History of the Second World War (78 page)

* Liddell Hart:
The Other Side of the Hill,
p. 359.

These solemn assurances made a convincing impression. The next afternoon Westphal and another general, Toussaint, drove to the headquarters of the Italian Army at Monterotondo (sixteen miles north-east of Rome).

Our reception by General Roatta was very cordial. He discussed with me in detail the further joint conduct of operations by the Italian 7th and German 10th Armies in Southern Italy. While we were talking a telephone message came through from Colonel von Waldenburg with the news of the broadcast announcement of the Italian capitulation to the Allies. . . . General Roatta assured us that it was merely a bad propaganda manoeuvre. The joint struggle, he said, would be continued just as had been arranged between us.†

†
ibid.,
p. 359

Westphal was not altogether convinced by these assurances and when he got back to the German headquarters at Frascati late in the evening he found that Kesselring had already signalled to all subordinate commands the codeword ‘Axis’ — the pre-arranged signal which meant that Italy had quitted the Axis and that the appropriate action must be taken to disarm the Italians immediately.

The subordinate commands applied a mixture of persuasion and force according to the situation and their own disposition. In the Rome area, where the potential odds against him were heavy, Student used shock tactics.

I made an attempt to seize the Italian General Headquarters by dropping on it from the air. This was only a partial success. While thirty generals and a hundred and fifty other officers were captured in one part of the headquarters, another part held out. The Chief of the General Staff had got away, following Badoglio and the King, the night before.*

* Liddell Hart:
The Other Side of the Hill,
p. 360.

Instead of trying to overcome Student’s couple of divisions, the Italian commanders hastened to withdraw out of reach, falling back eastward to Tivoli with their forces, and leaving their capital in the hands of the Germans. That also cleared the way for negotiations, in which Kesselring applied a more gentle form of persuasion, proposing that if the Italian troops laid down their arms they should be allowed to go back to their homes immediately. That offer was contrary to Hitler’s order that all Italian soldiers should be made prisoners, but it proved more effective at less cost of life and time. The results can be related in Westphal’s words:

The situation around Rome calmed down completely when the Commander of the Italian forces accepted in its entirety the German capitulation suggestion. This eliminated the danger to the supply of the 10th Army. . . .

It was a further relief to us that Rome no longer needed to become a battlefield. In the capitulation agreement, Field-Marshal Kesselring undertook to regard Rome as an open city. He undertook that it should be occupied only by police units, two companies in strength, to guard telephone communications, etc. This undertaking was always observed up to the end of German occupation. Through the capitulations it was now again possible to resume the wireless signals link with O.K.W. [the German Supreme Command] which had been broken off since the 8th. A further consequence of the bloodless elimination of the Italian forces was the possibility of immediately moving reinforcements by road from the Rome area to the 10th Army in the South. . . . Thus the situation around Rome, after so many initial worries, had been resolved in a manner which one could hardly hope to better.†

†
ibid.,
p. 360-1

Until then, Hitler and his military advisers at O.K.W. had tended to regard Kesselring’s army as doomed. Westphal has contributed significant evidence on this score:

 . . . supplies and replacements of personnel, arms, and equipment were almost completely cut off from us from August onward. All demands were at the time brushed aside by O.K.W. with, ‘Well see later on’. This unusually pessimistic attitude probably also played a part in the employment of [Rommel’s] Army Group B in Upper Italy It was told to take into the Appenine position such parts of our forces as had managed to escape the joint attack of the Allies and the Italians.

Field-Marshal Kesselring, similarly, took a grave view of the situation. But in his view it was still capable of being mastered in certain circumstances — the farther south that the expected large-scale landing took place, the better the chances would be. But if the enemy landed by sea and air in the general area of Rome, one could hardly bank on saving the 10th Army from being cut off. The two divisions we had near Rome were far from sufficient for the double job of eliminating the strong Italian forces and repelling the Allied landing — and in addition keeping open the rear communications of the 10th Army. As early as September 9 it was becoming unpleasantly apparent that the Italian forces were blocking the road to Naples, and thus the supply of the 10th Army. The Army could not have held out against this for long. And so the Commander-in-Chief heaved a sigh of relief when no air landings took place on the airfields round Rome on the 9th and 10th. On both these days we hourly expected such a landing to be made, with the co-operation of the Italian forces. Such an air landing would undoubtedly have given a great stimulus to the Italian troops and to the civil population that was unfavourably disposed towards us.*

* Liddell Hart:
The Other Side of the Hill,
p. 361-2.

Kesselring himself put the matter in a nutshell, saying: ‘An air landing on Rome and sea landing nearby, instead of at Salerno, would have automatically caused us to evacuate all the southern half of Italy.’†

†
ibid.,
p. 360-1

Even as it was, the days that followed the Allies’ landing at Salerno were a period of intense strain on the Germans, and all the more nerve-racking through lack of information as to what was happening there. Never was the ‘fog of war’ so thick — that being due to the fact that the Germans were fighting in the country of an ally who had suddenly deserted them. The effect can best be conveyed by again quoting Westphal’s account:

The Commander-in-Chief could at first learn very little about the position at Salerno. Telephone communication broke down — as it was on the Italian postal network. It could not be easily restored, as we had not been allowed to examine Italian telephone technique. Wireless communication could not be arranged at first because the signal personnel of the newly formed 10th Army headquarters were not familiar with the peculiar atmospheric conditions in the South.

It was fortunate for the Germans that the main Allied landing came in the area where they had expected it, and where Kesselring could most conveniently concentrate his scanty forces to meet it. The British Eighth Army’s advance up the toe of Italy also ran according to expectation, and was too remote to carry an immediate danger to his forces. He benefited much from the Allied commanders’ reluctance to venture outside the limits of air cover — and in his calculations was able to reckon on their consistency in observing such conventional limitations. As a result the Allied landings at Salerno — optimistically styled ‘Operation Avalanche’ — suffered a costly check. Indeed, Mark Clark himself speaks of it as a ‘near disaster’.* Only by a narrow margin did the landing force hold off the German counterattack and avoid being driven back into the sea.

