The Second World War (104 page)

Unaware of the malaria threat, both Alexander and Clark visited the
peaceful landing site. They seemed unconcerned by the lack of drive at senior levels, but in the forward battalions a sense of unease and dismay began to grow. ‘
We all had a sickening
feeling of anti-climax,’ wrote an Irish Guardsman. ‘Each and every one of us had been keyed up for a bold advance on Rome. It might have been rough and bloody, but we would have got there. We had the element of surprise. There were no Germans. What in the name of God was stopping the Division advancing?’ In British ranks there was an unfounded suspicion that they were being held back because the Yanks wanted to get to Rome first. Yet Lucas was not even pushing Major General Lucian Truscott’s 3rd Division forward with any urgency, despite the need to seize the hills to the north or cut the Tenth Army’s supply lines along Route 7.

The Allied landing caused panic in Rome and at Kesselring’s headquarters above the Tiber Valley, especially since he had committed his two reserve divisions to the battles along the Garigliano and Rapido rivers. He was woken with the news shortly before dawn and rang Berlin. A contingency plan, Operation Richard, was put into immediate effect, bringing divisions down from northern Italy and reinforcements from elsewhere. General der Kavallerie Eberhard von Mackensen was to move his Fourteenth Army headquarters from Verona. Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army headquarters was ordered to send all troops not engaged in combat back towards the Alban Hills and the Colli Laziali, which overlooked the Pontine Marshes of the coastal plain. Above all, Kesselring wanted as many batteries of guns as possible in those hills. But first he sent in his ‘flying artillery’, and the Luftwaffe used their ‘glide bombs’ against ships anchored offshore. One of them blew the Royal Navy destroyer HMS
Janus
in half. Another sank a brightly lit and clearly marked hospital ship. Mines were another hazard for the invasion fleet.

The British 1st Division on the western side of the beachhead finally began advancing rapidly on 24 January and by the next day had taken the small town of Aprilia. Truscott’s 3rd Division attacked towards Cisterna, where it found itself up against the Panzer Division
Hermann Göring
. It was not long before Kesselring’s gunners in the hills began an almost constant bombardment of the plain below. Lucas’s refusal to hurry to seize the high ground was now shown to be disastrous. With a perverse obstinacy, he had let the huge advantage of surprise slip through his fingers. But the fault also lay with Clark and Alexander, who should have put much more pressure on him to push out his forces in the first forty-eight hours. On the other hand, it can be argued that Lucas’s VI Corps with just two divisions was simply not strong enough to advance inland and protect its flanks, and that the whole operation was flawed.

By the time Clark visited the beachhead again on 28 January, the rapid
German build-up had passed parity with the invading Allied force of just over 60,000 men. Even more enemy reinforcements were on their way south. The comforting idea that Allied air power would prevent them deploying had proved an illusion, while German artillery fire became heavier and heavier. An eighteen-year-old Italian woman went into labour as a group of civilians and soldiers tried to shelter from shelling in a cemetery. While her mother prayed volubly to all the saints, a Royal Army Medical Corps corporal delivered a healthy boy as if it were an everyday task.

When Darby’s Rangers and Truscott’s 3rd Division attacked the following night, they were repelled by German forces several times greater than expected. A renewed attack led to disaster for the Rangers, with many of them killed or captured. The Germans later paraded their prisoners gleefully in Rome for photographers and Deutsche Wochenschau newsreel cameras. Hitler, who was obsessed with the symbolic significance of capital cities, was determined not to lose that of his most prominent ally. As a result, he was giving Kesselring even more resources for the defence of Italy than he had asked for.

Allied regimental aid posts, casualty clearing stations and the evacuation hospital were all overwhelmed with stretcher cases as German shelling increased dramatically. Small German fighting patrols infiltrated the perimeter. The battle was ‘
a series of short sharp
engagements’, an Irish Guards sergeant wrote. ‘There was so much cover in the culverts and deep irrigation ditches that the enemy were upon you in seconds.’ With the skies heavily overcast, the Allies could no longer rely on air support. Americans and British alike had to dig in and face the fury of Mackensen’s expected counter-attack, now nearly 100,000 strong with the newly arrived reinforcements.

