Читать книгу Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45 - James Holland, James Holland - Страница 17

For the best part of two years Kesselring’s opposite number had been General Sir Harold Alexander. No two commanders had battled it out for longer in the European war, and they would be pitting their wits against each other for a while longer yet. They were certainly aware of each other, although neither had ever tried to make the kind of mileage Montgomery had done from his professed rivalry with Rommel, and nor would they; both were far too modest. Self-glory was not their game at all.

There were other similarities. Alexander, or ‘Alex’ as he was universally known, was every bit as genial as Kesselring and he shared the German’s unflappability, but in many other ways they had little in common. Kesselring, for example, despite more than thirty years in the armed forces, had limited experience of battlefield command – he was a Luftwaffe field marshal, after all. Alexander, on the other hand, was one of the most experienced Allied battlefield commanders of the entire war. In a long and distinguished career he had fought in more battles in more countries and alongside more nationalities – including German – than any contemporary commander with whom he served.

And unlike Kesselring, his background was distinctly aristocratic. Born in December 1891, the third son of the Earl of Caldeon, he spent much of his childhood at the Caldeon estate in Northern Ireland, where he indulged in his lifelong passions of shooting, fishing and painting. At Harrow he excelled at sports, and then seamlessly progressed to Sandhurst, passing out in July 1911. As a fiercely proud Ulsterman – he carried an Irish flag with him throughout the war – he joined the Irish Guards, a regiment created by Queen Victoria only eleven years before, and although in those final pre-war years he had little opportunity to show his promise as a soldier, he did develop into the perfect gentleman, a tag he would never lose. Handsome, charming and athletic, he played polo, boxed, raced motor-cars at Brooklands and, at Easter 1914, entered Ireland’s most famous run, the Irish Mile, and won quite effortlessly.

The First World War developed him as a soldier and revealed extraordinary bravery and leadership. In November 1914, he was seriously injured in the thigh and was invalided home, but was determined to get back to the front as quickly as possible. To prove his fitness, he walked and ran sixty-four miles in one day, and by February 1915 he was back in France. Later that summer Alexander led his company at the Battle of Loos. He was wounded twice more, survived the Somme, Cambrai and Passchendaele, and in 1917, still only twenty-five, became acting lieutenant-colonel commanding the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards. By the war’s end, he had won a DSO and bar, an MC, the French Légion d’Honneur, and had been mentioned in despatches five times. Adored by his men, he combined courage and compassion with ice-cool composure and decisiveness: in combination, rare gifts in a soldier.

There was no sign of Alexander’s career faltering with the end of the war. In 1919, he was sent to command the Baltic Landwehr, part of the Latvian Army, in the war against Russia. Most of the men under his command were of German origin, so he had the unique distinction amongst Allied commanders of having commanded German troops in battle. Staff College and subsequent staff appointments were followed by stints along the North-West Frontier in India, experience that would not be forgotten in the equally mountainous terrain of Italy.

By the outbreak of war in 1939, ‘Alex’ was one of the youngest major-generals in the British Army and commanding the 1st Division. In France, he supervised the final withdrawal of British troops from Dunkirk and was the last senior officer to leave – on the penultimate day of the evacuation.

Remaining in England for the next two years, Alexander did much to revolutionise the way British troops were trained, developing battle schools in which troops were taught simple combat drills and, by using live ammunition, were given a much-needed dose of realism. It was during this time that he began increasingly to catch the Prime Minister’s eye, and in early 1942 Alex was posted to Burma to oversee yet another retreat from defeat. This time, with his usual unflappability, he safely oversaw the British crossing of the Irrawaddy River, and with it – for a time at any rate – saved British forces from the threat of annihilation at the hands of the Imperial Japanese.

In August 1942 he was sent to Cairo to become British Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, with Montgomery, as Eighth Army commander, as his subordinate. While Monty commanded on the battlefield, Alex improved the administrative and supply situation, played a vital buffering role between his forces and London, as well as adding his military advice on the ground; El Alamein was his victory too. By the beginning of 1943, with the Allied campaign in Tunisia stalling badly, Alex was given command of the newly formed 18th Army Group and took over direct control of the campaign. In a little over ten weeks after taking command, he had improved almost every aspect of the Allied war effort in Tunisia and had won a great victory, with the capture of more than a quarter of a million troops.

