The British replaced in part their medium-range bolt-action rifle, the Enfield No. 4, with various submachine guns (“Sten guns”) that fired the same 9-millimeter pistol cartridge as the Schmeisser, coupling them with the Bren gun, a reliable light machine gun. The Americans were slower to replace the M1 Garand semiautomatic medium-range rifle. Wherever possible they used the Thompson M1928 submachine gun, firing .45-caliber pistol ammunition, but this weapon was in short supply. Americans made do with their M1s, Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs), and light machine guns. It was late 1944 before they introduced the M3 submachine gun (grease gun) in large numbers to compete with the Schmeisser.
The Germans learned to exploit the weaknesses of Americans under fire for the first time. In such cases Americans had the tendency to freeze or to seek the nearest protection. All too often American infantry merely located and fixed the enemy, and called on artillery to destroy the defenders. Only after much experience in 1943 did American infantry learn that the best way to avoid losses was to keep moving forward and to close in rapidly on the enemy.
Tanks could not be used in the mountainous terrain of Italy in massed attacks as Rommel had done in Africa. In Italy tanks largely reverted to the infantry-support role that the British had envisioned for their Matildas and other “I” tanks at the start of the war. However, American tankers and infantry had little training in this role. Infantry and tanks could not communicate with each other. Infantry could not warn tankers of antitank traps and heavy weapons, and tankers could not alert infantry to enemy positions. Consequently, infantry had a tendency to lag behind tanks, and Americans did not work out the smooth coordination of tanks, infantry, and artillery that the Germans had developed long before in their battle groups or Kampfgruppen.
Similar problems developed in the use of tank destroyers (TDs), essentially 75-millimeter guns on open-topped tank chassis. TDs were designed to break up massed German panzer attacks. The Germans no longer massed tanks, but used them as parts of Kampfgruppen. American commanders slowly changed the use of TDs to assault guns to destroy enemy tanks and defensive positions with direct fire.
Finally, the Allies did a poor job of coordinating air-ground operations. Allied fighter-bomber pilots flying at 200 mph often could not distinguish between friendly and enemy forces on the ground. The pilots could not talk to ground units, and vice versa. This resulted in many cases of Allied aircraft bombing and strafing friendly forces. Consequently, Allied troops often fired on anything that moved in the sky. Only in the spring of 1944 did the U.S. Army Air Force deploy forward air controllers (FACs), using light single-engine liaison aircraft (L-5s) that could direct radio communication to aircraft and air-ground support parties at headquarters of major ground units. It was a bit late: the Germans had employed this system in the campaign in the west in 1940 to direct Stuka attacks on enemy positions.
The idea of restricting Allied efforts to southern Italy had been forgotten. Eisenhower set his sights on Rome in a November 8 directive, and was thinking of driving on up at least to Florence and Livorno (Leghorn).
Because of slow Allied progress up the peninsula, Hitler decided to make a prolonged stand in Italy. He dissolved Rommel’s army group in northern Italy, and gave Kesselring Rommel’s divisions—though he sent four of the best to Russia and replaced them with three depleted divisions that needed to recover.
Kesselring also got the 90th Panzergrenadier Division which Hitler had sent to Sardinia. It had withdrawn to Corsica when the Italians surrendered, then to Livorno. Kesselring rushed it to the east coast to help check Montgomery’s belated offensive, which finally developed on November 28.
Montgomery had been reinforced by the 2nd New Zealand Division, giving him five divisions and two armored brigades for the Sangro offensive. Meanwhile the Germans had formed 76th Panzer Corps to oppose 8th Army. This corps had received 65th Infantry Division, a raw and ill-equipped force of mixed nationalities, replacing 16th Panzer Division, being sent to Russia. Otherwise, the corps had only remnants of 1st Parachute Division and 26th Panzer Division, which was still en route to the Adriatic coast.
Montgomery intended to smash the Sangro line, drive to Pescara, get astride the highway to Rome, and threaten the rear of German forces holding up 5th Army.
