Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45

TWO

Battle Begins 11–12 May 1944

Manning his machine-gun post amongst the rubble near what had once been the Via Casilina – the main road to Rome – was Hans-Jürgen Kumberg. The 4th Fallschirmjäger Regiment had moved down from the heights of Monte Cassino a month earlier. Although the ruins provided excellent defensive cover, the place was a hell hole, swarming with malaria-infested mosquitoes and reeking of death and sewage. The men were short of just about everything: water, food, cigarettes; reinforcements that had been promised but had not materialised. And they were exhausted: living like sewer rats and being pummelled by relentless Allied harassing fire was not conducive to sleep. Only the Pioneer – engineers – battalion of the 4th Regiment had arrived to help, having joined them alongside the Via Casilina just the day before.

Amongst them was twenty-three-year-old company commander Lieutenant Joseph ‘Jupp’ Klein, a battle-hardened veteran of the Eastern Front, Sicily and the second and third battles of Cassino. His company’s recent leave had been the first since arriving in Italy the previous August following the Sicily campaign and had done much to revive their spirits, but after a day back at the front they still had much to do. There were more machine-gun positions to be built, more tunnels to dig and retreat routes to be prepared.

On the night of 11 May, at eleven o’clock, Jupp Klein was standing on the debris-strewn Via Casilina, talking to one of his corporals, when ‘suddenly from heaven to hell the night became as bright as day’.9 As the shells screamed overhead, Jupp immediately recognised that the sheer scale of the barrage could only mean one thing: the offensive had started – and sooner than any of them had expected.

A few miles north in a concrete bunker along a narrow valley between the mountains above Cassino, Major Georg Zellner, commander of the 3rd Battalion Hoch-und-Deutschmeister Reichs Grenadier Regiment, gathered around him a few of his officers. Throughout the day he had been receiving the best wishes of his men on this his thirty-ninth birthday. Some of his staff had even brought him some flowers picked from the mountain. The major, however, was not in good spirits. Desperately homesick, he hoped for a letter or card from his wife and two young daughters back home in Passau in south-east Germany, but nothing had yet arrived. All day, he’d waited, praying there would be some word from them on the evening’s ration cart but nothing came.

Two bottles of sekt – sparkling wine – had arrived for him and he and a few of his officers were about to share them. Having eased the cork from the first of the bottles, Georg was about to take a birthday gulp when the world seemed to be ripped apart as the massed Allied guns roared the opening salvo of the battle. ‘We drink the sekt anyway,’ he noted drily.10

Watching the barrage from the safety of Monte Trocchio, behind the Allied lines, was twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Ted Wyke-Smith, a former steel engineer from Sheffield now serving with 78th Division Royal Engineers. As commander of a bridging unit, his job was to be amongst the division’s spearhead as it advanced, once the 4th and 8th Indian Divisions had made the initial breakthrough, and build Bailey bridges over the numerous rivers and anti-tank ditches that barred the Allied progress. Ted had been sitting in his tented dugout listening to nightingales in the trees nearby when the guns opened fire. ‘It was terrific,’ he remembers. ‘The noise was incredible and even where we were, several miles behind the lines, the ground trembled.’ Curiously, however, the nightingales began singing again shortly after. ‘It was most extraordinary,’ says Ted, ‘a concerto of nightingales and cannons.’

The first infantry to attack were the unblooded Americans of the 85th Infantry Division, who set off from their start positions the moment the barrage began. None of the French and American troops of Fifth Army had any rivers to cross, but they faced formidable obstacles nonetheless. The 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 338th Infantry Regiment had been ordered to assault a 400-foot high ridge studded with knolls, known as Spigno Saturnia. Terraced and dotted with farmhouses and occasional olive groves, the forward slopes were well defended by the infantry regiments of the German 94th Division.

Company D of the 1st Battalion had been given ‘Point 131’ as their first objective – the most imposing and best-defended height along the ridge. Lieutenant Bob Wiggans had been impressed by the scale of their barrage and had begun the advance through the wheat fields and olive groves with a certain amount of confidence. As the barrage lifted, however, he realised to his horror that the Germans, hidden in their well-constructed concrete bunkers, were almost completely unharmed.

