• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1130 0

a massive counter-attack on the perimeter. ‘I never saw so many people killed around me before in all my life,’ said an Irish Guards corporal. An NCO, watching as swine snuffled around the bodies of the dead in no man’s land, mused bitterly, ‘Is this what we are fighting for, to be eaten by pigs?’ The Germans found the experience of Anzio as tough as did the Allies. ‘Spirits are not particularly high since 4½ years of war start to get on your nerves,’ wrote one of Kesselring’s soldiers with some understatement. Another man observed on 28 January that he had been unable to get his boots off for a week: ‘The air roars and whistles. Shells explode all around us.’ The February assault cost the Germans 5,400 casualties, and their army log reported: ‘It has become very difficult to evacuate the wounded. All ambulances, even the armoured ones, have been lost, making it necessary to use assault guns and Tiger tanks.’ Some Allied units broke, streaming in flight towards the rear – and so too did several German ones, in the face of annihilatory US and British artillery fire. The Allies expended 158,000 rounds during the February battles, ten for each one fired by the Wehrmacht.

Meanwhile further south, though the Allies were still pinned in the mountains, their foes found nothing to celebrate. The German corps commander at Cassino, Gen. Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, told an aide: ‘The rotten thing is to keep fighting and fighting and to know all along that we have lost this war … Optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.’ Von Senger, a rare and indisputable ‘good German’, soldiered on like the fine professional he was. But his men endured hell under Allied bombing and shelling, which levelled the town below as well as the monastery on the mountain. Explosions flung men about like ‘scraps of paper’. A German lieutenant described the March air attacks: ‘We could no longer see each other. All we could do was to touch and feel the next man. The blackness of night enveloped us and on our tongues was the taste of burnt earth.’ Yet as clouds of dust subsided and the Allied infantry and tanks began to advance, still the Germans fought back. Craters and rubble created by the bombing obstructed the attackers, not the defenders. ‘Unfortunately we are fighting the best soldiers in the world – what men!’ Alexander wrote ruefully to Brooke on 22 March.

The breakthrough in Italy, when it came, was too late and too incomplete to promote triumphalism: on 12 May Alexander launched his first intelligently planned attack, with Allied forces making two simultaneous thrusts. Deception persuaded Kesselring to fear a new amphibious landing behind his front, and thus to hold back his reserves. General Alphonse Juin’s men of the French Expeditionary Corps played a prominent role in overrunning the Hitler line south-west of Cassino, while Polish forces overcame the defences north of the monastery. The Americans attacked on the left, just inland from the sea. The Germans, their front broken, began a general retreat northwards. On 23 May Alexander ordered a breakout from the Anzio beachhead, besieged for four months. Many German units were reduced to one-third strength or less. ‘My heart bleeds when I look at my beautiful battalion,’ one CO wrote to his wife, ‘… see you soon, I hope, in better days.’

Operation Diadem, as the May offensive was codenamed, offered the Allies their only opportunity between 1943 and 1945 to achieve the comprehensive defeat of Kesselring’s armies in Italy, by cutting off their retreat. The consequences of Gen. Mark Clark’s disdain for this objective because of his obsession with gaining the personal glory of taking Rome, has passed into the legend of the war; his disobedience of orders emphasised his unfitness as an army commander. Alexander, a weak commander-in-chief, was not the man to control the anglophobic Clark, and bore significant responsibility for Allied sluggishness in exploiting Diadem. When Rome fell on 4 June, Kesselring withdrew to a strong new defensive position, the Gothic line, on a north-westerly axis anchored