All Hell Let Loose (74 page)

Once again, Allied firepower had turned the scale. ‘The heavy naval barrages were especially unpleasant,’ noted a German officer. Every movement by Kesselring’s forces was met by a storm of shelling and air attacks. If Allied soldiers were appalled by Salerno, the Wehrmacht scarcely enjoyed the experience. ‘Here we got our first taste of what superior material force really meant,’ said panzer gunner Erich Dressler ruefully. ‘First came low-flying bombers in such close formation that one could not distinguish the individual squadrons, whilst artillery and mortars plastered us for hours.’ Again and again the panzers thrust forward, and again and again they were halted. Kesselring’s casualties in the battle totalled only 3,500, including 630 killed, against 5,500 British and 3,500 American, but the Germans lacked sufficient combat power to reach the sea. They mauled the invaders, as they would do later at Anzio and in Normandy. But they could not expel them in the face of devastating artillery and air support.

The 1943 Landings in Italy

The unimpressive Allied showing, against smaller Axis forces, nonetheless exercised a decisive influence on the subsequent campaign. Kesselring began to withdraw northwards, but Salerno convinced him that the Wehrmacht’s skills could keep up a long delaying action in the Italian peninsula, terrain ideally suited to defence. Hitler agreed, and scrapped his earlier plan for a strategic withdrawal to the northern mountains. The Allies’ Mediterranean assault was thus far successful, to the extent that it persuaded him to withdraw sixteen divisions from the Eastern Front to reinforce Kesselring. But the stage was set for eighteen months of slow and costly fighting in some of the most unyielding country in Europe. ‘The Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch,’ a German paratrooper wrote in an unfinished letter found on his corpse at Salerno, ‘and we will surely make hard chewing for them.’

Kesselring settled himself to conduct a series of defensive battles, which the Allies found painfully repetitive. At each stage they bombed and shelled the German positions for days before their own infantry advanced into machine-gun, artillery and mortar fire. After days or weeks of attrition, the Germans made a measured withdrawal to a new mountain or river line, protected by demolition of bridges, rail links and access roads. Everything of value to the civilian population as well as to the Allies was pillaged or destroyed. It was estimated that 92 per cent of all sheep and cattle in southern Italy together with 86 per cent of poultry were taken or killed by the retreating army. With the malice that so often characterised German behaviour, Kesselring’s men destroyed much of Naples’s cultural heritage before abandoning the city, burning whole medieval libraries, including the university’s 50,000 volumes. Delayed-action bombs were laid in prominent buildings, where they inflicted severe casualties after the city’s liberation. Some Allied soldiers behaved no better than their enemies, vandalising priceless artefacts.

Churchill remained wedded to a belief, indeed an obsession, that a big campaign in Italy could open a path into Germany. The Americans, however, decided that further Mediterranean operations offered only bitter fruits; once some good bomber airfields had been secured, they sought to divert forces as swiftly as possible to the invasion of France, and they were surely correct. British enthusiasm for a southern strategy was justified in 1942–43, but forfeited credibility as the cross-Channel attack loomed, and as the difficulties of achieving a breakthrough in Italy became apparent. Allied forces must stay there, to tie down Germans who would otherwise fight in France or Russia. But no important victory was achievable, certainly not by field commanders of such meagre abilities as Alexander and Clark.

By the end of September, thirteen Allied divisions confronted seven German, while a further eleven of Kesselring’s formations secured the country behind the front, employing the most brutal methods everywhere that partisans attempted to challenge their mastery. Through the autumn months the Allies battered their way slowly up southern Italy, checked at every turn by demolitions, ambushes, stubbornly defended river crossings and hill features. ‘If the “liberation” of Italy goes on at this rate,’ Countess Iris Origo wrote bitterly from occupied territory in October, ‘there will be little enough left to free; district by district, the Germans are leaving a wasteland.’ The ‘Gustav line’ along the Garigliano and Sangro rivers was contested for weeks, during which torrential storms reduced the battlefield to a quagmire. ‘I don’t think we can get any spectacular results so long as it goes on raining,’ Montgomery reported to Brooke shortly before relinquishing command of Eighth Army to return to England to direct the Normandy invasion. ‘The whole country becomes a sea of mud and nothing on wheels can move off the roads.’

