The unsung heroes of this and every other advance in Italy were the men of the US Engineers and the Royal Engineers, whose work had to go forward while others fought. No soldier would pretend that it was enjoyable to be shot at, or to fight cooped up inside the hull of a tank that might burst into flames and roast its occupants alive, but the “sappers”, as the British called them, had to display a different and more cold-blooded courage. They had to carry out tasks requiring cool thinking under fire without being able to take cover or being able to shoot back, conscious that their personal enemies, the German engineers, were determined to break their nerve or kill them, as the Germans well knew that such skilled men could not be replaced easily. Road-mines (the flat, cylindrical “Teller” mines) were fitted with anti-handling devices or booby-trapped; one fiendish device being succeeded by another as soon as the trick of the first had been discovered. The whole Allied advance depended on the nerve and skill of relatively few men engaged in this lethal battle of wits, scrabbling about in the mud feeling for tell-tale protrusions and wires, only too aware that a wrong guess would be punished by their being blown to pieces.
The 10th Corps after a rough introduction to the art of mountain warfare in the passes met the same sort of resistance in the plain of Naples. As in Calabria, combat degenerated into a slow advance, traffic jams, and waiting for the sappers to clear a route. McCreery began his break-out on the 23rd, and it was not until 9.30 a.m. on October 1 that the armoured cars of the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards reached the centre of Naples, abandoned by the enemy but still subject to sporadic bursts of rifle-fire as the citizens settled outstanding scores with the Fascisti.
The occupation was marked by a mildly comic episode throwing a small but not insignificant shaft of light on the enigmatic character of General Clark. A task force composed of the British 23rd Armoured Brigade to which the US 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment was attached had been formed to clear Naples, and on the morning of the 1st the parachute commander, Colonel James M. Gavin, later famous as General, was up in front with his leading troops as they approached its suburbs when one of his staff arrived with a message too important to be entrusted to the radio. Gavin was to halt his advance until the Army Commander, no less, arrived to make a “triumphant entry”. This was a manoeuvre for which there was no “standard operating procedure” and one for which Gavin’s previous training had not prepared him. Besides, the responsibility for General Clark stopping a bullet from a stay-behind German sniper or some trigger-happy Neapolitan would be his, but orders were orders and parachutists were expected to cope with any emergency. Gavin formed a column with General Clark in an armoured half-track followed by a battalion of his regiment mounted in trucks, placed himself at its head in his Jeep, and set off to find the Piazza Garibaldi where, the Fifth Army staff was confident, a large crowd would be assembled all agog to see their liberator. Disappointingly the convoy drove through deserted streets to an empty square, as the citizens had prudently decided to stay indoors behind closed shutters until the shooting stopped. Gavin heard later that a crowd had in fact gathered, but in the Piazza del Plebiscite where, as he put it with pleasant irony, “conquerors traditionally were received”.2
Meanwhile, on the other side of Italy Montgomery, his mental energy restored now that he was faced with a task suited to his capability as an army commander, applied himself to two preliminary and extremely important tasks. First he sent off a task force based on the 4th Armoured Brigade to secure the airfields in the Foggia area, which it did without meeting any serious opposition. Next he had to organise and reanimate a new Eighth Army. Few of the old Desert hands “with sand in their boots” remained in the new incarnation. There were the staffs of Army HQ and HQ 13th Corps, the 4th Armoured Brigade (scheduled to return to England) and some of the army artillery. The 2nd New Zealand Division with its new organisation of two infantry and one armoured brigades commanded by the heroic Bernard Freyberg, which had been re-forming in Egypt, was not ready for battle in Italy until early November, and the veteran 4th Indian Division did not arrive until December. (The New Zealand Division had previously had a British armoured brigade but had formed a New Zealand one in Egypt.) Montgomery would have liked to have recovered his 10th Corps together with its three British divisions, but that was out of the question until the Fifth Army could be reinforced by the same number of US divisions. In any case the 7th Armoured Division, the oldest serving unit of the Desert War was due to return to England for OVERLORD, where the 50th (Northumbrian) and the 51st (Highland) Infantry Divisions had already gone. Montgomery, a “regimental” soldier to his fingertips, had come to regard the old Desert Army as a sort of extended regiment, “his” army, understandably as it had won the battles which had made him famous. He refused to believe that any part of it was not perfect, but in fact these units were no great loss. The two infantry divisions had fought a long time with great self-sacrifice and they were burnt out morally and physically. Both required to be completely restored from rifle companies upwards. As for the 7th Armoured Division, the kindest thing that can be said of it is that its high opinion of itself was not shared by independent observers outside the mystic circle of the old Desert Army. The new team that lined up for the autumn battles on the Adriatic coast was far better, indeed, with hindsight, too good to fritter away in the bloody and unprofitable little battles that were to follow. They were the 1st Canadian, the 2nd New Zealand, the 5th British, the 8th Indian and the 78th Infantry Divisions.
