The Second World War (110 page)
The bloody stalemate in the Apennines had a demoralizing effect on Allied forces. There was a high rate of self-inflicted wounds and combat fatigue. Nearly 30,000 men had deserted or were absent without leave from British units in Italy, and American divisions also suffered.
There were few cases of combat fatigue among the 56,000 men in II Polish Corps under General W
adysaw Anders. After the failure in March of Freyberg’s New Zealanders and Indian troops to take Monte Cassino, the task was then handed to the Poles. They made it abundantly clear to British colleagues that they had no intention of taking German prisoners. The Poles were not just eager for revenge, they knew that they had to obtain a spectacular victory to help the cause of a free Poland. Stalin was openly hostile to their government-in-exile, especially after the discovery at Katy
of the Polish officers murdered by the NKVD. He was planning to set up a puppet Communist government, with the Red Army now poised once again to invade their homeland.
The renewed assault on Cassino was part of Operation Diadem, a general offensive planned by Alexander. Nearly half a million men from ten nations were involved. Clark’s Fifth Army in the west on the Tyrrhenian coast, with Juin’s French Corps in the mountains and the Eighth Army under Montgomery’s replacement, Lieutenant General Sir Oliver Leese, were to overwhelm Kesselring’s forces on the Gustav Line. Alexander called for numerous deceptions to be used. Fake bunkers were built conspicuously on attack sectors, while radio traffic and dummy landing craft gave the impression of another amphibious assault. Truscott’s forces in the beachhead were greatly strengthened. Alexander’s plan was for the attack on the Gustav Line to bring forward German reserves, then Truscott’s corps would thrust north-east to Valmontone to cut off Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army.
Clark was furious. He was not interested in trapping the Tenth Army. ‘
The capture of Rome is the only important objective
,’ he told Truscott. Clark, verging on paranoia, seemed to think that Alexander’s plan was a British trick to take his Roman triumph away from him and give it to the Eighth Army instead. Alexander’s assurances that the Fifth Army would be allowed to take Rome seemed only to increase Clark’s suspicions. Army group orders were perfectly clear, but Clark secretly prepared to disobey them.
At 23.00 hours on 11 May, the Allied artillery–25-pounders, 105mm howitzers, 5.5-inch medium guns and 155mm Long Toms, opened fire in a deafening roar, with blinding flashes of light all along the horizon. The Poles went straight into the attack, but found, to their dismay, that the Germans were relieving all their front-line battalions that night. The enemy force was thus almost double the estimated strength, and Polish casualties were appalling. So were those of the 8th Indian Division on their left crossing the Rapido River against the fortified village of Sant’Angelo, where the American 36th Division had suffered heavy losses at the beginning of the year. At last the engineers managed to get bridges in place
and the Gurkhas, supported by tanks, cleared the village. But the British bridgehead was small and Monte Cassino still dominated the whole area.
The American II Corps close to the coast met heavy opposition across the Garigliano River. Juin’s French colonial divisions in between the Americans and the British also received a murderous response. Juin decided to change tactics. He switched his axis to seize Monte Majo in a sudden attack with strong artillery support. It cost his men more than 2,000 casualties, but the Gustav Line was broken. His
goumiers
pushed on, out for blood and booty. ‘
Most wore sandals
, wool socks, gloves with the trigger fingers snipped off, and striped djellabas; a beard, a soup-bowl helmet, and foot-long knife at the belt.’ The knives were used for cutting off fingers and ears from the German dead as trophies. The
goumiers
were formidable mountain fighters. But they terrorized Italian civilians, and there were tales of brutal rapes, which their French officers tended to shrug off as the price to be paid in war.
Clark was furious with his American corps for not advancing as fast as the French and contemptuous of the Eighth Army, still held up by the 1st Fallschirmjäger Division at Monte Cassino. But Polish courage and gradual encirclement forced the paratroopers to withdraw. On 18 May, the white and red flag of Poland flew from the ruins of the great Benedictine abbey. It had cost them nearly 4,000 casualties.
The German withdrawal to the Hitler Line, ten to twenty kilometres behind the Gustav Line, did not go smoothly. Juin’s troops allowed them no rest, and when the Eighth Army finally advanced into the bottleneck of the Liri Valley, it was clear that this second line of defence was at risk. Kesselring, desperate to hold it, transferred divisions from Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army containing the Anzio beachhead. This was the moment for which Alexander had been waiting.
Truscott’s VI Corps, secretly reinforced to seven divisions, was now stronger than Mackensen’s whole army. On 22 May, Clark flew into the Anzio beachhead to try to demonstrate to the world that he, not Alexander, was in control of this operation. The next morning, Truscott’s divisions attacked north-east towards Valmontone as Alexander had ordered. Casualties were heavy but the following day, finding that the Germans had pulled out, II Corps on the coast joined up with the Anzio beachhead. Clark, with a group of war correspondents and photographers in Jeeps, dashed over to have the event immortalized.