Morale slumped. ‘Italy would break their backs, their bones, and nearly their spirits,’ American historian Rick Atkinson has written. ‘All roads lead to Rome,’ said Alexander ruefully, ‘but all the roads are mined.’ Booby-traps and anti-personnel devices inflicted a steady toll of casualties. ‘A man’s foot is usually blown loose at the ankle,’ a US Army doctor noted, ‘leaving the mangled foot dangling on shredded tendons. Additional puncture wounds of both legs and groin make the agony worse.’ Evacuating casualties from the mountains was a nightmare task, four men being required to carry each stretcher. The Germans created imaginative obstacles: north of the Sangro, they felled a half-mile-long line of roadside poplars. Before Allied armour could pass, these had to be cleared by bulldozers at the rate of one tree an hour.

Most men’s memories of the campaign were dominated not by the sun and natural beauty with which popular imagination endowed Italy, but by the horror of winter conditions. ‘The ground for fifty yards outside is MUD – six inches deep, glistening, sticky, holding pools of water,’ gunner officer John Guest wrote home. ‘Great excavations in the mud, leaving miniature alps of mud, show where other tents have been pitched in the mud, and moved on account of the mud to other places in the mud. The cumulative psychological experience of mud … cannot be described. Vehicles grind along the road beneath in low gear. Either side … is a bank of mud, thigh-deep. The sides … collapse frequently and the huge trucks, like weary prehistoric animals, slide helplessly down into the ditches … My men stand in the gun-pits stamping their feet in the wet, their heads sunk in the collars of greatcoats. When they speak to you they roll their eyes up because it makes their necks cold to raise their heads. Everyone walks with their arms out to help them keep their balance.’ In November, Canadian soldier Farley Mowat wrote from Italy to a friend in Britain: ‘I hate to disillusion you about the climate, but it must be the worst in the whole bloody world. It either burns the balls off you in summer, or freezes them off in winter. In between, it rots them off with endless rain. The only time I’m comfortable is in my sleeping bag, wearing woollen battledress and burrowed under half a dozen extra blankets.’

US battalion commander Lt. Col. Jack Toffey, a hero of the Italian campaign, mused aloud about how to develop his men’s killing instincts, to instil in them the tigerish lust to close with the enemy which alone could win battles: ‘Our boys aren’t professionals, and you have to condition them to enjoy killing.’ By November, more than half the soldiers whom Toffey led ashore had become casualties. Another American likened fighting in Italy to ‘climbing a ladder with an opponent stamping on his hands at every rung’. Combat artist George Biddle wrote: ‘I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire … cold, wet, hungry, homesick and frightened.’

By 1 December, seventeen Allied divisions were deployed against thirteen German ones. The invaders enjoyed overwhelming air support, but this was of limited assistance in winter weather, against defenders deeply dug into the mountains. In the four battles of Monte Cassino, fifty miles south of Rome, between January and May 1944, bombing destroyed one of the great medieval monasteries of Europe without significantly furthering the ground advance. The Allied armies, which now comprised a remarkable conglomeration of British, American, French, New Zealand, Polish, Canadian and Indian troops, displayed courage and fortitude in conditions resembling those of the Eastern Front, or of Flanders in World War I, but their sacrifices achieved little. Poor generalship and ill-coordinated attacks, together with German skill and intractable terrain, caused the failure of assault after assault. France’s Gen. Alphonse Juin was the only Allied commander to emerge from the mountain campaigns with an enhanced reputation: a marshal who had voluntarily dropped a rank to fight in Italy, Juin was far better fitted to direct operations than either Alexander or Clark.

