The Gothic Line Page 8
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Under the Boot Heel
GERMAN EFFORTS to fortify the Gothic Line were greatly hindered by an increasingly hostile populace. Many Italians living inside German-occupied Italy refused to recognize the legitimacy of Benito Mussolini’s puppet government. Mussolini and his cabinet ruled from the Fascist capital city of Salò on Lake Garda—near Verona—but they functioned entirely at the behest of their German overseers.
With every passing day, as the Allies advanced northward, growing numbers of guerillas were launching hit-and-run ambushes against German installations and supply routes. The partisans became so well organized and numerous that in May 1944 General Harold Alexander’s headquarters staff reported: “There are three Allied armies in Italy. The Eighth and Fifth in front of the enemy need no introduction but the Partisans fighting in the enemy rear have been the subject of… much tainted enemy propaganda.”1 Partisan strength was estimated at about 100,000. The report claimed that, except for the main roads and railways, the partisans effectively controlled all mountain areas from Genoa to the Po River and from Bologna to the Gothic Line.
Even these transportation corridors were far from safe. “The toll of bridges blown, locomotives derailed, odd Germans eliminated, small groups of transport destroyed or captured, small garrisons liquidated, factories demolished, mounts week by week. The German nerves are so strained, their unenviable administrative situation taxed so much further, that large bodies of German and Italian Republic troops are constantly tied down in an effort to curtail Partisan activity. Occasionally pitched battles have been fought, with losses to the enemy comparable with those they might suffer in a full-scale attack.”2 Commander-in-Chief Southwest Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s decision to impress thousands of civilians into labour battalions to work on the Gothic Line construction and to repair transportation links damaged by partisan activity and Allied aerial bombardment prompted hundreds more Italians to join the resistance.
Nothing the Germans did could bring the partisans to heel. After each raid, the guerillas melted back into the mountains beyond the reach of the manpower-short German forces. Kesselring estimated that between June and August 1944, the partisans inflicted German losses of “5,000 killed and 7,000–8,000 killed or kidnapped, to which should be added a maximum total of the same number wounded. . . . The proportion of casualties on the German side alone greatly exceeded the total partisan losses.”3
The Germans responded savagely. Hostages were shot or hanged in reprisal for every German soldier killed. Some villages were burned to the ground. Yet the partisan numbers and the boldness of their strikes merely increased. Reprisals and counter-reprisals spawned a circular pattern of brutality that touched almost everyone.
Situated atop a high ridge, Coriano lay about ten miles south of Rimini. Most of its one thousand citizens were poor farmers, eking a living out of nearby plots of land. The village’s houses clustered around a small church square. With his parents and two brothers, sixteen-year-old Oviglio Monti lived in one home. A short walk away was a Catholic school, where his language studies consisted of both French and German. His father, Paulo, and mother, Eda, were not political and had adopted a live-and-let-live attitude towards the Italian Fascists and German occupation forces. It was a common attitude in Coriano, where the people were poor and had to work hard simply to survive. Few ever possessed cash. Instead, they traded produce and livestock for other consumables. A skilled craftsman who could earn money through construction work in Rimini, Paulo Monti was more fortunate.
Remaining neutral in the middle of a land being fortified proved increasingly difficult in the summer of 1944. When the Germans tried to draft some of the men and older youths for work parties, most fled to the hills. Then the oldest son of a family living near the Montis joined the partisans and was quickly identified as participating in a raiding party that killed a German soldier. In reprisal, the Germans seized the man’s younger brother, Ciavatta Aristodemo, and announced that either the older brother surrendered the next day or the boy would be executed. When the accused partisan failed to surrender, the townspeople were forced to gather in the village square. There, Ciavatta Aristodemo was shot by a firing squad.4
IN NEARBY RIMINI, conditions steadily worsened during the summer of 1944. Ever more civilians were being impressed into labour parties, while each day brought Allied bombers overhead to hammer the city’s railway marshalling yards, docks, and highway intersections. For twenty-one-year-old Amedeo Montemaggi, the destruction of his beloved city felt like a personal wound to the heart. The first raid on Rimini had come on November 1, 1943 when about three hundred U.S. 12th Airforce B-25 Mitchell bombers struck. It was All Saint’s Day. The bombers returned the following day, which was All Dead’s Day. Montemaggi thought the date appropriately macabre, for the raid killed many civilians and destroyed several historic buildings.
