Finally, the codebreakers traced one more development, one that meant bad news for the campaign in Italy. The Germans had adroitly evacuated Sardinia and Corsica, adding nearly forty thousand troops to their defenders on the mainland.
Italy 1943-44: A Winter of Discontent
For a time after the Fifth and Eighth Armies had linked up, decrypts indicated that Hitler might order Kesselring to evacuate southern Italy and make a staged withdrawal to the Rome area. The slow pace of the Allied advance changed the führer's mind. Kesselring and Vietinghoff organized their defenses to check the Allies from reaching a primary goal: the wide Liri Valley, lying beyond the mountain barriers and offering access to Rome. Allied troops made heroic sacrificial efforts to cross the rivers, climb the mountains and dislodge the Germans from their strongholds only to be thrown back. The battle settled into a bitter, bloody stalemate.
Eisenhower and his fellow generals began to consider an amphibious end run that would reach around and beyond the German lines. This landing would take place at Anzio, a coastal town thirty-five miles south of Rome. As with Salemo, Anzio would be preceded by a drive by the armies inland meant to draw the German troops away from the landings. And again, the inland troops were to link up with the invaders. This first Anzio plan came to nought, however, when neither Montgomery's nor Clark's armies could, despite more examples of incredible heroism and tremendous losses, dislodge the Germans from their mountain redoubts. Eisenhower gave up on the idea of an Anzio landing.
Then Churchill weighed in. Obsessed by the calendar that had the invasion of Normandy scheduled for May or June and that of southern France to coincide, the prime minister felt he couldn't allow the Italian campaign to drag on inconclusively. He pressed for what he called a "cat-claw," another reach around the Germans in the west. Coerced from on high, the Allied commanders agreed to organize a new try at Anzio.
Signals intelligence gave a favorable forecast for the mission, set for January 22, 1944. The codebreakers advised, accurately as it turned out, that the only German forces in place to oppose the landings would be at most two divisions, some tanks and a couple of parachute battalions. Decrypts also advised that no strong reinforcements were available within forty-eight hours' journey. Bold and decisive action would catch the Germans unprepared not only at the beach but further inland.
Once again, bold and decisive action was what Clark did not deliver. He seemed to have doubts about the landing's success. He cautioned his general in command of the operation, John P. Lucas, "Don't stick your neck out, Johnny. I did at Salerno and got into trouble." Clark gave Lucas limited objectives: to seize and hold a beachhead, yes, but to risk an inland dash only after getting firmly established ashore. Lucas was sent in without the mechanized troops for a rapid advance, and shortages of landing craft kept him from receiving armor when he most needed it. Kesselring later said of Anzio that it had seemed to him "a half-hearted measure."
The landings began well enough. With their air reconnaissance decimated by Allied fliers, the Germans did not detect the approach of the invasion fleet. The landings met with little opposition, and the first drive inland encountered only two exhausted battalions which had been pulled out of the mountain defenses to rest and refit. They were quickly overrun.
But then the successes stopped. Lucas was only too willing to accede to the warnings of caution. He concentrated on organizing his thumbnail of a beachhead instead of maintaining the momentum of his attack. Kesselring observed "the hesitant advance of those troops which had landed," and wrote, "That morning I already had the feeling that the worst danger had been staved off."
By the time Lucas was ready, on the ninth day, to push toward Rome, his German opponent had put together a formidable defensive cordon around the Anzio beachhead. Hitler helped by rushing in reinforcements from Yugoslavia, Germany, France and northern Italy. Decrypts warned of these transfers and also of the shift of bombers to harass the beachhead.
Lucas's belated offensive was quickly checked, with grim losses. Clark and Alexander ordered him to abandon the attack and dig in. Now it was the Germans' turn. Kesselring planned another of his powerful counterattacks meant to split the beachhead forces and either encircle the fragments or drive them back into the sea. Then occurred what Hinsley termed "one of the most valuable decrypts of the whole war," a revelation that is credited with converting even Mark Clark into a believer in Ultra. It forewarned of the counterattack and predicted precisely where it would hit. When the Germans came, the Allied troops were ready for them. The advance was met by withering fire from Lucas's artillery, tanks, tank destroyers and mortars as well as by some seven hundred sorties by Allied aircraft and shelling by two navy cruisers.
