Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [196]
The whole edifice was collapsing now. Down in northern Italy the U. S. 5th and British 8th armies, who had painfully inched their way forward to the last positions of the Gothic Line all winter, gathered their strength for the last battle. The Germans had, as usual, methodically strengthened their position; it seemed to matter little to them that they were fighting a hopeless war as the Russians were but forty miles from Berlin. On April 2 the Allied drive began, 8th Army leading off on the Adriatic coast. Twelve days later, with German reserves fully committed in the east, 5th Army began its attack. The Germans held hard for a week, then could stand the pressure no longer, and rolled back into the Po Valley. As they rushed northward in a desperate attempt to salvage what they might out of the wreckage, the 5th Army at last entered Bologna and Modena, then flowed out into the plain after them. For the next two weeks there was once more, as the summer before, a pursuit in open country, with the Allies fanning out over the flat river valley, heading for the distant mountains, Alps this time, no longer Apennines. The British pushed into and past Venice, heading toward Trieste. Americans reached the French frontier along the Riviera, then Turin, and drove toward the Brenner Pass and Austria.
In the midst of the confusion and the surrenders and the fighting, the Italian partisans, who had controlled considerable stretches of territory behind German lines for the winter, came out in the open at last. Mussolini’s Salo Republic collapsed like the house of cards it was, and the ex-dictator thought now only of how to get away. He did not succeed. On April 28 he, some last supporters, and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were caught by the partisans near Lake Como. They were quickly tried and as quickly shot, and Benito Mussolini, once Il Duce, ended up hanging by his heels from a lamppost in front of a Milan gas station.
The next day the remnants of the Italian Fascist Army surrendered, and General von Veitinghoff negotiated a complete surrender of all the German forces in Italy, to take effect at noon on May 2. The long thankless task was over at last, and the Allies had finally won their victory, one that tied down countless German troops, but one that fell far short of Churchill’s initial hopes and expectations.
As the Allied armies raced across western Germany several things preoccupied their attention. One was the rumor of a mountain fastness, the National Redoubt, deep in the heart of the Bavarian Alps. There were dark, troll-like yearnings in the mythology of nazism, and out of them Goebbels had created the idea of a stronghold where the last and greatest of the Nazis would gather, in the event of the Götterdämmerung, and fight on forever. The Allies knew only enough of this to worry about it and to orient some of their advance toward southern Germany in an effort to forestall it.
A second problem was Berlin itself. The Russians were now driving hard for it and were determined that they and not the Western Allies would conquer the enemy’s capital. The Allied leaders had already agreed on the postwar disposition of Germany: it was to be divided into zones of occupation; Berlin was to be well inside the Russian zone but was to be garrisoned by all the Allies jointly. Churchill began to have second thoughts on this matter and privately wanted the Western Allies to get to Berlin first if at all possible. He was ultimately