Italian campaign (see Maps 53–5). This period of the war has never ceased to excite harsh judgements. It was a hurried and improvised attempt to exploit the Axis collapse in the
North African campaign by carrying the war to the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The initial decision to strike at Sicily was agreed upon at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, (see
SYMBOL), but a definite agreement to invade Italy was not secured until the second Washington conference in May (see
TRIDENT). Once the Axis forces had surrendered in North Africa, the Allies had to be seen to be doing something to continue Germany's defeat on land. The only alternative was to bring the Allied troops, flushed with victory, home to the UK, an immensely complex task which would have left these experienced forces in unjustifiable idleness for twelve months.
The strategic logic underlying the employment of Allied forces in the Mediterranean basin appeared overwhelming to the British
Chiefs of Staff, especially the
Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS),
General Brooke. The aim of an Italian campaign was to distract German forces from France and the Eastern Front. It would prepare the ground for
OVERLORD (the landings in Normandy) and perhaps contribute to a decisive Axis defeat in the east. At TRIDENT the British chiefs declared that ‘the Mediterranean offers us opportunities for action in the coming autumn which may be decisive…If we take these opportunities, we shall have every chance of breaking the Axis and of bringing the war to a successful conclusion in May 1944’. But their plan at this stage was to get an army north of Florence in the shortest possible time to strike at Germany's vulnerable southern flank. They did not envisage fighting up every inch of the Italian peninsula.
Because of American scepticism, the eventual decision to invade was hedged about with qualifications. At the operational level, the aim of the Italian campaign was never clearly stated. All planners were agreed that speed and surprise were of the essence, but this would be achieved by the most hazardous and intricate of all military operations—
amphibious landings. They agreed, too, that adequate tactics would have to be improvised in a mountainous theatre of war quite unsuited to mobile warfare. These contradictions led to a great deal of muddle and miscalculation. The problems emerged clearly during the
Sicilian campaign of July 1943 (HUSKY) which ended with the Germans making an orderly withdrawal across the strait of Messina.
Sicily set the scene for the Italian campaign. Despite Allied command of the air and excellent intelligence, the Germans always escaped to fight another day. The invasion of the mainland was delayed by haggling over whether the Italian peace terms were consistent with the doctrine of
unconditional surrender announced at Casablanca. The Germans moved sixteen divisions into Italy during this interlude. The Allied invasion plan envisaged a pincers movement across the straits of Messina, with landings near
Reggio di Calabria by the Eighth Army (BAYTOWN) and a landing by the Fifth US Army south of Naples at
Salerno (AVALANCHE). The former was an object lesson in over-insurance, as the crossing was unopposed; the latter a careless, complacent scramble. Once the news of the Italian surrender was announced on the evening of 8 September, Allied troops expected the Salerno landing at 0330 the next morning to be unopposed. Instead, they were almost driven into the sea for, as at the start of the Sicilian campaign, the available force was spread over too wide an area. The beachhead only survived because the German counter-attack was too weak to destroy it. But Salerno convinced Hitler that the strategy advocated by
Kesselring, commander of Army Group C defending Italy, was correct: every inch of ground should be contested, and orders were issued for the construction of the
Gustav Line south of Rome.
Each battle thenceforth sought to break gaps in the German defences; the campaign was transformed into a remorseless, attritional grind. A foretaste of the great
battles of Monte Cassino was savoured during the frustrating fighting on the banks of the Garigliano and Sangro rivers in the autumn. ‘I don't think we can get any spectacular results’, Montgomery reported to Brooke, ‘so long as it goes on raining; the whole country becomes a sea of mud and nothing on wheels can move off the roads.’ But both the weather and the terrain were to deteriorate as the winter wore on. The four great battles of Cassino ( 12 January– 18 May 1944) brought to a head all the muddles and contradictions of the Italian campaign. Alexander, commanding the two Allied armies, was given no operational aim or timetable to fulfil it. His attacks were uncoordinated and often too weak for a decisive breakthrough. The Allies consistently underrated the defensive skill of the Germans. Central Italy was ideal defensive terrain, and because of the hard rock the attacking troops could not dig in. At Cassino, the Allies were drawn into fighting a battle of attrition under the most disadvantageous circumstances on ground not of their choosing—a battle they were neither mentally nor materially equipped to fight.
The first battle of Cassino resembled the
First World War battle of the Somme in even more appalling conditions and
Mark Clark, who command the Fifth US Army, showed an obstinacy worthy of Haig in insisting that attacks on the 2nd US Corps front north of Cassino town continue long after any chance of breaking through had disappeared. But Clark's persistence was justified by the need to break through and relieve the 6th US Corps at the
Anzio bridgehead. Anzio (SHINGLE), launched in January 1944, was another improvised amphibious operation. Its aim was never thought through. Alexander expected its commander, Lucas, to drive for the Alban hills, cut enemy communications south of Rome, and permit the Fifth Army to breach the Gustav Line and advance up the Liri valley. Lucas, taking advice from Clark, thought it more prudent to strengthen his defences. Anzio was isolated and beleaguered. The strategic design was reversed. Clark renewed his offensive to take the strain off troops whose landing had been calculated to relieve the Fifth Army. The first battle of Cassino cost the Fifth Army 16,000 casualties for just over 11 km. (7 mi.).
