# Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45

James Holland

Today Italy is a land of beauty and prosperity but in 1944-45 it had become a place of nightmares, a land of violence, war, and destruction. James Holland's ground-breaking account expertly documents the German advance to the stalemate of the Gothic line and a segment of Italian history that has been largely neglected.The war in Italy was the most destructive campaign in the west as the Allies and Germans fought a long, bitter and highly attritional conflict up the mountainous leg of Italy during the last twelve months of the Second World War. For front-line troops, casualties rates at Cassino and then along the notorious Gothic Line were as high as they had been along the Western Front in the First World War. There were further similarities too: blasted landscapes, rain and mud. For the men who fought there, Italy really was the hardest campaign.And while the Allies and Germans were slogging it out through the mountains, the Italians were fighting their own battles, one where Partisans and Fascists were pitted against each other in a bloody civil war. Around them, civilians tried to live through the carnage, terror and anarchy while, in the wake of the Allied advance, beleaguered and impoverished Italians were forced to pick their way through the ruins of their homes and country and often forced into making terrible and heart-rending decisions in order to survive.'Italy's Sorrow' is the first account of the war in that most beautiful of countries to tell the story from all sides and to include the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. Offering extensive new research, it weaves together the drama and tragedy of a terrible year of war with new perspectives and material on some of the most debated episodes to have emerged from the Second World War. It is a magnificent achievement by one of our finest young military historians.

## ITALY’S SORROW

A Year of War, 1944–1945

JAMES HOLLAND


For Daisy


By the spring of 1944, the vast reach of Hitler’s Third Reich, chieved so spectacularly in the early part of the war, was diminishing. In the East, the Soviet Red Army was clawing back land lost and was about to regain the Crimea, while in the West, the Western Allies were poised to invade France. Already the Axis powers had lost North Africa and, the previous summer, Sicily. Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, had been deposed, and on 8 September 1943, the Italians surrendered to the Allies. With British troops already on the southern toe of the peninsula, the main Allied invasion force landed at Salerno, south of Naples, the morning after the Italian armistice. Thus began a long and bloody campaign that would cause untold suffering. Seven months of fighting, mostly in the intractable terrain around the town of Cassino, would wreak appalling destruction.

By May 1944, with the Italian winter behind them, the Allies were ready to renew their drive towards Rome. As the battle rolled north, the rest of Italy would become consumed by the campaign raging up its narrow leg. That year, from May 1944 to the war’s end almost exactly twelve months later, would be one of the most terrible in Italy’s history.

## CONTENTS

List of Maps

Note on the Text

Principal Personalities

Prologue

Part I: The Road To Rome

1 The Eve of Battle: May 1944

2 Battle Begins: 11–12 May 1944

3 Churchill’s Opportunism

4 The Slow Retreat

5 Frustrations

6 Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

7 Masters of the Skies

8 The Battle Rages: 13–16 May 1944

9 New Order

10 Breaking the Gustav Line: 17–18 May 1944

11 Achtung Banditen!

12 The Fog of War: 18–23 May 1944

13 Break-out: 23–26 May 1944

14 General Clark and the Big Switch: 26–30 May 1944

15 The Fall of Rome: 1–5 June 1944

Part II: The Brutal Summer

16 The North

17 The Problems of Generalship: June 1944

18 The Typhoon Rolls North

19 Breaking the Albert Line: 20–30 June 1944

20 The Politics of War

21 Differences of Opinion

22 Summer Heat: July 1944

23 Crossing the Arno: July–August 1944

24 A Change of Plan: August 1944

25 Despair: August 1944

26 The Gothic Line: 25 August–1 September 1944

27 The Tragedy of Gemmano: 1–12 September 1944

28 Mountain Passes and Bloody Ridges: 12–21 September 1944

Part III: The Winter of Discontent

29 Death in the Mountains: 22–29 September 1944

30 The Reason Why

31 Rain, Mud and Misery, Part I: 1–14 October 1944

32 Rain, Mud and Misery, Part II: 15–31 October 1944

33 The Infantryman’s Lot: November 1944

34 The Partisan Crisis: November–December 1944

35 White Christmas: December 1944

Part IV: Endgame

36 Stalemate: January–February 1945

37 Getting Ready: February–April 1945

38 The Last Offensive: 9–20 April 1945

39 The End of the War in Italy: 21 April–2 May 1945

Postscript

References

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and Glossary

Guide to ranks

Index

Copyright

About The Publisher

## MAPS

Italy showing German defensive lines

Cassino front, 11 May 1944, and Alexander’s battle plan for DIADEM and the destruction of AOK 10 south of Rome

The Monte Sole massif

Operational zone of the 8th Garibaldi Brigade of Partisans, also showing the river network Eighth Army had to cross, September 1944 to April 1945

The Val d’Orcia

Northern Italy, Lake Como and Lake Garda

Main Italian rail network and ports

Allied Control Commission Organisation of Italy, 1 September 1944

The Winter Line, January 1945

DIADEM: The battle for Rome and German lines of retreat for AOK 10

The Allied pursuit from Rome to the Albert Line, 5–20 June 1944

From the Albert Line to the River Arno, July and early August 1944

Alexander’s battle plan for the Gothic Line, August 1944

Eighth Army’s attack on the Gothic Line, August to September 1944

Fifth Army’s assault on the Gothic Line, 10–18 September 1944

The German attack on Monte Sole

Fifth Army’s attempt to break through the Apennines, 1–15 October 1944

The final offensive, April to May 1945


Italy showing German defensive lines


Cassino front, 11 May 1944, and Alexander’s battle plan for DIADEM and the destruction of AOK 10 south of Rome


The Monte Sole massif


Operational zone of the 8th Garibaldi Brigade of Partisans, also showing the river network Eighth Army had to cross (Sept. 1944–April 1945)


The Val d’Orcia


Northern Italy, Lake Como and Lake Garda


Main Italian rail network and ports


Allied Control Commission Organisation of Italy, 1 Sept. 1944


The Winter Line, January 1945


## NOTE ON THE TEXT

One of the difficulties faced when writing about different armies of different nationalities is that many units have similar names. Furthermore, many American servicemen also have Germanic-sounding names. So in an effort to avoid any confusion, I have used the German spellings for the names of military units and ranks. For example, the German name for an army was Armeeoberkommando, or AOK as it was known; paratroopers were called Fallschirmjäger; armoured divisions were called panzer divisions. I have also included as an appendix to the book a comparison of military ranks.

On the other hand, I have translated Italian ranks, but have kept certain Italian words in their true form where there is no appropriate translation, such as contadini, who were Italian peasant farmers, and rastrellamento, the word to describe a military operation to clear an area of partisans.

Traditionally, army numbers are spelled out, and corps numbers given in Roman numerals. However, I have used numerical figures to describe German corps, purely because LXXVI Panzer Corps seems unnecessarily long-winded. I hope readers will accept these inconsistencies and anomalies in the spirit in which they were intended.

## PRINCIPAL PERSONALITIES (ranks as at end of war)

Cosimo Arrichiello Italian former soldier with Fourth Someggiata Field Battery; agricultural labourer hiding in the Stura Valley south of Turin

John Barton British officer and agent with SOE, Italy

Sam Bradshaw British reconnaissance trooper with 6 Royal Tank Regiment, 7th Armoured Brigade

Kendall Brooke South African subaltern with A Coy, Royal Natal Carbineers, 6th SA Armoured Division

Friedrich Büchner German trainee artillery officer with 98th Infantry Division

Albert Burke American master sergeant with Divisional HQ, 92nd ‘Buffalo’ Infantry Division

Ion Calvocoressi British senior aide-de-camp to General Sir Oliver Leese, Tactical HQ, Eighth Army

Carla Capponi Italian civilian and member of Rome-based resistance movement GAP Central

Eugenio Corti Italian lieutenant with 184th Artillery Regiment, Nembo Division, CIL, later Folgore Combat Group

Carla Costa Italian civilian spy with German Intelligence Service (Abwehr)

William Cremonini Italian sergeant with Bir el Gobi Company, Alessandro Pavolini’s personal bodyguard

Antonio Cucciati Italian teenager paratrooper with Nuotati e Paracadutisti Battalion, Flottiglia Decima MAS

Elena Curti Italian civilian and illegitimate daughter of Benito Mussolini, working for government of the RSI

Charles Dills American fighter pilot with 522nd Squadron, 27th Fighter Bomber Group

Group Captain Hugh ‘Cocky’ Dundas British airman serving as wing commander, HQ Desert Air Force, 244 Wing; commanding officer, 244 Wing, RAF

Clara Duse Italian civilian living in Trieste

Tom Finney British trooper with 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, 78th Division

Dick Frost South African lance corporal with D Squadron, Royal Natal Carbineers, 12th Motor Infantry Brigade, 6th SA Armoured Division

Martha Gellhorn American freelance journalist and war correspondent with Collier’s Magazine. Estranged wife of the writer Ernest Hemingway

Tini Glover Maori sergeant with 28th Maori Battalion, 2nd New Zealand Division

Hans Golda German commanding officer serving with 8th Battery, Werfer Regiment 71

Reg Harris British sergeant with 3rd Battalion, Coldstream Guards

Stephen Hastings British liaison officer with No 1 Special Force, SOE in Piacenza

Willi Holtfreter German fighter pilot with fighter group III/JG 53

Hamilton Howze American commander, 13th Armored Battalion; later commander Combat Command B, 1st Armored Division

Jupp Klein German commander with Pioneer Company, 1st Fallschirmjäger Division

Hans-Jürgen Kumberg German paratrooper with 4th Parachute Regiment, 1st Paratroop Division

Norman Lewis British intelligence officer with 412th Field Security Service

Franz Maassen German NCO with 2nd Battalion, 994th Infantry Regiment, 278th Infantry Division

Iader Miserocchi Italian partisan commander of 2nd Battalion, 8th Garibaldi Brigade; later served with 28th Garibaldi Brigade

Peter Moore British officer with 2/5th Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment

Ken Neill New Zealander flight commander with 225 Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, RAF

Marchesa Iris Origo Irish/American/Italian civilian living in Val d’Orcia, southern Tuscany

Cornelia Paselli Italian civilian living near Monte Sole

Francesco Pirini Italian civilian living near Monte Sole

Pasua Pisa Italian civilian farmer living on Monte Rotondo, near Amaseno

Italo Quadrelli Italian civilian living at Onferno, near Rimini

Walter Reder German commanding officer, 16th Reconnaissance Battalion, 16th Waffen-SS

Gianni Rossi Italian partisan; served as second-in-command, Stella Rossa, Monte Sole

Wladek Rubnikowicz Polish troop leader with 2nd Squadron, 12th Lancers Reconnaissance Regiment, 3rd Carpathian Division, II Polish Corps

Emilio Sacerdote Italian Jew and partisan in Piemonte

Ray Saidel American private first class with G Coy, 1st Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division

Rudi Schreiber German engineer with Pioneer Battalion, 16th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division

Stan Scislowski Canadian private with Perth Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, 5th Canadian Armoured Division

Willfried Segebrecht German commanding officer, 1 Company, 16th Reconnaissance Battalion, 16th Waffen-SS

Eric Sevareid American broadcast journalist and war correspondent for CBS

Hans Sitka Czech German NCO with East Regiment

Carlo Venturi Italian partisan with Stella Rossa and later 62nd Garibaldi Brigade

Roberto Vivarelli Italian volunteer with Bir el Gobi Company

Ernest Wall British wireless operator/air gunner with 1 Squadron, South African Air Force

Bucky Walters American sergeant with H Coy, 135th Infantry Regiment, 34th ‘Red Bull’ Infantry Division

Bob Wiggans American commanding officer with ‘D’ Coy, 1st Battalion, 338th Infantry, 85th ‘Custer’ Infantry Division

Ted Wyke-Smith British officer with 281st Field Park Company, 214th Field Company, 78th Division Royal Engineers

Georg Zellner German commanding officer with 3rd Battalion, ‘Hochund-Deutschmeister’ Reichs Grenadier Regiment (44th Infantry Division)

## PROLOGUE

A few minutes before two o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 23 March 1944, Rome was a city bathed in spring sunshine and temperatures that were easily the warmest so far that year. But while the promise of summer may have lightened the mood of the majority of Romans, the heat brought no such cheer to twenty-two-year-old Carla Capponi, or ‘Elena’ as she was known amongst her fellow partisans. Clasping a pistol in her pocket, she was already feeling conspicuous for carrying a man’s raincoat on such a beautiful day.

