The World at War (64 page)

MAJOR GENERAL FRANCIS DE GUINGAND

Montgomery's Chief of Staff

The
Italians surrendered and it was anyone's guess what the effect would be. I think most of us felt that the Germans would withdraw right out of Italy to the passes of the north, but in the event they didn't and so it looked a very difficult job because we knew the Italians' hearts were not in the fighting. It took us ten days to prepare ourselves to cross the Straits of Messina, and we got all our artillery geared up to cover us and the Air Force geared up to cover us, and the Navy ready and really it was a pretty thing but there was very little opposition when we got over. Then the real difficulty started when we got there and the terrain was completely different to the desert, which is flat, easy country to manoeuvre over. When you got to Italy there were these numbers of small rivers that were running down from the backbone of Italy down to the sea, which created bottlenecks every few hundred yards, and the Germans were blowing up all bridges. It meant a most laborious business of having to push the enemy rearguards out of action and then having to build bridges, get our people across and then come over the hill and find another ruddy bridge gone.

GENERAL SIEGFRIED WESTPHAL

Field Marshal Kesselring's Chief of Staff

Hitler and the High Command had no hope that the forces in southern Italy could survive a combined operation of the American Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army in a landing and therefore Hitler was happy that we could defend the Apennines, and that was the reason the Army Group B, under the command of Field Marshal Rommel, was in northern Italy in order to take this position. But the position in the Apennines was twice longer than the smallest position, south of Rome in the Abruzzi. We made this proposal to defend south of Rome because we were sure that we could survive the capitulation we expected from the Italians, and we have proof of that because we got all our divisions out from Sicily. Nevertheless the railroad and the roads were destroyed by air bombs and we have very few of petrol, so Hitler didn't believe us and all our requests for reinforcements were without any answers. If I did speak with the German High Command I got only answers good for a naughty child, but not for a man who has a strong task. After the Italian capitulation and the landing near
Salerno it seemed they were right but Hitler did change his opinion and he ordered that Army Group Kesselring had to defend south of Rome and that the Army Group B who was behind us had to go to the Western Front.

MAJOR GENERAL STRONG

We were preparing the land at Salerno and Eisenhower was very anxious indeed that he should get the maximum cooperation possible from the Italians and this is the reason that he insisted, or pressed very hard, that this armistice should be signed. We hadn't awfully many troops, General Castellano told me that we needed at least fifteen divisions if we were going to make a successful landing. We had four or five divisions but we couldn't tell Castellano that. If we could drop them near Rome that would cut the German communications and probably, with the assistance of the Italians, capture Rome. When the time came the Italians got cold feet. They said if you drop parachutists there we cannot support them: the Germans have taken away from us all our vehicles, all our petrol and we are absolutely immobile, and therefore they will be destroyed before they can do anything. I think myself that it was a pity we cancelled the operation. General Eisenhower sent a man up to Rome, one of his trusted officers, to find out the situations there and he reported back to Eisenhower and said the operation was not feasible. I think it's a great pity it was postponed; I have a feeling that it could have succeeded and that the Italians would have given us more support in Rome than we thought. But General Eisenhower said he had to take the point of view of the man on the spot, who said the thing was not possible.

DREW MIDDLETON

I think there was great exhilaration, yes, but more than that confidence. They knew their weapons, they knew their commanders, they thought they could do it. But my point is that the surrender of the Italians did not lead them to think that Salerno or anything else was going to be easy – they knew it was going to be hard.

MAJOR GENERAL STRONG

When we landed at Salerno the Germans had been suspicious for some time that it was a possible landing place. It was the most suitable. It would've been much better if we could've gone further north and cut the lines of communication nearer Rome. Admiral Cunningham, who was the naval commander at the time, wanted to sail up the Tiber to Rome but the Air Forces said, 'You can not carry out those operations except under an air umbrella, the support of the air, and the furthest north we can give you the support of the air is at Salerno.' And that is why Salerno was chosen. Of all General Eisenhower's battles that is the one when I think we were nearest to a tactical defeat. We knew the German troops were there, we knew that we would be attacked by them, and we knew the risk was very great. But when the time came it required the intervention of all the Air Forces, it required their intervention to save us at Salerno, and indeed one of the commanders there had got as far as considering that he might have to take his headquarters out of Salerno and back to Sicily again.

