The Italian Campaign, May–September 1944

The offensive in Italy that began in mid-May represented the pinnacle of Allied strength in the theater. Substantial French and Polish forces, trained and equipped by the Americans, proved a crucial addition. The French troops came from North Africa and other colonies. The Poles had found their way to the Middle East after release from Stalin’s camps; despite the certainty that either the Germans or the Soviets would control their homeland after the war, they still fought with extraordinary bravery.

Plans called for Eighth Army, which had taken over the front at Monte Cassino, to make a major thrust up the Liri valley; to its left, Fifth Army would break through to Anzio, while the six divisions in the pocket would, at the appropriate time, break out toward Valmontone. There, Route 6 represented both the main logistic link for the German Tenth Army as well as its main escape route. The campaign intended to destroy German forces south of Rome. However, Clark never accepted this fundamental goal of Allied operations. He was much more interested in ensuring that his Fifth Army and his American troops would liberate the Eternal City and bask in the international publicity a grateful press would shower on this moment in history.

With an overwhelming superiority in firepower, the Allies plastered German frontline positions on 11 May. The firing of 1.2 million heavy shells suggests the Allied advantage. At first the offensive achieved little. Eighth Army gained minimal ground, while the Poles suffered heavily in attacks on Monte Cassino. Fifth Army’s veteran units had no greater success. But in the middle of the Allied lines, the four French colonial divisions proved startlingly effective. Because the mountainous terrain seemed impassable, the Germans covered the sector in front of General Alphonse Juin’s divisions with one weak division. Clark himself had little respect for the French, which is why they drew a sector with such formidable terrain. For his part, Juin showed a mutual disrespect for Clark’s plans and, in French fashion, proceeded to march off on his own line of attack.

After heavy fighting, the North African troops destroyed the German defending force, broke through the Gustav Line, and proceeded across the mountains. Unlike many other Allied generals, Juin understood and accepted his operational goal: to penetrate the rear of the German Tenth Army and allow the breakout of Fifth and Eighth Armies. The French success opened the way for the American II Corps. Equally important, Juin’s Goums (his Moroccan mountain infantry) crossed the escarpment and broke into the Liri valley before the Germans could man the backup Hitler Line. Thoroughly taken in by Allied deception efforts, Kesselring responded slowly. Adding to his troubles were the absence of his competent Tenth Army commander, General Frido Senger von Etterlin (who was home on leave), and the failure of commanders on the scene to respond quickly.

The plans of Alexander’s chief of staff, Major General John Harding, called for Fifth Army to link up with the six divisions in the Anzio bridgehead. The combined force was then to drive north to Valmontone on Route 6 and cut the main avenue for any German withdrawal. With Valmontone in Allied hands, Fifth Army would possess good prospects for encircling much of the German Tenth Army. The Germans expected a drive out of the Anzio bridgehead northwest toward Rome, an expectation VI Corps cultivated. However, on 23 May the Americans struck out of the beachhead due north toward Valmontone, and in two days of heavy fighting achieved a breakthrough. The road was open to Route 6. At this point Clark’s G-3 (operations officer), Brigadier General Donald Brann, arrived at VI Corps headquarters, where Major General Lucian Truscott was in command. Clark, defying Alexander’s orders, sent only one division toward Valmontone, while the whole weight of VI Corps was to push straight toward Rome. Truscott demanded to see Clark, but the Fifth Army commander had conveniently taken himself out of circulation.

In fact, Alexander had some intimation that Clark might disobey his orders, but he was not prepared to call his American commander on the carpet. In some ways Clark’s insubordination was similar to Montgomery’s disobedience in 1944 in not making the opening of Antwerp his first priority. But the difference was that Montgomery’s disobedience reflected the field marshal’s operational analysis of the situation, while Clark’s disobedience reflected a vainglorious pursuit of publicity and prestige.

The Germans held Valmontone long enough to allow most of Tenth Army to escape. As Fifth Army pushed on toward Rome, it immediately ran into strong German defenses. However, the German I Airborne Corps failed to cover the steep slopes overlooking Velletri, and troops of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division seized the position. Kesselring now had to admit that he could not hold Rome, and German troops pulled north in good order. On 4 June Clark and his troops marched into an undefended city— whereupon the Pope highlighted his ambiguous record by asking that the Allies keep black troops out of the Eternal City. For a few brief moments, Clark basked in publicity on the front pages of American newspapers, but within two days Operation Overlord—the invasion of northern France— subsumed events in Italy, and Clark found his army and himself relegated to the back pages.

