Читать книгу Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45 - James Holland, James Holland - Страница 13

On the morning of 11 May, the British Prime Minister had dictated a letter to Alexander, his commander in Italy. ‘All our thoughts and hopes are with you in what I trust and believe will be a decisive battle, fought to a finish,’ wrote Churchill, ‘and having for its object the destruction and ruin of the armed force of the enemy south of Rome.’14

Ever since the agreement to invade southern Italy the previous summer, Churchill had been looking forward to the day the Allies captured Rome. ‘He who holds Rome,’ he had told President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin the previous November, ‘holds the title deeds of Italy.’ This was perhaps overstating the case, but there was no doubting the enormous psychological fillip that the capture of Rome – which would be the first European capital to be taken – would provide.

Yet despite the considerable commitment of the Allies – and Britain in particular – to the Italian campaign, their presence there had never been part of any long-agreed master plan. Rather, it had been purely opportunistic, a decision born of a series of unfolding events, each one bringing Italy closer and closer to the typhoon of steel that would rip through it.

The seeds of this momentous decision date back to a meeting between a US general and the Russian Foreign Minister in Washington DC in late May 1942. Normally wary of promising too much, the US Chief of Staff General George Marshall, America’s most senior military figure, nonetheless assured Vyacheslav Molotov that the United States would start a second front before the end of the year. Three days later, speaking to Molotov on 1 June, President Roosevelt reiterated his determination to help the Soviets by engaging German troops on land some time during 1942.

What Roosevelt and Marshall had in mind was an Allied invasion of Continental Europe. America’s commitment to a ‘Europe-first’ rather than a ‘Pacific-first’ policy had been agreed with Britain more than six months before, in December 1941, at the hastily arranged Washington Conference following the US’s entry into the war. The Americans agreed that Nazi Germany, rather than Japan, posed the greatest immediate threat, especially since the Soviet Union appeared to be a hair’s breadth away from defeat. Such a collapse would have been catastrophic for the Western Allies, with the weight of the Nazi war machine turned against them. Furthermore, Germany would then have had access to all the oil and minerals it needed; indeed, it was for these essential raw materials, above all, that Hitler had ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union. Britain and the United States, not the USSR, were regarded as the most dangerous enemy by the Führer.

There was thus considerable urgency to help the Soviet Union as soon as possible. Broadly, they agreed on a policy of ‘closing and tightening the ring around Germany’,15 which was to be achieved in a number of ways: by supporting the Russians materially; by beginning a campaign of aerial bombardment against Germany; by building up strength in the Middle East and wearing down Germany’s war effort; and then striking hard with a punch that would see a combined Allied force make an invasion of Continental Europe, preferably in 1942, but otherwise certainly in 1943.

Yet despite this agreement, Britain and America approached the task of winning the war from completely different strategic viewpoints. Britain’s tactic was to gather the necessary forces and wait for events to dictate where the decisive engagement would take place. The Americans, on the other hand, began with deciding where they should attack and then, working backwards, preparing the forces required for success. The British viewed the American approach as naïve, born of their lack of experience in war and international affairs. Conversely, the Americans thought the British lacked decisiveness and the willingness to make the necessary sacrifices to see the job done.

To begin with, however, these differences in approach were smoothed over. Britain was happy to agree in principle to America’s avowed intention to invade northern France, while it soon became apparent that America was physically unable to stick to its desired timetable. Despite its rapidly expanding manufacturing capabilities and massive mobilisation, n 1942 the United States was still some way behind the times and its armed forces were just a fraction of the size they would balloon to by the war’s end. In September 1939, for example, America’s standing army comprised just 210,000 men – only the nineteenth largest in the world. By the time of Pearl Harbor, this figure had only slightly more than doubled. From there on, the figure would rise exponentially, but there could be no seaborne invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe just yet and most certainly not of France. Nor could Britain be relied on to mount such an operation. With their forces already overstretched in the Far East, in North Africa and the Middle East, the Allies accepted that the proposed invasion would have to take place in 1943 instead – although, as General Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, pointed out during a visit to Washington in June 1942, it was important that no alternative, lesser operation should be undertaken in 1942 that might affect the chances of a successful large-scale assault into Europe the following year.

