Italy Volume I: The Sangro to Cassino
I: The Strategic Prelude
I: The Strategic Prelude
(i)
‘YOU have marked out a great battlefield for the future’. So Ernest Renan addressed Ferdinand de Lesseps in bidding him welcome to the French Academy in 1885.1 It was in defence of the canal which de Lesseps had cut through the isthmus of Suez that British troops crossed the Egyptian frontier into Cyrenaica on 11 June 1940, the day of Italy's entry into the Second World War. As the raiding Hussars drove their armoured cars across the perimeter wire they opened the longest campaign of the war. It was not to end until, nearly five years later, soldiers from New Zealand picketed the streets of Trieste and Americans bivouacked in the shadow of the Alps.
1 Quoted by André Siegfried: The Mediterranean, p. 11.
(ii)
The friendship of the British and Italian peoples had political roots as deep as the Risorgimento of the mid-nineteenth century and cultural roots much deeper; and of the songs about liberating Italy, which the realist Cavour complained were too numerous, not a few were written in English. An understanding that rested in large measure upon common respect for parliamentary forms of government was shaken after 1922 when Benito Mussolini grasped power in the Italian State, but an open breach was delayed until 1935. In that year the honourable rejection by the British public of the Hoare-Laval plan for awarding Fascist Italy a portion of Ethiopia, followed by the application of sanctions by the League of Nations, propelled the Duce into the waiting arms of Adolf Hitler, dictator of the other great revisionist Power of Europe. Though the fate of Austria divided the two countries, the Rome-Berlin Axis was made public in November 1936, and after an interval in which they alienated the rest of Europe and deceived each other by a series of unlawful aggressions, this unequal and faithless partnership ripened into the more formal alliance of the ‘Pact of Steel’ (22 May 1939). Despite the obligation of each ally to give full military aid to the other should it go to war, no one was surprised when, upon the German invasion of Poland three months later (1 September 1939), Mussolini, well aware of Italian military unpreparedness, claimed for his country the novel status of non-belligerency.
1 Rear-Admiral Raymond de Belot: The Struggle for the Mediterranean, 1939–1945 (English translation, 1951), pp. 8–9.
Mussolini had always prided himself on being a tempista and the timing of this stroke was his and his alone. He gambled on an early French collapse and an early British surrender. These expectations were only partly fulfilled, and therefore his plans wholly miscarried. For Italy he purchased a war of less than a fortnight against a prostrate France, but the price he paid was a war of more than three years against the British Commonwealth and the allies that came to its side, and when that war was ended the long devastation of his country by invading armies and their air and naval auxiliaries, the overthrow of the Fascist regime and his own death in ignominy.
(iii)
According to the geopolitics of the three totalitarian Powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, who celebrated their solidarity in the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940, Italy's allowance of the world was to be the Mediterranean. There, in the chosen field of her ambitions, Italy was to be permitted for the time being to pursue her advantages while Germany followed up her victory in the West by the subjugation of England.
In the last quarter of 1940, as it became apparent that the Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain, Hitler's interest dwelt temporarily upon the Mediterranean, where he contemplated ambitious operations extending from the Levant to Gibraltar and even beyond to the Canary Islands. Such difficulties as the naval hazards, General Franco's politic coyness and the hard bargaining of Vichy, however, confirmed his preference for the project of an invasion of Russia.
It was therefore defensively, in response to an Italian appeal for aid in Africa and in her hapless venture in Greece, that about the turn of the year Germany intervened in the Mediterranean with air forces based on Calabria and Sicily, the first elements of the Afrika Korps in the desert and the invasion of Greece. Even after the Axis successes of April and May 1941 in the Balkans, Greece, Crete and Libya, the Germans, now deep in their Eastern plans, continued to regard the Mediterranean as primarily an Italian sphere.
(iv)
1 Quoted by Marshal Pietro Badoglio: Italy in the Second World War (English translation, 1948), pp. 17–18; and by Elizabeth Wiskemann: The Rome-Berlin Axis, p. 213.