The attack started under cover of an immense air and artillery bombardment. Montgomery had five soldiers to Kesselring’s one, and 65th Division gave way, withdrawing behind the Sangro to the main line farther back. Here the division held on firmly, giving 26th Panzer and 90th Panzergrenadier Divisions time to come up. These reinforcements slowed the British to a crawl. It took till December 10 to cross the Moro River, eight miles on, and until December 28 for Canadians to clear Ortona, two miles beyond the Moro. Montgomery was checked at Ricco, halfway to Pescara. He had been forced into a stalemate by the end of the year, when he gave up his command to Oliver Leese, and returned to England to take over 21st Army Group in preparation for the cross-Channel invasion of Normandy.
Mark Clark’s 5th Army had risen to ten divisions, but two of them, the British 7th Armored and the U.S. 82nd Airborne, were being withdrawn for the Normandy invasion. Kesselring now had four divisions facing Clark, with one in reserve.
Clark’s offensive started on December 2, aiming to crack—in a headlong attack—the mountain barrier west of Route 6 and the Mignano Gap. He used 10th Corps and the new U.S. 2nd Corps under Geoffrey Keyes. In heavy attacks, supported by massive artillery bombardment, the Allies made some progress, but at heavy cost. By the second week of January 1944 the offensive had petered out, still short of the Rapido River and the forward edge of the Gustav line. Losses had risen almost to 40,000, far exceeding German casualties, plus 50,000 Americans who had become sick in the cold and wet struggle in the mountains.
Marshal Kesselring had the most insightful comment on Allied leadership in Italy:
The Allied high command’s dominating thought was to make sure of success, a thought that led it to use orthodox methods and material. As a result it was almost always possible for me, despite inadequate means of reconnaissance and scanty reports, to foresee the next strategic or tactical move of my opponent.
By January 1944 Italy was already a secondary theater. German and western Allied attention was turning toward a direct confrontation on the beaches of northern France in the spring.
The Teheran conference between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in November 1943, immediately preceded by the Anglo-American conference at Cairo, confirmed the priority of Operation Overlord, along with Anvil, a supplementary landing in the south of France.
The role of Italy in Allied planning shrank to that of keeping as many German forces as possible from being moved to France. The Allied commander in Italy, Sir Harold Alexander, got only the task of capturing Rome, and, later, of driving up to the Pisa-Rimini line. Therefore the terrible battles that followed in the winter and spring of 1944 had an anti-climactic air even as they were being fought.
It was well into January 1944 before 5th Army moved up to the Gustav line, which extended from the mouth of the Garigliano River on the west to Castel di Sangro in the center of the peninsula.
This barrier promised to be formidable, and the Allied commanders decided the easiest way to lever the Germans out of it and break their hold on Rome was to make an amphibious landing at Anzio, halfway between the Gustav line and Rome.
The plan was for Mark Clark’s 5th Army to launch a direct assault against the Gustav line around January 20. Once the main advance got going, the U.S. 6th Corps was to land at Anzio. The hope was that German forces would have to turn back from the Gustav line to deal with the threat, thus weakening the line and making a breakthrough easier, thereby allowing 5th Army to link up with 6th Corps.
The campaign started well enough. The British 10th Corps forced a crossing of the Garigliano near its mouth on January 17–18, 1944, and formed a strong bridgehead around the town of Minturno. But the attack on January 20 by the U.S. 2nd Corps across the Rapido R
iver a few miles south of Cassino proved a bloody failure. The aim was to swing around to the north and seize the abbey on Monte Cassino and the town of Cassino at its base. They dominated Route 6, the main highway between Naples and Rome, axis of the Allied advance.
The two leading regiments of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division were largely destroyed by German paratroopers. An attempted assault by the British 46th Division on the immediate left also failed.
On January 22 John P. Lucas’s 6th Corps landed unopposed at Anzio (Operation Shingle). The initial forces were the U.S. 3rd and the British 1st Divisions, plus Commandos and Rangers, a parachute regiment, and two tank battalions. Lucas’s job was to reach the Alban Hills south of Rome, and cut Routes 6 and 7, over which supplies reached the Gustav line.