A couple of hours before, she had been too nervous to have any of the beer and potatoes on offer for lunch. Instead, she and her boyfriend, Rosario ‘Paolo’ Bentivegna, and two other partisans of the Roman resistance group GAP Central – the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica Centrale – had left their meal and hurried over to the hideout near the Colosseum. There Paolo had collected the old dust cart that had been stolen the day before, in which there was now hidden a homemade bomb of 18 kilogrammes of TNT topped by a 50-second fuse. While the bomb was big enough to destroy an entire building, the Gappists had planned to bolster their attack with mortars and gunfire. It had been Carla’s job to pick up four mortars from the hide-out and deliver them to ‘Francesco’, a fellow partisan, waiting in the Via del Traforo. Carrying the mortars in nothing more than a shopping bag, she had managed safely to deliver them to Francesco, and then, as she had walked past, had glanced down the Via Rasella. It had been quite deserted; Paolo, with his heavy bomb-laden dustcart, had not yet reached his appointed position.

Passing the bottom of the Via Rasella, Carla had continued up the Via del Traforo and was now waiting by the offices of Il Messaggero newspaper. She spotted Pasquale Balsamo, another partisan, standing by a news-stand. Perhaps he could sense her nerves in the taut expression in her face, because as he looked across he gave her a reassuring wink.

At least they were both now in position. It was Pasquale’s job to give Carla the signal to let her know that the German troops were on their way. She would then turn right onto the Via del Tritone, a main thoroughfare that ran roughly parallel to the Via Rasella, and after 300 yards, turn right again onto another main street, the Via delle Quattro Fontane, until she reached the top end of Via Rasella. There she would wait for Paolo with the raincoat – the overcoat that was to cover up his dustman’s uniform as they attempted to make good their escape.

Standing by Il Messaggero, Carla paused to look at the newspaper pinned in a display case outside the entrance, keeping half an eye out for Pasquale’s reflection in the glass in front of her. Nearby, far too close for comfort, were two men – very obviously plainclothes policemen. The newspaper was full of news about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius five days earlier, but as her eyes flickered over the newsprint she was conscious that too much time was going by. Why hadn’t Pasquale given her the signal? And where were the SS troops? The whole operation had been built around the Germans’ unvarying Teutonic routine: every day, without fail, the same column of around 160 men of the 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion of the SS Police Regiment Bozen would march through the centre of the city on their way back to their barracks after a morning’s training at a shooting range near the Roman bridge, Ponte Milvio. As they marched, singing ‘Hupf, Mein Mädel!’ – ‘Skip, My Lassie’ – they would pass up the length of the comparatively narrow and enclosed Via Rasella.

A quarter past two came and went. Then 2.20 p.m., 2.30 p.m., 2.45 p.m. and still no sign of the troops. The plainclothes policemen approached her. As they did so Carla gripped the pistol in her pocket. ‘Excuse me, signorina,’ one of them said to her. ‘Are you waiting for someone?’ For a split second she froze, then said, yes, she was waiting for her fiancé, who, she explained, worked at the Palazzo Barberini. She then began talking to them about the eruption of Vesuvius and the potential disaster this might cause for Naples. This seemed to work. She felt calmer suddenly, so that when one of them asked her sharply why she was carrying a raincoat on such a hot day, she told them that it was her fiancé’s and that she had had a stain removed from it and was going to give it back to him.

She then saw Pasquale start towards her. What was the time? She asked the policemen: 2.47 p.m. one of them told her. In that case, she said, it was time for her to go. Hurrying away from them, she passed Pasquale who muttered something she could not make out, but knowing she could not look back and believing Pasquale’s message was the signal for her to move, she turned into the Via del Tritone and then down Quattro Fontane to take up her position for the attack.

At the top of Via Rasella, Carla saw Paolo sweeping the road half way down the street, the dustcart in the middle of the road. She had been expecting to see the SS column marching into the bottom of the street but there was still no sign. She could not think what had gone wrong. One of only twelve partisans from GAP Central, she was well aware that their chances of pulling off such an attack and then successfully escaping were not high. Life in Rome was becoming increasingly dangerous with not only the Gestapo closing in on them but also the Neo-Fascist secret police. There was also a particularly vicious gang of Fascist vigilantes, which had been set up soon after the German occupation the previous autumn as a counter-partisan ‘Special Police Unit’. Known as the Koch Gang after its leader, Pietro Koch, the band was already a byword for ruthlessness and brutality, known for the particular vindictiveness with which they tortured those who fell into their grasp.

The growing dangers had done little to deter the Gappists, but all of the partisans in GAP Central, Carla included, were very aware that their planned attack in the Via Rasella was the most daring strike attempted yet. The night before, lying next to Paolo in their hide-out, she had needed to remind herself why she was taking part in such an action. In the silence and dark, she had thought of how unjust the war was, and of the destruction and devastation it had caused to her country. She thought of her compatriots who had already been shot and tortured and of all those who had been deported and who had not been heard of since; and she thought of all those friends of hers who had already died in the fighting in Russia, in Greece, in Yugoslavia; she remembered her cousin, Amleto, killed fighting the Allies at El Alamein. But while such thoughts had helped stiffen her resolve, her fears remained. If they were caught, she knew they would be killed.

At the top of the Via Rasella, in the garden of the Palazzo Barberini, Carla spotted some children playing football. Imagining the horrors of the children being caught in the bomb blast she walked over and shouted at them, ‘You can’t play football in this garden. Go home and do your homework!’ Recognising something in her tone, they all immediately scurried off.

The minutes ticked by. Still nothing. What could have gone wrong? As she waited by the gates of the Palazzo Barberini the same two plainclothes policemen approached her again. It was now just after 3.30 p. m., more than an hour and a half after the bomb was supposed to have gone off. ‘You still here?’ they asked her. Her fiancé was at the Officer’s Club in the Palazzo, she told them, desperately hoping they would not see Paolo and his rubbish cart a hundred yards up ahead. She couldn’t go in there, she explained, as it was men only, and so had to wait. ‘We’ll wait with you,’ they told her.

Carla was almost at her wits’ end when she spotted an elderly friend of her mother’s on the other side of Quattro Fontane. Excusing herself from the two policemen, she hurried across the road and after a very brief conversation, whispered to her to get away as quickly as possible.

It was at that moment that she saw one of the other partisans walking down the street towards Paolo. As he passed, Carla finally spotted the head of the column of SS men turn into the bottom of the Via Rasella. Her heart in her mouth, she watched them gradually fill the entire street, tramping rhythmically – though not singing as usual – towards Paolo and the dustcart, until he was lost from view, engulfed by the marching column.

She was still straining to see him when he suddenly appeared by her side. The front of the column was now near the top of the Via Rasella. She gave him the raincoat, which he hastily put on over his overalls, just as Carla saw the two plainclothes policemen, who had not stopped watching her, begin to cross the street. She pulled out her pistol but a passing bus came between them.

And then the bomb detonated.

The explosion rocked the entire city centre. A violent blast of air followed, pushing Carla and Paolo forward and knocking the bus, directly in front of the Via Rasella, across the street. The policemen fled and Carla and Paolo sprinted in the opposite direction, gunfire and bullets from the troops at the head of the column pinging and ricocheting all around them and bits of stone and stucco from the buildings showering them as they ran. Behind them mortars exploded, but they both kept running, sprinting for their lives until the sounds of the inferno at last began to die down.

That same Thursday in March 1944 was proving to be a significant day on the main front line as well. Just over sixty miles to the south-east of Rome, lay the town of Cassino, and towering above it, the remains of the sixth-century Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino. Emerging from the high and jagged peaks that stretched east to the Adriatic coast and overlooking the flat Liri Valley before the mountains rose once more to the western coast, Monte Cassino held the key to the route to Rome and was the single most important point in the German ‘Gustav Line’, a defensive barrier than ran like a belt across the waist of Italy.

Since January, the Allies had repeatedly tried to force their way through, but the formidable defences had prevented them. Indeed, as the dust and debris of the blast in the Via Rasella began to settle that sunny spring afternoon, the Allies were about to call a halt to their third attempt to break Cassino and Monastery Hill above.

That the Allied attack was now almost beaten had much to do with the tenacious defending by the German 1st Parachute – or Fallschirmjäger – Division. Amongst these defenders was Hans-Jürgen Kumberg, a nineteen-year-old paratrooper born in Ventspils, Latvia to German parents. In 1939, as Russia was soon to occupy the Baltic States, the family moved to Posen in German-occupied Poland, and it was here, in June 1943, that Hans finished school. Inspired by a film about the Fallschirmjäger’s action over Crete in May 1941, he promptly, aged just seventeen, volunteered to become a paratrooper himself. Before Christmas, having successfully completed his training, he was posted to the Adriatic where the Fallschirmjäger were still defending Ortona. It had been a month since Hans and the division had arrived at Monte Cassino, in time for the Third Battle of Cassino.

The German defenders had fought with almost insane bravery and determination since the moment the Allies had landed at Salerno the previous September. Almost every yard had been bitterly contested as the defenders had fallen back across rivers, through mountains and networks of mines, booby traps and wire. Through November and December, they had successfully held the Allies at bay along the narrow Mignano Gap, a mere ten miles south-east of Cassino, before retreating in January to their well-prepared defences of the Gustav Line, along which Cassino was the key position. Helped by a particularly wet and cold winter, they had in that first month of the new year, and again in February, barred the Allies from bludgeoning their way through to the wider valley beyond that led to Rome. The first two battles of Cassino had seen some of the most bitter and bloody fighting of the war to date.

In the four long weeks since his arrival at Cassino, Hans had not had a chance fully to grasp just how high up he was in the mountains, or how dominant was the monastery that overlooked the Liri Valley below. His division had reached the town in the dead of night on 20/21 February. Arriving at the foot of Monastery Hill, they had then disembarked from their trucks and walked as silently as they could – despite their heavy packs and equipment – up through a steep gully to a ridge about a mile beyond and above the remains of the monastery. It was wet underfoot and bitterly cold and the climb a difficult one; yet, whatever the difficulties of hauling equipment and supplies high into the Cassino massif, there was no denying that such an imposing landscape was an enormous advantage to the defender. Monastery Hill itself rose sharply from the town below, standing sentinel and, at 700 feet, a formidable feature for any attacker. Compared with the range of mountains stacked behind it, however, Monastery Hill was just that – a hill – dwarfed by the 5,475-foot-high giant that was Monte Cairo.

In the Liri Valley, the defenders had smashed dikes and diverted water courses to flood large parts of the valley floor and so make it impassable to vehicles, especially heavy trucks and tanks. South of the valley, as far as the sea fifteen miles away, were more mountains: the Aurunci range rising to 5,000 feet – almost as high as the mighty range of the interior. It was along these positions that German engineers and their Italian press-ganged labour force had built a network of bunkers and gun emplacements and laid intricate webs of wire and mines. And it was from here that the defenders had blocked the Allied advance to Rome for more than two months.

