“John” Harding, as he was always known in the British Army, was one of those rare British officers who reached high rank without being a member of the upper-class establishment, attending a public school, the Royal Military College, Sandhurst or the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. His family sprang from the middle class, tough, hard-working backbone of Victorian England. His father was a solicitor’s clerk at South Petherton, in Somerset, and his mother ran the stationer’s shop. They brought their son up in their own tradition of strict religious observance and hard work. He received a good, basic education at Ilminster Grammar School and when only fifteen years old began work as a clerk in the civil service. The new Territorial Army provided interest and activity for just such as he, and fatefully he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in May 1914. Four years’ active service ending with the temporary command of a battalion convinced him that the army should be his career. He applied for a regular commission, was accepted into his county regiment, the Somerset Light Infantry, and in due course commanded it. When he attended the Staff College at Camberley Montgomery was an instructor and Dick McCreery a fellow student, and he earned a reputation for application rather than brilliance. His true quality was to emerge in the wild, swirling desert battles of 1941, when he was Brigadier, General Staff of the 13th Corps. At one stage during operation CRUSADER, engaged with Rommel, the corps was scattered, its HQ cut off from its units by the panzers and the corps commander lost and out of touch. Harding took complete charge, issuing orders as if he were in command, restored the situation and brought that phase of the operation to a successful conclusion. He was twice awarded the Distinguished Service Order, usually reserved for gallantry in combat. The second citation described him as “that invaluable asset, a fighting staff officer”. He went on to command the 7th Armoured Division, and was severely wounded when reconnoitring in the forward area at the end of the war in Africa.2
A “fighting staff officer”, certainly, and also the possessor of a keenly analytical brain, but much as Brooke might have wished him to rule the roost, he could only exert influence. It is important to understand the difference between the British staff system and the German, of which it was a pale imitation. The German general staff was a separate, united body, a caste rather than a corps, devised to serve, guide and even admonish generals who in the early days owed their position as much to their princely or noble rank as to their military knowledge. (Although, of course, in the twentieth century the German Army’s staff-trained officers rose to high command.) If a commander was relieved for incompetence his chief of staff was dismissed with him, as he was also regarded as responsible. A staff officer was expected to initiate orders on behalf of his commander and virtually act as his deputy. (We have seen how Colonel Ruenkel intervened at Salerno, riding rough-shod over the divisional commanders.) In the German Army a general such as Alexander, chosen for integrity and diplomacy rather than brains, would by training and custom accept his chief of staffs guidance to the point of rubber-stamping his plans and orders.
Such a concept of staff responsibility was utterly alien to the British Army. In the first place there was, strictly speaking, no such appointment as a “chief of staff”, nor was the staff a single body. The nearest to a chief of staff was the Brigadier, General Staff at Corps HQ and the Major-General, General Staff at Army HQ. The “general staff” was only a staff branch, concerned with operations, plans, training and organisation (“staff duties”). Personnel management with all its ramifications was the responsibility of the Adjutant-General’s branch and supplies, logistics and movement of the Quarter-Master General’s, whose subordinates were not “General Staff Officers” but the “deputies” or “assistants” of their chiefs, who had direct access to the commanding general. To be sure, the Brigadier (GS) or Major-General (GS) was the first among equals, and managed the staff as a whole, ensuring that it worked smoothly, but that was a far cry from the German system. As in the US Army, it was the commanding general who finally decided what the plan of battle was, and it was the head of the General Staff’s duty to realise it and attend to the details.* As a result Alexander, who was on the best of terms with his valued chief of staff, though repeatedly approving of his plans, often departed from them when he was faced with imposing them as orders on his recalcitrant subordinates, compromising when they could not agree. This was the root of Alexander’s failure as a commander. “Harding was concerned with the loss of initiative, and decided that it was essential to sit down and have a hard, cool look at where they were really heading, which, in contrast to Montgomery’s, was not Alexander’s way of setting about things …” Alexander’s system was to allow a plan to evolve through discussion with his army commanders. It was then the business of his chief of staff to translate it into order and action. The adequacy of the forces, the arrangements for command, logistics and so on were the concern of the staff.3
However well Alexander and Harding agreed, Harding could not possibly have controlled his vacillating chief as a German staff officer could his. Apart from the interpretation of the boundaries between their different responsibilities, Harding, like all British officers, had been indoctrinated with the tradition of absolute loyalty. To be sure, there are British examples of loyal staff officers addressing their commanders in forthright terms in the hope of keeping them on the rails (as de Guingand did once to Montgomery) or even having to call in the higher commander (as did Galloway on his own initiative when he summoned Auchinleck to HQ Eighth Army during the crisis of the winter battle in 1941) or, indeed simply taking charge, as Harding himself did during the same battle, but in the British Army such initiatives are rare and only possible in a dire emergency.
