Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45

However, on the eve of battle – 11 May – that day of days, Clark was playing the part of army commander perfectly. It is typical of him that he should have chosen that morning to address the men of the 36th Texas Division – the men who blamed him above all for the Bloody Rapido – looking them in the eye and stirring them for the battle to come, a battle in which yet more of them would lose their lives.

News that the offensive would at last begin that night was given out to men along the line throughout the day, in the form of thin paper fliers. In the case of those in Eighth Army, one was from General Alexander and the other from General Leese. Then, in the afternoon, battalion commanders gathered their officers around them and gave them a general as well as a more specific brief. The 19th Indian Brigade, for example, part of 8th Indian Division, had a key role that opening night of the battle. ‘Tonight,’ the Brigade Commander, Major Parker, told his officers, ‘we’re attacking the Gustav Line across the River Rapido here. We’ll have the Poles and 4th Division on our right and French troops on our left. The Fifth Army are making a push at the same time. This is the first blow of the Second Front. It will be closely followed by the invasion of Western Europe and a general attack by the Russians in the south-east.’

The attack, Major Parker continued, would begin with a massive barrage at 11 p.m. using just under 1,700 guns – almost double what had been used at the Battle of Alamein in November 1942. To begin with, the fire would be counter-battery, that is, falling behind the German forward positions in an effort to hit the enemy’s own artillery. Then it would be directed against targets on the front. After this opening barrage, the infantry would begin their attack. In their own sector along the Liri Valley, the division would make their assault alongside the 4th Division, crossing the River Garigliano under cover of continued artillery fire, while the Poles assaulted Cassino and the Goums and part of the French Expeditionary Force attacked the Aurunci Mountains on their left, ‘with instructions to cut off the heads of every German they meet’. Furthest to the south, along the Minturno Ridge that runs to the sea, the US II Corps would attack with the new boys, the 85th and 88th Infantry Divisions.

The task of 19th Infantry Brigade was twofold. The Indian battalions were to get themselves across the river, whilst the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were to invade what was known as the ‘Liri Appendix’, a narrow finger of land between where the Garigliano turned sharply and ran parallel to the River Liri before actually joining it. From the moment the barrage began, the Appendix would be covered by machine-gun fire to keep the Germans’ heads down. ‘So if you hear close machine-gun fire,’ the Brigade Major told them, ‘you’ll know it’ll be our fellows pumping lead into this Appendix.’ The barrage would not finish until 4 a.m., and would then be followed by wave after wave of Allied bombers and fighter planes – ‘as many as we’ll want’.

Having given his brief outline, Major Parker paused, folded away his map, then smiled dryly at his men. ‘We hope,’ he told them, ‘this will do the trick.’5

Although any infantry heading into battle obviously faced extreme danger, amongst those men most at risk were the junior officers. American Lieutenant Bob Wiggans was a platoon commander with Company D of the 1st Battalion, 338th Infantry Regiment – part of the 85th ‘Custer’ Division.* The 85th had reached Italy less than seven weeks before, sailing into Naples under the smoke and pall of the still-erupting Mount Vesuvius, and had only been sent up to the front in the middle of April. The entire division, along with the also newly arrived 88th Division, were the first American all-draftee divisions to go into combat. Bearing the brunt of the Americans’ initial assault in the coming battle, their performance would be the first proper test of the US Army’s wartime training and replacement system – a system that had been set up in some part by General Mark Clark.

A twenty-six-year-old farmer from upstate New York, Bob Wiggans had undergone reserve officer infantry training whilst at Cornell University – an activity that was compulsory for all male students – and so when he was given his draft notice just a couple of weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, he was immediately sent to Camp Shelby in Mississippi to join the cadre that would help form and train the brand-new 85th Infantry Division.

Bob regarded 7 December 1941 as one of the saddest days of his life. The war would not only take him away from the farm he had bought less than a year before, but also from Dot, his wife of five months. Leaving home was a terrible wrench, but he believed that the United States was doing the right thing, and that Nazism had to be defeated.