From the beginning of the war these possibilities for good and ill loomed clear in the mind of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. He insisted, as Nelson had successfully argued in the comparable circumstances of 1798, that the Royal Navy should hold the Mediterranean, even at the risk of crippling losses from air attack and even though it proved necessary for three years after May 1940 for all but some twenty of the most urgent convoys for Malta and Alexandria to take the long and unavoidably wasteful route round the Cape. After the expulsion of the British Expeditionary Force from the Continent, the Mediterranean became the one theatre where British land forces could engage the enemy with some prospect of profit, and Britain's scanty resources of war materials and shipping were strained to nourish General Sir Archibald Wavell's Middle East forces, and especially those in Egypt.
Upon the fortunes of this desert army pivoted Churchill's plan for the general conduct of the war – a plan adapted to the capacities of a maritime State fighting alone against a continental coalition which presented a tender flank to the sallies of sea power. An early hint of its nature was contained in a directive to the Chiefs of Staff Committee of 6 January 1941 to press on with the study of a scheme for the occupation of Sicily, which Churchill saw in October 1941 as ‘the only possible “Second Front” in Europe within our power while we were alone in the West’.1 Soon a definite sequence of operations was being envisaged. After the clearance of Cyrenaica and an advance into Tripolitania, the Eighth Army (as the desert force was now called) would enter French North Africa, with the assistance of the French if it was offered, thus putting the entire North African shore into British or friendly hands; or, as an alternative to the advance into French North Africa, the army might wheel northward to descend upon Sicily.
(v)
1 Winston S. Churchill: The Second World War, Vol. III (The Grand Alliance), p. 479.
Early in their partnership these Allies made two paramount decisions, which the student of the Mediterranean war must carefully mark. The first, in logic as in time, was to give precedence to the European theatre and to the defeat of Germany, ‘the prime enemy’.1 It was grounded on the classic principle of concentration and the conviction that the fall of Germany must be followed by the collapse of Italy (if that had not already occurred) and by the defeat of Japan. The second great decision proposed the means. At a London conference in April 1942 Churchill accepted the American view that the principal Allied attack should be delivered in Western Europe across the English Channel, though it was not until the quadrant conference at Quebec in August 1943 that this frontal attack was formally given precedence as ‘the primary United States-British ground and air effort against the Axis in Europe’. Weighty arguments overbore all other solutions – the unrivalled facilities of the United Kingdom as a base; the opportunity, available nowhere else, to employ British metropolitan land, sea and air forces in an offensive role; the directness of the route from the Channel coast to the heart of Germany and the absence of great natural obstacles barring the way; the comparative ease with which preliminary air superiority could be won at the point of assault; and the economy in shipping and naval escorts during the long period of preparation as well as in the actual invasion.2
1 This course had been agreed upon at Anglo-American staff conversations in February 1941, and it was reaffirmed soon after the United States entered the war.—Report of United States Joint Army and Navy Board to the President, 21 December 1941, quoted in Robert E. Sherwood: The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, Vol. I, p. 449. At the first Washington conference, which opened almost immediately afterwards, the staffs agreed that ‘only the minimum forces necessary for the safeguarding of vital interests in other theatres should be diverted from operations against Germany’.—Churchill, III, p. 624.
2 Dwight D. Eisenhower: Crusade in Europe, pp. 51–2; Sherwood, II, pp. 524–5.
Whatever indulgence American naval opinion showed towards the Mediterranean approach was likely to be discounted by the frank attraction of the Pacific war; while American military opinion firmly favoured the most direct thrust at German land and industrial power and welcomed the opportunity to deploy the massive product of American war factories, confident that weight of metal, skilfully managed, could crush the enemy. This was the natural policy of a Power conscious of industrial supremacy and material might but without the experience of the human cost of a wide continental war. It was likewise in harmony with American aptitudes for large-scale planning looking to distant ends. By feeding men and machines into an assembly line and by committing the finished product, trained and equipped armies, to a single, scientifically planned stroke at the heart of the enemy, the Americans would give a new content to the old French phrase, ‘organiser of victory’. Any distraction from the Channel invasion was therefore regarded with reserve and sometimes with open misgivings by the highest American military commanders; and when tension existed between the two great Allies, it frequently sprang from American suspicions that the pragmatic British method of waging war meant the dribbling out of resources in a series of ineffectual ‘side-shows’.