Still, the fighting in Italy did not cease. The Germans fell back toward their new Gothic Line in front of the Po River valley just north of Florence. There, they intended to take a strong stand, since industrial production in northern Italy, largely untouched by Allied bombing, was supplying weapons and other materiel in considerable quantities to the Reich. Over the course of the summer, Kesselring fought a series of delaying actions as his troops withdrew, and for once Hitler—distracted by events elsewhere in Europe—did not object to withdrawals. Kesselring was merely retreating to a line that Hitler had considered holding in fall 1943.

As their advance ground slowly northward, the Allies pulled seven divisions out of the theater for the invasion of southern France (its codename now changed from Anvil to Dragoon). Clark gave up three veteran U.S. divisions, his special forces of divisional strength, and all six of his French divisions. He was probably not sad to lose the last, since the French not only had proved cavalier in following his instructions but then had been successful in their disobedience to boot. After the war, a number of British commentators suggested that removal of these divisions from the Italian theater prevented Alexander from capturing the Po River valley and driving on to Trieste and Vienna. Given the record of Allied Armies Italy, it is possible that they might have captured the Po River valley, but the idea that they might have pushed on over the Alps to Vienna is inconceivable. After all, the Austrian Army had managed to use the mountains to hold off innumerable Italian attacks in World War I (and kill 600,000 Italians), and this time the defenders in the Alps would have been Germans, not Austrians. Moreover, Dragoon’s contribution in opening up the ports of southern France proved crucial in meeting the Allies’ supply crisis in France in fall 1944, especially after Montgomery’s failure to open the Scheldt. Even more to the point, it hardly seems reasonable that France would leave its troops in Italy, while its own countryside was being liberated from the Germans.

In late August, Alexander’s forces tried to break through into the Po with the remaining 18 Allied divisions. The Canadians delivered a skillful blow that came close to penetrating German defenses near the Adriatic and gaining the Po River valley. But the Eighth Army commander, General Oliver Leese, failed to position his reserves to take advantage of such a possibility. A plodding infantryman, Leese had been the XXX Corps commander at El Alamein, where his performance had been less than spectacular. As always, the Germans responded more quickly than did the Allies, and the possibilities opened up by the Canadian success disappeared. Moreover, the rainy season arrived to turn the battlefield into a morass that slowed movement to a crawl.

Clark’s drive on Bologna opened on 10 September; the sterling U.S. 88th Infantry Division, one of the best in Italy, attempted to outflank the city to the east but failed. Clark followed up that effort with a series of straight-ahead attacks that bled his divisions white. In fact, the U.S. Army was facing a worldwide crisis in manpower, and the Italian theater was well down on the priority list for infantry replacements. This crisis finally brought home to Clark why the British were so much less willing than he to drive their divisions to exhaustion. As a result of their failures, the Allies could maintain only a weary watch on the Po River valley over the winter of 1944–45.

Mark Clark would move up to take command of the Allied army group in Italy, but that could hardly have assuaged his thirst for glory. In April 1945, Allied forces in Italy finally broke their German opponents, but largely as a result of the collapse of German forces elsewhere. To Allied strategists, the Italian theater had been a major disappointment; but to the troops who fought there it had been a horror, and for the Italian people it was nothing short of a catastrophe.

US Army - The Situation on V-E Day

As V-E Day came, Allied forces in Western Europe consisted of 4.5 million men, including 9 armies (5 of them American—1 of which, the Fifteenth, saw action only at the last), 23 corps, 91 divisions (61 of them American), 6 tactical air commands (4 American), and 2 strategic air forces (1 American). The Allies had 28,000 combat aircraft, of which 14,845 were American; and they had brought into Western Europe more than 970,000 vehicles and 18 million tons of supplies. At the same time they were achieving final victory in Italy with 18 divisions (7 of them American).

