The Allied
Invasion of Italy
This long, well
documented book by Rick Atkinson is one of the best accounts of any war to
appear in the last decade or more. The
Day of Battle is the second volume in Atkinsons planned
trilogy on the Western Allies campaigns against the Axis in Europe in World War II. The first volume, An Army at Dawn, told the story
of the invasion of North Africa, and the third will run from the Normandy invasion in
June 1944 to Hitlers end the following spring.
The new book
begins with a fascinating account of how in Washington,
early in 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill convinced President
Franklin D. Roosevelt that the successful Allied campaign against the Germans
and Italians in North Africa must be followed by an attack on Italy itself.
Roosevelt and the U.S.
chiefs of staff would have preferred to concentrate Allied forces in Britain, for an early attack across the British
Channel into German-occupied France.
As always, the
future was unknowable. Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff,
told his American colleagues that if the Allies mounted an attack on Italy, in Churchills phrase the soft
underbelly of Europe, the overall war in Europe
might be won by 1944. Without the invasion of Italy, a cross-Channel attack might
not be feasible until 1945 or even 1946.
The British won
the day. On the morning of July 9, 1943 Allied forces led by British General
Bernard Law Montgomery and American General George S. Patton landed on the
southern coast of Sicily.
What few readers may know is that there was no full agreement in the Allied
high command as to what should happen after Sicily was taken; perhaps the invaders would
not go on from the island to invade the Italian mainland.
We have long
known from military histories that things did not go well in that invasion.
Atkinson brings it all out, quoting the famous front-line cartoonist Bill Mauldin: Nobody really knows what hes
doing. The 82nd Airborne Division, renowned today for its decades of skilled
service, jumped into Sicily
after receiving only a third as much training as some other divisions.
Five-sixths of the paratroopers landed far from the planned drop zones because
the pilots got lost. Some planes strayed into the British zone, and eight of
them were lost to friendly fire. Not only the
Americans had problems. The British Eighth Army planned an assault by 1,700
troops to be landed by 144 gliders. The towplane
pilots got lost, the glider pilots were untrained, the weather was bad, and
only 54 gliders made landand a number of those crashed and killed the men they
were carrying. There were atrocities, and some on the Allied side. In one case
soldiers of the U.S.
180th Infantry murdered fifty to seventy Italian soldiers who had surrendered
and been disarmed.
Atkinson relies
mainly on American and British sources, published and unpublished, including a
number of interviews he did with surviving participants in the Italian war. He
also enlisted the help of people in Italy with translations. What is
missing is a full account from German sources of how the Wehrmacht
fought the invaders, in Sicily
and later. We cannot, then, call this the definitive history of the Italian
campaign; nor does Atkinson claim that it is.
The author
nevertheless gives us an excellent feel for what the war was like on not only
the Allied but the Axismainly Germanside. The Wehrmacht
commander was a brilliant, fearless, and ultimately cruel Field Marshal named
Albrecht Kesselring, who had anticipated for six months that the initial Allied
move into Southern Europe would be the invasion of Sicily. He thought all of Italy was
defensibleif the Italians would fight alongside the Wehrmacht.
The Italians had ten divisions in Sicily,
the Germans just two. Soon after the Sicily
invasion began, Kesselring began to receive reports at his headquarters in Frascati, outside Rome,
that whole Italian divisions were evaporating. He flew down to Sicily, and brought two
more Wehrmacht divisions to the island. These Germans
were by and large skilled and experienced soldiers; more experienced than the
Americans they opposed. Four Wehrmacht divisions
could not, however, stand up to an Allied force that
came to outnumber them in Sicily three to onefor
after Mussolini was deposed on July 25 the Italians could not be counted on at
all, although the new regime in Rome told Hitler
that Italy
would continue to fight.
Many Americans
still recall the figure of George Patton, the brave and irascible general,
played by George C. Scott in the 1970 film, who was castigated for slapping a
sick soldier. He and his British counterpart, Montgomery, were two egotistical
types, each intent on becoming the conqueror of Sicily. Montgomery
moved without warning across Pattons front, preventing Patton from cutting
the main escape route for the Italian and German units that would need to cross
the Strait of Messina to reach the Italian mainland.
Patton, for his part, was hellbent on reaching Messina before the British, and disinterested in
coordination with Montgomery.
As Atkinson makes
clear, there was no coordinated Allied plan to prevent Kesselring from
evacuating Sicily.
The Germans knew the importance of getting what they called our valuable
human material to the mainland, and with what the author calls precise
choreography the Wehrmacht divisions crossed the Strait of Messina with minimal lossesbecause the
Allies did not attack the ferrying operation with either their strategic bomber
force or their ships.
One
wishes that the author had drawn parallels between the successful German
withdrawal from Sicily and Robert E. Lees
successful retreat across the Potomac River into Virginia,
after his Confederate army was defeated at Gettysburg in 1863. When the Union commander,
George G. Meade, cabled President Abraham Lincoln triumphantly that the
Confederates had fled Northern soil, Lincoln
was distraught that Meade had not pursued the enemy. Lincoln saw, as his general did not, that it
was the destruction of Lees army and not the liberation of Northern soil
that would end the war.
Eighty years
later, no one at the topnot President Roosevelt, U.S. Army chief of staff
George C. Marshall, or Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, and not Churchill
or his generals, including General Sir Harold R.L.G. Alexander, the overall
commander of Allied armies in italysaw the need to
annihilate the Wehrmacht divisions at Messina before
they crossed the strait.