The Anzio landings had utterly failed to undermine the Tenth Army’s defence line on the Garigliano and Rapido. The great rock of Monte Cassino, crowned by its Benedictine monastery, was its strongpoint. But less than ten kilometres to the north-east the French corps of two North African divisions commanded by General Alphonse Juin had crossed the River Secco and seized Monte Belvedere inside the Gustav Line. They suffered 8,000 casualties in the harshest mountain combat. Back down the Rapido Valley, artillery duels of counter-bombardment continued relentlessly.

On 30 January the US 34th Infantry Division, having initially been forced back, managed to ford the Rapido north of Cassino. Over the next few days it fought its way from hill to hill round the back of the great mountain. But the battle for the town of Cassino and Monte Cassino itself swung back and forth, in freezing weather and flurries of snow. The 34th Division, exhausted and mangled by its courageous advance, had to be
replaced soon afterwards by the 4th Indian Division.

Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg, the New Zealand corps commander, now took over the sector. The huge and fearless Freyberg, known to British colleagues as ‘a bear of very little brain’, saw things in straightforward terms. He concluded that the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino was impregnable as it stood. Instead of trying to spare it, as both Eisenhower and Alexander had earlier laid down, the Allies should destroy it completely. Inaccurate reports that the Germans had secretly turned it into a fortress were believed, and reports that it was filled with refugees were discounted. General Juin was strongly opposed to its destruction, so was Clark and the commander of the US II Corps. But Alexander stepped in firmly to support Freyberg. The pressure for results from Churchill in London was too great.

On 4 February, Mackensen’s attack on the British salient at Anzio began, with panzergrenadiers driving a huge flock of sheep in front of them over the minefields. The 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards and the 6th Gordons took the brunt of the fighting, as Mark IV Panzers came on behind. The 1st Infantry Division was forced back, losing 1,500 men, of whom 900 were taken prisoner. Another German attack came three days later against Aprilia. Once more a breakthrough to the sea was held off only by massed artillery and the guns of Allied warships offshore.

Hitler in the Wolfsschanze, having pored over large-scale maps of the Anzio beachhead, issued detailed orders to Mackensen for a massive attack to crush it completely. He wanted a conspicuous and salutary lesson to be inflicted on the Allies to discourage them from a larger undertaking on the Channel coast later in the year. On 16 February the fighting rose to a new intensity. The 3rd Panzergrenadier Division and the 26th Panzer Division attacked Aprilia again, and the area between the US 45th Division and the recently arrived British 56th Division. Two days later, Mackensen threw in his reserves as well.

Panzergrenadiers attacked almost in Napoleonic columns down the same axis from Carroceto. Artillery observers had seen them coming and within minutes batteries of Allied field guns had ranged in to produce a devastating effect. Americans dubbed this approach road ‘
the Bowling Alley
’. While Allied casualties had been high, Mackensen lost over 5,000 men.

Clark, under pressure from Alexander, returned to the Anzio beachhead to sack Lucas as VI Corps commander and replace him with Truscott. It was ironic that this decision came just after the battle had started to turn in the Allies’ favour. Churchill’s timing was also out when he made his famous remark about Anzio a week later at a meeting of the chiefs of staff
in London: ‘
We hoped to land a wildcat
that would tear out the bowels of the Boche. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water!’

On 29 February, Mackensen, under orders from Kesselring and Führer headquarters, sent in another major attack. Allied batteries fired 66,000 shells at these forces. Hitler was taking as close an interest in the dozen kilometres of the Anzio beachhead as in the eastern front. But he refused to recognize that his troops could not win if they lacked artillery ammunition and air cover, while the Allies grew stronger and stronger in the
Materialschlacht
, the battle of hardware. Kesselring, on the other hand, understood that a turning point in the war had been reached in Italy. The Wehrmacht could not continue to expend troops and weaponry for much longer against an enemy with such apparently inexhaustible reserves of firepower. At Anzio, three-quarters of its casualties has been caused by shellfire.

On 15 February, the full destructive potential of the Allies was unleashed on Monte Cassino. Leaflets had been showered over the ancient monastery the evening before to warn all those sheltering there to abandon the place as rapidly as possible for their own safety. But, due to confusion and suspicion, few left. The abbot refused to believe that the Allies were capable of such an act. The B-17 Flying Fortresses and waves of B-25 Mitchells and B-26 Marauders bombed the mountain top in relays while the entire artillery of the Fifth Army in the Rapido Valley added its own explosive contribution. Several hundred refugees were killed.

