Tug of War

by Shelfold Bidwell

  Four private soldiers received awards for valour, two posthumously, all four for personal attacks on groups of machine-gun posts. On April 5 a Japanese of the 442nd (Nisei) Infantry, Private (First Class) Sadao S. Munemori took over a rifle squad when the NCO in command was wounded and captured the objective, personally silencing two machine guns with hand grenades. Almost immediately an enemy grenade, its fuse burning, fell among his comrades. He threw himself on to it, saving their lives, but losing his own. On the 14th Private (First Class) J. D. Magrath of the 85th Mountain Infantry fell mortally wounded to a stray shot, having attacked and silenced four posts, using captured weapons when he had expended his rifle ammunition. He and Munemori were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour.

  On the 9th two sepoys (privates) of the 4th Indian Division won the Victoria Cross during the assault crossing of the Senio. It involved climbing the twenty-five-foot-high dyke on the enemy bank, beyond which lay concealed machine guns whose crews had survived the artillery bombardment. Haidar Ali of the 13th Frontier Force Rifles accounted for two, though wounded in leg and arm, charging out alone ahead of his company which was pinned by their fire. Namdeo Jadhao, 5th Mahratta Light Infantry, was the “runner” (messenger) of one of the attacking companies, whose HQ was moving close behind the leading platoon. Once over the bank it came under fire from three machine-gun posts, leaving Namdeo the only man not killed or wounded. He first carried back two wounded and then equipped with machine pistol and grenades attacked single-handed, returning once for more grenades. The guns silenced, he returned a third time to cheer the rest of his company on, standing on top of the flood-bank shouting the Mahratta war-cry. That the awards for heroism were distributed among a Japanese, a white American, a Muslim and a Hindu was, perhaps, symbolic, and certainly appropriate to the multinational character of the Allied armies.

  The Eighth Army at last achieved the breakthrough it had been denied four times. The crossing of Lake Comacchio achieved complete surprise, and Arbuthnott, who kept up a rolling attack by day and night, passing one brigade through another, reached Argenta on the 17th. There the 78th and the 56th Divisions met stiff resistance, as by then von Vietinghoff perceived that he had been the victim of the Allied deception plan, and committed the 29th Panzer Division to the Argenta corridor. It was too late. On the 16th McCreery placed the 6th Armoured Division under Keightley, who ordered Major-General “Nat” Murray to pass through the Argenta Gap and make for the Po without slackening his attack by day or by night. Refreshed and encouraged by its return to the mobile role after its dismal slogging match in the Apennines, the division (four cavalry regiments in tanks, motorised Guards and Greenjackets) set off in a burst of the true cavalry spirit. On the 23rd, patrols of the Derbyshire Yeomanry stood on the south bank of the river, and the Scots Guards and engineers prepared to cross.7 By then the hard-pressed von Vietinghoff had received a harsh and, indeed, insulting reply from OKW to his last appeal to be allowed to disengage to the Po defence line. It accused him of a “defeatist attitude”, reaffirming that his mission was to defend “every inch of Italian soil”, concluding ominously by reminding him of the “serious consequences” of not carrying out the “Fuehrer’s orders to the last word”. That was the death warrant of Army Group “C”. Kesselring was no help. He, from his distant HQ, was now simply reaffirming Hitler’s manic decrees.