However, Roosevelt was determined to see his promise to Molotov fulfilled. ‘It must be constantly reiterated,’ he told his Chiefs of Staff on 6 May 1942, ‘that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis material than all the twenty-five nations put together… the necessities of the case called for action in 1942 – not 1943.’16 Moreover, he was all too aware that the American people, having been led into war, would not tolerate a long period of apparent inaction.

It was following the talks with Molotov that Churchill suggested the Allies invade northwest Africa as a means of Roosevelt keeping his word. There were, he argued, all sorts of good reasons for making such a move: the British Eighth Army was already fighting in Egypt and Libya – and in strength – and securing Vichy-French-held Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia would be a less demanding task than an assault anywhere on the Continent. Furthermore, securing the Mediterranean would ease British shipping for future operations in Europe, would enable Allied bombers to attack Germany and Italy from the south, would hasten Italy’s exit from the war, and tie up Germany’s forces – all of which would help Russia.

General Brooke and the British Chiefs of Staff, despite their concerns, soon fell in line with their prime minister. But both the American Chiefs of Staff, and General Eisenhower and his planning team in Britain – Mark Clark included – were deeply sceptical, believing an invasion of north-west Africa would be a major deviation from their main goal – and one that could, if undertaken, see hopes for an assault on France dashed even in 1943. Roosevelt, however, saw some merit in the plan, and having accepted there was no other viable place they could successfully bring about a second front, supported Churchill’s proposals. The misgivings amongst his military commanders may have continued, but Roosevelt had made up his mind and his word was final. The invasion of north-west Africa was on.

This, then, was how the Mediterranean strategy was born. In a remarkably short time, Eisenhower, together with General Clark as his chief planner, diverted their attention to an invasion of north-west Africa instead of France. In November 1942, as the Eighth Army was soundly beating Rommel’s German-Italian army at El Alamein, a joint British and American invasion force landed in Morocco and Algeria. The landings were an astonishing achievement and produced a rapid and overwhelming victory. Admittedly, the opposition had hardly been very stiff, but conception to execution had taken a little over three months. It showed what could be achieved, logistically at any rate.

It certainly got Churchill’s mind whirring. Suddenly he began to see a wealth of opportunities emerging in the Mediterranean. With the whole of North Africa secure, he realised that Britain and America would be ‘in a position to attack the underbelly of the Axis at whatever may be the softest point, i.e. Sicily, southern Italy or perhaps Sardinia; or again, if circumstances warrant, or, as they may do, compel, the French Riviera or perhaps even, with Turkish aid, the Balkans’.17

This memo to his War Cabinet in October 1942 showed that Churchill was beginning to think in terms of a double second front – one that could be opened alongside the cross-Channel invasion. Churchill has often been accused of putting his designs for the Mediterranean above those of the invasion of France, but this was not the case in the autumn of 1942. There were few people more determined to see, for instance, the cross-Channel invasion take place in 1943, something Churchill stuck to longer than most. But he was the arch-opportunist, a man who never lost sight of the ultimate goal, but who was always open to new ways and different approaches to achieving that final victory.

By January 1943, with the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa looking to be inevitable – even if it was taking considerably longer than originally envisaged – a more concrete Mediterranean strategy was agreed. At the Casablanca Conference that month, the decision was made to follow success in North Africa with an invasion of Sicily. This, it was argued, would knock out Axis airfields threatening Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, but more importantly would provide the Allies with the greatest chance of forcing Italy out of the war, and, for the time being, was considered the best way to continue closing the ring around Germany – even if that meant postponing the invasion of northern France for yet another year.

This time it had been General Brooke who successfully manipulated the Americans into following the British way of thinking, and with the subsequent capture of more than 250,000 Axis troops in Tunisia, Churchill finally began to start looking towards the long and mountainous leg of Italy.

The news of the victory in North Africa in May 1943 came as the Prime Minister was steaming his way across the Atlantic for yet more talks, and in the flush of so emphatic a triumph both he and the British Chiefs of Staff were unsurprisingly gung-ho about what might still be achieved that year. German forces, they argued, were now widely stretched, not just in Russia, where the tide seemed to be turning in the wake of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad in February, but elsewhere too: trouble was brewing in the Balkans; in France, which since the Allied invasion of North Africa was now entirely, rather than partially, occupied; resistance was also growing in Norway; and Italy appeared to be on the point of collapse. If and when Italy was out of the war, Germany would have to replace the half-million Italian troops in Greece and the Balkans, not to mention the figure that would surely be diverted to Italy itself, as well as the French Riviera and other borders now vulnerable to Allied attack. This kind of dispersal of forces, they suggested, was just what was needed to help the Allies get a toe-hold in France for 1944.

