Tug of War

by Shelfold Bidwell

  East of the Rapido river, Highway No. 6 is overlooked by M. Lungo from the south and M. Sammucro from the north; at the foot of the latter the village of S. Pietro Infine was fortified and strongly held. This was another of those positions which the Fuehrer ordered to be held to the last man. The task of clearing it was given to General Walker and his 36th Infantry Division whose fate it was to have some of the more unpleasant assignments; first Salerno, now S. Pietro, and later an ill-fated assault crossing of the Rapido. Walker, reinforced by the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, a Ranger battalion (equivalent to a British Commando) and tanks, mounted attack after attack between November 8 and 16, when the defenders of S. Pietro, a battalion of 29th Panzer Grenadier Division, withdrew. By then he had lost 150 killed, 800 wounded and 250 missing, and still had to go on and try to take the next village, S. Vittore, where the next layer of the Bernhard Line was anchored to the western foot of M. Sammucro. (Inside S. Pietro 300 Italian civilians died out of the 1,000 or so who refused to leave their homes and tried to weather the storm in their cellars or in nearby caves.) Martin Blumenson, in his Salerno to Cassino, devotes a whole chapter to this action, which, taken with Camino, provides a revealing contrast in the styles of warfare employed in the British and US armies. The British simply could not afford to lose 1,200 men in a single action of secondary importance.

  At the beginning of December McCreery launched a second attack to clear M. Camino, using a brigade of the 46th Division on the night of the 1st to secure a good jump-off point for the 56th Division, supported by a short but intense artillery programme designed to blast the enemy defence posts and stun their garrisons. Clark added every gun in range belonging to the neighbouring US 2nd Corps to the 256 guns of the 10th Corps. In the opening fire-plan that carried the troops of the 56th Division on to their first objectives, 1,329 tons of ammunition were fired in seventy-five minutes, and in the subsequent bombardments 3,000 tons more. On December 6 Kesselring agreed that it was profitless to feed any more valuable reserves into this furnace and the Tenth Army withdrew to the forward edge of the Gustav Line.

  On the Adriatic coast the Eighth Army succeeded in crossing the Sangro and breaking into the Gustav Line at its seaward end, but its rate of advance had slowed down to half a mile per day and its losses had become more than it could bear. The New Zealanders fought a long and costly battle to capture one of the strongest of the enemy bastions, the hilltop town of Orsogna, once actually entering the streets in a surprise attack, only to be ejected after a fierce fight. Orsogna could have been captured, at a price, but it was not a price that New Zealand could afford, unless a whole division written off was worth the exchange. Nearer the coast the Canadians cleared the enemy from another key area of the defence near the village of S. Leonardo after eight consecutive attacks, and they were faced with a German parachute battalion determined to defend the coast town of Ortona. The resourceful Canadians worked out the tactics of street fighting as they went along, and their clearance of the town still remains a model for anyone who is forced to engage in that peculiarly unpleasant form of warfare.

  At one moment Montgomery dared to hope that he might break through, but the weather tipped the balance. Movement on the Adriatic coast was difficult and sometimes impossible, but north of the demolition belt the defenders were free to move in any direction over undamaged communications and move reserves to every threatened point in turn. The weather grew worse week by week. On December 5 Montgomery recorded in his diary that the Sangro, over which his vital communications now ran, had risen eight feet and all the bridges built by the engineers were under water or had been washed away. Operations had to stop while every company of engineers concentrated on replacing them. By mid-December he was clear that it was futile to persist, and closed down the offensive. He and his new army had failed, but failed with honour. Neither his methods, his determination nor the valour of the troops of four nations could be questioned, but the whole operation had been launched at the wrong place and at the worst time.

  * The Authorised Version, a quotation frequently on the lips of British generals who were great Bible readers. Americans may be more familiar with the Revised Standard Version: “If the bugle gives an indistinct sound who will get ready for battle?” In fact, the instrument used for military signalling in c. AD 47 was probably a horn.

  * To avoid confusing the reader we will refer only to the Bernhard, Gustav and Hitler Lines as above. The term “winter line” was used loosely referring to all three, the Hitler Line was also called the Senger Line and the various delaying lines were also given names. The whole front of the Gustav Line from the foot of Montecassino to the sea was barred by a deep, fast river. In the north where it flows in a loop round the east side of Cassino town it is the Rapido. Below the town it is joined by the smaller Gari, and takes its name, becoming the Garigliano downstream of its confluence with the Liri. In Allied accounts, however, it is called the Rapido as far as that point.

  * A “Spandau” was the German machine gun No. 38, with a cyclic rate of fire of 1,000 rounds per minute, called a “burp-gun” by the US infantry and much feared by all who came under its fire.

  * “Yeomanry” was the ancient title of volunteer cavalry, later incorporated in the Territorial Army, converted in the 1930s to Royal Artillery or armoured units.

  * Say, two hours’ expenditure at normal rates of fire.