Harding could advise, but he could not alter Alexander’s style. As Harold Macmillan (admiringly) noted in his diary: “He has the most effective way of giving not exactly orders but suggestions to his commanders. They are put forward with modesty and simplicity. But they are always so clear and lucid that they carry conviction. It is a most interesting (and extremely effective) method.” (From whom, one wonders, did Macmillan — otherwise a shrewd, often a harsh judge of men — obtain such an impression? Or that it was Alexander, not Montgomery, who had reanimated the dejected Eighth Army in August 1942, and won the battles of Alam el Halfa and El Alamein?) It was precisely this flaccid system of command that was to prevent the full fruits of operation DIADEM being reaped in May and to botch the offensive against the Gothic Line.
These difficulties lay in the future, however. For the moment Harding had the full support of his chief and Clark, with a string of failures behind him, was in no position to be obstructive. He confided the bilious expressions of his grievances only to his diary. Harding first sorted out the question of command and staff and after “some difficulty” persuaded Alexander to allow him to organise a proper HQ for him in the great palace of Caserta, near Naples. That done he turned his attention to two other important matters. Strong as the Cassino–Garigliano front was, an offensive there was more likely to offer successful strategic development than the Adriatic front, so he recommended that the bulk of the Allied divisions should be concentrated there. To simplify logistics US Army and US-equipped French forces were to be grouped under the Fifth Army, and British Commonwealth and the British-equipped Polish Corps under the Eighth. Accordingly the New Zealand Corps was dissolved and its two divisions withdrawn to rest, the 2nd Polish Corps relieved the French troops in the mountains and the 13th Corps extended the Eighth Army front southwards to the confluence of the Liri and Garigliano rivers. From there the Fifth Army took over as far as the sea, the 2nd Corps on its left and the newly constituted Corps Expéditionnaire Français on its right, freeing the 10th Corps to rejoin the Eighth Army. This considerable redeployment occupied most of March and April. Next, because of the hoped-for timing for ANVIL and the question of surrendering landing craft, it was intended that the offensive would be renewed in April. Harding wanted more time to prepare it and also the advantage of dry weather
, clear skies for the air force and hard going for the tanks. Mid-May was preferable, but to put back the date revived the conflict about landing craft and the surrender of the forces in AAI earmarked for ANVIL. This solved itself, as when the OVERLORD planners examined the problems of mounting it they advised postponement to June. May 11 was finally settled on as D-day for Alexander’s offensive, code-named DIADEM.
Having arranged these moves Harding’s next task was to embark on the rigorous analysis of the whole strategic situation in Italy; its bare bones are as follows. Alexander’s mission was to attract the German strategic reserves to Italy for the benefit of OVERLORD. The Allied planners had, from time to time feared that Kesselring might slip away to the Pisa–Rimini line or a defensive position even further north, but this took no account of the fact that Hitler was temperamentally reluctant ever to give ground, at least without a fight, that the Gustav Line ran across the shortest and naturally strongest part of Italy and that immense effort had gone into fortifying it. Harding concluded that the Germans would conduct a protracted defence of the Gustav Line; from his point of view the best possible option, for he saw in the Allied dispositions the prospect of a battle of annihilation. If Kesselring was forced by Hitler to stand his ground until it was too late for him to disengage cleanly and stage an orderly withdrawal with an unbroken front from one defensive line to another, he could, in Harding’s opinion, be trapped. “With ruthless logic [he] pointed out that neither pushing back the German line nor the capture of Rome would help to achieve the aim. That must be to destroy the German formations in Italy.”4 If that could be done, or even partly done, the liberation of a large part of Italy, the fall of Rome and the primary and overriding aim of drawing in the German reserves would follow.
The first calculation Harding had to make was the balance of strength. It is a military cliché that for a successful offensive a numerical superiority of four to one is desirable, but in terms of divisions (an inexact but convenient measure) the Allied armies could dispose of twenty-five, Kesselring twenty-three. It was not the true ratio of strength, because the German divisions varied a great deal in quality from the elite parachute troops and panzer grenadiers to ordinary marching infantry divisions, which were under-gunned, under strength and diluted with non-German personnel. The Allies had complete command of the air, and overwhelming superiority in artillery and in numbers of tanks. Harding’s aim was to achieve local superiority by concentrating his forces at the vital areas. In the Cassino sector, the most important in his estimation, instead of companies and platoons he proposed to commit three corps, the 1st Canadian, the 2nd Polish and the 13th British, a total of six infantry divisions, three independent armoured brigades to support them and two armoured divisions with a third, the 6th South African, available. The Garigliano front was to be attacked by four and a half French divisions and the coastal sector by the US 2nd Corps with two. The 6th Corps in Anzio was to be built up to three US infantry divisions, two British, the Special Force of US Ranger and Canadian Commando units and the complete 1st Armored Division.
To keep the balance favourable at least during the break-in phase of the offensive Harding proposed an elaborate deception plan, DUNTON, to play on the German fear of another Anzio-scale landing in their rear. At the same time every precaution was taken to prevent German Intelligence from discovering the actual date of the defensive. All this, one of the cleverest and most elaborate deception plans made in the war before OVERLORD, was so successful that Kesselring was completely deceived, and on D-day both the commanders of the Tenth Army and of the 14th Panzer Corps were on leave in Germany.