  On the 14th the Fifth Army opened its attack, two days late, having been delayed by bad flying weather. The mountainous terrain left Truscott with little room for manoeuvre, but by attacking in succession first with the 4th Corps and then with the 2nd, he too achieved a complete breakthrough, using the full weight of the Allied air forces to support each corps in turn. The US Army staff reaffirmed its aptitude for organising large and complex troop movements in mid-battle by side-stepping the 2nd Corps on to Highway No. 64, along which it advanced, not without hard fighting, west and north-westwards into the plain of Emilia, by-passing Bologna. At the same time the 6th Armoured Division reached the Po, and the leading regiment of its left-hand group was preparing to clear the village of Finale Emilia. There the 16th/5th Lancers met the tanks of the 11th South African Armoured Brigade attacking the same objective from the west, while a liaison officer from the 17th/21st Lancers fortunately arrived at HQ US 91st Infantry Division just in time to dissuade it from advancing to the attack supported by a full-scale artillery bombardment — on to the rear of the 16th/5th.*8 Joining hands, the right of the US 2nd Corps and the left of the British 5th Corps trapped the bulk of the 76th Panzer Corps south of the Po. On the 25th, when the 27th Lancers of the 78th Division captured Generalleutnant Graf Gerhard von Schwering, he was asked to reveal the locations of his corps. He replied laconically that “it could be found somewhere south of the Po”. Everywhere the fields were covered with abandoned vehicles and heavy weapons, some defiantly set alight, among them roaming hundreds of draught horses turned loose to graze. The orders given to the German soldiers had been to make their own way to the Po, but many of the bridges and ferries organised to take them across had been destroyed by air attack. Over 100,000 men stood around waiting to be rounded up and, they hoped, fed and protected from the anti-Fascist and anti-German partisans. (These, lavishly armed by the Allies, and capable of little more than murder and noisy fire-fights with their fellow Italians of a different political hue, had been summoned into action to support the final offensive.)9

  The confusion in the battle area extended back from the units of Army Group “C” to its high command and beyond. Kesselring, though privately a realist, for the moment came down on the side of the diehards who wished to fight on to the bitter end. Those who, like von Vietinghoff, saw no alternative to surrender, still felt bound by the oath of loyalty they had so foolishly sworn. Only SS General Wolff, whose task it was to punish traitors, felt strong enough to cut through the bickering and hesitation and persuade Alexander to accept emissaries empowered to arrange a surrender.

  At last in the presence of Alexander’s chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Sir William Morgan, an agreement for the unconditional surrender of all the German and pro-Axis forces in Italy was signed at Caserta, on April 29. The cease-fire became effective on May 2.10

  The Allied victory evoked no euphoria, no sense of triumph, no victory parades. The fighting troops after a good sleep were fully occupied in collecting, disarming and making arrangements to administer 145,000 prisoners of war, demobilising the partisans and restoring the public utilities of towns wrecked by bombing. The older men could remember the first air-raid sirens of 1939, the victory and defeat in France and the beaches of Dunkirk. The younger men, most of them veterans of twenty-four or twenty-five, had known nothing but a state of world war during their adult lives. It was, at first, hard to grasp that it was all over.

  * So named when the 12th TAC joined the 6th Army Group in France.

  * Illustrating the difficulty of control when two friendly armies meet head-on in a double envelopment. One of the tank commanders of the 16th/5th loosed off at a South African tank, but fortunately missed.

  26

  REFLECTIONS

  It is better to be wise before the event than after; but it is still better to be wise after the event than not to be wise at all.

  Enoch Powell*

  The end of the war in Italy was overshadowed by the death of Hitler, the collapse of the Third Reich and the explosion of the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All that remained in popular memory was an impression of bungled operations; the landing at Anzio and the destruction of the Abbey of Montecassino. The British, nostalgically obsessed with defeats, heroic or otherwise, dwelt on Dunkirk, Singapore and the earlier battles in the Western Desert. American attention was divided between the war in the Pacific and, understandably, OVERLORD, as it was the task of liberating north-west Europe and the defeat of Germany that brought the US Army across the Atlantic. Italy was a diversion.

  Yet the Italian war is of abiding interest. It demonstrated the self-generating momentu
m of military operations once begun, it is full of examples of the pitfalls of coalitionary war, and offers an insight into Anglo-American relations at a period fraught with mutual dislike and suspicion. The debate centred about the aim of the campaign and the question, never satisfactorily answered, of how far the military resources poured into what was manifestly a subsidiary theatre of war paid a dividend. We suggest that this is too simple a way of assessing so complex an activity as warfare — perhaps the question is not a valid one at all. Nevertheless, it has to be answered; first, though, it is necessary to draw attention to an ironic circumstance. The military ideology, or “doctrine” of the British and United States Armies was fundamentally the same. Theoretically there was no need for the bitter differences between the British and American chiefs of staff. Both adhered to a set of maxims for the conduct of large-scale operations, which the British somewhat misleadingly termed the “principles of war”. Both Marshall and Brooke would have unhesitatingly agreed that the Object should first be carefully and exactly defined, and thereafter every resource be devoted to its attainment according to the principles of Concentration and Offensive Action, Forces diverted to necessary subsidiary operations, such as the protection of an open flank, or to mask the direction of the main thrust should, according to the principle of Economy of Force, be no larger than required for the task. The invasion of mainland Italy was launched in the hope that a brief and limited effort could bring about large gains. As so often seen in history of warfare, this had proved a delusion.

  A further irony was that the early studies leading to a British war doctrine had been based on the lessons of the Civil War in the United States. The definitive work, and the operational bible of the British Army, was the Field Service Regulations (Volume II, Operations) as written and later revised after the First World War.*

  The authors of the Field Service Regulations attached great importance to economy of force, which had been at the heart of the great debate between the “westerners” and the “easterners” during the First World War. The “westerners” (like Roosevelt and Marshall in 1943) believed that the best, indeed the only way to defeat the Central Powers was a direct assault on the German positions in France and Belgium and the defeat of the German armies in the field, leading to the occupation of Germany itself. The “easterners” argued for a more imaginative, wider strategy, attacking the eastern and southern perimeter of the Central Powers wherever they could — in Iraq, Egypt, the Dardanelles, Salonika and Italy. “FSR Vol. II” was, in effect, a post-war endorsement of the policy of the “westerners”. The Staff College students and instructors of the inter-war years who were to reach high positions during the Second World War were accordingly indoctrinated, but a further irony was that the supreme director of the British war effort was to be Churchill, a convinced, obstinate and, indeed, obsessive “easterner”. This is not to say that Churchill was wrong and Marshall was right. Marshall was a military fundamentalist of a narrow and rigid kind. The British and American soldiers agreed on the exclusion of all political considerations. In their philosophy there was no question of gaining public opinion, or regarding war as a final and legitimate means of gaining political objectives. In democracies it was for governments to set political goals, and for soldiers to secure military objectives.

  The principles of war were no more than maxims — some of them mutually exclusive and contradictory — intended to fix the minds of soldiers on operational essentials. It is not known whether Churchill ever opened a copy of FSR Vol. II, but if he did he would have approved of “the fifth principle”, Offensive Action. As for the rest, he was not the man to allow doctrinaire considerations to deflect him from courses of action which his acute political sense told him were correct. Churchill may or may not have been whole-heartedly behind the OVERLORD enterprise, but that question lies outside this particular discussion. What he did understand was that the Allies were not mentally or physically prepared to invade north-west Europe in 1943. (A view reinforced by the experience of invading Sicily and the Salerno landing, both successful, but revealing serious errors in Allied planning, execution and the morale and training of the troops.) Churchill also perceived that inactivity in 1943 was politically and morally impossible. It was necessary to engage in offensive operation in mainland Europe as soon as possible to reassure the Russians and to convince the Western Europeans inside and outside the frontiers of Nazi-dominated Europe that their prison wall could be breached, and that the German Army could be defeated by the Western soldiers, in mainland Europe, and not only in distant Africa and off-shore islands in the Mediterranean. In 1943 Italy was the only place where the Allies could be certain of obtaining a foothold.

  The success or failure of the Italian campaign has, therefore, to be assessed in the wider, political perspective of grand strategy. It cannot be satisfactorily judged by the crude method of striking a quantitative balance, for that would not be comparing like with like. On the one side there were the lean German divisions, all but the few elite panzers and panzer grenadiers marching on their feet, their few guns and scanty supplies relying on horse draught and, for most of the campaign, virtually without air support. On the other, there were the lavishly supplied Allied armies, counting their tanks and guns by the thousand and their artillery ammunition by the million rounds, supported by a powerful tactical air force. Nor was this all. They were backed by an elaborate logistic infrastructure stretching across the Mediterranean from Morocco in the west to Suez in the east. It could be said, therefore, that it was not Alexander who was drawing in forces that could otherwise be employed against Allies in north-west Europe, but Kesselring who was containing Alexander. That was the logic behind the diversion of six US and French divisions to the south of France in the summer of 1944.

  An alternative, suggested oddly enough by Churchill himself (at the QUADRANT conference in 1943), was to close the theatre down. Once the Allies had reached a line sufficiently far north of the airfields in southern Italy required by the USAAF for the southern limb of the Combined Bomber Offensive, it would be fortified and garrisoned by no more troops than required to hold it. The impracticability of such a course is obvious. If too weak the garrison would invite a German offensive; if strong enough to hold it the object of freeing forces for use elsewhere would be defeated. If entirely passive the morale of the garrison would suffer, but a policy of raids and patrols, as obtained during lulls on the Western Front in the earlier war, would only serve to disgust the troops, always quick to resent pointless effort and unnecessary casualties. Divisions could be moved from theatre to theatre, but the logistic base in the Mediterranean with its string of ports and airfields could not easily be picked up and put down somewhere else. It was not only the accessibility of Italy that invited invasion: the essential machinery to mount and sustain it was already in existence.

  There is more weight in the argument that once Alexander had been given his final directive and the DIADEM offensive was seen to have gathered momentum, he should have been given his head and all the resources available. This had the support of Mark Clark, at least from the moment when he realised that the only opportunity to distinguish himself would be in Italy in command of the Fifth Army. In his own memoirs he asserted that the removal of six of his divisions after DIADEM was “one of the outstanding mistakes of the war”.1 His biographer, quoting him, writes: “Had the Allies reached Bologna in 1944, moved into the Balkans and been in eastern Europe before the Russians … ‘they might have changed the whole history of relations between the western world and Soviet Russia.’”2 It is not clear exactly what Clark meant by “the Balkans”; conventionally Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. None of these was accessible to the 15th Army Group, and it is highly unlikely that the Russians would have tolerated such an incursion into territory they had marked out as their own, even if Clark could have reached them.3 Clark was in fact to reach Austria in May 1945, and it made little difference to the course of events in central Europe in the long term.


  The military side of this option, put up in outline by Alexander, to be immediately rejected by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, was to gain the head of the Adriatic by a combination of land and amphibious thrusts and then advance on Vienna via the so-called “Lubljana Gap”. The plan ignored the fact that the Allies had taken over a year to battle their way up the length of Italy where the natural defensive lines, though strong, at least were long enough to offer some room for manoeuvre and surprise. Yet it envisaged an advance in winter along a narrow mountain route 250 miles long, first over the Julian Alps, then through the high pass or “gap” near Lubljana, no more than thirty miles wide and offering many good defensive positions, along the valley of the Save and then over a great Alpine massif. Central Europe as a goal was political and military moonshine.

  A better option might have been to turn north-westwards after breaking the Gothic Line and invade France by the classic route along the coast and over the Alpes Maritimes. (Provided that the advance of the Allied armies had not perforce been halted after the ANVILDRAGOON contingent had been removed.) Not only would the CEF have been ideally employed in the mountains, but the fact that it was advancing into France would have fired it with enthusiasm. This was never given serious consideration, except by Churchill. The rigid, unimaginative decision to launch ANVIL-DRAGOON had been taken unilaterally by the Americans, as the dominant partners in the alliance and, moreover, redeploying forces that were theirs or under their control. All Churchill’s protests were therefore in vain.