By late spring 1943, the Americans and British and their
Commonwealth and colonial Allies had won the war in North Africa. The opening
of a Second Front in northwest Europe was still a distant possibility, and the
victory in Africa left the Allies in the Mediterranean with a choice of where
next to fight the Germans. Italy? The Balkans? Greece and the Aegean? The war
had to be fought somewhere: Allied planners estimated that a possible D-day in
France was still a year away. The triumvirate of leaders—Roosevelt, Stalin, and
Churchill—were at odds over where to fight next. The Russian victory at
Stalingrad in February 1943, and the British triumph at El Alamein, had proved
to be turning points. The preceding year in the Pacific, the Americans’
aircraft carrier groups had broken the invincibility of the Japanese navy at
the Battle of Midway, only six months after Pearl Harbor.
Churchill argued that control of the Mediterranean meant
control of Europe, and he wanted England, its armies, and the Royal Navy to
have it. In the telegrams that the three leaders exchanged daily, early summer
1943 was devoted to deciding how the war in south and southeastern Europe would
be fought. Control of Italy, with its 4,750 miles of coastline commanding every
shipping lane in the middle of the Mediterranean, and thus access to the Suez
Canal and India, was crucial for the British. It would also decide how military
operations in neighboring countries in southern Europe, like Yugoslavia,
Austria, and southern France, could be carried out. These in turn would dictate
the postwar map of the northern Mediterranean.
A liberated Sicily and Italy would enable the Allies to
dominate the Mediterranean sea-lanes and the air bases within striking distance
of Germany and the whole of southern Europe. The Allies had three possible
courses of action. First, invade Sicily
and the Italian mainland, and fight from bottom to top, thus tying down
hundreds of thousands of German troops who could otherwise be deployed against
a forthcoming invasion of northwestern Europe, or else used in Russia. Second,
they could stage seaborne landings at the very top of Italy, on the
Mediterranean and Adriatic coasts, fight across the country, and cut off the
whole mainland and the German and Italian forces in it. Third, they could
negotiate an armistice and surrender with the Italians, move fast, and invade
and occupy the country before the Germans had time to reinforce it from the
north. Having occupied Italy, the Allies could then race up the spine of the
country toward the Alps, outflanking and trapping German divisions by a series
of leapfrogging amphibious landings on both Adriatic and Mediterranean
coastlines. They chose the first option. And at first it all went according to
plan.
Meeting at Casablanca in January 1943, the Americans and
British argued about whether Sicily or Sardinia should be the first target.
Sicily won. In Operation Husky, begun on the night of July 9, 1943, the British
8th Army under General Bernard Montgomery and the American 7th Army under Lieutenant
General George S. Patton launched amphibious and airborne assaults across the
southern and eastern coasts of Sicily. It was the largest venture of its kind
in the war to date, and was successful, although many of the problems that
could beset a combined amphibious, naval, and airborne operation did so. Husky
was preceded by a series of diversions, the most imaginative of which was
code-named “Operation Mincemeat.” The Allies were obviously desperate to
persuade the Germans and Italians the landings were planned elsewhere, for as
Winston Churchill had said after the success of the North Africa campaign,
“Everyone but a bloody fool would know it’s Sicily next.”
So the Allies devised a cunning plan. The dead body of a
homeless Welshman from north London was painstakingly disguised to resemble the
corpse of a British Royal Marines officer. The scheme pretended that he had
drowned after an air crash while carrying secret documents destined for General
Harold Alexander, commander in chief of the Mediterranean theater. The body,
with a fictitious identity—“Major Martin”—was dumped overboard by a British
Royal Navy submarine off the southern coast of neutral Spain. A leather
briefcase was chained to it, containing papers purporting to show that the
Allies intended to invade Sardinia or Greece. A local fisherman found the body
after it washed ashore, and it was passed to the Spanish navy, which in turn
allowed German military intelligence in Madrid to copy the documents. Hitler
fell for it. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was transferred to Greece to command
German operations there against the supposed Allied invasion and, most
important, three German tank divisions were transferred from Russia and France
to Greece, just before the strategically crucial armored battle at Kursk in the
southern Ukraine in 1943.
