Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45

By the beginning of October, the Allies had taken both Naples and the Foggia airfields, after three weeks of hard fighting, but then it began to rain. Bad weather in ‘sunny’ Mediterranean Italy had not really been considered by the Allied chiefs before the campaign began. It did not seem possible that a bit of rain and cold could affect modern armies. Yet with almost every bridge and culvert destroyed by the retreating Germans, and with rivers quickly rising to torrents, the Allies, with all their trucks and tanks and jeeps and countless other vehicles, soon found themselves struggling horribly in thick, glutinous mud where roads used to be.

So it was that increasingly stiff resistance, bad weather and the onset of winter, and, above all, a severe shortage of men and equipment, ensured their advance ground to a halt. A hard-fought-for foothold in the southern tip of Italy now seemed like a small reward for their efforts.

And yet, and yet. More than fifty German divisions – the best part of a million men – were now tied up in Italy, the Balkans and the Aegean. By the end of October there were nearly 400,000 German troops in Italy alone. It began to dawn on the British especially, and Brooke and Churchill in particular, that if Italy was anything to go by, OVERLORD was going to be an incredibly tough proposition. If the cross-Channel invasion was to have any chance of success – and Churchill was remembering Gallipoli all too clearly – then it was imperative that even more be done to keep up the pressure on German forces throughout the Mediterranean.

With this in mind, at the Tehran Conference at the end of November 1943, the British pressed the Americans to agree to continue the advance up the leg of Italy to a line that ran from Pisa in the west to Rimini in the east. By overstretching Germany in southern Europe, they reasoned, the invasion of France would have a greater chance of success. However, in terms of strategy, the gulf between the United States and Britain was widening. As far as America was concerned, Britain had had its own way far too long. Increasingly suspicious about British intentions in Italy and the Mediterranean, the American chiefs only very reluctantly agreed to British proposals. OVERLORD would be postponed for the last time, and by a month and no more, and only in order to give the Allies more time to take Rome and reach the Pisa-Rimini Line. And there was to be one very strict caveat: in July 1944, a significant amount of Allied resources would be diverted from Italy to be used in an operation that would give more direct support to OVERLORD. This was to be the Allied invasion of southern France, codenamed Operation ANVIL.

With this now an agreed and approved strategy, General Alexander was given a little under eight months in which to achieve this latest Allied goal. After that, he had been told emphatically, the tap would be turned off.

General Alexander now had just two months left. He had guessed the present battle would last three to four weeks. Replying to Churchill’s message on the morning of 11 May, he had signalled that everything was now ready for the battle ahead. ‘We have every hope and intention of achieving our object,’ he wrote, ‘namely the destruction of the enemy south of Rome. We expect extremely heavy and bitter fighting, and we are ready for it.’20

Throughout the night and into the morning of 12 May, the cipher clerks at AAI headquarters in the vast Reggio Palace at Caserta were busy transcribing signals as news of the opening of the great battle began to pour in. Even for a man of General Alexander’s imperturbability, these must have been tense times. There was much at stake.

FOUR

The Slow Retreat

Dense smoke and mist may have confounded the British Eighth Army’s opening attack into the Liri Valley, but the fog of war was every bit as thick on the German side. Not only had they been caught off guard, they were without a number of their senior officers. Incredibly, Generaloberst von Vietinghoff, commander of AOK 10, was away, as was General von Senger, commander of 14th Panzer Corps that opposed the Allies from the Liri Valley to the coast, as well as his Chief of Staff, Oberst von Altenstadt; so too was Generalmajor Baade, commander of AOK 10 Reserve. Kesselring’s Chief of Staff, General Siegfried Westphal, was also away sick at the time. Von Senger’s temporary substitute was new to Italy and comparatively inexperienced, as was the other corps commander in AOK 10, General Feuerstein of the 51st Mountain Corps, which covered the Cassino massif.

General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin – or ‘Frido’ von Senger as he was known – had been called away from the front on 17 April at the personal behest of Hitler for the investiture of the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross at the Führer’s Obersalzberg headquarters in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Von Senger, a learned Catholic from Baden in south-west Germany, was something of an intellectual and a keen student of warfare. A former Rhodes Scholar, he had served throughout the First World War and remained in the much-reduced post-war Reichswehr. Rising steadily through the ranks, he had been an armoured brigade commander during the Blitzkrieg and had then been sent to Italy as Chief German Liaison Officer with the Franco-Italian Armistice Commission, a two-year post that had given him a deep understanding of Italy and its people. By late 1942, he was commanding a Panzer Division in Russia, but after the collapse at Stalingrad was posted back to the Mediterranean as Chief Liaison Officer to the Italian Army in Sicily, a difficult task that he performed extremely well. After then extricating German troops from Sardinia and Corsica, he was given command of 14th Panzer Corps, covering the western side of Italy. It was von Senger’s troops who met the Allied invasion at Salerno.

