The Last Great Cavalryman

by Richard Mead

  Much more significantly, 4 Indian Division was also withdrawn into reserve before following 46 Division to V Corps. Dick had launched Operation Vandal, the advance up the Upper Arno valley to Bibbiena, on a two-division front on 4 August, which involved not only attacking along the valley bottom, but also securing the ranges of hills on each side, the Pratomagno to the west and the Alpe di Cantenia to the east. Now, just over a week later, he was reduced to a single infantry division and 9 Armoured Brigade, which remained with the corps but could only be used on rare occasions. The arrival of the Lovat Scouts, who were specifically trained in mountain warfare but lightly armed, did little to redress the balance.

  4 Indian Division had been required for Operation Olive, which saw Leese switching most of his weight to the Adriatic. The Eighth Army commander expected this application of force to carry him right into the Plain of the Po before the end of the year, taking Bologna and rolling up the Gothic Line from the east. The Poles would initially continue their attacks towards Rimini, but the main punch would come from V Corps and I Canadian Corps passing through them on the night of 25/26 August. XIII Corps would pass to Fifth US Army, which had lost not only the FEC but also VI US Corps to the invasion of Southern France. Clark planned to launch his own attack through the mountain passes north of Florence in early September and needed Kirkman’s troops until he could bring up more American divisions. X Corps’ role was greatly diminished, being effectively to maintain what pressure it could with modest resources on a very wide front and to move into any vacuum created by the Germans in their retreat to the Gothic Line.

  This task was made more difficult over the following weeks by further losses. The two yeomanry regiments in 9 Armoured Brigade had been on active service for so long that they were repatriated to the UK, whilst the 3rd Hussars were placed under the direct command of AAI. At much the same time the 12th Lancers were transferred to V Corps.

  As is turned out Leese’s new offensive, followed in due course by Clark’s, drew away some of the Germans formations facing X Corps and the pressure began to come off Dick during late August and September. On 26 August, the day before Bibbiena was entered by a patrol from 10 Indian Division, he was able to get away for a whole day to an officers’ rest centre on an island in Lake Trasimene, spending much of the time sleeping on a deckchair, whilst on 19 September he was able to take his first leave since his stay in Sorrento in early April – just five days, of which three were spent in Rome, where he much enjoyed seeing all the sights and during which he had an audience with the Pope. By the time Dick returned, the German withdrawal to the Gothic Line had been completed and he was able to drive all the way to Bagno di Romagna.

  Dick’s only remaining complete division, 10 Indian, was now itself moved in great secrecy to the Adriatic, where Leese had met considerable resistance and needed further reinforcement. By this time X Corps was down to its lowest level of manpower since it had moved into the Apennines in April. Dick’s only formations of any size were 1 Guards Brigade and 2 AGRA. Otherwise there was an extraordinary mix of units, including two anti-aircraft regiments, one retraining as infantry, the other as field artillery, the Nabha Akhal Battalion, an Indian States Forces unit, and 2271 Field Squadron of the RAF Regiment. The armoured cars of the Household Cavalry Regiment and the King’s Dragoon Guards remained, as did Skinner’s Horse, the 8th Manchester Regiment, and the 1st/4th Essex Regiment, the last three of which had been temporarily left behind by 10 Indian Division. The bottom of the barrel had been well and truly scraped!

  For Dick himself, a dramatic change was about to occur. On 28 September he was summoned to a meeting at HQ AAI, where Alexander told him that Leese would be going to the Far East as Commander, Allied Land Forces South-East Asia, and that Dick had been selected to take over from him as the commander of Eighth Army. Two days later he left X Corps en route to his new HQ.

  Chapter 21

  Army Commander

  Leese left Eighth Army on 1 October, having briefed Dick the previous evening. Following Montgomery’s example, he was taking with him to India all his most senior staff. George Walsh, his chief of staff, stayed behind to introduce Dick to the remaining staff members and the various commanders, following Leese a week later. Dick had brought with him only his Chief Royal Engineer, two more junior staff officers, his jeep driver, his excellent cook and Walter Jones. His most urgent requirement was a replacement for Walsh and he was delighted to be offered Harry Floyd, who had been serving as BGS of VIII Corps, with four months’ experience of the fighting in north-west Europe. Floyd arrived on 20 October.

