The Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 was envisaged as a swift push on Rome. Yet, as James Holland explains, by the end of the year, the campaign was stymied by German defences far from the capital
Jerry sending shells over. Deathly chatter of machine-guns. Rumbling of falling buildings.” Major Roy Durnford, padre of the Canadian Seaforth Highlanders, was writing his diary in a church in what remained of Ortona, a small town midway down Italy’s Adriatic coast. Ortona was by then a smashed wreck, as was the countryside immediately to the south. Just a few weeks earlier, this had been a lush region of vineyards and peaceful olive groves. Now it was a hell of churned-up mud, vines and tree stumps punctuated by scores of dead, bloated bodies, shattered buildings, grotesquely torn metal and blackened tank hulks. It was Christmas Day, 1943.
Durnford recorded those observations more than three months after Allied forces had launched their invasion of Italy with landings in Calabria and at Salerno, on the west coast, south-east of Naples. They had confidently expected to be masters of Rome by now, and for the front line to be at least 50 miles north of the capital. Yet even adjusted ambitions had not been met. Two days later, on 27 December, the wreck of Ortona would finally be taken – still some way south of Pescara, the revised year-end target for the British Eighth Army.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, the Fifth Army – a multinational force of US, British and French troops under the command of US general Mark Clark – was also struggling to make much headway. At the beginning of November, it had come up against the first of two formidable German defensive lines. The Bernhardt Line – or Winter Line, as the Americans called it – across the peninsula was strongest at one of the very few routes through the mountains. This was the Mignano Gap, through which ran a railway line and the Via Casilina – Highway 6 – from Naples to Rome. The long, low saddle of Monte Lungo sat in this gap, flanked by Monte Sammucro and Monte Camino standing sentinel like monstrous gate guardians, the former soaring well over 1,000m. Either side of these loomed a phalanx of yet more mountains – huge, forbidding, seemingly impassable.
The Bernhardt Line had finally been broken 10 days before Ortona fell – but only after brutal and costly battles fought over the summits of Camino and Sammucro. On the lower slopes of Sammucro, the village of San Pietro – largely untouched and unchanged in centuries – lay more ruined even than Ortona. Behind them, all the way from Salerno, the Allies left a trail of destruction in their wake as their typhoon of steel ripped through the region. Towns and villages crumbled to ruins; the ground was poisoned with mines, booby traps and unexploded ordnance; and refugees were constantly on the move.
Neither the German defenders nor the Allied attackers were trained in mountain warfare, yet this was the terrain in which they had been fighting. The soil was thin or non-existent; this harsh, unyielding ground exacerbated the shattering effects of shellfire and mortars, and created thousands of razor-sharp rock splinters that were sprayed on troops along with shrapnel during explosions. It was also freezing cold, with near-constant rain and a merciless, biting wind. After the Bernhardt Line was finally broken, Fifth Army came up against another firmly bolted door: the even-stronger Gustav Line. As the new year dawned, the Allies would have to take a deep breath, square their shoulders and start again. Rome was still 70 miles away.
Reversal of fortune
So why had the Allies’ situation, which had earlier looked so promising, spiralled so badly over the previous four months? It was a gloomy end to a year that had earlier brought glittering successes. May had seen the Allies defeat Axis forces in Tunisia – an immense victory that had followed the Soviet annihilation of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. The U-boats had been defeated in the Atlantic, so the Allies could now plan future operations, certain that most of their shipping would safely reach its destination. In March, RAF Bomber Command had launched its all-out strategic air campaign, pummelling the industrial heartland of the Ruhr region in western Germany and, in late July, largely destroying Hamburg, the Reich’s second city. The Germans had also been pushed back at Kursk, south of Moscow, and were in retreat along the eastern front. In the Mediterranean, the Allies had launched an amphibious invasion of Sicily on 10 July, conquering the island in just 38 days. Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, had been overthrown.
Meanwhile, though, the demands of a global war were growing. The cross-Channel invasion, at the time planned for May 1944, was to be the primary theatre and therefore the priority for resources. The war against Japan was also being fought concurrently, demanding vast amounts of shipping. Operations in the Mediterranean were important, but deemed to play second fiddle following the successful end of the campaign in Sicily.