But the actual invasion of Sicily, which began on the night
of July 9, got off to a discouraging start. Because of strong winds and
inexperienced pilots of the 147 gliders carrying the first wave of British
airborne assault teams, only 12 reached their correct targets and 69 crashed
into the sea. American paratroopers were scattered across southeastern Sicily.
The initial landings were almost unopposed, but within hours the Germans and
Italians counterattacked with tanks. The Italian army fought much harder than
expected, and the British, overconfident after beating them in North Africa,
found themselves out-fought by them, albeit briefly, on two occasions. But then
the weather swung in the Allies’ favor: the Italians and Germans had assumed
that nobody would attack in the bad weather that prevailed before the attack,
and so they were slow to react. The enormous dominance in Allied air power
hindered the German tanks’ ability to move easily in the open Sicilian countryside.
Using their infantry and tanks together, the Allies—who were numerically
outnumbered almost two to one—swung north, west, and east across Sicily,
pushing the Germans into the northeastern corner toward the Strait of Messina.
The Germans fought a series of bitter rearguard actions as they withdrew toward
the port of Messina, from where they could rescue their troops back onto the
toe of the mainland.
For the Allies, the fighting was characterized by several
factors they would encounter on the mainland. The combat was dominated by the
physical terrain and the Germans’ exemplary command of the fighting withdrawal.
Both sides effectively deployed armor and infantry together: the Germans used
lightning counterattacks to keep the Allies off guard as their main force
withdrew from one defensive position to the next. It was to prove a precursor
to the fighting on the mainland. There was also the heat, dust, mosquitoes, the
lack of water, the beauty of the countryside, the two-thousand-year history,
and the rural poverty.
The fighting in Sicily introduced the Allied soldiers and
their commanders to a new German opponent, which was to dominate the strategic
and operational dictats of their lives for the next eighteen months. Luftwaffe
Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring was in charge of the German Army Command South.
He was a fifty-eight-year-old veteran of the First World War who had commanded
the German air forces during the invasion of Poland and France, and during
Operation Barbarossa in Russia. He made several decisive observations in
Sicily. Without German support, the Italians would collapse, although they were
around 230,000 in number. So he decided to evacuate his 60,000 Germans back to
the mainland and save them for the defense of southern Italy. He did this in a
series of tactically brilliant fighting withdrawals, using the geography on
land and sea to his advantage. More than 50,000 Germans escaped from Sicily by
August, including two elite paratroop divisions, along with nearly 4,500
vehicles. Kesselring achieved this despite the fact that the Allies had command
of land, sea, and air.
The campaign lasted four weeks. The British and Americans
lost around 25,000 killed, wounded, missing, or captured, and the Germans some
20,000. The Italians surrendered and lost around 140,000, the majority of whom
were taken prisoner. Fighting was brutal. But after a morning spent observing
combat in a peach orchard, a British war artist said that he couldn’t decide
which was more compelling: the physical beauty of the island or the visceral
violence of infantry fighting. The combat casualties on the American side were
exceeded only by the number of soldiers who caught malaria, from the Anopheles
gambiae mosquito, breeding in the ponds, swamps, and drainage ditches that
crisscrossed Sicily.
The Allies ran head-on into the world of Sicilian organized
crime, and into la dolce vita too. In one key town, American troops fought
alongside Italian Mafia gunmen masquerading as partisans, after their battalion
commander agreed with the local capo that political and material control of the
area would revert to him once the Germans had retreated. The geography was new
too. Suddenly, after the throat-scorching heat and arid lack of compromise that
were the sand and rocks of North Africa, here were the southern gardens of the
old Roman Empire. The idiosyncratic color of war was also far from absent.
A unit of British special forces was the first to liberate
the eastern port of Augusta. They outfought and outmaneuvered a numerically
superior German unit, which withdrew toward a viaduct above the town. The
British soldiers then liberated not just the bar in the local brothel but also
the wardrobes of the prostitutes who worked in it. When an English company of
soldiers arrived to link up with the Special Raiding Squadron, they found a
small group of rugged, ragged men in special forces berets, captured German
weapons slung over their shoulders, some wearing a mix of combat uniforms and
women’s negligees and underwear. One was playing an upright piano under the
orange trees in the town square, surrounded by the others, who were drinking
Campari and singing.
