Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Peter Caddick-Adams
Title Page
Dedication
Maps
Epigraph
Preface
1. Roads to Cassino
2. An Italian Winter
3. France Fights On
4. A Very British Way of War
5. Blood and Guts
6. How to Destroy a Monastery
7. The Empire Strikes Back
8. Man versus Nature
9. Kiwis at Cassino
10. Poland the Brave
11. Winning Cassino
12. Trouble in the Liri
13. Pursuit from Cassino
14. Roads to Rome
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Index
Picture Section
Copyright
About the Book
By the spring of 1944, Europe had been at war for nearly four and a half years. Fighting had raged through Russia, North Africa, and since the Allies’ invasion of Salerno the previous autumn, the heavily-defended European mainland of Italy. At the beginning of the year, the Allied armies approached a network of important river valleys, through which ran key roads. Their destination was Rome, a further eighty miles north, but to get there, the troops had to inch past the town of Cassino.
Overlooking the town is a Monastery, perched on the summit of Monte Cassino, an architectural masterpiece established by St Benedict of Nursia in 529. Over the next 1,400 years the Abbey was built, destroyed several times by nature or man, and reconstructed, until in 1944 it was recognised as one of the architectural wonders of the world.
From January to May, several small units of Germany’s best-trained formations stalled the might of nine Allied national armies, assembled to overcome the Gustav Line and seize Rome. In a desperate attempt to remove the Germans from their redoubt, the Allies levelled the monastery with one of the most ferocious and concentrated air raids of the war. A month later their bombers returned and destroyed the town in similar fashion.
Some say that Malta remains to this day the most bombed place on earth, but Cassino vies for that dubious accolade. Worse, the Allies overlooked the fact that the Germans would occupy the rubble, which provided even better cover for their defence of the whole area. From 17 January to 18 May 1944, the Gustav Line defences were assaulted four times in battles of attrition that seemed more like those of the First World War. For the last the Allies gathered overwhelming force that finally drove the Germans from their positions, but at huge cost.
Cassino remains one of the most iconic battles of the Second World War. The destruction of its Benedictine Monastery was one of its most controversial acts, and turned into a propaganda triumph by the Germans. It was a coalition campaign of nine Allied armies ranged against one – the troops of Italy, France, the United States, Great Britain, India, New Zealand, Poland, Canada and South Africa opposed by Germany. This is their story.
About the Author
Dr Peter Caddick-Adams has been a professional military historian for over twenty years. He lectures at the UK Defence Academy and staff colleges around the world on military history, war studies and media operations. Specialising in battlefield tours, doctrine and leadership, he worked with the inspirational Richard Holmes for twelve years and has led visits to more than fifty battlefields worldwide. As a regular and reserve soldier he has experience of three major war zones: Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is a frequent TV and radio broadcaster on military and security issues.
Also by Peter Caddick-Adams
Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives
MONTE CASSINO
TEN ARMIES IN HELL
In memory of Richard Holmes CBE, TD, JP
friend, colleague and mentor
1946–2011
We are the D-Day Dodgers,1 out in Italy,
Always on the vino, always on the spree.
Eighth Army skivers and their tanks,
We go to war in ties like swanks.
For we’re the D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy.
We landed at Salerno, a holiday with pay.
Jerry brought his bands out to cheer us on our way,
Showed us the sights and gave us tea,
We all sang songs, the beer was free.
For we’re the D-Day Dodgers, the lads that D-Day dodged.
Palermo and Cassino were taken in our stride,
We did not go to fight there, we just went for the ride.
Anzio and Sangro are just names,
We only went to look for dames,
For we’re the D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy.
On our way to Florence, we had a lovely time,
We drove a bus from Rimini, right through the Gothic Line,
Then to Bologna we did go,
And went bathing in the River Po,
For we’re the D-Day Dodgers, the lads that D-Day dodged.
We hear the boys in France are going home on leave,
After six months’ service such a shame they’re not relieved.
And we’re told to carry on a few more years,
Because our wives don’t shed no tears.
For we’re the D-Day Dodgers, out in sunny Italy.
Once we had a ‘blue light’ that we were going home,
Back to dear old Blighty, never more to roam.
Then someone whispered: ‘In France we’ll fight,’
We said: ‘Not that, we’ll just sit tight,’
For we’re the D-Day Dodgers, the lads that D-Day dodged.
Dear Lady Astor, you think you know a lot,
Standing on a platform and talking Tommy-rot.
Dear England’s sweetheart and her pride,
We think your mouth is much too wide –
From the D-Day Dodgers, out in sunny Italy.
Look around the hillsides, through the mist and rain,
See the scattered crosses, some that bear no name.
Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone,
The lads beneath, they slumber on.
They are the D-Day Dodgers, who’ll stay in Italy.