  Dick knew most of the senior commanders already. Charles Keightley was now GOC of V Corps. After leading 6 Armoured Division in Tunisia he had commanded 78 Division in Italy. Just 43 years old, he was the only commander of a British corps on active service to have been commissioned after the Great War. All Keightley’s divisional commanders had served under Dick within the last 12 months. Hawkesworth was still leading 46 Division, Reid 10 Indian Division and Freyberg 2 New Zealand Division, whilst Dudley Ward of 4 Division and John Whitfield of 56 Division had both commanded brigades in 5 Division on the Garigliano.

  At II Polish Corps, Dick had worked alongside Anders during his sojourn in the High Apennines in the late spring and thought highly of him, while understanding that he brought with him some potentially difficult political baggage relating to his country’s circumstances. This left the one formation with which he was not familiar, I Canadian Corps, although he had exercised oversight of 5 Canadian Armoured Division in England in early 1942 and one of its brigades had served briefly in X Corps. He found the corps commander, Tommy Burns, very uninspiring, but liked what he saw of Chris Vokes of 1 Canadian Division and Bert Hoffmeister of 5 Canadian Armoured Division.

  Extraordinarily, no announcement was made about Leese’s departure or Dick’s appointment until about a month after the handover, although by that time Dick had visited every single formation in Eighth Army and many of their constituent units, so his arrival was far from a secret in the theatre itself. The word spread within Army circles elsewhere, Templer writing from England, where he was still convalescing: ‘Do you remember my saying in First Camino (in that wet chestnut wood) that you’d be an Army Comd. soon?’1 Even Auchinleck, now C-in-C India, to whom Dick had reported on the performance of the Indian divisions, wrote warmly to ‘My dear Dick’ saying, ‘as a former commander of 8th Army myself I am sure I feel it could not be in better hands and I wish you all the good luck in the world,’2 – a remarkable sentiment from one who had sacked Dick not much more than two years earlier!

  Given Dick’s successful career as a corps commander in the theatre, the patronage of Alexander and the vital approval of Brooke, the choice appears to have been inevitable. The only other experienced corps commander in Italy was Kirkman, but he was in the middle of fighting an important battle. Dick wrote to Lettice telling her how pleased Alexander had been, and he had met Brooke for dinner as recently as 22 August, the CIGS confiding in his diary how delighted he was to see him.

  Dick noted in his own diary on the day of his arrival at Eighth Army: ‘Things are very much bogged down and at a standstill at the moment.’ In fact Operation Olive had been a tactical victory but a strategic disappointment. It had achieved its first objective, the Canadians crashing through the Gothic Line along the coast, but Leese had failed to provide them with adequate reserves to exploit their success. On the V Corps front, the Germans proved as tenacious in the foothills as they had been in the mountains and the corps ground to a halt in front of the Coriano ridge. 1 Armoured Division, which had been brought up to drive the advance onwards, arrived late at its start point and failed to establish any momentum. It took a combined attack by both corps to shake the defences loose.

  With the capture of Rimini by the Canadians on 20 September, Eighth Army was on the threshold of the Po Valley, but it was now faced with what seemed like an endless succession of rivers crossing its path, obstacles which were to
prove just as difficult to overcome as the mountain peaks. With heavy rains in the Apennines in these wettest months of the year, the rivers were all in flood, while the low-lying country for which Leese had longed turned out to be a sea of mud. Dick wrote to Lettice two days after he arrived: ‘Today we have had over 2 inches of rain, and only four days ago there were another 2 inches here. The Po valley will be an absolute morass, the poor tanks find Italy almost impossible.’3 Considerable losses had been incurred during Olive, one consequence of which was a decision taken just before Dick arrived to disband 1 Armoured Division to provide reinforcements for other divisions, although his old 2 Armoured Brigade, now commanded by John Combe, remained in Eighth Army as an independent formation.