When daylight broke the following morning, Hans could just about see the scree-like ruins of the monastery emerging through a thick mist, but the valley floor below and Monte Cairo behind remained completely hidden. As Hans was soon to discover, he had come to one of the most desolate and violent places in the world. The hard rock and precipitous slopes of the mountains and the flooded valley below had blunted the Allies’ superior fire power. At Cassino, each yard – each foot – had to be won or defended by the men unfortunate enough to find themselves thrown into this battle of attrition.

The monastery had been just one of the victims, obliterated by the Allies a week before Hans’ arrival. Other victims from the previous months’ fighting lay scattered and strewn in front of Hans’ machine-gun post; the dead were everywhere. The stench of rotting corpses, bloated and noxious, was overpowering. Hans’ regiment occupied a small ridge known as Hill 445, some 400 yards to the north of the obliterated monastery. By day, Hans and his comrades remained at their post, the constant smoke and dust from shellfire and from British fog canisters shrouding the top of the mountain. By night, they would be able to cautiously slink their way back to the ruined farmhouse that served as company headquarters, or back down the hill to collect ammunition and supplies.

Although Hans’ arrival had coincided with a lull in the fighting, shell and mortar fire, bombing and sniping continued incessantly. Neither side could ever afford to relax; as the German paratroopers had soon learnt, they had to be on their guard at all times. Opposite them were the 1/9th Gurkha Rifles, notorious for their proficiency with kukri knives. Sometimes at night, when less ordnance was hurled back and forth, Hans could hear the screams of his fellow paratroopers as Gurkhas stealthily infiltrated a German outpost, killing – often decapitating – the men with their curved knives. Hans and his comrades hardly dared sleep at night for fear of meeting such a fate: on edge all the time, the strain was immense.

A week before, the battle had begun again in earnest. The morning of 15 March had been clear and sunny, but at around 8.30 a.m. Hans and his unit heard the sound of massed aero engines and then watched open-mouthed as the sky filled with Allied aircraft. They had come to pulverise Cassino town: nearly 800 planes in all, dropping over 1,000 tonnes of bombs. When they had gone, and the dust had settled, the town lay utterly and completely destroyed. The ruins had since proved easier to defend than when the town had been standing, as the New Zealand troops sent in afterwards had discovered at great cost – the Corps losing around 4,000 men. At the same time, the British 4th Indian Division had failed to make headway around Monastery Hill. Hans-Jürgen Kumberg and his comrades had fought hard and valiantly – and had even earned a certain respect from their enemy, who had started to refer to the paratroopers as the ‘Green Devils’.

That evening, 23 March, the British general, Sir Harold Alexander, Commander-in-Chief of Allied Armies in Italy (AAI), drove up to the front line to see the battlefield for himself. The New Zealand commander, General Freyberg, and the US Fifth Army commander, General Mark Clark, had both recommended that the Third Battle of Cassino be called off without delay. Agreeing that any further offensive action was indeed futile, Alexander concurred. The Germans had scored another defensive victory. Difficult though it was to accept in this age of highly mechanised modern warfare, the harsh winter conditions and formidable natural defences of this thin, mountainous country had ensured that the Allies would henceforth have to return to the old summer campaigning season of centuries past.

Curiously though, along theAnzio bridgehead, thirty miles to the northwest, the German Supreme Commander South-West, Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring, was drawing much the same conclusion as his opposite number as he drove along the front and talked with his commanders. It was now two months since the Allies had made their landing at Anzio in Operation SHINGLE. On 22 January, 36,000 American and British troops under the command of US VI Corps had come ashore on the flat land thirty miles south of Rome. Although intended as a means of outflanking the main front along the Gustav Line to the south-east, the shortage of available shipping had ensured that not enough men and equipment had been landed quickly enough to take early advantage of the surprise that had been achieved. The initiative was quickly lost as German troops were hurriedly sent to counterattack, and Allied hopes of forging a link to their forces further south were subsequently dashed.

Anzio, however, had proved equally frustrating for the Germans who had recognised the importance, both psychologically and strategically, of forcing the Allies back into the sea. Generaloberst Eberhard von Mackensen, commander of the German AOK (Armeeoberkommando) 14, whose area of operations included both Rome and the Anzio bridgehead, had for some weeks been suggesting to Kesselring that they should give up any hopes of such a goal. Repeated German counterattacks had been forced back, blunted by the Allies’ superior fire power. Indeed, the night before, as Carla Capponi had lain with Paolo in their hide-out in Rome, they had heard the distant muffled thunder of the guns along the Anzio bridgehead to the south.

The Allies may have managed to cling on to their small gains, but for the American and British troops trapped there, the Anzio bridgehead had proved a hellish place, with the men enduring conditions akin to those of the Western Front in the previous war. The landscape all along the front was now witness to a terrible desolation. Villages and towns lay utterly flattened. Areas of thick pine forest stood splintered and shorn. The earth was pockmarked by shell crater after shell crater; the soil churned into thick, glutinous mud by the sheer scale of exploding ordnance and labouring Allied vehicles. As Ray Saidel – a nineteen-year-old private with the US 1st Armored Regiment – had discovered, artillery dominated every aspect of their lives. His friends and comrades around him all shared the same look: deep-set hollow eyes from lack of sleep, and the ‘Anzio Crouch’ – the way they walked so as to be ready to throw themselves flat on the ground the moment a shell whistled nearby.

For the troops trapped in the Anzio enclave, there were two ways of existing and both were underground. The first was in large dugouts each holding about five men, where there was plenty of company but only a comparatively thin roof because the hole was too wide to support anything heavy. The second option was to dig a tiny foxhole about six-feet long, like a coffin, but with an entrance at an angle at one end. Ray liked his buddies well enough but he also wanted to stay alive, so he opted for the one-man foxhole, dug beside a felled pine tree. He covered it with branches and wood and mud, and discovered that at the end of every night’s shelling, as more and more branches and debris landed on top, his roof became thicker and thicker, and therefore more secure.

However, although he felt safe enough in there, at just three feet deep it was hardly comfortable; any lower and the water level would have flooded the floor. He could just about lie there and read a book by the light of a small candle dug into the side. Sharing this miserable shelter was a stray puppy. The dog had become something of a lucky mascot as it could hear approaching shells coming long before Ray and his comrades could, and would immediately take cover.

By day, Ray would travel by jeep down the notorious ‘Bowling Alley’, a long, highly exposed and extremely hazardous disused railway line that led to the forward area. There, in a sunken road, were five tanks from his own Company G, hunkered down amongst the infantry. Ray’s task was to take messages from the tanks to an observation post in a small, squat, one-storey shell of a building on the junction of the Bowling Alley and the sunken road. Message carrying was an extremely dangerous occupation, as any movement would attract German fire. There was never any room left in the GIs’ foxholes along the sunken road, and so, in between running errands, Ray and his colleagues would take whatever cover they could between the tanks and the dirt bank. As he was well aware, Anzio was an easy place to get yourself killed.

The one consolation was that the Allies were firing greater amounts of ordnance at the Germans than the Germans were firing at them, and it was for this reason that, as the partisans’ bomb shattered the spring calm in Rome, Feldmarschall Kesselring agreed to call a halt to any further offensive action along the Anzio front.

So it was that on that March day, a renewed stalemate developed along the two fronts. The Germans had achieved a victory of sorts during the third battle at Cassino; the Allies at Anzio. For Ray Saidel and Hans-Jürgen Kumberg, and for the many thousands of other troops opposing one another, this merely meant a lessening in the intensity of the fighting. They still had to keep their wits about them and do their best to make sure they survived this war of attrition. And that meant concentrating on what was happening immediately around them. Their war was one being fought on a very narrow front; and the lives of innocent men – whether Italian or German – far away in distant Rome were of no concern to them at all.

It was, however, of great concern to Feldmarschall Kesselring as he arrived back at his headquarters north of the capital at around seven o’clock that evening. The terror attack at the Via Rasella that afternoon had caused fury and outrage among the German occupiers. It had also given an ugly foretaste of the menace the guerrillas would present from that day until the end of the war. Miraculously, not only had Carla and Paolo safely escaped, so too had the other eleven Gappists involved in the Via Rasella attack. The SS troops had suffered 60 per cent casualties. Twenty-eight had been killed immediately in the initial attack and during the following day that figure would rise to thirty-three. As an effective unit, the 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion SS Police Regiment Bozen had ceased to exist. Two civilians, a middle-aged man and a thirteen-year-old boy, had also been killed. The street itself was now wrecked by a massive thirty-foot crater and littered with debris.

The German response was swift. Moreover, the conversations that followed between Rome, Germany, and the German command in Italy late that afternoon and evening of 23 March were to have far-reaching consequences for the remaining fourteen months of the war in Italy.

It was General Kurt Mälzer, the German Commandant of Rome, who had first informed German Supreme Command South-West (SW) of the attack, even though the SS troops had been policemen and therefore came under the direct command and jurisdiction of General Karl Wolff, the senior SS officer in Italy. Since Kesselring and his Chief of Staff, General Siegfried Westphal, were still not back from the Anzio front at this time, Mälzer had spoken to a staff officer at Supreme Command SW, Oberst Dietrich Beerlitz. He had then informed the German High Command in Berlin, the OKW, who in turn informed Hitler.

The Führer had been spending the day quietly at the Wolfsschanze (‘Wolf ’s Lair’) – his underground bunker complex near Rastenburg in East Prussia – when he was interrupted with the news soon after the attack had taken place. He flew into a rage and demanded the kind of retribution that would ‘make the world tremble’. He would, he vowed, destroy an entire quarter of Rome with everyone in it; a moment later he demanded the shooting of at least thirty Italians for every German killed. During the same rant this figure rose to fifty Italians to be shot for every slain SS man.

Hitler’s reaction reached Beerlitz before Kesselring and Westphal’s return and so he rang Generaloberst von Mackensen at AOK 14 headquarters. Mälzer, Beerlitz and von Mackensen all recognised that the Führer’s demands were excessive, but they also realised that something drastic and urgent had to be done. Partisan actions in Rome had, until then, largely targeted Neo-Fascist Italians rather than Germans. Neither these nor earlier German casualties had prompted any form of reprisal, but there was a feeling now that anti-partisan measures had been too lenient. Moreover, the events of that afternoon seemed to signal a departure from previous partisan activities: this attack had been more violent and destructive, and it was close to the front line. A strong and speedy display of force was necessary. But what did von Mackensen consider was necessary? Beerlitz asked him. Mälzer had suggested shooting Italians at a ratio of 10:1; and now von Mackensen agreed, but stipulated that only those already sentenced to death and awaiting execution in prison should be proceeded against. Beerlitz duly reported this decision back to OKW in Berlin, who in turn presented the suggestion to Hitler.

When Kesselring finally reached his headquarters based at Monte Sorrate, a mountain north of the capital, he was quickly informed of the news and then spoke with SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) – the SS intelligence service – in Rome, and asked him whether he had enough people awaiting execution to fill the ten to one criterion. Both Kesselring and Beerlitz, who was listening in, heard Kappler say that yes, he did have enough prisoners already condemned to death. The Field Marshal then received a call from the High Command in Berlin stating that Hitler definitely wanted ten Italians shot for every German killed that afternoon in Rome, and that that was a direct order. Later, some time between ten and eleven o’clock that night, Westphal spoke with General Jodl, Hitler’s Chief of Operations, in Berlin. Jodl repeated Hitler’s order, and stressed that the executions were to be carried out by the SD under Kappler’s supervision. ‘The Führer wishes that thorough action should be taken this time,’ Jodl told Westphal. ‘Tell that to your Feldmarschall.’1 The implication was clear: Kesselring’s Wehrmacht officers could not be trusted to carry out such a brutal reprisal. Soon after this conversation, Kesselring confirmed the order: ten Italians would be killed for every German soldier killed in the Via Rasella, and the executions were to be implemented immediately, within twenty-four hours.