Preface
THE MAN CURSED his tight-fitting clothing. Familiar friends, his woollen trousers and jacket nevertheless were scratchy and uncomfortable. Under his hat, the heat of the day was causing him to sweat, matting the golden locks of his hair and gluing his linen shirt to his chest. He dabbed at his forehead and neck with a handkerchief and swatted at the pulsing clouds of flies. Looking considerably younger than his thirty-two years, he wondered at the train of events which had caused him to leave London and come to central Italy. This was not the noble land of the caesars he had anticipated, but a landscape festooned with ruins and sullen, subdued people who possessed none of the sparkle he supposed the Mediterranean might have encouraged.
The only way up the hill was by a battered track, which zigzagged tortuously up the face of the rocky massif. Dominating all around him, unrelenting high ground: hard limestone with 6,000-foot jagged peaks and fifty-degree slopes. Too steep for any wheeled transport, the man made his way perched astride a donkey, slipping and swaying uncomfortably with its every stride. To one side loomed the rising massif: scree and dislodged stones of the broken hillside, razor-edged boulders and crags jutting out of the alpine grass like fangs. Every now and then a black smudge indicated a cave; those nearer the pilgrims’ track held shrines, festooned with gaudily painted statues, rosary beads and freshly picked mountain flowers. To the man’s other side, through the heat haze, a fantastic panorama: the River Gari gushing from the high hills to the north before merging with the wider Liri from the north-west and the great Garigliano, then feeding into the Tyrrhenian Sea some twenty miles distant. The silvery rivers snaked their way along the valley floors, past the tattered villages the traveller had explored hours before, and roads, no more than muddied, rutted tracks. All seemed billiard-table flat from his lofty vantage point, though, as he knew to his discomfort, the terrain was anything but level. As he gazed at the plain, he paused to take in the significance of the mountain he was ascending, and the huge building on top of it, named after the feature on which it perched, and why it had been so frequently and violently fought over.
His local guide, hidden under a vast straw hat, trudged on foot behind, humming a peasant song and urging the burro on lethargically. They moved slowly, at the pace of a funeral procession, the Englishman thought. Clouds of dust kicked up from the path. Apart from the rhythmic creaking of the animal’s leather halter, all was incredibly quiet: there with none of the bustle of Rome or London that he was used to. Instead, a gentle background accompaniment of crickets, the scent of the bright mountain blooms and herbs – the tangled smells of fresh thyme, mint, juniper, eucalyptus and heather. Petals displaying lilac, pale yellow, cornflower blue, orange-red and endless shades of white dotted the hillside, around which multi-coloured bugs, bees and wasps competed for space. High above, the bells of the abbey boomed out periodically, echoing through the prehistoric landscape, as if to herald their arrival, as they had greeted countless others through the centuries.
Looking up, he hadn’t been prepared for the abbey’s vastness; it dominated the massif, the town of Cassino below and the entrances to the Rapido and Liri valleys; he thought it the largest building he had ever seen. His eyes took in the towering walls, made from massive cubes of light grey limestone, hewn many hundreds of years before from the surrounding mountains, and fitted together without a hint of mortar. The human effort of hauling them to this place was beyond his comprehension. The walls, in places over twenty feet thick, studded with rows of tiny windows, like gunports facing outwards, and silhouetted against a cloudless azure sky. Which is it, he thought; monastery or fortress?
The structure was gargantuan and undeniably impressive, but perhaps out of place in such a hidden setting. The peak it sat on had been terraced into submission: many tiers of earth and stones, some now crumbling, led down from the walls; some sprouted stunted olive trees, others vines, mostly now abandoned and overgrown. This was garden engineering on an impressive scale that had kept battalions of monks busy through the ages. As the traveller drew closer he noticed black-robed figures flitting about the grounds. A raven, perched high on the entrance gateway, watched his sorry approach and announced his arrival. He drank in the many floors and balconies, and the letters chiselled deep into the stone that spelt out the letters ‘P A X’ above the entrance – Peace.
There was, indeed, a sense of peace and quiet learning about the place, though torn apart by earthquakes and twice destroyed by invading armies. The traveller could see why a pre-Roman tribe, the Volsci, had established a fortified village up here, and why the Romans had moved the settlement to the foot of the hill, calling it Casinum. They left their shrine to Apollo on the hilltop, by a mountain spring, far away from the ordinary world of the valleys. Saint Benedict of Subiaco, seeking a refuge for contemplation, had decided to build his small retreat on the shrine’s ruins in AD 529, craftily reusing the Volscian stone and Roman brick he found lying around. The visitor had read how Benedict – perched almost in the clouds – devised his regula monachorum, the rules for daily monastery life, here.