When he had taken over in Tunisia, Alex had been justifiably concerned about the greenness of American troops, but had handled the firebrand, General Patton, with firmness and skill and had earned the respect of not only Patton, but another future star, General Omar Bradley. By the time of the Sicily invasion, however, he had still had certain reservations about the effectiveness of American troops, and this had led to a potentially damaging dispute in which he had allowed Montgomery and Eighth Army to gain a priority over the American troops that they did not deserve. That it was Montgomery who bore the brunt of understandable American grousing says much about Alex’s personal charm and charisma. To Bradley, Alex carried ‘the top rating among Allied professionals’,27 while to General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean, he was not only an outstanding soldier but also personable and easy to get along with. ‘Americans,’ he noted, ‘instinctively liked him.’28

So did almost everyone else. He had an ability to speak freely with anyone and to make them feel at ease. He never swore – describing something as ‘tiresome’ was the closest he came to cursing – and only once was he seen to have lost his temper, and that apparently was when some of his men refused to give two dying Germans a drink of water during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. He drank but was never drunk; he liked to sketch and paint whenever he had the chance, spoke a number of languages including German, French, and Russian, and when in Burma even made an effort to learn Urdu.

Moreover, he looked the part. Despite his modesty – bragging was anathema to him – he had something of the dandy about him. Dressed immaculately at all times, he liked to wear a high-peaked cap, with its visor dropping over his eyes – a style he had spotted on a Russian officer in 1919 and which he had liked so much he had asked his hatter in St James’s to copy.

He was universally admired by his men. General John Harding, his Chief of Staff, wrote that Alex’s soldiers ‘thought of him as one of themselves, as a soldier. That’s what I call the magic; he’d got that.’29 During some of the darkest moments at Salerno, he had joined Clark, striding amongst the troops and exuding a sense of unruffled calm and resolve. Never one to stay stuck away miles behind the lines, he was seen at the front most days, talking to commanders and troops and surveying the battlefield for himself. Whilst maybe not a brilliant tactician, he developed a very sound judgement and understood the men under his command, from privates to generals, and how to get the best from them all. He understood how much men could endure and what could be expected of them. He understood that armies need confidence and experience in combat, and that the approach to battle – the preparation and the removal of potential stumbling blocks – was the key to success. And he understood that any attacking fighting force needs both balance and momentum.

The problem facing Alex in Italy had been that right up until the late spring of 1944, he had had neither balance nor momentum, and far too many stumbling blocks, none of which had been of his making. From the moment Allied troops had landed at Salerno, Alex had been plagued by the slow build-up of his forces. In Italy, the German build-up, begun way back in July, had been far faster than anything the Allies had been able to achieve. Supplying their forces by land – on rail and by road – was a huge advantage. The Allies, on the other hand, had only been able to do so by air and sea – and mostly the latter. The frustration was that the shipping that was so desperately needed simply had not been available; nor had there been enough landing craft. ‘The reduction in craft,’ Alex had written, ‘already decreased by wear and tear, has been so serious as to preclude us from taking advantage, other than with minor forces, of the enemy’s inherent weakness, which is the exposure of his two flanks to turning movements from the sea.’30 In other words, rather than playing to the advantages Italy offered the attacker, the Allies had been forced to play to its massive disadvantages instead. As any German commander was aware – not least Kesselring – there were more than 2,000 miles of Italian coastline for them to defend. Fortunately for them, the Allies simply did not have the shipping to make the most of this defensive weakness.

The Allies were fighting in far more corners of the globe than Germany. Not only had there been the continuing build-up of troops and supplies in Britain, there had been their commitments in the Far East, and, at Churchill’s urging, in the Aegean, where British forces had humiliatingly lost the battle for the Dodecanese Islands. With the huge losses of shipping so far in the war – in the Pacific, the Atlantic, Arctic and Mediterranean – resources had been stretched to breaking point.

Furthermore, the US Chiefs of Staff had decided that the build-up of an effective bomber force in Italy at the airfields around Foggia in central southern Italy should be the first priority. Six heavy bomber groups of around forty-eight aircraft each had been sent over the moment Foggia had been captured at the end of September, forming the embryonic US Fifteenth Air Force, with twelve more and a further four fighter groups operating from Italy by the end of 1943. By March 1944, there had been twenty-one heavy bomber groups in Italy and seven long-range fighter groups – some 1,300 aircraft.

