Clark’s mood during the preparations for DIADEM was one of anger, frustration and uneasiness, which was made plain to Kirkman when he paid him a visit. He made two insignificant requests. The inter-army boundary had not yet been moved, and he wanted to establish a small tactical HQ in the Fifth Army sector so that he and his operations staff and engineers could conveniently study the battlefield. A methodical and studious tactician, as soon as he had arrived in Italy he had formed small training teams to collate all the latest operational lessons, and he wanted two of his staff to be allowed to visit the British divisions in the Anzio bridgehead. Kirkman was kept waiting for some time before he was allowed to enter Clark’s office, and then given a lecture on the Anzio landing. The gist of this was that for five days the German and 6th Corps build-up had run level, but then the Germans had pulled ahead. Kirkman did not understand what this had to do with current business. He wrote in his diary rather unkindly: “Qui s’excuse, s’accuse” He noticed that Clark was very cold towards him and other British visitors at dinner. His two requests were refused. Puzzled, he consulted Major-General Richardson, the senior British liaison officer at HQ Fifth Army, and was told that quite apart from his dissatisfaction with the DIADEM plan Clark was still sore over what he saw as a British plot to rob him of the credit for his victory at Salerno.5 Kirkman remained unruffled. He was one of those archetypal British officers who valued calmness and phlegm very highly, along with good manners, whose reaction towards bad ones was to remain impassive. He was going to have a close association with Clark and his patience and loyalty were to be highly tested.
The reasons for Clark’s malaise were much deeper than these superficial causes. He was much too intelligent not to realise that the stagnation of SHINGLE and the operational failures on the Garigliano and around Cassino threatened his appointment as army commander, although he was incapable of seeing that his failures were of his own making. Being the man he was, he looked for a scapegoat and the British conveniently fitted the role. This was secondary. It seems unlikely that he knew that his relief was being discussed by the British, or that Alexander and Maitland Wilson had twice called in Harold Macmillan to advise them. (On March 29 and April 2, 1944.) Macmillan’s sage advice was to exercise extreme caution. Alexander was due to visit London, and if it leaked out that the DIADEM plan or Clark’s relief had been a British initiative it could have unfortunate results.6 Clark’s immediate worry was that although the DIADEM plan would put Fifth Army troops in the vanguard of the march on Rome the British were somehow planning to cheat him out of it. Rome was as important to Clark as his appointment to Fifth Army had been. It would be another step on the ladder to being recognised as a great soldier, and gaining the fame and recognition he craved, but now it was even more important. The general seen and extolled as the US general whose US army, alone, had liberated the Eternal City, would be unsackable.
Clark’s plot was skilfully and convincingly laid. On the perfectly justifiable grounds of keeping his options open and planning for every possible variation of the situation when the 6th Corps broke out he ordered General Truscott to prepare four contingency plans. One was to go right-handed or south-east to join hands with the 2nd Corps, one to Valmontone, one north-east over the Alban Hills directly on Rome, and one to the left of the bridgehead, also towards Rome.
On May 5 Alexander, as was his perfect right, visited Truscott’s HQ and was shown these plans. In his mild and non-committal way Alexander observed that only the thrust to Valmontone promised any strategic advantage. Truscott reported this to Clark, who became very agitated. He telephoned Alexander to complain of “unwarranted interference with Fifth Army command channels”, and went on to pour cold water on Harding’s proposed strategy and the possibility of cutting off any part of the Tenth Army. The Germans, he said, were “far too smart”. Clark’s understanding of grand tactics may have been imperfect or naive, but it is difficult to believe that he could not see the obvious rewards that envelopment of the German right wing would confer, or that he would be playing the leading part in a great victory. Rome in any case was to be his prize, whether the Tenth Army was manoeuvred out of its position, or whether it stood and fought. What he was doing was boldly testing how far he could go with Alexander. Valmontone was not open for bargaining, for it was integral to the whole plan. He had now at this late date made it clear to the Commander-in-Chief that they were totally at loggerheads, and it was at that moment Alexander should have dropped on Clark like the proverbial leopard from a tree but, alas, though Alexander was a lion, he was no leopard. As usual he soothed and temporised.7
In the meantime Keyes of the 2nd Corps and Juin, commanding the CEF, were girding up their loins for the impending battle, and the staff of the Eighth Army were assembling the great ram with which it was to batter its way past Cassino and into the Liri valley.
