There were to be other dramatic moments later in the campaign; the German counter-offensive at Anzio and in the Auruncan mountains, the scene of the only truly brilliant stroke of the war when the French Expeditionary Force led by General Alphonse Juin broke through a German defence line that had so far baffled the soldiers of four armies, and the tragic and heroic moment when the 12th Podolski Lancers hoisted the flag of Poland and the Union Jack over the ruins of the Abbey of Montecassino. The rest of the war was, however, in the strict literal meaning of the word, dreadful. Many officers who had served on the Western Front in 1916–18 declared that Italy was as cruel. The weather was vile, the ground largely Napleon’s “fifth element”, mud, where it was not granite or limestone, and the line of advance perpetually barred by a succession of fast-flowing rivers and mountain crests. It was a bloody affair, a war of attrition designed to wear down the German strategic reserves by lasting a year and a half, claiming some 312,000 Allied killed, wounded and prisoners and some 435,000 German. The wretched Italian people, paying for the sin of supporting a gimcrack dictator, suffered terribly, as much from the bombs and shells of their liberators as from the brutality of their erstwhile German ally. The destruction of the Abbey on Montecassino was a tragic event, but nothing compared to the misery of civilians, their beautiful towns and villages destroyed by the retreating Germans or smashed above their heads by the Allied artillery and air force.
Wherein, therefore, does the interest of that stark conflict lie? First and foremost, in the human predicament of men at war. Counting the Germans and non-German auxiliaries as one, altogether the armies of eight nations played a part, each with its own style of fighting, and with different reasons for fighting at all. Their successes and failures were dramatic, and on an epic scale, as was the clash of will, not only between the opposing generals but among the Allies. Generals as a rule are strong-minded, self-opinionated men of high mettle, and in Italy inevitable differences of opinion were exacerbated by rival national aims. They made many mistakes, but war is not a game of chess, and commanders in war cannot be judged against some impossibly perfect model. If history is to be written faithfully the historian is forced to be critical, but as our story unfolds the reader will perceive that the leading actors in the drama were all men fitted to endure the acute stresses and strains of war and breathe the rarefied air at the summits of command.
The campaign in Italy is an example of how an operation of war begun to achieve rational and limited goals develops a momentum of its own. As each is reached another even more desirable appears. Like the black holes believed to exist in space, inexorably sucking matter into their gravitational fields, a local war once started develops an increasing appetite for men and materials. The invasion of Sicily (the first major amphibious landing on a coast line held by an enemy and embarked on with some trepidation) was a logical conclusion to the campaign in North Africa. Until it was in Allied hands the sea route through the Mediterranean was still hazardous. Its success, and signs of the imminent collapse of the Fascist regime in Italy, led to the next step.
In 1942 Britain and the United States joined together to study the problems of how to assemble a very large American force in England, and how their united armed forces could best cross the English Channel and open operations in northern France. After much discussion the British point of view prevailed: that there were insufficient resources available, particularly of specialised shipping and landing craft, to attempt the crossing that year. Instead, after some American misgivings, it was decided that rather than stand idle the limited resources available could in the meantime be used to carry the war to French North Africa with the aim of clearing the whole Mediterranean coast by a coordinated offensive eastwards from Algeria and westwards by the British Eighth Army from the sands of the Western Desert. This was a wise decision for a reason which was not expressed overtly in the councils of the two nations. Neither army as yet was fully trained or tough enough to meet head on the best soldiers in the world in that most difficult of all operations in war, an opposed landing. In the summer of 1942 an Axis force inferior in numbers led by General Erwin Rommel had routed the Eighth Army in the Western Desert, and early in 1943 the Americans received a salutory bloody nose in Tunisia. Both learnt valuable lessons, and the Allies found in General Montgomery and General Patton commanders who were able to reanimate their battered and somewhat discouraged troops. On those occasions there had been space to withdraw and time to rally, but in a seaborne invasion to withdraw is to drown.
The weather, stiff resistance and mismanagement of the western arm of the pincers delayed the completion of the African campaign until the spring, and the question was where to go from there. Once again it was agreed, after much debate, to postpone the great invasion of France until spring the following year, and to take the obvious step of capturing and occupying Sicily, thus ensuring control of the Mediterranean from end to end and hemming in the Axis on its southern perimeter. Sicily was successfully occupied and proved a tonic for the Allies. The successful landings exorcised the ghosts of Suvla Bay and Gallipoli which appeared whenever they contemplated landing on an enemy-held coast.* The Americans, who had struck a bad patch in Tunisia, showed that they could outfight the best of German troops, and recovered their habitual confidence. As a campaign, however, it was badly bungled by the Allied high command, and in Sicily there appeared the jealousies and lack of grip which were to bedevil the war in the mainland almost to its victorious end. The initial plan for invasion, made by Major-General Charles Gairdner, chief-of-staff to Alexander, and a specially assembled planning staff, was for separate landings by General Patton at one corner of the island and by General Montgomery, who was in Cairo while the planning staff worked in Algiers, at another. It drew strong objections from Montgomery, and was eventually changed, although not without friction.2
Montgomery, having succeeded in altering the plan so that the Eighth and Seventh armies landed side by side, tactlessly gave Patton the impression that his role was subordinate to that of the Eighth Army. The airborne component of the invasion was wrecked by a fearful error, caused by poor air force navigation and rough weather, which led to the incoming aircraft being engaged by the anti-aircraft artillery of the fleet. Patton, sensing the lack of grip from the top, departed from the operational plan and went off at a tangent with Palermo as his objective, covering a good deal of ground but engaging few German units. He thus effectively ruined the plan for a concentrated thrust by the whole of the 15th Army Group.