On the face of it, this had been a sensible idea, especially as part of the reason for invading Italy had been the prospect of bombing Germany from the south. However, transporting the men, parts, ammunition, ordnance and fuel necessary for such an air force took up vast tonnages of shipping that could have otherwise been used to strengthen the ground forces. Alex had requested that the Fifteenth Army Group be built up properly first. This had been refused.

Compounding the problem had been the removal of a large number of his more experienced troops to Britain in preparation for the invasion of France. Their transfer had long been planned for November 1943, but even so, when it took place it had been felt particularly keenly because German resistance was stiffening all the time. The slow build-up and shortage of Allied troops had put a greater strain on those already in place in Italy. Clark’s Fifth Army had struggled to recover quickly from the losses they had suffered at Salerno and the fighting that had followed first at the River Volturno and then as they had struggled through the Mignano Gap. Unfortunately, however, as pressure on the Germans had lessened, so the enemy had been able to spend more time on improving defences and making the Allied troops’ task even harder, thus creating a vicious circle. For the kind of speedy campaign the Allies had envisaged, far greater commitment had been needed. Yet because Italy had always been seen, by the Americans at least, as a secondary theatre, this commitment had not been forthcoming. Although the Normandy invasion had not yet occurred, the Allies had – in logistical terms – already begun fighting on two fronts in the West. Had they hit Italy hard with everything they had from the outset, the situation by the spring of 1944 might have been very different.

As it was, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had won important but costly and hard-fought gains on the Adriatic coast, and the US Fifth Army had continued to push northwards, eventually breaking through the first German line of defence, the so-called Winter – or Bernhardt – Line, before running out of steam around Cassino where in January they hit the more formidable Gustav Line. In the mud, cold, and rain, the fighting had suddenly seemed horribly familiar to all those who had experienced the Western Front in the First World War – and that had been the majority of British commanders. For Churchill and the British chiefs, the opportunity for glorious exploitation in the Mediterranean and Balkans had passed; it was as though a glittering prize had somehow slipped through their hands. Meanwhile, as far as the American chiefs had been concerned, Italy had become the millstone of their worst fears, a drain that was distracting their efforts from the most important operation of all: the invasion of France.

In the middle of December 1943, General Alan Brooke had toured the Italian front on his return from the Tehran Conference, meeting with Generals Alexander, Montgomery and Clark, and other commanders. Already depressed about the slow Allied progress in Italy, Brooke saw nothing to improve his mood. Monty, he had thought, looked tired and in need of a rest, while it seemed as though there was no real plan for the capture of Rome, the goal for which they were supposed to be striving.

This was not quite true. Back in October, Alex had begun to formulate ambitious plans for Italy, recognising the need for the Allies to force their way north of Rome, clear of the Apennines, and break out into the Po Valley and the plains of the north. While he had not conveyed this far-sighted strategy to the Allied chiefs, just a few days later he had presented a very clear picture of Allied prospects and had urged greater ambition and direction in Italy. Churchill had been so impressed that he had cabled this ‘masterly’ document in full to Roosevelt and Stalin. But at this stage the Tehran Conference was still over five weeks away. Alexander and his commanders could only be expected to do so much without clear policy and direction from the top.

As far as Brooke had been concerned, it was clear to him that Alex had not been ‘gripping this show’.31 His comments had been an expression of his disappointment and frustration at Allied progress thus far in the campaign; throughout the war, generals not doing as well as hoped were often accused of ‘lacking grip’. Sometimes, the accusation was justified; sometimes not. Certainly what Brooke failed to appreciate was that fighting on a battlefield such as Italy, with its horrendous geography and, in winter, truly atrocious conditions, had less to do with fire power – or even air power – and more to do with manpower; and in this area the Allies did not have the overwhelming advantage needed by any attacking force. Even by May 1944, when Alex would at last begin the great battle for Rome, the Allies had only twenty divisions available in Italy to pit against Kesselring’s twenty-six.