With this in mind, the British pressed their case to follow an invasion of Sicily with an invasion of southern Italy. This would open up yet further airfields from which to attack the German Reich, and could lead to exploitation eastwards into the Balkans and Aegean. At the very least, they argued, this use of their massed forces would be of greater help to the cross-Channel invasion than transferring most of the troops in the Mediterranean back to Britain. And in the best-case scenario, who was to say such operations might not prove decisive?

If the British were getting carried away with themselves, it was hardly surprising. Not only had they fought through a long, three-and-a-half-year campaign in North Africa, they had had interests in the Mediterranean dating back to Nelson’s day, nearly a hundred and fifty years before. The Americans, however, had none of these emotional attachments and had so far played a far smaller role in the theatre. ‘The Mediterranean,’ General Marshall said at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs in May 1943, was ‘a vacuum into which America’s great military might could be drawn off until there was nothing left with which to deal the decisive blow on the Continent.’18 They had agreed to North Africa, and had been persuaded there was sense to the invasion of Sicily, but they were damned if British over-enthusiasm for the Mediterranean was going to get in the way of the stated and original Number One Goal: the invasion of France.

Determined not to be outmanoeuvred, as they had been at Casablanca, General Marshall insisted that a date for the cross-Channel invasion be decided upon and that this should be the priority over and above any other operations. Only when the British had agreed to 1 May, 1944, for what he now appropriately renamed Operation OVERLORD, and had accepted that a certain number of troops would have to be withdrawn back to Britain to help with that task, would Marshall acquiesce to any further Allied action in the Mediterranean, whether it be the invasion of Italy or anywhere else.

The British agreed with the American terms – after all, they still believed in the invasion of France too – but to Churchill’s great frustration, no definite plan was made about what should follow the successful conquest of Sicily and by 10 July 1943, the day the Allies made their landings on the southern Italian island, the matter had still not been resolved.

The decision to go on and invade southern Italy was finally taken on 16 July. It had, in fact, been prompted by none other than Marshall himself, who proposed an amphibious operation to take Naples and then to push on as quickly as possible to Rome. Needless to say, the British Prime Minister jumped at this suggestion. ‘I am with you,’ Churchill cabled to Marshall on hearing this plan of action, ‘heart and soul.’19

No one was under any illusion, however, that Italy would be an easy place to fight a campaign should the Germans make a stand – not since Belisarius in the sixth century had Rome been captured from the south. Yet despite General Marshall’s lack of enthusiasm for any further Mediterranean strategy, he recognised the necessity of both knocking Italy out of the war for good and drawing German troops away from northern France and Russia; and Italy was the only feasible place in which they could do this. Air superiority was a prerequisite for any seaborne landing, so this ruled out southern France; capturing Sardinia and Corsica were possibilities but would not draw enemy troops or necessarily prompt Italy’s collapse; while an invasion of Greece and the Balkans carried the same risks as Italy, the roads and lines of communication there were considerably worse, nor would there be the benefits of a sizeable launch pad such as Sicily close at hand.

And anyway, both Marshall and the Allied chiefs had good cause for optimism. Momentum was with them, and the gutful of intelligence at their fingertips suggested Germany had no plans to defend southern Italy at all. Rather, it looked as though they intended to fall back to a line more than 150 miles north of Rome. With luck, the invasions would be as lightly defended as those on Sicily. Italy’s southern airfields would be captured and there was no real reason to doubt that some time before Christmas, Rome would be theirs.