But then the Italians made a move that very nearly caught
the Germans by surprise. In secret, they had negotiated an armistice with the
British and Americans: it was signed on September 3 at a military base at
Cassibile outside Syracuse in southern Sicily. Italy’s Fascist infrastructure,
under the twenty-year dictatorship of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, was by now on
the ropes. The country, badly defeated in North Africa and at sea in the
Mediterranean, was exhausted by war. Il Duce’s lavish architectural designs,
feckless colonial wars, and huge public spending had bankrupted Italy. His
cloying, sycophantic allegiance with Hitler had motivated him to dispatch
235,000 Italian troops of the 8th Army to fight alongside the Germans,
Romanians, and Hungarians around Stalingrad. They were badly equipped, with
weapons that, at best, semifunctioned in the Russian winter, and they had no
suitable clothing for the subzero temperatures. In seven months, from August
1942 to February 1943, 88,000 were killed or went missing; 34,000 were wounded,
many of them with extreme frostbite. And by July 1943, the Italian mainland was
already being bombed by the Allies. The country’s predominantly Catholic
population was at risk of reprisals if Pope Pius XII spoke out too vociferously
about the Germans’ treatment of Europe’s Jews.
So the end, when it came, was draconian. Mussolini was told
by the Grand Council of Fascism on July 25, 1943, that not only would his
powers be curtailed, but control of the armed forces would be handed over to
King Victor Emmanuel and Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio. The former was
considered ineffectual; the latter, with a shameful record in World War I, was
thought little better than Il Duce. So the next day Mussolini was arrested at
Villa Savoia in Rome. The signature of the armistice was effectively a total
capitulation of the country’s armed forces. For the Germans, who by chance had
intercepted an Allied radio conversation from Sicily about the negotiations, it
was a confirmation of what they had feared and expected all along. Their
capricious and militarily lackluster allies had done a deal behind their backs.
Fearing that with the Italian army incapacitated, the
British and Americans would quickly occupy Italy, the Germans moved as fast as
they could and launched Operation Alarich, their plan to occupy Italy. If the
Allies had been prepared to cooperate in full with the antifascist Italian resistance
before Mussolini was deposed, the British landings in mainland Italy could have
taken place unopposed. But British foreign secretary Anthony Eden insisted on a
full and unconditional surrender by the Italians. During the 1935 Abyssinian
crisis, Mussolini had described Eden, then an undersecretary of state at the
Office of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, as “the best dressed fool in
Europe.” Eden remembered and smarted at this, and demanded a full and
unconditional surrender.
Badoglio was timid and terrified of offending the Germans,
so the chance to provide muscular military leadership to the many Italians who
would be prepared to resist both Fascists and Germans was lost, and the Allies’
opportunity to join forces with the antifascist partisans was squandered. The
Germans’ speedy reaction paid off: while the Allies were still negotiating
final terms, and arguing about what should become of Italy’s monarchy, Hitler
dispatched nine extra divisions down through the Brenner Pass, eastward from
southern France and westward from Yugoslavia. After a short-lived defense by
Italians loyal to the king, Rome was occupied by the Germans on September 9,
1943. The Italian army collapsed into three pieces.
Italy Falls Apart
As an Italian army officer, Arrigo Paladini had volunteered
for service in Russia in 1941 and fought near Stalingrad. But unlike 88,000
other Italian soldiers in Russia who were killed or taken prisoner, Paladini
made it home alive, with nothing worse than a bad case of frostbite in one
foot. It meant that for the rest of his life he could hardly run. When the
armistice was signed at Cassibile in September 1943, Arrigo Paladini was still
a twenty-six-year-old second lieutenant in an artillery unit of the Italian
army, based near Padua in northern Italy.
As soon as he heard news of the armistice, broadcast from
Allied-occupied Algeria by the American major general Dwight Eisenhower, and
then on the BBC and Radio Italy, Paladini quickly decided which side he was on.
Fellow soldiers in the Italian army faced four choices: desert and go home;
follow the orders of superior officers and face detention in squalid camps to
await the eventual arrival of the Allies, or possible execution by the Germans;
remain loyal to the deposed Mussolini and his Fascist regime; or join a
partisan group. As a confirmed antifascist, he felt his only choice was to move
south and enlist with a group operating in the Abruzzo region, which lies
between the Apennines and the country’s eastern seaboard on the Adriatic.