MAJOR GENERAL JOHN HARDING

Field Marshal Alexander's Chief of Staff

The purpose was to me quite clear: it was to pin down, to use up, exhaust as much of the German military strength as possible in order to give the maximum support to Overlord, and the subsequent operations in the north-west. Certainly that was always in Alexander's mind.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL CLARK

Ours was more or less a secondary role, you might say, an unglamorous role. You might compare it to the guards of a football team who take the tacklers out so the fleetbacks can run and make a touchdown. We were holding, and drawing into Italy all the troops we possibly could to keep them from interfering with General Eisenhower when he made the main show in Normandy, so that our role was to hold enemy troops, to keep them there, to chew 'em up and prevent them from fighting in other places.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

I don't know that the difficulties of fighting in the mountains were fully appreciated by people who thought of Italy as a place of sunshine and fine weather. I don't think they appreciated in any way the problems that arose, particularly the logistical problems, the movement problems from the effect of heavy rain and snowfalls in mountainous country, which was not very well roaded. I remember once a fairly distinguished Member of Parliament coming out to look at the front and we had a Member of Parliament on the Alexander staff and I told him that he'd better take his colleague out before dawn to make sure that he got wet through and that he had to help him push his Jeep out of the mud at least three times, and not to bring him home until after dark. And he had no difficulty in carrying out his instructions to the letter.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL CLARK

The terrain of course was – you couldn't have worse, it wasn't terrain that was susceptible to the use of armour. It wasn't until we got to the Po valley that we could really turn our armoured units loose. We had to use their armoured infantry as infantry and the tanks as artillery pieces.

PRIVATE WHITMORE

Sherwood Foresters

Oh, terrible, terrible it was. It was worse than being in the Peak District of Derbyshire. The village people of southern Italy are very crude, no toilets, no nothing. What I can remember, there were houses they lived in, would have a bed in that corner and a couple of nanny goats sleeping in this corner and a few fowls in that corner and that would be it. The road would lead up into the hills out of the village, a lane sort of thing, and each side of this lane was absolutely swarming with flies on human excreta. I've never seen anything like it, there were no toilets anywhere and possibly I think that was why so many of us were sick.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

The
Monte Cassino monastery is the keystone from a tactical point of view to the entrance to the Liri valley, which is the easiest and best approach from Naples to Rome. It stands very prominently on the eastern flank of the Liri valley and it would be out of the question to advance in strength up the valley on the way to Rome leaving Cassino in the hands of the enemy. I think it was necessary to bomb it from a point of view of the morale and confidence of the troops. Everybody thought the Germans were using it for military purposes. Whether or not they were remains of some doubt, but they claim they weren't. As far as we were concerned it was the general belief on that front that the Cassino monastery was being used for military purposes by the Germans, and that being the case it's part of my military philosophy you must not put troops into battle without giving them all possible physical and material support to give them the best chance for getting a success. That being so it was necessary to take out the monastery for those reasons. It proved to be illusory, because the ruins of the monastery buildings gave a better position to the German forces, which the 1st German Parachute Division which was stationed there took full advantage of, than the buildings themselves if they'd remained erect.

LIEUTENANT J GLENN GRAY

US Army Intelligence

It was at the very beginning of our entry into the line in front of Cassino. We were a very green division, well trained but inexperienced and like many cruelties in the war it was somewhat unintended. Our soldiers were accustomed to giving food to the hungry, shivering civilians and some order came down that this was illegal and improper. The civilians gathered with their tin cans with wire handles, and we discovered the rather horrible spectacle of having to throw food in huge cans into this dirty mud. An Italian winter, with these youngsters, even old men and women standing around watching us, was the rather grim introduction to the war for me in the winter of 1943–4. At first I was horrified and wrote in my journal about how hard a man's heart is. But like everything else I got used to it and managed to eat my fill – at first when we were giving the food to the civilians, many of us ate only half our lunches or suppers.