The German armed forces and the nation were prostrate, beaten to a degree never before seen in modern times. Hardly any organized units of the German Army remained except in Norway, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans; these would soon capitulate. What remained of the air arm was too demoralized even for a final suicidal effort, and the residue of the German Navy lay helpless in captured northern ports. Through five years of war, the German armed forces had lost over 3 million men killed, 263,000 of them in the west, since D-Day. The United States lost 135,576 dead in Western Europe; while Britain, Canada, France, and other Allies combined incurred after D-Day approximately 60,000 military deaths.

Unlike in World War I, when the United States had come late on the scene and provided only those forces to swing the balance of power to the Allied side, the American contribution to the reconquest of Western Europe had been predominant, not just in manpower but as a true arsenal of democracy. American factories produced for the British almost three times more Lend-Lease materials than for the Russians, including 185,000 vehicles, 12,000 tanks, and enough planes to equip four tactical air forces and for the French all weapons and equipment for 8 divisions and 1 tactical air force plus partial equipment for 3 more divisions.

Although strategic air power had failed to prove the decisive instrument many had expected, it was a major factor in the Allied victory, as was the role of Allied navies; for without control of the sea lanes, there could have been no buildup in Britain and no amphibious assaults. It was nonetheless true that the application of the power of ground armies finally broke the German ability and will to resist.

While the Germans had developed a flying bomb and later a supersonic missile, the weapons with which both sides fought the war were in the main much improved versions of those that had been present in World War I: the motor vehicle, the airplane, the machine gun, indirect-fire artillery, the tank. The difference lay in such accoutrements as improved radio communications and in a new sophistication in terms of mobility and coordination that provided the means for rapid exploitation that both sides in World War I had lacked.

From North Africa to the Elbe, U.S. Army generalship proved remarkably effective. Such field commanders as Bradley, Devers, Clark, Hodges, Patton, Simpson, Patch, and numerous corps and division commanders could stand beside the best that had ever served the nation. Having helped develop Army doctrine during the years between the two great wars, these same men put the theories to battlefield test with enormous success. Some indication of the magnitude of the responsibilities they carried is apparent from the fact that late in the war General Bradley as commander of the 12th Army Group had under his command 4 field armies, 12 corps, and 48 divisions, more than 1.3 million men, the largest exclusively American field command in U.S. history.

These commanders consistently displayed a steady devotion to the principles of war. Despite sometimes seemingly insurmountable obstacles of weather, terrain, and enemy concentration, they were generally able to achieve the mass, mobility, and firepower to avoid a stalemate, maintaining the principles of the objective and the offensive and exploiting the principle of maneuver to the fullest. On many occasions they achieved surprise, most notably in the amphibious assaults and at the Rhine. They were themselves taken by surprise twice, in central Tunisia and in the Ardennes; yet in both cases they recovered quickly. Economy of force was particularly evident in Italy, and simplicity was nowhere better demonstrated than in the Normandy landings, despite a complexity inherent in the size and diversity of the invasion forces. From the first, unity of command abided in every campaign, not just at the tactical level but also in the combined staff system that afforded the U.S. and Britain a unity of command and purpose never approached on the Axis side.

World War II: Italian Front (1943–1945)

Production of the M4 medium Sherman tank, with a 75 mm cannon in a fully traversable turret, began in October 1941. The standard U. S. Army medium tank, the Sherman was improved as the war progressed to the M4A3 version; almost 50,000 of them were produced. This tank's weight, initially 33.25 tons, grew to 35.5 tons. The most significant improvement was the high-velocity 76 mm gun. The crew was composed of five men. Engines varied widely, and the maximum speed was 24 to 26 mph. Variants to the standard tank included flamethrowers and recovery vehicles.

Pursuant to the Allied strategy of first invading Europe by way of what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) called its "soft underbelly," British and American forces invaded North Africa and defeated German and Italian forces there between 1941 and 1943, then stepped off to invade Sicily. 

