Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [165]
On June 4, 1944, the first Allied troops, Americans from 5th Army, entered Rome. Eighty years earlier, after seven tries, U. S. Grant had wired Lincoln, “Vicksburg is ours, and fairly won”; now Alexander and Clark could say, “Rome is ours, and fairly won,” but they had missed the real prize of the campaign; they had failed to destroy the German Army in Italy.
The May offensive was still a great one. It broke the Gustav Line, smashed the Hitler Line, allowed the Anzio breakout, took Rome, and carried the Allied armies 200 miles up the peninsula in one vast swelling tide.
Then, in the midst of this gloriously exhilarating pursuit, the troops in Italy had the rug pulled out from under them. Churchill and Alexander had both overextended their credit, and just as the gamble was paying off, their bills were called in.
In November of 1943, at the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed with Stalin that they would launch an invasion of southern France as a supplement to the Normandy operation. The Americans believed they would need the extra port facilities of Marseilles to supply their armies, and they envisaged a great pincer movement that would squeeze the Germans out of all southwestern France. Now both Alexander and Churchill pressed that this operation be abandoned. If they got into the Po Valley, and there was little doubt they would, they could exploit in either direction. They might well have enough momentum to carry them through the passes into the Danube Valley, to Austria and Vienna; the whole of southeastern Europe might be liberated in a rush. Alternatively, if they could not go in that direction, they could as well force their way westward, into France by way of the Riviera coast, and they would reach southern France without the necessity of another seaborne invasion.
The American high command stood fast. They knew Stalin did not want Western Allied troops in eastern Europe; they also used as an argument their feeling that the French would insist on an operation aimed primarily at the liberation of France, though up to this point the Americans had not been overly responsive to French views on the conduct of the war. Mostly, Roosevelt believed that since the agreement to invade southern France had been taken with Stalin’s concurrence, he could not change it now. Ironically and unhappily, all of this sensibility about the Russians’ feelings came a mere couple of months before the Warsaw rising. The Americans felt they had succumbed to Churchill and the Mediterranean for the last time. They now insisted that the earlier commitments be honored.
In Italy the pursuit flowed on. The long columns of infantry trailed through Rome; heavily laden G. I.’s trudged past the Colosseum, crossed the Tiber bridges, and took up the path that led to the north. The tanks, at last freed from their inglorious role as mobile artillery tied to infantry, swept up the Italian highways, hot on the heels of the Germans. Tactical aircraft strafed and bombed the retreating enemy columns. But the Germans remained tough and wily; they did not panic, they did not rush. They dropped their rear guards at every bend in the road and they blew up every culvert. Their staff work functioned smoothly as always, and finally, in late July they noticed a diminution of the Allied pursuit. For some reason the pressure was slackening, and they began to have a bit of breathing space.
The answer was simple enough: to get ready for the invasion of southern France the Allies were pulling seven divisions out of Italy, all of the Free French Expeditionary Corps, and three veteran American divisions. Not only were they moved out, but they had to travel back south to Naples, all the way against the stream of the pursuit going north.