12

 

Smiting the Axis's Soft UnderbellY

 

 

Although the Allies did not control the North African coast until mid-May 1943, the decision about where to strike next had been made back in January when Churchill, FDR and their staffs had met at Casablanca. The decrypts of Allied codebreakers had contributed strongly to the decision. Their decrypts had verified that a cross-Channel landing in France that summer, so strongly favored by General Marshall, would face too many German divisions. Nazi power must be reduced before an invasion became feasible. The Allies' choice of a target was what Churchill liked to call "the soft underbelly of the Axis": they would invade Sicily, the triangular island off the toe of Italy's boot. The new front would tie up and decimate German troops who would otherwise be available to fight the Russians or man the defenses on the French coast. Sicily's capture could provide other benefits as well: helping to clear the Mediterranean for Allied shipping, providing a base for invading the mainland "and persuading the Italians to drop out of the war.

Axis commanders thought an attack on Sicily the most likely new venture for the Allies, but without codebreakers' coups to back up their theories, they could not be sure: they could only guess.

It was a situation ripe for deception, for convincing the Axis the blow would fall anywhere but Sicily. Among Bletchley Park decrypts was a Luftwaffe Enigma message that disclosed what the Germans considered to be the most threatened areas. While Sicily was first, Crete, Corsica and Sardinia were also viewed as highly possible invasion sites. As Ewen Montagu's book The Man Who Never Was told, the decision was made to play to this Axis confusion.

The planning committee gave their scheme the grim code name of Operation Mincemeat. The idea was to float ashore on the coast of Spain the body of a supposed military courier drowned when his plane had crashed in the Mediterranean. He would be carrying a briefcase full of official-looking papers contrived to make the Axis think of targets other than Sicily.

Fantastic fakers, the Brits anticipated every possible question, covered every finicky detail. Where, for instance, should the body come ashore? Answer: the town of Huelva, where there was known to be a very active German agent in cahoots with the supposedly neutral local Spaniards. What could the Spanish authorities be expected to do? They would turn the body over to the British vice-consul at Huelva for burial, but only after the contents of his briefcase had been copied and passed on to the agent. When would be the best time to pull off this stunt? In April, when navy hydro-graphs confirmed that the winds would be right to push the body ashore at Huelva.

The plotters went to elaborate lengths to make the body itself fit the scheme. It would have to be the corpse of a youngish man who had died of pneumonia, because then he would have fluid in his lungs that would convince a coroner he had died by drowning.

He also should have been taking special precautions against losing his briefcase. Since it was common practice for couriers to chain to themselves the dispatch boxes carrying important papers, the pseudo-officer would have his case chained to his raincoat as though he had been trying to make himself as comfortable as possible on the long flight from London to Tunisia,

It was necessary to give Captain (Acting Major) William Martin a persona. In his pockets would be found a small wealth of documentation: his Marine identification card, a letter from his bank complaining of an overdraft of his account, letters from his fiancée—Pam—and a photo of her, a letter from his father warning that if he did marry Pam he should be sure to make a will, and ticket stubs from a London show he'd seen with Pam.

The ruse would be more convincing if Major Martin were going to North Africa for reasons beyond merely acting as a courier. A fabricated letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations, to Admiral Andrew Cunningham, the Mediterranean commander in chief, assured that the major was an expert in landing craft and therefore quite able to handle the problem that had come up.

As for the most important letter in the briefcase, the committee cooked up an "old boy" communication from "Archie" to "Alex," Archie being Sir Archibald Nye, vice chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Alex being General Sir Harold Alexander, at the Eighteenth Army Group headquarters in Tunisia. The main thrust of the letter was to sympathize with Alex about the supply problems he was facing, but to inform him that just now he couldn't be given everything he'd asked for. An almost throwaway aside mentioned that the Allied assault would come in the east, falling on Greece. The letter also reported that the idea of using a feint against Sicily as a cover for the Grecian landings had been rejected in favor of using it as the cover for another operation. That alternative went unmentioned—except that a jocular postscript looked forward to the time when these two old friends might sit down over a lunch of sardines.

The committee got permission to use the body of a thirty-four-year-old man who had died of pneumonia. They packed it in dry ice for the submarine trip to the waters off Huelva, dressed it in the proper uniform, chained on the briefcase and had the sub push it off to drift to shore.