  Alexander ordered Dick to continue the advance along the axis of Route 9, the old Roman Via Emilia which ran straight as an arrow from Rimini to Bologna. Dick decided that the Canadian Corps should take the coastal sector, whilst V Corps should attack through the foothills. Less deterred than Leese by the terrain to be encountered by the latter, he felt that success there would allow each river to be crossed upstream on relatively firmer ground, so the enemy’s flank could be turned. The attacks began on the night of 6/7 October in appalling weather, but the experienced mountain warriors of 10 Indian Division made good gains immediately, capturing Monte Farneto. This forced a German withdrawal and by 19 October 46 Division was in Cesena, 20 miles up Route 9 from Rimini. Two days earlier the Polish Corps had attacked further to the left and seized the heights of Monte Grosso and then Predappio, the birthplace of Mussolini. The Canadians in the meantime moved steadily up the coast road. By 25 October Eighth Army was over one of the larger rivers, the Savio, and approaching the next one, the Ronco, but on the following day, flooding caused by heavy rain washed away all the bridges on the Savio and the advance ground to a halt.

  Dick had made a good start, but Bologna remained a tantalizingly distant goal and the failure of Fifth US Army to capitalize on its own successful breakthrough of the Gothic Line in the mountains added to the Allies’ frustration. There was no alternative to pressing ahead. Whilst all thoughts of ending the Italian campaign in 1944 had long been abandoned, Alexander was determined to put AAI into the strongest possible position to launch an offensive when the weather improved in the spring. This required a huge effort to penetrate as far as possible before shutting down the front for the winter. After a brief halt to let river levels subside and rebuild the bridges, Eighth Army attacked again, forcing the Ronco near Forli on 30 October and attacking vigorously with 4 and 46 Divisions a week later. By 24 November the latter had reached the River Lamone near Faenza. Dick now launched a coordinated attack all along his front. The Canadians, with Burns replaced as their corps commander by Charles Foulkes, a man much more to Dick’s liking, took Ravenna on 4 December, but Faenza, the next major town on Route 9, was not taken by 2 New Zealand Division until nearly two weeks later.

  By this time significant developments had taken place, both in the command structure and in the political situation in the Mediterranean theatre. The catalyst for the former was the death of Sir John Dill, the head of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, and thereby the senior British representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff and a key intermediary between Brooke and Marshall. Dill’s successor was ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, who had been Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean since Eisenhower’s departure for north-west Europe nearly a year earlier. Alexander, highly acceptable to both Americans and British, was the obvious choice to succeed him, his place being taken by Clark, the senior of the two Allied army commanders. Dick thus found himself back under Clark’s command in 15th Army Group, as AAI was now renamed. When he saw Clark a few days later, he found him delighted by the promotion, his pleasure only tempered by one great fear, that he might be an army group commander who would never fight a big battle. One piece of good news was that the new C-in-C’s successor at Fifth US Army was Lucian Truscott, who had led VI US Corps brilliantly from the South of France to Alsace: he was immensely popular with the British and Dick personally rated him very highly. He was, moreover, a cavalryman, and they spoke the same language. Dick later described him as ‘Very professional. Very frank and forthright. No “ifs” and “buts” for him’,4 which description might just as easily have applied to himself.

  With five US infantry divisions and one armoured division in Italy, and one more infantry division promised for early 1945, together with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force and the transfer of 6 South African Armoured Division from Eighth to Fifth Army, Truscott had enough troops to form two strong and well-balanced corps and in early 1945 XIII Corps, with Kirkman somewhat bruised by his experiences under Clark,5 reverted to Eighth Army. This was just as well, as Dick had been losing formations fast in an unexpected direction.

  During the autumn of 1944, the Germans evacuated Greece to avoid being cut off in the Balkans by the advancing Red Army. The vacuum was filled initially by 2 Parachute Brigade, 23 Armoured Brigade and the Greek Mountain Brigade, the last of which had been fighting in Italy under the Canadians, and later by 4 Indian Division. In December the communist-led ELAS resistance movement rebelled against an order to disarm and fighting broke out in Athens and other cities. The British commander on the spot, Ronald Scobie, called for reinforcements, the first of which to arrive in early December was 139 Brigade from 46 Division. As the situation deteriorated, it was followed by 4 Division and then the rest of 46 Division, whilst HQ X Corps, now under Hawkesworth, was sent to control the military operations. Over a short course of time Dick had lost a significant proportion of his strength and he was to see none of it return other than Hawkesworth’s HQ and 2 Parachute Brigade.

