All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [333]
But it seems just to measure the disappointments the Allies experienced in Italy during June 1944 alongside those suffered by their armies elsewhere: the Wehrmacht displayed consistent skill and determination in escaping from encirclements on both Eastern and Western Fronts. Again and again the Russians trapped German armies, only to see them break out. If Clark had closed the Italian roads north, Kesselring’s retreating forces would probably have smashed through anyway. The failure of Diadem to translate tactical into strategic success was matched a few weeks later by the escape of substantial German forces through the Falaise Gap in Normandy, and by American unwillingness to cut off von Rundstedt’s withdrawal from the Bulge in January 1945.
In Italy, the Allies had to content themselves with escaping from the miseries of the winter stalemate and advancing 250 miles. Once it became clear that decisive victory in the theatre remained unattainable, to Churchill’s fury the Americans insisted upon winding down the campaign: they withdrew six US and French divisions to join the battle for France. For the last eight months of the war, in Washington’s eyes the only merit of residual Italian operations was that they engaged twenty German divisions which would otherwise have been defending the Reich against Eisenhower or Zhukov.
Hitler received news of the Italian retreat with uncharacteristic fatalism. In the late spring of 1944 he knew that within weeks, his armies must face a major Russian offensive. It was vital first to repulse the Anglo-American invasion of France, which was plainly imminent. If this could be achieved, it was unlikely that the Western Allies could mount a new assault on the Channel coast before 1945; most of the German forces in the west could be shifted to the Russian front, dramatically improving the prospects of repelling Stalin’s offensive. If this was an implausible scenario, as Germany’s generals thought, it was by nurturing such hopes that Hitler rationalised his strategy. Everything hinged upon the outcome of Eisenhower’s invasion attempt.
On the Allied side, there was a matching awareness of the stakes. A comparison of paper strengths suggested that the Anglo-Americans must prevail, above all because of their overwhelming air power. But amphibious operations in the Mediterranean had done nothing to promote complacency: in Sicily, and again at Salerno and Anzio, forces had landed in chaos, and come within a hair’s breadth of disaster. The British had always been apprehensive about fighting a big battle in France: when Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan began his task as chief Allied planner for D-Day in 1943, he found it ‘evident that the project was not highly regarded by the War Office save as a high-grade training exploit … The British entered upon this expedition from the start with the utmost reluctance and that is to put the matter very mildly.’ In May 1944, Churchill and Brooke were still scarred by the shambles of Anzio.
American and British air chiefs were also hostile. Believing themselves close to achieving Germany’s defeat by strategic bombing, they bitterly resented the diversion of their aircraft to invasion support. Churchill had his own objections to bombing French rail links, because of the inevitable civilian casualties, displaying a sensitivity that disgusted Bomber Command’s C-in-C Sir Arthur Harris: ‘Personally I couldn’t have given a damn if I killed Frenchmen. They should have been fighting the war for themselves. But I was being bullied all the time by Winston.’ Roosevelt, Marshall and Eisenhower overruled the prime minister. In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: ‘collateral damage’ in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe’s deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German build-up after D-Day, but the price was high.
If the peoples of