Everything went according to plan. A Spanish doctor examined the body and certified that death was due to asphyxiation by seawater. The fictitious Major Martin was given a full military funeral at the cemetery in Huelva. As Montagu noted in his book Beyond Top Secret Ultra, written later when he could acknowledge the help of the codebreakers, decrypts showed that the documents had indeed fallen into German hands and that while Axis leaders still believed Sicily was the most likely invasion site, they now felt sure the Allies might try to surprise them by capturing Sardinia first and then come down onto Sicily. Axis commanders also felt compelled to plan against landings in Greece.

Their response was to send troops to both Sardinia and Corsica and to strengthen the islands' defense facilities—at the expense of Sicily. In Sicily they switched forces from the southern beaches to those in the west and the north, better for fending off an approach from Sardinia. As for Hitler, he was so sure the initial landings would be made on Greece that he dispatched Rommel to organize Grecian defenses and shifted a panzer army there as well as some Sicily-based motor torpedo boats. The Germans also laid minefields off the Greek coast. Even after the assault on Sicily had begun, Hitler thought it only a feint covering the real objective, Sardinia.

In the foreword to Montagu's first book, Lord Ismay wrote that Operation Mincemeat "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." It "spreadeagled the German defensive effort right across Europe, even to the extent of sending German vessels away from Sicily itself."

 

 

Sicily: Patton vs. Montgomery vs. the Axis

 

Partly because of the deception, the Allied landings on the southeast corner of Sicily on July 10, 1943, met with little opposition. They confirmed, however, that a cross-Channel invasion of France that summer would have been premature. The Allies' mastery of amphibious operations was still too weak. The supply of landing craft available was inadequate to meet the needs of so large an undertaking. Command decisions were too rigid: the plan to send American and English glider forces in ahead of the landings was carried out even though high winds were prevailing over that comer of Sicily. The result was that the parachutists were too widely scattered to be effective, and many of the gliders, released against the strong head winds, never reached their landing sites, crashing instead into the sea. Communications were fouled up: navy antiaircraft gunners were not informed that approaching planes were C-47s carrying a reinforcement of paratroops; 22 of the planes were destroyed and 37 badly damaged, with 246 paratroops lost to "friendly fire."

But for the codebreakers the results might have been worse. Harry Hinsley has reported, for example, that the planners of the invasion had assumed that three hundred ships might be lost to air attack off the beaches. But decrypts of Enigma messages revealed that the bomber units based in Sicily were being withdrawn to the mainland. The vastly superior Allied air cover for the landings reduced the losses to just twelve ships.

Once landed in Sicily, Allied commanders benefited from a copious flow of signals intelligence. While the codebreakers were unable to read the Italian high-grade navy and air force codes, they more than made up for this blind spot by their mastery of the German air force Enigma. In addition, they were solving the key used by the Luftwaffe's ground organization in Italy, and that employed in army-air liaison traffic. A new high-level Fish-type German army key for communications between, the high command in Berlin and the forces in Italy was soon solved as well.

It was apparent to all the Allied leaders that once the landings were made, the goal was to reach the northeast-comer city of Messina, the closest point to the Italian mainland. It was a maneuver that could, and should, have entrapped Axis troops by the thousands. The push toward Messina, however, degenerated into a petty, publicity-seeking, never-mind-the-casualties race between George Patton and Bernard Montgomery. Under Eisenhower, Britain's Harold Alexander was supposed to be in overall charge of the operation. Both Montgomery and Patton launched major actions without consulting him. Monty, stymied by fierce German resistance in his drive along the eastern seaboard, on his own ordered a portion of his Eighth Army to swing in a westward arc directly across the front of the northward mid-island push by Bradley's II Corps. Monty's idea was that Patton and Bradley should be ordered merely to protect his left flank. Patton, detesting his British colleague, raging against so inferior a role, made his own decision: to spur his Seventh Army in a lightning strike to take the city of Palermo. Although it was on the far western side of the island and its capture no more than a needless diversion, Palermo did win Patton headlines.

