Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Meanwhile, momentous happenings were under way in Italy. Mussolini had been seduced by the prospect of easy pickings after a short war, and his declaration of war in 1940 was purely pragmatic. Italy’s economy was never capable of withstanding a long war, and by 1943 harsh reality had begun to make itself felt. Rationing had been introduced and food consumption reduced by 25 per cent; soap, coffee and tobacco were luxuries; bread was being sold at eight times its pre-war price; there was a thriving black market, and in Rome little old ladies were wondering where their pet cats had disappeared to, as the less well-off ate them. The German alliance had never been popular but with no oil of her own Italy was dependent on imports of German coal, which decreased as Germany needed it for her own use. Steel production had fallen, and Italian industry was barely capable of replacing the outdated weaponry of the country’s armed forces, let alone of manufacturing sufficient numbers of the modern fighter aircraft the Regia Aeronautica desperately needed. And as the British and Americans stepped up air raids on Italian targets, production declined yet further. Workers began to strike in protest at increases in working hours and in the armed services chaos reigned as generals were shuffled about and Mussolini made pointless appeals to Italian soldiers to die at their posts. The Duce himself was not well; an old ulcer had flared up, he was subject to violent mood swings*

  and he was unable or unwilling to curb the ambitions of his young mistress, Clara Petacci, who was thirty years younger than him and openly solicited favours for her numerous relations. While he was well aware that the Italian population was now equating fascism with shortages, hunger and air raids, he refused to consider telling Hitler that the Italian people could not take much more. However, a number of individuals who mattered – the king,Victor Emmanuel of the House of Savoy, Marshal Badoglio, the onetime Chief of Staff of the army until Mussolini sacked him, the dictator’s sonin-law Galeazzo Ciano, the former foreign minister who was now ambassador to the Holy See and a longtime opponent of the German alliance, other disillusioned former fascist functionaries – and one very influential institution, the Vatican, had all concluded that it was time for Mussolini to go. The final straw was probably an Allied air raid on Rome on 19 July that killed over 1,000 people, and on 24 July the Fascist Grand Council passed a vote of no confidence in Mussolini’s leadership and called for him to be replaced as head of the armed forces by the king. The next day Victor Emmanuel dismissed him as head of government, had him arrested and swore in a new government headed by Marshal Badoglio. Badoglio appointed soldiers and technocrats to his government, while those unreconstructed fascists who were unable or unwilling to turn their coats headed for Germany. The public generally supported the new regime but demonstrations demanding social reform were put down firmly, even brutally, with many of the agitators locked up.

  The new government did not attempt to leave the war, or at least not just yet. It made secret approaches to the Allies while still professing eternal solidarity to the Axis, but the Germans, from Hitler in Berlin to Kesselring in Rome, could see the writing on the wall and Hube was ordered to withdraw towards Messina while the Allies attacked either side of Mount Etna. In a skilful operation on the night of 11/12 August, the Germans evacuated 60,000 Italians and 40,000 Germans with all their weapons and most of their vehicles and equipment across the straits to Italy. The Allies, who were too busy squabbling amongst themselves, did little to oppose it and their amphibious operations designed to prevent it failed. There was now an unseemly race to Messina, the British from the south and the Americans from the west, which was won by the Americans, to Montgomery’s fury, on 16 August. Operation Husky cost the Allies 31,000 casualties, of which around half were from malaria (probably contracted in North Africa), the Germans about the same (but none from malaria) and the Italians 132,000, mainly deserters and prisoners of war. The Axis had lost 1,800 aircraft to the Allies’ 400 and, although the efforts of the Italian navy had been minimal, the Allies did lose twelve vessels, none of them capital ships.

  Now would have been the time to strike across the Straits of Messina, drop an airborne division on Rome, accept an Italian surrender, trap the German forces in Italy and free up the whole of the Italian mainland as an air base from which to bomb Germany. It was not to be. Inter-Allied argument and dissension, muddle and confusion, political wheeling and dealing all contributed to a three-week delay before the terms of Italian surrender were agreed and the Allies were ready to cross the straits. In agreeing that they would invade Italy, the Allies never expected to have to fight all the way up that country. Kesselring had other ideas, however, and every intention of exploiting the defensive qualities of the peninsula, and, while the Allies were indulging in secret haggling with the Italian government over the terms of surrender, the Germans moved sixteen divisions into Italy and honed their preparations for the long-suspected Italian defection. In the meantime, AMGOT, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, set up a civilian administration of Sicily composed of local worthies, who turned out to be the Mafia in suits.