Once inside the cool, tall-ceilinged rooms, the man looked at a selection of leaves of illuminated vellum that had survived the upheavals of time and war, ornate robes of past abbots and other monastic treasures. He paused at the basilica, a baroque masterpiece, and admired the marble floors, delicate frescoes and ornate carved woodwork, and was lulled almost into a trance by the fresh incense and gentle rhythm of chanting monks. The library, one of the most important in the world, had grown steadily to contain tens of thousands of texts, including many works of Rome’s earliest historians and philosophers. In the courtyard he saw the emblem of St Peter – the crossed keys – carved in stone and symbolising the gates of heaven, a reminder of the abbey’s close associations with the papacy. In the eighth century, Abbot Desiderius, later Pope Victor III, had presided over more than two hundred monks here, and manuscripts produced in his scriptorium and by the whole Cassino school of illuminators became famous throughout Christendom. In 1066, Desiderius commissioned bronze doors, decorated with thirty-six panels detailing in silver damask lettering the possessions of the monastery and its surrounding territories. A later pope, Urban V, had underwritten the cost of rebuilding the monastery after the devastating earthquake of 1349.
But the wealth and lofty atmosphere of the abbey sat uncomfortably with the shockingly impoverished villages below, including Cassino itself, where, the traveller noted, ‘there was not a single pane of glass to be seen, nor food to be had in any of the wretched hovels that passed for houses’. This was a journey of contrasts he would never forget. Shortly afterwards he devoted a few pages to the tour of Monte Cassino in his diary, and signed it: ‘Mr Charles Dickens,1 January 1845’.
At 8.30 on the morning of Wednesday 15 March 1944, the town of Cassino was wiped from the map as Allied forces began Operation Dickens, named in honour of the writer’s visit almost a century before. During that morning, almost five hundred US aircraft delivered a thousand tons of high explosive onto the little town, pulverising the centuries-old landscape familiar to Dickens, and countless other distinguished visitors, for ever. The Allied powers’ crude assault heralded their third attack in as many months on the strongest point of the Gustav Line, Germany’s defensive belt across the waist of Italy, constructed with elaborate care over the preceding months. But borrowing the writer’s name brought the Allies no greater luck than their earlier assaults on the mountain bastion in January and February. By the end of the month, Operation Dickens, an attempt to seize both Cassino and the monastery above, fought in impossible terrain, hostile weather and against some of the best units of the German army, had ground to a halt, leaving the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Divisions eroded and exhausted.
The New Zealanders and Indians were some of well over half a million Allied and Axis troops who poured into central and southern Italy during 1943–44. They comprised a mixture of men hardened by combat in Stalingrad, Leningrad, Tobruk and Tunis. Many of their number had battled across the wastes of Russia and deserts of North Africa, in Abyssinia and Sicily. Others, like the Poles, had escaped from captivity to fight their foes, while the Italians and some of the French had switched sides and were eager to prove their loyalty. The majority came from far distant lands, had no connection with Italy or even the Mediterranean, and would find the climate as much an enemy as the Germans. Many more were new to combat – green and anxious not to fail; a very few were reluctant conscripts looking for the moment to vanish altogether. This applied to Hitler’s Wehrmacht also – though mostly German-Austrian, it also included a significant minority of waifs and strays from Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia, initially caught up in the euphoria of the Thousand-Year Reich. By 1944, most non-Germans wearing field grey, finding themselves stranded in Italy on the defensive against superior opponents, were eager to melt away. All of these men – and a few women – assembled to operate and enable the machinery of war, guided by a mixture of emotions, in the battleground of central Italy.
All had anticipated a land of sun, cherry blossom and grapes, but found something very different. If ever battlespace was dominated by geology and combat directed by climate and terrain, then Monte Cassino provided an extreme example. Here battle slid back to a medieval pace; hand-to-hand fighting was common; mules and horses were used in place of modern engines of war, as combatants on both sides quickly discovered that the ground around Cassino was unforgiving. An ankle-twisting loose scree, caused by the fracturing of limestone outcrops over the millennia, covered all gradients. The hard and brittle hills shattered like glass when hit by any projectile – shells, mortar rounds, hand grenades and even bullets sent splinters of rock in all directions, and causing a horrifically high number of head, face and eye injuries.
Confronted with bedrock everywhere, most troops found it totally impossible to dig foxholes and gun positions to protect themselves from enemy shelling or the elements. The infantry on all sides were issued with ridiculously small entrenching tools, or picks, which might have been useful for sandcastles on Salerno beach but made little impression on the rugged mountainsides encountered inland. The only shelter to be found was in the natural caves or fissures in the hillsides, enlarged by explosion, or by creating nests of rock rubble – termed sangars by British and Indian troops. Burying the human dead was all but impossible – a problem made worse in the summer months, when the attendant flies, rats and wild dogs provided a health threat of their own.