The British method was a product of the momentum of the past and the imperious facts of the present. Never able to match her armies alone against the conscript masses of the Continent, Britain was cool towards heavy land commitments in Western Europe. Historic memories cautioned against the drain of human and material wealth by a second war of attrition, another 1914–18. War once being made, the traditional British formula for frustrating the would-be conqueror of Europe had been one of limited, if sometimes decisive, participation in continental warfare, the subsidising of allies whose manpower was greater than their wealth, the weapon of blockade and the exploitation on the periphery of the strategic mobility afforded by command of the seas. The typical expression of this policy was the amphibious outflanking movement, whereby the continental colossus might be wounded in the back and left to bleed.
1 See the discussion in Chester Wilmot: The Struggle for Europe, Chap. VI.
So inexorable is the dominion of history and geography over the strategist that no British mind pondering the means of overthrowing Hitler's Germany could have missed the possibilities of the central or Italian peninsula; for there, as in 1808 and 1915, the Daedalus-wings of sea power offered escape from the labyrinth of continental war, and there too, as in the other peninsulas in the other wars, was the homeland of the weak and reluctant ally or satellite. Britain, observed Admiral Raeder with rueful insight, ‘always attempts to strangle the weaker’.2
1 The Salonika expedition of October 1915 was aimed to feed Serbian resistance and belongs in the same strategic category.
2 Quoted by F. H. Hinsley: Hitler's Strategy, p. 99.
3 This belief was not unknown in Bomber Command, and even in early 1944 the hope that air operations alone would clear Italy was being expressed. Nor was this kind of thought peculiarly British. General Carl Spaatz, who assumed command of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe on 1 January 1944, ‘still privately regarded pointblank [the Allied bombing plan for Western Europe] not merely as a prerequisite to overlord [the code-name for the plan for the invasion of north-west Europe from the United Kingdom in 1944] but as a perfectly feasible alternative to it, and regretted the decision of the Combined Chiefs to risk a huge invasion when there existed a possibility of eventually bombing Germany out of the war’.—Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. III, p. 26.
The Mediterranean was not the only region in which the enemy flank lay open to attack, and Churchill was long an advocate of a landing in northern Norway to clear the Arctic sea route to Russia. Yet the Mediterranean was the most obvious choice. The alarming losses of Allied shipping in 1942 made its reopening as a regular convoy route urgently necessary to save the long haul round the Cape. The Japanese threat to India deepened the British desire to restore the quickest seaway to the East. Scarcely less influential was the investment Britain had already made in the Mediterranean. Since the Dunkirk evacuation, Egypt and Libya had been the scene of Britain's major war-making by land, and the actions at Taranto and Cape Matapan had established the moral supremacy of the British over the Italian navy in the theatre.1 Moreover, the redeployment of the large British forces and their establishments already committed in the Mediterranean for tasks elsewhere would have been very costly in shipping, and at a time when it was necessary to bring British military power continuously to bear would have given the enemy a welcome respite. With America as a partner, the northward leap across the sea now seemed a still more desirable sequel to the hard-fought desert campaign, which Churchill was reluctant to see expire in a bathos of minor operations. Nor could any other theatre by the end of 1941 offer strategy such a wide array of choices.2
(vi)
1 It is not possible to speak of British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean at this period. Cape Matapan was not decisive and the Italian fleet remained powerful, though it was not aggressively employed. During the period from the outbreak of the war in the Mediterranean until 8 September 1943, the Italian fleet lost 193 warships and the British 191.—De Belot, p. 230.
