The Second World War (96 page)

At Quebec, the conference discussed the imminent surrender of Italy, following secret overtures via Madrid and Lisbon from Badoglio’s emissary General Giuseppe Castellano. It was an encouraging prospect. Italian airfields could be used for bombing Germany and the Ploesti oilfields, as General ‘Hap’ Arnold, the chief of the US air force, emphasized. But British enthusiasm for an all-out Italian campaign to advance north to the line of the River Po was not shared by the Americans, even though Brooke argued forcefully that it would draw German divisions away from the Normandy front.

Roosevelt and Marshall did not want the advance to continue beyond Rome, even if that meant leaving their forces in Italy idle. They suspected, with some justification, that the British would use the Italian campaign as a means to delay the invasion of France and divert efforts towards the north-east, into the Balkans and central Europe. Unfortunately, Churchill’s gadfly approach to strategy–he now wanted to invade Rhodes and the islands of the Dodecanese to bring Turkey into the war–only seemed to confirm their misgivings. Marshall remained adamant that the seven divisions allocated for the invasion of Normandy should be withdrawn from Italy by 1 November, as had already been agreed at the Trident conference.

The invasion of Normandy, now called Operation Overlord, was nevertheless fixed for May 1944. Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, the chief of staff to the (as yet unnamed) supreme Allied commander, was already working on the initial plans. Supported by General Arnold, he underlined the urgent need to weaken the Luftwaffe first. Churchill had rather rashly promised General Brooke the supreme command on three occasions. He now faced the fact that Roosevelt would insist that an Ameri can general should have the job, as the US would provide the majority of the troops. The Americans also believed, mistakenly, that Brooke was against the invasion of France.

Brooke was deeply disappointed when Churchill told him that he would not command Overlord after all, and never really got over the blow. He was even more put out when he discovered that Churchill had privately settled in return for Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten to head SEAC, the new South-East Asia Command. The obvious candidate for Overlord
appeared to be General Marshall, even though he avoided putting himself forward.

On 3 September, Churchill travelled by train from Quebec to Washington. He arrived in time for a momentous day. The dapper General Castellano, Badoglio’s chief of staff, and Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Bedell Smith, had secretly signed the Italian armistice after difficult negotiations. The Germans had built up their forces in Italy to sixteen divisions, and the Italians were understandably terrified of German reprisals.

At dawn that day, British and Canadian troops landed near Reggio di Calabria. They were supported by warships and artillery fire across the Straits of Messina, but the landings were unopposed on that beautiful September morning, and the sea was calm. The British called it the ‘Messina Strait Regatta’. Other landings on the toe of Italy and at the naval base of Taranto soon followed. Admiral Cunningham took a risk by sending the 1st Airborne Division into Taranto on Royal Navy cruisers. The Italian fleet sailed to Malta to surrender, but the Luftwaffe managed to sink the battleship
Roma
with one of its new rocket-propelled bombs and kill 1,300 sailors.

The whole Italian campaign would be dogged by misconceptions and wishful thinking. Because of some earlier Ultra intercepts, Allied Force Headquarters believed that in the event of an Italian surrender the Germans would pull back to the Pisa–Rimini Line in northern Italy. Hitler had since decided, however, that this would be tantamount to abandoning the Balkans behind the backs of his Croatian, Romanian and Hungarian allies. In addition the Italians, despite their earlier assurances to Bedell Smith, were not prepared to defend Rome against the Germans. A planned drop on Rome by the 82nd Airborne Division, to coincide with the main landings at Salerno, was mercifully aborted as the aircraft were taking off. The whole formation would have been wiped out if it had gone ahead.

On 8 September Hitler, having spent too much time fretting over events in Italy, flew to Manstein’s headquarters in southern Russia to discuss the crisis on the eastern front. The Red Army had broken through between Kluge’s Army Group Centre and Manstein’s Army Group South. When he returned to the Wolfsschanze that evening, the Führer heard that the Italian armistice had just been announced and that the first wave of General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army had landed at Salerno, fifty kilometres south-east of Naples. His mood after hearing of Badoglio’s ‘treachery’ can be imagined, even though he had expected it. He summoned Goebbels and other Nazi leaders to a meeting the next day. ‘
The Führer
’, Goebbels wrote in his diary, ‘is determined to make a
tabula rasa
in Italy.’