‘We moved forward and immediately drew all kinds of fire,’ he noted, ‘machine gun, automatic weapon, rifle, mortar, and artillery. So many men were killed.’11 Although the Custermen had briefly gained the crest, they became pinned down and with reinforcements unable to reach them, they were forced to fall back halfway down the slopes. As Bob paused, he glanced at a ditch next to him where five men of his company were already lying dead. For two years they’d been training for this moment, yet for so many of them it had all been over in a trice.

It was not only the 1st Battalion that were being stopped in their tracks. Elsewhere along the southernmost part of the front, other American units were coming up against a wall of enemy fire and finding it almost impossible to make any headway. On their right, the French were also struggling. The Goumiers managed to take the heights of Monte Faito, but other objectives could not be taken as the colonial troops had been confronted with German flamethrowers as well as heavy mortar and machine-gun fire.

Meanwhile, in the Liri Valley, barely anything had gone right for the Allies. After the warm day and suddenly cool night, river mists had developed along the River Garigliano and then mingled with the intense smoke caused by the biggest barrage of the war. Despite weeks of endlessly practising river crossings, no one had considered the effect the smoke from the guns would have on visibility. Nor had the planners appreciated just how strong the current would be in the ‘Gari’. Many of those crossing in assault boats were swept away, while others were destroyed by machine-gun fire and mortars. Meanwhile the sappers who had been due to lay six Bailey bridges under the light of the moon had found the fog as thick as the worst kind of London pea-souper. Their task had been almost impossible. Only by a miracle and enormous ingenuity was the first successfully built by 9 a.m. on the 12th. Another was open for business an hour later, but attempts to build the others failed amidst enemy fire and appalling fog.

The Poles had not fared much better. They had not launched their assault until 1 a. m., two hours after the barrage had opened up and some time after the 8th Indian and 4th Divisions had attacked in the valley below. As a result, the German paratroopers were already alert to the possibility of an attack. To make matters worse for the Poles, the 3rd Fallschirmjäger Regiment, whose positions they were attacking, were in the process of relieving a number of their troops, so in the cross-over there were many more enemy forces opposing them than there might have been. This extra German fire power proved decisive. Although the Poles reached their first objectives, they were soon pinned down, and, like the Americans, struggled to get reinforcements and further supplies forward. By evening the following day, they had suffered 1,800 casualties – nearly a quarter of their attacking strength – and had been driven back to their starting positions.

Wladek Rubnikowicz and the 12th Lancers, in their positions below the rubble of the monastery, had been given the task of sending out reconnaissance parties across no-man’s-land, while the main force attacked the high ground to the north of the monastery. It was the first time they had ventured from their positions and although not part of the main attack, they had still come under heavy enemy machine-gun and mortar fire. It was merely a taste of what was to come.

News of the unfolding battle was patchy. Visibility, through the thick blanket of mist and cordite smoke that smothered the valley, was no more than ten yards and only snippets of information trickled in to HQ. Despite the paucity of news, the Signals Office was a hub of activity, with exchanges and calls coming through constantly. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had been cut to pieces at the Liri Appendix, but the division as a whole had captured a small but critical bridgehead. RAF Spitfires were soon patrolling overhead; then USAF bombers came over to paste the German positions. Reinforcements arrived for the Appendix, but the enemy mortaring did not let up.