The ‘division’ tended to be the military unit commanders used when analysing their strength, and at full strength usually meant around 14,000–17,000 men. However, although German and Allied military units were similar in composition, only recently had the Allies closed the gap in terms of tactics and training. Not until Alexander and Montgomery’s arrival in North Africa did British forces begin to work out how to beat German forces on the ground, and in this they were greatly helped by the massive material contribution of Britain’s new ally, the United States.

America was not a naturally warring nation, and its people were insular and inexperienced in the ways of continental politics and warmongering. However, America did have three important factors in its favour: it had enormous resources of manpower, a rapidly expanding and large-scale industrial capability, and a willingness to learn. Britain, on the other hand, could claim maybe only the last of these attributes. These three potential war-winning facets had been clearly demonstrated in the final six months of the campaign in North Africa. US equipment – from tanks right down to the tiniest nuts and bolts – had given the British Eighth Army technological parity with Germany for the first time and had played an important part in the victories at Alamein and those that had followed. In Tunisia, American greenness had been horribly shown up during their first battles with German troops, but despite several knocks and one particularly humiliating setback, they had bounced back, and in the closing stages showed how much they had progressed and learned.

Yet just as the Allies seemed to have caught up with the Germans, they had found themselves flung against topography and conditions that required a different, almost retrogressive, approach. The possession of high ground has been an advantage in warfare since the dawn of time, and in Italy the German defenders were able to choose where they defended, making the most of the best observation points. Guns, mortars and machine-gun posts could be hidden whilst maintaining a clear view of the enemy, while troops could hide amongst rocks, caves and in cellars that were often a feature of the countless towns and villages that dotted the mountains. Kesselring had discovered that a rearguard of only company strength could hold up an Allied division for as much as a day, taking pot shots, and then silently slipping away under the cover of darkness. The Allies could not pass through the valleys until the surrounding high ground was taken – otherwise they would have been sitting ducks as their massed equipment tried to rumble along the few metalled roads that would support them. This meant assaulting often viciously steep slopes, where they would find the Germans dug in on the reverse side where they were impervious to all but a few lucky mortar strikes.

In the winter the situation had been made worse because only the very best roads – which were few and far between – could be used; the rivers were high and difficult to cross; and the Germans had flooded the low ground of the Liri Valley that lay beneath the Monte Cassino massif.

So it was that while the ground was largely impassable to trucks, tanks and other vehicles, the onus lay with the Allied ground troops, the foot-sloggers, to make any significant progress. Around Cassino, and at Anzio, they had been all but halted. Suddenly the men had to unlearn the lessons of this new, highly mechanised war and return to the tactics of the 1914–18 war – a life of perpetual bombardment, trenches and dugouts and night-time patrols into no-man’s-land, and morale-sapping battles that achieved small pockets of ground in return for all too many casualties.

Yet from the Allied point of view, these small gains were important. They had kept up the pressure on the Germans so that Kesselring had been forced to keep troops at the front at all times. It would also make their task that much easier when the big offensive was finally launched at the beginning of the summer. The Anzio bridgehead, for example, seen as a failure back in January, now gave Alexander a huge advantage, forcing Kesselring off-balance in his efforts to protect both fronts. It also meant that Alexander had the launch pad for a double blow, a right and then a left punch, when the battle began.

By the beginning of May 1944, an already severely overstretched Germany had pushed around half a million troops into the peninsula, which was precisely what the Allies had hoped for when first considering Italy. And, as Alexander pointed out, ‘All this was achieved without our once having that numerical superiority usually considered necessary for offensive operations, with a mixed force of many nationalities and with little opportunity of flexibility in their employment.’32

Even so, there was still a feeling during those long winter months of 1943 and early ’44 that Alexander and his forces had lost a sense of direction. Because of the lack of shipping – above all – the landings at Anzio had had neither the scale nor conviction ever to cause a significant breakthrough, while the battering at Cassino suggested the Allies were not using what resources they did have to the best of their potential, despite the enormous limitations imposed by both weather and geography.

There had been a number of changes amongst the command in Italy as 1943 had given way to 1944. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, had been given command of OVERLORD, and Montgomery had left Eighth Army to command Eisenhower’s land forces into northern France. Eisenhower had in fact specifically asked for Alex as his commander, but had been overruled by Brooke, less because of his doubts about Alex but more because he had believed it would have been a mistake to remove both senior commanders in the theatre in one stroke. Furthermore, he had recognised that no other British general got on better with or was more highly regarded by the Americans; and while it was now recognised that OVERLORD was predominantly an American show, it was equally considered that the campaign in Italy was being largely run by the British. In the interests of future Allied policy in the Mediterranean, Brooke had understandably wanted the most popular British general to help maintain influence over their American ally.