The other essential task was to build up the Eighth Army’s logistic backing. As no long-term strategic plan for the Italian campaign had been made, it had not been possible to make a preliminary administrative plan, which was much more difficult than operational planning. If an army is to have freedom of movement it must be made well in advance and put in working order as soon as possible. Now it had to be done as the Adriatic advance actually began. Neither military writers nor line soldiers concern themselves greatly about administration because it is complicated and dull, though they are the first to allocate blame if the operational plan fails through maladministration, soldiers starve, die for lack of medical attention, the guns cease to fire for lack of ammunition or the tanks to roll for lack of motor-fuel. Montgomery is sometimes condemned for refusing to take administrative risks but he, like all British regular officers, had been brought up on the lessons of the administrative failures of the Crimea, South Africa and Mesopotamia. Moreover, he could not move physically until his communications had been restored, as we saw in Calabria. Only one good trunk road led up the Adriatic coast and that was unsuitable to carry the traffic of a modern army. It had been systematically wrecked together with the rest of the road and railway network. The base area and all the apparatus for supplying a modern army in the field had yet to be set up: transportation units, dumps of petrol, ammunition, food, ordnance and engineer stores, hospitals, workshops for the repair of weapons and vehicles, camps to hold reinforcing units in transit and replacements, and all the arrangements essential for the well-being of the troops such as a postal service, rest or holiday camps, welfare organisations and the service the US Army called the Post Exchange and the British the NAAFI.
Seen in distant historical perspective the fighting in the last three months of 1943 seems no more than an entr’acte between the excitements of the landings in September and the sequence of long-drawn-out and bloody battles to breach the Gustav Line in 1944, but that is not how they appeared to those who took part. Veterans of the Western Front declared that – though the scale of events was far smaller and battles did not last as long, between the intensity of the fighting, mud, and the severity of the winter – Italy was almost as unpleasant as Flanders or Picardy. To quote the experience of only one unit, by Christmas the total casualties in the 1st Canadian Division were 176 officers and 2,613 NCOs and rank and file killed, wounded and missing, 1,617 sick, of which 323 were diagnosed as “battle fatigue”, and therefore as effectively out of action as those physically injured. T
hese figures, confirming the rate of loss of the 10th Corps at Salerno, revealed the degree to which the British had underestimated the need for infantry replacements. The growing gap between demand and supply taxed the ingenuity of the British, Commonwealth and Polish commanders until the end of the war in Italy. Unlike the Americans who, in the person of Clark, considered that a commander had failed who did not continue to press his attack as long as he had a reserve to throw in, the British were forced to rely on fire-power and batde-craft, and to take their time to secure an objective. Nevertheless, when fighting the German soldier, who defended each ridge and river line with remarkable economy of force and turned a key position like Ortona into a miniature Stalingrad, the price of most objectives was a long infantry casualty list, however skilled the tactics employed. This was seen at Termoli.
