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.
Dense smoke and mist may have confounded the British Eighth Army’s opening attack into the Liri Valley, but the fog of war was every bit as thick on the German side. Not only had they been caught off guard, they were without a number of their senior officers. Incredibly, Generaloberst von Vietinghoff, commander of AOK 10, was away, as was General von Senger, commander of 14th Panzer Corps that opposed the Allies from the Liri Valley to the coast, as well as his Chief of Staff, Oberst von Altenstadt; so too was Generalmajor Baade, commander of AOK 10 Reserve. Kesselring’s Chief of Staff, General Siegfried Westphal, was also away sick at the time. Von Senger’s temporary substitute was new to Italy and comparatively inexperienced, as was the other corps commander in AOK 10, General Feuerstein of the 51st Mountain Corps, which covered the Cassino massif.
General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin – or ‘Frido’ von Senger as he was known – had been called away from the front on 17 April at the personal behest of Hitler for the investiture of the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross at the Führer’s Obersalzberg headquarters in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Von Senger, a learned Catholic from Baden in south-west Germany, was something of an intellectual and a keen student of warfare. A former Rhodes Scholar, he had served throughout the First World War and remained in the much-reduced post-war Reichswehr. Rising steadily through the ranks, he had been an armoured brigade commander during the Blitzkrieg and had then been sent to Italy as Chief German Liaison Officer with the Franco-Italian Armistice Commission, a two-year post that had given him a deep understanding of Italy and its people. By late 1942, he was commanding a Panzer Division in Russia, but after the collapse at Stalingrad was posted back to the Mediterranean as Chief Liaison Officer to the Italian Army in Sicily, a difficult task that he performed extremely well. After then extricating German troops from Sardinia and Corsica, he was given command of 14th Panzer Corps, covering the western side of Italy. It was von Senger’s troops who met the Allied invasion