• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1154 0

He criticised set-piece frontal attacks, overdependence on artillery, refusal to exploit infiltration to work behind defenders in close country. He urged that every battalion should be relieved of some twenty-odd of its soldiers who invariably ran away in action. He concluded: ‘The Germans have undoubtedly in one way scored a decided success in SICILY. They have been able to evacuate their forces almost intact having suffered very few casualties … They have inflicted heavy casualties on us. We all feel rather irritated as a result.’ This recklessly frank assessment reached Montgomery’s ears: his vanity pricked, he sacked Wigram from command of his battalion. No heed was taken of the colonel’s just strictures.

Apologists for the British and American armies assert that respect for the German defence of Sicily, like many other Axis battlefield achievements, cannot mask its ultimate failure. Kesselring’s forces were evicted from the island. They lost. This is true, and important. It is among the themes of this book that the Wehrmacht fought many battles brilliantly well, but that Germany made war very badly. Nonetheless, repeated Anglo-American failures to destroy Hitler’s armies, despite successes in displacing them from occupied territory, meant that the Red Army remained until 1945, as it had been since 1941, the main engine of Nazism’s destruction.

2 THE ROAD TO ROME

The Allied assault on the Italian mainland began on 3 September, when Canadians of Eighth Army landed in Calabria without meeting resistance; Kesselring, commanding the German defence, had decided to fight his first battle further north. Five days later, on 8 September, as Allied leaders assembled for a summit in Quebec, Marshal Badoglio’s government in Rome announced Italy’s surrender, prompting renewed optimism about a swift advance up the peninsula. On the 9th, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed at Salerno. This proved one of the critical actions of the western war, but not in the fashion the invaders anticipated. Col. Bill Darby’s US Rangers achieved initial success on the extreme left of the Allied line, clearing the Amalfi coast resort villages and securing the Chiunzi pass, with its distant view of Naples. But elsewhere the Germans deployed rapidly to meet the invaders, and launched a series of smashing counter-attacks. Clark’s one American and one British corps found themselves penned in four small beachheads, under intense fire.

On the 13th, Kesselring’s forces drove a wedge between US and British elements which brought his panzers within a mile of the sea. The amphibious armada offshore suffered heavy attacks by the Luftwaffe, employing new radio-controlled glider bombs. Clark panicked and proposed re-embarking the army. Though Eisenhower and Alexander overruled him, for hours chaos dominated the beachhead, especially after darkness fell. ‘In the belief that our position had been infiltrated by German infantry, [American troops] began to shoot each other,’ wrote a British eyewitness, ‘and there were blood-chilling screams from men hit by the bullets. We crouched in our slit trench under the pink, fluttering leaves of the olives, and watched the fires come closer, and the night slowly passed … Official history will in due course set to work to dress up this part of the action at Salerno with what dignity it can. What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos.’

Lt. Michael Howard of the Coldstream Guards wrote: ‘Shells whined swiftly over us like lost souls. Moan, moan, moan they wept.’ Some British as well as American units behaved deplorably: the Scots Guards official history acknowledged ‘a general feeling in the air of another Dunkirk’. Only an intense naval bombardment, pounding the German front, averted disaster. ‘For God’s sake, Mike,’ said Eisenhower to US VI Corps commander Maj. Gen. Mike Dawley a few hours before Dawley was relieved and sent home as a colonel, ‘how did you manage to get your troops so fucked up?’ Lt. Peter Moore of the Leicestershire Regiment wrote:

During