A World at Arms (117 page)

For some months there had been dissatisfaction in Italy. The loss of empire, the obvious threat of invasion, and the inability of Italy or her German ally to defend Italian cities from Allied air attacks all redoubled the original unpopularity of the alliance with Germany and the war.
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Furthermore, the Duce, who personified the regime, had lost his magic, his political touch, and, it would appear, his health. The “changing of the guard” of February 1943, Mussolini’s way of dealing with the crisis facing his country, simply did not produce the sort of national resurgence which was needed. Three strains of dissatisfaction merged into an upheaval which destroyed the Fascist system. First, there were the doctrinaire and rabid Fascists, led by Roberto Farinacci, who wanted to revive and reinvigorate what they hoped would be an energetic Fascist regime, which would galvanize the masses to fight alongside Germany against the British and Americans.
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There was a second group led by Dino Grandi, a Fascist also but far less certain than Farinacci that Mussolini was still the man to lead the country. Grandi wanted to reduce Mussolini’s authority over the military, which he clearly could not direct effectively. Third and most important, the circle around the court and King Victor Emmanuel III and some of the military leaders, who hoped to replace Mussolini with a regime that could find a way for Italy out of the war.

In a coincidence of timing largely created by the stimulus to all three groups by the obvious inability of German and Italian forces to block the invasion of Italy, these plots came to a head on July 24–26, 1943. At a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council held on July 24–25, the first since October 1939, the opponents of Mussolini carried a motion against him by a vote of 19 to 8. This action made it easy for the King to move up by one day the previously developed plan to dismiss Mussolini, immediately thereafter arrest’ him, and simultaneously announce the appointment of Marshall Pietro Badoglio as head of a new government. In no time at all, the Fascist Party which had dominated Italian affairs for
more than two decades practically evaporated while a new government of bureaucrats attempted to administer the country.
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Mussolini appears to have had no real sense of what was actually going on around him.
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He had completely failed to push Hitler on the critical issues facing Italy when they met at Feltre on July 19; coming during the bloody fighting at Kursk, that meeting had been a particularly poor time for him to urge his idea of a separate peace with the Soviet Union.
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On July 25, he explained to Japanese ambassador Hidaka Shinrokuro that the only hope for the Axis lay in Germany’s giving up the Ukraine, going back to the 1939 border, and taking advantage of the difficulties in the relations between the Soviet Union on the one hand and Britain and the United States on the other–symbolized by the Soviet establishment of the National Committee for a Free Germanyby concentrating all energies on the struggle against the Western Allies.
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Whatever theoretical sense there may have been in this concept, for which Mussolini wanted Japanese support, it could hardly have any impact on a domestic situation which was collapsing around him. The people remembered the tens of thousands of soldiers the Duce had sent to death and imprisonment on the Eastern Front for his own prestige and no conceivable Italian interest, not his new found insight (naturally kept secret from the public) into the strength of the Red Army.