Patton then made for Messina, revealing the obsession of US Army commanders for geographical goals which could be easily exploited for the purpose of publicity. The Eighth Army, not to put too fine a point on it, dawdled. Patton’s attempts to speed up his advance by employing landing craft in short “hooks” behind the withdrawing Axis troops proved fiascos. The Axis command wasted no time in exploiting these mistakes. Establishing a powerful defensive ring round the area of Messina and covering the crossing of the straits with a concentration of anti-aircraft guns and such few fighters as remained, it succeeded in extricating the bulk of the Axis forces and much valuable equipment without any interference from the Allied air forces or fleet.3 Patton made his vaunted entry into Messina only when the German defenders chose to withdraw, and not a moment sooner. None of this augured well for the invasion of the mainland. It was the business of the army group commander to ensure a good plan agreed by both army commanders; that his two fractious subordinates acted in a spirit of cooperation and obeyed their orders; and that every step was taken to destroy or capture the defeated Axis forces. In all these Alexander conspicuously failed.
For the general conduct of the war world-wide the Americans and British had set up a loose but effective staff and system for consultations. At the top stood the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, Winston Churchill, for Britain. The two heads of state attended by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) met at frequent inte
rvals, and their decisions were conveyed to the commanders-in-chief in the theatres of war, who were officers serving the Alliance and not national commanders. General Dwight D. Eisenhower held the first appointment of this kind, in North Africa. In spite of separation by the breadth of the Atlantic, inevitable differences of opinion over strategy and rival national aspirations, its members worked together, if not in harmony, at least with a remarkable capacity to agree.
Four main questions tugged the decisions of this great council of war in different directions. The first concerned the strategic priorities of the Alliance. There was a strong feeling in the American camp, arising from a combination of anti-British and anti-European sentiments never very far from the surface of American thinking, a natural desire for revenge for the Japanese attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor and the loss of the Philippines, that the war in the Pacific should have priority over the war against Germany. The second was the fate of Soviet Russia, and the consequences of its possible defeat, which had at all costs to be avoided, for were Hitler given time to defeat Russia and consolidate his German hegemony in Europe the war might well be lost in the Western hemisphere, or in the worst case last for years. The third and fourth concerned method. General George C. Marshall, the dominating figure of the United States Chiefs of Staff, argued successfully that the war against Hitler should be the first task of the Allies, and that their strategy should be the destruction of Nazi Germany, beginning with the invasion of north-west Europe and the liberation of France. The British chiefs of staff could only support such a decision, but did not adopt so rigid and fundamentalist an attitude as General Marshall’s. They were prepared to exploit any weaknesses on other parts of the perimeter of German-dominated Europe. The fourth concerned the priority given to the strategic bombing campaign against German war industry, her sources of oil and the morale of the working population by the destruction of German cities. This was the only area of the Alliance where there was total unanimity because the leaders of the United States Army Air Force and of the Royal Air Force shared a fanatical belief that Germany could be defeated by the bomber offensive alone.
All these factors came into play the moment the Allied leaders perceived that the battle in Sicily was going so well that they had to make a rapid decision on how far it should be exploited. General Marshall feared that all secondary fronts were “operations [that] invariably create a vacuum into which it is essential to pour more and more means”. He also feared that the ease with which Churchill was seduced by the political prospects of far-flung, harassing operations on the perimeter of Europe was evidence of his secret intention to distort the whole Allied strategy by making the major effort in the Mediterranean. Churchill countered this by saying one more push might force a dejected and demoralised Italy out of the war altogether with many resultant benefits, to which he added the irrefutable argument that as all were agreed that the cross-Channel invasion could not possibly be launched until the spring of 1944, the Allies could not suspend operations until then while the embattled Russians were grappling with no fewer than 156 German divisions. The voice of the airmen gave Churchill support. The occupation of mainland Italy up to a line north of Naples–Foggia would give them two valuable constellations of military airfields from which they could launch fresh offensives at a favourable range against southern and eastern Germany and also her main supplier of oil, Romania.
While these deliberations were taking place exciting news arrived from General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers. On July 25, 1943 a group of conspirators led by the senior Italian soldier – Marshal of Italy Pietro Badoglio – and the King of Italy nerved themselves to depose and imprison the dictator Mussolini, who had so far brought only defeat and ruin to Italy, and established a new government free from the taint of Fascism. On the 31st it decided in secret to approach the Allies and ask for an armistice.