The terrain also magnified artillery fire acoustically, which was nerve-wracking in the extreme and left speech impossible. One German commander in the hills wrote that ‘the demoralising effect2 of the intense bombardment was increased tenfold by the echoes from the valleys’. There was a terrible sense of feeling trapped when caught on a narrow mountain track by shellfire, with nowhere to shelter. Additionally, much of the Italian landscape in the winter months was shrouded in an eerie freezing fog, crippling the ability of all armies to fight, disorientating individual soldiers, playing on their fears. ‘Fog in front of the outposts,3 fog in front of the enemy, fog in front of the hotels, fog for taking away the wounded, fog for bringing up ammunition, fog, fog, fog,’ remembered another soldier; ‘there was no longer any day; there were only two species of night, one yellowish and full of clouds, that did not allow you to see and took you by the throat, the other full of flashes, of glimmers of light, of bursts of machine-gun fire, of fearful noises.’
Throughout history, from the Romans to modern times, armies of the northern hemisphere have tried to fight in the ‘campaigning season’, the period that extends from March to October. Outside those months, in Europe at least, poor weather degrades the wellbeing of soldiers and their ability to manoeuvre and sustain themselves. Wintry rain and snow turns gentle, fordable rivers into fierce torrents; unpaved roads become channels of thick, gooey mud. In such conditions, food, fodder and fuel for warmth become scarce; weapons malfunction and low temperatures sap the will to fight. Poor weather impedes land forces reliant on using motorised vehicles and even horses towing wheeled wagons laden with supplies and guns. As three Russian and two Italian winters during the Second World War would prove, such conditions could be complete show-stoppers, even to modern armies.
Apart from stunted olives, the area around Monte Cassino in 1944 was a grey, treeless landscape, with little vegetation for camouflage, and no wood for overhead cover or warmth-giving camp fires. Though rich and verdant today, this relentless lack of shelter proved corrosive to armies in winter, where temperatures in the high winds and blizzards remained well below freezing; healthy troops frequently died of exposure in such unforgiving conditions.
The battles of Monte Cassino would be fought over five months, through winter to the beginning of summer. Even at the height of the campaigning season, the beginning of a Mediterranean May would create other problems at Cassino, compounding the misery of already thirsty troops subsisting in a parched landscape. Life in the valleys varied dramatically between the rush of water from the mountains in mid-winter to the barren moonscapes of midsummer. Rivers subsided to a trickle; unless irrigated, the valley floors retained little water and soil baked in the sun turned to a fine dust – a powdered earth that hurt the eyes and nose, filled the mouth and clogged, jammed and eroded all the machinery of war – from engines and gun barrels to wristwatches.
Much of Cassino was fought along highways composed of crushed earth or stone, which deteriorated rapidly in the winter months. Even the surface of the few paved highways soon gave way under the incessant movement of vehicles. As many Italians still moved about the countryside by ox cart, none of these avenues had been designed to withstand the weight of a modern, mechanised, wheeled and caterpillar-tracked army on the move. Main routes were few; fewer still were paved. Hairpin bends, snaking up and down the mountains, had a lethality of their own in poor weather. ‘We passed a burned-out American tank,4 rounded a curve and saw two trucks which had plunged down a ravine and were hanging almost perpendicularly against the side of the mountain,’ wrote one observer.
The net effect of terrain, weather and shelling ground down some human beings with frightening results. Serving with the 5th Medium Regiment, RA, Captain Bill McLaren – later the famous rugby commentator – was investigating a farmhouse which had just had its roof blown off. Inside he discovered ‘this guy sitting, or rather lying,5 in the corner, his knees tucked right up under his chin in an almost foetal position … He was shaking violently and had a disturbing, wild-eyed look about him. Talking to him had no effect whatsoever: he just carried on staring at the wall. Clearly he was shell-shocked. I felt so sorry for him – he’d obviously had a terrible experience of some kind – and made a point of arranging for him to be taken back to the “wagon lines”.’
No other campaign in Europe pulled in the same range of nationalities and cultures as that in Italy. The brutality and nature of the fighting at times reached the worst extremes of the Russian front, while the attrition rates often exceeded those of the Western Front. Failure to achieve a decisive result at Cassino for the first five months of 1944 condemned those in Italy to a further year of war. From the first landings of 3 September 1943 to the German surrender which took effect on 2 May 1945, the casualties in Italy were excessive, though balanced. The Allies suffered 312,000 killed,6 wounded and missing; over the same period, the Germans lost 435,000, an average loss to both sides of 1,233 personnel every day, almost one for every minute of the 606-day-long campaign. This attrition was most pronounced at Monte Cassino, where some 200,000 casualties were inflicted on Germans, Italians, French, Americans, British, Indians, New Zealanders, Poles, Canadians and South Africans during 129 days of hell. This is their story.