At his Tactical Headquarters near Venafro, less than ten miles west of Cassino, General Leese appeared to be as unaware of the situation as most of the attacking troops, noting ‘there is a vast smokescreen like a yellow London fog over the battlefield’. Yet the Germans couldn’t see very clearly either. As General Alexander had intended, Feldmarschall Kesselring’s forces had been caught completely off guard. On the morning of the 11th at AOK 10 headquarters, Generaloberst von Vietinghoff ’s chief of staff had reported to Kesselring’s headquarters ‘nothing special is happening here’.12 Allied air superiority had prevented the Luftwaffe from carrying anything but the sparsest of aerial reconnaissance, while carefully executed deception plans had convinced the German commander that the Allies intended to make another amphibious landing, either to reinforce the troops at Anzio, or further north of Rome, near the port of Civitavecchia. Kesselring also had it in mind that the Allies might try an airborne assault in the Liri Valley near Frosinone. Moreover, German intelligence suggested that the Allies had far more troops in reserve and fewer at the front than was the case – which was also considered to be evidence that the Allies were preparing another attack north of the Gustav Line.

Because of this, Kesselring had left the front line relatively thinly defended. Most of his reserves were either north of the Gustav Line or around Rome. Both German armies had been in the process of regrouping since the beginning of May, but once again, thanks to Allied air dominance, movement by day had been all but impossible and so this reorganisation had not yet completely finished.

The Werfer Regiment 71, for example, had been withdrawn from the front line a couple of weeks before and moved back into reserve to give it a chance to regroup and rest. An artillery regiment of six-barrelled rocket mortars – nebelwerfer, or ‘moaning minnies’ as the Allies called them – the Werfer Regiment 71 had needed this break after a long stint of front-line duties. Eighth Battery commander, Oberleutnant Hans Golda, had heard the muffled noises from the front and seen flashes of light to the south, and had gone to bed that night feeling restless. His unease had been well founded. In the early hours he had been woken by Major Timpkes who telephoned with the news that the Allied offensive had begun and that they were to get going to the front right away. ‘Calmly and seriously we got ready to march,’ he noted. ‘Our recovery time had been cut short after two weeks.’13

But German troops in Italy were mostly a stoical bunch. They recognised that while the attacker could dictate the timing of his assault, it was the role of the defender to do his best – to respond as well as he could, whether properly rested or not.

THREE

Churchill’s Opportunism

On the morning of 11 May, the British Prime Minister had dictated a letter to Alexander, his commander in Italy. ‘All our thoughts and hopes are with you in what I trust and believe will be a decisive battle, fought to a finish,’ wrote Churchill, ‘and having for its object the destruction and ruin of the armed force of the enemy south of Rome.’14

Ever since the agreement to invade southern Italy the previous summer, Churchill had been looking forward to the day the Allies captured Rome. ‘He who holds Rome,’ he had told President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin the previous November, ‘holds the title deeds of Italy.’ This was perhaps overstating the case, but there was no doubting the enormous psychological fillip that the capture of Rome – which would be the first European capital to be taken – would provide.

Yet despite the considerable commitment of the Allies – and Britain in particular – to the Italian campaign, their presence there had never been part of any long-agreed master plan. Rather, it had been purely opportunistic, a decision born of a series of unfolding events, each one bringing Italy closer and closer to the typhoon of steel that would rip through it.

The seeds of this momentous decision date back to a meeting between a US general and the Russian Foreign Minister in Washington DC in late May 1942. Normally wary of promising too much, the US Chief of Staff General George Marshall, America’s most senior military figure, nonetheless assured Vyacheslav Molotov that the United States would start a second front before the end of the year. Three days later, speaking to Molotov on 1 June, President Roosevelt reiterated his determination to help the Soviets by engaging German troops on land some time during 1942.

What Roosevelt and Marshall had in mind was an Allied invasion of Continental Europe. America’s commitment to a ‘Europe-first’ rather than a ‘Pacific-first’ policy had been agreed with Britain more than six months before, in December 1941, at the hastily arranged Washington Conference following the US’s entry into the war. The Americans agreed that Nazi Germany, rather than Japan, posed the greatest immediate threat, especially since the Soviet Union appeared to be a hair’s breadth away from defeat. Such a collapse would have been catastrophic for the Western Allies, with the weight of the Nazi war machine turned against them. Furthermore, Germany would then have had access to all the oil and minerals it needed; indeed, it was for these essential raw materials, above all, that Hitler had ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union. Britain and the United States, not the USSR, were regarded as the most dangerous enemy by the Führer.