Operation Axis (formerly Alarich) was launched with ruthless rapidity. One of the first priorities for Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring was to
seize Rome. German paratroopers marched in while the city’s inhabitants were still celebrating what they imagined was the end of the war for them. The King and Marshal Badoglio escaped just in time. The sixteen German divisions disarmed Italian troops, and destroyed any who resisted. Some 650,000 were seized as prisoners of war, most of whom were later sent for forced labour. Himmler soon instructed the head of the security police in Rome, SS Obersturmführer Herbert Kappler, to round up the 8,000 Jews in the city.

While the Germans occupied Rome, they had sent forces to block off a possible Anglo-American landing in the Gulf of Salerno, which offered the obvious invasion site along that part of the Tyrrhenian coast. The recently created German Tenth Army was commanded by General Heinrich von Vietinghoff. He rapidly sent the 16th Panzer Division, the successor formation to the one destroyed at Stalingrad, to take up positions on the hills dominating the great bay. By that evening of 8 September, just after the Allied troops had celebrated news of Italy’s surrender on board their invasion ships, the first German troops were already in position to welcome them when they landed in the early hours of the following day.

The unexpectedly strong resistance took the Allied troops aback. Only when minesweepers cleared a channel forward the next morning could warships come close enough inshore to identify tank concentrations and German gun batteries. Most of the things that could go wrong at Salerno did go wrong. Major General Ernest Dawley, the commander of the US VI Corps, only contributed to the confusion on land. He did not secure his left flank with the British part of the invasion force until ordered to by Clark three days later, by which time German strength had increased. The
Hermann Göring
Panzer Division and the 15th and the 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions reached the Salerno front one after another.

British and Americans alike found themselves trapped in tobacco fields or in apple and peach orchards, or back on the sand dunes, where there was little cover apart from scrub and seagrass. Under the eyes of German gunners on the high ground, casualty evacuation was difficult by day, and aid men had to do their best with sulpha powder and field dressings.

On the extreme left, only Lieutenant Colonel William Darby’s Rangers had enjoyed success after they had quickly advanced inland to seize key points on the Chiunzi Pass. This snaking road led over the mountainous base of the Sorrento Peninsula to Naples. From their positions they were able to direct the heavy naval guns in the Gulf, firing on maximum elevation, to bombard German supply convoys and reinforcements coming down the coast road from Naples.

Clark, well aware that his invasion force could not hope to break out of this trap, pushed Dawley into sending the 36th Infantry Division of
Texan National Guardsmen to seize a hilltop village on the morning of 13 September. The German response was savage and the Texans were badly mauled. Worse was to follow. General von Vietinghoff thought that the two Allied corps were about to re-embark, so he launched an attack with panzer units and self-propelled guns due south from Eboli. The fighting was so desperate and the German breakthrough so dangerous that Clark considered pulling out and Vietinghoff believed that the battle was as good as won.

The Eighth Army’s advance north had not speeded up; its vanguard was still nearly a hundred kilometres to the south-east. Many delays were caused by bridges destroyed by the Germans in their withdrawal. Admiral Hewitt, the task force commander at Salerno, was appalled by the prospect of a re-embarkation. Early on 14 September he signalled Admiral Cunningham in Malta, who immediately despatched the battleships
HMS
Warspite
and HMS
Valiant
to provide more heavy guns. Cunningham also sent three cruisers at full speed to Tripoli to fetch reinforcements. But in the meantime the situation had stabilized a little. A determined defence, with 105mm guns firing over open sights, had stopped the panzer charge, and Clark’s urgent request for a regiment from the 82nd Airborne to be dropped within the bridgehead was answered.

General Alexander arrived on a destroyer on the morning of 15 September. In complete agreement with Admiral Hewitt, he cancelled any plans for evacuation. The Salerno bridgehead was soon secured by bomber support and the weight and accuracy of Allied naval gunfire. US Navy and Royal Navy warships inflicted heavy damage on the German tanks and artillery. Unfortunately, during a Luftwaffe raid at night, the
Warspite
fired its six-inch guns at one low-flying aircraft and hit the destroyer HMS
Petard
instead, causing heavy damage.