In the two years in which Bob had served with the 85th, it had grown from nothing to a fully-formed and trained combat division. However, the division showed its inexperience during its first few days on the Cassino front, when it took over positions from the British in the rubble and remains of the town of Minturno, the most westerly point of the front line. Most of the 85th’s men found the whole experience of being on the battlefield and close to the enemy and of coming under shellfire deeply unsettling. Bob had been called out one night offering to help 3rd Platoon who were convinced there were Germans crawling around in the rubble above them. It turned out the ‘enemy’ were just rats scurrying about. Bob had found that hurtling through the ruined town in his jeep, distributing mail, ammunition and supplies, was enough to get his heart racing. ‘These night missions were harrowing enough with the interdictory artillery fire,’ he noted, ‘but the awful smell of decaying flesh from under the rubble made it infinitely worse.’6

That the ‘Custermen’ were a little jumpy is no wonder: all the draftees, officers and enlisted men were entirely new to war, with no battlefield experience to draw upon. And like the Poles and so many of the assaulting troops, their first battle would be one of the biggest their countries had ever taken part in.*

That afternoon, back in his caravan at Fifth Army headquarters, General Clark dictated a message of best wishes to his fellow army commander, General Sir Oliver Leese – happy, on this occasion, to observe inter-army protocol. The British commander promptly replied in kind. ‘We all in Eighth Army,’ wrote Leese, ‘send your Fifth Army our cordial good wishes and look confidently forward to advancing shoulder to shoulder together.’7

Leese was impatient for the battle to begin, and though apprehensive was quietly confident. ‘Ultra’ intercepts of German Enigma codes passed on by the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, suggested that the Allies’ elaborate deception plans had worked and that the Germans were not expecting a major attack until the following month. Leese had more than a quarter of a million men under his command – ‘an immense army’ – all of whom were fully trained and briefed. Ammunition and petrol were ready in dumps at the front line. Everyone was agreed on the battle plan, and from his manic tours around the front, Leese believed his troops to be in good heart. ‘It has been a vast endeavour and it will be a huge battle,’ he wrote. ‘All we want is fine weather and a bit of luck.’8

As the evening shadows lengthened, infantrymen along the front furtively began moving up to their start lines and forming-up positions. In the Liri Valley, men uncovered assault boats; bridging parties moved trucks of Bailey bridge sections forward, while other sappers reeled out long lines of white marker tape to later guide the troops in the dark towards specific river crossing points.

Dusk soon gave way to the darkness of night, and the first desultory shelling of Cassino began just as it had every night for weeks since the end of the third battle of Cassino in March. Partly as cover, and partly to give the impression that this was just like any other evening along the front, the shelling gradually died out, so that at ten o’clock, when General Leese sat down to write to his wife, Margie, the front seemed eerily quiet.

‘In sixty minutes,’ he scrawled on the thick blue writing paper Margie Leese had sent out to him, ‘hell will be let loose, the whole way from Monte Cairo to the sea. At 11 p.m. on 11 May, 2,000 guns will burst forth.’* It had, he added, been a lovely day, and it was now a glorious night.

A huge weight of responsibility rested on Leese’s shoulders and those of his fellow commanders, not only for the men under their command but also because there was so much at stake with this, the biggest battle the Western Allies had yet attempted in the war. A sweeping, crushing victory promised untold riches, yet defeat would not only be a blow to Allied chances of success in launching an invasion of northern France, but it would also wreck the future of the Italian campaign and with it British credibility in particular. No wonder General Leese was counting down the minutes.

* Although they were now operating as infantry, the Polish cavalry and armoured units kept their usual structure and formation.

* Allied Central Mediterranean Forces had become Allied Forces in Italy on 9 March 1944.

* The 85th was given the association ‘Custer’ because the division was activiated in 1917 at Camp Custer in Michigan, so named after the Civil War and Indian Wars general who had led the Michigan Cavalry Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg.

