Apart from the obvious measures of regular rest, recreation and close attention to health and general well-being, the most effective way to maintain morale is purposeful activity. Though the great offensive was not to be launched until the first week in April both the Allied armies were kept busy. The last service of the gallant and ever aggressive Canadians in Italy was to eliminate two troublesome bridgeheads on the right bank of the Senio. McCreery kept his divisions out of the line hard at work in strenuous river-crossing exercises. Truscott was more fortunate in the matter of replacements, as he was allotted 7,000 surplus to divisional establishments. These he attached for training to the regiments they would join to make good casualties. Better still, a new specialist unit, the US 10th Mountain Division, joined the Fifth Army. Elitism ran counter to US Army traditions (although the superiority of the US Airborne divisions had already breached that principle) but inevitably when the 10th Division was formed it attracted fit, adventurous young men with college educations, including expert rock-climbers and skiers.
Truscott put this welcome reinforcement to good use. Soon after he had assumed command he concluded that it would be bad tactics to renew the attack on Bologna along the direct axis (Highway No. 65) where the autumn offensive had already failed. Although the US 2nd Corps was tantalisingly close to the city it still had to traverse some very difficult mountain country and the German defences on this obvious approach were well developed and proof against even the heaviest bombardment. Far better, thought Truscott, to choose the longer and more difficult route west of the River Reno and Highway No. 64. There the right flank of the 4th Corps, held by the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, angled back from the left of the 2nd Corps as General Crittenberger’s role in that sector was to guard General Keyes’ left flank. The mission given to the 10th Mountain Division, supported by the Brazilians, was to clear the heights west of the Reno and secure a good jump-off line some six miles ahead. This was accomplished between February 18 and March 5, the division greatly distinguishing itself in this its first action. The opening move was the escalade of a 1,500-foot precipice flanking the axis of advance of the 86th Mountain Infantry Regiment. After dark on the 18th special teams of rock-climbers scaled the cliffs attaching fixed ropes as they went. Thus aided, the rifle companies clambered up without difficulty, the leading battalion arriving on the crest undetected. The division widened the front of its attack the following night, once more making a long ascent in complete silence and infiltrating the German positions on the crests without attracting hostile defensive fire. Thereafter it employed more orthodox tactics with maximum air support and, well supported by the Brazilians, established a nine-mile-wide new front commanding the northern descending slopes of the range. It was an admirable display of specialised battle-craft and strict discipline for a division in its first action, but not cheap, bearing in mind that many of the rank and file were potential NCOs and officers. The cost was 1,140, of whom 309 were killed. Truscott then closed the operation down and turned his attention to planning his main offensive.
In retrospect it seems reasonable to question the need for a final, all-out offensive in Italy. After all, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had already ruled out any far-reaching strategic development in the theatre, it was bound to be costly, not least in civilian casualties. Surely it was obvious that German resistance was about to collapse? In the west the victory of the US armies in the Ardennes had virtually eliminated the German capability for further offensive action. In February the American, British and Canadian armies had cleared the “Siegfried” positions west of the Rhine. In March both British and Americans were across it and fighting in the industrial heart of Germany. By April 1 the US First and Ninth Armies encircled the Ruhr, trapping 325,000 German troops. On the eastern front the vast Soviet armies were on the move from Danzig to the eastern frontier of Austria. Nevertheless, at that time it did not seem that the war was likely to end as early as it did. Hitler was urging the German armies to fight to the bitter end, there were rumours of plans for a fanatical last stand in the Bavarian Alps, and the solid evidence of the extraordinary courage and tenacity displayed by German soldiers on every front. The only possible option open to the Allies once they had decided on the goal of unconditional surrender was to continue at full pressure in Italy, as on every other front.
Alexander’s mission remained clear — to pin as many German divisions in Italy as possible. He considered, quite correctly, that the best means to that end was the liquidation of Army Group “C”. To this could be added the personal and perfectly legitimate ambitions of his three newly appointed commanders. Neither Truscott nor McCreery would have been fit to hold their high appointments had they lacked basic aggressiveness, the urge to engage the enemy. Clark was rather different. He ardently desired renown and at last he was in an operational position to win it, preferably with a spearhead of United States Army divisions. Rightly, he insisted that the 15th Army Group offensive should not be delayed until May, when the weather and going would be perfect, but launched in the first week in April.
While HQ 15th Army Group improved its positions and discussed the plans put forward by its army commanders, Army Group “C” braced itself to meet the expected Allied offensive. Its new commander, von Vietinghoff, considered his position, and found it dire. Admittedly his main front was naturally very strong. The stretch of mountains from the Ligurian coast to Highway No. 64 was easily defended. The centre, in front of Bologna, was naturally strong and well fortified. If the Allies chose to make their main effort on the Adriatic flank they would be faced in succession with assault crossings of the Senio, the Santerno, the Sillaro, the Idice (all prepared for defence) and finally the Reno. But those and the fighting-power of his soldiers were von Vietinghoff’s only assets. He had no strategic reserve. Kesselring, still his superior commander, had removed four divisions from Italy, but there remained eight divisions in each of the two armies, two veteran divisions, the 90th and 29th Panzer Grenadiers as his only mobile operational reserve, two German divisions for the security of the rear areas against the swarming Italian partisans, and five useless Axis-oriented Italian divisions constituting the “Army of Liguria”. Von Vietinghoff’s sole hope of keeping his armies in being, endorsed by Kesselring, was a fighting withdrawal from his winter position first to the line of the Po, then the Adige and finally to the “Voralpenstellung” guarding the passes through the Alps. This plan, the one most feared by Alexander and Clark, because it could rob them of a quick success, was vetoed by Hitler, who thus ensured that Army Group “C” would be hammered to pieces on the anvil of its winter line.
