As regards his relations with his British ally, Clark was not an anglophobe in the sense that his famous contemporary “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was, who hated them as ancient enemies and despised them as dudes and snobs. He was far too intelligent, although many intelligent Americans were irritated by the British habit of self-deprecation combined with an ineffable sense of superiority. Again, it was the slightest threat to his own position or reputation that alarmed and angered him. The root of his dislike for the British was partly jealousy and his conviction that they intended to exploit him and his American soldiers.
Clark bore one other grudge after Salerno. He felt that the air forces had let him down. They had not interdicted the German forces coming up from Calabria, who had remarked on the absence of fighter-bombers on the roads. Their bombing of the 14th Corps routes had been ineffective and they had not made their presence felt on his own battlefield until the 14th. His air liaison officer had been refused the missions that he requested time and again and when they were granted they had taken too long to fulfil. To a large extent events had simply confirmed what his American colleagues had told him was the form in Sicily. Here again, he laid the blame at the door of what he conceived as British procedures propagated by Air Vice-Marshal Coningham and Air Marshal Tedder, and on the lack of support from Alexander.
Unhappily, Clark learned neither tactical nor operational lessons from Salerno. He was not a man given to analysis or self-criticism. All he perceived was that in his ambition to play a grand role as the commander of an army he had been handed a mission beyond the resources that he had been allotted. He had been too bold at Salerno, he was convinced. Four months later, on January 22, 1944, when he visited his 6th Corps at Anzio, on the first day of the next major landing that his Fifth Army was to undertake, he observed to its commander, General John P. Lucas, Dawley’s successor, “Don’t stick your neck out Johnny. I did at Salerno, and I got into trouble.” In one way and another the Battle of Salerno cast dark shadows a long way ahead.4
III
Interlude
7
MINES, MUD AND UNCERTAIN TRUMPETS
For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?
1 Corinthians 14:8*
When Kesselring ordered the Tenth Army to break off the Battle of Salerno he had good reason to be pleased with the way things had gone. It had suffered no irreparable damage, its withdrawal was proceeding smoothly and his arrangements for a protracted defence on his “winter line” were beginning to take shape. He did not regard Salerno as a defeat: far from it. He felt that he had taken the measure of his opponents who for all their vast resources and devastating fire-power were no match for German troops. When it came to close fighting a platoon of panzer grenadiers had proved a match for whole companies of American or British infantry. As well as his tactical and strategic success Kesselring had won another, moral victory: in the contest for the support of the Fuehrer. Hitler spent part of October and November vacillating between the advice of Rommel, who argued that Italy south of the line Pisa-Rimini was untenable, and Kesselring, who continued to press that he could hold the Allied armies south of Rome, for months if necessary, pointing as proof to the success of his operations so far. In November Hitler came down finally in favour of Kesselring, giving Rommel another appointment and disbanding Army Group “B”. All the German troops in Italy were placed under command of a new Army Group “C”, which included the Tenth Army and a new army, the Fourteenth, commanded by Generaloberst Eberhard von Mackensen. This reorganisation freed Kesselring from the trammels of remote control by Hitler and the Oberkommando Wehrmacht (OKW, the supreme HQ of the German armed forces), though Hitler remained incorrigibly addicted to telegraphing absurd orders on minor tactics. Nevertheless Kesselring still had to make provision for two inescapable dangers to his rear and his lines of communication. He had to retain garrisons in the industrial north, where the workers were strongly Communist and there was a growing risk of insurrection, and he had to guard his flanks against Allied amphibious assaults. Kesselring overestimated the amphibious capability of the Allies, and since as an educated German officer he would always have sought to manoeuvre an opponent out of a strong position rather than attack him frontally, he naturally assumed that his enemy would act in the same way. Accordingly he held back, posted his reserve divisions near likely landing places and was loth to move them to a threatened point on his front until the last minute.
