Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  On 13 April the brigade crossed the Santerno River by Bailey bridge erected by the engineers and by last light, after numerous skirmishes with retiring defenders, they reached La Ringhera. By first light on 15 April the infantry was poised to cross the River Sillaro, stoutly defended by men who well knew the tactical significance of the obstacle. At 1115 hours on 15 April, Second Battalion 2/10 Gurkha Rifles tried to establish a bridgehead on the northern bank, but, while they initially succeeded in getting across the river, they could not hold in the face of determined German infantry and fire from medium and heavy mortars. In the small hours of 16 April they tried again and this time they did succeed in establishing a precarious lodgement, closing up to Cesarina by 0430 hours, while 2/8 Gurkha Rifles, riding on 2 RTR tanks, reached Formasaccia. By 0700 hours the engineers had got a bridge across the river and now it was the turn of 2/6 Gurkha Rifles. With the Kangaroo-borne B Company and a tank squadron of 14/20 Kings Hussars in the lead, the battalion group pressed on. Around 1300 hours at Madonna del Silvaro they were held up by two German self-propelled guns (probably 88mm anti-tank guns) but these were disposed of and at 1500 hours C Company passed though B and hit the outskirts of Medicina at 1700 hours, just as it was getting dark. Medicina was, and is, a small medieval town with narrow streets and cellared houses, posing all the problems that operations in built-up areas bring. Fighting from building to building, dismounted from their Kangaroos, the Gurkhas fought their way into the town, ably supported by the tanks, which could blow holes in walls with their 75mm guns to allow the infantry to get in. Fighting in close quarters is always bloody and kukris and bayonets were used to good effect where ranges were too short for rifle fire. By 1800 the rest of the battalion group was in the town and by 2100 hours Medicina was secure. The next morning was spent in mopping up. Now the Polish Corps was across the Sillaro, its flanks secure and the advance went on. There were many one-day battles similar to that at Medicina, when a few companies or a battalion of infantry in armoured personnel carriers supported at close quarters by tanks and artillery fought to clear determined German defenders, who even with the end of the war only weeks away did their duty with little thought of giving up.

  Meanwhile, the American Fifth Army, faced with a choice of attacking up the heavily defended Ligurian coast or trying to turn the German defences by a flanking movement through the mountains to the east, chose the latter, and from 5 April began preliminary moves to establish secure start lines for the main offensive, which was planned to start on 12 April. On 10 April the town of Massa was taken, and the River Frigido crossed, and Carrione was captured on the 12th. Now the disadvantages of the mountain route began to show: the Massa to Cassione road was under German fire and all supplies had to come by mule up narrow mountain tracks. Attempts to air-drop supplies were abandoned when they provisioned only the enemy or delighted villagers well away from the action or fell into ravines unreachable to the troops. Despite the difficulties, 10 Mountain Division managed to force the Germans to pull back under cover of their own smoke and artillery and then the main offensive was launched on 14 April – it had been postponed for two days because low cloud prevented flying. Despite progress along the coast and in the western foothills being painfully slow, the advance on the right made spectacular progress and by 18 April the Americans had cut the German lines of communication and forced them to withdraw once more – again at their own pace – to the River Panaro. At 0900 hours on 21 April the leading elements of 133 Infantry Division, riding on tanks, entered Bologna to find that they had just been pipped by a few hours by the Poles, advancing from the direction of Medicina.