* Changed to Allied Armies, Italy in March 1944.
* British staff nomenclature confused foreign armies. The US staff system was logically organised at all levels into four numbered branches: (1) Personnel (2) Intelligence (3) Operations (4) Logistics, with the letter “G” prefixing appointments at division HQ and above, “S” below. E.g., Brigadier-General Brann was Clark’s head of operations “G3”, the same appointment in a US regiment being the S3. In a British HQ a GSO3 (or General Staff Officer, Third Grade), shortened to “G3”, was a lowly captain, concerned with keeping files and marking maps, the equivalent of the S3 was a “brigade major”, and his colleague on the logistic side, S4, the “Deputy Assistant Adjutant and Quarter-master General” (DAAQMG).
16
THE BATTERING RAM
There was no way round and no scope for cleverness, so I had to blast my way through.
General Sir Brian Horrocks, on his operation VARSITY, to break
through the Siegfried Line in February 1945
When Alexander decided to entrust the task of breaching the Gustav Line at its strongest point to the Eighth Army he chose well. Mark Clark’s nose may have been out of joint, but the supreme characteristic of American commanders and staff was their ability to mount very large operations at short notice and maintain their momentum. Once they had acquired the necessary experience they excelled in exploitation. By contrast the British were rather slow, not by temperament but because their experience had taught them that it was unwise to hurry or scamp preparations when attacking strongly entrenched positions, having attempted a round dozen since Alamein in 1942; five of them, like the Gustav Line, protected by fast-flowing rivers and overlooked by mountains. They were up to every trick of the game. Back in 1918 the Australian General Monash, a civil engineer, had compared his battle planning with the way he would tackle a construction project; a careful survey of the ground, assembling all the plant and material so that each item was ready to hand when it was wanted and setting about the actual work in a systematic manner. This was how General Oliver Leese and his corps commanders and their staffs planned the Fourth Battle of Cassino.
Leese was a Guards officer who had successfully commanded a corps under Montgomery, to whom he owed his promotion to command the Eighth Army, and for whom he had profound respect and admiration. He corresponded regularly with his old chief, giving news of the army’s achievements and old friends and discussing tactical and operational questions at length in letters that were full of good sense and sound military judgment. He even modelled his style of command on Montgomery’s, not altogether wisely. Like him he set up a small, private HQ, where he lived in isolation from his staff with only his military assistant and aides-de-camp for company, and where it was not always convenient to visit him. General Templer (commander of the 56th Division in Anzio and later the 6th Armoured) was once much vexed at having to drive many miles to it over wretched Italian roads to discuss some trivial matter. Another visitor was surprised to find the army commander clad in the baggy plus-fours worn by infantry officers in pre-battledress days, shirt-sleeves and a straw hat watering the plants in the garden of the vil
la he occupied, and the starchy Canadian General Burns was shocked and offended to find that he was expected to discuss questions concerning his corps with a large, naked gentleman scrubbing himself in a tub of water in the open. Eccentricity must be spontaneous. Not every officer could successfully adopt Montgomery’s “hail-fellow-well-met” system of chatting up stray private soldiers he met on his road journeys, and giving them cigarettes from the store he kept in his Jeep.
Leese soon after he took command found a Highland soldier sitting by the roadside and dutifully went through the routine. The “Jock” accepted the gift of cigarettes with good grace, and eyeing the large and burly figure with the baggy breeches observed amiably. “Ye’re new tae this job, then? There was a wee bugger with a black beret dishing oot the fags a while back.” Non e vero e ben trovato. No doubt the story was retailed by Leese himself, for there was no “side” about him. He gave the impression of a cheerful outgoing character, with not, perhaps, a lot of brain, always wearing a quizzical, amused expression, as if the world, even in wartime, was a comical place. Inwardly he was sensitive, highly strung and apt to overwork to the point of exhaustion. Later in his career he made a bad error of judgment* which marred it fatally, but his record in Italy was that of a somewhat slow and unimaginative but competent general.