The transactions that followed resembled the plot of a political thriller and, if they had not involved matters of life and death, could be seen as a comedy. Four different emissaries were sent to sound out the Allies; their brief being to obtain the best terms for Italy in return for her active participation on the Allied side. On July 31 two distinguished civilians were sent to the British Ambassador in Madrid and the British Consul in Tangier. This producing no result, a general officer, Castellano, the chief of the department of plans and operations in the Italian high command, was also sent to Madrid in disguise as a civilian but without any credentials, in case he was caught by the Germans who were already deeply suspicious of the loyalty of the new Italian Government to the Axis. He arrived on August 15 and was sent on to Lisbon, where he was interviewed by General Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General W. Bedell Smith, US Army and his chief intelligence officer, Brigadier Kenneth Strong, British Army. Castellano achieved little as he wanted to take back some assurance that the Allies would intervene in great strength in Italy to protect the new Government, while the two Allied representatives refused to reveal Allied plans and told him that the only condition on which an armistice would be granted was the unconditional surrender of the Italian Government. All this took some time, so the Italian Government sent their fourth emissary, a General Zanussi, taking with him as a proof of sincerity the British General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, VC, who was a prisoner of war in Italian hands.
Providentially these missions coincided with the important QUAD-RANT conference in Quebec, where the two Allied heads of government, the Combined Chiefs of Staff and their other advisers were conveniently assembled. The Italian proposals were not, however, received with sympathy. As Churchill put it when he first heard the news: “Badoglio admits that he is going to double-cross someone but … [it is] … more likely Hitler will be the one to be tricked … meanwhile the war should be carried on in every way the Americans will allow” (authors’ italics).
All the same, this put a completely different complexion on the place of Italy in future operations. There were those, like General Montgomery, who believed that the new Government of Italy was composed of men of straw, but that if the Italian armed forces possessed sufficient spirit to resist any German attempt to interfere with Italian sovereignty, Italy might be gained with little trouble. Sheer military necessity might persuade the Germans, who already had large forces committed to holding down the populations of the Balkan countries, to cut their losses in Italy and retire to a defensive line in the north, perhaps along the foothills of the Alps. All, then, that would be required of the Allies would be to commit sufficient forces to the Italian operation as would serve to reassure the Italian Government and stiffen the resistance of the armed forces. All the glittering rewards of an Italian surrender, the blow to German morale, the raised hopes of other peoples under the Nazi heel, the liberation of Rome, possession of the airfields, the winding down of the expensive war in the Mediterranean, could be obtained on the cheap. The buck was promptly passed to General Eisenhower. His directive was a compromise between the views of Marshall and Churchill. He was to prepare to part with seven British and American divisions together with a large proportion of his assault shipping and landing craft required in England for the invasion of Europe by November 2. At the same time he was to undertake such operations as were best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war, and contain as many German divisions in that country as possible.4
Eisenhower therefore faced a difficult problem, full of incalculable factors. In this he was not alone. The view from Hitler’s headquarters was deeply depressing. In February 1943 there had been a great disaster on the Russian front, ending in the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. In July a counter-offensive launched at Kursk in the hope of stopping the remorseless Russian advance had been completely defeated by the 17th. In comparison the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia and the loss of Sicily on August 17 were only dents in the curtain wall of Fortress Europe, but all the signs taken together pointed to a Germany under siege and facing ultimate defeat. To be sure, the German commanders in Sicily h
ad with great courage and professional skill not only halted Generals Patton and Montgomery, but removed 60,000–80,000 men and much equipment across the Straits of Messina to the mainland in spite of the attacks of the Allied air forces. Wars, however, are not won by glorious retreats. The German divisions in central and southern Italy were mere wrecks, requiring to be re-manned, re-equipped and re-trained. The German commanders on the spot could only wonder why the Allies did not embark at once, or had not forestalled the evacuation of Sicily by landing in Calabria ahead of them, and they thanked God for the respite their unenterprising opponents had given them.
In August Hitler was the target of contradictory advice. His favourite, Rommel, assured him that the British and Americans, supported by their overwhelming air-power, could not possibly be contained in the south of Italy. He recommended that the Reich could best be defended in the north, and that the centre and south should be abandoned. Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, who held the appointment of Commander-in-Chief (South) over all German and Italian forces, was more optimistic. He believed that if he were allowed time to rebuild his German forces the terrain of Italy was eminently suitable for a slow, deliberate withdrawal. Hitler, who was temperamentally incapable of giving up territory once conquered, however cogent the strategic reasons, could not respond completely to the logic of either course, so he backed both Rommel and Kesselring. Rommel was ordered to assemble an army group in northern Italy, and Kesselring to create the Tenth Army in the south, whose role would be to repel the Allied invasion (expected to land anywhere between the Straits of Messina and Naples), and, with a strong contingent located in the area of Rome, to take care of any hostile move by the Italian forces. These arrangements gradually took shape during the month of August until each of the rival commanders had eight divisions.
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