There was thus considerable urgency to help the Soviet Union as soon as possible. Broadly, they agreed on a policy of ‘closing and tightening the ring around Germany’,15 which was to be achieved in a number of ways: by supporting the Russians materially; by beginning a campaign of aerial bombardment against Germany; by building up strength in the Middle East and wearing down Germany’s war effort; and then striking hard with a punch that would see a combined Allied force make an invasion of Continental Europe, preferably in 1942, but otherwise certainly in 1943.

Yet despite this agreement, Britain and America approached the task of winning the war from completely different strategic viewpoints. Britain’s tactic was to gather the necessary forces and wait for events to dictate where the decisive engagement would take place. The Americans, on the other hand, began with deciding where they should attack and then, working backwards, preparing the forces required for success. The British viewed the American approach as naïve, born of their lack of experience in war and international affairs. Conversely, the Americans thought the British lacked decisiveness and the willingness to make the necessary sacrifices to see the job done.

To begin with, however, these differences in approach were smoothed over. Britain was happy to agree in principle to America’s avowed intention to invade northern France, while it soon became apparent that America was physically unable to stick to its desired timetable. Despite its rapidly expanding manufacturing capabilities and massive mobilisation, n 1942 the United States was still some way behind the times and its armed forces were just a fraction of the size they would balloon to by the war’s end. In September 1939, for example, America’s standing army comprised just 210,000 men – only the nineteenth largest in the world. By the time of Pearl Harbor, this figure had only slightly more than doubled. From there on, the figure would rise exponentially, but there could be no seaborne invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe just yet and most certainly not of France. Nor could Britain be relied on to mount such an operation. With their forces already overstretched in the Far East, in North Africa and the Middle East, the Allies accepted that the proposed invasion would have to take place in 1943 instead – although, as General Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, pointed out during a visit to Washington in June 1942, it was important that no alternative, lesser operation should be undertaken in 1942 that might affect the chances of a successful large-scale assault into Europe the following year.

However, Roosevelt was determined to see his promise to Molotov fulfilled. ‘It must be constantly reiterated,’ he told his Chiefs of Staff on 6 May 1942, ‘that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis material than all the twenty-five nations put together… the necessities of the case called for action in 1942 – not 1943.’16 Moreover, he was all too aware that the American people, having been led into war, would not tolerate a long period of apparent inaction.

It was following the talks with Molotov that Churchill suggested the Allies invade northwest Africa as a means of Roosevelt keeping his word. There were, he argued, all sorts of good reasons for making such a move: the British Eighth Army was already fighting in Egypt and Libya – and in strength – and securing Vichy-French-held Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia would be a less demanding task than an assault anywhere on the Continent. Furthermore, securing the Mediterranean would ease British shipping for future operations in Europe, would enable Allied bombers to attack Germany and Italy from the south, would hasten Italy’s exit from the war, and tie up Germany’s forces – all of which would help Russia.

General Brooke and the British Chiefs of Staff, despite their concerns, soon fell in line with their prime minister. But both the American Chiefs of Staff, and General Eisenhower and his planning team in Britain – Mark Clark included – were deeply sceptical, believing an invasion of north-west Africa would be a major deviation from their main goal – and one that could, if undertaken, see hopes for an assault on France dashed even in 1943. Roosevelt, however, saw some merit in the plan, and having accepted there was no other viable place they could successfully bring about a second front, supported Churchill’s proposals. The misgivings amongst his military commanders may have continued, but Roosevelt had made up his mind and his word was final. The invasion of north-west Africa was on.

This, then, was how the Mediterranean strategy was born. In a remarkably short time, Eisenhower, together with General Clark as his chief planner, diverted their attention to an invasion of north-west Africa instead of France. In November 1942, as the Eighth Army was soundly beating Rommel’s German-Italian army at El Alamein, a joint British and American invasion force landed in Morocco and Algeria. The landings were an astonishing achievement and produced a rapid and overwhelming victory. Admittedly, the opposition had hardly been very stiff, but conception to execution had taken a little over three months. It showed what could be achieved, logistically at any rate.