When the Eighth Army reached the German defence line along the River Biferno Montgomery decided to use his few landing craft to turn its seaward flank by amphibious assault while the main force attacked frontally. By capturing Termoli, a small town two miles north of the Biferno, he would effectively cut off the German line of retreat along Highway No. 16. Termoli was only lightly held by a detachment of railway construction engineers stiffened by a platoon of parachute troops whose parent battalion covered the Biferno river further to the west. The initial attack was made by two British commando units acting as spearhead for the 78th Division. The plan was to land the Commandos in front of the town before dawn on October 3 while the 11th Brigade, the 56th Divisional Reconnaissance Regiment and six Sherman tanks of the 3rd County of London Yeomanry* crossed the river and joined them. The few landing craft available would then go back and pick up the 36th Brigade (reduced of course to “assault” scales) and put them ashore at Termoli during the night of the 3rd/4th. The 3rd Army Commando and the 40th Royal Marine Commando cleared the enemy out of Termoli, those not captured being rapidly scattered. The Germans had blown the road bridge over the Biferno but the engineers though short of equipment built a bridge of boats by which the anti-tank guns and some fighting vehicles of the divisional reconnaissance regiment were able to cross while the infantry waded through the shallows. Then “General Mud” took a hand. On October 3 it began to rain heavily, the Biferno rose to a height which prevented fording and reduced by-passes round demolitions on the approach roads into a gluey swamp in which the vital tanks, field artillery and ammunition vehicles stuck. Inside the bridgehead it proved impossible to move anti-tank guns up to the defensive perimeter, where they were badly needed, for General Mud had been joined by General Sieckenius.
The 16th Panzer Division had been pulled back to a rest area north of the Volturno to refit and reorganise after the battering it had received at Salerno, but being the only reserve unit available, and as OKW had ordered that Termoli was to be held “at all costs”, it was sent there hot foot. Two battle-groups already known to the reader, KG Stempel and KG von Doering arrived on the 4th after a ninety-five-mile march over the mountains and threw themselves into the battle. For a short time the British position in Termoli looked desperate. The artillery of the 78th Division was down to 200 rounds per gun* and pumping them out as fast as possible in an attempt to hold off the panzers. The only hope of reinforcing the bridgehead by land was a bridge strong enough to carry tanks over the Biferno, but all the Bailey† equipment had been withdrawn from the divisional park to repair the lines of communication. The Royal West Kents had been overrun and the perimeter contracted to the outskirts of the town when there was a dramatic change of fortune. Bridging equipment was rushed up and the Royal Engineers working at high speed under fire put a bridge across the Biferno strong enough for the Sherman tanks of the 12th (Three Rivers) Canadian Armoured Regiment to join the fight. On the 6th the whole force counter-attacked and drove off the German battle-groups, the good shooting of the Canadian tank gunners being particularly admired. The moral of this action is that attractive as it may seem to turn the enemy flank or land in his rear the issue still has to be decided by ordeal by battle.3
All that the “end-run”, as the Americans called the manoeuvre, achieves is to shift the scene of combat momentarily to a site more advantageous to the attacker. If, however, he falters or is in insufficient strength to defeat the enemy reserves or is pinned by a determined counter-attack, then he has lost the advantages of surprise and the initiative and the tables may be turned on him. It used to be said in Burma, where the British were continually subjected to Japanese infiltration and encirclement, “Don’t forget that when the Jap is round behind you, you are also round behind him” – something equally clear to the German commanders. Faced with a determined opponent the attacker who does not succeed in an envelopment or an attack on the rear outright may be at worst cut off, at best be thrown on the defensive and so become an embarrassment to his own side instead of a threat to the enemy. This was to be seen on a large scale at Anzio.
