The Sicilian campaign taught the Anglo-Americans painful lessons. Amphibious and related air operations were poorly planned and clumsily managed. Coordination between air and ground forces was lacking. If Italian troops had fought with the same determination as the Germans, the invaders would have been pushed back into the sea. The Americans were dismayed by Alexander’s lack of grip, contemptuous of Montgomery’s sluggishness, irked by their ally’s apparent desire to relegate them to a subordinate role. The British, in their turn, were exasperated by the reluctance of American commanders, especially Patton, to conform to agreed plans. Each partner criticised the combat performance of the other’s troops. Both found it hard to overcome defenders holding high ground dominating the island’s few roads. The Germans executed masterly ambushes and demolitions, a foretaste of their tactics up the length of Italy during the next two years. The invaders failed to exploit sea power to outflank resistance, and merely conducted a succession of slogging matches.
Fifty thousand Germans had held half a million Allied soldiers at bay for five weeks. The invaders made much of the perils posed by Tiger tanks, nebelwerfer mortars, ‘spandau’ machine-gun and artillery fire; the difficulties of attacking in steep terrain; the heat; malaria and combat-fatigue losses. But it was plain that, though overwhelming Allied superiority eventually prevailed, the Wehrmacht’s soldiers had fought more convincingly than their Anglo-American counterparts. Again and again Allied forces failed – as they would again fail in north-west Europe – to translate captures of ground into destruction of enemy forces. The Germans were so baffled by their own escape, and by Allied failure to launch an amphibious operation into Calabria to cut them off, that some cherished a fantastic theory that Alexander had acquiesced in their withdrawal for political reasons.
The Sicilian campaign represented the only significant summer 1943 land operation against the Germans by the United States and Britain, engaging eight Allied divisions and costing 6,000 dead. During the same season, four million men were locked in combat around Kursk and Oryol, where half a million Russians perished. Some German civilians, desperate for an end of the war, lamented the slowness of Western Allied progress. Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote on 14 August: ‘We hoped and hoped that things would move even faster.’ There are explanations for the modest Western Allied ground commitment in 1943, but it is easy to see why the Russians regarded it with such contempt. So too did some participants. Lt. Col. Lionel Wigram, one of the British Army’s most energetic and imaginative officers, submitted a report analysing failures he had observed at first hand. He criticised set-piece frontal attacks, overdependence on artillery, refusal to exploit infiltration to work behind defenders in close country. He urged that every battalion should be relieved of some twenty-odd of its soldiers who invariably ran away in action. He concluded: ‘The Germans have undoubtedly in one way scored a decided success in SICILY. They have been able to evacuate their forces almost intact having suffered very few casualties … They have inflicted heavy casualties on us. We all feel rather irritated as a result.’ This recklessly frank assessment reached Montgomery’s ears: his vanity pricked, he sacked Wigram from command of his battalion. No heed was taken of the colonel’s just strictures.
Apologists for the British and American armies assert that respect for the German defence of Sicily, like many other Axis battlefield achievements, cannot mask its ultimate failure. Kesselring’s forces were evicted from the island. They lost. This is true, and important. It is among the themes of this book that the Wehrmacht fought many battles brilliantly well, but that Germany made war very badly. Nonetheless, repeated Anglo-American failures to destroy Hitler’s armies, despite successes in displacing them from occupied territory, meant that the Red Army remained until 1945, as it had been since 1941, the main engine of Nazism’s destruction.
2 THE ROAD TO ROME
The Allied assault on the Italian mainland began on 3 September, when Canadians of Eighth Army landed in Calabria without meeting resistance; Kesselring, commanding the German defence, had decided to fight his first battle further north. Five days later, on 8 September, as Allied leaders assembled for a summit in Quebec, Marshal Badoglio’s government in Rome announced Italy’s surrender, prompting renewed optimism about a swift advance up the peninsula. On the 9th, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed at Salerno. This proved one of the critical actions of the western war, but not in the fashion the invaders anticipated. Col. Bill Darby’s US Rangers achieved initial success on the extreme left of the Allied line, clearing the Amalfi coast resort villages and securing the Chiunzi pass, with its distant view of Naples. But elsewhere the Germans deployed rapidly to meet the invaders, and launched a series of smashing counter-attacks. Clark’s one American and one British corps found themselves penned in four small beachheads, under intense fire.
