The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [216]
Field Marshal ‘Smiling Albert’ Kesselring was in overall charge of German troops in Italy, superior even to Rommel. A bourgeois gunner turned airman from Bavaria, he was looked down upon socially by the aristocratic Prussians under his command, but he was obeyed. Kesselring assumed that the Allies’ next step would be to make amphibious landings at the Gulf of Salerno, just south of Naples, which was as far north as Allied air cover from Sicily could stretch. Sure enough, at 03.30 hours on Thursday, 9 September 1943, forty-seven-year-old Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed on the Gulf in Operation Avalanche, and dug in on four narrow, unconnected beach-heads. They were vigorously counter-attacked by the German Tenth Army, commanded by General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who had commanded a Panzer division in Poland, a Panzer corps in Yugoslavia and Russia and the Fifteenth Army in France and was now to prove an equally formidable opponent in Italy. ‘Shells were flashing in the water,’ recalled an American journalist, Jack Belden, ‘flames were yellowing the sky, and bullets were slapping into the boat. They snapped over our heads, rattled against the boat sides like hail and beat at the ramp door… The boat shuddered and the ramp creaked open… I stepped down… At last I was on the continent of Europe.’8
Montgomery had landed almost unopposed on the tip of Italy five days earlier in Operation Baytown. Nonetheless the Germans concentrated their efforts further north at Salerno, hoping to fling Clark’s Fifth Army – comprising Major-General Richard McCreery’s British X Corps to the north of the Sele river and Major-General Ernest Dawley’s US VI Corps to the south – back into the sea. If they had succeeded, which they almost did on 13 September amid bitter fighting, it would have had a profound effect on the plans to invade Normandy the following year. At the same time as Avalanche, the 1st Airborne Division of the Eighth Army landed at the instep of the Italian boot at Taranto. In Berlin, Goebbels was reading Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel about Wales, How Green was my Valley. ‘It is very informative about English mentality,’ he noted in his diary on 20 September. ‘I don’t believe that England is in any present danger of becoming Bolshevized.’9
Sailing to Salerno, the men of the Fifth Army had been informed that Italy had signed an armistice, formally dropping out of the war. It made no difference to the reception that Clark’s men received from the Germans when they landed, of course, and Kesselring later claimed that Badoglio’s defection had meant that ‘Our hands were no longer tied’ and that he could now requisition anything he needed without tiresome negotiations with the Italians over compensation.10 There was a viciousness to Kesselring that was to come to the fore in March 1944 when, with his full prior knowledge, following the killing of thirty-two SS men in Rome by partisans, 335 Romans were taken to the Ardeatine Caves on the southern side of the city and shot in the back of the neck in groups of five. He could also undertake wholesale reprisals against the partisans, sending out an order on 17 June 1944 that ‘The fight against the partisans must be carried out with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice of methods… Wherever there is evidence of a considerable number of partisan groups a proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the event of an act of violence being committed these men will be shot.’11 Churchill and Alexander nonetheless called for the commutation of Kesselring’s death sentence in 1947, and he was released in 1952.
Although the Germans disarmed and interned all Italian forces