The Second World War (102 page)
On 6 October 1943, Himmler addressed Reichsleiters and Gauleiters at a conference in Posen. Grossadmiral Dönitz, Generalfeldmarschall Milch and Albert Speer (although he tried to deny it for the rest of his life) also heard his speech. For once dropping the standard euphemisms of the Final Solution–such as ‘evacuated east’ and ‘special treatment’–Himmler was at last frank with outsiders about what they were doing. ‘
We faced the question
: what should we do with the women and children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men–that is to say to kill them or have them killed–and to allow the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our
sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken, to have this people disappear from this earth.’
On 25 January 1944, Himmler addressed nearly 200 generals and admirals, once again in Posen. They too needed to be aware of the sacrifices which the SS had been making. The ‘
race struggle
’ carried out by his ‘ideological troops’, Himmler again explained, would not ‘allow avengers to arise for our children’. In this total elimination of the Jews there would be no exceptions.
Himmler could have boasted to his audience how so few of his men had managed to murder so many. Through a mixture of outright deception, uncertainty and then unspeakable cruelty, the minute force of persecutors had succeeded in killing nearly three million victims, unable to believe that extermination camps could exist in Europe, supposedly the cradle of civilization.
OCTOBER 1943–MARCH 1944
T
he Allied invasion of mainland Italy in September 1943 had seemed a good idea at the time, with the collapse of Fascism and the prom ise of airfields. Yet there had been a distinct lack of clear thinking about the objectives of the campaign and how these would be achieved. Alexander, the commander of the Allied 15th Army Group in Italy, failed to coordinate the operations of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army and General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army. Clark was still far from happy with the slowness of Montgomery’s advance to relieve him at Salerno, despite all the cheerful messages saying ‘
Hang on we’re coming
!’ To make matters worse, Montgomery somehow seemed to believe that he had saved the Fifth Army at Salerno.
Allied relations were not helped by the fact that both the short, wiry Monty and the tall, gangling Clark should be so obsessed with their image. Clark, who soon increased his public relations team to fifty men, insisted that photographers should capture his most flattering profile with its truly imperial nose. Some of his officers dubbed him
Marcus Aurelius Clarkus
. And Monty had started to hand out signed photographs of himself as if he were a movie star.
Over them, the charming but diffident ‘Alex’ seemed to think that planning could be made up as they went along, an attitude which certainly suited Churchill, who wanted to keep the Italian campaign going far beyond what the Americans envisaged. Montgomery, on the other hand, did not like to do anything unless it had been carefully worked out in advance. ‘
There was as yet
’, he wrote acerbically in his diary, ‘no plan known to me for developing the war in Italy, but I was quite used to that!’ But, as Alexander knew from experience, Montgomery would in any case do only what he wanted to do. As his biographer remarked, Alexander played the part of ‘
an understanding husband
in a difficult marriage’. Eisenhower also failed to get a grip on his subordinates and failed to establish any clarity in thinking about what they were trying to do in Italy.
The real problem, of course, came from the very top, and the central disagreement which had dogged Allied strategy since 1942. Roosevelt and Marshall were determined that nothing should delay Overlord. Churchill and Brooke, on the other hand, still saw the Mediterranean as the vital
theatre for the time being, where the surrender of Italian troops should be exploited. In fact both men, who remained nervous of a cross-Channel invasion without air supremacy, half hoped that a run of successes in the Mediterranean might provide a good excuse to delay Overlord. The only senior American officer who agreed with them was General Spaatz, the US air force commander in the Mediterranean. Like Harris, Spaatz believed that bombing alone could win the war in three months and ‘
didn’t think Overlord
was necessary or desirable’. He wanted to continue the advance in Italy, across the River Po and even into Austria so as to get his bombers closer to Germany.
Churchill had undoubtedly been right to push for Torch and Husky against all of Marshall’s opposition. Even if motivated by the wrong reasons, he had at least prevented a disastrous attempt to invade France in 1943. But he was now starting to lose all credibility with the Americans, thanks to his new obsession with retaking Rhodes and other islands in the Aegean which had been occupied by the Italians. General Marshall naturally suspected that this island-hopping in the eastern Mediterranean was part of a secret plan to invade the Balkans. Not surprisingly, he vigorously refused any American help or involvement whatsoever.