Tens of thousands of former Italian soldiers, accompanied by
civilians who hated the German occupation of their country, formed partisan
groups. Loosely aligned along political lines, they were looking to the future
while fighting in the present. The Germans were the immediate enemy, their
defeat the immediate goal. But regional political control at the end of the war
was the ultimate objective. Paladini’s group was allied to the Christian
Democrats: its main rivals in the Abruzzo area were Communists. It started life
at a meeting in an ilex grove above a village, and at the very beginning had
around twenty men, with four Carcano rifles, two submachine guns, and a few
Beretta pistols, captured from the police, among them. Paladini took the code
name of “Eugene.”
After being deposed, Mussolini had been put under the guard
of a force of two hundred carabinieri, Italian paramilitary police officers who
had remained loyal to the king. They hid the former dictator and his mistress,
Clara Petacci, on the small Mediterranean island of La Maddalena, off Sardinia.
After the Germans infiltrated an Italian-speaking agent onto the island, and
then flew over it in a Heinkel He 111 taking aerial photographs, Mussolini was
hurriedly moved.
They took him to the Hotel Campo Imperatore, a skiing resort
in the Apennine mountains, high up on the plateau of the Gran Sasso and
accessible only by cable car. Here he spent his time in his bedroom, eating in
the deserted restaurant surrounded by carabinieri guards, and taking walks on
the bare, deserted mountainside outside the hotel. Hitler, meanwhile, had been
planning.
In September 1943, he ordered an Austrian colonel in the
Waffen-SS, Otto Skorzeny, to come up with a plan to rescue Mussolini, and to
assemble a group of men to do it. Thus was born Operation Eiche, or Oak.
Skorzeny was colorful, charismatic, and austere, and one of Germany’s foremost
practitioners of commando and antiguerrilla warfare. As a teenager growing up
in Vienna in the 1920s depression, he once complained to his father that he had
never tasted butter. Best get used to going without, replied his father.
Skorzeny was a skilled fencer too, and one cheek bore the scar of a dueling
schmiss, or blow from an opponent’s blade.5 By 1943 he was an officer in the
Waffen-SS with a hard-earned reputation for success in counterinsurgency
operations in France, Holland, the Balkans, and Russia. He commanded the newly
formed SS commando unit Sonderverband Friedenthal, and with paratroopers from
the German Luftwaffe, he rescued Mussolini without firing a shot.
The two hundred Italian carabinieri protecting Il Duce
surrendered after Skorzeny and his assault team landed by glider on the top of
the plateau next to the Imperatore. Mussolini, in a black homburg and
overcoated against the autumnal Apennine chill, was flown to Rome—with a stop
in Berlin to be greeted by Hitler—in a light aircraft. Then he returned to
northern Italy, where he created the Italian Socialist Republic, a puppet
Fascist state that the Germans drew out within the territory they occupied. It
became known as the Salò Republic, from the northern Italian town in which it
was headquartered. So with Mussolini now in his small Fascist statelet, Germany
occupying Italy, and the Allies arriving on the mainland, Paladini and his
small band got to work.
The Arguing Allies
By the time the Americans landed on the beaches at Salerno,
south of Rome, in September 1943, the Allies had just lost one of their more
capable generals. The irascible, direct, but tactically effective battlefield
commander Lieutenant General George Patton had led the U.S. 7th Army in the
invasion of Sicily. He had no time for soldiers under his command who
complained of suffering from “battle fatigue,” or any form of neuropsychiatric
combat-related stress. At the beginning of August 1943, visiting American
military hospitals in Sicily, he assaulted and abused two soldiers who were
claiming to be affected by fatigue. Army medical corpsmen had diagnosed at
least one, if not both, of them to be in the early stages of malaria,
alternating between high fever and shivering fits, with attendant paranoia,
hallucinations, nausea, and vomiting. It is questionable that either of them
knew what he was saying.6 Patton slapped both of them, kicked one in the
behind, and threatened to shoot the other. News of the incident mushroomed, and
despite there being as much support for Patton as criticism over the incident,
he was sidelined from combat command for several months as the 7th Army was
split up. His successor was a general who would influence the Allies’ strategy
as much as Albert Kesselring, though in different ways.