OPERATION HUSKY

The Allied invasion of Sicily from North Africa, called Operation Husky, began on the night of July 9-10, 1943, when 3,000 ships and landing craft carried 14,000 vehicles, 600 tanks, 1,800 guns, and 160,000 men of the Fifteenth Army Group to a landing on the island. Air strikes to soften up defenses had prepared the way for the landings, and an advance guard of paratroopers, from the British First Airborne and U. S. 82nd Airborne also participated. Combined German and Italian land forces, about 350,000 men, outnumbered the attackers, but 3,680 Allied planes overwhelmed the 1,400 Axis planes in the area and quickly achieved air supremacy, greatly facilitating the landings. The Allies rapidly secured beachheads, and the British Eighth Army captured Syracuse on July 12, then Augusta on July 14. Axis resistance stiffened at Catania, where the enemy held the slopes of Mount Aetna. While the British forces were stalled at Catania, U. S. general George Patton (1885-1945) continued his advance, taking the port of Licata, then beating back a counterattack at Gela. 

After this, the U. S. II Corps, under Omar Bradley (1893-1981), drove up the center of Sicily to capture San Stefano. After Gela and San Stefano, the thrust of the American advance turned east in two columns. One proceeded along the coast, while the other advanced via an inland route. The bifurcated American advance drew off pressure from the British Eighth Army, which was able to take Catania. However, it was the capture of Messina by U. S. units that ended the 38-day campaign for Sicily. 

FALL OF MUSSOLINI

At a cost of 167,000 Axis casualties, mostly Italian, and 31,158 Allied losses (including 11,923 Americans), the Allied offensive had been brought to the doorstep of the Italian mainland and the European continent. The rapid advance of the Allies pulled the last supports from Benito Mussolini's (1883-1945) tottering Fascist regime. Many in Mussolini's own party, including his foreign minister and son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano (1903-44) and his general Pietro Badoglio (1871-1956), had already denounced him and been sacked by February of 1943. With the Allied invasion, a Grand Council of Fascist leaders convened on July 25 and, after a vicious debate, voted to depose Il Duce and return their country to "the King and parliament." Mussolini resigned the next day. Victor Emmanuel III (1869-1947) appointed Badoglio to head a new government and issued a warrant for Mussolini's arrest. 

Faced with a dilemma-Italy wanted peace but was afraid to break with Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and provoke a German attack-Badoglio feigned loyalty to Germany but made secret contact with the supreme Allied commander, Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969). Badoglio was hoping to time an armistice with immediate Allied occupation in order to avoid having to fight Germans, but the Americans made it clear in August that Italy's surrender had to be unconditional. Worse, Eisenhower would not promise to land as far north as Rome. 

The Germans were growing suspicious as two British corps crossed the Strait of Messina unopposed, and Badoglio agreed on September 3 to Allied occupation. The Italian surrender was announced on the 8th and Allied landings followed immediately, that very night, in the Bay of Salerno south of Naples. Before the week was out, Hitler's commandos parachuted into northern Italy, rescued Mussolini, and set him up as puppet dictator. All Badoglio's efforts to exit the war proved fruitless when the Allies demanded that the Italians declare war on Germany. He executed the volte-face on October 13, and Italy became an Allied "co-belligerent." 

Allied confusion over just what Italians under Badoglio would do-would they honor the peace? would they resist?-stayed the British and Americans from rushing to occupy all of Italy. The delay bought the Germans time to occupy the mainland with a large force. The Allies now realized that even with Italy formally out of the war the invasion would not be the swift stroke that would open up the rest of Europe. 

MAINLAND ITALY CAMPAIGN, 1943

The object of fighting up through Italy was not only to take Italy and invade Europe by its back door but also to force the Germans to withdraw troops from the Russian front to defend Italy. This, it was hoped, would enable the Russians to defeat the vast German forces that had invaded Soviet territory. With Allied pressure applied from the Italian south and the Russian east, a massive landing in the west, across the English Channel, would successfully complete the invasion and subsequent liberation of Europe. 

What Allied planners had not counted on was how fiercely and effectively the Germans would resist Italy's invasion. On September 3, 1943, the British Eighth Army landed on the mainland at Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot. On September 9, the day after Badoglio concluded an armistice with the Allies, the U. S. Fifth Army under Lieutenant General Mark Clark (1896-1984) landed at Salerno, where German resistance was extremely intense. It was not until September 18, after much bloodshed, that British and American operations were sufficiently coordinated to enable the U. S. Fifth Army to declare the Salerno beachhead secure. The cost had been tremendous. The able German general Albert von Kesselring (1885-1960) inflicted more than 15,000 casualties on the Allies while incurring 8,000 losses. 