All too quickly, however, these high hopes were dashed. Only the occupation of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica – two of the pre-invasion objectives of the Allies – had brought any cause for cheer and these had both been abandoned by the Germans as part of their plans to deal with the Italians’ collapse. In Italy itself, the strong and determined resistance shown by the Germans at Salerno in September 1943 had demonstrated there would be no easy victory. The Italian armed forces – with the exception of a large part of the navy and some of the air force – had been swiftly and efficiently disarmed by the Germans, not just in Italy but throughout the Balkans, Greece and the Aegean as well. In fact all but a few of the Dodecanese islands were soon in German hands, and most of those that were not were quickly taken back from the Allies. In Italy itself the Allies had discovered that it was a truly terrible place to fight a war. Running down three-quarters of the narrow peninsula were the Apennine Mountains – for the most part, high, jagged peaks that in places rose more than 10,000 feet. All too frequently sheer cliffs and narrow ridges towered over the narrow valleys below. And where there are mountains, there are always rivers, which in Italy generally ran down towards the sea and across the path of the Allied advance. Even where there were no mountains, there were still plenty of hills, such as in Tuscany, and although there were some flat coastal plains – like that around Anzio – these were criss-crossed with yet more rivers, canals, dikes and other water courses. In the north, there was the open country of the Po Valley, but then the mountains rose again – this time the even higher Alps. Furthermore, despite being a Mediterranean country, the winter climate was harsh – often freezing cold and wet, and to make matters worse, the winter of 1943/44 was especially bad.

Compounding the problem was Italy’s relative economic backwardness and poor infrastructure. Certainly, there were the great industrial cities of the north, but much of Italy was dotted with tiny villages and walled mountain-top towns, a reminder that not so long ago Italy had been a place of city states and warlords, not the unified whole it had become less than a century before. Mussolini may have improved the railways, but few proper roads linked these isolated towns and villages. Indeed, large parts of the mountainous interior were joined by nothing more than tracks.

By the beginning of October, the Allies had taken both Naples and the Foggia airfields, after three weeks of hard fighting, but then it began to rain. Bad weather in ‘sunny’ Mediterranean Italy had not really been considered by the Allied chiefs before the campaign began. It did not seem possible that a bit of rain and cold could affect modern armies. Yet with almost every bridge and culvert destroyed by the retreating Germans, and with rivers quickly rising to torrents, the Allies, with all their trucks and tanks and jeeps and countless other vehicles, soon found themselves struggling horribly in thick, glutinous mud where roads used to be.

So it was that increasingly stiff resistance, bad weather and the onset of winter, and, above all, a severe shortage of men and equipment, ensured their advance ground to a halt. A hard-fought-for foothold in the southern tip of Italy now seemed like a small reward for their efforts.

And yet, and yet. More than fifty German divisions – the best part of a million men – were now tied up in Italy, the Balkans and the Aegean. By the end of October there were nearly 400,000 German troops in Italy alone. It began to dawn on the British especially, and Brooke and Churchill in particular, that if Italy was anything to go by, OVERLORD was going to be an incredibly tough proposition. If the cross-Channel invasion was to have any chance of success – and Churchill was remembering Gallipoli all too clearly – then it was imperative that even more be done to keep up the pressure on German forces throughout the Mediterranean.

With this in mind, at the Tehran Conference at the end of November 1943, the British pressed the Americans to agree to continue the advance up the leg of Italy to a line that ran from Pisa in the west to Rimini in the east. By overstretching Germany in southern Europe, they reasoned, the invasion of France would have a greater chance of success. However, in terms of strategy, the gulf between the United States and Britain was widening. As far as America was concerned, Britain had had its own way far too long. Increasingly suspicious about British intentions in Italy and the Mediterranean, the American chiefs only very reluctantly agreed to British proposals. OVERLORD would be postponed for the last time, and by a month and no more, and only in order to give the Allies more time to take Rome and reach the Pisa-Rimini Line. And there was to be one very strict caveat: in July 1944, a significant amount of Allied resources would be diverted from Italy to be used in an operation that would give more direct support to OVERLORD. This was to be the Allied invasion of southern France, codenamed Operation ANVIL.

With this now an agreed and approved strategy, General Alexander was given a little under eight months in which to achieve this latest Allied goal. After that, he had been told emphatically, the tap would be turned off.

General Alexander now had just two months left. He had guessed the present battle would last three to four weeks. Replying to Churchill’s message on the morning of 11 May, he had signalled that everything was now ready for the battle ahead. ‘We have every hope and intention of achieving our object,’ he wrote, ‘namely the destruction of the enemy south of Rome. We expect extremely heavy and bitter fighting, and we are ready for it.’20

Throughout the night and into the morning of 12 May, the cipher clerks at AAI headquarters in the vast Reggio Palace at Caserta were busy transcribing signals as news of the opening of the great battle began to pour in. Even for a man of General Alexander’s imperturbability, these must have been tense times. There was much at stake.