2 Two other motives – desire to vindicate the Gallipoli strategy of the First World War and concern for the political future of the Balkans – are sometimes said to have influenced Churchill's interest in the Mediterranean; conversely, American caution is attributed to distrust of British ‘imperialist’ ambitions in southern and eastern Europe. These hypotheses call for no comment here beyond the remark that they are not necessary to account for either the British or the American attitude.
Its importance as a theatre of war from April 1942 lay at the mercy of events external to it and beyond the shaping of those who fought there – the state of the war in the Pacific and in South-East Asia, the progress of the battle against the U-boats, the intensity of Russian pressure for diversionary operations, the range of employments open to Allied troops elsewhere, the turn of politics at Vichy or Madrid or Rome, and especially the preparedness of the armies that were to storm Hitler's Festung Europa. Until the second front par excellence could be launched, it was better to march forward in the Mediterranean than to mark time at home. The Mediterranean, then, became the place where, at first, surpluses might be spent and, later, economies effected; it was the field for interim measures; strategically, it lived from hand to mouth.
1 Churchill, Vol. V (Closing the Ring), p. 140.
2 The pseudonym used by Churchill in his most famous correspondence with Roosevelt, comprising about 1700 letters, telegrams and other communications. Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy for seven years (1913–20) during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson.
It was, nevertheless, in April 1942, while these reverses were still in full flood, that Roosevelt, on the advice of his Chiefs of Staff, sought and obtained British assent to the principle of the Channel attack (round-up) as the main Allied effort, which was to be launched, if possible, in the spring or summer of 1943. But what was to be done in the meantime? On visits to London and Washington in May and June, V. M. Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, made strong representations for the early opening of a substantial second front in Western Europe. By now competition was keen among rival plans for filling the interval until round-up could be mounted. Molotov's visit had not weakened the American preference for the frontal attack on Europe, nor had Churchill's renewed plea for the North African venture and his fresh plea for the liberation of northern Norway allayed American fears of the fruitless dissipation of power where it could achieve no decisive result. Roosevelt, therefore, at the urging of General George C. Marshall, proposed for the late summer or autumn of 1942 a more limited operation in northern France, perhaps at Brest or Cherbourg, where a permanent lodgment might be effected until in 1943 it could be expanded into a wholesale invasion of the Continent; meanwhile it would draw appreciable air forces from the Russian front. A further, though always remote, possibility was the employment of American troops in Egypt with the British or even farther east in Syria or the Persian Gulf.
1 Mark W. Clark: Calculated Risk, p. 33. The United States Second Corps began to arrive in England on 12 July.
2 Clark, p. 51; Sherwood, II, p. 628.
(vii)
It was in these circumstances that Roosevelt resolved to break the deadlock. Hopkins, Marshall and Admiral Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet, having failed in London to persuade the British that the Channel sortie was practicable in 1942, the President signalled a request for a date not later than 30 October for the combined landings in North Africa. Thus, at last, American might was to re-enter the Mediterranean, where in Jefferson's time the United States fought against the Barbary corsairs their first overseas campaign, blockading and raiding ‘the shores of Tripoli’. It has been said that in this choice, largely that of naval minds, Roosevelt, exceptionally, overruled his highest-ranking advisers.1 Churchill himself described the slow emergence of the decision as ‘strategic natural selection’,2 but the historian is at liberty to suppose that the phrase attributes too much to nature.
Apart from the clamant need to seize the initiative, to hit out at the enemy in some direction and to employ and toughen idle troops, the prime strategic objects of torch, as the North African operation was now renamed, were the clearance of the Mediterranean for shipping and the destruction of the Axis army of the desert. It would also forestall (what was now indeed improbable) the German occupation of French North Africa, and when Marshal Stalin was let into the secret by Churchill in Moscow he discerned other strategic advantages – the overawing of Spain, the threat to Italy and the provocation of trouble between French and Germans. A gratuitous gain was the capture of the reinforcements Hitler poured into Tunisia.