Freyberg’s plan backfired in every possible way. He failed to launch his attack until long after the bombers had departed. Even then it was in insufficient strength and ill co-ordinated. The Allied bombardment gave the Germans the right and opportunity to turn the partly ruined monastery into a veritable fortress. And Allied attempts to blame the Germans, with false claims that they had occupied the monastery, were firmly contradicted by the abbot in a filmed interview with General der Panzertruppen Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, the commander of XIV Panzer Corps.

The town of Cassino, now defended by the 1st Fallschirmjäger Division, became Freyberg’s primary objective, but his decision to attack with his 2nd New Zealand Division and the 4th Indian Division was thwarted by relentless rain. He needed dry ground for the tanks, but everywhere was waterlogged. When the rain stopped on 15 March, the town was pounded by bombers and artillery. Despite the claims of Fifteenth Air Force bomber crews, it was not their finest hour in navigation and aiming. Five other towns were also hit by mistake; in fact the US aircraft managed to bomb just about every nationality on their own side–the Indian Division, Eighth
Army headquarters, the newly arrived Poles and General Juin’s headquarters–causing 350 Allied casualties and seventy-five civilian.

Following standard German practice when a major attack was expected, the town of Cassino had been held with only a small force. The bulk of the paratroopers had been pulled back to second- and third-line positions. The subsequent advance of Freyberg’s forces was not helped by the rubble blocking the streets and huge craters. The Sherman tanks could not get through, and then, despite the encouraging weather forecast, the rains began again.

The German paratroopers defended the ruined town with deadly skill. The New Zealanders, who had their defeat on Crete to avenge, certainly did not lack courage or determination, nor did the Indian Division, especially the 9th Gurkha Rifles. But to Clark’s frustration Freyberg went at his own pace, showing no tactical flair and hammering away obstinately. The battle went on for eight days, with Freyberg’s corps losing twice as many men as the Germans. Isolated detachments, such as the Gurkhas who had seized hills at great cost, were called back. The whole corps was withdrawn, battered, embittered and dispirited.

At Anzio, meanwhile, the self-perpetuating nature of the war in Italy had continued with Allied forces in the beachhead perimeter increased to almost 100,000 men, thus retaining parity with the Germans. But this, the most savage of battlefronts, had now sunk into a routine behind the nightly skirmishing of fighting patrols. Soldiers planted vegetables and bought livestock off the evacuated Italian families before they left. Bored troops bet on anything from beetle-racing to baseball. American business enterprise flourished with the sale of hooch from improvised alembics. ‘
Bootleggers from the 133rd Infantry
blended fifty pounds of fermented raisins and a dash of vanilla to make “Plastered in Paris”.’ British soldiers caught rats in sandbags and hurled them like satchel-charges into German trenches. Cases of self-inflicted wounds were worryingly high, mainly it seems out of anticipated fear rather than the immediacy of fear itself. Combat fatigue, as psychiatrists soon noted, was always likely to increase in surrounded beachheads and bridgeheads. It dropped dramatically only when a war of movement began.

On 23 March, while the fighting for Cassino was at its height, Italian partisans in Rome ambushed a detachment of German police as they marched through the city. An enraged Hitler ordered reprisals, ten executions for every German killed. Kappler, the SS chief in Rome, selected 335 hostages for execution the next day at the Ardeatine Caves outside the city. Kappler’s hunt for Jews had been less successful, with just 1,259 rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. The majority had been hidden by Italians,
including by the Catholic Church, even though the Pope had not spoken out against the persecution.

Across the Adriatic, German reprisals in Yugoslavia became more savage. Himmler had authorized the recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into the 13th SS Gebirgs Division
Handschar
to fight Tito’s partisans, depicted to them as the hated Serbs. They wore a grey fez with the SS death’s-head. In fact the partisans came increasingly from all the Yugoslav nationalities, while the almost exclusively Serb
tniks of General Mihailovi
had backed away from confrontation with the Germans after the appalling reprisals of October 1941. Tito’s Communist forces, on the other hand, had no scruples about escalating the conflict, counting on German atrocities to swell their numbers. Once it became clear to the British that the
tniks were hanging back, SOE withdrew its military mission to them and increased its support to Tito’s brigades. Supplies from the SOE base in Bari were flown in, and on 2 March 1944 bombing raids on targets in Yugoslavia began from the Foggia airfields.