He then swung eastward along the northern coast. By a combination of frontal attacks and semisuccessful amphibious end runs around the stubborn Axis defenders, Patton's and Bradley's troops closed in on Messina. Bradley's memoir has divulged how civil dignitaries attempted, on the morning of August 17, to surrender to Lucian Truscott, one of Patton's generals. The general declined. Patton had issued orders that all of that should be left to him. One result, Bradley wrote, "was we had to hold Truscott's men in the hills and watch helplessly as the last of the Germans fled the city. I was so angry at Patton's megalomania that I was half tempted to enter the city myself and greet him on a street corner when he arrived."

Patton arranged a motor cavalcade and a surrender ceremony an hour before the first of Monty's troops entered the city. The victory trappings were tarnished by a major failure of the campaign. The Allies allowed the cornered Axis troops, most particularly the Germans, to escape across the Strait of Messina to Italy virtually unpunished. The failure came about even though the codebreakers warned as early as August 6 that the withdrawals were under way. Headquarters staffs simply seemed unable to accept what the decrypts were telling them. As late as August 10 an HQ summary found "no adequate indication that the enemy intends an immediate evacuation of the Messina bridgehead." Only on August 13 was the Tactical Air Force told that "evacuation is held to have begun," when actually it was nearing completion. Thousands of Axis troops and their armor awaited the Allies on the far shore.

The conquest of Sicily, taking thirty-eight days, was a needlessly costly campaign. Allied casualties ran to 22,811—5,532 killed, 14,410 wounded and 2,869 missing. However, the invasion did succeed in its aims, particularly the goal of driving Italy out of the war and out of the Axis. Allied fliers helped by heavily bombing the railroad marshaling yards in Rome, confirming the belief of many Italians that defeat was inevitable. Magic decrypts of reports from Japan's ambassador to Rome supplied the Allies a day-by-day accounting of Italy's desire for a separate peace, information that told Allied leaders just when to give the Italians ten days to accept an unconditional surrender. On July 25, King Victor Emmanuel III summoned Mussolini to his palace, told him he was dismissed, had him arrested, and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio to succeed him as head of the Italian government. While pretending, for as long as possible, to remain on Hitler's side, the Italians secretly signed terms of unconditional surrender set by the Allies.

Any elation Allied leaders felt, however, was conditioned by decrypts verifying that Hitler was determined to fight on in Italy and was, in fact, rushing in reinforcements both from the Eastern Front and the Western Wall.

 

 

Italy: The Costly Climb up the Boot

 

Surviving German generals confessed to war historian Liddell Hart after the war that they had expected the Allies, after prevailing in Sicily, to make their next landings well up to the north on the Italian coast. Hindsight suggests that this move would probably have been the right one. Successful invasions near Rome could have saved the Allies from having to fight their way the whole length of the 750-mile-long peninsula—a campaign that became the longest, most grinding, most frustrating struggle of the war in the West. What stopped Allied leaders from such a daring move was that landings so far from their Sicilian bases would have left the invasion forces without fighter aircraft protection. The Allies settled for planning two more cautious landings—one on the toe of the Italian boot, the other 200 miles up on the boot's ankle, at Salerno, south of Naples.

Several factors accounted for the painfully slow progress made by the Allies. Most important was the terrain. It was ideal both for defense and for rearguard delaying actions; it was deadly for the offense. Down the center of the peninsula are the Apennines, a rugged range that presented to the invaders an endless series of soaring mountains. From the central spine steep ridges project east and west toward the seas, and in between are ravinelike valleys through many of which race swift streams. Following the valleys, tortuous ribbons of roads twist through narrow defiles. The German defenders became experts at roadblocks, ambushes, minefields, booby traps. Their demolition teams grew skillful at blowing up bridges, culverts, viaducts and tunnels. Their surveillance was always from on high, their big guns lying in commanding positions. In such topography tanks were of marginal use; the main task lay with foot-slogging infantry.