It certainly got Churchill’s mind whirring. Suddenly he began to see a wealth of opportunities emerging in the Mediterranean. With the whole of North Africa secure, he realised that Britain and America would be ‘in a position to attack the underbelly of the Axis at whatever may be the softest point, i.e. Sicily, southern Italy or perhaps Sardinia; or again, if circumstances warrant, or, as they may do, compel, the French Riviera or perhaps even, with Turkish aid, the Balkans’.17

This memo to his War Cabinet in October 1942 showed that Churchill was beginning to think in terms of a double second front – one that could be opened alongside the cross-Channel invasion. Churchill has often been accused of putting his designs for the Mediterranean above those of the invasion of France, but this was not the case in the autumn of 1942. There were few people more determined to see, for instance, the cross-Channel invasion take place in 1943, something Churchill stuck to longer than most. But he was the arch-opportunist, a man who never lost sight of the ultimate goal, but who was always open to new ways and different approaches to achieving that final victory.

By January 1943, with the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa looking to be inevitable – even if it was taking considerably longer than originally envisaged – a more concrete Mediterranean strategy was agreed. At the Casablanca Conference that month, the decision was made to follow success in North Africa with an invasion of Sicily. This, it was argued, would knock out Axis airfields threatening Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, but more importantly would provide the Allies with the greatest chance of forcing Italy out of the war, and, for the time being, was considered the best way to continue closing the ring around Germany – even if that meant postponing the invasion of northern France for yet another year.

This time it had been General Brooke who successfully manipulated the Americans into following the British way of thinking, and with the subsequent capture of more than 250,000 Axis troops in Tunisia, Churchill finally began to start looking towards the long and mountainous leg of Italy.

The news of the victory in North Africa in May 1943 came as the Prime Minister was steaming his way across the Atlantic for yet more talks, and in the flush of so emphatic a triumph both he and the British Chiefs of Staff were unsurprisingly gung-ho about what might still be achieved that year. German forces, they argued, were now widely stretched, not just in Russia, where the tide seemed to be turning in the wake of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad in February, but elsewhere too: trouble was brewing in the Balkans; in France, which since the Allied invasion of North Africa was now entirely, rather than partially, occupied; resistance was also growing in Norway; and Italy appeared to be on the point of collapse. If and when Italy was out of the war, Germany would have to replace the half-million Italian troops in Greece and the Balkans, not to mention the figure that would surely be diverted to Italy itself, as well as the French Riviera and other borders now vulnerable to Allied attack. This kind of dispersal of forces, they suggested, was just what was needed to help the Allies get a toe-hold in France for 1944.

With this in mind, the British pressed their case to follow an invasion of Sicily with an invasion of southern Italy. This would open up yet further airfields from which to attack the German Reich, and could lead to exploitation eastwards into the Balkans and Aegean. At the very least, they argued, this use of their massed forces would be of greater help to the cross-Channel invasion than transferring most of the troops in the Mediterranean back to Britain. And in the best-case scenario, who was to say such operations might not prove decisive?

If the British were getting carried away with themselves, it was hardly surprising. Not only had they fought through a long, three-and-a-half-year campaign in North Africa, they had had interests in the Mediterranean dating back to Nelson’s day, nearly a hundred and fifty years before. The Americans, however, had none of these emotional attachments and had so far played a far smaller role in the theatre. ‘The Mediterranean,’ General Marshall said at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs in May 1943, was ‘a vacuum into which America’s great military might could be drawn off until there was nothing left with which to deal the decisive blow on the Continent.’18 They had agreed to North Africa, and had been persuaded there was sense to the invasion of Sicily, but they were damned if British over-enthusiasm for the Mediterranean was going to get in the way of the stated and original Number One Goal: the invasion of France.

Determined not to be outmanoeuvred, as they had been at Casablanca, General Marshall insisted that a date for the cross-Channel invasion be decided upon and that this should be the priority over and above any other operations. Only when the British had agreed to 1 May, 1944, for what he now appropriately renamed Operation OVERLORD, and had accepted that a certain number of troops would have to be withdrawn back to Britain to help with that task, would Marshall acquiesce to any further Allied action in the Mediterranean, whether it be the invasion of Italy or anywhere else.