On 25 May, Truscott’s 1st Armored Division was within striking distance of Valmontone, and within twenty-four hours he could have cut the Tenth Army’s line of retreat. But that afternoon he received orders from Clark to switch his axis of advance to the north-west, towards Rome. Truscott and his divisional commanders were most uneasy, but Truscott
loyally followed Clark, who concealed what he was up to from Alexander. Clark’s obsession was so intense that one can assume that he had become slightly deranged. His later attempts to justify his actions were confused and contradictory. Clark even claimed at one point that he had warned Alexander that, if units of the Eighth Army attempted to get to Rome before him, he would order his men to open fire on them.
Clark was not merely determined that Alexander should have no credit, he was not prepared even to acknowledge Truscott’s role. The Second World War saw many examples of egomania. Clark’s desire to enter Rome as conqueror before Overlord was one of the most flagrant. Field Marshal Brooke once wrote in his diary: ‘
It is astonishing
how petty and small men can be in connection with questions of command.’ Alexander described Clark’s behaviour as ‘
inexplicable
’, but then proceeded to explain it: ‘I can only assume that the immediate lure of Rome for its publicity value persuaded him to switch the direction of his advance.’
While Alexander’s forces fought the main battle of the Italian campaign, far greater events were in preparation in north-west Europe. Overlord would be the largest amphibious operation in history, with more than 5,000 ships, 8,000 aircraft and eight divisions in the first wave. There was considerable nervousness, known as ‘D-Day jitters’. Senior British officers had painful memories of Dunkirk and other evacuations, to say nothing of the disastrous Dieppe raid. But the planning which went into Operation Neptune–the Channel-crossing stage of Overlord–was extraordinary in its detail. On receiving their orders, which ran to several hundred pages, the 3rd Canadian Division dubbed it ‘Operation Overboard’.
The Germans were expecting an invasion, but they did not know exactly when or where it would come. The British staged an intricate series of deception plans under the general heading of Plan Fortitude. Fortitude North hinted that a ‘Fourth British Army’ would land in Norway, where Hitler, to the despair of his generals, had insisted on keeping more than 400,000 men. Fortitude South, using dummy tanks, aircraft and even landing ships in south-east England, persuaded the Germans that a second invasion would be unleashed on the Pas de Calais with a 1st Army Group led by General George Patton, the leader the Germans feared most.
Using double agents and captured spies, the Double Cross system set out to persuade the Germans that the landing in Normandy was just a preliminary or a feint, and that the real attack would come later south of Boulogne. German military intelligence, having greatly overestimated the forces and manpower available to the Allies, swallowed this scenario. Later when the scale of the deception became clear and anti-Nazi officers conspired to kill Hitler in July, the Gestapo began to suspect that the
intelligence officers had allowed themselves to be misled, as part of a treasonous plot to lose the war.
Overlord planners had foreseen that success or failure would be decided during the dangerous days immediately after the landings. The Allied buildup of forces might not be able to match German reinforcements arriving to counter-attack the beachheads. The response to this was the idea developed in Italy, that you should seal off the combat zone by destroying all communications to the enemy’s rear: bridges, railway lines, marshalling yards and key road intersections. They would isolate the Normandy invasion area by making sure that little could come across the Seine to the east and the Loire to the south. But, to conceal the invasion target area, they had to extend their attacks all the way across to Holland and even Denmark.
The bull-headed Air Marshal Harris was not impressed. He had convinced himself that, if his Lancasters continued to pound Berlin and other cities, an invasion of France would be unnecessary. He also tried to argue that his bombers could not hit precision targets such as railway lines. General Spaatz wanted to continue with his ‘oil plan’, attacking refineries and synthetic-oil depots and also bombing aircraft factories. But morale was not good in the Eighth Air Force. Almost ninety crews deliberately landed their aircraft in Sweden or Switzerland, where they were interned for the rest of the war. The USAAF had made great claims about its daylight bombing accuracy, when in fact it was little better than that of Bomber Command at night. Its aircraft had even bombed towns in Switzerland instead of Germany.
Eisenhower, however, decided to bring the bomber barons to heel through his deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder. But hatreds within the RAF ran deep, and Tedder had to get Eisenhower to pull rank, with Roosevelt’s full backing. Harris and Spaatz fell into line. Churchill was appalled to discover that the planners were preparing an intensive destruction of French towns as this was the only way of blocking major road junctions. The prospect of heavy civilian casualties and towns reduced to rubble would outrage the French. He appealed against this part of the ‘Transportation Plan’ to Eisenhower and then to Roosevelt, who backed the supreme commander’s argument that it would save Allied lives. Churchill asked for a limit of 10,000 civilian casualties, but even this notional figure was not conceded. In the event, some 15,000 French civilians were killed and 19,000 others seriously injured in the lead-up to D-Day.
Churchill’s other preoccupation was what to do with General Charles de Gaulle. British and American commanders did not want the secrets of Overlord to be passed to the French leadership in Algiers because they knew that the Germans had broken their old-fashioned codes. Eisenhower, however, insisted on taking General Pierre Koenig into his confidence.
Koenig, as the commander-in-chief of all resistance groups now known as the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, would be sending out instructions to them just before the landings to sabotage communications and transport. And a number of French warships, air force squadrons and ground-force units were also taking part in the invasion.