  The Germans were now in real trouble: the Allied air forces made road movement almost impossible by day, and, as von Vietinghoff’s men retreated across the open plains towards the Po, many artillery pieces and vehicles had to be abandoned. The troops still fought well, however, particularly the parachute divisions and LI Mountain Corps, but, as time went on, it became increasingly apparent that even if the Germans could get most of their men back and across the Po – by improvised bridges or boats, for all the permanent bridges had been destroyed by Allied bombing – they were going to have great difficulty in mounting a coherent defence along it. As the days went on, the Allies overran more and more piles of burning stores, and took more and more prisoners from administrative units that could not keep up with the retreating infantry and tanks, including a paymaster who had just drawn his division’s pay from a field cashier, and a field bakery where the bread was still warm. The Allies were not without their own difficulties: damaged roads made supply precarious, the British had fired off a quarter of the artillery ammunition in theatre and there was a serious shortage of bridging equipment, but by last light on 24 April Fifth Army had closed up to the Po and was holding a sixty-mile front from west of Parma to Felonica, where it linked up with Eighth Army’s V Corps. With most of the German army group’s vehicles and communications equipment abandoned south of the Po and many men having had to swim across that river with only the bare minimum of equipment, the last chance the Germans might have had of withdrawing to the Alps and fighting a defensive battle there had gone, despite Berlin’s increasingly hysterical orders to fight to the last man.

  Even with so many signs of an imminent German collapse, the Allies could not afford to take chances – beyond the Po was the River Adige and, if that had been prepared for defence, then there would be another fierce battle to get across it. Political factors now began to weigh: there were increasingly vociferous bands of Italian partisans operating in the liberated areas or in the areas abandoned by the Germans but not yet under control of the Allies; the communist Yugoslav partisans were claiming Trieste; the Red Army was approaching the Balkans. It was vital for the Anglo-Americans to occupy as much of north-eastern Italy as possible, and even to get into Austria, before the Russians or their surrogates got there first. The Germans had calculated that after the push to the Po the Allies would now do what they always did, and have a long pause to regroup and replenish, allowing defences along the Adige to be prepared. It was not to be. By straining every logistic sinew they had and by requisitioning every vehicle they could find, German, Italian, military, civilian, mechanically propelled or horse- or ox-drawn, both Allied armies pressed on. Now they were on a roll, and Fifth Army began to cross the Po on the night of 24 April against negligible resistance, Eighth Army following suit on the 25th. On 26 April the Americans had Verona and the British were across the Adige. On 29 April, Eighth Army captured Padua and Venice, Fifth Army took Milan and on the east coast the German 148 Division and the Italian Bersaglieri surrendered to the Brazilians, before the two Allied armies linked up at Treviso on 30 April. That same day, after fierce fighting around Lake Garda, the Americans were able to report that the towns to the north of the lake were secure, they took control of Turin from the partisans and made contact with the French on the Franco-Italian border along the west coast towards Nice, while the British 6 Armoured Division pressed on towards Caporetto, scene of the Italian debacle and great Austro-German victory of 1917. The Germans were given no chance of occupying a further defence line; they were being pushed back and given no chance to halt and consolidate, their transport by now was almost non-existent, communications were severed and the escape routes through the Brenner Pass and back into Austria were blocked.

  Feelers for a possible surrender in Italy had been put out since February, tentative at first for, had Berlin known about them, the instigators would have been hauled before a court martial and quite possibly shot, and unofficial negotiations involving representatives of the British and American governments, Alexander’s headquarters and the Germans had been conducted sporadically in neutral Switzerland under the codename of Operation Sunrise. On the German side the prime mover was Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen SS Karl Wolf,* SS Leader and Police Commander Italy, and on the Allied side Allen Dulles, head of OSS for the Mediterranean and later head of the CIA. Ostensibly, Wolf ’s line was that the
war was lost and further bloodshed was therefore unnecessary, while his unwritten agenda was that a German surrender now would allow the Western Allies to occupy northern Italy and forestall a communist republic, and to get into the Balkans before the Russians. Negotiations stalled when the Russians heard of them and demanded to be represented, and again when Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief West, refused to agree. Eventually, after much discussion to and fro, an instrument of unconditional surrender was signed by Colonel-General von Vietinghoff in Caserta on 29 April. Even then, Kesselring would not accede to it until after Hitler’s death on 30 April. The ceasefire was due to come into effect on 2 May, and on that day the Italian campaign officially ended, although it took some time for the message to get through to all German units and the fighting went on throughout the 2nd, with the British finishing up in Caporetto and finding Tito’s Yugoslavs just down the road in Cividale.