Despite his growing reputation and experience, von Senger was known to be no admirer of either Nazism or fascism and his experience at Hitler’s headquarters that April had done little to change those views. The Führer, von Senger thought, looked tired. His uniform was drab and scruffy, his handshake clammy, and his pale eyes seemed glassy rather than hypnotic. Only his voice, so loud and forceful during his speeches, seemed soft and steady. He had, noted Frido, ‘a pitiful and scarcely concealed melancholy and frailty’.21

Von Senger, one of the more senior officers present in Berchtesgaden, wondered what the more junior officers and NCOs must have thought of their leader, especially when Hitler began to list a string of defeats, and to describe the critical situation they now found themselves in. No mention was made of the few recent successes they had achieved in Italy. ‘The impression gained by General Baade, who had been summoned to the reception to receive an even higher decoration,’ noted von Senger, ‘was the same as mine, namely that this political and military regime was coming to an end … and Hitler knew it.’22

Hitler was certainly not the man he had once been. There had been too many defeats, too many setbacks, and by the spring of 1944 he had realised he had lost the unshakeable belief of his people. He had consequently become more and more withdrawn and was hardly seen at all in public or in newsreels or heard on the radio. He was also, as von Senger had seen with his own eyes, a sick man. Ageing fast, he had a heart condition, stomach and intestinal problems, and, it seems, was suffering from Parkinson’s, which caused uncontrollable trembling in his left arm and leg.

His all-consuming prosecution of the war was undoubtedly impairing his health. By nature, he was an idle man, and throughout the 1930s and the early years of the war he had been content to spout forth his ideas and let others put them into action. Now, though, trusting fewer and fewer people, he took increasingly direct control of every matter of state, be it military or domestic. His authority and power were absolute, and every decision required his authority and his alone. Because of this obsessive need to control, he subjected himself to a punishing work schedule, which allowed little or no time for relaxation and nowhere near enough sleep. Even then, he was unable to cope with such a vast workload, and the stress and strain accordingly took their toll. Although he was prone to violent mood swings and outbursts of anger at the best of times, these had recently become more frequent and severe.

And yet, although the war was spiralling out of his control, Hitler remained in deep denial about the catastrophic changes in German fortunes, and continued to preach the same unvarying message to his generals: that there should be no retreat and no surrender; that if they just held firm, the tide would be turned once more. The fragile alliance between Eastern and Western Allies would collapse; new German wonder weapons would come to their rescue. Massive self-deception and delusion were part and parcel of the Führer’s world. Occasionally, as von Senger had witnessed, doubts would creep in, striking him with a crippling depression; but there was never any question of surrender. If Hitler was going to fall, then all of Germany would fall with him.

Nor did he ever accept responsibility for any mistake or misjudgement. Failings and disasters were always because of other people’s treachery, disobedience or weakness. To his mind, the Italians were shining examples of this. They had waited too long to join the war and had bungled everything since then, starting with the failed invasion of Greece in October 1940. Since then, despite the large numbers of Italian troops fighting in Russia, they had been little more than a millstone around Germany’s neck. German troops had come to their rescue in the Balkans, elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and in North Africa. By the autumn of 1942, with Rommel’s men routed at Alamein, and with the Allies advancing towards Tunisia, Hitler began to realise that the great victory in North Africa that had seemed so tantalisingly possible in the summer of 1942 was rapidly turning into a catastrophe. He had considered the Mediterranean theatre peripheral so long as it had been restricted to North Africa; but like the British, he had begun to see all too clearly what would follow should they be defeated there. With this in mind, he had resolved to pour troops and equipment into Tunisia in an effort to forestall Italy’s collapse and any subsequent – and suddenly far more serious – threat to his southern flanks.

Hitler’s aim had been to keep the campaign in North Africa alive until the autumn of 1943 at the very least, by which time the conditions would be unfavourable for an Allied invasion of Sicily. The plan, however, had backfired spectacularly: the subsequent Axis defeat in May 1943 had been even bigger than that suffered at Stalingrad three months earlier, and only served to weaken Italy further.