Generals Mark Clark and Harold Alexander
Lieutenant General Mark Clark was a brave and ambitious
staff commander who had risen fast through the ranks of the American officer
corps. Born in 1896, his father was a career soldier in the U.S. Army; his
mother, an army wife, was the daughter of Romanian Jews. He grew up on a series
of army posts, joined the army in 1913 at age seventeen, and graduated from
West Point in 1917 as a second lieutenant, 110th out of a class of 139. In the
manner in which promotion often works in wartime, he was a captain five months
later, before being wounded in France later that year fighting in the Vosges
mountains. He remained in the military between the wars, holding a variety of
staff appointments, at which he excelled, and was quickly promoted. By 1942, he
was a major general and deputy commander in chief under Eisenhower in North
Africa. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by his friend and
superior, General Eisenhower, after the successful completion of Operation
Flagpole in October 1942.
The Allies were determined that the French army in Tunisia
and Algeria not oppose the landings code-named “Operation Torch,” the invasion
of North Africa. A group of pro-Allied senior officers from the pro-German
Vichy French government, based in Tunisia, had indicated that they would be
able to persuade the French forces in that country not to resist an Allied
invasion. Along with a group of senior officers and three British commandos,
Clark was sent to meet them. The group flew by B-17 Flying Fortress to
Gibraltar and then boarded the British Royal Navy submarine HMS Seraph. (This
vessel would later drop the fake body of “Major Martin” off the coast of
southern Spain during Operation Mincemeat.) Clark spent three days ashore in
Tunisia, the mission was a success, and senior French officers announced that
when Allied troops came ashore in North Africa, they, the French, would arrange
a cease-fire. Eisenhower was delighted. It showed Mark Clark’s diplomatic
flexibility and powers of persuasion and command, and added to his staff
capability. By November 1942, Clark was the youngest lieutenant general in the
U.S. military.
In January 1943, he took over command of America’s first
field army of World War II—the 5th Army in Italy. Eisenhower was an admirer,
and Clark was certainly brave in a mildly reckless way, but he had a reputation
for being vainglorious and ambitious. Neither of these were unnatural or
surprising qualities in a West Point cadet who had finished near the bottom of
his class yet had risen so quickly in the military. Clark was also a classic
product of the political economics of 1930s America, a country that was
becoming a world superpower and where post-Depression industrial strength
restored much of the people’s confidence. It was a country where merit,
personal drive, and ambition went hand in hand. Clark was not lacking in of any
of these, and he found that war and high command provided the fuse for this
volatile trio of qualities.
The commander of the 15th Army Group, which contained the
British 8th and American 5th Armies, was General Harold Alexander. The son of
an earl, he was educated at Harrow, one of England’s leading private schools.
He joined the Irish Guards in 1911, after briefly considering becoming an
artist. Unlike so many of his generation, he survived the First World War,
where he fought on the Somme, and was decorated for gallantry three times.
Britain’s leading balladeer of Empire, Rudyard Kipling, arranged for his severely
nearsighted son, John, to serve in Alexander’s battalion at the Battle of Loos
in 1915, where he was killed. Afterward, he wrote that “it is undeniable that
Colonel Alexander had the gift of handling the men on the lines to which they
most readily responded … His subordinates loved him, even when he fell
upon them blisteringly for their shortcomings; and his men were all his own.”
Alexander served in India between the wars, and in 1937 was
promoted to major general, the youngest in the British Army. After Dunkirk in
1940 and service in England, in 1942 he was dispatched to Burma to lead the
army’s retreat to India. Recalled to the Western Desert by Churchill, he led
the Allied advance across North Africa after the battle of El Alamein, and then
took command of the 15th Army Group, reporting to Eisenhower. The British
diplomat David Hunt, who served as an intelligence officer in North Africa,
Italy, and Greece, was, after the war, on the British Committee of Historians
of the Second World War. He considered Alexander the leading Allied general of
the war. He quotes the American general Omar Bradley as saying that he was “the
outstanding general’s general of the European war.” But despite this, he had an
uneasy relationship with Mark Clark, who found him too reserved.