Originally founded by the Etruscans, Rimini had become a Roman colony in 268 BC. Situated on what was then called the Ariminus River, the Romans knew it as Ariminium. Finding the northern Apennines impassable, any travel by land between Rome and Gaul passed through the city. The great highway Via Aemilia ran from Gaul to Ariminium, where it linked to the Via Flaminia, which followed a pass through the Apennines to Rome. In 48 BC, after leading his troops south of the Rubicon in defiance of a Senate edict, Julius Caesar made his famous address to the soldiers in the city’s main plaza. The Arch of Augustus, at the southern end of the city, was started in 27 BC and completed in 22 AD by Tiberius. The Roman ruler also built Ponte de Tiberio (Tiberius’s Bridge) in 21 AD.
Following the Roman Empire’s collapse, Byzantines, Goths, Lombards, and Franks variously controlled Rimini before it became an independent commune in the twelfth century. In 1334, the Malatesta family was declared the city’s ruling lords. Malatesta lord Sigismondo Pandolfo built an extensive fortification around the city in the fifteenth century. He also murdered his first two wives to clear the way for his marriage to Isotta degli Atti. When Isotta died shortly thereafter, the grief-stricken Sigismondo transformed the city’s thirteenth-century cathedral into a personal chapel dedicated to her memory. The intricate and lavish architecture and interior artwork rendered the renamed Tempio Malatestini one of the most significant creations of the Renaissance. Sigismondo’s rebelliousness against Papal rule resulted in Pope Pius II condemning him to hell in 1461. Eventually forced to submit to the pope, Sigismondo surrendered most of his land beyond Rimini. In 1509, the city became a Papal state.
Rimini’s conversion into a modern city with tourism as its economic mainstay came in the late nineteenth century when business-people expanded outside the decaying fortress walls to erect seaside resorts on the Riviera del Sole of the Adriatic, Europe’s longest continuous beach. By 1920, a series of satellite towns lined the coast for a ten-mile stretch from Torre Pedrera in the north to Miramare to the south. Summer saw the white sand densely crowded with rows of beach umbrellas backed by shoulder-to-shoulder hotels.
His father had taught Montemaggi a passion for history. A railroad engineer who also edited the local newspaper, Cronaca di Rimini, Montemaggi’s father instilled in his son a strong anti-fascist sentiment, a love of freedom, of newspapers, of the racehorse Muscletone, and the toreador Manolete. When his father died of cancer on January 1, 1941, Montemaggi, then only eighteen, took over the newspaper editorship and simultaneously began studying journalism at the university. Cronaca di Rimini focussed on local stories. Montemaggi’s correspondents, who were mostly unpaid, submitted reports on the happenings of such nearby localities as Riccione, Cattolica, Coriano, and Morciano.
Italy was under the boot heel of Mussolini’s Fascists, so Montemaggi was careful not to print anything obviously political in nature. Any anti-fascist display had to be printed discreetly to avoid denunciation by local party officials. Before becoming a newspaper editor, Montemaggi’s most public anti-fascist act had occurred at age twelve when he was unwillingly declared a member of Rimini�
��s “Guard of Honour” by the city’s Fascist authorities. Young Guards of Honour were supposed to stand guard beside various Rimini memorials to demonstrate the nation’s martial vigour. Montemaggi had simply failed to report for duty, an act that resulted in no formal repercussions from the authorities.
In the summer of 1943, however, Montemaggi met the forty-nine-year-old renowned anti-Hegelian Marxist philosopher Galvano della Volpe and helped him type the first draft of Communism and Freedom. Montemaggi was now flirting dangerously close to subversion. With Italy’s surrender in September and Mussolini’s temporary imprisonment, Montemaggi wrote a critical article focussing on the former Il Duce’s many romantic interludes with mistresses in Riccione and, in particular, with his mistress Claretta Petacci at the Rimini Grand Hotel. After the Germans freed Mussolini and installed him as head of the Salò Government, Giorgio Pini, Mussolini’s biographer and now a government minister, notified Montemaggi that he was banned from continuing as a newspaper editor. Montemaggi was grateful that Pini had not denounced him as a Communist, for that would have resulted in his arrest and probable deportation to a German concentration camp or forced labour factory.
