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By Root 1604 0

with the Italians, and the Germans feared the partisans much more than the Chetniks. Meanwhile, also at Teheran, on Stalin’s insistence it was decided that Germany was not to be split up into five autonomous countries, as Roosevelt and Churchill had envisaged. Teheran saw the high-water mark of Allied co-operation in the war, and was hard fought though generally good natured. Roosevelt’s overt keenness to charm Stalin, however, allowed the Marshal to spot a gap between the two democracies that he was to seek to exploit over the coming months. Nothing got past him. Each of the Big Three left Teheran with something he wanted, but each had to give up something too, although it is hard to escape the conclusion that Churchill was forced to give up the most.

‘The army’s advance up the spine of Italy,’ wrote John Harris in his novel Swordpoint,

had been that of a bull, wearied yet still willing, butting its way head-down in assault after assault. The pattern had rarely changed. Plains were few and far between and no sooner had one river or mountain been crossed than another barred the route. They’d battled across the Creti, but behind the Creti was the Agri, and behind the Agri was the Sele, and behind the Sele was the Volturno… The whole country, every river, every town, every hill, had shown them how useless machines could be when climate and terrain conspired to make them so. ‘Oh yes,’ the current joke ran, ‘the Germans are retreating all right. Unfortunately, they’re taking the last ridge with ’em.’21

The terrain has been described as one ‘that goats would find difficult to negotiate’.22

The Fifth Army crossed the swollen Volturno river, whose bridges the Germans had destroyed, in mid-October, after which Alexander ordered a short rest for regrouping and recuperation. The way ahead, over seemingly endless mountain passes through atrocious weather, could not but depress the most enthusiastic spirits. As the Germans withdrew, they adopted a scorched-earth policy against all types of food supplies and public utilities. This was only intensified when the Badoglio Government, ruling from the safety of Bari having judiciously fled Rome, declared war on Germany on 13 October.

With the Eighth Army – commanded by Montgomery’s protégé Oliver Leese after 1 January 1944 – to the east of the Apennines, and Clark’s Fifth Army to the west, there was precious little meaningful mutual support. As the Germans retreated northwards, they provided their countrymen with as much time as possible to perfect the Bernhard, Barbara, Winter and especially the Gustav Lines of defence. The last stretched right across Italy from the Gulf of Gaeta in the Tyrrhenian Sea to just south of Ortona in the Adriatic.

Informed via Ultra of Hitler’s decision of 4 October to support Kesselring’s plans to fight south of Rome, Eisenhower and the 15th Army Group commander Harold Alexander concocted a plan that would use the Fifth and the Eighth Armies in unison to take Rome. The Eighth Army would capture Pescara and swing westwards, while the Fifth Army advanced up the Liri Valley, aided by a bold amphibious landing just south of Rome at Anzio that would take reserves off the Gustav Line and draw away any strategic reserves further north. Although Alexander had eleven divisions in Italy by December 1943, Kesselring had nine south of Rome, and another eight in reserve to the north. Whereas the Wehrmacht was an homogeneous army in Italy, no fewer than sixteen nationalities fought on the Allied side, including Poles, New Zealanders, Algerians, South Africans, Moroccans, a Jewish contingent and even a Brazilian expeditionary force – many of them speaking different languages and using different weapons and ammunition. Moreover, the Anglo-American rivalries that had been seen in the ‘race’ to capture Messina in Sicily – convincingly ‘won’ by Patton – resurfaced and multiplied in the bid to capture the Eternal City. In general the British, exhausted after the North African and Sicilian campaigns, seemed slow and over-cautious to the Americans. On the reverse side of the