  During the negotiations between the representatives of Badoglio’s government and the Allies, which took place in Lisbon and Tangiers, much delay was caused by differences as to exactly what the Italian exit from the war would mean. The Allies had stated at Casablanca that only unconditional surrender would be accepted, whereas the Italians saw themselves as joining the Allies in the fight against Germany. Further delay was imposed by the conflicting requirements for landing craft: the Americans were insisting that the cross-Channel invasion in 1944 – now codenamed Overlord – was the absolute priority, while the British pressed the claims of the Far East, where Wavell was planning an advance into Burma supported by amphibious landings. Eventually an agreement was hammered out and signed on 3 September. The Allies would mount an attack on southern Italy, with three seaborne landings – one at Calabria on 3 September followed by one at Taranto and one at Salerno on 9 September – and would drop an airborne division on Rome. At the same time the Italian surrender would be announced and the Italian government would demand that the Germans leave. In the event, the Italians were unable to guarantee the security of the drop zone for the airborne operation, which was cancelled.

  The landing on Calabria, Operation Baytown, would be carried out by the British Eighth Army, which would put two divisions, 1 Canadian and 5 British, across the Straits of Messina on 4 September. Operation Slapstick would send another division, the British 1 Airborne, across to Taranto from North Africa by sea the following day. The Salerno landings, with their objective Naples, thirty miles to the north-west, would be the responsibility of Lieutenant-General Mark Clark’s American Fifth Army, which had been formed in January 1943, originally for the defence of Algeria and Morocco. As it was seriously under-strength, it was augmented by British troops and now consisted of the US VI Corps of four divisions, the British X Corps of two infantry divisions and one armoured division, three American Ranger battalions and two British army commandos. All landings would be supported by naval gunfire, mainly by the Royal Navy as the Americans withdrew shipping in the build-up for Overlord, and in the case of Calabria by massed artillery firing across the straits. As bomber squadrons were being withdrawn from the Mediterranean, the air support was less than ideal, and indeed Air Marshal Tedder considered it to be inadequate. As it was, the British landings on 4 September were carried out with little opposition, the German regiment covering eighteen miles of coastline very wisely withdrawing in the face of the overwhelming artillery bombardment, and by 8 September the toe of Calabria was firmly in Allied hands. The landings at Salerno, Operation Avalanche, were a different matter.

  Although Marshal Badoglio’s accredited representatives had signed the instruments of capitulation on 3 September, it was agreed that they would not be made public until 1830 hours on 8 September, when Eisenhower and Badoglio would both broadcast the news. Badoglio then asked that the announcement be delayed until after the Allied invasion. As the Allies had no intention of
telling the Italians when the invasion was to come, Eisenhower insisted that the terms could not be varied and at 1830 hours, when the invasion forces for Salerno and Taranto were at sea, he broadcast the news that Italy had surrendered. An hour later Badoglio announced over Italian radio that Italy had left the war. Within the Italian armed forces and administration there was chaos. Hardly anyone knew of the intention to rat, and even the Chief of Staff, General Mario Roatta, was taken completely by surprise. Having been told nothing, most units of the Italian Army stayed in barracks and did nothing. A few turned on the nearest Germans, many conscripts took the opportunity to desert and go home, and in the Balkans some joined the partisans, but the vast majority were bewildered and without orders – no one had told them what to do in such an event and only the navy acted in accordance with the armistice terms, sailing to Malta and losing one battleship, the Roma, sunk and another badly damaged by the Luftwaffe on the way. The Germans reacted swiftly. Within an hour of Badoglio’s announcement, Kesselring had issued the code word Achse – Axis – for the disarming of the Italians and the seizing of Rome. Reinforcements poured in over the Brenner Pass, brushing Italian roadblocks aside, government buildings were occupied, Italian troops disarmed and coastal defences taken over. Those few Italian troops who were prepared to fight for the Germans were retained; over 600,000 were disarmed and sent to prison camps in Germany.