On the 13th, Kesselring’s forces drove a wedge between US and British elements which brought his panzers within a mile of the sea. The amphibious armada offshore suffered heavy attacks by the Luftwaffe, employing new radio-controlled glider bombs. Clark panicked and proposed re-embarking the army. Though Eisenhower and Alexander overruled him, for hours chaos dominated the beachhead, especially after darkness fell. ‘In the belief that our position had been infiltrated by German infantry, [American troops] began to shoot each other,’ wrote a British eyewitness, ‘and there were blood-chilling screams from men hit by the bullets. We crouched in our slit trench under the pink, fluttering leaves of the olives, and watched the fires come closer, and the night slowly passed … Official history will in due course set to work to dress up this part of the action at Salerno with what dignity it can. What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos.’
Lt. Michael Howard of the Coldstream Guards wrote: ‘Shells whined swiftly over us like lost souls. Moan, moan, moan they wept.’ Some British as well as American units behaved deplorably: the Scots Guards official history acknowledged ‘a general feeling in the air of another Dunkirk’. Only an intense naval bombardment, pounding the German front, averted disaster. ‘For God’s sake, Mike,’ said Eisenhower to US VI Corps commander Maj. Gen. Mike Dawley a few hours before Dawley was relieved and sent home as a colonel, ‘how did you manage to get your troops so fucked up?’ Lt. Peter Moore of the Leicestershire Regiment wrote:
During the night the Germans had positioned mortars and spandaus to cover the whole perimeter. The first sign of the impending bombardment was the familiar tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung of mortar bombs being dropped down the barrel and fired. We waited tensely and in seconds came the screaming whoosh-bang, whoosh-bang, whoosh-bang as the bombs exploded among us. At the same time the spandaus opened up with long bursts of rapid fire over our heads, tearing through the vines. The mortaring was very accurate and soon we had many wounded and a few killed. It was very difficult to go to the help of the wounded because of the intense machine-gunning. We fired our Bren guns and rifles to give cover as they crawled or were manhandled to a cave which we had found. The exchanges of fire continued all day. I had persuaded myself into a state of resignation. I did not see how we could sustain a prolonged attack and just hoped that whatever fate awaited me would be quick. I always carried the Army Prayer Book, and I gained enormous comfort and solace from reading through the order of Matins and Evening Prayer, the familiar canticles, psalms and prayers.
After days of heavy fighting, Kesselring’s counterattack was beaten off. ‘In the first grey hints of light, we buried the German dead,’ wrote Michael Howard. ‘These were the first corpses I had handled: shrunken pathetic dolls lying stiff and twisted, with glazed blue eyes. Not one could have been over 20, and some were little more than children. With horrible carelessness we shovelled them into their own trenches and piled on the earth. The scene remains etched in my mind: the hunched, urgent diggers, the sprawling corpses with their dead eyes in a cold dawn light that drained all colour from the scene, leaving only mournful blacks and greys. When we had
finished, we stuck their rifles and bayonets above the graves and scuttled quickly back under cover. It was a scene worthy of Goya.’
Once again, Allied firepower had turned the scale. ‘The heavy naval barrages were especially unpleasant,’ noted a German officer. Every movement by Kesselring’s forces was met by a storm of shelling and air attacks. If Allied soldiers were appalled by Salerno, the Wehrmacht scarcely enjoyed the experience. ‘Here we got our first taste of what superior material force really meant,’ said panzer gunner Erich Dressler ruefully. ‘First came low-flying bombers in such close formation that one could not distinguish the individual squadrons, whilst artillery and mortars plastered us for hours.’ Again and again the panzers thrust forward, and again and again they were halted. Kesselring’s casualties in the battle totalled only 3,500, including 630 killed, against 5,500 British and 3,500 American, but the Germans lacked sufficient combat power to reach the sea. They mauled the invaders, as they would do later at Anzio and in Normandy. But they could not expel them in the face of devastating artillery and air support.