  This seriously exacerbated a problem which Dick was already feeling deeply, the sheer lack of manpower in his army. Great Britain’s human resources were very finite: new conscripts were not coming through fast enough to replace casualties on the three fronts on which it was fighting and priority was accorded to 21st Army Group in north-west Europe. Already steps were being taken to create more infantrymen from surplus resources, as the retraining of anti-aircraft artillerymen and the deployment of men from the RAF Regiment had demonstrated in X Corps. Another major problem was desertion, which had become endemic in Eighth Army. The mountains provided a good refuge for deserters among generally sympathetic inhabitants and it was easy to lose oneself in chaotic cities like Naples. Right from the time of his appointment Dick had seen morale as a major issue among troops who had been fighting for a long time in very difficult conditions and he placed a great deal of emphasis on this in meetings with his commanders. He decided to set up a home leave scheme, focused on the front line infantry, which accelerated once the winter campaigning had come to an end and did a great deal to raise morale.

  Throughout the battles of October and November, Dick covered considerable distances to visit not only the commanders but also the fighting troops, often going as close to the front line as he could. Keightley was later to write: ‘Time and again I had my Corps OP what I thought was pretty forward in the battle, only to find he had his in front of mine.’ Dick’s style was never to interfere with commanders who were doing their job properly, but to be as well informed on developments as possible so that he could offer advice and assistance should it become necessary: Keightley described him as ‘clear, incisive, always helpful’.6 Many of his subordinates thought that Eighth Army under Leese had verged on the chaotic, but that Dick had brought order to the HQ very quickly. Floyd turned out to be an outstanding chief of staff and the officers already there reacted well to the new regime. The experience of John Bland, Dick’s military secretary, was typical. With no knowledge of the new army commander, he had been warned by others to watch his step and decided to play himself in very carefully. He found that he and Dick only talked about essential business for the first few days as each summed the other up, then suddenly there was a great change after which he could talk freely and not just on business, and an understanding
developed which was close to friendship.

  For the first time in his career, Dick now had a direct relationship with the RAF, which had become an integral part of operations. That this was so was largely due to the legacy of Montgomery who had, from the time of his arrival in Egypt, co-located his HQ with the Desert Air Force. The techniques of air support for ground operations had developed considerably since those early days, but there remained a number of problems. Dick raised these with the AOC, Air Vice-Marshal William Dickson, who was succeeded in early December by Air Vice-Marshal Robert ‘Pussy’ Foster. The issues came to a head at a meeting on 19 December when Dick was highly critical of the Desert Air Force’s allocation of priorities and its commitment to attacks in support of his troops. Foster pointed out that he had certain responsibilities outside Eighth Army, was short of equipment to a point at which he was considering disbanding squadrons and was as concerned as Dick about losses of personnel, whom he found difficult to replace. What was at times a difficult discussion cleared the air and from then on the relationship developed into a very close one, and the Desert Air Force played an increasingly important role in future operations. Dick demonstrated his own commitment to the relationship by dining in the RAF mess on Christmas Day.

  On 26 November, the day before the announcement of the command changes, Alexander held his last Army Commanders’ conference, issuing orders to Dick to advance to the line of the River Santerno and, if possible, to secure bridgeheads across it, and to Truscott to attack towards Castel San Pietro on Route 9 south-east of Bologna. In the event the combination of bad weather and a counter-attack by the Germans on Fifth Army’s left flank against a recently arrived and inexperienced division put paid to Truscott’s operation. Dick, on the other hand, used the occasional spells of dry weather to advance all along his front. The Canadians took Ravenna on 4 December and reached the River Senio on 16 December, the same day that the New Zealanders captured Faenza. By 6 January the majority of the German pockets south of the Senio had been eliminated, although there were still stretches where they held the high embankments along the east bank. The Santerno, however, was a river too far. One major problem affecting the capability of both the Allied armies was a serious shortage of artillery ammunition – by the end of 1944 neither had more than two weeks’ supply for full-scale operations. For Dick this was a blessing in disguise, as the troops were exhausted and badly needed to rest, recuperate and train for the year ahead. He was pleased when Clark called a halt to offensive activity.