The Germans pressed their first attack for five days, only to be held off by American firepower and GI will. Decrypts pointed up the moment, on February 21, when Kesselring admitted that the offensive had failed. Clark came ashore and relieved Lucas, replacing him with the more aggressive Lucian K. Truscott.
The Germans refused to give up their attempts to smash the Anzio toehold. Further decrypts gave notice that they were organizing another counterattack. Again the Allies knew what to expect and where to mass their power. The German attackers were mauled. On March 1 they sent messages reporting that they were withdrawing to their starting line. A long report from Kesselring advised Berlin that he could not hope to eliminate the beachhead with the forces at his command; the best he could do was to keep it bottled up. For prudence's sake he was rushing the construction of a new defense line to which he could fall back and still prevent the Allies from reaching Rome.
That was the end of German attempts to eradicate Anzio. Kesselring was content to pin in the invaders, keep them separated from the main Allied forces and make life on the beachhead perilous and miserable. His heavy guns and Luftwaffe bombers forced the Allied soldiery to burrow underground and live like beleaguered moles. German radio called Anzio "a prison camp where the inmates feed themselves."
Churchill lamented, "I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we had got was a stranded whale."
The inland attack ordered by Clark to draw Germans away from the Anzio landing was an assault across the Rapido River. Clark persisted in carrying out the attack even though he was warned that the strong German defenses and zeroed-in artillery on the far side of the deep, swift-flowing stream doomed it to failure. For the GIs involved, the Rapido crossing quickly turned into a hopeless death trap. So overwhelming was the defeat that it was investigated after the war by a Congressional committee.
With the repulse at the Rapido, with Anzio a stranded whale, a virtual stalemate continued all through March and April and early May. The center and symbol of Allied frustration became the monastery of Monte Cassino. Its great two hundred-yard-long bulk of masonry sat atop the Cassino massif and looked down from a height of seventeen hundred feet on the approaches to it. Below the abbey was Castle Hill, another rugged promontory, and on the banks of the Rapido River the armed town of Cassino itself. By placing heavy guns and artillery spotters on the brow of the massif, by turning the lower reaches into a vast warren of concrete pillboxes, fortified stone houses, minefields and barbed wire entanglements, and by diverting the Rapido to flood the plain below into a quagmire in which armor bogged down, the Germans had made the whole into an impregnable natural fortress.
Allied commanders waged three major battles trying to take the monastery, only to have each of them driven back with severe casualties. Although German gunners placed themselves close to the abbey's walls on either side, their general scrupulously avoided using the structure itself as a fortification, a nicety that Allied commanders refused to accept. Eighth Army commanders called for it to be destroyed—a decision that, to his credit, Clark strongly opposed. The plan went ahead, with heavy artillery combining with a raid by U.S. bombers to reduce the historic structure to rubble.
The bombers were supposed to first drop leaflets on the monastery warning the monks
and refugees within its walls to get out at once. That done, the bombers' assault would be followed by having a division of Indian lighters swing around to the abbey's rear and drive out the German defenders. Like so many other actions in the Italian campaign, execution of the plan was botched. The bombers made their terrible run not on February 16 as expected but a day earlier. The bishop and some 250 of the refugees remaining in the shrine were killed. The Indians were not ready and their attack failed. The German troops happily moved into the rubble and used the giant blocks of stone to make their fortress still stronger. Here as at Anzio the stalemate held.