The 1943 Landings in Italy
The unimpressive Allied showing, against smaller Axis forces, nonetheless exercised a decisive influence on the subsequent campaign. Kesselring began to withdraw northwards, but Salerno convinced him that the Wehrmacht’s skills could keep up a long delaying action in the Italian peninsula, terrain ideally suited to defence. Hitler agreed, and scrapped his earlier plan for a strategic withdrawal to the northern mountains. The Allies’ Mediterranean assault was thus far successful, to the extent that it persuaded him to withdraw sixteen divisions from the Eastern Front to reinforce Kesselring. But the stage was set for eighteen months of slow and costly fighting in some of the most unyielding country in Europe. ‘The Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch,’ a German paratrooper wrote in an unfinished letter found on his corpse at Salerno, ‘and we will surely make hard chewing for them.’
Kesselring settled himself to conduct a series of defensive battles, which the Allies found painfully repetitive. At each stage they bombed and shelled the German positions for days before their own infantry advanced into machine-gun, artillery and mortar fire. After days or weeks of attrition, the Germans made a measured withdrawal to a new mountain or river line, protected by demolition of bridges, rail links and access roads. Everything of value to the civilian population as well as to the Allies was pillaged or destroyed. It was estimated that 92 per cent of all sheep and cattle in southern Italy together with 86 per cent of poultry were taken or killed by the retreating army. With the malice that so often characterised German behaviour, Kesselring’s men destroyed much of Naples’s cultural heritage before abandoning the city, burning whole medieval libraries, including the university’s 50,000 volumes. Delayed-action bombs were laid in prominent buildings, where they inflicted severe casualties after the city’s liberation. Some Allied soldiers behaved no better than their enemies, vandalising priceless artefacts.
Churchill remained wedded to a belief, indeed an obsession, that a big campaign in Italy could open a path into Germany. The Americans, however, decided that further Mediterranean operations offered only bitter fruits; once some good bomber airfields had been secured, they sought to divert forces as swiftly as possible to the invasion of France, and they were surely correct. British enthusiasm for a southern strategy was justified in 1942–43, but forfeited credibility as the cross-Channel attack loomed, and as the difficulties of achieving a breakthrough in Italy became apparent. Allied forces must stay there, to tie down Germans who would otherwise fight in France or Russia. But no important victory was achievable, certainly not by field commanders of such meagre abilities as Alexander and Clark.
By the end of September, thirteen Allied divisions confronted seven German, while a further eleven of Kesselring’s formations secured the country behind the front, employing the most brutal methods everywhere that partisans attempted to challenge their mastery. Through the autumn months the Allies battered their way slowly up southern Italy, checked at every turn by demolitions, ambushes, stubbornly defended river crossings and hill features. ‘If the “liberation” of Italy goes on at this rate,’ Countess Iris Origo wrote bitterly from occupied territory in October, ‘there will be little enough left to free; district by district, the Germans are leaving a wasteland.’ The ‘Gustav line’ along the Garigliano and Sangro rivers was contested for weeks, during which torrential storms reduced the battlefield to a quagmire. ‘I don’t think we can get any spectacular results so long as it goes on raining,’ Montgomery reported to Brooke shortly before relinquishing command of Eighth Army to return to England to direct the Normandy invasion. ‘The whole country becomes a sea of mud and nothing on wheels can move off the roads.’
Morale slumped. ‘Italy would break their backs, their bones, and nearly their spirits,’ American historian Rick Atkinson has written. ‘All roads lead to Rome,’ said Alexander ruefully, ‘but all the roads are mined.’ Booby-traps and anti-personnel devices inflicted a steady toll of casualties. ‘A man’s foot is usually blown loose at the ankle,’ a US Army doctor noted, ‘leaving the mangled foot dangling on shredded tendons. Additional puncture wounds of both legs and groin make the agony worse.’ Evacuating casualties from the mountains was a nightmare task, four men being required to carry each stretcher. The Germans created imaginative obstacles: north of the Sangro, they felled a half-mile-long line of roadside poplars. Before Allied armour could pass, these had to be cleared by bulldozers at the rate of one tree an hour.
