by Mark Zuehlke
Ironically, five days later, Hitler slipped into one of his increasingly common funks and issued an order renaming the Gothic Line the innocuous-sounding Green Line.9 The Allies, having just a few days before discovered from a captured map the designation of Gothic Line, paid the name change no attention. As when Hitler ordered the Adolf Hitler Line in the Liri Valley renamed the Senger Line to avert an Allied propaganda victory, the order came too late to prevent the Allied propaganda value of the original designation.10
The Germans would defend their Green Line while the Allies would attack a Gothic Line.
HITLER’S ORDERS ASIDE, holding the Allies south of the Apennines was not viable because Kesselring’s armies were simply too weak after the Liri Valley Battle to engage in protracted battle without benefit of a fortified line. On June 2, Kesselring advised OKW that he had 38,024 dead, wounded, or missing and that “the figure keeps mounting.”11 Considering both personnel and weapons, the fighting strength of the divisions of Tenth and Fourteenth armies had been reduced to between 50 per cent and 10 per cent of their strengths prior to the battle. Kesselring’s most elite formations, the 1st Parachute Division and the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division, could muster only about 15 per cent of their normal strength. On June 10, the paratroopers numbered just 902 men.
Obergefreiter Carl Bayerlein, serving in the 3rd Company of the 1st Fallschirmpionier (Engineer) Battalion of the 1st Fallschirmjäeger (Parachute) Division, had missed the fighting at Cassino and the Hitler Line, enjoying instead a rare and welcome period of leave in Germany. When the nineteen-year-old fallschirmpionier rejoined his company near Rieti, he was shocked to see how few men survived. His platoon’s flame-thrower operator had gone missing amid the ruins of Cassino and machine-gunner Arno Köhler was dead. All the company’s officers and sergeants had also been either killed or wounded. “A large part of our ‘new’ platoon,” he later wrote, “were strangers, and I had to get used to new faces and new names. Some were older soldiers, but most were younger.”12 His commander, Unteroffizier Reinhard Schumacher, who had been wounded in a minefield at Cassino but since recovered, had Bayerlein assigned to his gruppe (a platoon with a normal strength of twelve). The section commander was Feldwebel Heinz Schumacher, Reinhard’s younger brother. After eight days’ rest in Rieti, the battalion boarded their Henschel engineer vehicles and drove north.
“Now the real retreat began,” Bayerlein wrote. “It went all the way back along the route I had travelled just a few days before [when returning from leave]. We were deployed all over the place on our mining and demolition missions. It often happened we would not see each other all day long. Sometimes you were alone, sent all by yourself for several days and nights in some demolition site, under bridges, in houses, or in the open. Then, when the last German unit passed the site, it could be detonated and the retreat continued. We used commercial explosives like Donarite or Ekrasite, and dynamite. Later, aircraft bombs were used for demolition, since there were no longer aircraft to use them. Even mines and shells were used. Anything that had military significance was regarded as a target: roads, bridges, towers, defiles, railway installations, fuel and ammunition dumps, factories, and various workshops and tunnels. The important point was to hold up the oncoming enemy as long as possible and to weaken him.”13
On July 17, the engineers reached Piegaro, a small town south of Lake Trasimeno. Several houses adjoining an arched gateway through which the main road exited the town were to be blown up to form an obstacle. While Unteroffizier Gutheil’s gruppe rigged the gate and houses for destruction, Bayerlein’s team was south of Piegaro planting explosives on each of the switchback curves that wound up to the edge of the hill town. Bayerlein was drenched in sweat from wielding a pick under a searing sun. Not for the first time, he “cursed the life of a combat engineer.”14
Holes dug, the engineers planted explosives in them, lit the fuses, and drove through the town. As they passed under the gateway, Gutheil’s party was finishing setting the demolitions that would destroy the gateway. So that everyone could see the fireworks, the driver of Bayerlein’s truck paused at a curve five hundred yards beyond the town walls. Soon the cry of “Fire in the hole” was heard. Gutheil’s men jumped into their truck and pulled away, but no explosion followed. When it was obvious the fuse must have had time to burn through, Gutheil’s men walked back. Just as they passed through the gateway, a powerful explosion collapsed it and the adjoining houses. A great cloud of dust swallowed the engineers. Although Bayerlein’s gruppe dug frantically through the rubble, they found no trace of survivors. Gutheil and his troops, all recent paratroop reinforcements, were initially assumed killed. But everyone agreed it was odd that no bodies were unearthed. Later, Bayerlein learned that they were believed to have deliberately rigged the demolition so it would not explode and then, under the guise of investigating, had dashed through the gateway and set off the explosives behind them to prevent being followed. In this manner, they had been able to desert and surrender to the Allies, an increasingly frequent course of action taken by demoralized German troops.15
Bayerlein’s engineers were working to Kesselring’s orders that the Tenth and Fourteenth armies do everything possible to delay the Allied advance. But these orders were much less strident than Hitler had envisioned. Nobody was fighting to the last man or bullet to hold every inch of ground south of the Gothic Line. Kesselring’s ability to defy Hitler’s initial order arose from a compromise he had pried out of the Führer during a personal meeting on July 3 at the German leader’s personal retreat high atop a Bavarian mountain in the village of Obersalzberg.
For the first hour of the meeting, Kesselring and his operations chief Oberst Dietrich Beelitz suffered silently through one of Hitler’s lengthy lectures, delivered in a quiet and modulated voice. “The only area which offers protection against the enemy’s superiority and restricts his freedom of movement,” Hitler concluded, “is the lower gut of Italy.”16
Ever the dutiful toady, Jodl, who was also present, noted in his personal diary that this was: “A graphic description of the situation by the Führer, and insistence on the necessity of fighting for every square mile of ground and every week of time.”17
Kesselring’s response was heated. “The point is not whether my armies are fighting or running away. They will fight and die if I ask it of them. We are talking about something entirely different, a question much more vital: whether after Stalingrad and Tunis you can afford the loss of yet two more armies. . . . If I change my plans to meet your ideas, sooner or later the way into Germany will be opened to the Allies. On the other hand, I guarantee, unless my hands are tied, to delay the Allied advance appreciably, to halt it at latest in the Apennines, and thereby to create conditions for the prosecution of the war in 1945, which can be dovetailed to your general strategic scheme.”18
Surprisingly, Hitler was mollified by Kesselring’s promise to stop the Allies in the Apennines. “Hitler said no more—or rather, he muttered a few words which… were not uncomplimentary. Anyhow, I had won my point,” Kesselring wrote.19
Kesselring never doubted he could keep his promise, despite the daunting nature of the task. Somehow Kesselring must conduct a slow fighting withdrawal south of the Apennines and simultaneously find the manpower and resources to build up defensive works sufficient to enable his Tenth and Fourteenth armies to pin the Allies down in front of the Gothic Line until early 1945.
Kesselring did receive some modest reinforcements in the form of three fresh, although inexperienced divisions—the 356th Infantry Division, the 162nd Turcoman Division, and the 20th Luftwaffe Field Division. The latter was shipped to Italy from Denmark and consisted mainly of underutilized Luftwaffe aircraft mechanics lacking any infantry training. The Turcoman division was composed of enforced conscripts from Eastern Europe more inclined to surrender or desert at first opportunity than to fight for Germany. All that kept such divisions fighting were the guns pointed at the men’s backs by their German commanders and sergean
ts.
Although these divisions were of poor quality, they allowed Kesselring to withdraw three of his most battered Fourteenth Army divisions for regrouping, rest, and absorption of reinforcements outside a combat zone.20 He could offer his other divisions little respite. They must continue to suffer the inevitable casualties for as long as possible in order to buy time for the Gothic Line’s completion.
THE GOTHIC LINE took advantage of a major Italian topographic feature. From the toe of Italy, the Apennines run like a hard spine virtually up the peninsula’s centre to the upper Tiber River. Here, abruptly, the mountains turn northwest to cut across the peninsula and join the Maritime Alps on the French border. This sharp dogleg separates central Italy from the great basin of the Po River Valley and Lombardy Plains to the north. Cutting as they do across the breadth of Italy, the mountains present a natural strategic barrier. Only on the east coast do they fall away sufficiently to allow relatively straightforward north-south passage. Even here, though, a series of spurs juts out from the mountains in the form of ridges, like the fingers of splayed hands, to touch the Adriatic Sea.
The Apennines’ northwest dogleg is about 140 miles long and varies in depth from 50 to 60 miles. In 1944, only eleven, mostly poor roads transected the mountains from south to north. Carved out of the flanks of narrow valleys and crossing steep passes, these roads were subject to heavy winter snowfall and torrential year-round rains. To the west, the passes soared to heights of 4,300 feet. In the centre, where Highway 65 linked Florence and Bologna, the highest pass was only 2,900 feet and the distance through the mountains just 50 miles. It was, however, a rugged route with many easily defended choke points.21
Even before the Allies invaded Italy, the Germans had been so impressed by the defensive potential of the northern Apennines that OKW believed no more than a delaying operation should be fought to their south. Hitler had advised Mussolini of this on July 19, 1943, while the Sicilian campaign was still being fought.22 On August 18, OKW had issued an operations order to the effect that, should Italy surrender, “Southern and Central Italy will be evacuated, and only Upper Italy, beginning at the present boundary line of Army Group B (line Pisa–Arezzo–Ancona) will be held.”23
Initially, Kesselring had only been responsible for operations in the southern part of Italy, while Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel commanded Army Group ‘B’ in the north. Increasingly pessimistic after the destruction of his Afrika Korps and the loss of Sicily, the Desert Fox became the leading proponent for maintaining the August 18 plan. Within weeks of the Allied landings in Italy, however, Kesselring began advocating a different strategy—development of a series of fortified lines in southern Italy to check the Allied advance south of Rome. Ultimately, Kesselring prevailed and the Allies were forced to pay a high price in both casualties and long delays in order to fight their way through one defensive line after another.
The strategy exacted a price from the Germans as well, for they had to divide their efforts to construct defensive lines. Such dispersion of resources meant that by early August 1944 the Gothic Line appeared far more formidable on paper than it was in reality. Kesselring had realized this deficiency the previous January when Allied landings at Anzio threatened the rear of the Gustav and Hitler lines. Near the month’s end, Kesselring had issued an order, intercepted by Ultra, to “develop the Apennine position with the greatest energy,” with special attention to the eastern flank at Pesaro because of the lack of inherent physical features favourable to the defence.24
Despite Kesselring’s desire for haste, construction progressed slowly throughout the winter and early spring of 1944. In April and May, Ultra code-breakers provided General Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander, Mediterranean with the contents of detailed engineering reports on Gothic Line progress. The reports revealed that the line’s readiness state varied greatly from one sector to another, with the eastern flank less developed than the western flank and the interior mountains having received the least attention of all.
On June 2, with the fall of Rome imminent, OKW took renewed interest in the work and issued a comprehensive order that set out point-by-point tasks and the means that would be provided to ensure their completion. Sectors that provided the most open ground for tank manoeuvre, such as the eastern flank on the Adriatic coast, were to be protected by the deadly Panzerturms that had destroyed so many Allied tanks during the May 24 breaching attack on the Hitler Line. Each Panzerturm was a fabricated steel-and-concrete shelter dug into the ground and mounted with a turret from a disabled Panther Mark V tank. The turret could rotate through a 360-degree field of fire and its powerful 75-millimetre gun had a maximum range of 1,200 yards. These well-camouflaged gun positions were difficult to detect by aerial reconnaissance. They were also virtually immune to Allied tank or artillery fire. Thirty Panzerturms were to reach Italy by July 1, the order stated, and one hundred steel shelters (most capable of housing a machine-gun post or antitank gun) were also en route. Extensive tunnels were to be dug into the rocky terrain and fire embrasures carved out to protect artillery from aerial or counter-battery fire.
