been laid – he reminded his staff that the British had laid a million in two months during his campaign against them in North Africa – though explosive held in France was sufficient to manufacture 11 million. Within weeks of his arrival, mine-laying had increased from a rate of 40,000 to over a million a month and by 20 May over 4 million were in place. Between November and 11 May half a million obstacles were laid on the beaches and likely airborne landing-grounds, and he had ordered the delivery of an additional 2 million mines a month from Germany. On 5 May he dictated to his secretary: ‘I am more confident than ever before. If the British give us just two more weeks, I won’t have any more doubt about it.’
The defence of the French coast could not, however, be assured by the Atlantic Wall alone. Rommel, a m
aster of mobile warfare but also a respectful veteran of campaigns fought under conditions of Western Allied air superiority, knew that he would have to get tanks to the water’s edge at the moment the Allies disembarked if they were to be defeated. To do so he must solve two problems: the first was to identify where they would land; the second was to establish the shortest possible chain of command between himself and his armoured units. The problems were interconnected. To justify taking personal command of the Panzer divisions under OB West he must be able to show that he knew where they could be best used; but he could not credibly lay claim to the divisions as long as the Allies wreathed their intentions in a mist of misinformation and deception.
The war of mirrors
The Allied deception plan for Operation Overlord, as the invasion of north-west Europe was codenamed at the Washington Trident Conference in May 1943, was deliberately conceived to persuade the enemy that the landing would fall in the Pas de Calais, where the Channel is narrowest, rather than in Normandy or Brittany (though Hitler’s fears of a descent on Norway, to which he was acutely sensitive, were also kept alive, with the profitable result of fixing eleven German divisions there throughout 1944-5). A Pas de Calais landing made military sense: it entailed a quick crossing to level and sandy beaches, which were not closed off from the hinterland by high cliffs, whence the exploitation route into the Low Countries and Germany was short. Operation Fortitude, as the deception plan was codenamed, centred on the implantation in the consciousness of German intelligence – the Wehrmacht’s Abwehr and the army’s Foreign Armies West section – of the existence, wholly fictitious, of a First US Army Group (FUSAG), located opposite the Pas de Calais in Kent and Sussex. False radio transmissions from FUSAG were sent over the air; false references were made to it in bona-fide messages. General Patton, whose reputation as a hard-driving army leader was known to the Germans, was mentioned as its commander. Moreover, to reinforce the notion that FUSAG would debark on the short route to the Reich, the Allied air forces in their programme of bombardment preparatory to Overlord dropped three times the tonnage east of the Seine as they did to the west. By 9 January 1944 the deception had borne fruit: an Ultra intercept referred to FUSAG on that day and others followed. It was the proof the Fortitude operators needed that their plan was working. They could not, of course, expect to distract the attention of the Germans from Normandy, the chosen landing site, for good; but they hoped to minimise German anticipation of a Normandy landing until it was actually mounted, and thereafter keep alive the anxiety that the ‘real’ invasion would follow in the Pas de Calais at a later stage.