Even so, in August 1943 there were good reasons for following up the capture of Sicily with an invasion of mainland Italy. It would unquestionably help to force Italy out of the war, meaning that there would be one less enemy to deal with. But it would also force the Germans to either abandon Italy, the Balkans and Greece, or to occupy those areas with troops drawn from the eastern and western fronts. And the Germans would be certain to do that, because the Romanian city of Ploiești, close to Yugoslavia, was Germany’s only source of real oil. Hitler was not willing to risk losing such a precious asset.
A further very good reason for invading Italy was to swiftly capture the complex of airfields around Foggia,
a rare area of flat ground in the south-east of the country from where heavy bombers could further tighten the noose around Nazi Germany. There was, though, a big snag: the shortage of shipping. Already, huge numbers of landing craft had been withdrawn; though plenty of troops were in place, the shipping wasn’t available to support them properly – and certainly not for a major amphibious landing in a region far more strongly defended by German troops than Sicily had been.
A Rubicon had been crossed, however. On 17 August, the Combined Chiefs of Staff – the Allies’ supreme military leadership body – had decided to invade mainland Italy, even if it meant doing so with a fraction of the forces that had been available for Sicily. Negotiations had begun with Italian representatives about a surrender, and it was hoped that the Italians would help to diffuse any German response to an invasion.
Allied leaders had also latched onto old – and spurious – intelligence suggesting that Hitler planned to retreat
to a line some 150 miles north of Rome. The sensible, methodical, materiel-heavy approach that had worked
so well for the Allies over the previous year was now abandoned in favour of an extremely high-risk operation based on a number of assumptions – and which had no guarantee of bearing fruit.
Confusion and mistrust
To make matters worse, confusion and mutual mistrust surrounded the announcement of the armistice on
8 September (it had been agreed five days earlier with an Italian delegation at Cassibile on Sicily). The Italians, riven by internal factions and the self-interest of their king, had expected it to come later, and were not ready. Their entire army was swiftly disarmed with clinical efficiency by the Germans, who had anticipated Italian surrender. Hitler had been intending to pull back to the north, and had been preparing to issue orders to that effect on 9 September – the very day that Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed at Salerno. Instead, the 16th Panzer Division met the landings, and were swiftly joined by five further divisions and elements of a sixth. There would be no hasty withdrawal north of Rome after all.
Salerno, then, was a close-run thing. The Allies were saved by overwhelming air and naval power, but also by heroic fighting on the ground by initially just three divisions, joined by US and British divisions landed in the first days after the initial assault. Clark performed very well indeed, considering he had never commanded an army in battle before, and the woefully under-resourced situation in which he found himself. He’d last commanded troops in battle in 1917, as a junior officer, yet at Salerno he directed his meagre forces with
cool-headed bravery and imperturbable leadership, making the most of the bad hand he’d been dealt.
Meanwhile, the British Eighth Army had earlier landed a small force on the very toe of Italy, with more troops arriving after the swift capture of Taranto, Brindisi and Bari. Incredibly, the south-east of Italy was taken with barely a fight. Foggia – the single most important location south of Rome – was captured on 27 September.
As a result, three of the four aims of the Italian campaign had been won by the Allies in just three weeks: Italy was out of the war; some 50 German divisions were either now in or heading towards the southern front; and the Allies had their airfields. Strategic bombers would be operating from southern Italy as soon as they were ready.
An attacker’s nightmare
By early October, then, only Rome still eluded the Allies. But as they pushed north – Eighth Army through the central southern and Adriatic coast, Fifth Army through Naples and on to the Volturno river – the awful reality of fighting through this mountainous country became clear. With its vast mountains, endless rivers running towards the sea (against the Allied advance northwards) and poor road network, Italy was a defender’s dream – and an attacker’s nightmare. The weather added to the misery. The campaign had been planned in the heat of August beneath azure-blue skies, but at the beginning of October the clouds opened. “Rained some,” scribbled Bud Wagner, a US artilleryman in the 34th Division, on 2 October. “Rained again,” he added two days later. “Are in a muddy spot.” The rain barely stopped for the rest of the year.
Italy was not a suitable arena for mechanised armies equipped with thousands of vehicles. The Germans blew up any infrastructure that could be used by the Allies – roads, bridges, buildings, power plants, rail networks – and laid a web of mines and booby traps. The pace of the Allied advance slowed. Mission creep also played a part. Originally, six heavy bomber groups were to be sent to Foggia; by the end of November, this number had grown to 21. That required thousands of personnel, as well as vast amounts of fuel, ammunition and spares – not to mention aircraft. This build-up had to compete with ground forces for the ever-diminishing amounts of shipping.
Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs became increasingly frustrated with the status in Italy. Blame has since largely been aimed at General Sir Harold Alexander, the overall Allied field commander; General Bernard Montgomery of Eighth Army; and Clark of Fifth Army. But they were doing the best they could with grossly insufficient supplies for the task. If anyone was to blame for the slowing of the campaign, it was the Combined Chiefs. “Once undertaken, the operation must be backed to the limit,” said General George C Marshall, US chief of staff, back in May 1943. But Marshall had not followed his own sage advice.
Fighting every step
It was the men on the ground – above all the infantry – who suffered the most. Fighting in conditions for which they’d not been properly trained and with insufficient support, they took enormous casualties. Infantry battalions rarely operated at full strength, were kept in the front line longer than reasonable, and suffered privations not previously experienced by Allied troops in Europe.
It was miserable for the Germans, too. Kesselring had won Hitler’s support and backing, but that brought the führer’s full gaze to bear on his efforts – and that meant fighting for every step. Yet Foggia had already been ceded without a shot and, militarily, fighting south of Rome instead of gradually retreating north to the Pisa–Rimini Line made little sense. Kesselring was able to keep his show on the road only by sacrificing entire divisions while fire-fighting and plugging holes with mixed-up troops from other units. Meanwhile, the poor Italian civilians caught up in this maelstrom witnessed the destruction of their homes and livelihoods – and many lost their lives.
As the year advanced, so the Allied campaign slowed and the misery of those caught up in the battle spiralled. At Ortona, the young Canadian officer Farley Mowat was struggling badly with combat fatigue. He’d narrowly avoided death on several occasions, even being blasted by a shell onto the rotting corpse of a dead German. “Too difficult trying to find the sense and meaning in any of this,” he wrote in a letter home. “Pray God we get a decent break.” He was not going to get one any time soon.
The first phase of the Allied invasion had ground to a halt, stymied by bad weather, harsh terrain, resource limitations and planning problems. The next few months would be pivotal in determining its success, or otherwise. For now, though, the situation was dire – on both sides.
“Plague of lice and fleas,” noted Major Georg Zellner, a battalion commander in the German 44th Infantry Division, on 29 December. “Dead and wounded by mines. The artillery fire continues with its monotonous regularity… The suffering is great.” His 9th Company received a direct hit the following day, killing and wounding more men. That night, Zellner slept fitfully, then woke and thought of home. “Outside,” he jotted, “rides death.”
LIBERATION V DEVASTATION
James Holland on the moral dilemmas surrounding the destructive Allied assault
“Our cause,” concluded US general Mark Clark at a pre-invasion conference, “is a righteous one.” Yet that ‘righteous cause’ came at a terrible cost for Italy. Al- ready, much of Sicily lay in ruins, as did many towns and cities in mainland Italy. And the situation was only going to get worse.
“Today every step reveals to me a show of misery and devastation,” wrote Filippo Caracciolo in his diary a couple of weeks later, on 16 September, following his return to Naples. “Collapsed houses, cluttered streets of rubble, piles of garbage.” A few weeks more down the line, the British 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artil- lery, was just south of the Volturno river. “We are at present shelling villages by the river,” noted RSM Jack Ward. All of the towns and villages his regiment passed through had been damaged, with some largely obliterated.
A key strategy for the Allies during the Second World War was ‘steel not flesh’ – using technology and mechanisation to avoid the slaughter of a generation of young men that had happened in the previous conflict of 1914–18, placing much emphasis on aerial bombing and firepower. It was still brutally dangerous for the ‘poor bloody infantry’ but, crucially, there were now significantly fewer of them than there had been a generation earlier. Broadly speaking, the policy worked well, especially in the sparsely populated deserts of North Africa. Italy, however, was home to 40 million civilians, and – from 3 September 1943 – no longer in the war. The Allies were supposed to be the liberators, yet they were destroying much of the country they were fighting through.
This posed a terrible dilemma. Did the Allies still hold the moral high ground if they were bringing so much death and destruction to those who were not their ene- my? Their main priority, they reasoned, was to win the war as quickly as possible, minimising casu- alties among their own troops. If that meant destroying Italian towns and lives, then so be it. The morality of the cause, however, was unquestionably becoming murkier as they inched their way up the leg of Italy.
James Holland is a historian, broadcaster and writer. His new book, The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943, was published in September 2023 by Transworld
This article was first published in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine