The Gothic Line Read online

  Alexander did have one surprising American backer—Fifth Army commander General Mark Clark. An unapologetic anglophobe, Clark was also a glory hound. He realized there would be scant glory for an American general commanding an army whittled down to a mere five divisions and three tank battalions. Worse, the men he was losing—both French and American—represented 40 per cent of his most experienced combat strength. Word that his strength would be bolstered by a regimental combat team from the recently formed and unblooded 92nd U.S. Negro Infantry Division little raised his spirits.* He was even less impressed when the untried Brazilian Expeditionary Force was attached to his army.

  Clark frantically tried to save his veteran American divisions. On June 17, while meeting with Marshall, Clark argued that the French corps alone could take Marseilles. General Alphonse Juin, the highly respected commander of Corps Expéditionnaire Français, agreed. Marshall refused to back down. The American divisions must be transferred.

  * The American military was still segregated in World War II, with African Americans generally restricted to service in support roles, such as truck drivers. By 1944, however, manpower shortages led to the formation of segregated combat divisions in which black personnel could serve. Most of their officers were white.

  When circumstances in Normandy suddenly improved, Churchill, Wilson, and Alexander renewed the debate. On July 25, General George Patton’s Third U.S. Army broke out on the right flank of the Normandy salient, raising the prospect of the liberation of several channel ports. Churchill cabled Roosevelt on August 4, suggesting cancelling Operation Dragoon.

  The British prime minister pressed his case vigorously with Eisenhower the following day. The American general “continued to say no all afternoon and ended up saying no in every form of the English language at his command,” Churchill wrote.12 Eisenhower informed Washington that under no circumstance would he agree to Dragoon’s cancellation.

  Indeed, cancelling Dragoon was no longer practicable. The assigned divisions were already boarding ships and the invasion was set for August 15. Five days before the first troops hit the beaches in Provence, Churchill wrote the British Chiefs of Staff. “We are not prepared in any circumstances to have it [Italy] regarded as a lesser operation than Dragoon or that Dragoon should have priority over its essential needs.”13

  This was mere bluster. The shortage of manpower and resources remaining in Italy necessitated that future operations be limited in scope. Alexander’s task in Italy was to push the Germans back to a line running from Venice through Padua, Verona, and Brescia. Only when this line was reached would Alexander be given further instructions.14

  To reach this line, however, Alexander must crack the Gothic Line.

  HAVING LOST the diplomatic skirmish with his American allies, Alexander turned his attention to winning the forthcoming offensive against the Germans. His instinct was to go for the jugular. The most strategically important city immediately to the north of the Apennines was Bologna. Florence and Bologna were separated by some of the highest Apennine peaks, but running through these was Highway 65. This narrow road provided the shortest route by which the Allies could reach Bologna. Alexander’s remaining forces had been concentrated around Florence with this knowledge in mind. If he struck quickly, Alexander believed the Germans would be denied the time they sought to strengthen the Gothic Line. A bold dash should enable his armies to break through with barely a pause.

  His plan called for both Fifth Army and Eighth Army to strike simultaneously, as they had in the Liri Valley. Eighth Army had two rested corps—I Canadian Corps and V Corps. Together they fielded five divisions. He also had a newly arrived reinforcement division, the 1st British Armoured Division, to back up V Corps’s infantry divisions. By July 17, an operational appreciation had been drafted that called for these two corps to attack with two divisions forward. Meanwhile, II Polish Corps would continue its slow slog up the Adriatic coast and a detailed deception plan would be carried out there to mislead the Germans into thinking the offensive was coming on the Allied extreme right flank rather than out of the centre.

  The U.S. Fifth Army, reduced to four infantry divisions and one armoured division all much battered in recent fighting, currently stood in front of the massive Monte Pisano. Alexander had learned the costs of attacking such features head-on at Monte Cassino in the Liri Valley. He therefore suggested Clark assume a defensive posture, but concentrate his forces so that, at Alexander’s signal, they could drive east of Empoli and fan outward to capture both Lucca and Pistoia. Clark agreed and Alexander set the offensive’s start date for between August 5 and 10.15

  Alexander wanted not only to break out into the Po Valley, he wanted to trap the Tenth and Fourteenth armies south of the Po River and destroy them before they could escape to the other side. On July 12, Mallory Major—an air operation intended to destroy all key bridges crossing the Po and subsidiary rivers—was launched. In three days, nineteen bridges were rendered unusable. Fears that the Germans might repair them before the Allies reached the Po prompted more raids through to July 27, after which the bridges were reported to be irreparable without major work.

  On August 4, with the clock ticking down to the launch date, Eighth Army commander General Sir Oliver Leese asked Alexander for a hasty meeting. Alexander and his Chief of Staff, General Sir John Harding, flew from Rome to meet Leese at Orvieto airfield. It was scorching hot, so the three generals hunkered in the shade cast by the wing of a Dakota transport. The day before, Leese had visited the headquarters of Lieutenant General Sir Sidney Kirkman, commander of XIII Corps, at Casciano near Florence. Kirkman, Leese reported to Alexander, believed the offensive could not succeed because the fighting would occur in narrow mountain valleys and passes.16 Having learned its trade in North Africa, Eighth Army had hardly any experience in mountain fighting. There was little ground in these confined valleys for massing tanks and thousands of artillery pieces. Kirkman had urged Leese to persuade Alexander to switch Eighth Army’s offensive to the Adriatic coast, where he believed the ground open enough for fighting the set-piece offensive at which Eighth Army was adeptly skilled.17

  Leese said he agreed with Kirkman, hence this emergency meeting.18 On the Adriatic coast, Leese summarized, “Eighth Army would have fewer mountains to contend with, the chance of employing its artillery in controlled and concentrated ‘set-piece’ attacks and the hope of flat country ahead for its desert-trained armour; above all it would be fighting its own battle without the distractions of day to day consideration of the progress of another Army moving on the same objective.”19 Pressed by Harding, Leese agreed that his concerns were largely psychological in nature. But he argued that the topographical problems also compellingly weighted the issue in favour of redirecting the offensive towards the Adriatic front.

  Harding flatly disagreed. Having been the chief architect behind Alexander’s original plan, he stuck by it; but the final decision rested with Alexander. Whatever he decided, Harding said he would support. Equally reluctant to put his commander’s back to the wall, Leese tempered his remarks by assuring Alexander that should he decide the offensive must be directed at the centre Eighth Army would make sure it succeeded.

  Fifty-three-year-old Sir Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander was no autocrat who would impose his will on subordinates. If his own arguments were not sufficiently persuasive to win a subordinate over to his plan, Alexander generally acceded to the subordinate’s alternative proposal. He had demonstrated this tendency in May 1944 when Clark openly defied Alexander’s orders by breaking away from his assigned line of advance in order to ensure that American troops were first into Rome. A furious Alexander had nonetheless avoided confronting Clark or insisting that the general follow orders. This resulted in large numbers of the Fourteenth and Tenth armies escaping the very encirclement that had been the primary raison d’être behind the entire Liri Valley offensive. Clark claimed Rome as his prize even as he rendered the victory a hollow one.

  Now, after p
atiently hearing Leese out and weighing Harding’s objections, Alexander, “realizing how impolitic it would be to persuade an Army Commander to fight a battle against his inclination and judgement,” agreed to the Adriatic switch.20 Right there, Alexander recast his plan. Instead of Eighth Army driving through the mountains in Italy’s centre, it would carry out a swift, secret movement to the Adriatic. Once there, the army would roll up the German left flank at a point where the enemy enjoyed the poorest advantage of terrain along his entire front. Once this attack was underway, the U.S. Fifth Army would launch a subsidiary attack from the Florence area and advance on Bologna.21 Leese said the plan—largely what he had proposed—suited him completely. Harding reluctantly nodded approval.

  Leese was delighted. Eighth Army would now fight where he preferred and he also would not have to fight alongside Clark, whom he despised. Clark believed Leese and the Eighth Army were ineffectual and that the British had left the Americans to suffer the heaviest casualties throughout the course of the Italian campaign. No evidence to the contrary was going to sway his opinion.

  Clark took every opportunity to publicly snub Leese. When the Americans occupied Rome, he issued orders putting the city off limits to Eighth Army personnel. Even the British divisions fighting alongside the Americans as part of Fifth Army were denied access except for one 1st British Infantry Division battalion assigned to garrison duties for form’s sake.22 In the end, Clark’s order did not hold and the Americans opened the city to limited numbers of Eighth Army personnel carrying a suitable pass. But Rome remained a largely American furlough base.

  On hearing that Alexander had approved Leese’s plan, Kirkman wrote: “Oliver Leese must have been delighted to be well separated from 5th Army and to get away from the inevitable wrangles and the unpleasant spirit of competition between the two armies, which was always encouraged by Mark Clark.”23

  LEESE DID NOT GET everything he wanted, however. When Alexander met Clark on August 10, the American general raised the tactical point that, while an Eighth Army division would be covering his right flank, its army commander would be on the other side of the country directing a major offensive. Therefore, all of XIII Corps, to be left in the centre to form a line bridging the distance between Fifth Army and the Eighth Army’s main body on the Adriatic, should come under his command. This would boost Fifth Army’s strength by four divisions—also bringing some of the most experienced Eighth Army divisions under Clark’s control. Although he had little but contempt for the Eighth Army, Clark would be able to use these divisions to cover his flanks. He could then concentrate his American divisions to spearhead any offensive. As with Leese, Alexander deferred to Clark’s arguments and agreed to put XIII Corps under Clark’s command.24

  By giving Clark Kirkman’s corps, Alexander denied Leese the ability to siphon off any of those divisions—two being veteran armoured divisions—to form a reserve for his Adriatic offensive. Alexander’s entire force was now almost evenly distributed between Fifth Army and Eighth Army. There could be no concentration of force against a specific point of the Gothic Line.

  Yet Fifth Army was assigned no significant role in the initial offensive. Instead, Alexander intended to use it later to deliver the second punch in his preferred offensive style. He called this a “two-handed punch” where two points, equally vital to the Germans, were attacked, forcing the enemy to split its reserves. Initially, Clark’s VI Corps would carry out highly visible manoeuvres in the direction of Lucca to mislead the Germans into thinking an offensive there was imminent, while at the same time covertly concentrating II Corps and XIII British Corps in front of Florence for a follow-on drive up Highway 65 to Bologna. This advance would only proceed once the Germans were forced to leach divisions from this front in order to reinforce the Adriatic sector in an attempt to stem Leese’s offensive.25

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  With the Greatest Energy

  IF I ONLY KNEW where the Canadians are!” Generalmajor Friedrich Wentzell, Tenth Army Chief of Staff, lamented to Army Group Chief of Staff Generalleutnant Hans Röttiger in early July.1 For nearly two months, the Germans had unsuccessfully sought the whereabouts of I Canadian Corps, but some 85,000 men had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Tenth Army intelligence staff feared the Canadians were concentrating, gathering to spearhead the next Allied offensive. I Canadian Corps’s performance in the Liri Valley had fixed in the German mind the belief that the Canadians were Eighth Army’s crack shock troops and would surely lead any major attack. “One of these days,” LXXVI Panzer Corps Chief of Staff Oberst Henning Warner Runkel confided to Wentzell, “the Canadian Corps is going to attack and then our centre is going to explode.”2

  One clue to the Canadians’ location seemed to emerge in July when II Polish Corps paused unexpectedly outside Ancona to regroup. Tenth Army Commander Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff telephoned Commander-in-Chief Southwest General-feldmarschall Albert Kesselring. Casting himself in Alexander’s shoes, von Vietinghoff postulated: “This may mean several things. The Poles are getting nowhere; ‘we might take them out and put in the Canadians.’ Or he may also say to himself, ‘It seems to go well in the centre. I will take the Canadians there and push ahead.’”

  “Which centre do you mean?” Kesselring asked.

  “The Tiber Valley.”3 Kesselring and von Vietinghoff were just speculating. Neither had the slightest idea where I Canadian Corps was or where the inevitable Allied hammer blow would fall.

  Born into a middle-class family of Bavarian farmers and beer brewers, the fifty-eight-year-old Kesselring had entered the German army in 1904 shortly after his eighteenth birthday. “I wanted to be a soldier,” he said later. “I was set on it, and, looking back, I can say that I was always a soldier heart and soul.”4 After two years of World War I service on the Western Front, Kesselring had been appointed to the General Staff. In the 1930s, during Adolf Hitler’s military rebuilding, he transferred to the Luftwaffe and, under the patronage of Reich-marschall Herman Göring, became Chief of Air Staff. In 1940, he was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall and had commanded units in the Battle of Britain and the Siege of Malta before assuming responsibility for Germany’s defence of Italy. Even the Allies conceded that Kesselring was a brilliant defensive strategist. Although forced to surrender one defensive line after another, Kesselring had always denied the Allies the chance to destroy his two armies. And every battle had exacted a bloody toll in Allied casualties.

  Kesselring’s cheerful nature, unfailing optimism, and iron willpower enabled him to rebound from each defeat with amazing alacrity. These personality traits also ensured that he was able to draw the best out of subordinate commanders. Kesselring had proven himself the perfect German commander for the Italian theatre, a man who could almost without fail use his limited resources and manpower to best effect.

  He did, however, have one flaw—a tendency to ignore or discount unpleasant realities. In May, for example, he had refused repeatedly to accept that Monte Cassino and the Hitler Line must soon be lost. He then decided that the Melfa River could be turned into a new defensive line that would hold until winter mud and rain ground Allied operations to a standstill. This despite the fact that it was spring and the Allies had before them many months of good campaigning weather. Such optimism in the face of reality led Kesselring to believe his army always on the verge of decisively stalemating the Allies.5

  Kesselring was also fettered in his handling of the Italian theatre by Hitler’s increasingly deluded operational meddling. When Rome fell, Kesselring had planned a speedy and orderly withdrawal to the Gothic Line. His decision was supported by Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command, acronymed OKW) Operations Staff Officer, General der Artillerie Walter Warlimont. The OKW staff officer had flown from Berlin to tour the Italian front on June 7. Everything Warlimont saw over the next few days convinced him that retreating into the defensive works of a significantly strengthened Gothic Line was essential.

  Before flying back to
Berlin on June 10, Warlimont had telephoned Operations Chief Generaloberst Alfred Jodl and offered his conclusion. “If… despite the greatest efforts the enemy cannot be brought to a halt, it will be necessary to fall back to the Gothic position in three weeks.”6

  Jodl cautioned him: “I can only advise you most emphatically to be most careful when you get back here and make your report.”7Every OKW officer understood the subtext of this kind of warning. Hitler was obviously in no mood to hear of surrendering ground without a fight. Warlimont argued his case anyway. Hitler refused to even glance at the officer’s supporting maps, charts, and organizational tables. Adequately fortifying the Gothic Line would take at least seven months, he declared. Kesselring must hold south of the Apennines until then.

  On June 11, Hitler sent an order to Kesselring that stated: “Delaying resistance must not be continued till the Apennines are reached. After reorganization of the formations the Army Group will resume defence operations as far south of the Apennines as possible.”8 German tactical doctrine made a precise distinction between delaying resistance and defence. The former involved gradually yielding ground, the latter holding out to the last man and bullet.

  A dismayed Kesselring complained to Jodl that defending unprepared positions south of the Gothic Line raised the spectre of entire divisions being encircled and destroyed. An even greater danger was that his divisions would become so reduced in strength that they would be incapable of adequately garrisoning the line when it was occupied. Another risk was that the Allies might reach the line simultaneously with the retreating Germans and bounce it before a defence could be organized.