The German defences between the Monastery heights and the north bank of the Liri river were known to be very strong, although the deadly details of the Hitler Line were only disclosed when the Canadians attacked it. The northern heights were still securely in the hands of Heidrich’s fanatical parachute infantry, whose lay-out and defensive fire-plan had been improved after every unsuccessful Allied offensive; the whole area being covered by an intricate cross-fire from mortars, machine guns and artillery, while the artillery observers could observe every movement between M. Trocchio and the Gari–Rapido. The Gustav Line was lightly held, with Heidrich’s machine-gun regiment in Cassino town and four panzer grenadier battalions watching the river line and posted in depth. Nine miles behind them was the strongest section of the Hitler Line, where the fortified village of Piedimonte loomed over the valley floor past Aquino to Pontecorvo, with the Forme d’Aquino stream, its banks scarped to form an anti-tank obstacle and sown with mines, acting as moat. This section of the rearward defences of the Gustav Line (known variously as the Hitler, Senger and also the Orange Line) was a true fortress system of steel and concrete, designed to be impregnable. The bony skeleton, the “hardened” defences, consisted of deep underground bunkers where the garrisons could safely sit out the tremendous Allied bombardments that were known to precede an attack, rows of bottle-shaped machine-gun posts, the neck protruding just above ground fitted with a ring on which the gun in a steel cupola could revolve, interspersed with the turrets of Panzer Mark V tanks fitted with a long 75-mm gun capable of defeating any Allied tank’s armour. In between, grouped round the Panther turrets, were trenches and emplacements for infantry and mobile anti-tank guns. Experience had shown that during the bombardment it was essential for company officers and under-officers to move about and encourage their men, and for local reserves to be moved without being destroyed by fire, so the whole system was interconnected by tunnels and communication trenches.
General Leese’s outline plan for the breakthrough and exploitation was to consider the Gustav-Hitler-Monastery heights positions as a whole. General Kirkman’s 13th Corps (three infantry, one armoured division, reinforced by Canadian and British tanks) was to cross the Gari under cover of a bombardment by every gun that could be mustered and deployed. Lieutenant-General Anders’ 2nd Polish Corps was to drive the Germans from the heights and capture Piedimonte, so unhinging the northern part of the Hitler Line. According to the way the breaching operation went, Lieutenant-General E. L. M. Burns’ 1st Canadian Corps would either go through the 13th or, as was decided in the event, come up on the left of the 13th and he and Kirkman would drive at the Hitler Line side by side. With the 5th Canadian, the 6th British and 6th South African Armoured Divisions, the 1st (Independent) Canadian Armoured Brigade, the British 25th Tank Brigade and the Polish Armoured Brigade, Leese could dispose of more than 2,000 tanks in the Cassino-Liri valley sector, a concentration that even a Red Army general might have considered adequate.
This was all very fine, but the basic objection to the plan was the lack of space for manoeuvre. This great mass of armour was to be committed to a tiny battlefield, no more than seven miles wide from the foothills of the Cairo massif to the left bank of the Liri, with access only by the single main highway and a number of farm tracks and minor roads insufficient to carry the mass of tanks and supporting vehicles — engineers with their bridging trains, supply vehicles (an armoured division required 900 tons of fuel and ammunition at “intense”, or combat rates) to say nothing of the field artillery forcing its way forward to keep in range as the advance progressed. Command and control at the tactical level would be hampered by mutual interference between the hundreds of radio sets crammed into so small a space.
It was also a mistake to make the Liri a boundary between the two armies, as it prevented flexibility of manoeuvre if one army uncovered the flank of the defenders facing the other. (Altering an inter-army boundary always requires firm control from the top, and Clark was very difficult to deal with over such matters.)