Kesselring hadn’t expected a lodgment at Anzio. An invasion farther north would have been much more dangerous. All he had in place was a battalion of the 29th Panzergrenadier Division, which was resting there.
But General Lucas was a cautious, pessimistic officer who moved with extreme slowness. In contrast, Kesselring reacted with great speed and skill. He told the forces on the Gustav line to stand firm, and switched the Hermann Göring Division and other elements to Anzio. Hitler, hoping a disaster at Anzio might deter a landing in France, told Kesselring he could call on all divisions in northern Italy and was sending two more divisions, plus two heavy tank battalions.
In eight days, Kesselring brought up elements of eight divisions to Anzio and set up a new army, the 14th, under Hans Georg von Mackensen, to contain it. Meanwhile Lucas—with Clark’s approval—refused to advance until he had consolidated the beachhead. This might have been a blessing. Lucas and his subordinates were so super-cautious that a quick advance inland under their leadership might have led to disaster. They would have been easy targets for a German flank attack.
The first real attempt to push inland didn’t start till January 30, and Germans already in place stopped it. The whole Anzio beachhead, only six miles deep by fifteen miles wide, was in range of German artillery, which promptly began to harass it. In addition, Luftwaffe aircraft made repeated bombing raids on the crowded Allied shipping around Anzio. Allied aircraft, operating out of the Naples area, were unable to stop these raids.
The Anzio beachhead—instead of being a lever to wrench the Germans out of the Gustav line—became a hemmed-in force in need of being rescued. As Winston Churchill commented, “I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.”
Mark Clark now decided to try to break the impasse at Cassino by attacking from the north side. On January 24, the U.S. 34th Division did that, assisted by a French four-division corps under Alphonse Juin, which joined 5th Army in January. It was hard going for the Americans against the German 14th Panzer Corps under Frido von Senger und Etterlin, and they were withdrawn February 11, exhausted and depleted.
A new corps under Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg now came up, containing the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Divisions (with combined British and Indian units).
Francis Tuker, commanding 4th Indian, urged an indirect approach on Cassino through the mountains to the north, a plan favored by the French. But Freyberg rejected the proposal, and Tuker, whose division drew the job of tackling Monte Cassino, asked that the historic monastery crowning the height be neutralized by aerial bombardment. There was no evidence the Germans were using the monastery. They had not even entered it, and General Senger had evacuated the monks and works of art. But the structure was a symbolic deterrent to the Allies, and Clark and Alexander authorized the operation.
On February 15, 1944, a tremendous attack dropped 450 tons of bombs that demolished the famous monastery. The Germans now felt they could occupy the rubble. Consequently, the attack actually increased the strength of their defenses. On two successive nights 4th Indian tried in vain to seize a knoll that lay between its position and Monastery Hill. On the night of February 18 the division made a third attempt. Fighting was desperate, and all the men reaching the knoll were killed. Later that night a brigade bypassed the knoll and moved directly toward the monastery, only to encounter a concealed ravine heavily mined and covered by German machine guns. Here the brigade lost heavily and had to retreat. Meanwhile 2nd New Zealand Division crossed the Rapido just below Cassino town, but German tanks counterattacked and forced it back. The direct attack on Cassino had failed.
On the Anzio front the Germans counterattacked on February 16, and on the next two days they threatened to reach the beaches and split the bridgehead in two. The Germans were held only by the desperate defense of the British 1st and 56th and American 45th Divisions. A new attitude appeared within the bridgehead when Lucian K. Truscott arrived, first as Lucas’s deputy, then as his successor. The Germans tried once more on February 28, but Allied aircraft broke up the assaults, and on March 4 Mackensen stopped.
The Italian campaign was beginning to resemble the gruesome close-in battles on the western front in World War I, with losses just as great and gains just as minuscule.