On 23 October the Eighth Army, under General B. L. Montgomery, attacked at El Alamein; on 8 November the leading elements of the British First Army and the United States Second Corps, under the supreme command of the American General Dwight D. Eisenhower, assaulted the beaches near Casablanca and Rabat, Oran and Algiers; and on 13 May 1943 General Sir Harold Alexander, commanding in the field the armies now united in Tunisia, signalled the Prime Minister: ‘We are masters of the North African shores’.3
1 Sherwood, II, p. 615.
2 Churchill, Vol. IV (The Hinge of Fate), title of Chap. XX.
3 Ibid., p. 698.
(viii)
These shores, the Prime Minister had no doubt, were to be ‘a springboard and not a sofa’.1 Though the possibility had not yet been abandoned, the prolonged enemy resistance in Tunisia rendered more doubtful the mounting of the major invasion of northern France in 1943, and the reinvestment of Mediterranean profits promised richer rewards. The continuing need for relief to Russia could be most economically fulfilled in the Mediterranean, where formidable strength in men and shipping was assembled. It was still necessary to secure the sea line against aircraft based on the northern shore, and it was estimated that the possession of Sicily as well as of the North African coast would release 225 vessels for use elsewhere.2 Unremitting pressure would harry the Fascist regime in Italy and perhaps break the Axis. At Casablanca (14–23 January 1943) Sicily was therefore chosen as the next Anglo-American objective. Americans disturbed by the broadening Mediterranean prospect took consolation by reflecting that Sicily was a small island which could be inexpensively garrisoned and the occupation of which did not commit the Allies to further offensives in the area.
Yet it was hardly to be conceived that the conquest of Sicily would wholly absorb the impetus of Allied exertion. It is true that the third Washington conference (12–25 May) gave notice that henceforth the southern theatre must be strategically ancillary to the western: 1 May 1944 was tentatively fixed as the date for the Channel attack (overlord) and from 1 November 1943 seven divisions were to be withdrawn from the Mediterranean for the purpose. Equally, however, it was made clear that vital work remained to be done there. To eliminate Italy from the war and to contain as many German troops as possible were the two aims set before Eisenhower, as Allied Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, to guide him in planning to exploit success in Sicily. He was to prepare suitable operations, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff would decide which to adopt.
1 Churchill, IV, p. 583.
2 Sherwood, II, p. 672. The following comparative mileages show the saving effected by the reopening of the Mediterranean: London-Alexandria, via the Cape 11,608 miles, via the Mediterranean 3097 miles; London-Abadan, via the Cape 11,400 miles, via the Mediterranean 6600 miles; New York – Suez, via the Cape 12,200 miles, via the Mediterranean 5050 miles; New York – Persian Gulf, via the Cape 12,000 miles, via the Mediterranean 8500 miles.–De Belot, p. 54; Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond: Statesmen and Sea Power, p. 322.
Since the United States Government vetoed a Balkan expedition, the choice lay between Sardinia, which had been passed over before in favour of Sicily, and the Italian mainland; and early in June 1943 planning for both alternatives began. Sardinia and Corsica were possible objectives if enemy strength on the mainland forbade invasion with the limited resources available to Alexander,1 commanding 15 Army Group. Their occupation would at least keep the Allied advance moving and destroy bases for air attack on Mediterranean shipping, but it would contain few German troops and would not of itself eliminate Italy from the war. It was to the mainland, then, that eyes, and more especially British eyes, were turned. Both at Washington with the President and later at Algiers with the Allied Commanders-in-Chief, Churchill argued powerfully for Italy as the only objective worthy of crowning the campaign and commensurate with Allied power in the theatre. He even offered a further cut in the British civilian ration to provide the shipping for moving extra divisions to Italian shores.
1 To carry out the strategic tasks pursuant to the conquest of Sicily, there were available nineteen British and British-equipped, four American and four French divisions, but of these many were under strength or not fully trained and others were required for garrison duty in the Middle East and North Africa. Shipping, especially landing craft, was also limited.