The die had been cast.

The problem for Kappler was that despite his claim to the contrary, he did not have anything like 280 prisoners already awaiting execution and certainly not the 330 that were needed by the following afternoon. In fact, there were only three prisoners in the whole of Rome already sentenced to death. A looser classification was then hastily adopted: candidates would be drawn from those ‘worthy of death’, but this still only produced sixty-five Jews and a handful of known Communists. Other criminals were rounded up, as were men from the Italian armed forces who had been detained after the German occupation of Rome the previous September. During the day more were frantically added to the list, including a priest and a number of people detained by Neo-Fascist authorities on largely spurious charges.

The dazed and disorientated prisoners were taken in butchers’ lorries to the Ardeatine Caves, just south of the city near the ancient catacombs on the Appian Way. The first arrived shortly before 3.30 on the afternoon of Friday, 24 March. The men, in groups of five, were then taken deep into the dark caves, told to kneel and turn their heads to one side. They were then shot.

To begin with, the executions were carried out with some semblance of order, but as the bodies began to mount and the caves began to fill with corpses, discipline, made worse by the amount of drink the executioners had taken to help steel themselves for the task, began to waver. The firing grew wild; moreover most of the executioners were clerks rather than soldiers, and members of the SS and SD, who, like Kappler, had only limited military training. Nearly forty of those killed were completely decapitated by the wayward firing. Others were beaten to death. More still were not killed instantly and were left to die through suffocation and loss of blood. Somehow, an extra five men had been rounded up earlier that day. As witnesses to the executions they could not be spared, and so they too were shot, making the final tally of those slain that afternoon 335.

The massacre at the Ardeatine Caves was the first reprisal carried out by the Germans against the Italian people. It would not be their last; rather, it signalled the start of a policy to counteract partisan activity that was to cast a terrible shadow over Italy and which would fan the flames of a bloodbath that would last beyond the end of the war.

PART I

The Road to Rome

ONE

### The Eve of Battle May 1944

There were many nationalities and differing races in the two Allied armies waiting to go into battle. The British and Americans formed the largest contingents, but there were also French, Moroccans, Algerians, Canadians, New Zealanders (whites and Maori), Poles, Nepalese, Indians (all faiths), South Africans (white, Asian, black, Zulus), and in the air forces, Australians, Rhodesians and others beside. Whatever their differing creeds and wide-ranging backgrounds, they all were relieved to see that on this day, the eve of battle, the weather was being kind. Thursday, 11 May 1944, was a glorious day: warm, with blue skies, and, by the afternoon, not a rain cloud in sight, just as it had been for most of the month. By evening, the temperature had dropped somewhat, but it was still warm, with just the faintest trace of a breeze – even near the summit of Monte Cassino, some 1,700 feet above the valley below. In their foxholes, the men of the 45,600-strong II Polish Corps waited, repeatedly checking their weapons; eating a final meal; exchanging anxious glances. The minutes ticked by inexorably slowly. It was quiet up there, too; quieter than it had been for many days. Not a single gun fired. The mountain, it seemed, had been stilled.

It was now three weeks since the Poles had taken over the Monte Cassino sector and since then, almost every minute, both day and night, had been spent preparing for and thinking about the battle ahead. By day, the men had trained; they had held exercises in attacking strongly fortified positions, practising rock climbing and assaulting concrete bunkers. New flamethrowers were also introduced, while each squadron and platoon[*] was given clear and detailed instructions as to what they were supposed to do when the battle began.

By night, the Poles had been even busier. Vast amounts of ammunition and supplies had to be taken up the mountainside, a task that was impossible during daylight when the enemy would easily be able to spot them – secrecy was paramount; so, too, was saving lives for the battle ahead. It was also a task that could only be achieved by the use of pack mules and by the fortitude of the men, for there were just two paths open to them – both old mountain tracks, which for more than six miles could be watched by the enemy. A carefully adhered-to system had been quickly established. Supplies were brought from the rear areas by truck. Under carefully laid smoke screens, they were loaded onto smaller, lighter vehicles, then, as the mountain began to rise, they were transferred onto mules and finally carried by hand and on backs by the men themselves, slogging their way up the two mountain tracks that led to the forward positions. All this was done in the dark, without any lights, and as quietly as possible. Even so, the men were often fired upon. The German gunners around Monte Cassino would lay periodic barrages along various stretches of these mountain paths and despite their best efforts, casualties mounted – casualties II Polish Corps could ill-afford.

Now the waiting was almost over, and as the sun slipped behind the mountains on the far side of the Liri Valley, and darkness descended, the Poles knew that at long last the moment for which they had endured so much in the past four-and-a-half years was almost upon them.

In what had once been a lovely mountain meadow, the men of the 2nd Squadron, 12th Lancers, were now dug in. Part of the Polish Corps’ 3rd Carpathian Division, they were some 600 yards from the crumbled ruins of the monastery, and the ground ahead of them was pockmarked and churned by shell holes, and strewn with twisted bits of metal and remnants of the dead. Not that twenty-seven-year-old Wladek Rubnikowicz had had much chance to examine the area that was to be his part of the battlefield. In an effort to keep their presence a secret, Wladek and his comrades had been forbidden to send out patrols to reconnoitre the area. In fact, since arriving in their positions on the night of 3 May, Wladek had done little but bring up more supplies by night and brace himself for the attack by day.

The Lancers were cavalry, trained to use armoured cars and to operate as a fast-moving reconnaissance unit, but for the battle they had become infantrymen, foot-sloggers like almost every other soldier that had fought across this damnable piece of land for the past four months. The armoured cars now waited for them miles behind the line with the rear echelons. Only once the battle was won, and the men were out of the mountains and into the valleys below, would they get their vehicles back.

For the vast majority of Polish troops now lying in wait on the mountain, their journey there had been long and tortuous – an epic trek that had seen them travel thousands of miles, crossing continents and enduring terrible losses and hardship – and Wladek was no exception. It was a miracle that he was alive at all.

The blitzkrieg that followed the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 had lasted just twenty-eight days and on 29 September, the country was carved in two by the month-old allies, Germany and the Soviet Union. What had been a beacon of democracy was now subjugated under fascism in one half and Stalinist communism in the other. Its cities and towns lay in ruins, while its stunned people wondered how this apocalypse could have happened in such a short space of time.

Wladek, then a cadet with the Polish Army, had been wounded in the shoulder in the final days before the surrender. Left behind in a disused schoolhouse, he was helped by some local girls who tended him and brought him food and water and, once fit enough to walk, he began the long journey back home to Glebokie, a small town in what had been northeast Poland, but which had now been consumed by the Soviet Union.

His older brother had been killed in the fighting, leaving a wife and two small children, while his home town had been devastated by the war. ‘I could see that every thing that made life worthwhile had come to standstill,’ Wladek recalled. Nor could he stay at home. Russian troops were everywhere, arresting Poles in their droves. He eventually managed to get to Warsaw after travelling most of the way by clutching to the buffers of a train in temperatures well below freezing, and despite being arrested at the German–Russian border. Temporarily locked in a barn, he quickly escaped and made his way through the snow into the German-occupied half of Poland.

For a while Wladek worked for the Polish resistance movement, but on a mission back into Russian-occupied Poland, he was arrested at the border once again. This time he did not escape.

For thirteen long months, Wladek was held at Bialystok prison. He was one of fifty-six prisoners crammed into an eight-man cell. Occasionally he would be interrogated and beaten. Eventually he was sentenced to three years in a Siberian labour camp. In June 1941, he and 500 others were loaded onto a goods train, fifty to a wagon, and sent to a labour camp in the Arctic Circle.

Ventilation for the wagon came from a small, barred hole and an opening in the floor used as a toilet. There was not enough air and they all struggled to breathe properly. Each prisoner received 400 grammes of bread and one herring at the start of the journey, but the salty herring made them thirstier. They were eventually given a small cup of water each, which, they were told, had to last until the following day. Dysentery soon gripped many men, and most had fever. A number died, their bodies remaining where they lay amongst the living. ‘Can you imagine?’ says Wladek. ‘We didn’t realise then that of course the Soviets hoped these conditions would kill off many of us on the way.’

The journey lasted two weeks. The further they travelled the more bleak and desolate the surrounding country became. Eventually they halted at a railhead on the Pechora River. Staggering off their wagon, they were herded towards a transit camp before continuing their journey by paddle steamer. This took them a further 700 miles north. They disembarked a week later at Niryan-Mar Gulag, in one of the most northern parts of Russia.

Conditions had been bad at Bialystok, but Niryan-Mar reached new depths of deprivation. The men were housed in large marquee-like summer tents, each sheltering around 180 men, and although they each had a rough wooden bunk to sleep on, there were neither mattresses nor blankets and the prisoners slept fully clothed at all times. They kept their clothes stuffed with cotton wool and although they just about managed to keep warm, they were soon plagued by lice.

Every day the prisoners were put to work at the nearby port on the mouth of the Pechora for twelve-hour days of physically demanding labour, sustained only by meagre rations of water and hard bread. As Wladek says: ‘We worked as slaves.’

The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, but there was nowhere a prisoner could go even if he did escape: they were miles from anywhere and the surrounding forests and marshes were home to wolves. Even so, Wladek did make one bid for freedom. A Swedish vessel came into port and thinking the crew seemed friendly and sympathetic, he managed to slip away and hide in the hold. He misjudged them, however. Soon discovered, he was handed back to the Soviets. ‘The punishment I received I shall never forget,’ he says; Wladek was beaten to within an inch of his life.

Inevitably, many prisoners succumbed to disease. Illness, however, was no excuse not to work. Despite high fevers and crippling dysentery, prisoners had to keep going, as ‘the alternative to working was death’. Wladek’s malnutrition caused him to start to go blind. His affliction was worse in the evening and to ensure that he did not step out of line and that he made it safely back to camp each night, he depended on others to guide him.

This hell did eventually come to an end, however. Months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, he and his fellow prisoners were released and, armed with a free rail pass and some meagre rations, were told to head south. As they did so, Stalin had already begun to renege on his promises and large numbers, Wladek included, were forcibly detained on collective farms. He and several others managed to escape by stealing and pilfering, and, weeks later, they finally reached the Polish camp at Guzar in Uzbekistan, one of the most southerly points in the Soviet Union.

Even before Wladek had left the gulag and set out on the journey that would take him eventually from the Arctic Circle to the edge of Persia, he had been in a weakened physical state – and just a fraction of his normal body weight. Several thousand miles later, having travelled by rail, boat, and on sore and bloody feet, he was seriously ill. Struggling with a high fever, he staggered to the Polish camp’s registration office and was then sent to the first aid station, where he was told he had contracted typhoid.

Meanwhile, General Wladyslaw Anders in the southern Soviet Union, and General Sikorski, the Commander-in-Chief of the Free Polish Forces, in London, had been having a difficult time with the Soviet leaders. It had been the Poles’ hope and intention that the reconstituted Polish Army should fight as a whole against Germany on the Eastern Front, which would send out a strong signal to the world about Polish solidarity and their fighting spirit. Stalin, however, who had designs on Poland if and when Germany was beaten, had no intention of allowing this to happen, and so had been making life as difficult as possible, giving the Poles mustering areas and camps in inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union where disease – such as typhoid – was rife, and waylaying potential Polish troops by forcing them to work on collective farms.

Eventually, however, Stalin decided he wanted to free himself of any obligations to arm and provide for the Polish Army, no matter how useful they might one day be. Churchill had let it be known that he wanted Polish forces fighting alongside the Allies in the Middle East, and so under pressure from both Britain and America, Sikorski agreed that Anders’ Polish Army should be evacuated to Persia, from where they would train under British guidance.