  † The “Bailey bridge” was the invention of a British engineer of that name. Essentially it was made of standardised components suitable for carriage in ordinary transport, and bolted together to form as long and as strong a bridge as was required, like a giant version of Meccano or Erector toy kits. The simplest of the launching drills was to construct a bridge of rather more than double the length required to span the gap, so that it would not overbalance, and push it forward on rollers until the end hit the far bank. It was one of the great war-winning inventions, and adopted by the US Army.

  IV

  Lost Battles

  8

  AN ODOUR OF GALLIPOLI

  This whole affair had a strong odour of Gallipoli and apparently the same amateur was still on the coach’s bench.

  Major-General John Lucas, commander US 6th Corps,

  diary entry, January 10, 1944

  No doubt General Lucas was tired when he came out of the Une on December 31 and was shown the plan for the amphibious “end-run” at Anzio that he was to command. That might explain why he was so sceptical about it. However, the more he looked at the plan in the next week the less he liked it, and he was particularly irritated at the way it was being foisted on him by Alexander’s and Clark’s staff officers, who seemed to him to know very little about fighting battles. It reminded him of Gallipoli and the similarity became closer when he heard that Winston Churchill was its instigator.

  Lucas had replaced Dawley in command of the 6th Corps. After Salerno he had fought his divisions over the Volturno in October and through the mountains of the Bernhard Line in November, when two weeks of unrelenting rain made mud “the consistency of good, thick bean soup and about the same colour”.1 In November and December his 3rd, 36th and 45th Divisions were replaced by French divisions and on December 31 he handed over the French troops on the corps front to the newly-arrived French Expeditionary Corps headquarters of General Alphonse Juin, and on the left to Major-General Geoffrey Keyes’ 2nd (US) Corps, which had been in the line since mid-November. The 2nd Corps now absorbed Lucas’ remaining division, the 34th, and Lucas’ headquarters withdrew to take over the two divisions destined for Anzio, the fresh 1st British, newly arrived from North Africa, and the rested 3rd US that we last met on the Volturno, commanded by Lucian Truscott.

  Lucas was a down-to-earth practical soldier, by then experienced in fighting Germans and the logistics of warfare in the mountains of Italy. Although a sympathetic and understanding man he was not considered soft. Retaining no lingering illusions about the capabilities of infantry relying on their own weapons and an artilleryman h
imself, he had made his artillery support effective and fearsome. It had been the saviour of the lives of his infantry every day since Salerno. He had also created, from scratch, a system of mule transport, without which neither his infantry nor his artillery could have sustained the fighting in the mountains. His pack train of about 500 mules, ponies and asses used whatever equipment could be scrounged from the ordnance or “liberated” from the countryside. “The result was the most peculiar collection of little jack asses, pack saddles, ponies and gear of all descriptions that I have ever seen,” he wrote, “but it worked. It had to work.” As for the handlers, men who had the knack and acquired the knowledge emerged from unexpected places. Often the despair of weapon training instructors, useless on the square or “boot camp” and incorrigibly scruffy, they enjoyed their independence and worked around the clock, usually on their own, toiling up narrow tracks where shelling could panic heavily loaded animals into a gadarene descent to the bottom of a ravine.

  Even if fatigue may have coloured Lucas’ judgment of the Anzio plan, his experience qualified him to criticise it. Careful, and sceptical of get-rich-quick methods, he was allergic to over-sanguine believers in the triumph of will over reason, there being too many of them at Fifth Army and the other higher headquarters in the rear, he believed. Indeed, had he known the full story of the plan’s provenance he might have extended his critical comment – “I am amazed at the ignorance of war displayed by the leaders of a people who have been at war for so many years” – which condemned his own countrymen as well as Churchill and Alexander at whom it was directed.

  Indeed, Eisenhower had allowed the campaign to drift in the three months since Salerno. His mind had changed too often. Although he had received contradictory, sometimes impracticable, instructions from Washington and London he did not play the part of commander, demanding clear directives so that he could make decisions, because he preferred the status quo. He was not used to taking responsibility, and continued, in spirit, Marshall’s staff officer. As Alexander was under Montgomery’s influence, because he had been a student of his at the Staff College, so Eisenhower, as one of the Marshall ring, was under Marshall’s spell. Alexander was a courageous battle soldier; Eisen-hower an excellent staff officer. Unfortunately what both men lacked was experience in directing large-scale operations. Both were attractive to politicians because they were malleable. They suited each other because each found the other easy-going and understanding. In fact they were too alike and, although the Alliance benefited from their personalities, operations suffered. Neither could make a military plan and stick to it through political and military vicissitudes. Alexander lacked a strong staff officer to make him do it until General John Harding arrived in 1944, and even then he slid away from any firm decision. Eisenhower had Bedell Smith, but he was a politician too, and the rest of his huge staff did not command much respect from field commanders who found its grasp of operations palpably deficient. The Allies were desperately short of experienced operational staff officers, for most of them were in fighting divisions. So Eisenhower fell into the hands of staff planners and, being inexperienced himself, was too easily blown off course by opinionated and persuasive subordinates whose qualifications were questionable. The reputation of Eisenhower as an admirable coalition leader will endure only if we recognise the effects that his two personality flaws, inconsistency and inconstancy, had on operations.