Even Brooke, who supported the Italian campaign and other operations in the region, feared that the prime minister had become completely unbalanced by what he called his ‘
Rhodes madness
’. ‘
He has worked himself
into a frenzy of excitement about the Rhodes attack, has magnified its importance so that he can no longer see anything else and has set his heart on capturing this one island even at the expense of endangering his relations with the President and with the Americans, and also the whole future of the Italian campaign… The Americans are already desperately suspicious of him, and this will make matters far worse.’
Wishful thinking that the Allies would soon be in Rome had infected American commanders as well as Churchill. Mark Clark was absolutely determined to be crowned as its conqueror, and even Eisenhower believed that the Italian capital would fall by the end of October. Alexander declared unwisely that they would be in Florence by Christmas. But there were already clear indications that the Germans would fight ruthlessly in retreat and take their revenge on Italian troops and partisans, who were actively helping the Allies.
East of Naples, in a village near Acerra, B Squadron of the 11th Hussars found the local inhabitants in the cemetery burying ten men that the Germans had put against a wall and shot. ‘
Just after [our] armoured cars
had gone,’ the regiment recorded, ‘more Germans suddenly jumped over the cemetery wall and shot down the crowd with Tommy guns as they stood beside the graves.’ Hitler’s fury against the Italians for having changed
sides had filtered right down to the ordinary German soldier.
Clark’s Fifth Army, advancing north-west from Naples, faced its first major obstacle at the River Volturno, thirty kilometres further on. In the early hours of 13 October, both divisional and corps artillery opened a massive barrage across the valley. The British 56th Division had a tough time near the coast, but the main stretch of the river, although broad, was fordable, and by the following day a large bridgehead had been secured. The Volturno was only a holding position for the Germans, for Kesselring had already identified their main line of defence south of Rome. Like Hitler, he wanted to hold the Allies as far down the peninsula as possible. Rommel, who commanded the German divisions in the north and argued for a withdrawal, had been sidelined.
Both Allied armies soon discovered in the next stage of the advance that the mountainous terrain and the weather did not present the ‘sunny Italy’ which they had imagined from pre-war tourist posters. That autumn in Italy was like the Russian
rasputitsa
of constant rain and deep mud. Both British battledress and American olive drab were sodden for weeks at a time. Trench foot soon became a problem for those who did not put on dry socks once a day. Late autumn downpours turned the rivers to raging torrents and tracks to quagmires, and the retreating Germans had blown every bridge and mined every route. The British, although they had invented the Bailey bridge, envied the well-equipped and numerous American engineer brigades. But even the US Army was short of bridging equipment in such an abundant succession of mountain valleys.
The Germans conducted their withdrawal with defended roadblocks and mines, covered by well-camouflaged anti-tank guns. Advance to contact now meant waiting until the lead tank or armoured car hit a mine and was then knocked out by an armour-piercing round ‘coming out of nowhere’. The wide-ranging manoeuvres of the desert war were far behind them. Narrow roads in narrow valleys, and well-defended hilltop villages, meant that the infantry had to take over point position. Less than thirty kilometres north of the Volturno, the advance came to a complete halt.
The Gustav or Winter Line, selected by Kesselring, ran 140 kilometres from just below Ortona on the Adriatic to the Gulf of Gaeta on the Tyrrhenian side. This was the narrowest part of the Italian boot and well chosen for defence. The Gustav Line had the natural fortress of Monte Cassino as its main strongpoint. All the unguarded optimism of the Allied commanders evaporated as Ultra confirmed that Hitler and Kesselring would mount a ferocious defence. This is the point at which Eisenhower should have insisted on a re-evaluation of the whole campaign. With the seven divisions due to be sent back to England for Overlord, the Allies no longer had the numerical superiority required for a major offensive. Churchill and
Brooke seemed to think it was somehow unfair that the Americans should insist on sticking to the agreement made at the Trident conference in May.
Reconnaissance on the ground soon confirmed what the maps indicated. For Clark’s Fifth Army the only path to Rome lay along Route 6, which went through the Mignano Gap, guarded by massive mountains on either side. And behind them ran the Rapido River, which in its turn was dominated by Monte Cassino.