* Clark:
Calculated Risk,
p. 179.

In the original planning, Mark Clark had proposed that the landing should be made in the Gulf of Gaeta on the north side of Naples, where the country was more open and there was no mountainous ground as at Salerno to hinder the advance inland from the beaches. But when Tedder, the Allied Air Commander-in-Chief, told him that air support could not be so good if stretched to the Gaeta sector, Clark gave way and agreed to the choice of Salerno.

In some Allied quarters it had been urged that the most effective way to take the Germans off their guard, and throw them off their balance, was to make a landing beyond these limits; and it was argued that a landing on the heel of Italy, in the area of Taranto and Brindisi, would be ‘the line of least expectation’ while entailing little risk — and promising the early possession of two fine ports.

Such a landing was added to the plan at the last moment, as a subsidiary move, but the Taranto force consisted only of the British 1st Airborne Division, which was hurriedly collected from rest-camps in Tunisia, and rushed across in such naval vessels as were available at short notice. It met no opposition — but arrived without any tanks, and with scarcely any artillery or motor transport. In fact, it lacked the very things it needed to exploit the opportunity it had gained.

From this broad survey of the Allied invasion we come to a closer examination of the course of the operations, which started with the crossing of the narrow Straits of Messina by Montgomery’s Eighth Army on September 3.

The orders for this landing in Calabria, ‘Operation Baytown’, were not issued until August 16, when the last German rear-guard was in process of withdrawing from Sicily. Even then, no ‘object’ was specified in the orders — as Montgomery caustically pointed out in a signal to Alexander on the 19th. In reply, the object was belatedly defined, and he was told:

Your task is to secure a bridgehead on the toe of Italy, to enable our naval forces to operate through the Straits of Messina.

In the event of the enemy withdrawing from the toe, you will follow him up with such force as you can make available, bearing in mind that the greater the extent to which you can engage enemy forces in the southern tip of Italy, the more assistance will you be giving to
Avalanche
[the Salerno landing].

This was a meagre object, and a rather hazy one, to set the veteran Eighth Army. Montgomery remarks in his memoirs: ‘No attempt was made to co-ordinate my operations with those of the Fifth Army, landing at Salerno. . . .’ For the secondary purpose of giving assistance to this army, the landing of the Eighth was made at the most unsuitable place — over 300 miles from Salerno, along a very narrow and mountainous approach, ideally suited to obstruction by the enemy. There were only two good roads up the toe, one skirting the west coast and the other the east coast, so that only two divisions could be employed, with a single brigade heading each, and it was often difficult to deploy more than one battalion on either line of advance. There was thus no need for the enemy to keep large forces in this area, and all the less incentive to do so since he could be sure that the larger part of the Allied forces would be landing elsewhere. Once the Eighth Army was committed to the Calabrian peninsula, any chance of surprise by the Fifth was diminished, as the alternative possibilities with which the enemy had to reckon were reduced. The toe was the worst possible place for creating an effective distraction. The enemy could safely bring his forces back from there, and leave the invasion to suffer from operational cramp.

Despite the unlikelihood of meeting any strong opposition, Montgomery’s assault-landing on the toe was mounted with his habitual carefulness and thoroughness. Nearly 600 guns were assembled, under the command of the 30th Corps, to provide an overwhelming barrage from the Sicilian shore to cover the crossing of the Straits and the landings on the beaches near Reggio, which were carried out by General Miles Dempsey’s 13th Corps. The process of assembling this mass of artillery delayed the assault for days beyond the intended date. The bombardment was further increased by the fire of 120 naval guns.

During the previous days, Intelligence reports showed that the Germans had left ‘not more than two infantry battalions’ near the toe, and even these were posted over ten miles back from the beaches, to cover the roads up the peninsula. That information of the enemy’s withdrawal caused critical observers to remark that the preparatory barrage was a case of ‘using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut’. The comment was apt, but not exact — as not even a nut was left to crack. It was a tremendous waste of ammunition.

At 4.30 a.m. on September 3, the two divisions employed in the assault, the 5th British and 1st Canadian, landed on empty beaches, devoid even of mines and barbed wire. A Canadian note jocularly recorded that ‘the stiffest resistance of the day came from a puma which had escaped from the Zoological Gardens in Reggio, and was seemingly taking a fancy to the Brigade Commander’. No casualties were suffered among the assaulting infantry, and by evening the toe of the peninsula had been occupied, to a depth of more than five miles, without meeting resistance. Three German stragglers and three thousand Italians had been picked up as prisoners. The Italians readily volunteered to help in unloading the British landing-craft. No serious resistance was met in the days that followed, as the invaders pushed up the toe, and there were only brief contacts with enemy rearguards. But numerous demolitions, which the Germans skilfully executed in withdrawing, imposed repeated checks on the Eighth Army’s advance. By September 6, the fourth day, it was barely thirty miles beyond the beaches where it had landed, and it did not reach the toe joint — the narrowest part of the peninsula — until the 10th. That was less than one-third of the distance to Salerno.

Yet according to Montgomery, ‘Alexander was most optimistic’ when he visited the Eighth Army on September 5, and brought the news that the Italians had privily signed an armistice two days before. Montgomery remarks that Alexander ‘was clearly prepared to base his plans on the Italians doing all they said’, That confidence was questioned by Montgomery — ‘I told him my opinion was that when the Germans found out what was going on, they would stamp on the Italians.’ Events confirmed that comment, recorded in Montgomery’s diary.