Hitler’s first instruction to Kesselring, in October, was to establish a defence line across the narrowest part of the leg of Italy, from Gaeta to Ortona. Then, if the Allies did not press him but showed signs that they were using southern Italy simply as a base or stepping stone for an invasion of the Balkans, Kesselring was to consider launching a spoiling counter-offensive. In retrospect there is a degree of irony in the opposing views of the two sides. Hitler and his advisers feared an invasion of the Balkans more than an offensive in Italy because of the double threat to the supplies of oil from Romania and the encouragement that it might give to the anti-Axis and partisan movements in the area, real or potential. The Allied landings in Africa, Sicily and Italy had demonstrated the tactical and strategic initiatives made possible by sea-power. Yet these were the very moves that the US Chiefs of Staff were determined to circumvent, the first by direct opposition at the conference table and the second by the withdrawal of assault shipping from the Mediterranean. This is not to say that their policy was mistaken: on the contrary, it is probable that the Balkans might have swallowed more troops and resources than Italy. It is, however, a classic example of how opposing commanders, each in their own way, are apt to “take counsel of their fears” instead of considering how best to use their resources to inflict the maximum damage on their opponents. However, Hitler soon lost interest in a counter-offensive in Italy, for after all it was only a secondary theatre, where a defensive strategy was appropriate. The mission he finally gave to Kesselring was to hold the Allied armies south of Rome; Rome, because being essentially a politician, like Churchill and Roosevelt, he also attached the utmost importance to its value as a symbol.
Kesselring’s plan, well thought out in advance, was to fight a series of delaying actions beginning on a line south of Naples, and finally conduct a protracted defence on the strongest natural line in Italy. This ran along the southern slopes of the mountains looking down on the right bank of the Garigliano river from its mouth to the mountain mass whose summit was M. Cairo and south-eastern buttress Montecassino, commanding the Liri valley and the main avenue to Rome, and thence eastwards through rugged, mountainous country along the River Sangro from its source near Castel di Sangro to its mouth on the Adriatic. Along this he ordered his engineers to construct a deep belt of fortifications, the Gustav Line. An enemy advance up the Adriatic coast would meet a succession of natural barriers in the shape of deep mountain valleys through which ran rivers magnified into torrents by the winter rains, and so was the least attractive axis for an Allied offensive. Kesselring deduced correctly that it was the western sector which was more likely to be threatened, for though its natural defences were formidable, the two main routes to Rome ran through it, Highway No. 7, the Via Appia of antiquity, along the coastal strip between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Auruncan mountains, and Highway No. 6, the Via Casilina, through the Liri valley. To give the Gustav Line in this sector more depth two defensive belts were added to it; the Bernhard Line as an outpost and breakwater forward of the Garigliano river, taking in the natural bastions of Ms. Camino, Difensa and Sammucro, and behind it a “switch” or stop line, known to the Allies as the Hitler Line, barring the north-western exit from the Liri valley and ending at Terracina on the coast. Between the Gustav and Hitler Lines some discontinuous fortified lines were prepared and improved as time allowed. Such, in outline, was Kesselring’s “Lines of Torres Vedras”, his “Hindenburg Line”, on which he prepared to fight all the winter. To give the German engineers time to complete their task
Kesselring decided to fight four delaying actions: south of Naples, along the line of the Volturno and Biferno rivers, from M. Massico to the River Trigno and finally on the Bernhard Line itself. This masked the strongest section of the Gustav Line and he intended to make the Allies fight very hard before he yielded it.*
The total force available to Kesselring in Italy fluctuated between twenty and twenty-five divisions, but a division is not a satisfactory measure of strength when assessing the German armies because the value of even those of the same type varied a great deal from time to time. There were elite divisions of parachute troops, SS divisions, mountain divisions, Jaeger (light infantry) divisions, panzer and panzer grenadier and ordinary marching infantry divisions, all with different scales of men and weapons. The official scales of tanks and artillery were seldom maintained owing to losses on the Russian front and the shortcomings of German heavy industry. Hitler complicated matters further by his fad of playing at being the director of the war on his maps, using a “division” as a sort of chess piece of fixed value. He never allowed weak or wrecked divisions to be broken up to reinforce others, and one of the traps Allied Intelligence staffs had to avoid was crediting a “division”, once located, with its official strength. (The other, into which at least the British fell repeatedly, was reporting such and such a unit as being low in morale; estimates regularly disproved by the British troops who met them in battle. This was the consequence of accepting too readily the information volunteered by deserters, many of them non-Germans, who habitually condemned their officers and NCOs to justify their desertion.)