1
Roads to Cassino
UNLIKE MANY OF the Second World War’s blood-soaked campaigns, there was, sadly, no inevitability about the grim series of battles fought across the Italian mainland. In 1942, Hitler had strategic visions of an unstoppable armoured steamroller advancing south from Stalingrad through the Caucasus and taking the Persian oilfields, while Rommel’s Afrika Korps pushed beyond Egypt, over the Suez Canal into the Near East, in a vast pincer movement. By May 1943 these dreams were shattered with the Russian victory at Stalingrad and ejection of the Italo-German army from the North African littoral. Collectively, defeat on these two fronts deprived the Axis of nearly 1.5 million troops, while Tunisia significantly affected wider Italian morale and determination to resist.
By 1943 it was clear – even to Hitler’s blinkered allies – that the Führer was on the defensive in the Russian and Mediterranean theatres and had no proactive plan to achieve his endsieg (final victory); he was by then relying on irrational hopes without positive foundations. In the east, he anticipated exhausting Russia with attritional campaigns to wear down the Red Army, seemingly unaware that his smaller Wehrmacht was being eroded faster by its larger rival. In the west, he put faith in tactical weapons whose potential had yet to be proven (rockets, missiles and jet aircraft), and a hope that disagreements between the Allies would bring about a change in the fortunes of war. Underlying this was a determination to hold on to every foot of conquered territory – in a world of diminishing human and material resources, this meant that one theatre could be reinforced only at the expense of another.
For the Allies, the campaign in Italy came about partly through a need, as Churchill saw it, not to embark on an ill-prepared, under-equipped invasion of France in 1943. More positively, the Allies sought to exploit their triumphs in Tunisia and Sicily, and continue the land offensive against Germany and Italy. There were mutterings about ‘tying down’ German divisions in Italy that might be deployed elsewhere, but the real prize was the conquest of an Axis capital, Rome, one of the most famous cities in the world. It was hoped that Italy would yield ‘cheap’ victories, in terms of time and lives, as the Germans were not expected to make a vigorous stand, while the Italian defence of their homeland was unlikely to be any more inspired than their performance in Libya, Tunisia or Sicily.
In mid-1943, the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht),1 the Supreme Command of the German armed forces, assessed several strategic options in the event that Italy left the Axis. Hitler considered two alternative courses of action, each proposed by a field marshal. Initially, Erwin Rommel – formerly the Desert Fox, now with no desert and no army, who was kicking his heels in northern Italy – advised his Führer that the Germans could and should hold only northern Italy along a geographic line that would prevent the loss of the Po Valley and its rich agricultural and industrial resources. Kesselring, already de facto Mediterranean theatre commander, argued the precise opposite – that a defence south of Rome was possible, advisable and highly desirable.
The OKW recognised the impending danger to German troops in Italy if the Italians defected and the Allies invaded mainland Italy: an Allied landing near Rome was assessed as likely, where local Italian troops might also help isolate German forces in southern Italy, though a full-scale invasion of the mainland was thought improbable except by prior agreement with the new government. The OKW contingency plan of August 1943 required Rommel to occupy all key roads and railways leading out of northern Italy, disarm Italian Army units, and secure the Apennine passes. Kesselring was to withdraw his forces towards Rommel, disarming Italian units on the way, crushing any resistance. Once complete, Rommel was to assume command over all German forces in Italy. Peeved at Hitler’s disregard of his advice, and mindful of past tensions with Rommel, Kesselring submitted his resignation on 14 August. SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the senior SS and Gestapo commander in Italy, intervened suggesting to his Führer that Kesselring’s presence in southern Italy was vital to prevent an early Italian defection (which was nonsense); Hitler, however, refused to accept Kesselring’s resignation.
Mussolini’s premiership had been doomed from the moment the Allies launched Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily by sea and air. When the Allies appeared to overwhelm the already reluctant Italian defenders on Sicily with ease, the Fascist Grand Council, as the only check on Mussolini’s power, met fifteen days later on 24 July to pass a vote of no confidence in Il Duce, and bloodlessly deposed him from power. The Fascist salute was abolished, the Fascist militia was integrated into the regular forces and took an oath of loyalty to the King, Victor Emmanuel III.2 In August the new head of government, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, started secret peace negotiations and the Royal Italian Army would soon enter the war on the side of the Allies. The armistice, signed on 3 September in Sicily,3 was to be kept secret until the Allied invasion was well under way.