With the collapse in North Africa, Hitler and the German High Command had very clearly read the writing on the wall, and so had hastily begun working on contingency plans for when Italy pulled out of the war. For some, there had been relief that they would soon be rid of the Italians, as many Germans felt little more than contempt for their less well-trained, poorly equipped, and mostly reluctant ally. No doubt Hitler could have defended the Alpine passes with only a handful of divisions, but an Allied-occupied Italy would have left Germany horribly exposed elsewhere. The Führer’s overriding fear, for example, had been the loss of the Balkans, a rich source of oil, bauxite, and other key minerals essential to his war effort – and it was this that the German High Command had believed was the most likely target for the Allies’ Mediterranean strategy. As a result Hitler had demanded that Italy should be hastily occupied and then defended.

Despite the warnings, however, Hitler had still flown into a severe rage when he heard, on 25 July 1943, the news that Mussolini had been dismissed as head of the Italian government and replaced with Marshal Pietro Badoglio, formerly Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, who had always been against Italy’s alliance with Germany and who had resigned following the disastrous campaign in Greece in 1940. Hitler now declared the Italians the ‘bitterest enemy. They say they’ll fight but that’s treachery… this bastard Badoglio has been working against us all the time.’23 He had demanded that German troops occupy Rome immediately, and that Badoglio and the King, Vittorio Emanuele III, be taken captive. In this kind of paranoid and irrational mood, the Führer was hard to placate, and both Generalobersts Keitel and Jodl, the German Chief of Staff and Chief of Operations, had only been able to listen with mounting concern as Hitler appeared ready to elevate the urgent needs of the Mediterranean above all others – even Russia, where the situation was worsening.

Hitler had eventually conceded that the storming of Rome might be impracticable, but he had refused to waver over the need to act in Italy; he had screamed for revenge for Italy’s ‘betrayal’ and he was going to get it. By committing his forces to the Italian peninsula, he had condemned his old ally to a terrible fate.

Feldmarschall Rommel had been hastily called in and given command of the newly formed Army Group B, and on 28 July had been ordered to begin seeping troops into northern Italy and securing the Alpine passes that fed into Austria. Then, when Italy surrendered – as Hitler had been convinced it would – his troops would disarm all members of the Italian armed forces and take over all areas of southern France, northern Italy, the Balkans, and the Aegean, which up to that point had been held by the Italians, in a carefully planned operation that was given the codename AXIS. Meanwhile, from 12 August, Kesselring, in agreement with Jodl, had begun evacuating all German troops from Sicily back to the mainland. With typical efficiency, he had managed to get more than 60,000 troops across the Straits of Messina, the last safely making their way across just a few hours after the Allies took Messina town and with it all of Sicily.

The problem was that despite the lightning efficiency with which these plans had been put into effect, Germany simply did not have the capacity either to mount a major front in Italy or to occupy the Balkans and the Aegean. When Feldmarschall von Kluge, commander of Army Group Centre in Russia, complained forcibly that the removal of key troops from the Eastern Front to Italy would be disastrous, Hitler had replied, ‘Even so, Herr Feldmarschall: we are not master here of our own decisions.’24 By September, the German southern flank in Russia had begun to collapse. With it came the loss of key strategic areas, including the Donets Basin with its vast reserves of coal. Every setback had knock-on effects and Germany could not afford any one of them.

No clear-thinking leader would have demanded that four senior commanders leave the Italian front at a time when a new enemy offensive was expected to be launched at any moment – even if intelligence suggested it would happen a couple of weeks after it actually began. Rather than being hurried back to the front after their investiture, Generals von Senger and Baade were sent on an indoctrination course at the Ordensburg in Sonthofen, the Nazi party school that had been set up in 1936 to train instructors in Nazism for the rising generation. While this was a complete waste of both men’s time, it was also followed by a short stretch of leave that ensured that both were far away from Italy when the Allies launched Operation DIADEM; in the meantime von Vietinghoff – the army commander – had been summoned to yet another of Hitler’s investitures.

And yet there was no suggestion that Hitler’s mental capacity had been in any way damaged by his worsening health. Rather, his irrational behaviour was merely part of his character. Furthermore, despite his often woeful lack of judgement, he did, on occasion, demonstrate a certain clear-headedness and lucidity. This was certainly true with regard to Italy, for, little as he could afford a campaign there of any kind, having made the decision he had soon recognised there was sense in fighting the Allies as far south as possible. That he had come to this conclusion had been largely due to his man at the front line – Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring.

Kesselring had demonstrated to Hitler what the Germans might yet achieve in Italy. Moreover, this Luftwaffe field marshal had clearly shown his aptitude as a battlefield commander. During almost two years in the Mediterranean, Kesselring had been dogged by a troublesome partner and an overmighty subordinate. Once free of those constraints, his true worth had rapidly emerged.