The new government of Badoglio promised the Germans to continue in the war, though the latter were certain–and correctly so–that it would try to leave.
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In the ensuing race between Badoglio and his associates and the Germans, the Italians did almost everything as stupidly and slowly as possible. They did not even conceal or guard Mussolini effectively, and in September he was rescued by a German airborne operation and subsequently installed by the Germans as a puppet in northern Italy.
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Unwilling either to face the wrath of the Germans or to surrender to the Allies, Badoglio and his military and diplomatic assistants dithered for weeks.
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In the end Badoglio had to surrender as the Allies had told him from the beginning;
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but in the meantime the Italians had allowed the Germans to bluff, threaten, and bamboozle them out of important spots in the Italian-occupied territories, the passes through the Alps from France and Germany, and key positions all over north and central Italy as well.
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As the Allies announced the Italian surrender simultaneously with the landing at Salerno, Italian soldiers began surrendering in great numbers to the Germans. Since they would not fight for their country against the Germans, they would now be hauled off to slave labor camps in Germany, which many did not survive, while the soldiers of other countries fought over and devastated the country they left
behind. Even the capital was not properly held by the Italian army, and the planned landing of the United States 82nd Airborne Division to seize Rome was called off at the last moment when the Italians insisted on additional forces.
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With Rommel recalled from Salonika on July 26, the Germans had moved quickly to contain the risk of Italian defection and poured troops into Italy. In the last days of July and early August, they had withdrawn crack SS units from the Eastern Front and sent them into central Italy, while their successful evacuation of all units from Sicily enabled them to prepare to defend the northern portion of southern Italy, around Naples. The German garrisons of Corsica and Sardinia were successfully shipped back to the mainland as the Italians looked on in fear and confusion. As discussed in
Chapter 7
, a substantial portion of the Italian navy did get away, but even in the home bases of that proud navy, tiny detachments of Germans prevented sabotage, seized key facilities and held some of the warships. If there was anything the new Italian government could have fouled up that was overlooked, it has yet to come to light.
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The Western Allies, who had not settled the details of their Mediterranean strategy at the Washington Conference in May, had left it to their theater commander, General Eisenhower, to recommend the next step after “Husky.” The division of opinion over a landing on the mainland was resolved in favor of such a project when the Allied air commanders, who had opposed such a landing, shifted to its support in order to make possible the seizure of the airfields around Foggia on the Adriatic coast of Italy. From there, many of the most important targets of the German and German-controlled aircraft industry could be reached and the fighter defenses forced to divide their effort. The result was that, with the newly won supporters, Eisenhower by July 18, 1943, adopted Brooke’s and Churchill’s idea of a landing on the Italian mainland and obtained the approval of the Combined Chiefs of Staff for an amphibious assault at Salerno, the northernmost beach within range of fighters from Sicilian bases (“Avalanche”), and a supporting crossing of the Straits of Messina to the Calabrian toe of Italy (“Baytown”).
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The fall of Mussolini and the soundings of the Badoglio government for an armistice coincided with the early stages of planning for the Salerno and Calabrian landings. Allied diplomats and military leaders hoped that the Italians would coordinate their steps with those of the Allies, pressed Badoglio to get on with the surrender and then, after Badoglio’s representative had finally signed, simply landed in Calabria on September 3, and announced the armistice hours before landing at Salerno. Once again, as in Sicily, they would get ashore, but once again
there were serious problems because the Germans had been steadily building up forces in the area near Naples. The plan for two landings assumed that the two would assist each other–which they did not–and that the Italians would be helpful–which they were not. Above all, Montgomery was against the whole approach, and the American appointed to command the newly designated 5th Army for the Salerno landing, Mark Clark, was inexperienced. On September 3 the British 8th Army crossed to the Italian mainland and thereafter devoted its efforts to building up supplies, bringing in reinforcements and very little else. Montgomery had become an inspired and inspiring leader, whose soldiers were devoted to him–as he was to them–and he was a folkhero at home in the United Kingdom where, after years of defeats, he stood out as the one general who seemed able to win victories. Now he missed the opportunity to recover high standing with the Americans by deliberately pausing after his unopposed landing instead of dashing northwards. Alexander would and could not interfere with Montgomery’s tactical dispositions; and Brooke, who was the great advocate of both the invasion of Italy and Montgomery as a key figure in it, neither explained to his protégé why the Italian campaign was so important nor sent a rocket to him even while sighing into his diary that the Salerno landing “is doomed.”
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Montgomery never had such a chance again. Newspaper correspondents could drive up the Italian roads toward Naples, but the 8th Army rested on its laurels as their American and British comrades died on the Salerno beaches.
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The American 5th Army landing at Salerno started ashore in the early morning of September 9, 1943, a few hours after the Italian surrender had been announced. An American and a British corps landed in Salerno Bay with the British on the left and the Americans on the right. The planned airborne operation against Rome had been cancelled at the last moment. The Germans had anticipated an Allied landing in this general area and mounted a counter–attack after disarming all Italian units in the vicinity. The German 16th Panzer Division was in the immediate area, and other units quickly joined in, while all German forces further south were summoned to the battlefield. In several days of bitter fighting, the Germans drove the British and American forces back some, but their announcement of victory was premature. In the struggle to hold the beachheads, the Allied forces were not only provided heavy air support but very effective naval gunfire and were reinforced by the regiments
of the airborne division originally scheduled for the Rome landing. By September 16, the Germans had been held and even pushed back and now began to assume a position across the Italian peninsula designed to hold the Allied forces in the south. The German 10th Army pulled back slowly in the face of the United States 5th Army and the even more slowly arriving forward elements of the British 8th Army.

By October 1 the Americans had taken Naples, where the Germans had wrecked even the museums in fury at their erstwhile ally, while the British had seized the Foggia airfields which had played such a large part in Allied planning. What was to happen next depended on decisions argued about then and still a subject for dispute,
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but the Western Allies were back on the continent in force for the first time since 1941, and at least some of the divisions they faced had been diverted from the titanic battles in the East where the major land fighting of the war took place during 1943 as in 1942 .

THE EASTERN FRONT

The Germans had initially planned to attack on the Eastern Front right after the spring thaws had dried up the terrain sufficiently for their armored forces to move, probably about the middle of April. From their perspective, the sooner the better and especially before the Red Army had recovered from the Kharkov defeat. The original order for the attack, dated March 13, called for von Manstein to strike north into the Kursk bulge while Army Group Center, strengthened as a result of the evacuation of the Rzhev bulge, would strike southwards into that bulge. Army Group North was to follow up with an offensive against Leningrad that would off-set the Soviet success there in January, and seize the city, thereby strengthening Germany’s hold on the Baltic and Finland, threatening Sweden and securing the whole northern flank.
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A major function of the whole operation, code-named “Zitadelle” (Citadel), was to seize the initiative on at least one portion of the Eastern Front and thereby make possible a stabilization of the front as a whole, thus enabling Germany to create a reserve of such substantial proportions that an enemy offensive in the East would be precluded in 1943 and any invasion elsewhere could be crushed.
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In the following weeks, other offensive projects were considered but rejected. Not only did discussion over these cause delays, but General (later Field Marshal) Walter Model, the commander of the German 9th Army, which had been made available because of the evacuation of the Rzhev salient and which was to launch the offensive from the north, repeatedly called for postponement until he could build up his forces
and, in particular, receive a substantial allocation of the new Panther and Tiger tanks.
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In the face of the objections of the other German commanders, especially von Manstein and von Kluge, who argued that the longer operation “Citadel” was postponed the more chancy it became as the Russians built up their defenses, Hitler sided with Model, one of his favorites.
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In the face of increasing doubts among his military advisors, and considerable sentiment for refraining from an offensive altogether, Hitler decided by June 19 to go ahead. He had stated in the April 15 version of the attack order that “the victory of Kursk must have the effect of a lesson to the world.”
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He was quite right in this prediction but not in the way he intended.

The German 9th Army, attacking from the north, and the 4th Panzer Army and the Kempf Army, striking from the south, had been enormously reinforced with replacements and new weapons as well as heavy air support. Some 2700 tanks and assault guns were to provide the push as 1400–1800 German aircraft swarmed overhead. The German forces were keyed up to a major operation even if the objective this time was far less ambitious than in 1941 or 1942; the aim was to seize the initiative and win a great tactical victory, not a knock–out blow.
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