On March 15, the Allies launched another direct attack on Cassino. The New Zealand Division was to push through the town, after which 4th Indian Division was to assault Monastery Hill. This time Cassino town was the main target. A thousand tons of bombs and 190,000 shells rained down on town and hill. As the bombers flew away and the cannon fire lifted, the infantry advanced.
“It seemed to me inconceivable,” Alexander said, “that any troops should be left alive after eight hours of such terrific hammering.” But they were. The 1st Parachute Division fought it out amid the rubble with the advancing New Zealanders. By nightfall two-thirds of the town was in Allied hands, while 4th Indian Division came down from the north and, the next day, got two-thirds of the way up Monastery Hill.
But that was the end. British tanks couldn’t negotiate the craters made by bombs and shells, the Germans filtered in reinforcements, and the weather broke in storm and rain. On March 23 Alexander halted the operation. Once more stalemate had fallen on Cassino.
The continued failures at Cassino demonstrated the basic mistake of the Allied strategy in Italy. Cassino was important because it barred entry to the valley of the eastward-flowing Liri River, the only route in this part of Italy that could accommodate Allied tanks, artillery, and vehicles. Route 6, the Naples-Rome highway, ran through it.
The Allies tried first to force a crossing of the Rapido a few miles south of Cassino, with the intention of swinging up and around the town and Monastery Hill. This had failed with heavy losses because the Rapido was fast-moving and German artillery could fire from valleys just west of Cassino.
The Allies had also tried to swing around Cassino from the north, but the Apennines in this region consist of rocky escarpments and deep ravines, which limited movement to small bodies of men supplied by mules.
Why did the Allies not swing entirely around Rome and the mountains and land farther up the Italian boot, either on the western or eastern coast? Allied sea power was overwhelming, and an invasion could have been made almost anywhere. It would have been easiest along the Adriatic coast, especially around Rimini or Ravenna in the great Po Valley of northern Italy, where there were no mountains to harbor German defenders, and the terrain would have been better for Allied tanks and other vehicles. But any strategic landing beyond major German troop dispositions—that is, beyond where a landing could be easily contested, not close by as Anzio was—would force an enemy withdrawal from points south.
Churchill was not a great strategist, but he saw the opportunity plainly. He telegraphed Alan Brooke on December 19, 1943: “There is no doubt that the stagnation of the whole campaign on the Italian front is becoming scandalous…. The total neglect to provide amphibious action on the Adriatic side and the failure to strike any similar blow on the west have been disastrous.”
But the Allies had elected to conduct a straight-ahead, direct campaign right through the mountains of Italy, and at Cassino they experienc
ed the bloody consequences of that strategy in full measure.
In cooperation with British General H. Maitland Wilson, who had taken a new post as supreme commander, Mediterranean, in January 1944, Alexander developed another plan to break through the Gustav line. He shifted most of 8th Army westward to take over the Cassino–Liri Valley sector, leaving only a single corps on the Adriatic side of the Apennines. Clark’s 5th Army, along with the French corps, assumed responsibility for the Garigliano River sector along the coast and the Anzio beachhead.
Alexander’s plan was another brute-force effort, to be launched May 11. It called for 8th Army to crack through at Cassino, 5th Army to thrust across the Garigliano, and the Anzio force to break out toward Valmontone on Route 6. Alexander assembled sixteen Allied divisions along the Gustav line against six German divisions (with one in reserve). Twelve were lined up from Cassino to the mouth of the Garigliano, and four were close behind to exploit any breakthrough by thrusting up the Liri Valley in hopes of piercing a second defensive line, six miles in the rear, before the Germans could occupy it.
Three of 8th Army’s nine divisions were armored. Because dry weather had come, the tanks would have far better going than in the wet and muddy winter. In the attack, a Polish Corps of two divisions was to tackle Cassino, while the British 13th Corps of four divisions was to advance about three miles south toward St. Angelo. The attack was supported by 2,000 guns, while all available Allied aircraft made heavy attacks on the German rail and road network.
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 25