  With the end of the war in Italy came the end of Mussolini’s rump state: on 28 April communist partisans stopped a convoy including Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, took them to Mezzegra and shot them both. The next day the bodies were taken to Milan and displayed hung upside down from the girders of an unfinished building opposite a petrol station which the partisans claimed was the site of a hostage shooting by fascists the year before. The bodies were spat at and abused. It was not the way to treat a head of state, however misguided he may have been. The Italian campaign had lasted for twenty months, had cost the Allies 312,000 casualties, including 21,000 British, 29,560 American and 7,000 Indian and Gurkha dead, with German casualties estimated at over half a million, 200,000 of this number killed. In many ways it has been a forgotten campaign, entered into reluctantly and always taking a lower priority to events in Western Europe, but it was a vicious, hard slog against a superb enemy, foul weather and unforgiving terrain, and, if its contribution to the winning of the war was slight, the achievements of the soldiers and airmen on each side can only be admired and wondered at.

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  By the end of 1944 the situation for the Germans on the Eastern Front was desperate. Twenty-seven divisions of Army Group North were bottled up in the Courland pocket in Lithuania, relatively secure as long as the German navy still controlled the Baltic, but fulfilling no useful purpose other than to obey Hitler’s ‘no retreat’ order. South of that, the Front ran from the Baltic through Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the Dalmatian coast. Army Group Centre had been destroyed, as had Army Group South Ukraine in Romania; all Germany’s allies had deserted her except for the Hungarians; fuel was desperately short, particularly now that the Romanian oil had been lost; most of the Luftwaffe was grounded and the army even more dependent on horse-drawn transport, with what meagre fuel supplies that could be obtained reserved for the armour. The huge losses in manpower could not be made up, and in September the first conscription for the Volksturm had been ordered: over a million boys and men aged from sixteen to sixty and hitherto exempt from military service for all sorts of reasons were formed into battalion-sized units where they would be given the most rudimentary basic military training and sent off to defend the Fatherland. The extraordinary thing is that the vast majority of them did their duty willingly to the end. On paper, German strength on the Eastern Front in December 1944 was twenty-one panzer, eleven panzer grenadier and 106 infantry divisions, but the ration strength was far less. Hardly any divisions were more than 50 per cent manned, many far smaller, and the lack of fuel for troop-carrying vehicles and administrative transport meant that the infantry could only move as fast as a man or a horse could march. German industry, despite the constant attrition wreaked by the Allied bomber offensive, was still functioning, however, and tanks continued to arrive at the front. In December the Germans could field around 5,000 tanks and assault guns, but the Red Army faced them with 14,000.

  The Russians now hurled their full weight at Hungary – for them the capital, Budapest, was a political symbol of great importance; for the Germans it was the last source of oil that they controlled and they would fight determinedly to keep it. The Soviet offensive to take Budapest began on 23 October, but with stubborn German defence and furious counter-attacks – and the Ostheer was still capable of stopping the Red Army and doing considerable damage in limited and local operations – it was not until 29 December that the Soviets were able to surround the city, now designated by Berlin as a fortress, inside which one German army panzer division and one infantry division, two SS divisions and a Hungarian division had been ordered to fight to the last man. And fight they did. Offered surrender terms on 29 December, they refused; the city was subjected to a three-day artillery bombardment and then the Soviets attacked, but it was not until 13 February, after bitter fighting with the Russians being driven back again and again but always coming on with even more forces, that the garrison was forced to accept defeat. Fifty thousand of the defenders were killed and 138,000 captured. Sixteen thousand men broke out but only 700 got back to their own lines. In the meantime, earlier than had been intended, Stalin had launched the Red Army’s last major offensive, one that would drive to the Rivers Oder and Neisse, Germany’s old borders, and then capture Silesia and Pomerania and Berlin itself. The reason for the earlier start was simple: on the Western Front the Germans had once again demonstrated that, however hopeless their situation might seem, they were not beaten yet.