In any case, Sicily at the end of
August 1943 was lost to the Axis, and as Atkinson says, additional gains did
accrue to the Allies. The Mediterranean became much safer for Allied shipping,
including supplies bound through the Suez Canal to the Soviet Union and Allied
forces in southern Asia.
The strategic
problem of Italy however
remained, indeed increased, when Hitler sent an additional twelve Wehrmacht divisions down into Italy
to join the four divisions that had escaped from Sicily and retreated up the Italian boot.
There was for the moment, Atkinson writes, no strategic guidance for Allied
commanders; should a major campaign be mounted to push northward? Montgomery and
his Eighth Army began a leisurely progress up through Calabria, meeting little opposition.
On September 8,
1943 the Italian government announced it was surrendering its armed forces.
Soon the enlarged German force took over effective control of Italy. Mussolini
was rescued from detention in an operation led by a daring SS colonel, and
taken north to head a new puppet state, the Italian
Social Republic,
in Lombardy. One can read much, especially in
Italian sources, of the anti-Wehrmacht operations of
Italian partisans; those however came mainly later. The coming months would see
war waged in Italy
between the Wehrmacht and an Allied force composed of
American and British armies that also included Canadian, French, and Polish
divisions.
The Allies
decided that while Montgomerys army
continued to make its way up the Italian boot, they should stage an amphibious
invasion at Salerno, not far south of Naples. As Atkinson tells
us, Allied intelligence learned much about German plans through ULTRA, the
top-secret program that was intercepting Wehrmacht
messages. But Kesselring also had means at his disposal, including
reconnaissance planes, and after concluding that a landing would be made at Salerno he displayed
the agility so characteristic of his generalship. When the Allies landed
on September 9 the Wehrmacht was waiting for them.
The fighting at Salerno was more
difficult than the invasion commander, U.S. General Mark Clark, had
anticipated. After several days Clark wondered
whether his force would have to be evacuated. He denied later having seriously
considered this possibility, but meanwhile some other commanders, Atkinson
says, privately questioned his fortitude. Questions about him remain even
today, and Atkinson says frankly that he was in over his head at Salerno. Even less
favorable is Atkinsons description of how, while the Salerno beachhead was close to being overrun
by the Germans, Montgomery and his Eighth Army of 64,000 troops continued to
amble slowly northward toward them, patching demolished bridges and
holding medals ceremonies.
After nine long
days the Allies won out at Salerno
and the Wehrmacht retreated. Naples
was taken and the road to Rome
lay ahead; but a brave American lieutenant colonel
named John J. Toffey, whom we see much of in this
book, wrote that it looked like the road to hell. There were difficult
mountains to cross and soon enough winter weather arrived. The Germans had had
time to prepare a well fortified line, then another, and it was not until the
end of May 1944 that the Allies broke through and, on June 4, entered Rome. It is in Rome that the book ends, with an epilogue that summarizes
the long battle that lay ahead until the war in Europe ended in 1945, with the Wehrmacht still in Lombardy.
No one on the Allied side had foreseen how hard it would be to get as far as Rome. No one foresaw how
difficult the battles beyond Rome would be;
British General Alexander wrote Churchill that neither the Apennines nor the
Alps should prove a serious obstacle to the Allied forces moving u p Italy toward Germany.
The generals
should, of course, have known by now that they should not make blithe
predictions. After Naples had fallen and the
Allied advance stalled in the mountains northward toward Rome,
it was decided to make another amphibious landing, at Anzio. This was something Churchill pushed
hard for; if it worked, Romejust
34 miles northshould fall quickly. However, as Atkinson might have done well to
recall, there had been a case in the First World War when Churchill, as First
Sea Lord, had engineered an amphibious landing, in the Dardanelles,
that proved a disaster.
The Allies went
ashore at Anzio
in February 1944 and things did not work well at all; for a moment it seemed
that their beachhead might be destroyed; in the end, with good air support and
what Atkinson calls singularly good American artillery, disaster was
averted and the Allies won the day.
The author gives
an excellent account of the hard winter war that was meanwhile being waged a
little farther inland. The reviewer has walked over some of the mountains that
were fought over; they rise only four or five thousand
feet above sea level but their slopes can be steep and the vegetation thick and
thornyand in 1943-44, Wehrmacht machine guns sprayed
the slopes. Readers of this book should also read And No Birds Sang, the stark account of this
campaign that was published in 1979 by Farley Mowat,
who became famous with People of
the Deer and Never
Cry Wolf years after he had served as a Canadian lieutenant in Italy.
Many of the
heroes in this book turn out to have blemishes, large or small. One who does
not is young Colonel Toffey, killed by a tank round
at Palestrina the day before Rome
fell. The campaign to liberate Italy
lasted 608 days and cost 312,000 Allied casualties, 40 percent of them
American. German casualties were far higher, perhaps half a million, half of
them dead or missing. The soft underbelly of Europe
proved to contain much granite and gore.
Peter
Bridges is
a former ambassador to Somalia, and cofounder of the
Elk Mountains Hikers Club in Colorado.
He is the author of Safirka: An American
Envoy and Pen of Fire: John Moncure
Daniel. He is currently writing a biography of Donn
Piatt, diplomat, soldier, and editor.