Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [160]
A week later, General Eisenhower ordered Alexander to keep on and occupy Rome. Ironically, both the Allied and the German high commands agreed that the Germans could not hold south of the capital, and that the best defensive line would be Pisa-Florence-Rimini, up in the north. But Kesselring was not so sure of this. His troops in Italy had quickly disarmed the Italians once the news of the armistice had been announced; they had seized the road, rail, and communications networks, and the situation seemed to be well under control. Kesselring was much more optimistic a personality than Rommel and he assessed the Allied moves so far as pedestrian, hesitant, and extremely cautious. He kept reporting back to Hitler that he thought he could hold south of Rome, and that there was no sense giving the Allies anything that they were not strong enough to take.
Eventually, Hitler accepted this view of things, which conformed so well to his own desires anyway. Kesselring was told to hang on between Naples and Rome as long as he could. He began building successive defensive positions across the peninsula, determined to make the Allies fight for every mile.
In the face of this stiffening opposition the weaknesses of the Allied view soon became apparent. They had expected to get something for nothing. Denied a cheap victory, the proponents of the Italian campaign, most notably Churchill, kept asking for more men and matériel with which to gain their ends. But those Allied leaders who had not been especially in favor of going to Italy in the first place now remained adamant; Italy had all the resources it was going to get. The result of this, in turn, was that Alexander, as the field commander, was continually asked to deliver victories but denied the means to win them. He launched a whole series of operations on successive shoestrings; these inevitably ran into trouble, and as they reached crisis stages, the Allies then found themselves forced to allocate the resources they had initially refused. More than any other campaign of the war, Italy was beset by divided counsels at the top, uncertain perception of what the campaign was supposed to achieve, and a sense among the troops of being a second-class operation, undertaken because the Allies did not really know what else to do at the time. Partly because of these factors, partly because of the terrible terrain, Italy became the theater of fighting that most resembled the horrible static trench warfare of World War I. Few soldiers of World War II experienced the kind of deadening, soul-destroying fighting that had characterized the earlier war, but most of those who did experience it fought in Italy.
As the Allies wheeled out of Salerno for the push up the peninsula, they linked up with 8th Army, coming up from Calabria. They ended up with 8th Army on the Adriatic coast of the peninsula and with 5th Army on the western, Tyrrhenian coast. Between the two armies lay the chain of the Apennines, forbidding, lunar, barely passable to small groups, and generally such bad country that fighting deep in the mountains was out of the question. It therefore became impossible to flank the Germans on their inland side. Unfortunately, it also proved impossible, in all but one instance, to flank them on their seaward side as well. Partly this was because of the Italian coast which, though it looks wide open, actually offers relatively few spots that are suitable for an amphibious operation. Even more it was because the theater lacked the sealift capacity to supply both the existing fronts, and new beachheads as well. The upgrading of the Pacific and the preparations for the invasion of France both robbed the Mediterranean of any potentially surplus shipping. This deficiency was further compounded by the needs of the air force. The Allies soon were in possession of the Foggia airfields and they wished to use them for bases from which to bomb the Balkans.