It had been nearly four years since Italy had joined the war. Now the fighting was just fifteen miles away, and although Pasua had absolutely no idea what the military commanders had in store, in a few days’ time the front line would cut a swathe right through the Aurunci Mountains. Even high on the mountains, Italians were discovering they were not safe. Soon it would be Pasua’s turn to face the whirlwind of war.
* An artillery piece mounted onto tracks or sometimes wheels. Unlike a tank, it does not have a revolving turret.
* The massacre of Italian troops on Cephalonia was worse even than that in Katyn Forest, but although the German commander who ordered it, General Lanz, was later tried for war crimes, he was given just twelve years in prison.
* The Carabinieri was a police force, but strictly speaking were military police, since they were part of the army. Their role was to maintain law and order like any other police force.
By the beginning of May, the US General Ira Eaker, commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force, (MAAF), could call on no fewer than 3,960 operational aircraft in Italy alone, a formidable air force. In sharp contrast, his counterpart, Feldmarschall Wolfram von Richtofen, had just a little over three hundred. How the tables had turned. In the first two years of the war in the Mediterranean, the Luftwaffe, along with their Italian partners, the Regia Aeronautica, had all too often ruled the skies. Their fighter planes, especially, had frequently overwhelmed the tired and battered Hurricanes and Kittyhawks of the RAF. Since then, however, better aircraft, increased production, and the arrival of the Americans in the theatre had coincided with lessening German production and shortages of fuel. All aspects of the German war machine were now being hugely stretched and the Luftwaffe were among the hardest hit. Those aircraft destroyed in the air or on the ground by the Allied air forces were no longer being replaced in kind.
So it was that every time Leutnant Willi Holtfreter took to the skies, he invariably found himself surrounded by hordes of Allied fighters. Rather as the beleaguered RAF pilots had discovered two years before over Malta, Willi found that instead of actually shooting down any enemy planes, he was doing well just to get back to base safely.
Just turned twenty-one, Willi was from the village of Abtshagen, near Stralsund on the Baltic coast. Before the war, the village had been dominated by the timber works, renowned for its manufacture of parquet flooring, and Willi’s father was a foreman there. The third child of a family of two boys and two girls, he had a sheltered but happy upbringing. Like most children, he left school at fourteen and immediately went to work at the timber factory as an apprentice. But while he was quite content with this line of work, he developed a passion for aircraft. Not far from his home was an airfield and he and his friends would often watch planes there. Then, with the Hitler Youth, he learned to fly gliders. ‘It was incredible that you could do this for free,’ he says. ‘To have that opportunity was very exciting.’
At the outbreak of war he was studying woodwork technology in Dresden, but returned home to register for the Luftwaffe before he was due to be conscripted into the army. ‘You had to volunteer to fly,’ he explains. ‘And I was happy to do so. Like most people, I wanted to do my bit for the Fatherland.’ On registering he stated his desire to become a fighter pilot, but as with the RAF or US Army Air Force, whether a potential pilot ended up flying single-or multiple-engine aircraft tended to be decided on as flying training progressed. As it turned out, however, he was indeed singled out to fly fighters, and after more than a year of ‘pretty thorough’ training, he was posted to the Fighter Reserve in France in November 1943, before being sent to join the celebrated fighter group, JG 53, in Italy at the end of March.
Jagdgeschwader 53 was one of the oldest Luftwaffe fighter groups. Known as the ‘Pik As’ – the Ace of Spades – the group had become one of the top-scoring fighter units, having served in France, over Britain, in Russia, North Africa and over Malta. Like all German fighter groups, it was divided into gruppen – or wings, and was, by the spring of 1944, split up, with just III Gruppe left in southern Italy. By the beginning of May they had just over thirty single-engine Messerschmitt 109s left.
One of these had been lost by Willi on 1 May. Flying over the Cassino front, he and his three other colleagues had soon been pounced on by hordes of Spitfires. Badly hit, he had been forced to bail out for the second time in eight days. He was not alone. Since the beginning of March, III/JG 53 had lost no less than thirty-eight aircraft, destroyed either in the air or on the ground.
But with such a dearth of resources, all the Luftwaffe in Italy could do was send up men like Willi Holtfreter on a fool’s errand in the vain hope that they might achieve something, however slight.
This was not the case for the Allies, however, who spent much time and soul-searching trying to master the opportunities offered by air power. Mediterranean Allied Air Forces was now a vast behemoth of an organisation, with British and Commonwealth units operating hand-in-hand with American. By May 1944, it was the biggest air force the world had ever seen, with more than 12,500 aircraft throughout the Mediterranean theatre. To ease potential clashes of nationality, the system of commander and deputy commander that had been implemented by the Allies in all theatres extended to the air forces too. Thus the American, General Eaker, was commander of MAAF, with Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, British, as his deputy. Defining these roles, however, was no easy matter, because in the case of Slessor, his responsibilities extended beyond those of MAAF, since he was also Commander-in-Chief, Royal Air Force Mediterranean and Middle East, and therefore in charge of subordinate commands in Egypt, East Africa, the Levant, Iraq and Persia, which meant that west of Greece he was responsible, through Eaker, to the Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean, and east of Greece to the British Chiefs of Staff only.
It was an odd and potentially fraught set-up but happily for the Allies it caused few difficulties. ‘It worked all right,’ wrote Slessor, ‘because I had in Ira Eaker an Allied Commander-in-Chief who was not only an old friend but a great airman and a splendid chap who stood on no dignities, trusted me to serve him loyally in the sphere where he was responsible and left me to get on with it – and gave me all the help he could – where he was not permitted by his directive from Washington to have a direct interest.’45 Eaker was every bit as warm in his praise of Slessor. ‘Nothing could have pleased me more,’ he told Charles Portal, the British Chief of the Air Staff on hearing of Slessor’s appointment in January. ‘I also wish to assure you that without question he and I will work together in perfect harmony.’46
That these two men were able to operate so well together was enormously fortunate because both were experienced and highly able commanders, whose close partnership was much needed in Italy – a theatre where air power was able to give the Allies an essential and decisive edge. Although both had started their careers as fighter pilots – Slessor had made the first ever aerial attack on a Zeppelin during the First World War – more recently their backgrounds had been with bombers. Eaker had commanded the US Eighth Air Force in Britain, overseeing the daylight strategic bombing of Germany, until getting the top job in the Mediterranean. Slessor, on the other hand, had commanded 5 Group, RAF Bomber Command, in England, and had then taken charge of Coastal Command where he had played no small part in the destruction of the U-boat threat in the Atlantic.
Although both men had been hoping to play major parts in the upcoming invasion of France, they recognised that a considerable challenge faced them in Italy. With such an enormous force, spread over such a wide area, theirs was a massive responsibility. The two biggest components were the Mediterranean