A second hindrance was the operation's lack of status. It was always regarded as a secondary show, with the coming invasion of France at center stage. Churchill referred to the Italian campaign as his Third Front, with the Russians first and the cross-Channel attack second. The Allies' main purpose in Italy was not so much to penetrate and conquer the nation itself as to keep German troops occupied south of the Alps and to reduce their numbers. At a key point, seven divisions were pulled out to go to England and prepare for D-Day. Both Eisenhower and Montgomery departed to take up commands for the Normandy invasion. Other divisions were siphoned off for landings on the French Riviera. To make up for these defections, the Allied command pressed into service the resources available to them from around the globe. The Italian battles were fought by what Jesse Jackson would have called a Rainbow Coalition: martial-caste Indians, knife-wielding Algerian goumiers, Moroccans, South Africans, Free French, Free Poles, a contingent of Brazilians, Japanese American nisei, newly formed teams of turnabout Italians, U.S. National Guard divisions and, near the end of the conflict, even a division of black infantrymen that the segregated U.S. Army deigned to send into combat. They were, of course, commanded by white officers. While many of these units distinguished themselves by their bravery, their diversity did cause problems in communications and effective coordination. Also, as John Keegan put it, "Recognition of the human fragility of the instrument under their command afflicted all the Allied generals throughout the battle for Italy and deeply affected their conduct of it."

A third factor protracting the campaign was the excellence of German generalship. Hitler told Baron Oshima he was resolved not merely to hold out in Italy but to drive the Allies back into the sea. He assigned some of his best generals to the fight. Divisions in the south were directed by the very able Albert Kesselring, aided by the astute old Prussian infantry commander, Heinrich von Vietinghoff. To head up his last bastion in the north, Hitler called on Erwin Rommel to disarm the Italian soldiery set loose by the Italian capitulation, recapture thousands of Allied prisoners and organize nearly a million captives to prepare the tough fortifications of the Gothic Line, which cut across the peninsula north of Florence.

Against these strong professionals was a mixed bag of Allied commanders. Under Eisenhower as overall commander and Alexander in charge of the Italian campaign, Montgomery was again to lead his Eighth Army. The Americans had a new leader. Patton was out of it because, in two separate incidents at hospitals in Sicily, he had slapped the faces of GIs he'd thought of as malingerers, arousing an outrage that forced Ike to put him temporarily in officerial limbo.

The new face was that of Mark Clark, commanding the Fifth Army. Eric Sevareid, a radio reporter covering the campaign, included in his memoir Not So Wild a Dream an insightful assessment of Clark. He had met both Clark and Eisenhower when they had just been made general officers. "I was to see one of them," he wrote, "become the victim of the natural pressures of his position and fame, while the other became their master." Sevareid noted how the jeep carrying Clark was always closely followed by another bearing his photographer, who knew he must not fail to shoot the general's preferred left profile.

Vanity of this sort might be accepted if, as in the case of Patton or MacArthur, it was accompanied by command brilliance. With Clark the evidence suggests otherwise. Worse, his cupidity for acclaim was to lead, late in the campaign, to one of the war's more deplorable decisions.

The Allied plan called for each of Montgomery's and Clark's armies to spread out from its beachhead, jointly cover the two hundred miles separating the forces and, it was hoped, entrap hordes of retreating Germans. It was a plan that called for bold action. But the boldness was all on the German side.

Montgomery had once again shown his cautious nature even before the Eighth's landing on the toe of Italy. He had delayed the invasion until British battleships, American bombers and six hundred field guns had bombarded the coast at Messina for three days—almost enough, it was said, to blow the toe off the boot. When his army did land, they found nothing but some dazed Italians who hurried forward to help unload the assault boats.

He was supposed to launch his attack well before Clark's so that he would be in a position to help Clark if the more vulnerable Salemo landings ran into trouble. But by delaying his start until September 3, Montgomery had too short a period in which to establish his beachhead before Clark made his landing, on schedule, in the early hours of September 9.

Knowing his enemy, Kesselring gambled. He left only one division to block Montgomery while shifting all his other troops, including thousands who had escaped from Sicily, to bottle up Clark's Fifth Army. An Allied decrypt warned of Kesselring's scheme, but Montgomery did not take advantage of the information. When the Germans pinned down both armies, a gap of 140 miles still yawned between them.

Clark's plan for the Salerno landings had one serious flaw. A predominantly British corps was to come ashore in the north while an American corps landed in the south. Between them was a ten-mile gap, which Kesselring quickly seized upon as an opportunity to drive a wedge between the two forces and push them separately back into the sea.