On 15 August 1943, Hitler activated his new Tenth Army, formed from the accumulation of German troops in Italy after Sicily. Leading them and promoted to the exalted rank of Generaloberst was the exceptionally capable fifty-five-year-old Heinrich von Vietinghoff, newly arrived from command of the Fifteenth Army in northern France. Vietinghoff was to coordinate XIV Panzer Corps with three divisions in the Gaeta-Naples-Salerno region and LXXVI Panzer Corps in Calabria and Apulia, and would personally influence the course of the campaign, being given enormous latitude by Kesselring, his superior. The German position in central and southern Italy stabilised as substantial numbers of combat troops arrived on the mainland; nevertheless, Hitler remained nervous that an Italo-Allied force could surround and destroy German troops in the south. In the event of an Allied landing on the mainland (and Wehrmacht intelligence assessed an Allied amphibious operation as being imminent), his plan was still to withdraw first to the Rome area, and thence towards Rommel’s lair in the northern Apennines. The OKW directive of 18 August directed Tenth Army to repulse any invasion in the Naples and Salerno with at least three mobile divisions while all other forces withdrew towards Rome, disarming Italian units as they went.
Allied intentions were confirmed for Berlin on 3 September when Montgomery’s Eighth Army crossed the Straits of Messina, landing in Calabria – by which time Kesselring had a strategy and troops in place to implement it. Vietinghoff’s new Tenth Army was ordered to delay the British-Canadian force while withdrawing its troops slowly northwards. Five days later, the moment Berlin had most feared arrived: the armistice was formally announced as a second Allied force, Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army, approached the beaches of Salerno. However, the prevarications and contingency planning of the previous months meant that Kesselring now knew exactly what to do, though faced with the dual task of resisting the Allied armies and rendering the Italian armed forces ineffective. Curious Italians would have witnessed long trains passing slowly south, flatcar after flatcar bearing tanks and half-tracks covered with camouflage netting and tree branches, and on every flatcar, seated at the rear, there was a steel-helmeted German soldier clutching his rifle watching for hostile aircraft.
After the September 1943 armistice, Hitler’s anger at Italian ‘open treachery’ knew no bounds. German commanders throughout Italy triggered Operation Asche, the forcible disarmament and neutralisation of the Italian armed forces. Germany moved rapidly to take over the Italian zones of occupation in the Balkans and southern France, and ‘neutralise’ Italian forces in Italy. In an act of gross negligence, the muddled Italian high command had failed to issue orders to their subordinates specifying what to do in case of an armistice (which most in any case knew – or suspected – was just beyond the horizon). According to Tenth Army reports, very few units attempted to resist and most did nothing or faded away; in Rome, Kesselring persuaded the five Italian divisions based there to disarm and return home, while Rommel did the same in northern Italy: the army which could have posed a threat and aided the Allies was neutralised overnight.
Some 720,000 Italian military personnel were immediately shipped north to German prison camps and all were obliged to work as slave labourers, a tenth of whom died in captivity. Other Italian garrisons in Albania, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, Croatia and the Aegean islands either surrendered to the Germans, joined partisan units, resisted or were shot. Between 15 and 22 September, 1,500 Italians died fighting the Germans on the Greek island of Cephalonia, but over 5,000 more, including the commander of Italian Acqui Division and some in hospital beds, were massacred by their former Axis partners. In total, in the aftermath of the armistice, German forces throughout the Mediterranean caused the deaths of over 35,000 Italians. There was also OKW concern about the presence of 80,000 Allied troops in Italian-run prison camps. It is estimated that perhaps 50,000 absconded immediately – often with the assistance of their former gaolers – before the arrival of new German guards, triggered by Asche. Of these some 36,000 were soon recaptured and sent north to the Reich, which left around 14,000 roaming the countryside, all reliant on the help of Italian civilians; most tried to regain the Allied lines or reach neutral Switzerland, while some joined partisan units. As the Allies pushed further north, the numbers of partisans would grow; by the end of the war, it was estimated there were as many as 232,000 partisans of all political persuasions, about half of whom were gun-toting activists.
Two months after Mussolini’s dismissal and arrest, Hitler came to his rescue. SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny received the mission – Operation Oak – of locating and liberating the Italian dictator, a task he would achieve spectacularly on 12 September. Skorzeny traced Mussolini to the Campo Imperatore Hotel, a ski resort on the Gran Sasso mountain, high in the Apennine range, eighty miles north of Rome. His men, elite SS-commandos, landed by glider, overwhelmed Mussolini’s captors and flew Il Duce out by light aircraft. Thereafter, Mussolini was installed as head of the small puppet Repubblica Sociale Italiana or RSI (Italian Social Republic) and ruled from Salò, a small town on Lake Garda, until it was overwhelmed by partisans towards the end of the war. Considerable numbers of young Fascists stayed loyal to him and were reformed into combat units which fought the Allies alongside the Germans, including a brigade which fought at Anzio in May 1944, but operated later as a police and anti-partisan unit. By June 1944, it had grown into a full division, and was officially named the 29th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division.