The British agreed with the American terms – after all, they still believed in the invasion of France too – but to Churchill’s great frustration, no definite plan was made about what should follow the successful conquest of Sicily and by 10 July 1943, the day the Allies made their landings on the southern Italian island, the matter had still not been resolved.

The decision to go on and invade southern Italy was finally taken on 16 July. It had, in fact, been prompted by none other than Marshall himself, who proposed an amphibious operation to take Naples and then to push on as quickly as possible to Rome. Needless to say, the British Prime Minister jumped at this suggestion. ‘I am with you,’ Churchill cabled to Marshall on hearing this plan of action, ‘heart and soul.’19

No one was under any illusion, however, that Italy would be an easy place to fight a campaign should the Germans make a stand – not since Belisarius in the sixth century had Rome been captured from the south. Yet despite General Marshall’s lack of enthusiasm for any further Mediterranean strategy, he recognised the necessity of both knocking Italy out of the war for good and drawing German troops away from northern France and Russia; and Italy was the only feasible place in which they could do this. Air superiority was a prerequisite for any seaborne landing, so this ruled out southern France; capturing Sardinia and Corsica were possibilities but would not draw enemy troops or necessarily prompt Italy’s collapse; while an invasion of Greece and the Balkans carried the same risks as Italy, the roads and lines of communication there were considerably worse, nor would there be the benefits of a sizeable launch pad such as Sicily close at hand.

And anyway, both Marshall and the Allied chiefs had good cause for optimism. Momentum was with them, and the gutful of intelligence at their fingertips suggested Germany had no plans to defend southern Italy at all. Rather, it looked as though they intended to fall back to a line more than 150 miles north of Rome. With luck, the invasions would be as lightly defended as those on Sicily. Italy’s southern airfields would be captured and there was no real reason to doubt that some time before Christmas, Rome would be theirs.

All too quickly, however, these high hopes were dashed. Only the occupation of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica – two of the pre-invasion objectives of the Allies – had brought any cause for cheer and these had both been abandoned by the Germans as part of their plans to deal with the Italians’ collapse. In Italy itself, the strong and determined resistance shown by the Germans at Salerno in September 1943 had demonstrated there would be no easy victory. The Italian armed forces – with the exception of a large part of the navy and some of the air force – had been swiftly and efficiently disarmed by the Germans, not just in Italy but throughout the Balkans, Greece and the Aegean as well. In fact all but a few of the Dodecanese islands were soon in German hands, and most of those that were not were quickly taken back from the Allies. In Italy itself the Allies had discovered that it was a truly terrible place to fight a war. Running down three-quarters of the narrow peninsula were the Apennine Mountains – for the most part, high, jagged peaks that in places rose more than 10,000 feet. All too frequently sheer cliffs and narrow ridges towered over the narrow valleys below. And where there are mountains, there are always rivers, which in Italy generally ran down towards the sea and across the path of the Allied advance. Even where there were no mountains, there were still plenty of hills, such as in Tuscany, and although there were some flat coastal plains – like that around Anzio – these were criss-crossed with yet more rivers, canals, dikes and other water courses. In the north, there was the open country of the Po Valley, but then the mountains rose again – this time the even higher Alps. Furthermore, despite being a Mediterranean country, the winter climate was harsh – often freezing cold and wet, and to make matters worse, the winter of 1943/44 was especially bad.

Compounding the problem was Italy’s relative economic backwardness and poor infrastructure. Certainly, there were the great industrial cities of the north, but much of Italy was dotted with tiny villages and walled mountain-top towns, a reminder that not so long ago Italy had been a place of city states and warlords, not the unified whole it had become less than a century before. Mussolini may have improved the railways, but few proper roads linked these isolated towns and villages. Indeed, large parts of the mountainous interior were joined by nothing more than tracks.