The Battle Rages 13–16 May, 1944
As General Oliver Leese’s senior aide-de-camp, Captain Ion Calvocoressi was able to view the unfolding events of the battle with a far greater clarity than the vast majority of men who shared his rank. Recently turned twenty-five, Ion was not, as his surname suggested, Italian, but half Greek. His upbringing, however, had been thoroughly English: born in India, he had then been sent to prep and public school in England and at the outbreak of war had joined the Scots Guards, subsequently serving with them in North Africa. Wounded at the First Battle of Alamein in July 1942, where he had won a Military Cross, he had later been called for by General Leese, then XIII Corps commander under Montgomery, just prior to the second battle. As was often the way with such appointments, there had been a connection: Leese had known Ion’s uncle and having heard of his wound and MC, and needing a new ADC, had sent for him.
They had been together ever since: through the remainder of the North African campaign, through Sicily, and in Italy since Leese had taken over as Eighth Army commander. And in that time Ion had met more generals and politicians – not to mention kings – than he could ever have imagined, and had become privy to the kind of intelligence that was often extremely sensitive – including information he should not have heard, such as when, during the Sicily campaign, Admiral Mountbatten had visited Leese’s HQ and Ion had attended the ensuing dinner. In the course of conversation, Leese had asked Mountbatten about what was going on in England and had then been told in great detail about a floating ‘Mulberry’ harbour they were planning to take across the Channel when the Allies invaded northern France. ‘Afterwards,’ says Ion, ‘General Oliver said to me, Mountbatten should never have talked about that. It was an appalling security breach.’
Not that Ion would ever have dreamed of betraying the trust placed in him. Nor would he have ever wished to let his chief down, for not only did he greatly admire ‘General Oliver’ as a commander, but also liked him enormously as a man. Although Leese was prone to brief outbursts of temper and irritability, for the most part he was good-humoured and informal, and took great care of his men. His Tactical HQ was always a lively and entertaining place to be. A cricket-obsessed Old Etonian, Leese was also known for his mild eccentricities of behaviour. His appearance, for example, was often most unbecoming for an army general; unlike the sartorial Alexander, he tended to wear baggy corduroy breeches and big sweaters, the effect of which was to exaggerate his large frame; like Clark, he was a tall man, some six foot three. Most of the staff at his HQ had nicknames – Ion’s was ‘Tante’, which Leese pronounced ‘Taunt’– while Leese had also introduced another in-joke, namely ‘Eighth Army French’, which helped lighten the atmosphere. This had developed during the planning of Operation DIADEM, when General Anders had asked for more guns. Leese spoke no Polish except ‘Oscryzakrit’, meaning ‘hairpin bend’ and ‘Poska ney darlecco’, meaning ‘Poles not far away’, while Anders had only a small command of English, so they tended to converse in French. Leese, however, was not quite as fluent as Anders and on this occasion he had replied to the Polish commander that there was ‘non beaucoup de chambre’ when trying to explain that there was not enough room for the guns Anders was demanding on the mountain. At this, Anders had fallen about laughing. Since then, Leese had continued to sprinkle in further howlers whenever he spoke with Anders. As Leese realised, it helped them to understand one another better.
On the evening of 12 May, however, Leese needed all his charm to calm the Polish commander after their disappointing opening attack at Monte Cassino. Accompanying him was Ion Calvocoressi. ‘The Poles were very gloomy,’ he noted in his diary. Leese had done as much soothing and reassuring as possible, but the Poles would now have to hold fire for a few days, regroup and then, on his signal, try again.
General Leese could not, of course, let on to his commanders his own feelings of anxiety. In Eighth Army’s sector, the news on the morning of 13 May was only slightly more encouraging. By great endeavour, another Bailey bridge – ‘Amazon’ – had been built across the Garigliano. The three bridges now open were not enough, but it did mean that bridgeheads were being slowly but surely established on the far side of the river. Progress, albeit slow, was being made.
No less anxious was the Fifth Army commander, General Mark Clark, who, having spent the first half of the morning reading reports and studying maps, then set off to tour his units along the front. Visiting the command post of the 85th ‘Custer’ Division, he learned that in the first thirty-six hours of battle the new boys had suffered 956 reported casualties – a heavy toll for one division. In the afternoon, he hurried over to see General Juin at the French Expeditionary Corps headquarters. There, however, the news was much better. Following on from their success the day before, the French had now captured the key position of Monte Maio, the southern bastion of the Gustav Line. Using pack mules and travelling over ground previously considered impassable, they had managed to make the first major breach of the German defences.
Few battles ever go exactly according to plan, no matter how meticulous the preparation. No one amongst the highly experienced Allied staff, for example, had considered the effect of a cocktail of river mists, smoke canisters, and a thousand guns in the Liri Valley; after all, nothing like it had ever been attempted before in such a location. Equally, no one had guessed that the first to break through the Gustav Line would be the French. But such was the capricious nature of battle, as General Alexander and his Chief of Staff, John Harding, were all too well aware. The key, however, was to have that ‘balance’ which Alex believed was so important, which enabled them to make the most of sudden and unexpected developments and to limit the effects of any potential setbacks. And balance meant having the right number of troops and materiel in the right areas – both at the front and in reserve. Furthermore, communication between commanders and units had to be good, ensuring that any change of orders could be acted upon quickly and precisely.
And so, on the evening of 13 May, Clark was in a position to act swiftly and decisively. Having realised the Germans opposite the French divisions in the Aurunci Mountains were in complete disarray, he recognised that it was imperative that the Americans to the south keep up, rather than allowing the French to penetrate too deeply and narrowly on their own. If they could bring about a major thrust forward between the mountains and the coast, then the whole German right-hand front would collapse. With this in mind, he ordered the two new divisions of the US II Corps – despite the heavy casualties they had taken so far – to speed up their own attacks that very night ‘regardless of previous schedules or plans’. This way, Clark noted, they could make the most of the Germans ‘being off-balance’.50
And off-balance they certainly were. In many ways it was a miracle the Germans were able to defend so much of the line at all. Communication between units was terrible. Not only had AOK 10’s HQ been bombed out, Allied bombers had also hit the headquarters of the 1st Fallschirmjäger, 44th Infantry, and 15th Panzer Grenadier Divisions and in so doing, seriously interrupted their ability to communicate with one another. And although AOK 10 eventually managed to set up a new HQ with 14th Panzer Corps, it still had not established an advanced headquarters close to the front.
All this meant that information from the front was patchy to say the least. As Kesselring was forced to admit, they were floundering in the dark, unable properly to evaluate the scale of the Allied attack and lacking the kind of ‘data on which to make a far-reaching decision’ on how best to respond.51
Inevitably, the absence of too many senior commanders was hardly helping. Neither General Feuerstein, the commander of the 51st Mountain Corps, nor General Hartmann, von Senger’s stand-in at 14th Panzer Corps, had much experience of command in a major battle. Nor were they especially familiar with the terrain. To make matters worse, Kesselring had, for once, made some crucial tactical errors. The lack of sound intelligence caused him problems on two scores. First, he had