Next Harding considered what the US Army aptly calls the “scheme of manoeuvre”. The possible thrust lines were limited by geography to four: through the Liri valley to Frosinone (the Via Casilina); the very difficult route where McCreery had been checked, from Minturno up the Ausente valley behind the Auruncan Mountains to Ausonia; the narrow coastal strip along which ran the Via Appia to Terracina and Rome and northwards from the Anzio bridgehead. Having weighed the arguments for timings Harding decided on opening the offensive against the Gustav Line, and to launch the 6th Corps later as soon as it was clear how the battle was going and where the enemy reserves were engaged. Bearing in mind his aim of destroying a substantial part of the opposing force he saw that the key to such a battle was the articulation of the two fronts. The 6th Corps, far from being a stranded whale, was a cocked pistol pointed at the rear of the 14th Panzer Corps. The Liri valley, unpromising as it was (heavily fortified, cut up by streams and much of it covered with woods and tall crops, overlooked from the north), he decided would be the Schwerpunkt, for it was the only sector of the Gustav Line against which the Allied armour would be used in strength. Moreover it had to be held by the Tenth Army at all costs. It was a bottleneck, but if the cork blew out the Tenth Army would be cut in half. If, however, it was reinforced at the expense of the Fourteenth Army, and the 6th Corps broke out and began rampaging in the enemy rear, a commanding position would be gained for the battle of annihilation for which he hoped. He chose as the vital objective for the 6th Corps the town of Valmontone on the Via Casilina.
The next question, which could only be answered decisively when a full view of the situation was available, was how the battle should then develop. This was to become the subject of violent disagreement between Clark and Alexander and a bone of historical contention to this day, so a brief explanation of the nature of an envelopment in battle in modern warfare will not be out of place. The classical examples of envelopment ending with the victorious side establishing a sort of cordon round the enemy rear were outdated, owing to the purely technical developments. Tanks, mechanised mobility and increased fire-power enabled a threatened force rapidly to establish a fresh defensive front and also to strike back. It is true that in 1940 the Germans’ Sichelschnitt – scything cut – cut off and liquidated the Anglo-French forces, and that the British served the Italians in the same way in the opening battles in North Africa, but in each case there was a great disparity in fighting power. To attempt such manoeuvres against German commanders was as rash as trying to put a half-nelson on a grizzly bear. The classical examples, Cannae and Sedan, were often on German lips, but only as a sort of shorthand or symbol. They themselves were great practitioners of envelopment, but their real models were the annihilating battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in 1914, or their early successes during BARBAROSSA against the Red Army after the invasion of Russia in 1941. Their object was to divide the opposing army or armies and crush the isolated portions in succession. The later German phrase for such a manoeuvre was Keil und Kessel, literally the “wedge and kettle”, “kettle” being used in the sense of “trap”. (Kesselring is a sporting term, meaning to surround a wood with guns and drive the game outwards so none escapes.)
It must be understood that Valmontone, chosen as the 6th Corps objective, was simply the centre of gravity of a potentially critical area. It was not, as Clark seemed to argue, a spot where the 6th Corps would stand on the Via Casilina like so many traffic policemen ordering the stream of German fugitives pouring up it to halt. From there the whole front of the Army Group “C” could be disarticulated, by not only the 6th Corps but by all the Allied forces available.
Such was the outline plan for the great DIADEM offensive. As in all great operations there were many difficulties to be resolved besides the conflicting timings of OVERLORD, DIADEM and ANVIL. There was some alarm about the deception plan DUNTON, as it was felt that it might compromise ANVIL, if the false trails laid indicated the French Riviera as the site of the next great amphibious operation. The change of date settled that problem, and DUNTON was a brilliant success. Woven into it were the preparatory exercises for DIADEM (the Poles practising assaults on caves and dug-outs with flame-throwers, the 8th Indian Division the use of assault boats and the tactics of river crossings), false information for line-crossing agents that the expected offensive was timed for June, radio transmissions from sim
ulated HQ for the German interception service to decrypt and misinterpret, and amphibious exercises by the Canadians and the US 36th Division in the bays of Naples and Salerno.
Alexander’s most acute difficulties lay inside his own army group. The lesser arose from the existence of the 1st Canadian Corps. The Eighth Army front, extending from the foot of Montecassino and to the Liri river, was no more than seven to eight miles wide, not nearly enough frontage for the mass of British, Canadian and later South African armour that was going to be fed into it. One corps HQ was quite enough to control the battle, and the task had been given to the experienced British 13th Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sidney Kirkman. It would be simple and convenient for him if the Canadian divisions and brigades could be placed under his command, but this was not agreeable to the Canadian Government or high command, who felt that Canadians should not be on a par with “colonial” troops like the Indians and used to reinforce British corps and placed under British commanders. It was a question of legitimate national pride, but that was not all. The Canadians felt that their higher commanders required experience and that could only be gained in battle, which meant either putting the Canadian Corps through the 13th at some stage, or, what in the event was done, fitting the two corps into the Liri corridor side by side, leading to all sorts of complications. The correct answer would have been to have moved the inter-army boundary well south of the Liri, but that would have led to even more and vehement protests from the commander of the Fifth Army, who had taken the transfer of the Rapido–Cassino–Montecassino sector to the “British” as a personal slight.
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