Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Germans reacted to the news of the Italian “betrayal” and of the Allied invasion of southern Italy with characteristic speed. While the available forces in central Italy converged on the Salerno beachhead, an armored division fought its way into Rome, Italian troops were disarmed or intimidated everywhere, and the Badoglio government, with King Victor Emmanuel, had to flee to the British-controlled area around Brindisi. Much of the Italian fleet escaped to Allied control in the Mediterranean, but numerous vessels were sunk by the Germans or were scuttled to escape falling into their hands. In most of Italy, there was political paralysis and confusion; at some places Italians fought one another, or simply murdered one another, while opinion ranged the whole gamut from complete indifference on one extreme to violent fanaticism on the other.

In order to have some legal excuse for controlling Italy, the Germans sent parachutists to rescue Mussolini from his “prison” in a summer hotel in the mountains of the Gran Sasso, escaping with him by air to northern Italy where he was presented with a German-picked government of “neo-Fascists” under the name Italian Social Republic (September 13-15, 1943). Broken and weary, the ex-Duce of Fascism became a pliant tool of German ruthlessness and of the corrupt and criminal neo-Fascists who surrounded him. In this group the most influential were the family of Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, which Count Ciano called “that circle of prostitutes and white slavers which for some years have plagued Italian political life.”

In Allied hands, the king and Badoglio were forced, on September 29, 1943, to sign another, much longer, armistice; by its provisions “the Italian Government were bound hand and foot, and made completely subject to the will of the Allied Governments as expressed through the Allied Commander-in-Chief.” In conformity to this will, on October 13th the king’s government declared war against Germany.

As the Allied forces slowly recovered Italian territory from the tenacious grasp of the Germans, the royal government remained subservient to its conquerors. Civilian affairs immediately behind the advancing battle lines were completely in military hands under an organization known as Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, or AMGOT; farther back, civilian affairs were under an Allied Control Commission. The creation of these organizations, on a purely Anglo-American basis, to rule the first Axis territory to be “liberated” became a very important precedent for Soviet behavior when their armies began to occupy enemy territory in eastern Europe: The Russians were able to argue that they could exclude the Anglo-Americans from active participation in military government in the east since they had earlier been excluded from such participation in the west.

While these political events were taking place, the military advance was moving like a snail. The Allied invasion of Italy, at American insistence, was given very limited resources for a very large task. This limitation of resources in Italy sought to prevent the British from using the Italian campaign as an excuse for delaying or postponing the cross-Channel attack on Europe scheduled for the spring of 1944. It was only under such limitations of resources, explicitly stated, that the Americans had accepted the British suggestion for any invasion of mainland Italy at all. In May 1943, at a plenary meeting in Washington, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had set May 1944 as target date for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe with 29 divisions, had ordered a full-scale aerial offensive on Germany with 2,700 heavy and 800 medium bombers, had given the American Joint Chiefs of Staff complete control over the Pacific war against Japan, and had asked General Eisenhower to draw up plans for an invasion of Italy using no forces beyond what he had on hand. This last limitation was repeated on July 26th when the general was ordered to carry out his plans.

The invasion of Italy was a two-pronged effort. On September 3rd two British divisions under General Montgomery crossed the Straits of Messina and began to move northward against little opposition. Six days later a British airborne division from Bizerte was landed at Taranto and began to move up the Adriatic coast. On the same day, September 9th, the Fifth Army of two American and two British divisions under Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark landed at Salerno. The landing site was in the next bay south of the famous Bay of Naples, and separated from it by the rugged Sorrento Peninsula. There was no preliminary bombardment by naval guns, in order to retain tactical surprise, and the American units came over the heavily mined and barbwired beaches right into the face of the German 16th Panzer Division. Within three days, six German divisions, four of them motorized, were around the Salerno beachhead, with six hundred tanks. In fierce fighting, the area was slowly expanded, although at one point the German counterattacks almost broke through to the beach. Naval gunfire against the German tanks was the decisive factor in a seesaw struggle.

On September 13th the American 82nd Airborne Division was dropped behind the beachhead. About the same time, Rommel, in command in northern Italy, refused to release reinforcements to Kesselring in the south. On September 16th the latter commander authorized a withdrawal from the area in order to get beyond the range of naval gunfire. On the same day, Montgomery’s Eighth Army made contact with Clark’s Fifth Army, and an Allied line was stretched across Italy to the Adriatic. This line moved slowly northward, capturing Naples on the first day of October 1943. The city was a shambles, filled with wreckage and heavily booby-trapped; the water supply had been deliberately polluted, and all food stores and government records had been destroyed; the harbor area, completely in flames, was filled with sunken ships, locomotives, and other large objects to make it unusable. This was the kind of situation where American energy, humanitarianism, and ingenuity excelled; sanitation and order were restored at once, food was provided for the hungry Italians, and the harbor was cleaned up so successfully that it was handling tonnage beyond its prewar rated capacity within three months.

By October 7th the Allied advance had been stopped on the Volturno River line twenty miles north of Naples. Two months later, when General Eisenhower was transferred to take over the Supreme Command for the approaching invasion of western Europe, the Allied lines had moved northward no farther than the German Gustav Line. This line, eighty miles south of Rome and following, roughly, the Rapido River in the west and the lower Garigliano in the east, took every advantage of the rugged terrain, and allowed the enemy to inflict heavy casualties on the attackers, especially by artillery fire from the greatly feared German 88-mm. guns. To outflank this position, an amphibious landing was ordered beyond the German rear at Anzio, just north of the Pontine Marshes, thirty miles south of Rome. Originally the landing was to have been made in one operation, leaving the Allied forces on a beach -with supplies for eight days and no provision for any reinforcements or replenishment from the sea. This was based on the expectation that the main Allied forces would come up from the south in time to relieve the new beachhead. When it became clear that the Allied forces could not advance up the peninsula, the plan was canceled on December 22nd. Three days later, at a hurriedly summoned conference at Tunis, Churchill was able to have the plan reinstated, offering a British division to go with the single American division originally planned.

On January 20, 1944, General Clark tried to cross the flooded Rapido River at the foot of the great hill on which stood the ancient Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino. His aim was to advance northward toward Anzio. After two days of bloody fighting, the crossing had to be abandoned; that same day (January 22nd) the two Allied divisions landed at Anzio, hoping to cut the German communications going southward toward Monte Cassino. The landing was easy, but within a week Marshal Kesselring was able to shift sufficient forces from the subsiding Rapido front to seal off the Anzio beachhead. Although the Allies committed four more divisions to the Anzio operation, giving six in all, they could not break out of the German vise. The result was a stalemate in which the Germans could hold both the Rapido line and the Anzio line by shifting forces rapidly from one to the other as seemed necessary.