Alexander had never been very confident of Clark's ability, and for the second battle he turned to the Eighth Army, now commanded by
General Leese. A newly organized New Zealand Corps, commanded by
Freyberg, was entrusted with the breakthrough—an improvised force organized on the principle that the senior New Zealand divisional staff should double up their duties. Freyberg calculated that he could blast his way through the outlying German defences—the
Hitler Line. A massive artillery bombardment was supplemented by aerial bombing, which destroyed the 6th-century Benedictine monastery overlooking the town. But the most vexed issue underlying Freyberg's tactics was not whether the monastery should have been bombed at all, but why this experiment in air–ground co-operation was so incompetently executed. After the aerial attack an entire day was wasted before the ground attack was thrown in. Movement on the ground was hampered by the bomb damage. There were no distractions launched on other parts of the Fifth US Army front. The method was crude and bull-headed. Indeed, the third battle was a repeat performance of the second: 1,060 guns supported by medium and heavy bombers. Again, the advance was halted because of the appalling conditions on the ground. Due to an extraordinary blunder the ruined monastery, now an ideal defensive site for the Germans, was omitted from the list of targets. The courage, endurance, and sacrifice of the troops was not compensated for by any significant advance. The weight of firepower only added to, rather than detracted from, the problems of topography that hamstrung the Allies.
Such problems could not be overcome merely by deploying overwhelming strength in the air. By the end of the first month of the Italian campaign, the Allies had secured complete aerial superiority. Increasingly, this would reflect a very marked American dominance. In that time, the United States Army Air Forces had flown two-thirds of the sorties and dropped 70% of the bombs. The operations of the Mediterranean Allied Strategic Air Force, commanded by Maj-General Nathan F.
Twining and comprising the Fifteenth US Army Air Force and No. 205 Group RAF, demonstrated the limitations of air superiority. In part this was a function of terrain. Tactical bombing in mountainous country was much less effective than on the open plains of north west Europe. The Germans withdrew twice—after Sicily and Salerno—in the face of air superiority and showed a certain immunity to it. This did not prevent the formulation of STRANGLE, an attempt to force the Germans to withdraw from the Gustav Line by interdicting their lines of communication. Indeed Twining's British deputy,
Air Marshal Slessor, wrote that he was forced to admit that the plan was not working, that is, to ‘make it impossible by the end of April [1944] for the Hun to maintain an army of seventeen divisions south of Rome’. After the fiasco of the bombing at Cassino, when co-ordination between ground and aerial forces was conspicuous by its absence, Slessor also concluded ‘that the immediate battlefield is not the place to use the bomber,
even the fighter-bomber.’ This was perhaps too pessimistic. It was only towards the end of the campaign that the interdiction began to work—the scarcity of petrol reduced the value of armoured reserves, and after 21 March the Brenner Pass remained permanently closed. Such a development underlines a general conclusion, namely that no matter how enormous the level of air superiority, it normally can be no substitute for progress in operations on the ground; and success here demands skilful planning and tight co-ordination.
The fourth battle of Cassino was embodied in Operation DIADEM which culminated in the fall of Rome. At long last Alexander's group of armies would be employed like an army group and not a miscellaneous string of corps. The Gustav Line was breached by a two-fisted punch mounted by both armies and the 6th US Corps would break out towards Valmontone in the German rear. The operational aim was now at last spelt out—the destruction of the German Army south of Rome. Kesselring was tricked into expecting further amphibious landings and kept his reserves well back. A massive artillery bombardment opened the offensive at 2300 hours on 11 May 1944. Leese likewise held his reserves back and the fresh 13th Corps ruptured the Gustav Line in a set-piece attack. The breakthrough was completed by the 2nd Polish Corps seizing Monte Cassino and the astonishing feat of the
French Expeditionary Corps (FEC) in overrunning the
Hitler Line. Kesselring committed his reserves too late in the Liri valley. Alexander monitored these movements closely through
ULTRA intelligence and on 23 May ordered the Anzio break-out. The victory seemed complete, but could it be exploited?