* There were 158,805 men in AOK 10 and AOK 14, while Alexander could call on 602,618 Allied troops in Italy at this time, of whom 253,859 were British, 231,306 were American, 71,827 were French and 45,626 were Polish. Although nothing like this number would take part in the coming battles, Alexander was still able to have the three to one advantage in manpower along the main battle line that he believed was necessary for victory. Even so, when one considers the air forces and men in reserve, the best part of a million men were to be directly and indirectly involved in the offensive.

* Leese was never particularly accurate with his facts and figures when writing to his wife. In fact, there were around 1,660 guns in action: 1,060 along Eighth Army’s front, and 600 along that of Fifth Army.

TWO

Battle Begins 11–12 May 1944

Manning his machine-gun post amongst the rubble near what had once been the Via Casilina – the main road to Rome – was Hans-Jürgen Kumberg. The 4th Fallschirmjäger Regiment had moved down from the heights of Monte Cassino a month earlier. Although the ruins provided excellent defensive cover, the place was a hell hole, swarming with malaria-infested mosquitoes and reeking of death and sewage. The men were short of just about everything: water, food, cigarettes; reinforcements that had been promised but had not materialised. And they were exhausted: living like sewer rats and being pummelled by relentless Allied harassing fire was not conducive to sleep. Only the Pioneer – engineers – battalion of the 4th Regiment had arrived to help, having joined them alongside the Via Casilina just the day before.

Amongst them was twenty-three-year-old company commander Lieutenant Joseph ‘Jupp’ Klein, a battle-hardened veteran of the Eastern Front, Sicily and the second and third battles of Cassino. His company’s recent leave had been the first since arriving in Italy the previous August following the Sicily campaign and had done much to revive their spirits, but after a day back at the front they still had much to do. There were more machine-gun positions to be built, more tunnels to dig and retreat routes to be prepared.

On the night of 11 May, at eleven o’clock, Jupp Klein was standing on the debris-strewn Via Casilina, talking to one of his corporals, when ‘suddenly from heaven to hell the night became as bright as day’.9 As the shells screamed overhead, Jupp immediately recognised that the sheer scale of the barrage could only mean one thing: the offensive had started – and sooner than any of them had expected.

A few miles north in a concrete bunker along a narrow valley between the mountains above Cassino, Major Georg Zellner, commander of the 3rd Battalion Hoch-und-Deutschmeister Reichs Grenadier Regiment, gathered around him a few of his officers. Throughout the day he had been receiving the best wishes of his men on this his thirty-ninth birthday. Some of his staff had even brought him some flowers picked from the mountain. The major, however, was not in good spirits. Desperately homesick, he hoped for a letter or card from his wife and two young daughters back home in Passau in south-east Germany, but nothing had yet arrived. All day, he’d waited, praying there would be some word from them on the evening’s ration cart but nothing came.

Two bottles of sekt – sparkling wine – had arrived for him and he and a few of his officers were about to share them. Having eased the cork from the first of the bottles, Georg was about to take a birthday gulp when the world seemed to be ripped apart as the massed Allied guns roared the opening salvo of the battle. ‘We drink the sekt anyway,’ he noted drily.10

Watching the barrage from the safety of Monte Trocchio, behind the Allied lines, was twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Ted Wyke-Smith, a former steel engineer from Sheffield now serving with 78th Division Royal Engineers. As commander of a bridging unit, his job was to be amongst the division’s spearhead as it advanced, once the 4th and 8th Indian Divisions had made the initial breakthrough, and build Bailey bridges over the numerous rivers and anti-tank ditches that barred the Allied progress. Ted had been sitting in his tented dugout listening to nightingales in the trees nearby when the guns opened fire. ‘It was terrific,’ he remembers. ‘The noise was incredible and even where we were, several miles behind the lines, the ground trembled.’ Curiously, however, the nightingales began singing again shortly after. ‘It was most extraordinary,’ says Ted, ‘a concerto of nightingales and cannons.’