Slowly and painfully, during September and early October, the U. S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies advanced northward, methodically consolidating gains in southern Italy. The advance was all but halted during the Volturno River campaign (October 12-November 14) by especially effective German resistance along what Kesselring called the "Winter Line," or "Gustav Line," a series of very well prepared defenses extending from the Gulf of Gaeta to the Adriatic Sea. Here the Allied advance was stalled through the end of 1943, when a standoff developed in rugged and frozen terrain just five miles southeast of the Rapido River. 

Heartbreaking as the Italian campaign was for the Allies, the effort of resistance did take a terrible toll on German forces as well, and, as the Allies had hoped, it also tied up forces that might otherwise have been used against the Russians. Thanks in some measure to the Italian campaign, the Soviet army was able to make significant progress, and 1943 proved to be a turning point on the Russian front. Whereas the Soviets had continuously fallen back since 1941, the seemingly interminable Stalingrad campaign, which ended in the loss of 300,000 Germans and the surrender of the 93,000 survivors of the German Sixth Army, brought, at the end of 1943, the launch of a major Soviet offensive. The tide had turned, and if Allied pressure pushing up from the south had stalled, it had nevertheless allowed the Russian push from the east to become overwhelming. 

ITALIAN CAMPAIGN, 1944

By January 1944, the U. S. Fifth Army and British Eighth Army had advanced to the Rapido River but got no farther. A fresh Allied landing took place on January 22, when an Anglo-American force of 50,000 hit the beaches at Anzio and encountered almost no resistance. Unfortunately, Major General John P. Lucas (1890-1949) decided to take time to consolidate his forces before commencing his inland advance. This delay allowed Kesselring to reinforce his positions in Anzio and, during February 16-29, mount a fierce counterattack, which forced Lucas to retreat. 

Lucas was relieved by Major General Lucien K. Truscott, Jr. (1895-1965), who had earned a reputation as an uncompromisingly aggressive commander. Yet even Truscott could not compensate for the momentum that had been sacrificed. Anzio rapidly hardened into a bloody stalemate that brought to mind the unproductive slaughter of WORLD WAR I trench warfare. 

With the opposing armies locked in a death grip at Anzio, the U. S. Fifth Army continued to strike against the Gustav Line along the Rapido. Three assaults were hurled against Monte Cassino. The Allies were repulsed in the first Cassino battles, on February 12 and during February 15-18; the Third Battle of Cassino (March 15-23, 1944) also failed to produce a breakthrough, even though massive air support was employed. The Anzio-Rapido-Cassino operations produced 23,860 U. S. and 9,203 British casualties during the four months before a brute-force frontal assault during May 11-25, coordinated with Allied air bombardment of German supply lines (Operation Strangle), finally produced a breakthrough toward Rome. 

Rome was an important objective, and it lured Clark to shift the advance of his Fifth Army in order to attain it. This decision, however, saved the German Tenth Army from envelopment; thus, while Clark was able to enter Rome in hard-won triumph on June 4, the German Tenth remained a viable force and continued to exact a heavy toll on the Allies. Still, the liberation of Rome set up a rapid Allied advance to the Arno River during the summer of 1944. The Fifth Army crossed the Arno on August 26, and the British Eighth Army took Rimini on September 21. Resistance at Bologna proved too strong for Clark to overcome, and Bologna remained in German hands, even after a full-out assault in October. 

ITALIAN CAMPAIGN, 1945

In contrast to the war's other fronts, Allied progress in Italy remained slow as 1945 began. In April, the British Eighth Army made a major breakthrough against the German Tenth Army just southeast of Bologna. Shortly after this, the U. S. Fifth Army penetrated the Po Valley in an action that sent the remaining German defenders there into full retreat. The German stronghold of Bologna was at last in Allied hands, and the U. S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies steadily and relentlessly pursued the retreating Germans far into northern Italy. On May 4, 1945, the U. S. Fifth Army linked up with the U. S. Seventh Army at the Brenner Pass, at long last marking the end of the Italian campaign.