It is no reflection on the hastily trained citizen soldiers of the United States and Britain to say that, as Kesselring believed, the German soldier, the genuine article, was superb. How far, outside the ranks of the parachute regiments and the SS, he was a fanatical believer in the total wisdom of the Fuehrer and ultimate victory is impossible to say. He was, however, strictly disciplined and thoroughly trained, the two being essentially interdependent, and indoctrinated to follow, if not the Fuehrer, at least his officers, not blindly, but with obedience and intelligence. The definition of a well-disciplined soldier as one who understands the logic of the orders he receives, and has the skill and courage to carry them out correctly exactly applied to them, but this was reinforced if necessary at the slightest sign of flinching by the pistol of his officer. Yet, paradoxically, the relationship between ranks was easier and had more camaraderie than in the British or US armies. The dictum that the backbone of an army is its NCOs was especially applicable. The under-officers, Feldwebels (sergeants) and corporals carried more responsibility and exercised far more authority than customary in the British or US armies. They habitually led in combat, leaving the comparatively few commissioned officers to plan and direct operations, although of course as in all armies, the officers were expected to take personal command and to place themselves at the head of their troops in an emergency or in moments of danger. (In the British and American armies the drain of good NCO material into the service corps and to a lesser extent into the special forces such as the Rangers, Commandos and airborne troops led to too great a dependence on commissioned officers, with the consequence of severe wastage and often the complete paralysis of a platoon or company bereft of their leadership.)1
Good as the genuine article, the echt German soldier was, the German regiments, judged by their own high standard were, except for the elite and fanatical parachute troops and the SS, growing gradually weaker, because the appalling casualties on the Russian front had led to their dilution by freed prisoners of war from the Red Army. Some ethnic groups, Russian Cossacks for instance, who hated their Soviet masters, volunteered wholesale to serve under the Swastika after they had been captured, and in Italy were used in complete units to relieve German regular troops of the duty of hunting down Italian partisans. Others, known as Hilfsrwilligeren (“willing helpers”), shortened contemptuously to “Hi-Wis”, had turned their coats to avoid a slow death by starvation or overwork and were employed in German regiments; sometimes on combat duties, but more often in ancillary or menial tasks. This dilution, however, did allow the German regulars to concentrate on fighting, and fight they did, long after any hope of victory had evaporated. Like the legendary soldiers of the French Foreign Legion they were prepared to “march, march, fight and die” until their world fell in ruins, and they accepted this grim, Wagnerian fate with fatalism.
The soldiers of the half-dozen different nationalities fighting in the Allied armies might not have been as hard-bitten but they were well led; confident that they could win the war and then go home. They applied themselves to the task in hand with good humour and stoicism, encouraged by the fact that their front was continually advancing. To them the sound of the trumpet was clear: it was their generals whose ears were afflicted by discordant notes.
In December, after two and a half months of bitter fighting, the Allied commanders were scolded by Churchill for lack of progress, and had the strategy of a major amphibious operation foisted on them, with the aim of breaking the Gustav Line in ten days, capturing Rome and consolidating these gains by the first week of February. In view of the geography of Italy, the severity of the Italian winter and the fighting quality of the German soldier, that this was so much military moonshine should have been apparent before the end of ninety-nine days of fighting between the Battle of Salerno and mid-December, when at last the Allied armies came hard up against the Gustav Line.