DIADEM was the last opportunity for seizing a decisive victory in Italy. But all Clark's thoughts were concentrated on revelling in the glory of seizing Rome and denying it to the British. He issued orders altering the direction of his Fifth US Army's advance towards Rome even before it had arrived in the area of Valmontone. A gap opened up between the Allied armies as Clark moved away from the decisive point—closing the rear of the German Army. But even after the fall of Rome on 4 June, Alexander's second pursuit ordered three days later was wooden and hesitant. He gave the impression of preferring to close up to the next German defensive position—now identified by ULTRA as the
Gothic Line—rather than to destroy German forces in the open. This failure in the pursuit was the most marked feature of the western Allies in the Second World War.
After DIADEM the Italian campaign assumed a secondary status and six divisions (including the expert mountain troops of the FEC) were withdrawn for the
French Riviera landings. Efforts were made to replace some of these troops with Italians. An agreement had been reached with the Italian government substituting an enlarged force of six battle groups for the moribund Italian Corps of Liberation (CIL), originally formed in April 1944. This newly equipped force was to take the field between October 1944 and January 1945, but that proved too optimistic. By October 1944 only two of the battle groups had received any equipment. Bands of Italian partisians also launched guerrilla raids, though Alexander discounted their military value. On 1 July 1944 General John Harding, Alexander's chief of staff, estimated that Army Group C comprised 18–21 divisions and the Allied armies in Italy 14 infantry and 4 armoured divisions. Alexander was now ordered to close up to the River Po. Subsequent operations would develop in three stages: securing bridgeheads over the Po; gaining the line Padua–Vicenza–Verona; and finally, crossing the Piave to capture the Ljubljana gap. The first stage envisaged a central thrust which would entrap the Tenth German Army against the south bank of the Po. On 4 August Leese urged Alexander and Harding to meet him at Orvieto airfield. He persuaded them that an offensive (OLIVE) should be concentrated on the Adriatic coast. He believed that the going was better for armour north of Pesaro than in the steep mountains of the northern Apennines. This attack also had the major advantage for Leese of being distant from the Fifth US Army: there would be no doubt as to the nationality of the victor. But in persuading Alexander to adopt this change, Leese was repeating earlier errors in not utilizing the full resources of an army
group.
Leese, moreover, was wrong in his tactical calculations. The many rivers flowing west–east proved to be as great a barrier as the mountains. The time lost in reorganizing the Allied forces brought heavy autumnal rain which swelled their waters. The operation was not a failure, but it was not a conspicuous success either. Progress through the Gothic Line was satisfactory until the weather broke on 3 September, and clouds of dust were turned into glutinous mud. Even though Leese broke out into the Romagna by 20 September, the Eighth Army, after a year spent in the Italian mountains, had forgotten how to fight a fluid, mobile battle.
The lack of success of OLIVE confirmed
Marshall, the US chief of staff, in his view that Italy was an expensive sideshow, but Alexander refused to be downhearted. In December 1944 he resuscitated his grandiose scheme for an attack through the Ljubljana gap, driving on Vienna. But his ambitious goals only increased American suspicions of Britain's motives in enlarging operations in Italy. Marshall was inclined to believe that the British were trying to strengthen their imperial position in the Mediterranean; such suspicions made British attempts to modify American strategy in north-west Europe more difficult. After the Yalta conference in February 1945 (see
ARGONAUT), Alexander, now Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean, was instructed by the
Combined Chiefs of Staff merely to pin down the maximum number of German divisions in Italy while the Nazi collapse in the west continued apace. Alexander sought to fulfil this directive by annihilating the German armies before they could retire behind the Alpine barrier. In GRAPESHOT he at last achieved his goal of destroying the German army group now commanded by General Heinrich Von Vietinghoff (1887–1952).
Argenta fell to the Eighth Army and both Allied armies joined hands fittingly at Finale nell'Emilia on 25 April. A cease-fire followed on 2 May 1945.
Allied casualties during the campaign were 188,746 for the Fifth US Army, 123,254 for the Eighth Army. German casualties were probably 434,646 (including 214,048 missing). The process of attrition was therefore not self-defeating. But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the campaign had been Kesselring's skill as a defensive commander deprived of the initiative and facing overwhelming air superiority. As to the contribution of the Italian campaign to the Allied victory, the record is mixed. Contrary to early British expectations, it had no appreciable impact on the Eastern Front. As for OVERLORD, it provided a valuable proving-ground for gaining experience in amphibious landings and tied up more than 20 divisions. Nevertheless, the campaign was a distraction for the Allies, too. Hitler was able to muster 26 new divisions for the
Ardennes campaign without drawing upon forces in Italy. The Italian campaign became an object lesson in the constraints imposed by scarce resources and the tensions of waging coalition warfare.
Brian Holden Reid
Bibliography
Graham, D., and and Bidwell, S. , Tug of War: The Battle for Italy, 1943–45 (London, 1986).
Reid, B. H. , ‘The Italian Campaign, 1943–45’, in J. Gooch (ed.), The Decisive Campaigns of the Second World War (London, 1990).