What finally did the Germans in was a plan that depended heavily on their intelligence blindness. Now they were lacking not only cryptanalytic clues; their air reconnaissance had largely been swept from the skies. Astutely employing radio-silent maneuvers at night and camouflage by day, Alexander organized a huge attack force. Kesselring thought he was facing six divisions on the main front when in actuality he was up against more than fifteen. Among them were a division of agile, mountain-climbing Moroccans and a Polish division whose troops had once been captives of the Russians.
As a deceptive move, Alexander had amphibious operations staged near Naples, where German intelligence agents were sure to report them. Kesselring responded as expected: he kept his mobile units in the west to guard against being outflanked by another possible landing.
Alexander's planning was guided by a steady flow of signals intelligence that told him Kesselring's complete order of battle, the sections of the front for which his units were responsible and such other details as the number of his tanks and how many of them were serviceable.
A Bletchley decrypt even informed Alexander when to launch this, the fourth Battle of Cassino. It disclosed that Hitler had summoned several officers to discuss plans with him on May 11 to 12. The news assured Alexander that an attack at that time would be a surprise, and it was.
The offensive was helped by one of Kesselring's rare errors. Thinking the rugged terrain of the Aurunci Mountains would forestall any advance there, he left only a thin line to guard the area. The French mountain troops readily managed the ascent and broke through to a point where they were within reach of the Liri Valley and the road to Rome. The German front crumbled. By May 17 the British had outflanked Cassino. The next day the Poles occupied the monastery ruins and raised their flag over the site, whose capture had claimed nearly four thousand of their colleagues' lives. The Germans were at last in retreat along the entire main battlefront, and their exhaustion and desperation were aptly chronicled by Allied decrypts.
As for the troops at Anzio, Alexander wanted them to break out, drive northward toward the town of Valmontone and block the Highway 6 escape route of the German divisions retreating from the south—a move, he thought, that would bag thousands of prisoners.
He figured without Mark Clark. Along with his own ego driving him to become the liberator of Rome were added the pressures from on high, particularly from Churchill and Marshall, to take the Eternal City before the political significance of its capture was overshadowed by the Normandy landings. Moreover, as Clark recorded in his memoir, "I was determined that the Fifth Army was going to capture Rome." His determination was driven by the belief that "practically everybody else was trying to get into the act."
The Taking of Rome: A Hollow Victory
General Truscott fulfilled his part of Alexander's plan. His troops drove through the German defenses at Anzio and headed north toward Valmontone. Eric Sevareid has left a vivid account of what came next. General Clark, who had earlier endorsed the plan to entrap the Germans, called a press conference at which he now claimed it was "nonsense" to think the Germans could be bottled up by seizing Highway 6, since there were many lesser roads by which they could escape. He ordered Truscott to direct only about a third of his troops toward Valmontone; the main body would head straight for Rome.
The correspondents were dumbfounded. Truscott and other commanders were outraged. But Clark was in charge. Paranoid that the British might take Rome while his troops were busy rounding up Germans, he made sure his Fifth Army got there first.
Even though the Germans were in retreat, they could still manage delaying actions. The most serious holdup came at the Alban Hills, the last breastworks defending Rome. Impatient, Clark sent armor across the flat ground between the hills and the sea. According to Sevareid, "Every vehicle was easily spotted in the enemy's gun sights and within ten minutes we had lost twenty-five tanks."
The Alban Hills impasse was solved by General Fred Walker of the Thirty-sixth Division. He drew two regiments from the main line, circled them stealthily around to the right during the night and sent them climbing the two-thousand-foot height behind the German line. His maneuver broke the defense. Most of the Germans, declaring Rome an open city, retreated beyond it. But some maintained a rearguard action.
At one point of delay, Brigadier General Robert Frederick, whom Sevareid described as "the young and capable commander of the special 'commando' regiment of Americans and Canadians," was watching the progress of his men when a jeep drew alongside. Major General Geoffrey Keyes, corps commander, descended. "General Frederick," he asked, "what's holding you up here?"
FREDERICK: The Germans, sir.
KEYES: How long will it take you to get across the city limits?
FREDERICK: The rest of the day. There are a couple of SP [self-propelled] guns up there.