On the Volturno front General Clark’s hopes of a rapid advance and a crossing of the river on the run over a broad front were dashed by October 9. To force the passage of a large river is a difficult enough operation when the attacker has every advantage, but on the lower reaches of the Volturno where the 10th Corps had to cross, the river was one hundred yards wide and six feet deep, and flowed at four to five miles an hour, and the approaches, soon converted to deep mud by the passage of vehicles, were sown with mines. Clark’s disappointment that the formal assault crossing had to be delayed until the 13th showed in his impatience with McCreery, when the latter’s right division, the 56th, gained only a toehold on the far bank, and McCreery refused to press its attack. By then the 46th Division, which was making the main corps thrust on the left, had a good bridgehead on the coast. The 7th Armoured Division, whose initial crossing was only a diversion, also had a bridgehead and, next day, built the only thirty-ton bridge across the river – albeit one that led into muddy terrain unsuitable for armour. But the main Fifth Army thrust was supposed to be astride Highway No. 6 from Caserta towards Rome at the town of Capua and upstream where the 3rd US Division was to cross in the vicinity of Triflisco. So Clark was angry at the 56th Division’s failure there and compared its effort with the excellent performance of the 3rd Division on its immediate right. Von Vietinghoff described their operation as “very cleverly planned and forcefully executed” by its commander General Lucian Truscott. He observed that the division avoided the mistake made at Salerno by advancing regardless of the threat to its flanks. To protect the 3rd Division’s flank Clark handed over its thirty-ton bridge, constructed in six hours under fire, to the 56th Division and shifted the corps boundary to allow the British to use it to cross the Volturno. But he made another black mark in his record of British failures and American successes. The 3rd Division was, indeed, a consistent achiever for Clark, but on this occasion McCreery was right not to insist on the 56th Division repeating its attack and Clark’s decision saved both lives and time.
Assault river crossings cost time, men and materials, as Clark discovered. It is not enough simply to cross a river, one also has to have the means at hand to follow up the enemy without delay and in sufficient strength to prevent his standing again a few miles up the road. Montgomery has often been charged with slowness when in fact he was building up the means to enable his army to “fight through” an objective. On the Volturno, it was not until October 24 that the advance could be resumed along the whole front because the Fifth Army had not the means to press the enemy closely. Then exhausted infantry had to forget about rivers for the moment and think about mountains. At last, in November it came up against the Bernhard Line.
On November 6 McCreery ordered the 56th Division to drive the enemy from the great feature overlooking the confluence of the Liri and the Garigliano from the east, M. Camino: a tangled mass dominated by three peaks, each descending slowly to the south in bare ridges, the whole very broken and extending some six miles from east to west and three from south to north. It was held by five battalions, against which Major-Gener
al Gerald Templer, who was by then commanding the division, could pit only four British, the 6th Grenadier, 3rd Coldstream and 2nd Scots of the 201st Guards Brigade reinforced by the 7th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry; the largest force he considered could be maintained by porters and 100 mules with Italian muleteers, but supported by 168 guns. The Panzer Grenadiers and the Guardsmen contested the possession of the heights from the 6th to the 14th, when McCreery with considerable courage advised Clark that he wished to break off the action and bring the survivors down, which was agreed.
Perhaps it was then that Clark’s slowly festering Anglophobia was aggravated by disillusion with McCreery’s determination and British fighting power. The 56th Division was the one which could not carry out its assigned mission at Salerno and had caused him to over-extend the front of the 6th Corps. The 10th Corps as a whole had taken two whole days to prepare its advance to Naples, and then he had to give it the 505th Parachute Regiment to help it along. The 56th Division had failed on the Volturno and had to cross via the 6th Corps sector. And now it had given up on Camino. The “poor, dumb British” he called them. However much he did to help them they never seemed to get on any better. What Clark did not know (and it would not have moved him if he had) was that by the third week in November the infantry battalions in the 10th Corps had suffered an average figure of 409 casualties, never to be completely replaced, and that the first Battle of Camino, for instance, cost the 6th Grenadier Guards 220 out of 483 and one of the Scots Guards companies 51 out of 108.
Tug of War Page 13