General Alexander had also been kept on as battlefield commander in Italy. General Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland Wilson, at the time British C-in-C in the Middle East, had been appointed Supreme Commander in Eisenhower’s place, which had been a sound decision. The role of the Supreme Commander was largely political and administrative. It was far better that Alex remain in command of the battle. He did, however, have a new Eighth Army commander in Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese, and, crucially, he had a new Chief of Staff in Lieutenant-General John Harding.

Harding, an experienced staff officer and commander, had only recently recovered from serious wounds suffered in North Africa when he had arrived in Italy at the beginning of the year. Good staff officers were worth their weight in gold. From army group to brigade level, every commander had a team of them, whose job was to assist him in the task of command. And most important of all was the Chief of Staff, who was the commander’s right-hand man: his adviser, his confidant; the man who ensured the smooth operation of logistics and planning; and the conduit between the headquarters and the HQs down the chain of command. It is no coincidence that the best generals almost always had excellent Chiefs of Staff. Eisenhower, for example, had found his ideal partner in General Bedell-Smith; Montgomery in General Freddie de Guingand; Kesselring had General Westphal. In North Africa, Alexander had been well served by Lieutenant-General Dick McCreery, now commanding X Corps. But since Sicily his Chief of Staff had been Alec Richardson, who was perfectly competent but lacked vision and had been unable to bring about a partnership of minds with Alex.

All this had changed with Harding, who had been a platoon commander at Gallipoli and who had developed a deep and studied understanding of warfare. Together he and Alexander had immediately begun to plan for a large-scale offensive that would shatter the German defences for good. By constant discussion between the two, Harding had drawn up a new appreciation of Allied aims in Italy, in which he had suggested that capturing Rome was not a big enough goal. Instead, German forces in Italy had to be completely destroyed, so much so that only by massive reinforcement would the German southern front avoid complete collapse.

For this to be achieved, Harding and Alexander had recognised that three things had to happen. First, there needed to be a superiority of manpower of at least three to one at the main point of attack. Second, the weather needed to be sufficiently dry to allow the Allies’ great mechanical superiority to play its part; and third, there needed to be enough time to properly rest, refit and retrain those forces exhausted by the bitter winter fighting.

Throughout the spring, the battle plan had been refined and preparations made. Exhausted troops were moved out of the line and to a quieter sector, while new divisions, both American and British, had arrived and made their way towards the front. A major and extremely complicated regrouping had taken place, with army boundaries changing and a number of corps crossing over from Eighth to Fifth Army and vice versa. In this new battle, Alex was going to use both armies, supported by more artillery and aircraft than had ever been used before by the Allies in a single battle.

There were to be three distinct phases in the battle. First, the Allies had to break through and destroy the Gustav Line before Kesselring realised the threat of an amphibious landing further up the coast was nothing more than a deception plan. Second, the Allies had to break the second line of defence, the Hitler or Senger Line as it was variously called.* Finally, once Kesselring was fully occupied trying to hold the main line in the south, and the Allies were surging north towards Rome, a reinforced US-led VI Corps would burst out of the Anzio bridgehead and cut off the retreating German AOK 10. Surrounded, it would then be destroyed.

The date for the launch of the battle, originally April, was moved to May, while from the middle of March, Allied air forces had been carrying out Operation STRANGLE, which aimed to destroy all German lines of communications – roads, bridges, and railways – from Cassino to 150 miles north of Rome.

By the beginning of May 1944, the stage had almost been set. General Alexander had got his three-to-one advantage around Cassino, his guns were primed and ready, and overhead he had complete command of the skies. But only time would tell whether this enormous battle would wash away the disappointments of the winter and bring about the decisive victory that promised the Allied armies in Italy so much.

* The Germans initially labelled it the Führer Line, but then, realising this might have an adverse psychological effect should it be overrun, changed it to the Senger Line. The Allies, however, continued to refer to it as the Hitler Line.