(ix)
The invasion of Sicily by the British Eighth Army and the United States Seventh Army began on 10 July. The early news was encouraging. So faint was the resistance of Italian soldiers, so cordial was the welcome of Italian civilians and so light were the casualties of the landing that Eisenhower almost at once recommended the attack on the mainland. On 20 July planning for Sardinia by the United States Fifth Army was cancelled. By a seemingly irresistible logic war approached Italy. First in May there had been the Allied decision to maintain the pressure in the Mediterranean after the fall of Sicily; now the pressure was to be applied direct to Italy; next would come the decision how to do so. The original intention of a landing in Calabria, with the danger of confinement within the narrow toe through the winter, was seen to be too unenterprising and was to be supplemented by operations against the heel of Italy or Naples.
1 This was ‘the important thing’ in the opinion of General Siegfried Westphal, The German Army in the West, p. 165. Westphal was chief of staff to Kesselring in Italy.
The opposition to be expected was not then predictable, but it was hoped that Italians would not be among the defenders of Italy. On 15 August, the day before these decisions were finally confirmed, a secret envoy of Badoglio appeared at the British Embassy in Madrid bearing an offer from the Marshal that, upon invasion of the mainland, his Government would quit the German for the Allied side.
The Germans had long before resolved to fight for Italy and for that purpose had begun to make drafts upon divisions re-forming in France after mutilation at Stalingrad. At the thirteenth meeting of the two dictators, which was held at Feltre on 19 July, Hitler, though distrustful of the loyalty of some Italians, offered up to twenty divisions for the defence of the peninsula, but would not promise to post them permanently farther south than a line from Pisa to Rimini. News of Mussolini's fall less than a week later shocked but did not paralyse the Fuehrer. The immediate reinforcement of Italy was ordered, partly to secure the communications of the German troops fighting in Sicily, partly to command without delay the Po valley and the important railway system of the north. From the end of July German troops poured into Upper Italy and within a month eighteen divisions were available to man the southern ramparts of the Reich. Six divisions south of Rome and two in the general area of the capital comprised the command of Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring. The remaining ten divisions, of which one and a half garrisoned Sardinia and Corsica, formed Army Group B, under Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel, with command of all forces in Italy and Italian-occupied Slovenia north of a line from Grosseto to Rimini.
Although these forces were so disposed as to dispute any likely landing save in Calabria, the Germans had not yet decided how much of the peninsula they would attempt to hold, nor was it until many weeks had passed that Hitler's vacillating mind came to rest in favour of Kesselring's advocacy of holding the invaders as far south page 16 as possible. Meanwhile, strategy was fluid. Painful as it was to contemplate yielding without a blow the port facilities of Naples, the airfields of the south and the prestige of occupying the Eternal City, two anxieties troubled the Germans. The resistance, passive or active, of mettlesome civilians, such as the inhabitants of the industrial areas were reputed to be, might tie down so many troops that it would be prudent to restrict German territorial responsibilities to the more vital north, particularly in view of the possibility of the sabotage of transport and other public services. A more acute fear was that the Allies, by a silent sweep of amphibious power, would trap the German formations in the south by landings farther up the coast – a grave risk which Kesselring was, and Rommel was not, prepared to accept.1
German fears were Italian hopes. The slow progress of the armistice negotiations was primarily due to the Italian desire for an assurance that the Allies would land in such overwhelming strength as to guarantee the rapid success of the invasion and far enough north to safeguard a substantial part of Italy and of the Italian army from German reprisals. The preliminary Allied terms were of a military nature. Five or six hours before the main assault the Allied Commander-in-Chief would broadcast the conclusion of the armistice; the Italian Government would simultaneously confirm the announcement, order its forces and people to join the Allies and resist the Germans, despatch its shipping, fleet and air forces to Allied bases and release Allied prisoners. Though the Italian Government made no demur to the terms, it sought an undertaking that at least fifteen divisions would be landed north of Rome. Refusing to disclose their much more modest intentions, the Allied negotiators offered the dropping of an airborne division to assist in the defence of Rome, made known the Allied determination to proceed with the invasion as planned, and set a date for the acceptance or rejection of their new offer.
