Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [204]
When the conference ended on August 24, Ian Jacob wrote, “There seems to be general satisfaction, though I can’t see what has been decided which takes us much beyond Trident.” The “general satisfaction” was merely a matter of public courtesy. Brooke wrote, “The Quebec conference has left me absolutely cooked.”757 He subsequently acknowledged that758, at this time, he was close to a nervous breakdown. The Americans, for their part, were deeply unhappy about British conditionality towards Overlord. Churchill’s team had not for a moment abandoned their determination to keep the Allies deeply engaged in Italy, even at risk to D-Day. After a brief break at a mountain camp for fly-fishing—not a pastime which Churchill indulged with much conviction—he travelled to Washington, where he spent the next five days urging the need to hasten operations in Italy. On September 3, Italian representatives signed the surrender document at Cassibile, in Sicily, while at dawn units of Eighth Army landed on the Italian mainland north of Reggio. Five days later, the British 1st Airborne Division seized the port of Taranto without opposition, which Churchill dubbed “a masterstroke” in a laudatory signal to Alexander.
On September 9, Mark Clark’s Fifth Army staged an amphibious assault at Salerno, precipitating one of the bloodiest battles of the campaign, and a near disaster. “It was like fighting tanks759 barehanded,” wrote an American infantry lieutenant colonel facing a panzer assault on the beachhead. “I saw riflemen swarm over the top of moving German tanks trying to shoot through slits or throw grenades inside. Other tanks would machine-gun them off. They ran over wounded men … and spun their treads.” In the first hours, Clark was sufficiently panicked to order reembarkation, until overruled by Alexander. At painful cost, a perimeter was established and held. That day, as German forces raced to occupy key strategic positions across southern Italy, the Italian fleet set off toward Malta to surrender. Its flagship, the battleship Roma, was sunk en route by German bombers, once again demonstrating the Luftwaffe’s skills against maritime targets. A mad Allied plan for a parachute assault on Rome was mercifully cancelled at the last moment. Even the Anglo-Americans at their most optimistic were forced to acknowledge that, against the Germans, such an adventure would prove disastrous.
Churchill was mortified that, once again, he was in Roosevelt’s company when bad news came. He had held out to the president a prospect of easy victory in Italy. Now, instead, they learned of savage enemy resistance at Salerno. The British were naïve in anticipating that a surrender by Italy’s government must of itself deliver most of the country into Allied hands. Brooke had told the Combined Chiefs of Staff on May 13: “He did not believe Germany would try to control760 an Italy which was not fighting.” He and Churchill were importantly deceived by Ultra decrypts, which showed that the Germans intended to abandon most of Italy without a fight.
In the event, however, and as so often, Hitler changed his mind. This was a direct consequence of the Allied armies’ poor showing, in German eyes, on Sicily and at Salerno. Anglo-American commanders and men exposed their limitations. Montgomery’s performance was no more impressive than that of Mark Clark. The Germans were astonished by the ease with which some British and American soldiers allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. Kesselring, the German commander on the spot, concluded that defending Italy against such an enemy might be less difficult than he had previously supposed. He reported accordingly to Hitler. The führer responded by ordering a vigorous defence of the peninsula, a task Field Marshal Kesselring—appointed German supreme commander in Italy on November 6—undertook with extraordinary energy and effectiveness. Allied fumbling of the first phase of operations in Italy thus had critical consequences for the