Major General James Doolittle’s bombers smashed the town of Battipaglia just behind the German lines so thoroughly that General Spaatz sent the message: ‘
You’re slipping Jimmy
. There’s one crabapple tree and one stable still standing.’ But a new bombing doctrine was being born, which the Americans called ‘Putting the city in the street’. This meant deliberately smashing a town to rubble so that enemy reinforcements and supplies could not get through. This would become a key tactic the following June in Normandy.

By this time, German intelligence had discovered Mussolini’s whereabouts. After holding him first on the island of Ponza and then on La Maddalena, Marshal Badoglio had him moved secretly to a ski resort north of Rome in the Apennines, known as Gran Sasso. Hitler, horrified by this humiliation of his ally, ordered a rescue attempt. On 12 September
Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny, with a force of Waffen-SS special troops in eight gliders, crash-landed on the mountain. The Carabinieri guarding him did not resist. Mussolini embraced Skorzeny, saying that he knew his friend Adolf Hitler would not abandon him. He was flown out and brought to the Wolfsschanze. Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant described him as ‘
a broken man
’. The Germans’ plan was to install him as figurehead of a so-called Repubblica Sociale Italiana, thus creating the fiction that the Axis was still in force to justify their occupation of Italy.

On 21 September Free French forces landed on the island of Corsica, which the Germans had abandoned to reinforce the mainland. At Salerno, the German withdrawal had begun three days earlier. Kesselring had told Vietinghoff to pull his army gradually back to the line of the River Volturno north of Naples. Clark finally sacked his corps commander General Dawley, and the British on the left of the beachhead attacked north to seize the base of the Sorrento Peninsula and prepare the advance up the coast to Naples. After the Coldstream Guards had taken a hill there in a night attack, the platoon commander Michael Howard described the scene.
‘We stood to at dawn
. In the first grey hints of light we buried the German dead. These were the first corpses I had handled: shrunken pathetic dolls lying stiff and twisted, with glazed eyes. Not one could have been over twenty, and some were little more than children. With horrible carelessness we shovelled them into their own trenches and piled on the earth.’

By 25 September the Eighth Army and Clark’s Fifth Army had joined up and established a line across Italy. The American forces at Salerno had suffered some 3,500 casualties and the British 5,500. The Eighth Army advancing on the Adriatic side seized the Foggia Plain with all its airfields to be used for bombing southern Germany, Austria and the Ploesti oilfields. Clark’s Fifth Army in the west pushed past Mount Vesuvius, and on 1 October the King’s Dragoon Guards in their armoured cars led the way into Naples under the ubiquitous washing lines stretched across the streets. But there were no sheets hung out to dry. Naples was without water because the Germans had blown the aqueducts, in revenge for the resistance shown to their brutal occupation. They had wrecked as much of the city as they could, including ancient libraries, sewers, electricity stations, factories and above all the port. Time bombs were left in other major buildings to explode over the following weeks. Already the war in Italy was beginning to replicate the horrors of the eastern front.

The Bletchley Park intercept which indicated that Hitler planned to evacuate most of Italy was not followed by other signals revealing that Führer headquarters was changing its mind, largely under pressure from Kesselring who wanted to defend the country from south of Rome. Rommel’s advice to pull back was discarded partly because Hitler feared the
effect it would have on his Balkan allies, but also because the Allied invasion was floundering. Yet Hitler’s determination to hold Italy, and his conviction that the British would invade the Balkans and the Aegean, meant that a total of thirty-seven German divisions would be tied down in the region while the Wehrmacht was fighting for its life on the eastern front.

Goebbels and Ribbentrop urged Hitler to initiate peace talks with Stalin, but the Führer angrily rejected such an idea. He would never negotiate from weakness. General Jodl of the OKW recognized the mad logic in which they were trapped by the Nazi mantra of ‘final victory’. ‘
That we will win
, because we must win,’ he noted soon afterwards, ‘means that world history has lost all sense.’ Since there was now no hope of negotiating from strength, the implication was all too clear. Germany would fight on until its total destruction.