  On the day that Italy surrendered, another of Churchill’s pet schemes was unveiled when General Sir Maitland Wilson, now Commander-in-Chief Middle East, was persuaded against his better judgement to despatch troops to the Aegean to capture Rhodes and other islands in the Dodecanese. It was a totally misguided attempt to persuade Turkey to enter the war on the Allied side, as well as being part of Churchill’s dream of a Balkan Front, was strongly objected to by the Americans, failed to take Rhodes and achieved nothing except the surrender of five British battalions and the loss of 113 aircraft and eighteen vessels of various types when the Germans retook the subsidiary islands in October 1943.

  At Salerno, the landings on 9 September began at 0330 hours under naval cover that included four battleships, seven cruisers and forty destroyers of the Royal Navy and four cruisers and seventeen destroyers of the US Navy. As Salerno was at extreme range for aircraft operating from Sicily, 150 miles away, most air cover would be provided from seven Royal Navy carriers. The initial waves got ashore, and then it all started to go wrong. The area was the responsibility of General Hube’s XIV Panzer Corps and when X Corps landed on time and began to make some progress in getting off the beach, they were met by 3 Panzer Division, while 16 Panzer Division stopped the Americans and prevented them from even getting off the beach. For three days the situation was desperate. The German build-up was happening faster than that of the Allies and, although the British managed to capture Salerno port and Montecorvino airfield, they were unable to push the Germans back far enough for them to be able to be used. When the German Tenth Army mounted a counter-attack on 12 September, it looked at one stage as if the landing was about to be pushed into the sea. Only by committing all his reserves and by throwing every man who could hold a rifle – clerks, cooks, drivers, bandsmen and storemen – into the battle was Clark able to hold. Eventually, but not until the arrival of 1,500 British reinforcements rapidly moved by three cruisers from Tripoli, the dropping of three battalions of the American 82 Airborne Division into the beachhead, the addition of two British battleships and the diversion of almost every aircraft in the Mediterranean capable of dropping a bomb, the situation was stabilized and on 16 September the Germans withdrew at their own pace to take up a defensive position north of Naples. On the same day the Americans made contact with Eighth Army making its way up from Calabria, and on 1 October the Allies entered Naples.

  The latter stages of Operation Avalanche saw one of the few mutinies of British troops during the Second World War. Mutiny is the worst of all military offences for it strikes at the very basis of discipline; it is a collective offence, that of deliberate and wilful defiance of lawful authority, and was defined in the Army Act applicable at the time as ‘collective insubordination to resist or to induce others to resist lawful military authority’. Many of the 1,500 men sent out from Tripoli at the height of the battle included men in reinforcement camps or returning from leave or recovering from wounds, and the idea was that they should be fed in as individual reinforcements to units. As it transpired, they arrived on the beaches when the worst of the crisis was over, but some of them, mainly men of the 51 Highland Division and 50 Tyne Tees Division, were unhappy that they were being sent to battalions other than the ones into which they had originally been conscripted. The British Army takes the regimental system very seriously, and in law a soldier cannot be ordered to change his cap badge, but it has always been accepted that in an emergency men can be drafted to whatever unit has need of them, even if they are returned to their parent regiment when the moment passes. Of the 1,500 men who arrived, three sergeants, sixteen junior NCOs and 170 privates refused to move and join the units to which they were allocated.* In due course they were brought before a court martial in Bizerta that, after an exhaustive inquiry, found them guilty of mutiny – indeed, it is difficult to see how the verdict could possibly have been otherwise. Mutiny was a capital offence* and the three sergeants were sentenced to death (suspended on review), with the others receiving prison sentences of between five and ten years (also suspended). While we do not know what passed through the minds of the confirming authorities who decided that the sentences should be suspended, no doubt the existing shortage of manpower, the fact that the men were conscripts, and a fear of what the press might say (no executions had yet been carried out in this war) were persuasive. Whatever the mitigating circumstances (and there appear to have been few in this case), there can never be any excuse for mutiny, particularly in the middle of a war and in the circumstances of the critical situation pertaining to the Salerno landings. That the men concerned were clearly a thoroughly bad lot is evidenced by the fact that over 40 per cent of them subsequently deserted when returned to their parent units.