Under a tremendous naval and aerial bombardment, the landings met only moderate opposition. Kesselring had but one division in the immediate area to counter the invasion. But when the Allied attackers did not move aggressively enough to capture the high ground shutting in the Salerno plain, Kesselring's artillery and tanks seized it and used the advantage to ravage the Allied troops. With two German divisions rushed in from the line opposing Montgomery and other thousands of soldiers assembled from elsewhere in Italy, Kesselring thrust his troops into the gap. His plans for the counterattack were minutely detailed in a report to Hitler—the BP decrypt runs five pages long and tells exactly where the German general would strike, what units he would commit and how he hoped to mop up the sundered U.S. and English armies.

He came perilously close to succeeding. Clark in his 1950 memoir, Calculated Risk, called Salerno "a near disaster" and wrote of having to consider a lesser Dunkirk.

While Bletchley's decrypt seems not to have had any effect, other factors did. One was pure American grit. Two artillery battalions joined up to place their guns in a deadly row facing the oncoming Germans. While the battalions' officers put rifles into the hands of artillerymen not essential to the firing and rounded up an improvised infantry made up of clerks, cooks and other headquarters troops, the gunners fired eight rounds per minute per gun—an astonishing rate of firepower that, together with the rifle fire of the dug-in GIs, turned back the German thrust not much more than a mile from the beach.

Also helping to stop the Germans was another devastating round of naval gunnery and additional waves of aerial bombers. To secure the beachhead, Clark ordered a landing of paratroop reinforcements. Men of the 82nd Airborne Division were flown in from Sicily and dropped on the beach.

With the German counterattack blunted, Kesselring and Vietinghoff had to settle for a slow, grudging withdrawal northward. On September 16, spearheads from Montgomery's Eighth met with an outward push from Salemo to establish a continuous offensive line across Italy.

The codebreakers kept Allied leaders informed about another important development. A September 9 decrypt detailed orders to the German army to take over Italian warships and merchant vessels—a capture that would have added more than two hundred ships to the German arsenal. The order came too late. On September 8 the Italians fulfilled one of the terms of their withdrawal agreement with the Allies by ordering their navy to surrender. The fleet took off from its ports. Ships on the west coast fled to North Africa; those at Taranto steamed for Malta. The Germans were reduced to trying to destroy the vessels of their late allies. Using new radio-guided glider bombs, they sank an Italian battleship and damaged other vessels. Most of the ships, however, escaped. A longtime worry crease was removed from the Allied brow.

Decrypts also discovered Hitler's plans to rescue Mussolini, imprisoned in the north. The plans were executed in a daring raid on September 10, and II Duce was set up as the head of a puppet state, ostensibly commanding the handful of Italian soldiers still loyal to him.

Finally, the codebreakers traced one more development, one that meant bad news for the campaign in Italy. The Germans had adroitly evacuated Sardinia and Corsica, adding nearly forty thousand troops to their defenders on the mainland.

 

 

Italy 1943-44: A Winter of Discontent

 

For a time after the Fifth and Eighth Armies had linked up, decrypts indicated that Hitler might order Kesselring to evacuate southern Italy and make a staged withdrawal to the Rome area. The slow pace of the Allied advance changed the führer's mind. Kesselring and Vietinghoff organized their defenses to check the Allies from reaching a primary goal: the wide Liri Valley, lying beyond the mountain barriers and offering access to Rome. Allied troops made heroic sacrificial efforts to cross the rivers, climb the mountains and dislodge the Germans from their strongholds only to be thrown back. The battle settled into a bitter, bloody stalemate.

Eisenhower and his fellow generals began to consider an amphibious end run that would reach around and beyond the German lines. This landing would take place at Anzio, a coastal town thirty-five miles south of Rome. As with Salemo, Anzio would be preceded by a drive by the armies inland meant to draw the German troops away from the landings. And again, the inland troops were to link up with the invaders. This first Anzio plan came to nought, however, when neither Montgomery's nor Clark's armies could, despite more examples of incredible heroism and tremendous losses, dislodge the Germans from their mountain redoubts. Eisenhower gave up on the idea of an Anzio landing.

Then Churchill weighed in. Obsessed by the calendar that had the invasion of Normandy scheduled for May or June and that of southern France to coincide, the prime minister felt he couldn't allow the Italian campaign to drag on inconclusively. He pressed for what he called a "cat-claw," another reach around the Germans in the west. Coerced from on high, the Allied commanders agreed to organize a new try at Anzio.