The increasing danger from Allied bombing raids and his shaky political status convinced Montemaggi that he should flee to the country, but before he could act a draft notice arrived, ordering him to report for service in the Fascist army Mussolini was forming to fight the partisans and Allies. Montemaggi had no intention of reporting. Instead, along with his mother and younger brother, he set off on foot the next day and walked fifteen miles across country to a village called Pecchiano, just a little cluster of houses a few miles outside the somewhat larger village of Sogliano. The villagers were poorly educated peasants, who took no interest in events beyond their farms and neighbours. Montemaggi’s family rented a small house.
Montemaggi owned a small crystal radio set that was about the size of a box camera. By running an aerial wire across the roof from one side of the house to the other, he was able to tune in to BBC Radio for news. Clad as a peasant, he then roamed from farm to farm and to other nearby villages, reporting the news he had heard on the radio and spreading other anti-fascist propaganda. He won their trust by being able to talk with them in the local dialect.
A few weeks after his arrival in Pecchiano, Montemaggi’s anti-fascist activity was made riskier when a German supply transport unit occupied the little village and a sergeant major moved into the house with Montemaggi’s family. The German told Montemaggi that his wife and two children had been killed during a bombing raid on Bremen. He also advised Montemaggi that if partisans attacked his unit it would be nothing personal, but the Germans would shoot Montemaggi and his brother.5
The sergeant major’s warning echoed standard German practice. On June 20, 1944, Kesselring had issued an order stating: “Whenever there is evidence of considerable numbers of partisan groups a proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the event of an act of violence these men will be shot. The population must be informed of this. Should troops be fired at from any village, the village will be burned down. Perpetrators or ringleaders will be hanged in public.”6
Further German orders drafted on August 9 added that local “Prefects, Party Secretaries, and other Fascist Headquarters are instructed to prepare lists of all Communists in the area, so that these elements are always at their disposal. Hostages may be taken from the circles which produce these criminals, so that, should shooting be necessary, a blow is dealt at others of the same ideology.”7 When acts of violence were committed by partisans, “an appropriate number of hostages will be hanged. In such cases the whole population will be assembled to witness the execution. After the bodies have been left hanging for 12 hours, the public will be ordered to bury them without ceremony and without the assistance of any priest.”8
IN CORIANO, Oviglio Monti spent the first weeks of August engaged in a dangerous game of deception with the Germans, who, learning that he spoke German, had ordered him to interpret for requisitioning parties that were rounding up farm oxen, mules, and horses to use for transport. Despite its reputation for carrying out lightning-fast blitzkrieg invasions, the German army had always been heavily dependent on animal-drawn wagons to move supplies and munitions beyond the reach of railway lines. A typical infantry division until 1943 fielded a total of 1,133 horse-drawn vehicles as opposed to 942 motor vehicles. While such a division consisted of 17,000 men, it also numbered 5,375 horses. The daily food requirement of the men was fifty-four tons (including cooking fuel) while the horses consumed fifty-three tons of hay and oats per day.9 In 1943, the number of motor vehicles assigned to an infantry division was slashed and the number of horse-drawn vehicles increased. Finding enough stock to meet demand, however, became a critical challenge for the Germans in Italy and civilian stock became highly prized. Italian farms little used horses or mules. The ox was the draft animal of choice.
Monti was sick with anxiety the first morning when three Germans collected him from his home. He knew that for the farmers to lose their precious oxen and mules would inflict terrible hardship, for they would then have to plow their fields entirely by hand—an almost impossible task. As the soldiers stomped into each farmyard, the desperate farmers turned to the sixteen-year-old for help.
“Tell them these animals are no good for transportation, Oviglio,” they urged him. “Tell them they are sick, old, diseased. Anything.”
Monti duly concocted one dire story after another. As it turned out, the German soldiers with him were all city raised, so accepted this plague of pitiful farm stock at face value. At day’s end, they all trudged back to Coriano empty-handed and reported that no suitable stock was to be found on any of the farms.