The Gothic Line’s front approaches were to be blocked by swaths of minefields and a six-mile-deep obstacle zone created “by lasting demolition of all traffic routes, installations and shelters.” All civilians living within a twelve-mile area to the front of the line, and to a depth of six miles behind, were to be evacuated. About two thousand German troops were assigned to enforce this evacuation and forcibly recruit male Italians for civil labour construction teams.25
On August 1, Obergefreiter Carl Bayerlein’s engineer battalion was transferred from the interior to Fano on the Adriatic coast. “Our assignment was the demolition of the coastal railway, plus coast surveillance, preparing positions and mining the coastal strip. The Gothic Line already had many bunkers, minefields and dugouts, but most of them were still under construction. Between Fano and Pesaro, as a defence against enemy landings, we laid a new kind of mine. These were made of concrete in which nails, screws and miscellaneous bits of scrap iron had been cast. They were stuck on wooden poles just above the ground and connected with trigger wires. They were to be used against landing troops, and were all painted green so as to be invisible in the grass. The effect of these mines was devastating.”26
After completing their work at Fano, the parachute engineers moved northward to Pesaro, home to the Benelli motorcycle production plant and several other large industrial factories. Most of the machinery, tools, and production materials from these installations had already been stripped and transported to factories north of the Gothic Line or to Germany itself. Bayerlein’s team blew up any equipment that could not be removed.
Bayerlein was next put in command of an Italian labour group of thirty civilians and ordered to prepare some fighting positions at the very front of the Gothic Line. The heat and bugs were terrible. Mosquitoes posed a particular hazard. The German soldiers slept under mosquito netting at night and took Atabrine to ward off malarial infection.
More threatening than the hovering mosquitoes were the Allied fighter-bombers that circled high overhead searching for prey. Any detected vehicle or work party was bombed or strafed. Bayerlein’s Italian workers apparently feared being killed by the Allied planes more than being shot by him, for within a week he had only eight men left. The rest had run away one by one when his back was turned. Confiscating the identity papers of the next batch of rounded-up civilians stopped further desertions.
The Allied bombing not only disrupted the rate of work on the line, but also destroyed much that had been completed. When one fighter-bomber attacked a minefield, its bombs detonated hundreds of the mines that had taken days to plant. Nearby, Bayerlein’s party was constructing a dugout in the side of a sandy hill. Suddenly Bayerlein “heard a howling in the sky, and when I looked up, there was a fighter-bomber diving on us. At the last moment, I was able to push two men inside the dugout, and I finally found cover. Already the cannon were hammering away. The
projectiles struck the earth right above the entrance—it was work made-to-measure.”27 When the attack ended, the Italians immediately fled en masse, despite Bayerlein’s possession of their identity papers.
On August 20, 1st Parachute Engineer Battalion moved a few miles north to Cattolica to assume coastal watch duties and form an immediate ready reserve for the LXXVI Panzer Corps divisions holding the Adriatic sector of the Gothic Line. A popular seaside resort prior to the war, Cattolica’s beach was lined with hotels. Since its civilian population had been evacuated, the German troops had the run of the place and little to do but maintain a casual eye on the Adriatic horizon for an amphibious invasion nobody really expected. Bayerlein and his comrades spent many hours floating nude in the blue, warm sea or playing about on pedal boats. From the nearby fields they gathered tomatoes for salads and picked grapes and melons. In one small hotel, Bayerlein found a letter written by two German women some months before Italy became a war zone. They inquired whether nude bathing was permissible. Bayerlein duly wrote a reply stating that “everyone was bathing in the nude.” By now bored with endless swimming, Bayerlein happily discovered some artist’s paints in a house and set to trying to portray the blue sea and the boats. It was, he thought, “an idyll come true.”28
Meanwhile, other German and Italian labour and engineering teams worked on. By August’s end, Tenth Army’s sector of line, stretching from just north of Vicchio east to Pesaro, boasted 2,375 machine-gun posts; 479 antitank gun, mortar, and assault-gun positions; 3,604 dugouts and shelters that included 27 caves; and 16,006 riflemen’s positions that consisted of embrasures constructed of fallen trees and branches. The Germans had also laid 72,517 Teller antitank mines, 23,172 S-mines, 73 miles of wire obstacles, and dug 9,780 yards of antitank ditches. Only four Panzerturms, however, were complete. Another eighteen were under construction and seven more planned. Eighteen of forty-six smaller tank gun turrets mounting 1- and 2-centimetre guns were ready. While twenty-two steel shelters were under construction, none was as yet complete.29