On the left, the British X Corps faced the River Garigliano as a barrier. On 5 November, it attempted to outflank the Mignano Gap by seizing Monte Camino–only to find that this huge feature, with one false ridge after another, was well defended by the 15th Panzergrenadier Division in the first part of the Winter Line. The men of the
201st Guards Brigade
, unable to break the German defence, found it impossible to dig in on what they called ‘bare-arse ridge’. In freezing rain, they instead had to construct sangars, or shelters improvised with rocks. German mortar fire from above proved even more lethal than usual, with stone splinters flying in all directions. After several days, Clark had no option but to agree to pull them back off what had become known as Murder Mountain. Dead men were left propped in position, weapons pointed at the enemy, as the survivors withdrew.
Higher in the central Apennines to the north-east, the US 34th and 45th Divisions herded goats in front of them across mountain meadows to set off any mines. The uncomfortable truth was that neither the British nor the Americans had really learned the lessons of mountain warfare. In such terrain, trucks could not get near the forward positions. Food and ammunition had to be carried up the steep, zig-zag paths by mules or men. On the way back, the mule-trains would bring back the dead. The muleteers, mainly charcoal-burners hired at a daily rate, were spooked by their gruesome cargo. Wounded could only be brought out at night by stretcher-bearers, a painful journey up and down steep, slippery slopes for both the carriers and the carried.
In the afternoon of 2 December, under black skies and in the midst of yet another rainstorm, 900 guns of Fifth Army artillery opened a heavy bombardment while dripping infantrymen clambered up the slopes, the British up Monte Camino again and the Americans up La Difensa led by the 1st Special Service Force. By dawn the next day, this semi-irregular group had seized the crest and prepared for counter-attacks by the panzergrenadiers. Over the following days, the fighting for La Difensa was pitiless on both sides. The Americans, having suffered some dirty tricks, took no prisoners.
Just to their south-west, the British had finally taken Monte Camino, so the central German position astride Route 6 could now be partially
outflanked. Clark sent in the 36th Division on the north-east side to break the Bernhardt Line in front of the village of San Pietro. Monte Lungo on the south-west side of the Mignano Gap had to be the first objective, because otherwise German artillery positioned there would break up the main offensive. A brigade of Italian Alpini, keen to show their mettle against their former ally who had treated them so badly, went bravely into the assault, but they were cut to pieces by heavy machine-gun fire. Clark even tried using tanks, but they stood little chance of advancing in such rocky terrain without breaking or shedding a track. After several days of heavy losses, Monte Lungo was taken from the west, and San Pietro fell soon afterwards. The Germans simply pulled back to their next line.
Clark’s soldiers presented a sorry sight by the middle of December. They were unshaven, had long, dank hair, and dark circles of exhaustion under their eyes. Their uniforms were impregnated with mud, their boots were coming to pieces, and their skin was white and wrinkled from being perpetually wet. Many suffered from trench foot. The Italian villagers from San Pietro, who had taken shelter from the fighting in caves, were also in a sorry state. They emerged to find their homes completely ruined, and their vegetable plots and vines mangled. Almost every tree on the hillsides around had been smashed by artillery fire.
On the Adriatic side of the Apennines, Montgomery’s Eighth Army could have been fighting a separate war. Build-up was slow until harbours were cleared, so the Eighth Army was delayed by supply shortages, especially fuel. The bulk of shipping coming in to Bari was earmarked for the rapid development of Major General James Doolittle’s Fifteenth Air Force, based on the thirteen Foggia airfields.
Montgomery recognized that the primary purpose of the Italian campaign should be to tie down as many German divisions as possible, and to use the Foggia bases to bomb the Germans in Bavaria, Austria and the Danube basin. The mountainous terrain of south central Italy favoured the Germans in defence and rendered it almost impossible for the Allies to make use of their much larger tank forces. The fighting, they found, was far more ruthless than in the desert. On the German side it had taken on what a war correspondent called an ‘
ordered ferocity
’. The Germans shot ‘every man in a platoon of Canadians who were surrounded, isolated and signalled their surrender’. And ‘any civilian found in the battle area is immediately shot irrespective of whether his home is there’.
