The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [228]
I find it bewildering the way our own and the Jerries’ positions are so interwoven. There is no hard and fast straight line as the front between us… The men keep asking why we don’t press forward and drive the enemy back – any risk is better than our present conditions. The answer is that there are more wadis beyond, and at the expense of much blood we would only be in exactly the same predicament, but with lengthier lines of communication.48
Walking the wadis today – it is advisable to do so only with a guide as there is still some unexploded ordnance there – one can see how close-quarter the fighting was, with trenches less than 50 yards from one another along waterlogged ditches, and man-sized holes dug out in the side of mud-banks for protection and makeshift accommodation. The 1st Battalion, Irish Guards took 94 per cent casualties in the wadis in only five days serving there, while the 2nd Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters was reduced from 250 officers and men down to a mere thirty in a similar period.49 Yet the Germans failed to break through either there or at the nearby Flyover.
‘I had hoped that we were hurling a wild cat on to the shore,’ Churchill complained to the Chiefs of Staff on 31 January, ‘but all we got was a stranded whale.’50 It was true that the Anzio operation had not succeeded in its objectives, largely owing to the German capacity for counter-attack. In his novel of Anzio, Seven Steps Down, the war correspondent John Sears Barker describes the Ranger attack on Cisterna on the night of 29 February, carried out along one of the main drainage ditches of the Mussolini Canal that came close to the town:
The Rangers considered it a sheltered alley… That 800 yards would be over unprotected open land but the Rangers, advancing through the early morning shadows, counted on surprise. What they didn’t count on was the Hermann Göring Division, which had set up a three-point ambush. Machine gun emplacements, mortars, anti-tank guns, depressed anti-aircraft guns, and Tiger tanks, hidden in farmhouses, ditches and haystacks, rimmed the ditch on all sides.51
The attack was disastrous: of the 767 men of the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions who took part, twelve were killed, thirty-six wounded and almost all of the rest were captured.
In the event, instead of VI Corps saving X Corps trapped on the Gustav Line, it turned out to be X Corps breaking through the Line in Operation Diadem in mid-May that finally opened up the oppor tunity to save the trapped VI Corps. With a proportion of Eighth Army brought back across the Apennines in support, Diadem saw Allied superiority of three to one, and an opening barrage of 1,500 guns at 23.00 hours on Thursday, 11 May 1944.52 General Alphonse Juin’s Free French Corps performed impressive feats of specialist mountain soldiering in turning the German flank. Meanwhile, II Corps of Fifth Army made good progress, and on 16 May Alexander could finally report to a hugely relieved Brooke that the Gustav Line had ‘definitely’ been breached. After initial rebuffs, XIII Corps of Eighth Army broke through, and it turned out to be the Polish II Corps which took Monastery Hill on 18 May. (Their charismatic commander, General Władysław Anders, died in exile in 1970, and his grave can be seen among those of his comrades at the Polish cemetery there.)
As the Tenth Army reeled back from the Gustav Line, and tried to defend the Hitler and Caesar Lines behind it, the opportunity arrived for Alexander to use VI Corps at Anzio to cut off the Germans’ retreat. Having missed capturing large numbers of the Wehrmacht in Sicily