Most men’s memories of the campaign were dominated not by the sun and natural beauty with which popular imagination endowed Italy, but by the horror of winter conditions. ‘The ground for fifty yards outside is MUD – six inches deep, glistening, sticky, holding pools of water,’ gunner officer John Guest wrote home. ‘Great excavations in the mud, leaving miniature alps of mud, show where other tents have been pitched in the mud, and moved on account of the mud to other places in the mud. The cumulative psychological experience of mud … cannot be described. Vehicles grind along the road beneath in low gear. Either side … is a bank of mud, thigh-deep. The sides … collapse frequently and the huge trucks, like weary prehistoric animals, slide helplessly down into the ditches … My men stand in the gun-pits stamping their feet in the wet, their heads sunk in the collars of greatcoats. When they speak to you they roll their eyes up because it makes their necks cold to raise their heads. Everyone walks with their arms out to help them keep their balance.’ In November, Canadian soldier Farley Mowat wrote from Italy to a friend in Britain: ‘I hate to disillusion you about the climate, but it must be the worst in the whole bloody world. It either burns the balls off you in summer, or freezes them off in winter. In between, it rots them off with endless rain. The only time I’m comfortable is in my sleeping bag, wearing woollen battledress and burrowed under half a dozen extra blankets.’
US battalion commander Lt. Col. Jack Toffey, a hero of the Italian campaign, mused aloud about how to develop his men’s killing instincts, to instil in them the tigerish lust to close with the enemy which alone could win battles: ‘Our boys aren’t professionals, and you have to condition them to enjoy killing.’ By November, more than half the soldiers whom Toffey led ashore had become casualties. Another American likened fighting in Italy to ‘climbing a ladder with an opponent stamping on his hands at every rung’. Combat artist George Biddle wrote: ‘I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire … cold, wet, hungry, homesick and frightened.’
By 1 December, seventeen Allied divisions were deployed against thirteen German ones. The invaders enjoyed overwhelming air support, but this was of limited assistance in winter weather, against defenders deeply dug into the mountains. In the four battles of Monte Cassino, fifty miles south of Rome, between January and May 1944, bombing destroyed one of the great medieva
l monasteries of Europe without significantly furthering the ground advance. The Allied armies, which now comprised a remarkable conglomeration of British, American, French, New Zealand, Polish, Canadian and Indian troops, displayed courage and fortitude in conditions resembling those of the Eastern Front, or of Flanders in World War I, but their sacrifices achieved little. Poor generalship and ill-coordinated attacks, together with German skill and intractable terrain, caused the failure of assault after assault. France’s Gen. Alphonse Juin was the only Allied commander to emerge from the mountain campaigns with an enhanced reputation: a marshal who had voluntarily dropped a rank to fight in Italy, Juin was far better fitted to direct operations than either Alexander or Clark.
The American field ambulances won warm praise, retrieving casualties hour after hour and day after day under continuous fire. One driver’s vehicle was blasted into a ditch by a near-miss, after which he went forward on foot and brought in four Indian casualties one by one ‘under a hail of fire … Day and night, and non-stop if necessary, those American boys would carry on. They could always be trusted to get through, no matter how sticky the situation.’ The 1/2 Gurkha Rifles spearheaded one of many attacks on Cassino. ‘The leading companies walked into a death trap. This scrub proved to be thorn thicket seeded with anti-personnel mines, its outskirts threaded with trip-wires linked to booby traps. Behind this deadly barrier stormtroopers lay in wait, in machine-gun posts less than fifty yards apart. Between these nests foxholes sheltered enemy tommy-gunners and bomb-throwers. A shower of grenades arched out of the night … The leading platoons dashed into the undergrowth and blew up almost to a man. Colonel Showers fell shot in the stomach. Two-thirds of the leading company was struck down within five minutes, yet the survivors continued to force their way forward. Riflemen were found afterwards with as many as four trip-wires around their legs. Naik Birbahadur Thapa, although wounded in many places, managed to burst through the scrub and seize a position … Stretcher-bearer Sherbadur Thapa made sixteen trips across this deadly ground before he was killed. An unscathed handful battled on until ordered to withdraw. Seven British officers, four Gurkha officers and 138 other ranks had fallen.’ In six weeks, 4th Indian Division suffered more than 4,000 casualties. Its own officers conceded that as a fighting formation it was never the same again.
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