The responsibility of sorting all this out was primarily Eisenhower’s and, if he did not act, Alexander should have tackled him. There was an opportunity and motive for action in early November when Eisenhower received confirmation that Kesselring had been ordered to defend the Winter Lines. That information and the nature of the fighting in the Bernhard Line made it obvious that the Allies were not simply following a retiring enemy. However, as nothing positive was done by their superiors until December the two army commanders were left to fight almost separate campaigns with the inconvenient mixture of American and British units which they had inherited from Salerno. Clearly, then, the costly and indecisive nature of operations in the last three months of 1943 flowed from the initial failure to analyse the Allied aims in Italy in a logical way and to make a master plan of how operations should be developed before the invasion was launched. Warfare has its own blind momentum. Clark and Montgomery could not simply sit still and consolidate, so both men honestly strove to direct their respective armies at goals consistent with their respective missions. Also, it is not unfair to either man to say that they felt, albeit subconsciously, that they were pursuing a beaten enemy, or at least an enemy who had no intention of fighting a protracted defensive battle. The notion that the defection of the Italians from the Axis might lead to Hitler abandoning the greater part of Italy lingered and was to influence Allied thinking into 1944. In such circumstances what Haig had said long ago in the summer of 1918 seemed a good guide: that manoeuvres formerly regarded as risks to be avoided should now be accepted as a matter of course – and it was duly followed.
After Salerno, then, Montgomery was given as his first objective the airfields at Foggia, and then the mission of advancing up the Adriatic coast as far as Pescara, wheeling left across the mountainous central spine of the country and liberating Rome provided that the Fifth Army did not get there first. (It was formally allotted to Montgomery by Alexander, but Montgomery mentioned it in conversation to Clark in September when he visited the Salerno bridgehead. In view of the relationship between the two men Alexander may as usual have simply ratified Montgomery’s intentions.) This was the most difficult axis of operations so far traversed by a British army since Wellington had scaled the Tras os Montes or Roberts had set off from Kabul to Kandahar, but at least those two generals commanded armies that marched on two or four legs and did not require to build scores of bridges strong enough to carry tanks, and supplies of petrol and ammunition counted in thousands of tons.
The tasks facing Clark were
hardly less severe but his correct course of operations and his immediate objectives were obvious. On September 18 he summoned his two corps commanders to his HQ in the Salerno bridgehead to receive fresh orders. McCreery was to follow his original mission and break out along Highways Nos 18 and 88 through the narrow defiles leading through the mountains to Naples, secure the port, and then line up along the Volturno river between its mouth and Capua preparatory to crossing it. Major-General John P. Lucas, who was to relieve the luckless Dawley in command of 6th Corps on September 20, was to send the US 3rd Division by the mountain tracks to Avellino and then extend eastwards from McCreery’s right along the upper reaches of the Volturno, with the US 34th Division to the right of that again, while the US 45th Division (made up to full strength by that date) advanced via Eboli along Highway No. 91 to Benevento.
Had anyone in the 45th Division ever wondered what had delayed the Eighth Army’s march to relieve Salerno he would have had the answer by the end of the first fifteen miles of the division’s advance, as it waited for the divisional engineers to replace twenty-five bridges blown up by the retreating enemy. Nor was this the only obstacle. At every position suitable for a delaying action an enemy rearguard might be found in position, supported by artillery observers shelling the bridge site and its approaches. This could only be driven off by a properly organised attack. At Acerno, ten miles from Battipaglia, the US 3rd Division had to deploy a complete regiment to remove riflemen and machine-gunners dug in on the far side of a deep and wide gorge. Near Oliveto on Highway No. 91 a lieutenant and a corporal of the 45th Division won Congressional Medals of Honour for separate actions when single-handed they attacked and silenced enemy machine-gun posts, but normally the enemy rearguards did not fight to the bitter end. Their object was to delay their pursuers for as long as possible and live to fight another day, moving off as soon as the enemy threatened to get around behind or above them. On rare occasions a glimpse of them could be had through binoculars; a few gaunt, unshaven men in shabby grey uniforms slinking away defiantly to repeat the same tactics a few miles back; the machine-gunners carrying their much-feared MG42 “Spandaus”* over their shoulders and swathed with cross belts of reserve ammunition, each rifleman similarly decorated and a stick-grenade thrust handily down the leg of a muddy jack-boot.
Tug of War Page 12