  Just before Salerno, Eisenhower told the CCS that German resistance would force the Allies to “advance methodically” in Italy. A euphemism for a series of stiff battles between short advances, it described Montgomery’s view rather than his own which, presumably, was to be reflected in the dispersed landings and optimism about the result of the Italian surrender. During the “crisis” at Salerno he declared that any advance after the battle would be too difficult for the troops he had, but when the battle ended without disaster he cheered up, declared that the Germans would not stand south of Rome and forecast the fall of the capital in a month. In early October he returned to his first opinion, saying that the Germans would withdraw, pacing themselves, to the Pisa–Rimini line.2

  Had Eisenhower reflected soberly on events since Salerno he might have concluded that whatever their ultimate intentions, in fact the Germans had resisted so strongly and withdrawn so slowly that by October 9, when Clark reached the Volturno, a review of his strategy was timely. Hitler, who had vacillated while Kesselring carried on his dogged resistance, came to that conclusion about then. News of the change of German strategy – to stand firm on the Gustav Line – reached Eisenhower from his chief intelligence officer, Kenneth Strong. Eisenhower’s moods had been influenced by Strong’s comforting opinion that the Germans would withdraw, despite evidence from the field that they were not doing so except under extreme pressure. Both men paid too little regard to field conditions and too much to the current indulgence in what one staff officer called the “annual ߢcollapse of Germany’ predictions” which were greeted with derision and cynicism in the field. Eisenhower was too much addicted to Ultra,* from which this information about German intentions originated.

  Ultra was a destabilising influence on Eisenhower because he had no consistent plan – no master plan as Montgomery put it. In the field, Ultra could seldom be the principal source of intelligence for commanders fighting battles. At the highest level its importance was greater, of course, but even there it should not have been the foundation of strategy, but its guide. Yet Eisenhower’s perceptions were “startlingly changed” about October 7, by information from Strong about Kesselring’s intentions.3 On October 4 Kesselring had persuaded Hitler to let him make a prolonged stand south of Rome and on the 9th Hitler had referred to the Bernhard Line as of decisive importance. Reinforcements were traced moving south to bring Kesselring’s strength to nine divisions. On the 25th Hitler sent for Kesselring and reversed his intention to appoint Rommel to command all the German forces in Italy. Rommel had favoured a withdrawal to the Pisa–Rimini line and, eventually, to the Po. On November 6 Kesselring’s appointment in his place marked “the end of the withdrawals” and on the 23rd Kesselring assumed supreme command with instructions to hold the front south of Rome indefinitely.4

  This information set in motion one of the train of events that sent Lucas to Anzio in January. Eisenhower perceived that an advance to the Pisa–Rimini line, let alone the Po, was too tough an assignment unless the Germans could be dislodged by an amphibious landing on the west coast behind the Winter Line. Nevertheless it was still necessary to reach Rome with its neighbouring airfields, and the Pisa–Rimini line to cover them. Consequently, although it was always possible that Hitler might change his mind again, on October 13, the day that Clark crossed the Volturno, Eisenhower asked the CCS for more landing craft. Washington was unmoved and adhered to its conviction that the Germans would not stand until they reached the three lines in the north – the Pisa–Rimini, the Po and the Alps. There would be no more resources and no change in the decisions made at QUADRANT in Quebec City in August that 7 divisions, 170 bombers and troop-carrying aircraft, assault shipping and landing craft would leave the Mediterranean for England at the beginning of December.5

  It had been assumed by the army commanders that amphibious end-runs were essential if the campaign in Italy was to proceed, so Eisenhower’s request was not innovative but was the only way the purpose of the campaign could be achieved without excessive loss of life. At Termoli, Eighth Army had mounted a comparatively small operation on October 3. At about the same time Clark ordered General (ߢIron Man’) O’Daniel to form an amphibious operations section to plan landings on the west coast. He made a number of proposals in October. All were frustrated either because the navy found that those planned close to the front used unsuitable beaches or those further afield, for which the army needed a larger force to ensure that it could survive longer, required too many ships.

  Nevertheless, from O’Daniel’s work emerged the conviction that Anzio was the place for a landing to unh
inge the Winter Line and take Rome, provided that the main front of Fifth Army was advancing and it had reached the vicinity of Frosinone. The size of the landing force obviously depended on the ships available and there the outlook was bleak. To find out how bleak, Eisenhower’s staff undertook a study at the end of October, primarily to determine whether even the planned build-up of forces in Italy could be completed before the landing ships and craft required for it left for England. The conclusions were discouraging. If fifty British LSTs and twelve US craft were retained for an additional fifteen days, until December 15, the build-up of ground forces could be completed and there would also be sufficient for an amphibious landing by one division. The air force units, whose maintenance would eventually require as much shipping as the whole of the Eighth Army, could not be accommodated. However, if these craft were retained until January 5 the whole build-up could be completed and the amphibious landing mounted.6