  It was during the Salerno battle that the Germans decided to ‘rescue’ Mussolini from his arrest and detention in the Hotel Campo Imperatore, 7,000 feet up in the Apennine ski resort of Gran Sasso, seventy miles east of Rome. It was a daring and spectacular affair with German troops landed by glider and Mussolini removed in a two-seater Fieseler Storch short take-off and landing aircraft on 12 September, the whole under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny. As the Gran Sasso was accessible via a perfectly good chair-lift and as the Germans by now controlled most of Italy, one can only assume that the method of rescue was intended as a public relations coup – as indeed it was – and Mussolini was soon on his way to Venice, where the Germans were firmly in control. Skorzeny was promoted to SS Obersturmbannführer and awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

  Prior to the Calabria and Salerno landings, Hitler and OKW had believed that, in the event of an Italian defection and an Allied landing, southern Italy should be abandoned and the German defence concentrated in the north. Kesselring had held the opposite view, and the Salerno battle had proved him right; the whole of Italy could be defended and from now on it would be. Kesselring based his plan on a series of lines which would make the most of the Italian mountains and were already being prepared for defence. The German army would delay, harry and generally make life difficult for the advancing Allies and then withdraw back to the next prepared defence line. Kesselring was confident that he could hold Italy and the Balkans almost indefinitely, giving up ground only slowly and only when he had to. Winston Churchill, who was convinced that Italy was the ‘soft under-belly’, had obviously never consulted a map, or at least not a map with contours, for in Italy the mountains run east to west from a central spine, and the rivers run in the valleys created between those spurs. That means that anyone wanting to fight their way up Italy has to fight over a succession of mountain ridges,
having first got over the rivers in front of them. The geography of the country is ideal for defence and the Germans, with their usual ingenuity and professionalism, were going to make full use of it. That the Allies were still fighting in Italy up to May 1945 tends to prove the point.

  The first main position for the German defence of Italy was the so-called Gustav Line, which ran roughly from Minturno on the west coast to Ortona on the east across the narrowest part of the Italian peninsula and had as its dominating feature the 1,700-foot-high Monte Cassino, a craggy mountain crowned by a medieval Benedictine monastery that dominated the landscape for miles around and overlooked the Liri Valley and Route 6, the approaches to Rome. The ground made digging impossible and the Germans had blasted artillery positions, machine-gun nests and troop bunkers out of the rock; they had turned every village into a strongpoint and had carefully sited positions which covered the Rivers Garigliano and Sangro that ran south of the Line. With the British advancing up the east side and the Americans the west, the onset of the autumn rains soon reduced the few roads and tracks to muddy streams; wheeled vehicles could not move off the roads and there were few wide-open spaces for the tanks to manoeuvre. Although the Allies had complete air superiority, this was of less help in the narrow defiles of the hills and valleys than it had been in the open wastes of North Africa. Once the two armies had got over the rivers in front of the Gustav Line, there were to be four battles of Cassino and a long and costly four months of attritional warfare before they could move on.

  The Allies did not, of course, expect to fight four battles. Alexander, commanding 15th Army Group, intended the American Fifth Army to attack the Monte Cassino area which, he hoped, would force Kesselring to move his reserves south. When that happened, an amphibious landing would be made on the west coast north of the Gustav Line behind the Germans. With the Allies north and south of them, the Germans would have no choice but to withdraw, abandoning the Gustav Line and Rome. Eighth Army would then hook across Italy and take Rome – and the Fifth Army operation orders were entitled ‘The Battle for Rome’. There were a number of flaws in this plan. Firstly, Allied intelligence had concluded that the German troops, having fought their way back up Italy from Salerno, must be exhausted and close to collapse, and that morale was low. Unfortunately, however, wishing that something is so does not make it so, and, while the Germans were certainly tired and most units were under-strength, they were well led, well motivated and confident that they could make the Allies fight for every bit of ground before withdrawing at a time of their choosing. Secondly, any amphibious landing would have to happen before mid-January 1944, as after that there would be insufficient landing craft to move enough troops for a landing that could beat off the inevitable counter-attacks and survive. The landing craft were originally to be withdrawn in December, as part of the build-up for Overlord, but after pleading from Churchill the Americans had reluctantly agreed to a postponement, and this meant that the battle would have to be fought with the minimum time for preparation and rehearsal, and regardless of the weather, which in winter made low-level bombing extremely hazardous and thus reduced the effects of Allied air power.