The first infantry to attack were the unblooded Americans of the 85th Infantry Division, who set off from their start positions the moment the barrage began. None of the French and American troops of Fifth Army had any rivers to cross, but they faced formidable obstacles nonetheless. The 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 338th Infantry Regiment had been ordered to assault a 400-foot high ridge studded with knolls, known as Spigno Saturnia. Terraced and dotted with farmhouses and occasional olive groves, the forward slopes were well defended by the infantry regiments of the German 94th Division.

Company D of the 1st Battalion had been given ‘Point 131’ as their first objective – the most imposing and best-defended height along the ridge. Lieutenant Bob Wiggans had been impressed by the scale of their barrage and had begun the advance through the wheat fields and olive groves with a certain amount of confidence. As the barrage lifted, however, he realised to his horror that the Germans, hidden in their well-constructed concrete bunkers, were almost completely unharmed.

‘We moved forward and immediately drew all kinds of fire,’ he noted, ‘machine gun, automatic weapon, rifle, mortar, and artillery. So many men were killed.’11 Although the Custermen had briefly gained the crest, they became pinned down and with reinforcements unable to reach them, they were forced to fall back halfway down the slopes. As Bob paused, he glanced at a ditch next to him where five men of his company were already lying dead. For two years they’d been training for this moment, yet for so many of them it had all been over in a trice.

It was not only the 1st Battalion that were being stopped in their tracks. Elsewhere along the southernmost part of the front, other American units were coming up against a wall of enemy fire and finding it almost impossible to make any headway. On their right, the French were also struggling. The Goumiers managed to take the heights of Monte Faito, but other objectives could not be taken as the colonial troops had been confronted with German flamethrowers as well as heavy mortar and machine-gun fire.

Meanwhile, in the Liri Valley, barely anything had gone right for the Allies. After the warm day and suddenly cool night, river mists had developed along the River Garigliano and then mingled with the intense smoke caused by the biggest barrage of the war. Despite weeks of endlessly practising river crossings, no one had considered the effect the smoke from the guns would have on visibility. Nor had the planners appreciated just how strong the current would be in the ‘Gari’. Many of those crossing in assault boats were swept away, while others were destroyed by machine-gun fire and mortars. Meanwhile the sappers who had been due to lay six Bailey bridges under the light of the moon had found the fog as thick as the worst kind of London pea-souper. Their task had been almost impossible. Only by a miracle and enormous ingenuity was the first successfully built by 9 a.m. on the 12th. Another was open for business an hour later, but attempts to build the others failed amidst enemy fire and appalling fog.

The Poles had not fared much better. They had not launched their assault until 1 a. m., two hours after the barrage had opened up and some time after the 8th Indian and 4th Divisions had attacked in the valley below. As a result, the German paratroopers were already alert to the possibility of an attack. To make matters worse for the Poles, the 3rd Fallschirmjäger Regiment, whose positions they were attacking, were in the process of relieving a number of their troops, so in the cross-over there were many more enemy forces opposing them than there might have been. This extra German fire power proved decisive. Although the Poles reached their first objectives, they were soon pinned down, and, like the Americans, struggled to get reinforcements and further supplies forward. By evening the following day, they had suffered 1,800 casualties – nearly a quarter of their attacking strength – and had been driven back to their starting positions.

Wladek Rubnikowicz and the 12th Lancers, in their positions below the rubble of the monastery, had been given the task of sending out reconnaissance parties across no-man’s-land, while the main force attacked the high ground to the north of the monastery. It was the first time they had ventured from their positions and although not part of the main attack, they had still come under heavy enemy machine-gun and mortar fire. It was merely a taste of what was to come.

News of the unfolding battle was patchy. Visibility, through the thick blanket of mist and cordite smoke that smothered the valley, was no more than ten yards and only snippets of information trickled in to HQ. Despite the paucity of news, the Signals Office was a hub of activity, with exchanges and calls coming through constantly. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had been cut to pieces at the Liri Appendix, but the division as a whole had captured a small but critical bridgehead. RAF Spitfires were soon patrolling overhead; then USAF bombers came over to paste the German positions. Reinforcements arrived for the Appendix, but the enemy mortaring did not let up.