Their officer turned a skeptical eye on Monti. “Tomorrow, Monti,” he said, “you come with me and we’ll keep the oxen and horses.”
Monti knew there would be no fooling this steely eyed officer whose gaze had seemed to pierce right into his soul and recognize the deceit there. He also could not rid his mind of the image of his friend being executed in Coriano’s square. Monti wanted nothing to do with the Germans. “No more Germans,” he said to his parents. “I’ll speak no more German for them. This is no good for Italy. It’s no good for our people. I have to go to San Marino.”10
That night, Monti walked west through the fields to San Marino. Situated on the slopes of Monte Titano, ten miles inland from Rimini, San Marino was Europe’s third-smallest independent state. Only 23.5 square miles in size, it was also the world’s smallest republic. Settled originally by the Dalmatian stonecutter Saint Marinus and a group of Christians escaping persecution by the Roman emperor Diocletian in 301 AD, the huge triple-summited limestone mass of Monte Titano provided a perfect refuge. A relic of the Italian self-governing states, San Marino’s independent status had been repeatedly ratified down through the ages. Surprisingly, when the Germans occupied Italy, they acknowledged San Marino’s independence and left it unmolested. In recent months, it had become a refuge for civilians fleeing the bombing of Rimini and the German impress gangs. It was also a base for partisan operations. The small nation was linked to the outside world by road and also by a railroad that ascended through a series of tunnels to the capital city of San Marino.
When Monti reached the tunnels, he found more than 200,000 civilians from the Rimini area already sheltered there. They slept on blankets shoulder to shoulder and he could see nowhere for another body to lie. So he slept outside in the company of hundreds of other boys who had also fled their homes. He discovered various friends from Coriano. Two days later, his parents and younger brothers arrived, carrying with them sacks of food. The family pitched a rough camp on the ground outside the tunnels. Monti’s father said he believed they would have enough provisions to wait out the German occupation of their village. It would not, he thought, be long.
Monti agreed. For from their lofty perch on the heights of Monte Titano the family heard the rumbling thunder of
the Allied cannon to the south and could sometimes see the rise of dust clouds churned up by exploding shells. Allied planes droned and circled overhead and then suddenly swooped down on unseen targets like hawks. At night, the southern skyline glowed red and orange with the flashes of the artillery and the fires their shells caused. The Allies were coming. Monti thought that soon these days of trouble would pass his family by.11
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A Tremendous Nut To Crack
EIGHTH ARMY faced a daunting task just to move two corps to the Adriatic front for the planned offensive. The day after General Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander, Mediterranean formally agreed to move the main thrust from Florence to the Adriatic, General Oliver Leese issued a warning order to lieutenant generals Tommy Burns and Charles Keightley. All divisions of I Canadian Corps and V British Corps were to immediately concentrate in the Foligno area, southeast of Perugia. From here, a major highway crossed the Apennines to intersect coastal Highway 16 north of Ancona.
On August 9, Leese, Burns, Keightley, and the deputy commander of II Polish Corps huddled at the Canadian corps’s headquarters to hammer out an operational plan. Leese wanted a three-corps attack in line that would entail II Polish Corps pressing up the coast, V Corps through the low land in the centre, and I Canadian Corps marching through the rugged foothill country. The Canadians were to “break the Gothic Line, secure the dominating ground on the left of the sector and protect the left flank of the breakthrough.”1At its disposal, V Corps had four divisions of infantry, the recently assigned 1st British Armoured Division, and an armoured brigade. Leese sensibly enough intended this corps to serve as the breakout force. Neither the Canadians with two divisions nor the Poles with three battle-worn divisions compared. Leese wanted V Corps positioned to punch a gaping hole in the German defensive line and then pursue the demoralized and routed German defenders deep into the Po Valley. Although Keightley endorsed Leese’s plan and Burns offered no objections, the Polish deputy commander cautioned that “progress along the coast road axis was generally slower than inland” because the Germans conducted extensive demolitions on the highway while tending to leave the interior roads less sabotaged.2Thinking that the Poles, having clawed a path up the Adriatic coastline for almost three months, should know their business, Leese immediately swapped the Canadian and British positions in the line.