The American field ambulances won warm praise, retrieving casualties hour after hour and day after day under continuous fire. One driver’s vehicle was blasted into a ditch by a near-miss, after which he went forward on foot and brought in four Indian casualties one by one ‘under a hail of fire … Day and night, and non-stop if necessary, those American boys would carry on. They could always be trusted to get through, no matter how sticky the situation.’ The 1/2 Gurkha Rifles spearheaded one of many attacks on Cassino. ‘The leading companies walked into a death trap. This scrub proved to be thorn thicket seeded with anti-personnel mines, its outskirts threaded with trip-wires linked to booby traps. Behind this deadly barrier stormtroopers lay in wait, in machine-gun posts less than fifty yards apart. Between these nests foxholes sheltered enemy tommy-gunners and bomb-throwers. A shower of grenades arched out of the night … The leading platoons dashed into the undergrowth and blew up almost to a man. Colonel Showers fell shot in the stomach. Two-thirds of the leading company was struck down within five minutes, yet the survivors continued to force their way forward. Riflemen were found afterwards with as many as four trip-wires around their legs. Naik Birbahadur Thapa, although wounded in many places, managed to burst through the scrub and seize a position … Stretcher-bearer Sherbadur Thapa made sixteen trips across this deadly ground before he was killed. An unscathed handful battled on until ordered to withdraw. Seven British officers, four Gurkha officers and 138 other ranks had fallen.’ In six weeks, 4th Indian Division suffered more than 4,000 casualties. Its own officers conceded that as a fighting formation it was never the same again.

Spirits were no higher on the other side of the hill. ‘I feel that much will be written in the future about these battles,’ wrote Sergeant Franco Busatti, a member of a fascist pioneer unit still serving alongside the Germans, ‘and I am curious to know the answers of tomorrow to the “why” of today.’ Swept along in the retreat of Kesselring’s army, he was struck by the contrast between Italian soldiers, chronically disordered, and the Germans, disciplined even in defeat. ‘The war will be won by either the Germans or the English and Americans,’ he wrote fatalistically. ‘The Italians are irrelevant.’ Like many of his countrymen, Busatti eventually decided that he owed allegiance to neither side: deserting the battlefield, he took refuge with his family at their home in Città di Castello until the end of the war.

For the Allies, however, there was an iron imperative to renew the assault. Captain Henry Waskow, a twenty-five-year-old Texan, led his diminished company on a night attack against one of innumerable German mountain positions, known only as Hill 730, on the moonlit night of 14 December 1943. ‘Wouldn’t this be an awful spot to get killed and freeze on the mountain?’ he murmured wryly to his runner. He felt a sudden yearning for toast. ‘When we get back to the States, I’m going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in and it pops up.’ A few seconds later, he was mortally wounded by a shell fragment when the Germans spotted the advancing Americans. Waskow left behind a letter for his family, of a kind which many young men wrote: ‘I would like to have lived. But, since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much, dear ones, for life in the other world must be beautiful, and I have lived a life with that in mind all along … I will have done my share to make the world a better place … Maybe when the lights go on again all over the world, free people can be happy and gay again … If I failed as a leader, and I pray God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try.’ It was only because many young men of many nations shared Waskow’s dogged commitment to do ‘the right thing’, as each belligerent society defined this, that the war could be carried on.

The principal victims of the campaign were the people of Italy. If Benito Mussolini had preserved Italian neutrality in 1940, it is possible that he might have maintained his dictatorship for many years in the same fashion as Gen. Franco of Spain, who presided over more mass murders than the Duce, yet was eventually welcomed into membership of NATO. It is unlikely that Hitler would have invaded Italy merely because Mussolini clung to non-belligerent status; the country had nothing Nazi Germany valued except views. As it was, however, between 1943 and 1945 the catastrophic consequences of adherence to the Axis were visited upon Italy. For many months even before Badoglio’s surrender, his fellow countrymen saw themselves not as belligerents, but instead as helpless victims of Hitler. Iris Origo wrote in her diary: ‘It is … necessary to … realise how widespread is the conviction among Italians that the war was a calamity imposed upon them by German forces – in no sense the will of the Italian people, and therefore something for which they cannot be held responsible.’ If this sentiment reflected naïveté, it was nonetheless widely held.