KEYES: That will not do. General Clark must be across the city limits by four o'clock.
FREDERICK: Why?
KEYES: Because he has to have a photograph taken.
FREDERICK [after a long pause]: Tell the general to give me an hour.
The guns were silenced, the general and his faithful photographer arrived and the pictures were taken, in Sevareid's words, "of the conqueror and his conquered city."
It was June 5. Clark got his headlines and pictures in the world's press. He had beaten the D-Day deadline imposed on him by his superiors by one day. The next morning he called for a meeting of his corps commanders. Arriving, they found they were to supply a proper martial backdrop for more of Clark's posturing before press photographers. Soon Clark signaled that he wanted to make an announcement. The measure of his myopia was made plain by his opening words: "This is a great day for the Fifth Army." The reporters blanched. His generals reddened with embarrassment, some with anger. What about the much-bloodied Eighth Army? The self-sacrificing Poles? The Free French? The whole of what Clark himself had called a "hodgepodge army" that had united to make this day possible?
For these newsbreaks the chance to encircle Kesselring's entire Tenth Army was lost. The German general took full advantage of the opportunity. His delaying actions at Valmontone fought off Truscott's inadequate force while the bulk of his army safely slipped through to the Gothic Line—to fight, and kill, again.
The rest of the Italian campaign was anticlimactic in terms of its news-making value. Churchill envisioned the Allies smashing through the Alps to seize Vienna and possibly even Budapest and Prague before the Russians claimed them, but that remained a dream. The need to transfer combat-hardened divisions to the invasion of southern France drained away strength for tackling the last German redoubts in Italy.
Yet it must be remembered that a main purpose of the war on the peninsula was to tie up and maim German forces that could otherwise have helped throw back the Normandy invasion and/or stop the Soviets in the East. The campaign did that. Hitler's decision to contest every yard of Italian territory played into the Allied hands. For twenty months a score of German divisions were held there and bloodied. As BP veteran Ralph Bennett has written, "Every man, tank and gun [Hitler] sent to Italy meant one less to defend Festung Europa."
Even with depleted forcesj Alexander and Clark continued the pressure. Their troops broke the Gothic Line and, as the war in Europe was ending, had the last of Germany's shattered Italian divisions fleeing through the Alps.
Their final
drive did have the effect of encouraging Italian partisans to spring up and seize northern Italy. In the process they captured Mussolini and his mistress, then killed them and strung up their bodies by the heels like sides of beef for once-worshiping countrymen now to jeer at and spit upon.
13
The Coming of the Ultra Americans
While the British were happy to see the influx of American fighting men, they were not so sure about the advent of U.S. codebreakers. A serious question arose as to whether the Americans and the British could ever reach an agreement to collaborate in signals intelligence. There were convincing reasons why they should unite their cryptanalytic programs, and a good many lives were lost because of their failures to do so. But there were almost equally powerful reasons why they should not. Chief among these were security concerns. No military unit with a hold on some aspect of Sigint trusts any other unit to protect its secrets. So it was then: security gave teeth to interservice rivalries. The U.S. Navy would not entrust the U.S. Army with its methods of cryptanalysis, much less make them available to the British. The British, for their part, saw American intelligence operatives as gabby, loose-lipped security risks who couldn't even keep the U.S. press from blabbing the Midway triumph. Seen from this perspective, both British and American intelligence seemed riddled with small-minded staffers who used the security issue more to guard their own turf than to question the advisability of cooperation.
Slowly both sides realized, however, that they had significant assets that could be shared. The Americans had their Magic; the British had Ultra. Both sides also had intelligence leaders who saw the need for mutual support. As early as August 1940, the head of the U.S. Army planning staff, Brigadier General George V. Strong, led a contingent to England to propose a "periodic exchange of information" between the British and American governments. Hinsley reported that at this meeting, Strong described U.S. progress against Japanese and Italian ciphers—this before the break-in on Purple was completed!
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