In September 1943, the main body of the two Allied armies
landed at Salerno, south of Naples, on Operation Avalanche. Two other British
landings took place in Calabria and at Taranto, on the toe and heel,
respectively, of Italy. A deception operation code-named “Boardman” coincided
with it, in which the British Special Operations Executive leaked faked plans
to invade the Balkans via the Dalmatian Adriatic coast. The plan was
successful, and these fell into the hands of the Germans in Yugoslavia. Winston
Churchill was, in the words of an American staff officer, “obsessed with
invading the Balkans,” part of his master plan to preempt a postwar Russian
occupation of territory in southern Europe that Churchill saw as rightfully
European, not Soviet.
Salerno was as far north as the Allies could land in Italy
while still retaining fighter cover from Sicily. The advance bogged down.
American troops that managed to break out of the Salerno bridgehead headed
eastward instead of north; they tried to link up with American, British,
Polish, Canadian, and Indian troops that were advancing northwest toward Rome
from their landing grounds at the bottom of Italy. The linkup failed. The
mountainous geography of the southern Apennines dictated that an advance to
seize the main access routes into the outskirts Rome would have to cross three
key rivers, then force its way up the valley of a fourth, the Liri, flowing
from the mountains that lay to the south of the capital. Kesselring had
anticipated this. The high ground that dominated these river crossings and the
main roads were controlled by German artillery, antitank weapons, and infantry.
Looming over the entrance to the Liri valley itself was a huge mountain, which
had a large ancient Benedictine monastery on top of it. It was called Monte
Cassino.
Trying to push northward and break the gridlock at Salerno,
the Allies made a crucial strategic decision that turned into a tactical error.
They carried out a huge amphibious landing north of Salerno, on the Mediterranean
coast, at a small fishing port called Anzio. It was only thirty miles south of
Rome. When 35,000 British and American troops landed there on January 10, 1944,
they found themselves completely unopposed, and they took the Germans by
surprise. They could have marched on the capital. But the querulous,
disagreeing Allied generalship—“the Arguing Allies,” as they were known—came to
the Germans’ rescue. Mark Clark placed the operation ashore under the command
of an overhesitant American general. The British and Americans were then
trapped for five months in an area where German gunners on the surrounding
Alban Hills had every square mile mapped onto their fire plans. The fighting
for both sides resembled the trench warfare of the Western Front, and one German
officer described it as being worse than Stalingrad.
British General Harold Alexander’s 15th Army Group comprised
Mark Clark’s 5th Army, with English General Oliver Leese commanding the 8th
Army. The Allies’ command structure then took another blow: Montgomery had left
for England in December 1943 to help lead the Allied invasion of Normandy. He
left behind him what he saw as a situation of strategic and tactical
disorganization, particularly by the Americans, that he was subsequently to
describe as a “dog’s breakfast.”
Clark’s dislike of Alexander was compounded by his
frustration at being the U.S. general who had to implement Alexander’s decision
to bomb the monastery of Cassino—although Clark personally furiously disagreed
with the order. The British in turn blamed Clark for the near failure of the
landings at Salerno. Into this goulash of mutual dissatisfaction, they also
stirred another ingredient. Clark had personally assigned the overcautious
American major-general John Lucas to command the Anzio bridgehead, and the
British, who took enormous casualties there, blamed Lucas for not breaking out
of the isolated enclave.
The landing at Anzio had been designed to solve Salerno and
the Cassino quagmire. It did neither. What it did do was give Field Marshal
Albert Kesselring plenty of time to prepare successive defensive lines north of
Rome, to which he could fall back one by one in a series of tactical
withdrawals. It allowed him to reinforce the north of the country and establish
a major defensive line that led diagonally across north-central Italy exactly
where the Apeninne mountains and the Po River valley perfectly suited defensive
warfare. It allowed him months to focus his capabilities and to build a string
of mutually supporting positions all along this line, which led from the
Adriatic coast on the east to the Mediterranean on the west. It was the
strongest German defensive position in southern Europe. Kesselring called it
Gotenstellung, the Gothic Line.
Italy was now a land of several opposing and cooperating
forces. There were the Americans and British, with their multinational corps
and divisions from India, Canada, and countries such as South Africa; there
were the Germans; there were the Italian partisan groups, with their myriad
political allegiances; and there were Italian Fascists loyal to Hitler and
Mussolini. The list of protagonists in the fight for one of Western
civilization’s oldest lands was as complex and tricky as the terrain and the
history of Italy itself.