Wladek Rubnikowicz was still making his miraculous recovery from typhoid when the first evacuation to Persia was made, but he joined the next one a few months later, only to contract malaria. After a couple of weeks the fever subsided leaving him with recurrences of the disease that would plague him for years to come. Things were looking up, however. He made his way to Iraq, where he joined General Anders’ camp at Quisil Ribat Oasis and where training began in earnest. It was whilst there that Wladek also heard good news about his parents. They too had escaped from the Soviet Union and were at a camp in Iran. He even managed to get leave to see them.

Now with the 12th Polish Lancers of the newly formed II Polish Corps, Wladek moved with his regiment to Kirkuk. With plentiful rations and a moderately balanced diet, he and the rest of his Polish comrades gradually began to build up their strength. ‘We all felt anxious to get to the front,’ he says, ‘and begin fighting for the liberation of Poland. That may sound strange, but it’s true.’

After further training in Palestine, the 12th Lancers, part of the 3rd Carpathian Division, reached Italy in December 1943. Several months were spent carrying out final training and acclimatising, until, in the middle of April, they were moved up to the Cassino front.

In fact, General Sir Oliver Leese, commander of the British Eighth Army, under which II Polish Corps served, had visited General Anders on 24 March and proposed that his troops be given the task of taking the Monte Cassino heights and then the hill-top village of Piedimonte, several miles to the west in what would become the fourth battle of Cassino. ‘It was,’ noted Anders, ‘a great moment for me.’2

The Polish commander had suffered as well in the previous years of war. Captured by the Russians in September 1939, Anders had been imprisoned in Lubianka after refusing to join the Red Army. Released after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he was given permission to trace and recruit Polish POWs held in the gulags. It was largely thanks to his tireless efforts that he managed to muster some 160,000 men in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan who were then trained to continue the fight for Poland. Now, at Cassino, he had a small corps of two divisions and an armoured brigade made up of 45,626 fighting men. It was an incredible achievement by the dashing and charismatic fifty-two-year-old.

For a few moments only, Anders had considered Leese’s suggestion. He was well aware that Monte Cassino had not been taken in two months of bitter fighting; that it had hitherto eluded the efforts of battle-hardened and highly experienced troops. The task that Leese was putting forward was an awesome proposition for his men in what would be their first battle since the fall of Poland. ‘The stubbornness of the German defence at Cassino and on Monastery Hill was already a byword,’ Anders observed. ‘I realised that the cost in lives must be heavy, but I realised too the importance of the capture of Monte Cassino to the Allied cause, and most of all to that of Poland.’3 And so he accepted.

Now, on the evening of 11 May, the moment had almost arrived. Wladek and his comrades had been thoroughly briefed. The messages of Generals Alexander and Leese to their troops had been translated into Polish and the single sheets of thin paper passed around. So too had Anders’ own message. ‘Soldiers!’ he wrote, ‘The moment for battle has arrived. We have long awaited the moment for revenge and retribution over our hereditary enemy … The task assigned to us will cover with glory the name of the Polish soldier all over the world.’

Wladek and the men of 2nd Squadron, 12th Lancers were as one behind their commander. Certainly, Wladek was scared, but he was excited too. ‘We all wanted to be able to fight for our country,’ he says. ‘All of us, 100 per cent and 100 per cent more, felt a sense of honour at going into battle for Poland.’

It was not only the Poles who felt ready for the coming battle. Operation DIADEM, the codename for the battle for Rome, had been launched by the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Armies in Italy at a commanders’ conference on the last day of February 1944.[*] Since then, General Alexander, his staff, and commanders had been working flat out, reorganising and training troops, planning and making sure that nothing was left to chance; they were not going to be caught short for want of a horseshoe.

All of the commanders felt tense. For every single one involved, whether at divisional, corps or army level, this was to be the biggest battle of their careers: more men, more guns; more aircraft above them. Each was acutely aware of how much was at stake. Despite the build-up of men and materiel, and despite the improved weather, there was unlikely to be any easy victory. The flooding in the valley had receded but the Liri Valley, only six miles at its widest and just four at the greater part of its length, was narrow for a two-corps assault. The serpentine River Liri was too wide and deep to ford, while numerous other tributaries and water courses cut across the valley and hence the path of the attackers. There were also heavy German defences: concrete dugouts, gun turrets, machine-gun posts, mines and wire. Furthermore, overlooking this softly undulating valley of pasture, cornfields and broken woodland – slow going for wheels and tracks – were the imposing mountain ranges, filled with yet more carefully positioned guns, machine guns and troops. Indeed, the mouth of the Liri Valley, the gateway to Rome, was protected by two superb artillery positions, Monte Cassino to the north, and Monte Maio to the south. In four months of fighting these ‘gate posts’ had not been cleared. Few of the Allied commanders, however, could have felt this pressure more keenly than Lieutenant-General Mark W. Clark, Commander of the US Fifth Army.

The planning for Operation DIADEM largely complete, Clark spent a final few days touring the front, briefing his commanders and inspecting his troops, many of whom would be going into battle for the first time. Earlier that morning of Thursday, 11 May, Clark had inspected also the US 36th Division, pinning a number of medals on the chests of Texans and addressing them briefly. It was the 36th Division who had been involved in the first disastrous attempt to break into the Liri Valley back in January, when they had tried to cross the narrow Rapido River that runs south through the town. Even before that attack, the auspices had not been good. The British 46th Division had already failed to cross the wider River Garigliano further south – an operation designed to help the Texans in their task to cross the Rapido – and had warned the Americans that the ground on the far side of the river was heavily defended. Moreover, they had insufficient river craft with which to do the job. Yet Major-General Walker, 36th Division’s commander, had assured Clark, despite considerable private doubts, that the operation was still achievable. Clark, who had urgently needed to divert German troops away from the Anzio beachheads for the Allied landing that would take place two days later, had consequently given the go-ahead.

In the forty-eight hour operation that followed, some 1,700 men were killed or wounded. Rather like the men on the Somme on 1 July 1916, the Texans had been cut down in swathes. The river had run red with blood; the bodies stacked six high in places. In America, the pressmen had labelled the ‘Bloody Rapido’ the worst disaster since Pearl Harbor.

General Clark had taken his share of the blame, but within a few days it became apparent that the American-led operation at Anzio, Operation SHINGLE, had also fallen short of its aims. Neither the Rapido disaster nor the setback at Anzio had been entirely Clark’s fault and both operations had been executed because of pressure higher up the chain of command. But an army commander lives and dies by his successes, and by the spring of 1944 – on the battlefield at any rate – these had been all too few. Clark was unaware that his position was under threat and that discussions had taken place about whether to remove him, but he nonetheless keenly felt the frustrations of his comparative lack of success.

Mark Clark – or ‘Wayne’ as friends knew him – had just turned forty-eight at the start of May. Standing six foot three inches tall, he was lean and muscular, his hair still dark, and despite a prominently hawkish nose, he was a youthful-looking and handsome three-star general who towered over most of his subordinates and superiors alike. One of the few American commanders who had seen action in the last war, he had led a battalion in France in 1917, until wounded when a shell had exploded nearby. He spent the rest of the war as a captain carrying out staff duties. It was a rank he kept for sixteen years, sitting out the post-war doldrums with mounting impatience.

In 1933 his fortunes had finally begun to change, with promotion followed by time spent at both the US Command and General Staff College and the Army War College, so marking him out for future high command. By the summer of 1937 he had joined the 3rd Division, where he renewed his friendship with his old West Point friend, Dwight D. Eisenhower. By 1940, he was a lieutenant-colonel and was appointed chief of staff to General Lesley McNair, the man commanded to expand, train, and reorganise the US Army ready for war. Clark immediately showed his exceptional aptitude for planning and organisation, demonstrating great resources of energy, intelligence, enthusiasm, and an ability to get things done, and done fast.

Catching the eye of General Marshall, the US Chief of Staff, Clark was sent to Britain in 1942 along with Eisenhower to arrange for the reception and training of American troops and to begin preparations for the invasion of Continental Europe. When immediate Allied plans were redirected towards an invasion of northwest Africa, Eisenhower was made Commander-in-Chief with Clark as his deputy. As head of planning for Operation TORCH, Clark deservedly won a great deal of credit for pulling off what was the largest seaborne invasion the world had ever known. It was also no small thanks to Clark and his pre-invasion discussions with Vichy French commanders that the resulting landing was a comparative walkover.

But however much Clark had proved himself as a planner and diplomat, he desperately wanted the chance for operational command but, as Eisenhower’s official deputy, he knew he was in danger of spending the rest of the war as a desk man. Consequently, he began to badger his chief for his own command until he was eventually appointed commander of the newly created US Fifth Army, the first American army headquarters to be formed overseas. Although for the first few months it was little more than a training organisation, it was then that he began to develop a deep affection for Fifth Army, a force that he nurtured and considered his own. Together, he believed, they were destined to achieve great victories.

Not until the invasion of Italy was Clark finally given the chance he so craved, of leading his men in battle. Given the task of planning the main Allied landings at Salerno, VI Corps from his Fifth Army duly landed on 9 September 1943. It was almost a massive failure. Heavily contested by Kesselring’s AOK 10, it had been a far more bitter fight than either the North African or Sicily landings. Clark, however, had showed resolve and courage, quickly getting himself onto the beachhead and taking firm and decisive command. At one point, during the second and most threatening German counterattack, he took personal charge of an anti-tank unit and turned back eighteen German tanks at almost point-blank range. The Allies regained their footing, a bridgehead was firmly established, and as Axis forces withdrew north towards the defences of the Gustav Line, Clark and his Fifth Army quickly took Naples, a key port on the route to Rome.

Despite this success, however, Clark suffered the mutterings of some. At the height of Salerno, with defeat a distinct possibility, Clark realised he had made no provision for an evacuation should the worst occur. Quickly trying to rectify this, he ordered his staff to make the necessary plans for a withdrawal. Although purely a contingency plan, news of these orders spread; to some, this was not seen as Clark’s pragmatism shining through, but rather a sign that he had momentarily lost his nerve.

In fact, at Salerno and in the fighting in Italy since the Allied invasion, Clark had proved himself an extremely able battlefield commander. He possessed a thorough understanding of modern all-arms tactics, an ability to grasp and see the bigger strategic overview, and was not afraid of taking difficult decisions or the rap if things did not go according to plan. However, many found him overly blunt, arrogant even; he could be prickly – and brusque and heavy handed with his subordinates. He was the boss – and no one was allowed to forget it. If that made him unpopular to some, well to hell with it; winning battles and the war was what counted, not worrying about telling people some harsh home truths. Again, in many respects, there was nothing wrong with this approach, but unfortunately Clark also suffered from a deep-rooted hang-up that many of his fellow commanders, whether Alexander or Leese, or the British corps commanders attached to his Fifth Army, had considerably more battlefield experience than he and he suspected that they looked down on him because of this. There is no evidence that anyone regarded this as a defect at all, but it niggled him considerably and made him far too quick to see the decisions of Alexander and others as an attempt to undermine him, his authority, and to belittle the efforts of his Fifth Army.

Just six days earlier, on 5 May, this paranoia had come to the fore when Alexander made a visit to the Anzio bridgehead, from where the US-led VI Corps was to make its break-out once the southern front had been sufficiently broken in the forthcoming battle. There, Alexander had spoken with Major-General Lucian Truscott, the VI Corps commander. After hearing Truscott’s plans, Alexander suggested he should be concentrating on only one course of action, namely to spearhead north-eastwards towards Cisterna, Cori and Valmontone, as had been previously agreed with Clark and all concerned. Truscott then informed Clark of this conversation. Outraged, Clark rang Alexander’s headquarters and demanded to speak with the British commander. ‘I told Alexander,’ Clark wrote in his diary, ‘that I resented deeply his issuing any instructions to my subordinates.’ Alexander, by now used to Clark’s occasional fits of over-sensitiveness, assured him he had not intended to undermine his authority in any way, and that he had merely made the point lightly in the course of his conversation with Truscott, gently reminding Clark that he was only telling Truscott what had already been agreed. It seemed to be what the American wanted to hear. ‘This is a small matter,’ Clark noted later, his honour sated and his feathers smoothed once more, ‘but it is well that I let him know now, as I have in the past, that he will deal directly with me and never with a subordinate.’4

However, on the eve of battle – 11 May – that day of days, Clark was playing the part of army commander perfectly. It is typical of him that he should have chosen that morning to address the men of the 36th Texas Division – the men who blamed him above all for the Bloody Rapido – looking them in the eye and stirring them for the battle to come, a battle in which yet more of them would lose their lives.