Signals intelligence gave a favorable forecast for the mission, set for January 22, 1944. The codebreakers advised, accurately as it turned out, that the only German forces in place to oppose the landings would be at most two divisions, some tanks and a couple of parachute battalions. Decrypts also advised that no strong reinforcements were available within forty-eight hours' journey. Bold and decisive action would catch the Germans unprepared not only at the beach but further inland.

Once again, bold and decisive action was what Clark did not deliver. He seemed to have doubts about the landing's success. He cautioned his general in command of the operation, John P. Lucas, "Don't stick your neck out, Johnny. I did at Salerno and got into trouble." Clark gave Lucas limited objectives: to seize and hold a beachhead, yes, but to risk an inland dash only after getting firmly established ashore. Lucas was sent in without the mechanized troops for a rapid advance, and shortages of landing craft kept him from receiving armor when he most needed it. Kesselring later said of Anzio that it had seemed to him "a half-hearted measure."

The landings began well enough. With their air reconnaissance decimated by Allied fliers, the Germans did not detect the approach of the invasion fleet. The landings met with little opposition, and the first drive inland encountered only two exhausted battalions which had been pulled out of the mountain defenses to rest and refit. They were quickly overrun.

But then the successes stopped. Lucas was only too willing to accede to the warnings of caution. He concentrated on organizing his thumbnail of a beachhead instead of maintaining the momentum of his attack. Kesselring observed "the hesitant advance of those troops which had landed," and wrote, "That morning I already had the feeling that the worst danger had been staved off."

By the time Lucas was ready, on the ninth day, to push toward Rome, his German opponent had put together a formidable defensive cordon around the Anzio beachhead. Hitler helped by rushing in reinforcements from Yugoslavia, Germany, France and northern Italy. Decrypts warned of these transfers and also of the shift of bombers to harass the beachhead.

Lucas's belated offensive was quickly checked, with grim losses. Clark and Alexander ordered him to abandon the attack and dig in. Now it was the Germans' turn. Kesselring planned another of his powerful counterattacks meant to split the beachhead forces and either encircle the fragments or drive them back into the sea. Then occurred what Hinsley termed "one of the most valuable decrypts of the whole war," a revelation that is credited with converting even Mark Clark into a believer in Ultra. It forewarned of the counterattack and predicted precisely where it would hit. When the Germans came, the Allied troops were ready for them. The advance was met by withering fire from Lucas's artillery, tanks, tank destroyers and mortars as well as by some seven hundred sorties by Allied aircraft and shelling by two navy cruisers.

The Germans pressed their first attack for five days, only to be held off by American firepower and GI will. Decrypts pointed up the moment, on February 21, when Kesselring admitted that the offensive had failed. Clark came ashore and relieved Lucas, replacing him with the more aggressive Lucian K. Truscott.

The Germans refused to give up their attempts to smash the Anzio toehold. Further decrypts gave notice that they were organizing another counterattack. Again the Allies knew what to expect and where to mass their power. The German attackers were mauled. On March 1 they sent messages reporting that they were withdrawing to their starting line. A long report from Kesselring advised Berlin that he could not hope to eliminate the beachhead with the forces at his command; the best he could do was to keep it bottled up. For prudence's sake he was rushing the construction of a new defense line to which he could fall back and still prevent the Allies from reaching Rome.

That was the end of German attempts to eradicate Anzio. Kesselring was content to pin in the invaders, keep them separated from the main Allied forces and make life on the beachhead perilous and miserable. His heavy guns and Luftwaffe bombers forced the Allied soldiery to burrow underground and live like beleaguered moles. German radio called Anzio "a prison camp where the inmates feed themselves."

Churchill lamented, "I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we had got was a stranded whale."

The inland attack ordered by Clark to draw Germans away from the Anzio landing was an assault across the Rapido River. Clark persisted in carrying out the attack even though he was warned that the strong German defenses and zeroed-in artillery on the far side of the deep, swift-flowing stream doomed it to failure. For the GIs involved, the Rapido crossing quickly turned into a hopeless death trap. So overwhelming was the defeat that it was investigated after the war by a Congressional committee.