Italian hopes of the Allies outweighed their fears of the Germans. Late in the afternoon of 3 September, the fourth anniversary of Britain's entry into the war, the armistice was signed at Alexander's headquarters near the Sicilian village of Cassibile. Early that morning, under a barrage fired from the southern shore of the straits, the Eighth Army had made an easy landing and was already advancing through Calabria.
1 Westphal, p. 155; Badoglio, pp. 78–9.
The next morning upwards of three divisions stormed the Salerno beaches. Though in the end they had to fight bitterly to establish themselves, the invaders were greeted by only one of the eighteen divisions sent to guard Italy.
(x)
The strategy by which war came to Italy is not without interest to every man who fought there. Why men fight is a question not to be answered in military terms; but why they fight here rather than there and at one time rather than another can be explained, as well as history can ever explain, by uncovering the course of strategy, and the campaign in Italy was the conclusion, if not the culmination, of a strategical process that has nothing less than the whole Mediterranean war for its context. In all wise war-making, the strategic purpose of a campaign tyrannises over the way it is fought, as means are subordinate to ends. The place of the Italian campaign in the entire curriculum of Allied conquest dictated in large part the resources allotted to it, the tempo at which it was conducted and even the character of the enemy response; thence the demands imposed upon troops, the objectives they were set, the risks they were ordered to bear, the reliefs and amenities they could be afforded, the casualties they sustained, the relations they established with allies in arms and civilians – in short, most things done and suffered. In the last resort, the determinations of high strategy, gathering ever greater particularity as they filter down, are despatched, ill or well, in the orders of the artillery sergeant to his layer or in the pointed finger and breathless word of the section commander.
Earlier pages have shown how halting and tentative was the strategic prelude to the war in Italy. Opportunism and improvisation led the way. At every successive step, voices were raised in doubt and heads were turned back towards the Channel coast. With the engagement of the enemy and the deployment of Allied power as major aims, the next advance was frequently valued rather as a page 18 movement than as a movement in a preordained direction. ‘We are off to decide where we shall fight next,’ wrote Hopkins on his way to Casablanca, where Sicily was the choice.1 ‘Where do we go from Sicily?’ asked Roosevelt a few months later when a fresh expedient fell due.2
The decision to enter the Italian mainland was taken only six weeks before the event; and the Fifth Army laid plans for four different courses of action. Though it was correctly supposed that the Germans would defend Italy, no one knew at what point, and no deep study had been given to the implications of a long campaign in the peninsula. It was known, indeed, that troops and landing craft must in future be strictly limited. Seven of the most experienced divisions in the theatre (later raised to eight) were already destined for overlord, and the agreement of the Quebec conference in August on the invasion of the south of France in the summer of 1944 could be expected to deprive the theatre of further seasoned troops. No definite geographical objectives were assigned to the planners of the campaign, and though the port of Naples and the airfields of Foggia were obviously desirable goals, and were often mentioned as such, Churchill himself, the most enthusiastic exponent of the enterprise, had been content to follow the lead of opportunity.3
These facts carry in themselves no censure; they simply suggest the extreme fluidity of the political and military situation. In this vexed sea of incalculables – ranging from the state of the weather to the moods of an Italian marshal – the Allied commanders steered on the compass bearing given them in May: the directive to eliminate Italy from the war and contain the maximum number of German troops.
When the Fifth Army went ashore near Salerno, the first of the two desiderata had been fulfilled: if not positively eliminated from the war, Italy had chosen a seemingly auspicious time to leave it. There was some disappointment that Rome fell so easily to the Germans and that the resistance of what Goebbels was now pleased to call ‘a gypsy people gone to rot’4 was so pusillanimous, but solid achievements remained – the bulk of the Italian fleet rallied to the Allies and, more important, the Germans now had to find substitutes for the lost Italian troops.
1 Sherwood, II, p. 668.
2 Churchill, IV, p. 709.
3 Ibid, pp. 735–7.
4 Quoted by Wiskemann, p. 310.
These were the reasons why the Allies made a battlefield of Italy's fair and famous land.