Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [161]
For the Germans it became the kind of war they were now used to. German writers criticize the Allied command and what they consider as its lack of initiative and daring. The more thoughtful among them, however, admit as they do so their ignorance of the vast complexities of amphibious operations. The Germans thus settled down behind the successive rivers that break out of the Apennines and run to the sea; as they held one river line, they would prepare the next behind it; when their fixed position was finally breached, they fell back, destroying everything as they went, to the next river. Then the whole deadly scenario had to be played all over again.
On the Adriatic side, 8th Army fought its way up the coast. Its ultimate target was the town of Pescara, the terminus of one of the few good roads running through the Apennines to the other side of the peninsula. If they had taken Pescara and that road, they might have been able to break across to Rome, levering the Germans on 5th Army’s side of the country out of their positions, and the great prize would have fallen. But below Pescara is a series of small streams—the Biferno, the Trigno, and, most important, the Sangro—and on each of these the Germans stood fast. As summer dust turned to fall mud, as the cold winter rains came on, 8th Army made a series of head-on attacks against the German lines. There was no alternative; it was like a football game with no passes and no end runs; just put your head down and bull your way up the middle. So it was with 8th Army; British, Canadians, New Zealanders, Indians, South Africans, all wore their hearts out slogging their way across the valleys and onto the heights behind. The Germans were always dug in, they always had good maps and good fields of fire, they had thoroughly swept the country as they retreated, and they were good soldiers determined to hold on.
Finally, late in November, 8th Army produced one last drive. They got over the Sangro and pushed along the coast but they lacked the stamina to get to Pescara. Christmas found the 1st Canadian Division, the last unbroken point of the British advance, fighting desperately from house to house in Ortona. They took it, but only after Ortona became Canada’s World War II equivalent of Vimy Ridge, and that was as far as they could go. When they at last ground down at the start of 1944, Pescara was still five miles away, it might as well have been five hundred.
On the other side of the peninsula, 5th Army encountered the same thing. They took Naples at the beginning of October, and thus had a port through which to supply. The Germans held on the Volturno, a rushing mountain stream. With the British component of 5th Army working along the coast, and the American inland, they broke across the river in mid-October. Rome lay a hundred miles ahead, and for the first forty of those the mountains came right down to the sea, in tangled masses crisscrossed by tumbling streams and marked by jagged outcrops of rock.
In this ideal defensive terrain the Germans constructed a series of positions. The lay of the land was such that they ran into one another, and different portions of lines were known by different names: the Winter Line, the Bernhard Line, the Barbara Line. The most famous, and the strongest, of them all was the Gustav Line. This was part of a general system that ran up along the lower reaches of the Garigliano, past the mouth of the Liri Valley and the main road leading to Rome, and into the mountains from there, up the Rapido River. The key point in the whole line, overlooking the shoulder where the Liri met the Rapido, was the town of Cassino. Above the town, on top of a mountain mass, lay the famous Benedictine