MAJOR GENERAL STRONG

It was very necessary to draw as many German forces as possible away from the
Anzio area and therefore the decision was made that in conjunction with the Anzio attack there should be an all-out attack on the main front, on what they called the
Gustav Line, which would gradually draw away those German divisions which were likely to oppose us at Anzio. Planning for this was mainly carried out by the American Army Group in Italy, but in January 1944 the Prime Minister, who was recovering from pneumonia, came to Marrakesh. Lord Beaverbrook was with him and I had to attend two conferences about the plan and I listened to him with great trepidation, to the statement that we would manage to penetrate the main front. I said that I didn't think this attack would be successful enough to do what they wanted. The Germans had spent endless effort in fortifying the Gustav Line with concrete pillboxes and every form of defence and I said I didn't think we'd penetrate it. So the Prime Minister listened to what I said but the plan went on as had been decided upon. And afterwards, when it was all over, he invited us to have a glass of sherry with him and he called me over to him. He said, 'You mustn't be disappointed if we don't take notice of what you say, but you are right, it's your right to call attention to the seamy side of this business.' People who had opposed the Prime Minister in the past had got into trouble, but I heard no more about it.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

I've got a very vivid recollection of that occasion: a stylish room, everybody sitting round the table with the Prime Minister in a dressing gown with a cigar resting over the top of a wine glass, Beaverbrook sitting next to him, and all of us round the table making our contribution during the course of the discussions about Anzio. Admiral Cunningham said that the operation was fraught with great risk whereupon the Prime Minister retorted, 'Yes, Admiral, of course there are risks but without risks there is no honour, no glory, no adventure,' which shut the Admiral up completely. Honestly, no admiral of the Royal Navy could possibly admit that he was not interested in honour, glory or adventure.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL CLARK

I
wanted to go into Anzio with all Americans or all British, one or the other, because when you take in a British division and an American one you're complicating your communications and your supplies and everything else. But that was turned down because they thought that if it was a failure each nation should share the blame equally. I went in with two and a half divisions, which was totally inadequate but that's the way the ball bounces in war. You do what you're told or they'll get somebody else to do it.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

BBC radio journalist

We were all assembled before the landing for the usual conference; we were to be briefed by the Corps Commander, Major General John Lucas and he appeared. I was a bit surprised, he wasn't quite the dynamic leader I expected, he smoked a corn-cob pipe and he was known to the troops as 'Corn-Cob Charlie', and he kept on quoting Kipling on every possible occasion. Some of Kipling's quotations didn't seem to work out later on. Anyhow, there was this rather nice, kindly fellow with a white moustache and he sat down and he briefed us. There was no map behind him because the Americans didn't believe in maps – the French never looked at maps, the Americans brought maps but didn't study them, the English lived on maps.

GENERAL WESTPHAL

When the Allies landed near Anzio in beginning of 1944 there were only two battalions and some very old-fashioned batteries at the coast for defending. If the Americans had realised the situation they could stay on the evening of the landing day in Rome. We had some feeling that new landings either south or north of Rome or Livorno or Genoa or on the Adriatic Coast were to be expected and we had given in December a general order to all troops what they have to do in any case of landing. When I was awaked in the morning of this operation at three o'clock I had only to say and give orders. Then came the troops from northern Italy, from southern France and from the front of the Tenth Army in the rear of Cassino and so we were able to build up a new front against the landing troops under the command of the American General Lucas. Then we got many forces from Germany too, but the counter-attack did fail because the very bad weather and because we had made a too strong attack line, but not large enough, and then the troops had not the possibility to use the opportunities. I was very anxious we would have too great losses and I proposed to end the counter-attack. Perhaps if I had not done so we could reach the sea.