In many ways, Kesselring was a rather untypical German field marshal. There was none of the patrician austerity, for example, that was a feature of many of the highest-ranking German commanders – no monocled scowl or stiff-backed swagger. Rather, he was known for being genial and good-humoured: not for nothing was he nicknamed ‘Smiling Albert’. He was also diplomatically adept, getting on well with his Italian partners and doing much more than most of his fellow Germans to forge a good working relationship with them. Shrewd both tactically and strategically, he fully understood modern warfare in all its facets, far more so than Rommel, for instance, his subordinate in North Africa. Yet there were paradoxes to Kesselring. Despite his obvious skills as a commander, he had a reputation for over-optimism. In September 1940, for example, he mistakenly believed that the Luftwaffe had all but destroyed RAF Fighter Command, while at the height of the Siege of Malta in the spring of 1942, as Commander-in-Chief of Axis Forces in the Mediterranean, he believed he had successfully brought the tiny British island to its knees only for it to recover more quickly than he had anticipated. In Tunisia, he repeatedly told Hitler the Axis forces could hold on long after his commanders had realised the game was up, and his optimism came to the fore again during the crisis of the Italian collapse, when he had refused to accept that the Italians would betray them. ‘That fellow Kesselring is too honest for those born traitors,’ Hitler said of him.25 Fine diplomatic skills had been offset by political naïvety.

Yet Kesselring always claimed he was nothing more than a simple soldier. Unlike many of the German senior commanders, his background was far from aristocratic and nor did he come from a family steeped in military tradition. Indeed, despite becoming one of the first three Luftwaffe officers – after Göring – to be made a Feldmarschall in July 1940, his had been an unremarkable upbringing, and it says much about the man that his rise was so comparatively rapid.

Born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, in 1885, where his father was a schoolmaster and town councillor, Kesselring came from solid middle-class stock. From an early age, however, he was determined to pursue a career in the army, and after matriculating from his local grammar school in 1904, he became a Fahnenjunker – an aspiring officer – in the 2nd Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment. Serving in the unglamorous foot artillery during the First World War, he gained valuable battlefield experience, and then in 1917 became a staff officer first at divisional, and by the war’s end, at corps level – a sure sign that he was beginning to stand out.

Indeed, he was one of comparatively few officers – along with Frido von Senger – to keep their jobs in the tiny post-war army, where he demonstrated his further aptitude as a staff officer, and where he rose to the rank of colonel with the command of a division. In 1933, Hitler came to power and immediately announced the clandestine formation of the Luftwaffe. Kesselring was retired from the army and given a civilian post in the new air force where he set to work running the administration and airfield development of the Luftwaffe. He also learnt to fly and worked hard to develop the Luftwaffe strategically and tactically. By 1936, he was back in uniform, both as a general and as the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff.

At the onset of war, Kesselring was in charge of the 1st Air Fleet that helped launch the blitzkrieg on Poland with such devastating results. He took over the 2nd Air Fleet, commanding it with great success in the Netherlands and France, and against Britain in 1940, and in Russia in 1941. During this time, he pioneered the theory of mass air assaults and did much to develop the use of the Luftwaffe as a tactical air force working in close co-operation with the German ground forces.

In December 1941, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Axis Forces in the Mediterranean, but despite his elevated position he had had a difficult time handling both his Italian partners and his subordinate, General Rommel. No inter-Axis staff had been established, while the chain of command had remained typically muddled, so that Rommel, commanding the Axis army in North Africa, had been, officially at least, under the command of the Italian Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, General Bastico, who in turn had been subordinate to the Italian Chief of Staff, General Cavallero. Further complicating matters had been Cavallero’s deep resentment of Kesselring’s appointment. Undeterred, however, Kesselring, from his base in Rome, had worked hard to improve relations with his allies, and in this had been highly successful. Showing both respect and sensitivity towards them, his diplomacy and brilliant organisational skills had done much to ease the difficult supply situation faced by the Axis forces in North Africa.

His inability to tame Rommel had had disastrous results for the Axis, although the blame had hardly lain with Kesselring. Whilst Rommel was directly appealing to Hitler to allow him to make his dash for Alexandria and the Suez Canal in the summer of 1942, Kesselring had been urging the Führer to first capture Malta and secure the Axis supply lines. Hitler deferred to Rommel with fatal consequences. As it happened, neither Kesselring’s subsequent misjudgement of the situation in Tunisia nor his gullibility over Badoglio had made much difference to the course of events. It had been Hitler who had insisted on pouring troops and supplies into North Africa, not Kesselring; and it had also been Hitler and the German High Command who had ordered the steady flow of troops into Italy from the moment Mussolini was forced from power.