At his Tactical Headquarters near Venafro, less than ten miles west of Cassino, General Leese appeared to be as unaware of the situation as most of the attacking troops, noting ‘there is a vast smokescreen like a yellow London fog over the battlefield’. Yet the Germans couldn’t see very clearly either. As General Alexander had intended, Feldmarschall Kesselring’s forces had been caught completely off guard. On the morning of the 11th at AOK 10 headquarters, Generaloberst von Vietinghoff ’s chief of staff had reported to Kesselring’s headquarters ‘nothing special is happening here’.12 Allied air superiority had prevented the Luftwaffe from carrying anything but the sparsest of aerial reconnaissance, while carefully executed deception plans had convinced the German commander that the Allies intended to make another amphibious landing, either to reinforce the troops at Anzio, or further north of Rome, near the port of Civitavecchia. Kesselring also had it in mind that the Allies might try an airborne assault in the Liri Valley near Frosinone. Moreover, German intelligence suggested that the Allies had far more troops in reserve and fewer at the front than was the case – which was also considered to be evidence that the Allies were preparing another attack north of the Gustav Line.

Because of this, Kesselring had left the front line relatively thinly defended. Most of his reserves were either north of the Gustav Line or around Rome. Both German armies had been in the process of regrouping since the beginning of May, but once again, thanks to Allied air dominance, movement by day had been all but impossible and so this reorganisation had not yet completely finished.

The Werfer Regiment 71, for example, had been withdrawn from the front line a couple of weeks before and moved back into reserve to give it a chance to regroup and rest. An artillery regiment of six-barrelled rocket mortars – nebelwerfer, or ‘moaning minnies’ as the Allies called them – the Werfer Regiment 71 had needed this break after a long stint of front-line duties. Eighth Battery commander, Oberleutnant Hans Golda, had heard the muffled noises from the front and seen flashes of light to the south, and had gone to bed that night feeling restless. His unease had been well founded. In the early hours he had been woken by Major Timpkes who telephoned with the news that the Allied offensive had begun and that they were to get going to the front right away. ‘Calmly and seriously we got ready to march,’ he noted. ‘Our recovery time had been cut short after two weeks.’13

But German troops in Italy were mostly a stoical bunch. They recognised that while the attacker could dictate the timing of his assault, it was the role of the defender to do his best – to respond as well as he could, whether properly rested or not.

THREE

Churchill’s Opportunism

On the morning of 11 May, the British Prime Minister had dictated a letter to Alexander, his commander in Italy. ‘All our thoughts and hopes are with you in what I trust and believe will be a decisive battle, fought to a finish,’ wrote Churchill, ‘and having for its object the destruction and ruin of the armed force of the enemy south of Rome.’14

Ever since the agreement to invade southern Italy the previous summer, Churchill had been looking forward to the day the Allies captured Rome. ‘He who holds Rome,’ he had told President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin the previous November, ‘holds the title deeds of Italy.’ This was perhaps overstating the case, but there was no doubting the enormous psychological fillip that the capture of Rome – which would be the first European capital to be taken – would provide.

Yet despite the considerable commitment of the Allies – and Britain in particular – to the Italian campaign, their presence there had never been part of any long-agreed master plan. Rather, it had been purely opportunistic, a decision born of a series of unfolding events, each one bringing Italy closer and closer to the typhoon of steel that would rip through it.

The seeds of this momentous decision date back to a meeting between a US general and the Russian Foreign Minister in Washington DC in late May 1942. Normally wary of promising too much, the US Chief of Staff General George Marshall, America’s most senior military figure, nonetheless assured Vyacheslav Molotov that the United States would start a second front before the end of the year. Three days later, speaking to Molotov on 1 June, President Roosevelt reiterated his determination to help the Soviets by engaging German troops on land some time during 1942.