General Alexander initiated the campaign that led directly to Monte Cassino on Friday 3 September 1943, the fourth anniversary of the declaration of war on Germany. A time for reflection and wonder for some: only a year earlier, any kind of victory against the Axis partners had seemed remote. But for the Desert Rats of Eighth Army, fresh from taking Sicily, there was no time to review the changes of fortune the intervening months had brought. Starting at 4.30 a.m. Britons and Canadians landed on the mainland near the tip of Italy’s toe, in Calabria. Though Monty was loath to admit it, his invasion – codenamed Operation Baytown – had been merely a diversion from the main Allied effort.
There was every reason to expect that the subsequent Allied landings at Salerno (codenamed Avalanche) would create a seismic shift in Axis fortunes. For this main assault the Allies could call on an invasion force of 450 ships, and over 150,000 British and American troops. Though newspaper headlines boasted ‘Landings at Naples Biggest of the War’, they were in fact dwarfed by the invasion of Sicily earlier in July. The Italians had just surrendered, and the Germans could muster only 20,000 men. So when Clark’s Anglo-American Fifth Army stormed ashore on the Italian mainland six days after Montgomery, there were high hopes of capturing Rome before the winter. Whereas Monty had encountered no opposition in the south, a series of violent German counterattacks forced a bitter ten-day battle for the Salerno beachhead. The Luftwaffe attacked each night and launched new, radio-controlled Fritz-X glider bombs against the fleet offshore, achieving notable successes.4 The British, landing in the north of the twenty-mile front, found themselves separated by a ten-mile gap from the nearest Americans to their south, terrain which the Germans soon filled.
Nothing escaped the attention of German artillery observers who could see every inch of the Salerno landing area, for the entire sector was overlooked by low hills, like an amphitheatre. However, they would not have been aware that Britain’s only recorded mutiny of the Second World War occurred at Salerno,5 when 700 troops from many different units, including men returning from leave and some recently released from hospital, were rounded up and sent to the beachhead as urgently needed reinforcements, to be posted to strange units. None knew each other, but no one took the trouble to explain to them the gravity of the situation. Exhausted from three years’ fighting in North Africa, where some had been decorated for bravery, they refused to go into battle. The rebellion was badly handled by officers who might have defused the ugly moment with good man management and patient explanation. A hardcore of ringleaders was sentenced to hard labour, those with rank or medals were stripped of them while the remainder were given the option of a rifle or court martial. This would turn out to be a mere precursor of a much wider discipline problem encountered by the Allies: the confluence of hostile weather, unfriendly terrain and determined opposition dented morale and encouraged desertion, which some claimed to have been on the verge of an epidemic.
For a while it seemed as though Avalanche might fail6 – on the fifth day ashore, Mark Clark was so discouraged that from his headquarters ashore he wrote, but did not issue, re-embarkation orders. At one stage Clark had to defend his own headquarters, fighting alongside his clerks and cooks, for which he would win a Distinguished Service Cross for personal gallantry. The arrival of Monty’s force after an amazing march of 300 miles from the south, and the sheer exhaustion of the five German divisions who concentrated to eliminate the Salerno landings eventually enabled the Allies to break out and capture Naples on 1 October, but the price of victory was high: 7,811 Allied casualties. Eighth Army, led initially by Monty and subsequently by Oliver Leese,7 resumed their advance up Italy’s eastern Adriatic seaboard. On their left, in the west, Fifth Army headed north along the narrow coastal strip and valleys that bordered the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Army commanders instinctively look for ‘movement corridors’, where terrain and enemy defences allow them the easiest passage: valleys are good; forests and low-level marshy ground or high, rocky hills tend to be bad. Italy offered very little in the way of easy routes. Hilly topography and rugged mountain peaks made up around eighty per cent of the Italian peninsula. Down its spine runs, for almost its entire length and roughly down the centre, the Apennine range. To east and west, like a ribcage, lesser hills and ridgelines span out to the coasts.
Italian geology dictated that most principal roads ran east–west, rather than north–south, which would always give the initiative to defenders and present any assailant with the problem of attacking against the grain of the landscape. Hugging the western coast between Naples and Rome lay the Via Appia (Appian Way), one of ancient Rome’s oldest roads, continuing eventually to the port of Brindisi in south-east Italy. Known as Route 7, it struggled northwards along the narrow coastal plain and at several junctures is chiselled into the mountains which rise steeply almost directly from the Tyrrhenian Sea. Such a movement corridor, with its frequent bottlenecks, and dominated for all of its length by higher ground, was of little use to an advancing army, where relatively small defensive positions could impose a significant delay: a problem the Allies had already encountered in the jagged landscape of Sicily in July-August 1943.
If Route 7 was off-putting to the strategists, there was an alternative which, siren-like, beckoned. Roughly twelve miles inland, and parallel to the coast, lie a series of flat-bottomed river valleys, leading from just north of Naples, through Caserta and all the way to Rome – a distance of nearly 125 miles. For the most part these valleys had widths of between two and six miles, the most notable of which contained the River Liri. Along these geological features runs another old Roman road, the Via Casilina, or Route 6; although dominated by high ground on either side, it provided a better movement corridor for an army in a hurry than the coastal road – though was far from ideal. Using either road threw away any chance of surprising the defending Germans.