Yet it was Kesselring who had done so much to confound the Allied assault on Italy the previous September. After extricating the majority of his troops from Sicily, he had begun to see that there was much to be gained by making a firm stand in the south of Italy, rather than retreating far north of Rome as favoured by Rommel and the High Command. He had already seen that Britain had become ‘the aircraft carrier from where powerful attacks were launched against northern Germany’ and feared what would happen if the Allies were to take a firm grasp of most of Italy.26 He had also correctly recognised that Italy’s economic capacity was important for the German war effort, but that it would be harder to sustain the further the Allies climbed up the leg of the peninsula. Furthermore, he had argued that other parts of Germany’s southern domains would be far more vulnerable if much of Italy were to be lost. All were sound arguments.

With regard to the Allies’ intentions, he had also correctly guessed that General Alexander would choose the Gulf of Salerno with the nearby major port of Naples as their objective. Nonetheless, at that point, with Hitler vacillating, the view of the High Command that they should withdraw north of Rome still held firm, so that despite repeated requests for urgent reinforcements from Rommel’s Army Group B in northern Italy, Kesselring’s pleas had been ignored. He had been left to defend the Allied invasion with only those troops still in the south.

Had Rommel come to his aid, events might have been very different in Italy. As it was, Kesselring had only retreated from Salerno once it had become clear the Allies had established a firm foothold. He had then begun a careful and highly effective retreat, blowing up much of Naples’ infrastructure and leaving barely a single bridge or road intact. In addition, the advancing Allies had been greeted at every turn with a network of minefields and debilitating booby traps. And while his troops had fought this rearguard action, Italian labourers had been set to work building up a defensive system across Italy – a series of lines that had originally been singled out by the Italians but which had then been massively strengthened on Kesselring’s orders.

These orders were based on three entirely correct assumptions – first, that Rome must surely be the Allies’ next goal, and second, that a modern army in winter could only effectively reach it from the south using one of the main Italian roads as the axis of their advance. There was no such road through the mountainous middle of the peninsula, and if the Allies attacked up the Adriatic, they would then have to cross back to the west coast to reach Rome. This meant that realistically there were only two routes open to them, either Route7–the ViaAppia–or Route 6, the Via Casilina. The Allies, he guessed, would be unlikely to use the former as the Via Appia ran along the coast, was narrow and easily defendable as it passed around the Aurunci Mountains, and then cut through the now-flooded Pontine Marshes. The Via Casilina, however, ran into the Liri Valley and so his third assumption was that this offered the most likely route of advance for the Allies.

Nonetheless, Kesselring felt sure the Via Casilina could be successfully blocked. Ten miles south-east of the Liri Valley, the road passed through a narrow defile, ideal for mounting artillery, and known as the Mignano Gap. Then, at the mouth of the Liri, were the twin guardians, Monte Cassino and Monte Maio and the mighty ranges beyond. It was for this reason that first the Mignano Gap, and then the main Gustav Line at Cassino, at the mouth of the Liri Valley, were to be the strongest and most heavily protected points of these new defensive systems. And there was another advantage to the Gustav Line: it ran across the narrowest point of the peninsula. Because the Allies would have to channel most of their forces along a comparatively narrow point, it would require, in theory, fewer men to defend it than the wider, more accessible Pisa– Rimini position further north.

‘Smiling Albert’ had, in early September, set out clearly his arguments for heavily defending southern Italy, but in this case it had been his actions that had spoken louder than his words. While Rommel had continued to urge Hitler to fall back as far as the Alps, on this occasion it had been Kesselring who had won the debate. Not only had Grand Admiral Dönitz, of whose views Hitler had been increasingly taking note, agreed with Kesselring’s view, the High Command had even begun to come round to his way of thinking. Sure enough, on 4 October 1943, Hitler had ordered Kesselring to continue his defence south of Rome. He had impressed to such an extent that by the third week in November, Rommel had been moved to northern France, his lustre further dimmed by suspicions of defeatism – something that could never be directed at Kesselring. Nor was his loyalty in question: Kesselring had made his oath to serve Hitler and he would stick to it; honour and obedience were part and parcel of the soldier’s creed.

After Rommel’s dismissal, Kesselring was, on 21 November 1943, appointed Commander-in-Chief Southwest and Army Group C, with direct command of all German forces in Italy. Furthermore he no longer had to weave his way through a political minefield, since the defence of Italy had become his show, and his alone.

Yet by May 1944, Feldmarschall Kesselring faced one of his toughest challenges thus far. His troops had been caught off guard by Alexander’s new offensive, his HQ had been badly bombed, and the phone lines to headquarters AOK 10, who were bearing the brunt of the Allied attack, had been destroyed.

And too many of his senior officers were far, far away.