News that the offensive would at last begin that night was given out to men along the line throughout the day, in the form of thin paper fliers. In the case of those in Eighth Army, one was from General Alexander and the other from General Leese. Then, in the afternoon, battalion commanders gathered their officers around them and gave them a general as well as a more specific brief. The 19th Indian Brigade, for example, part of 8th Indian Division, had a key role that opening night of the battle. ‘Tonight,’ the Brigade Commander, Major Parker, told his officers, ‘we’re attacking the Gustav Line across the River Rapido here. We’ll have the Poles and 4th Division on our right and French troops on our left. The Fifth Army are making a push at the same time. This is the first blow of the Second Front. It will be closely followed by the invasion of Western Europe and a general attack by the Russians in the south-east.’

The attack, Major Parker continued, would begin with a massive barrage at 11 p.m. using just under 1,700 guns – almost double what had been used at the Battle of Alamein in November 1942. To begin with, the fire would be counter-battery, that is, falling behind the German forward positions in an effort to hit the enemy’s own artillery. Then it would be directed against targets on the front. After this opening barrage, the infantry would begin their attack. In their own sector along the Liri Valley, the division would make their assault alongside the 4th Division, crossing the River Garigliano under cover of continued artillery fire, while the Poles assaulted Cassino and the Goums and part of the French Expeditionary Force attacked the Aurunci Mountains on their left, ‘with instructions to cut off the heads of every German they meet’. Furthest to the south, along the Minturno Ridge that runs to the sea, the US II Corps would attack with the new boys, the 85th and 88th Infantry Divisions.

The task of 19th Infantry Brigade was twofold. The Indian battalions were to get themselves across the river, whilst the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were to invade what was known as the ‘Liri Appendix’, a narrow finger of land between where the Garigliano turned sharply and ran parallel to the River Liri before actually joining it. From the moment the barrage began, the Appendix would be covered by machine-gun fire to keep the Germans’ heads down. ‘So if you hear close machine-gun fire,’ the Brigade Major told them, ‘you’ll know it’ll be our fellows pumping lead into this Appendix.’ The barrage would not finish until 4 a.m., and would then be followed by wave after wave of Allied bombers and fighter planes – ‘as many as we’ll want’.

Having given his brief outline, Major Parker paused, folded away his map, then smiled dryly at his men. ‘We hope,’ he told them, ‘this will do the trick.’5

Although any infantry heading into battle obviously faced extreme danger, amongst those men most at risk were the junior officers. American Lieutenant Bob Wiggans was a platoon commander with Company D of the 1st Battalion, 338th Infantry Regiment – part of the 85th ‘Custer’ Division.[*] The 85th had reached Italy less than seven weeks before, sailing into Naples under the smoke and pall of the still-erupting Mount Vesuvius, and had only been sent up to the front in the middle of April. The entire division, along with the also newly arrived 88th Division, were the first American all-draftee divisions to go into combat. Bearing the brunt of the Americans’ initial assault in the coming battle, their performance would be the first proper test of the US Army’s wartime training and replacement system – a system that had been set up in some part by General Mark Clark.

A twenty-six-year-old farmer from upstate New York, Bob Wiggans had undergone reserve officer infantry training whilst at Cornell University – an activity that was compulsory for all male students – and so when he was given his draft notice just a couple of weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, he was immediately sent to Camp Shelby in Mississippi to join the cadre that would help form and train the brand-new 85th Infantry Division.

Bob regarded 7 December 1941 as one of the saddest days of his life. The war would not only take him away from the farm he had bought less than a year before, but also from Dot, his wife of five months. Leaving home was a terrible wrench, but he believed that the United States was doing the right thing, and that Nazism had to be defeated.

In the two years in which Bob had served with the 85th, it had grown from nothing to a fully-formed and trained combat division. However, the division showed its inexperience during its first few days on the Cassino front, when it took over positions from the British in the rubble and remains of the town of Minturno, the most westerly point of the front line. Most of the 85th’s men found the whole experience of being on the battlefield and close to the enemy and of coming under shellfire deeply unsettling. Bob had been called out one night offering to help 3rd Platoon who were convinced there were Germans crawling around in the rubble above them. It turned out the ‘enemy’ were just rats scurrying about. Bob had found that hurtling through the ruined town in his jeep, distributing mail, ammunition and supplies, was enough to get his heart racing. ‘These night missions were harrowing enough with the interdictory artillery fire,’ he noted, ‘but the awful smell of decaying flesh from under the rubble made it infinitely worse.’6

That the ‘Custermen’ were a little jumpy is no wonder: all the draftees, officers and enlisted men were entirely new to war, with no battlefield experience to draw upon. And like the Poles and so many of the assaulting troops, their first battle would be one of the biggest their countries had ever taken part in.[*]

That afternoon, back in his caravan at Fifth Army headquarters, General Clark dictated a message of best wishes to his fellow army commander, General Sir Oliver Leese – happy, on this occasion, to observe inter-army protocol. The British commander promptly replied in kind. ‘We all in Eighth Army,’ wrote Leese, ‘send your Fifth Army our cordial good wishes and look confidently forward to advancing shoulder to shoulder together.’7

Leese was impatient for the battle to begin, and though apprehensive was quietly confident. ‘Ultra’ intercepts of German Enigma codes passed on by the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, suggested that the Allies’ elaborate deception plans had worked and that the Germans were not expecting a major attack until the following month. Leese had more than a quarter of a million men under his command – ‘an immense army’ – all of whom were fully trained and briefed. Ammunition and petrol were ready in dumps at the front line. Everyone was agreed on the battle plan, and from his manic tours around the front, Leese believed his troops to be in good heart. ‘It has been a vast endeavour and it will be a huge battle,’ he wrote. ‘All we want is fine weather and a bit of luck.’8

As the evening shadows lengthened, infantrymen along the front furtively began moving up to their start lines and forming-up positions. In the Liri Valley, men uncovered assault boats; bridging parties moved trucks of Bailey bridge sections forward, while other sappers reeled out long lines of white marker tape to later guide the troops in the dark towards specific river crossing points.

Dusk soon gave way to the darkness of night, and the first desultory shelling of Cassino began just as it had every night for weeks since the end of the third battle of Cassino in March. Partly as cover, and partly to give the impression that this was just like any other evening along the front, the shelling gradually died out, so that at ten o’clock, when General Leese sat down to write to his wife, Margie, the front seemed eerily quiet.

‘In sixty minutes,’ he scrawled on the thick blue writing paper Margie Leese had sent out to him, ‘hell will be let loose, the whole way from Monte Cairo to the sea. At 11 p.m. on 11 May, 2,000 guns will burst forth.’[*] It had, he added, been a lovely day, and it was now a glorious night.

A huge weight of responsibility rested on Leese’s shoulders and those of his fellow commanders, not only for the men under their command but also because there was so much at stake with this, the biggest battle the Western Allies had yet attempted in the war. A sweeping, crushing victory promised untold riches, yet defeat would not only be a blow to Allied chances of success in launching an invasion of northern France, but it would also wreck the future of the Italian campaign and with it British credibility in particular. No wonder General Leese was counting down the minutes.

[*] Although they were now operating as infantry, the Polish cavalry and armoured units kept their usual structure and formation.

[*] Allied Central Mediterranean Forces had become Allied Forces in Italy on 9 March 1944.

[*] The 85th was given the association ‘Custer’ because the division was activiated in 1917 at Camp Custer in Michigan, so named after the Civil War and Indian Wars general who had led the Michigan Cavalry Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg.

[*] There were 158,805 men in AOK 10 and AOK 14, while Alexander could call on 602,618 Allied troops in Italy at this time, of whom 253,859 were British, 231,306 were American, 71,827 were French and 45,626 were Polish. Although nothing like this number would take part in the coming battles, Alexander was still able to have the three to one advantage in manpower along the main battle line that he believed was necessary for victory. Even so, when one considers the air forces and men in reserve, the best part of a million men were to be directly and indirectly involved in the offensive.

[*] Leese was never particularly accurate with his facts and figures when writing to his wife. In fact, there were around 1,660 guns in action: 1,060 along Eighth Army’s front, and 600 along that of Fifth Army.

TWO

### Battle Begins 11–12 May 1944

Manning his machine-gun post amongst the rubble near what had once been the Via Casilina – the main road to Rome – was Hans-Jürgen Kumberg. The 4th Fallschirmjäger Regiment had moved down from the heights of Monte Cassino a month earlier. Although the ruins provided excellent defensive cover, the place was a hell hole, swarming with malaria-infested mosquitoes and reeking of death and sewage. The men were short of just about everything: water, food, cigarettes; reinforcements that had been promised but had not materialised. And they were exhausted: living like sewer rats and being pummelled by relentless Allied harassing fire was not conducive to sleep. Only the Pioneer – engineers – battalion of the 4th Regiment had arrived to help, having joined them alongside the Via Casilina just the day before.

Amongst them was twenty-three-year-old company commander Lieutenant Joseph ‘Jupp’ Klein, a battle-hardened veteran of the Eastern Front, Sicily and the second and third battles of Cassino. His company’s recent leave had been the first since arriving in Italy the previous August following the Sicily campaign and had done much to revive their spirits, but after a day back at the front they still had much to do. There were more machine-gun positions to be built, more tunnels to dig and retreat routes to be prepared.

On the night of 11 May, at eleven o’clock, Jupp Klein was standing on the debris-strewn Via Casilina, talking to one of his corporals, when ‘suddenly from heaven to hell the night became as bright as day’.9 As the shells screamed overhead, Jupp immediately recognised that the sheer scale of the barrage could only mean one thing: the offensive had started – and sooner than any of them had expected.

A few miles north in a concrete bunker along a narrow valley between the mountains above Cassino, Major Georg Zellner, commander of the 3rd Battalion Hoch-und-Deutschmeister Reichs Grenadier Regiment, gathered around him a few of his officers. Throughout the day he had been receiving the best wishes of his men on this his thirty-ninth birthday. Some of his staff had even brought him some flowers picked from the mountain. The major, however, was not in good spirits. Desperately homesick, he hoped for a letter or card from his wife and two young daughters back home in Passau in south-east Germany, but nothing had yet arrived. All day, he’d waited, praying there would be some word from them on the evening’s ration cart but nothing came.

Two bottles of sekt – sparkling wine – had arrived for him and he and a few of his officers were about to share them. Having eased the cork from the first of the bottles, Georg was about to take a birthday gulp when the world seemed to be ripped apart as the massed Allied guns roared the opening salvo of the battle. ‘We drink the sekt anyway,’ he noted drily.10

Watching the barrage from the safety of Monte Trocchio, behind the Allied lines, was twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Ted Wyke-Smith, a former steel engineer from Sheffield now serving with 78th Division Royal Engineers. As commander of a bridging unit, his job was to be amongst the division’s spearhead as it advanced, once the 4th and 8th Indian Divisions had made the initial breakthrough, and build Bailey bridges over the numerous rivers and anti-tank ditches that barred the Allied progress. Ted had been sitting in his tented dugout listening to nightingales in the trees nearby when the guns opened fire. ‘It was terrific,’ he remembers. ‘The noise was incredible and even where we were, several miles behind the lines, the ground trembled.’ Curiously, however, the nightingales began singing again shortly after. ‘It was most extraordinary,’ says Ted, ‘a concerto of nightingales and cannons.’