With the beachhead at Salerno now secure, Clark’s US Fifth Army moved north-west towards Naples on 19 September. Meanwhile, the left wing of Montgomery’s Eighth Army linked up with Clark’s 36th Division and his right flank had captured the vital airfields around Foggia8 on 27 September. Thereafter the Allies advanced northwards through the Italian peninsula: Clark’s Anglo-American forces to the west, with those of Montgomery to the east. With his opponents moving northwards cautiously, Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff used his time effectively, fighting a clever series of delaying battles as German forces retreated north from Salerno.
Behind them pioneers dug and drilled gun positions, machine-gun nests and observation posts into the hillsides, laid minefields and flooded valleys, creating defensive belts of awesome potential. The fortifications were designed by the Third Reich’s civil engineering group, the Organisation Todt,9 and built by conscripted construction battalions and civilian builders, including a 5,000-strong Slovak Engineer Division, despatched from the Eastern Front for the purpose. In a letter home of 2 October, Captain Miles Hildyard MC of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry described the systematic destruction as the Wehrmacht withdrew: they were ‘destroying village water supplies, electricity10 … and blocking streets with blown houses. Coupled with the effects of our bombing, Italy is not prosperous. It makes our progress abominably slow.’
The mauling of Clark’s Fifth Army at Salerno revitalised the Germans, no longer so keen to quit southern Italy. Rommel’s pessimism and his arguments for a northerly defence were beginning to lose their shine and the Führer now leaned towards Kesselring’s more optimistic slow withdrawal northwards. On 13 October, Vietinghoff visited Generalmajor Fries of 29th PanzerGrenadier Division and issued new instructions that reflected Hitler’s revised strategy. Fries was ‘no longer to pull back11 in long leaps. Instead, you need to fight in leapfrog fashion in the intervening terrain in all suitable locations. You must give the field army the opportunity to expand the Bernhardt [Line] position [in central Italy]. It is intended for it to be the winter defensive line.’ The issue was concluded on 6 November, when Hitler appointed Kesselring Oberbefehlshaber Südwest (Supreme Commander South-west), with instructions that the Bernhardt Line ‘will mark the end of withdrawals’. Kesselring was to control his land forces through Army Group C, which comprised Tenth and Fourteenth Armies. A bitter Rommel left Italy on 21 November, shortly after his fifty-second (and last) birthday, and was soon assigned to inspect the Atlantic Wall in northern France.
Hitler’s decision to back Kesselring would lead to the bloody battles from January to May 1944 at Monte Cassino and the Anzio beachhead. For these areas would otherwise have fallen to the Allies with minimal – if any – fighting. In so doing, the Führer, through his able nominee Kesselring, ensured that the Allies would not take Rome until 4 June 1944.
The quality of the German defences rested less on fixed lines and weapons and more on the men manning them and their leaders. German soldiers were a mix, as in any army, of the formidable, the passive and the inept. Their morale varied hugely. Growing disillusionment with Hitler and Berlin meant that many found they were ‘fighting for the comrade on our right12 … or perhaps for our immediate commander, whom we respected or perhaps because we believed we were fighting for our honour, doing our duty as soldiers up until the last day’, wrote one Wehrmacht colonel.
The most formidable formation was the Luftwaffe’s 1st Fallschirmjäger Division. Following the battle for Crete in May 1941, Hitler refused to authorise any further large-scale airborne operations due to the high casualty rate. His paratroopers subsequently became élite infantry, serving in Russia, North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. From the start, they were a volunteer-only force, with a high drop-out rate in training. Leutnant Hermann Volk, who fought at Cassino, recalled how on the first day of training in Pomerania recruits had to stand to attention and fall forward towards a comrade standing opposite, but without stumbling: ‘That was a true test13 of trust, for the many who put out their hands or legs to prevent injury were immediately rejected as unsuitable.’
Designed to land and fight in small groups, with limited prospects of resupply or reinforcement, Fallschirmjäger were trained to be highly resilient, resourceful, act without orders and to expect to tackle overwhelming odds. Though light in artillery, paratroops were reliant on large numbers of automatic weapons and grenades, and usually encountered as small, kampfgruppen (all-arms battle groups) organised from any available troops. They liked the nickname of ‘Grüne Teufel’ (Green Devils) awarded to them by their Allied opponents in Tunisia and Sicily, on account of their distinctive three-quarter-length camouflaged parachute smocks. An excessive esprit de corps was encouraged, and a disproportionate number of them gained high decorations, or fell in battle.
Apart from paratroops and specialised mountain soldiers (Gebirgsjagers14