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  After the heady advances though northern France and Holland following the Normandy battles, with some optimistic souls convinced that the war would be over in 1944, the realization that the Allies could not simply walk through the German’s West Wall came as a shock and a disappointment. By the end of November 1944 the front ran from the Scheldt Estuary north of Antwerp, east to Nijmegen in Holland, roughly south-west of Roermond, east of Aachen, and then south-east through Luxembourg to the Lower Rhine and Strasbourg. In the north was Montgomery’s 21st Army Group with Henry Crerar’s Canadian First Army and Dempsey’s British Second; in the centre was Bradley’s 12th Army Group with William Simpson’s Ninth, Hodges’s First and Patton’s Third Armies, while in the south-west was Lieutenant-General Jacob Devers’s US 9th Army Group, consisting of the US Seventh Army under Lieutenant-General Alexander Patch, which had landed in the Riviera in Operation Dragoon, and the French First Army under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. By now, Montgomery had accepted that his narrow thrust policy was not acceptable and was touting his theory that Eisenhower should revert to being Supreme Commander with a single Land Forces Commander under him – meaning, of course, himself – a proposition that he constantly put to anyone who would listen, and repeated in letters to Eisenhower. One of Montgomery’s peculiarities was that he spent his time either in his relatively small tactical headquarters surrounded by admiring young sycophants, or out visiting formations in his own army group, and hardly ever went to coordinating conferences at Eisenhower’s headquarters, claiming he was too busy and sending his chief of staff instead. It may, perhaps, have been that he had an inkling, even if only on a subconscious level, that he cut a somewhat ridiculous figure with his posturing and boasting. What is certain, however, is that his lack of contact with the other commanders and their staffs left Montgomery blissfully unaware of the effect his lobbying had on them, for the politics of the Anglo-American alliance were such that there was not the slightest possibility that, with forty-two US divisions in theatre compared to nineteen British, there could be an overall British commander – even if Montgomery was a reincarnation of the Duke of Wellington, which he palpably was not.

  On the German side, Rundstedt, once more ensconced as Commander-in-Chief West, fielded Colonel-General Kurt Student’s Army Group H in Holland and the Ruhr, Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B in central and west Germany and General of Panzer Troops Hermann Balck’s Army Group G in Alsace,* while in the south there was newly formed Army Group Oberhein, commanded by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, who, being too young for the First World War, had no previous experience of military c
ommand whatsoever.

  As Montgomery’s plea for priority for a northern thrust had been rejected, the Allied plan was to attack on either side of the Ardennes, push on to the Rhine and, having reached that river, continue operations in accordance with the situation then prevailing. In an inexplicable failure to learn from events as recent as those of 1940, the Allies decided that there was little prospect of danger from the Ardennes, and this area was covered thinly and in the main by newly arrived or inexperienced divisions of the US First Army as the main weight of the Allied forces was shifted to the flanks.

  While most German officers thought that the Eastern Front posed the most danger to the Reich and that it was there that available reinforcements and such armoured vehicles that German industry could produce should be directed, Hitler had different views. He had never believed that the unlikely alliance of democratic and capitalist Britain and America with the communist dictatorship of the USSR could last. If the Western allies could be dealt a short, sharp shock, a decisive defeat and perhaps even a second Dunkirk in the West, then German forces could be shifted to the East, and, while even Hitler now accepted that the German army could no longer defeat Russia, if the Red Army could be halted, some sort of a compromise peace might be arrived at. Since September, OKW operations staff had been looking at the possibilities of an offensive in the West, and these ranged from an attack west towards Aachen to break up the Allied divisions massing for an assault across the Rhine to a thrust through the Ardennes to capture Antwerp, and it was this latter, Fall Wacht am Rhein (‘Case Watch on the Rhine’), that was decided upon. It was a bold concept, a typical Hitlerian gamble staking everything on one card. If it succeeded, then the Allies would lose their major port and be unable to supply their armies, and they would also be split in two, with the British 21st Army Group and the US First and Ninth Armies cut off from the American armies to their south and either forced to evacuate or be destroyed.