The first infantry to attack were the unblooded Americans of the 85th Infantry Division, who set off from their start positions the moment the barrage began. None of the French and American troops of Fifth Army had any rivers to cross, but they faced formidable obstacles nonetheless. The 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 338th Infantry Regiment had been ordered to assault a 400-foot high ridge studded with knolls, known as Spigno Saturnia. Terraced and dotted with farmhouses and occasional olive groves, the forward slopes were well defended by the infantry regiments of the German 94th Division.

Company D of the 1st Battalion had been given ‘Point 131’ as their first objective – the most imposing and best-defended height along the ridge. Lieutenant Bob Wiggans had been impressed by the scale of their barrage and had begun the advance through the wheat fields and olive groves with a certain amount of confidence. As the barrage lifted, however, he realised to his horror that the Germans, hidden in their well-constructed concrete bunkers, were almost completely unharmed.

‘We moved forward and immediately drew all kinds of fire,’ he noted, ‘machine gun, automatic weapon, rifle, mortar, and artillery. So many men were killed.’11 Although the Custermen had briefly gained the crest, they became pinned down and with reinforcements unable to reach them, they were forced to fall back halfway down the slopes. As Bob paused, he glanced at a ditch next to him where five men of his company were already lying dead. For two years they’d been training for this moment, yet for so many of them it had all been over in a trice.

It was not only the 1st Battalion that were being stopped in their tracks. Elsewhere along the southernmost part of the front, other American units were coming up against a wall of enemy fire and finding it almost impossible to make any headway. On their right, the French were also struggling. The Goumiers managed to take the heights of Monte Faito, but other objectives could not be taken as the colonial troops had been confronted with German flamethrowers as well as heavy mortar and machine-gun fire.

Meanwhile, in the Liri Valley, barely anything had gone right for the Allies. After the warm day and suddenly cool night, river mists had developed along the River Garigliano and then mingled with the intense smoke caused by the biggest barrage of the war. Despite weeks of endlessly practising river crossings, no one had considered the effect the smoke from the guns would have on visibility. Nor had the planners appreciated just how strong the current would be in the ‘Gari’. Many of those crossing in assault boats were swept away, while others were destroyed by machine-gun fire and mortars. Meanwhile the sappers who had been due to lay six Bailey bridges under the light of the moon had found the fog as thick as the worst kind of London pea-souper. Their task had been almost impossible. Only by a miracle and enormous ingenuity was the first successfully built by 9 a.m. on the 12th. Another was open for business an hour later, but attempts to build the others failed amidst enemy fire and appalling fog.

The Poles had not fared much better. They had not launched their assault until 1 a. m., two hours after the barrage had opened up and some time after the 8th Indian and 4th Divisions had attacked in the valley below. As a result, the German paratroopers were already alert to the possibility of an attack. To make matters worse for the Poles, the 3rd Fallschirmjäger Regiment, whose positions they were attacking, were in the process of relieving a number of their troops, so in the cross-over there were many more enemy forces opposing them than there might have been. This extra German fire power proved decisive. Although the Poles reached their first objectives, they were soon pinned down, and, like the Americans, struggled to get reinforcements and further supplies forward. By evening the following day, they had suffered 1,800 casualties – nearly a quarter of their attacking strength – and had been driven back to their starting positions.

Wladek Rubnikowicz and the 12th Lancers, in their positions below the rubble of the monastery, had been given the task of sending out reconnaissance parties across no-man’s-land, while the main force attacked the high ground to the north of the monastery. It was the first time they had ventured from their positions and although not part of the main attack, they had still come under heavy enemy machine-gun and mortar fire. It was merely a taste of what was to come.

News of the unfolding battle was patchy. Visibility, through the thick blanket of mist and cordite smoke that smothered the valley, was no more than ten yards and only snippets of information trickled in to HQ. Despite the paucity of news, the Signals Office was a hub of activity, with exchanges and calls coming through constantly. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had been cut to pieces at the Liri Appendix, but the division as a whole had captured a small but critical bridgehead. RAF Spitfires were soon patrolling overhead; then USAF bombers came over to paste the German positions. Reinforcements arrived for the Appendix, but the enemy mortaring did not let up.

At his Tactical Headquarters near Venafro, less than ten miles west of Cassino, General Leese appeared to be as unaware of the situation as most of the attacking troops, noting ‘there is a vast smokescreen like a yellow London fog over the battlefield’. Yet the Germans couldn’t see very clearly either. As General Alexander had intended, Feldmarschall Kesselring’s forces had been caught completely off guard. On the morning of the 11th at AOK 10 headquarters, Generaloberst von Vietinghoff ’s chief of staff had reported to Kesselring’s headquarters ‘nothing special is happening here’.12 Allied air superiority had prevented the Luftwaffe from carrying anything but the sparsest of aerial reconnaissance, while carefully executed deception plans had convinced the German commander that the Allies intended to make another amphibious landing, either to reinforce the troops at Anzio, or further north of Rome, near the port of Civitavecchia. Kesselring also had it in mind that the Allies might try an airborne assault in the Liri Valley near Frosinone. Moreover, German intelligence suggested that the Allies had far more troops in reserve and fewer at the front than was the case – which was also considered to be evidence that the Allies were preparing another attack north of the Gustav Line.

Because of this, Kesselring had left the front line relatively thinly defended. Most of his reserves were either north of the Gustav Line or around Rome. Both German armies had been in the process of regrouping since the beginning of May, but once again, thanks to Allied air dominance, movement by day had been all but impossible and so this reorganisation had not yet completely finished.

The Werfer Regiment 71, for example, had been withdrawn from the front line a couple of weeks before and moved back into reserve to give it a chance to regroup and rest. An artillery regiment of six-barrelled rocket mortars – nebelwerfer, or ‘moaning minnies’ as the Allies called them – the Werfer Regiment 71 had needed this break after a long stint of front-line duties. Eighth Battery commander, Oberleutnant Hans Golda, had heard the muffled noises from the front and seen flashes of light to the south, and had gone to bed that night feeling restless. His unease had been well founded. In the early hours he had been woken by Major Timpkes who telephoned with the news that the Allied offensive had begun and that they were to get going to the front right away. ‘Calmly and seriously we got ready to march,’ he noted. ‘Our recovery time had been cut short after two weeks.’13

But German troops in Italy were mostly a stoical bunch. They recognised that while the attacker could dictate the timing of his assault, it was the role of the defender to do his best – to respond as well as he could, whether properly rested or not.

THREE

### Churchill’s Opportunism

On the morning of 11 May, the British Prime Minister had dictated a letter to Alexander, his commander in Italy. ‘All our thoughts and hopes are with you in what I trust and believe will be a decisive battle, fought to a finish,’ wrote Churchill, ‘and having for its object the destruction and ruin of the armed force of the enemy south of Rome.’14

Ever since the agreement to invade southern Italy the previous summer, Churchill had been looking forward to the day the Allies captured Rome. ‘He who holds Rome,’ he had told President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin the previous November, ‘holds the title deeds of Italy.’ This was perhaps overstating the case, but there was no doubting the enormous psychological fillip that the capture of Rome – which would be the first European capital to be taken – would provide.

Yet despite the considerable commitment of the Allies – and Britain in particular – to the Italian campaign, their presence there had never been part of any long-agreed master plan. Rather, it had been purely opportunistic, a decision born of a series of unfolding events, each one bringing Italy closer and closer to the typhoon of steel that would rip through it.

The seeds of this momentous decision date back to a meeting between a US general and the Russian Foreign Minister in Washington DC in late May 1942. Normally wary of promising too much, the US Chief of Staff General George Marshall, America’s most senior military figure, nonetheless assured Vyacheslav Molotov that the United States would start a second front before the end of the year. Three days later, speaking to Molotov on 1 June, President Roosevelt reiterated his determination to help the Soviets by engaging German troops on land some time during 1942.

What Roosevelt and Marshall had in mind was an Allied invasion of Continental Europe. America’s commitment to a ‘Europe-first’ rather than a ‘Pacific-first’ policy had been agreed with Britain more than six months before, in December 1941, at the hastily arranged Washington Conference following the US’s entry into the war. The Americans agreed that Nazi Germany, rather than Japan, posed the greatest immediate threat, especially since the Soviet Union appeared to be a hair’s breadth away from defeat. Such a collapse would have been catastrophic for the Western Allies, with the weight of the Nazi war machine turned against them. Furthermore, Germany would then have had access to all the oil and minerals it needed; indeed, it was for these essential raw materials, above all, that Hitler had ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union. Britain and the United States, not the USSR, were regarded as the most dangerous enemy by the Führer.

There was thus considerable urgency to help the Soviet Union as soon as possible. Broadly, they agreed on a policy of ‘closing and tightening the ring around Germany’,15 which was to be achieved in a number of ways: by supporting the Russians materially; by beginning a campaign of aerial bombardment against Germany; by building up strength in the Middle East and wearing down Germany’s war effort; and then striking hard with a punch that would see a combined Allied force make an invasion of Continental Europe, preferably in 1942, but otherwise certainly in 1943.

Yet despite this agreement, Britain and America approached the task of winning the war from completely different strategic viewpoints. Britain’s tactic was to gather the necessary forces and wait for events to dictate where the decisive engagement would take place. The Americans, on the other hand, began with deciding where they should attack and then, working backwards, preparing the forces required for success. The British viewed the American approach as naïve, born of their lack of experience in war and international affairs. Conversely, the Americans thought the British lacked decisiveness and the willingness to make the necessary sacrifices to see the job done.

To begin with, however, these differences in approach were smoothed over. Britain was happy to agree in principle to America’s avowed intention to invade northern France, while it soon became apparent that America was physically unable to stick to its desired timetable. Despite its rapidly expanding manufacturing capabilities and massive mobilisation, n 1942 the United States was still some way behind the times and its armed forces were just a fraction of the size they would balloon to by the war’s end. In September 1939, for example, America’s standing army comprised just 210,000 men – only the nineteenth largest in the world. By the time of Pearl Harbor, this figure had only slightly more than doubled. From there on, the figure would rise exponentially, but there could be no seaborne invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe just yet and most certainly not of France. Nor could Britain be relied on to mount such an operation. With their forces already overstretched in the Far East, in North Africa and the Middle East, the Allies accepted that the proposed invasion would have to take place in 1943 instead – although, as General Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, pointed out during a visit to Washington in June 1942, it was important that no alternative, lesser operation should be undertaken in 1942 that might affect the chances of a successful large-scale assault into Europe the following year.

However, Roosevelt was determined to see his promise to Molotov fulfilled. ‘It must be constantly reiterated,’ he told his Chiefs of Staff on 6 May 1942, ‘that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis material than all the twenty-five nations put together… the necessities of the case called for action in 1942 – not 1943.’16 Moreover, he was all too aware that the American people, having been led into war, would not tolerate a long period of apparent inaction.

It was following the talks with Molotov that Churchill suggested the Allies invade northwest Africa as a means of Roosevelt keeping his word. There were, he argued, all sorts of good reasons for making such a move: the British Eighth Army was already fighting in Egypt and Libya – and in strength – and securing Vichy-French-held Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia would be a less demanding task than an assault anywhere on the Continent. Furthermore, securing the Mediterranean would ease British shipping for future operations in Europe, would enable Allied bombers to attack Germany and Italy from the south, would hasten Italy’s exit from the war, and tie up Germany’s forces – all of which would help Russia.