There can be no doubt that these objections were perfectly clear to every senior officer from Harding down, but soldiers are practical people if nothing else, and never expect ideal conditions. In any case, there was no time to repine. Everyone had to get down to the vast and complicated task of turning a plan of action into orders. As Monash has said, preparing a modern battle is like mounting an industrial enterprise. It requires both managerial skill and imagination, and while thousands of fussy orders on reams of paper must not be inflicted on the fighting echelons – “delegation of responsibility” is one of the unwritten principles of war – it is the duty of the staff to see that no detail, no missing horseshoe nail that might lose the battle, be overlooked.* At army-group level Harding and his staff officers had to arrange for two tired divisions to leave Italy for rest, reinforcement and re-training, and six new ones to be absorbed and accommodated. The French and three Eighth Army corps had to be moved up or across the front into the southern Cassino–Minturno sector, while the 10th (McCreery) side-stepped to north of the Montecassino–Cairo massif. As regards divisions, the 2nd New Zealand and the battered 4th Indian moved over to the northern sector, the 8th Indian, the British 4th Infantry and 6th Armoured Divisions moved into the Liri sector and over a thousand guns and the two divisions of the 1st Canadian Corps redeployed in suitable positions behind it.
All these moves had to be completed without arousing the suspicions of a watchful enemy, whose air reconnaissance could not be totally driven out of the sky, and whose Italian agents could easily pass between the opposing lines. A degree of concealment could be achieved by routine methods such as moving only at night and lying up in well-camouflaged hides by day, leaving dummy HQ behind in their old locations with their radio nets busy and so on. Training exercises, the Poles practising mountain climbing and the use of flame-throwers to attack strong points in caves, the British and Indian infantry paddling assault boats across rivers, the Canadian armoured regiments instructing the Indian sepoys with whom they were to work in the techniques of infantry–armour fighting could be turned to good use by leaking real information as well as “disinformation” to suggest that no Allied offensive was likely before the first week in June. The German Intelligence staffs began to obtain a picture of Canadian troops and the US 36th Division engaged in amphibious exercises in the bays of Naples and Salerno, and of French and American divisions preparing to invade the French Riviera. All this helped to strengthen Kesselring’s conviction that the Allied commanders were too intelligent to continue bashing their heads against the Gustav Line, and that they would try to outflank it by sea. His favoured landing areas were near the mouth of the Tiber for a direct thrust a
t Rome, Civitavecchia or Leghorn.
On the divisional and brigade levels there was also intense activity. The infantry, without giving the game away, had to allow as many junior leaders as possible to look by day at the ground over which they had to advance by night, study air photographs, familiarise themselves with the arrangements for artillery and tank support and brief their men. The engineers – the key arm in any river-crossing and breaching operation, and always fated to spend the longest time of any arm in the most dangerous zone, the actual crossing site – busily patrolled the river banks to locate minefields and where possible lifted them, reconnoitred the best bridging sites and concealed positions where their material would be assembled, and where, under their supervision, the infantry would “marry up” with their wooden assault boats and be routed forward to the river. After nightfall on D-day all the routes forward would have to be marked with white tapes and dim lights. A large engineer force, 1,500 strong with all the necessary vehicles and plant, was formed ready to cross the river as soon as possible and re-open Highway No. 6 through the ruins of Cassino, where the ill-considered use of heavy bombers had blocked it with rubble or it had disappeared in a series of enormous craters. The whole success of the 13th Corps attack would depend on the free use of Highway No. 6 as a main supply route.
The biggest single operation on the Eighth Army front was deploying the artillery and preparing the fire-plan. Following well-established British practice, every gun that was not required to give minimum cover to the inactive parts of the line and all the guns of reserve formations were concentrated and placed under central control. The assembly of 1,060 pieces of artillery with supplies of ammunition (600 rounds per gun for the 25-pounders in the 13th Corps and 1,090 for the Polish Corps, 350 r.p.g. for the mediums and 200 r.p.g. for the heavy artillery), together with the activities of signallers laying cable and survey parties mapping the gun areas had to be carried out with every precaution against being detected by the watchful German observers on the heights across the river. The batteries were brought up to the survey markers on their positions night after night and remained silent until the battle started.*
Tug of War Page 30