With the repulse at the Rapido, with Anzio a stranded whale, a virtual stalemate continued all through March and April and early May. The center and symbol of Allied frustration became the monastery of Monte Cassino. Its great two hundred-yard-long bulk of masonry sat atop the Cassino massif and looked down from a height of seventeen hundred feet on the approaches to it. Below the abbey was Castle Hill, another rugged promontory, and on the banks of the Rapido River the armed town of Cassino itself. By placing heavy guns and artillery spotters on the brow of the massif, by turning the lower reaches into a vast warren of concrete pillboxes, fortified stone houses, minefields and barbed wire entanglements, and by diverting the Rapido to flood the plain below into a quagmire in which armor bogged down, the Germans had made the whole into an impregnable natural fortress.

Allied commanders waged three major battles trying to take the monastery, only to have each of them driven back with severe casualties. Although German gunners placed themselves close to the abbey's walls on either side, their general scrupulously avoided using the structure itself as a fortification, a nicety that Allied commanders refused to accept. Eighth Army commanders called for it to be destroyed—a decision that, to his credit, Clark strongly opposed. The plan went ahead, with heavy artillery combining with a raid by U.S. bombers to reduce the historic structure to rubble.

The bombers were supposed to first drop leaflets on the monastery warning the monks and refugees within its walls to get out at once. That done, the bombers' assault would be followed by having a division of Indian lighters swing around to the abbey's rear and drive out the German defenders. Like so many other actions in the Italian campaign, execution of the plan was botched. The bombers made their terrible run not on February 16 as expected but a day earlier. The bishop and some 250 of the refugees remaining in the shrine were killed. The Indians were not ready and their attack failed. The German troops happily moved into the rubble and used the giant blocks of stone to make their fortress still stronger. Here as at Anzio the stalemate held.

What finally did the Germans in was a plan that depended heavily on their intelligence blindness. Now they were lacking not only cryptanalytic clues; their air reconnaissance had largely been swept from the skies. Astutely employing radio-silent maneuvers at night and camouflage by day, Alexander organized a huge attack force. Kesselring thought he was facing six divisions on the main front when in actuality he was up against more than fifteen. Among them were a division of agile, mountain-climbing Moroccans and a Polish division whose troops had once been captives of the Russians.

As a deceptive move, Alexander had amphibious operations staged near Naples, where German intelligence agents were sure to report them. Kesselring responded as expected: he kept his mobile units in the west to guard against being outflanked by another possible landing.

Alexander's planning was guided by a steady flow of signals intelligence that told him Kesselring's complete order of battle, the sections of the front for which his units were responsible and such other details as the number of his tanks and how many of them were serviceable.

A Bletchley decrypt even informed Alexander when to launch this, the fourth Battle of Cassino. It disclosed that Hitler had summoned several officers to discuss plans with him on May 11 to 12. The news assured Alexander that an attack at that time would be a surprise, and it was.

The offensive was helped by one of Kesselring's rare errors. Thinking the rugged terrain of the Aurunci Mountains would forestall any advance there, he left only a thin line to guard the area. The French mountain troops readily managed the ascent and broke through to a point where they were within reach of the Liri Valley and the road to Rome. The German front crumbled. By May 17 the British had outflanked Cassino. The next day the Poles occupied the monastery ruins and raised their flag over the site, whose capture had claimed nearly four thousand of their colleagues' lives. The Germans were at last in retreat along the entire main battlefront, and their exhaustion and desperation were aptly chronicled by Allied decrypts.

As for the troops at Anzio, Alexander wanted them to break out, drive northward toward the town of Valmontone and block the Highway 6 escape route of the German divisions retreating from the south—a move, he thought, that would bag thousands of prisoners.

He figured without Mark Clark. Along with his own ego driving him to become the liberator of Rome were added the pressures from on high, particularly from Churchill and Marshall, to take the Eternal City before the political significance of its capture was overshadowed by the Normandy landings. Moreover, as Clark recorded in his memoir, "I was determined that the Fifth Army was going to capture Rome." His determination was driven by the belief that "practically everybody else was trying to get into the act."