General Brooke and the British Chiefs of Staff, despite their concerns, soon fell in line with their prime minister. But both the American Chiefs of Staff, and General Eisenhower and his planning team in Britain – Mark Clark included – were deeply sceptical, believing an invasion of north-west Africa would be a major deviation from their main goal – and one that could, if undertaken, see hopes for an assault on France dashed even in 1943. Roosevelt, however, saw some merit in the plan, and having accepted there was no other viable place they could successfully bring about a second front, supported Churchill’s proposals. The misgivings amongst his military commanders may have continued, but Roosevelt had made up his mind and his word was final. The invasion of north-west Africa was on.

This, then, was how the Mediterranean strategy was born. In a remarkably short time, Eisenhower, together with General Clark as his chief planner, diverted their attention to an invasion of north-west Africa instead of France. In November 1942, as the Eighth Army was soundly beating Rommel’s German-Italian army at El Alamein, a joint British and American invasion force landed in Morocco and Algeria. The landings were an astonishing achievement and produced a rapid and overwhelming victory. Admittedly, the opposition had hardly been very stiff, but conception to execution had taken a little over three months. It showed what could be achieved, logistically at any rate.

It certainly got Churchill’s mind whirring. Suddenly he began to see a wealth of opportunities emerging in the Mediterranean. With the whole of North Africa secure, he realised that Britain and America would be ‘in a position to attack the underbelly of the Axis at whatever may be the softest point, i.e. Sicily, southern Italy or perhaps Sardinia; or again, if circumstances warrant, or, as they may do, compel, the French Riviera or perhaps even, with Turkish aid, the Balkans’.17

This memo to his War Cabinet in October 1942 showed that Churchill was beginning to think in terms of a double second front – one that could be opened alongside the cross-Channel invasion. Churchill has often been accused of putting his designs for the Mediterranean above those of the invasion of France, but this was not the case in the autumn of 1942. There were few people more determined to see, for instance, the cross-Channel invasion take place in 1943, something Churchill stuck to longer than most. But he was the arch-opportunist, a man who never lost sight of the ultimate goal, but who was always open to new ways and different approaches to achieving that final victory.

By January 1943, with the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa looking to be inevitable – even if it was taking considerably longer than originally envisaged – a more concrete Mediterranean strategy was agreed. At the Casablanca Conference that month, the decision was made to follow success in North Africa with an invasion of Sicily. This, it was argued, would knock out Axis airfields threatening Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, but more importantly would provide the Allies with the greatest chance of forcing Italy out of the war, and, for the time being, was considered the best way to continue closing the ring around Germany – even if that meant postponing the invasion of northern France for yet another year.

This time it had been General Brooke who successfully manipulated the Americans into following the British way of thinking, and with the subsequent capture of more than 250,000 Axis troops in Tunisia, Churchill finally began to start looking towards the long and mountainous leg of Italy.

The news of the victory in North Africa in May 1943 came as the Prime Minister was steaming his way across the Atlantic for yet more talks, and in the flush of so emphatic a triumph both he and the British Chiefs of Staff were unsurprisingly gung-ho about what might still be achieved that year. German forces, they argued, were now widely stretched, not just in Russia, where the tide seemed to be turning in the wake of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad in February, but elsewhere too: trouble was brewing in the Balkans; in France, which since the Allied invasion of North Africa was now entirely, rather than partially, occupied; resistance was also growing in Norway; and Italy appeared to be on the point of collapse. If and when Italy was out of the war, Germany would have to replace the half-million Italian troops in Greece and the Balkans, not to mention the figure that would surely be diverted to Italy itself, as well as the French Riviera and other borders now vulnerable to Allied attack. This kind of dispersal of forces, they suggested, was just what was needed to help the Allies get a toe-hold in France for 1944.

With this in mind, the British pressed their case to follow an invasion of Sicily with an invasion of southern Italy. This would open up yet further airfields from which to attack the German Reich, and could lead to exploitation eastwards into the Balkans and Aegean. At the very least, they argued, this use of their massed forces would be of greater help to the cross-Channel invasion than transferring most of the troops in the Mediterranean back to Britain. And in the best-case scenario, who was to say such operations might not prove decisive?

If the British were getting carried away with themselves, it was hardly surprising. Not only had they fought through a long, three-and-a-half-year campaign in North Africa, they had had interests in the Mediterranean dating back to Nelson’s day, nearly a hundred and fifty years before. The Americans, however, had none of these emotional attachments and had so far played a far smaller role in the theatre. ‘The Mediterranean,’ General Marshall said at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs in May 1943, was ‘a vacuum into which America’s great military might could be drawn off until there was nothing left with which to deal the decisive blow on the Continent.’18 They had agreed to North Africa, and had been persuaded there was sense to the invasion of Sicily, but they were damned if British over-enthusiasm for the Mediterranean was going to get in the way of the stated and original Number One Goal: the invasion of France.

Determined not to be outmanoeuvred, as they had been at Casablanca, General Marshall insisted that a date for the cross-Channel invasion be decided upon and that this should be the priority over and above any other operations. Only when the British had agreed to 1 May, 1944, for what he now appropriately renamed Operation OVERLORD, and had accepted that a certain number of troops would have to be withdrawn back to Britain to help with that task, would Marshall acquiesce to any further Allied action in the Mediterranean, whether it be the invasion of Italy or anywhere else.

The British agreed with the American terms – after all, they still believed in the invasion of France too – but to Churchill’s great frustration, no definite plan was made about what should follow the successful conquest of Sicily and by 10 July 1943, the day the Allies made their landings on the southern Italian island, the matter had still not been resolved.

The decision to go on and invade southern Italy was finally taken on 16 July. It had, in fact, been prompted by none other than Marshall himself, who proposed an amphibious operation to take Naples and then to push on as quickly as possible to Rome. Needless to say, the British Prime Minister jumped at this suggestion. ‘I am with you,’ Churchill cabled to Marshall on hearing this plan of action, ‘heart and soul.’19

No one was under any illusion, however, that Italy would be an easy place to fight a campaign should the Germans make a stand – not since Belisarius in the sixth century had Rome been captured from the south. Yet despite General Marshall’s lack of enthusiasm for any further Mediterranean strategy, he recognised the necessity of both knocking Italy out of the war for good and drawing German troops away from northern France and Russia; and Italy was the only feasible place in which they could do this. Air superiority was a prerequisite for any seaborne landing, so this ruled out southern France; capturing Sardinia and Corsica were possibilities but would not draw enemy troops or necessarily prompt Italy’s collapse; while an invasion of Greece and the Balkans carried the same risks as Italy, the roads and lines of communication there were considerably worse, nor would there be the benefits of a sizeable launch pad such as Sicily close at hand.

And anyway, both Marshall and the Allied chiefs had good cause for optimism. Momentum was with them, and the gutful of intelligence at their fingertips suggested Germany had no plans to defend southern Italy at all. Rather, it looked as though they intended to fall back to a line more than 150 miles north of Rome. With luck, the invasions would be as lightly defended as those on Sicily. Italy’s southern airfields would be captured and there was no real reason to doubt that some time before Christmas, Rome would be theirs.

All too quickly, however, these high hopes were dashed. Only the occupation of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica – two of the pre-invasion objectives of the Allies – had brought any cause for cheer and these had both been abandoned by the Germans as part of their plans to deal with the Italians’ collapse. In Italy itself, the strong and determined resistance shown by the Germans at Salerno in September 1943 had demonstrated there would be no easy victory. The Italian armed forces – with the exception of a large part of the navy and some of the air force – had been swiftly and efficiently disarmed by the Germans, not just in Italy but throughout the Balkans, Greece and the Aegean as well. In fact all but a few of the Dodecanese islands were soon in German hands, and most of those that were not were quickly taken back from the Allies. In Italy itself the Allies had discovered that it was a truly terrible place to fight a war. Running down three-quarters of the narrow peninsula were the Apennine Mountains – for the most part, high, jagged peaks that in places rose more than 10,000 feet. All too frequently sheer cliffs and narrow ridges towered over the narrow valleys below. And where there are mountains, there are always rivers, which in Italy generally ran down towards the sea and across the path of the Allied advance. Even where there were no mountains, there were still plenty of hills, such as in Tuscany, and although there were some flat coastal plains – like that around Anzio – these were criss-crossed with yet more rivers, canals, dikes and other water courses. In the north, there was the open country of the Po Valley, but then the mountains rose again – this time the even higher Alps. Furthermore, despite being a Mediterranean country, the winter climate was harsh – often freezing cold and wet, and to make matters worse, the winter of 1943/44 was especially bad.

Compounding the problem was Italy’s relative economic backwardness and poor infrastructure. Certainly, there were the great industrial cities of the north, but much of Italy was dotted with tiny villages and walled mountain-top towns, a reminder that not so long ago Italy had been a place of city states and warlords, not the unified whole it had become less than a century before. Mussolini may have improved the railways, but few proper roads linked these isolated towns and villages. Indeed, large parts of the mountainous interior were joined by nothing more than tracks.

By the beginning of October, the Allies had taken both Naples and the Foggia airfields, after three weeks of hard fighting, but then it began to rain. Bad weather in ‘sunny’ Mediterranean Italy had not really been considered by the Allied chiefs before the campaign began. It did not seem possible that a bit of rain and cold could affect modern armies. Yet with almost every bridge and culvert destroyed by the retreating Germans, and with rivers quickly rising to torrents, the Allies, with all their trucks and tanks and jeeps and countless other vehicles, soon found themselves struggling horribly in thick, glutinous mud where roads used to be.

So it was that increasingly stiff resistance, bad weather and the onset of winter, and, above all, a severe shortage of men and equipment, ensured their advance ground to a halt. A hard-fought-for foothold in the southern tip of Italy now seemed like a small reward for their efforts.

And yet, and yet. More than fifty German divisions – the best part of a million men – were now tied up in Italy, the Balkans and the Aegean. By the end of October there were nearly 400,000 German troops in Italy alone. It began to dawn on the British especially, and Brooke and Churchill in particular, that if Italy was anything to go by, OVERLORD was going to be an incredibly tough proposition. If the cross-Channel invasion was to have any chance of success – and Churchill was remembering Gallipoli all too clearly – then it was imperative that even more be done to keep up the pressure on German forces throughout the Mediterranean.

With this in mind, at the Tehran Conference at the end of November 1943, the British pressed the Americans to agree to continue the advance up the leg of Italy to a line that ran from Pisa in the west to Rimini in the east. By overstretching Germany in southern Europe, they reasoned, the invasion of France would have a greater chance of success. However, in terms of strategy, the gulf between the United States and Britain was widening. As far as America was concerned, Britain had had its own way far too long. Increasingly suspicious about British intentions in Italy and the Mediterranean, the American chiefs only very reluctantly agreed to British proposals. OVERLORD would be postponed for the last time, and by a month and no more, and only in order to give the Allies more time to take Rome and reach the Pisa-Rimini Line. And there was to be one very strict caveat: in July 1944, a significant amount of Allied resources would be diverted from Italy to be used in an operation that would give more direct support to OVERLORD. This was to be the Allied invasion of southern France, codenamed Operation ANVIL.

With this now an agreed and approved strategy, General Alexander was given a little under eight months in which to achieve this latest Allied goal. After that, he had been told emphatically, the tap would be turned off.

General Alexander now had just two months left. He had guessed the present battle would last three to four weeks. Replying to Churchill’s message on the morning of 11 May, he had signalled that everything was now ready for the battle ahead. ‘We have every hope and intention of achieving our object,’ he wrote, ‘namely the destruction of the enemy south of Rome. We expect extremely heavy and bitter fighting, and we are ready for it.’20

Throughout the night and into the morning of 12 May, the cipher clerks at AAI headquarters in the vast Reggio Palace at Caserta were busy transcribing signals as news of the opening of the great battle began to pour in. Even for a man of General Alexander’s imperturbability, these must have been tense times. There was much at stake.