Von Vietinghoff’s difficulties did not end there. The Allied air forces in Italy had systematically wrecked the communication system on which his logistic arrangements depended. Road and rail traffic was disrupted, and the supplies of motor-fuel reduced to a trickle. The German marching divisions were frugal in their requirements and rubbed along with animal draught and even hand-carts, but without petrol the rapid reinforcement of a threatened point in the front by panzer units or transfer of the forward troops to a rear line was impossible. Air power had turned Army Group “C” into a 1918-type force, moving at the infantryman’s pace of two and a half miles an hour.
Meanwhile the first hair-line crack in German resolve to fight to the bitter end became visible in Italy in, of all things, Hitler’s praetorian guard. Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Wolff, head of the SS in Italy (the security, not the fighting, or Waffen SS) was in a position to know the full facts of the situation, and also the least likely to be suspected of treachery. It is evidence of how completely the high officials of the Third Reich were cut off from world opinion that Wolff believed that the United States and Britain could be persuaded to sign a separate peace, leaving Germany to defend her eastern frontier against the “Bolsheviks”. Wolff employed an Italian business man as a go-between to make contact with Mr Allen Dulles, representative of the United States Office of Strategic Services, based in the United States embassy in
Zurich. These negotiations began in February, but made little progress until the Allied breakthrough in April convinced the German commanders that unconditional surrender was their only option.2
For the Allied commanders in Italy, the question was how best to bring this about. When Clark succeeded Alexander at HQ 15th Army Group he believed, as we now know, that at last he could fight the war in the way he wanted, free from the trammels of British direction. His promotion, made at the suggestion of the British Prime Minister, to command a force in which British and Commonwealth units predominated, did nothing to mollify his distrust of the “British” or weaken his conviction that they — with whom he included the natives of the United Kingdom, the Canadians, the New Zealanders, the Indians and the South Africans — were no good, that they could not “carry the ball”. Only real Americans (he believed) could do that. What a man holding great responsibility writes in his private diary or to his wife to relieve his feelings should always be read with tolerance, but to despise the majority of his command is hardly the best qualification for a general.
When General George Marshall visited Clark in his new HQ on the way back from the Yalta conference Clark paraded for him detachments from every national army and ethnic group in the 15th Army Group. Marshall in response declared that the Italian campaign was “the most perfect example of team work among many nations united in a common cause”. This was not Clark’s view. What he had intended to show the Chief of Staff was that his was a “hodge-podge outfit”, lacking in flexibility — its units “can’t be switched around”. “I cannot put a British division or an Indian division on a snow-capped mountain like I can the Americans …”3 Fortunately Clark had the ability to dissemble, essential for a man in high office. Except to Kirkman his Anglophobia was never revealed until his diaries became available to historians. As a result, his original intention for the April offensive was to employ the British and Commonwealth troops in subsidiary and supporting roles. As ever, Clark attached great importance to a territorial goal. He made Bologna his objective, to be captured by the US Army divisions in the Fifth Army in a renewed attack along the direct route, Highway No. 65. He soon found, however, that as an army-group commander he had to defer, as he had forced Alexander to defer, to the views of his army commanders. Truscott insisted on fighting his batde in his own way, as did McCreery. The final plan was not a compromise, a course invariably fatal, but contained the inputs of two highly professional army commanders.
It seems to be a characteristic of wars waged by democracies — and coalitions — that every lesson has to be learnt afresh. The final offensive — it was given no comprehensive code-name — was, at last, after five botched ventures — planned with the aim of the destruction of the German armies in the field; the first principle of warfare. Because of the topography of the winter line there it was not a single concentrated thrust. Instead, the plan was for a double encirclement, what German tacticians termed the “Keil und Kessel” or “wedge and trap”.
Truscott’s intention was to strike into the plain of Emilia west of Highway No. 64 with the 4th Corps, and then side-step the 2nd Corps on to an axis clear of Bologna. One wing of his army was to make for Verona, while the other swung north and then east behind Bologna and south of the Po. To this plan he stuck like glue, remembering Clark’s predilection for prestige goals, like Rome.4
McCreery proposed a similar strategy. He wanted to strike northwards as hard as he could, his first objective being to cross the River Po. As part of his plan he organised a river-crossing task force under HQ 10th Corps. If this went well he would order part of his right wing north-west to meet the right of the Fifth Army behind Bologna. Here he had a tussle with Clark, who still hankered for the rapid fall of the city. Lacking confidence in McCreery and the Eighth Army, he considered that a major breakthrough on the Adriatic flank was unlikely. The Eighth Army, he ordered, was to attack eastwards up Highway No. 9 towards Bologna. Privately, it seems, he thought the best that McCreery could do would be to draw the Army Group “C” reserves away from Truscott. McCreery was to start two days before the Fifth Army, on April 9, with the added advantage of the whole Allied air effort devoted exclusively to his support until the 12th. (As it turned out Truscott had to delay his D-day until the 14th because of bad flying weather on the 12th and 13 th by which date the Eighth Army had broken the winter line.)