 

 

The Taking of Rome: A Hollow Victory

 

General Truscott fulfilled his part of Alexander's plan. His troops drove through the German defenses at Anzio and headed north toward Valmontone. Eric Sevareid has left a vivid account of what came next. General Clark, who had earlier endorsed the plan to entrap the Germans, called a press conference at which he now claimed it was "nonsense" to think the Germans could be bottled up by seizing Highway 6, since there were many lesser roads by which they could escape. He ordered Truscott to direct only about a third of his troops toward Valmontone; the main body would head straight for Rome.

The correspondents were dumbfounded. Truscott and other commanders were outraged. But Clark was in charge. Paranoid that the British might take Rome while his troops were busy rounding up Germans, he made sure his Fifth Army got there first.

Even though the Germans were in retreat, they could still manage delaying actions. The most serious holdup came at the Alban Hills, the last breastworks defending Rome. Impatient, Clark sent armor across the flat ground between the hills and the sea. According to Sevareid, "Every vehicle was easily spotted in the enemy's gun sights and within ten minutes we had lost twenty-five tanks."

The Alban Hills impasse was solved by General Fred Walker of the Thirty-sixth Division. He drew two regiments from the main line, circled them stealthily around to the right during the night and sent them climbing the two-thousand-foot height behind the German line. His maneuver broke the defense. Most of the Germans, declaring Rome an open city, retreated beyond it. But some maintained a rearguard action.

At one point of delay, Brigadier General Robert Frederick, whom Sevareid described as "the young and capable commander of the special 'commando' regiment of Americans and Canadians," was watching the progress of his men when a jeep drew alongside. Major General Geoffrey Keyes, corps commander, descended. "General Frederick," he asked, "what's holding you up here?"

FREDERICK: The Germans, sir.

KEYES: How long will it take you to get across the city limits?

FREDERICK: The rest of the day. There are a couple of SP [self-propelled] guns up there.

KEYES: That will not do. General Clark must be across the city limits by four o'clock.

FREDERICK: Why?

KEYES: Because he has to have a photograph taken.

FREDERICK [after a long pause]: Tell the general to give me an hour.

The guns were silenced, the general and his faithful photographer arrived and the pictures were taken, in Sevareid's words, "of the conqueror and his conquered city."

It was June 5. Clark got his headlines and pictures in the world's press. He had beaten the D-Day deadline imposed on him by his superiors by one day. The next morning he called for a meeting of his corps commanders. Arriving, they found they were to supply a proper martial backdrop for more of Clark's posturing before press photographers. Soon Clark signaled that he wanted to make an announcement. The measure of his myopia was made plain by his opening words: "This is a great day for the Fifth Army." The reporters blanched. His generals reddened with embarrassment, some with anger. What about the much-bloodied Eighth Army? The self-sacrificing Poles? The Free French? The whole of what Clark himself had called a "hodgepodge army" that had united to make this day possible?

For these newsbreaks the chance to encircle Kesselring's entire Tenth Army was lost. The German general took full advantage of the opportunity. His delaying actions at Valmontone fought off Truscott's inadequate force while the bulk of his army safely slipped through to the Gothic Line—to fight, and kill, again.

The rest of the Italian campaign was anticlimactic in terms of its news-making value. Churchill envisioned the Allies smashing through the Alps to seize Vienna and possibly even Budapest and Prague before the Russians claimed them, but that remained a dream. The need to transfer combat-hardened divisions to the invasion of southern France drained away strength for tackling the last German redoubts in Italy.

Yet it must be remembered that a main purpose of the war on the peninsula was to tie up and maim German forces that could otherwise have helped throw back the Normandy invasion and/or stop the Soviets in the East. The campaign did that. Hitler's decision to contest every yard of Italian territory played into the Allied hands. For twenty months a score of German divisions were held there and bloodied. As BP veteran Ralph Bennett has written, "Every man, tank and gun [Hitler] sent to Italy meant one less to defend Festung Europa."

Even with depleted forcesj Alexander and Clark continued the pressure. Their troops broke the Gothic Line and, as the war in Europe was ending, had the last of Germany's shattered Italian divisions fleeing through the Alps.

Their final drive did have the effect of encouraging Italian partisans to spring up and seize northern Italy. In the process they captured Mussolini and his mistress, then killed them and strung up their bodies by the heels like sides of beef for once-worshiping countrymen now to jeer at and spit upon.