McCreery’s operational plan for his northward thrust was imaginative and masterly. His left was in the mountains, his centre was barred by the eastward flowing rivers backed by the Reno, which swings in a great loop behind Bologna and then east and south into the Adriatic, receiving the waters of the others on its way. His right faced the twenty-mile-wide Lake Comacchio, a brackish lagoon separated from the Adriatic by a strip of land. Much of the low-lying ground to its west had been flooded by the breaching of flood-banks and the destruction of pumping stations by the German engineers, who had also prepared defensive positions along each river line. However, he perceived one weak spot. Between the Reno and the southern shore of the lake there was a corridor free of any major water-obstacle running north-west to Argenta on Highway No. 16. A number of amphibious, armoured, tracked assault vehicles (“landing vehicles, tracked” or LVTs) had arrived in Italy, and McCreery obtained sufficient to lift a brigade. Their use could convert L. Comacchio from an obstacle to a highway leading to the German left rear and to control of the “Argenta Gap”.
The Eighth Army’s main attack was entrusted to the 5th Corps (Lieutenant-General Charles Keightley). The 56th Division was to cross L. Comacchio, the New Zealand and the 8th Indian Division were to force the passage of the Senio and Santerno, followed by the reinforced 78th Division, virtually a large “panzer grenadier” division. Once a bridgehead over the Santerno had been secured the 78th was to cross, wheel right, make for the bridge over the Reno at Bastia, join hands with the 56th Division and clear the Argenta corridor. HQ 13th Corps (Lieutenant-General John Harding) was to be ready to take command of the left wing of the 5 th Corps when it divided. The direct thrust to Bologna aligned on Highway No. 9 was to be undertaken by the 2nd Polish and British 13th Corps.5
As usual the 15th Army Group plan included deceptive measures designed to play on the abiding German fear of a landing behind one or other of their sea flanks. Von Vietinghoff was sufficiently convinced to move the 29th Panzer Division to cover the Adriatic coast north of Venice, and when the US 4th Corps mounted a diversionary attack on the Ligurian coast directed on Massa and La Spezia he shifted a regiment of the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division to that area. German intelligence was certain of only one thing — that as soon as the weather improved the Allies would attack in great strength. Traugott Herr, commanding the Tenth Army, torn between exact obedience to the Fuehrer’s orders and his professional judgment, chose to be guided by the latter, but in doing so made a fatal error which was to ensure the success of McCreery’s plan.
Defying the explicit instructions of OKW, Herr decided to establish his main line of resistance along the Santerno out of range of the formidable artillery of the Eighth Army, maintaining only an outpost line on the Senio. His reasoning was sound, but he was unlucky. McCreery had indeed assembled 1,020 guns supplied with 2,000,000 rounds of ammunition to support his opening assault, but he had also been allotted air support on a huge scale. (As the Russians had overrun the targets of the Allied strategic bomber force based in Italy it was free to join the US 22nd Tactical Air Command* and the RAF Desert Air Force in the land battle.) Clark’s decision to attack with his armies in succession from left to right had the great advantage of concentrating this mass of fire-power first on McCreery’s front and then on Truscott’s. On April 9, as Herr had foreseen, a tremendous artillery bombardment struck his attenuated defences behind the Senio, but at the same time repeated attacks by the US heavy bomber force laying “carpets” of twenty-pound fragmentation bombs reduced his main line of resistance along the Santerno. On the 12th the New Zealanders and the Indians had established bridgehea
ds over it, and on the 13th Major-General R. K. Arbuthnott, commanding 78th Infantry Division, began his flank march along the north bank to Bastia.
There is an often-quoted saying that no operational plan ever survives contact with the enemy. That is certainly true if both sides are equally matched or, at least, equally determined. The fact that the plans of both Truscott and McCreery were brilliantly realised does not mean that the spring offensive was a walk-over; that the Allied armies rolled over the emaciated German divisions behind a vast curtain of artillery and air-power. All the records are of intense fighting against a ferocious, last-ditch defence lasting for sixteen days. After that only small isolated groups continued the struggle. Some of the 14th Panzer Corps, hotly engaged with a task force of the 10th Mountain Division, finally laid down their arms at Riva on the north shore of Lake Garda on May 3, one day after the official cease-fire. It took the Poles until the 21st to break through the 1st Parachute Division and enter Bologna. “Une très jolie petite battaille,” said Anders to Harold Macmillan with grim joviality, “Nous avons tué plus que deux mille Boches …”6
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