Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45. James Holland

Army commander, as his subordinate. While Monty commanded on the battlefield, Alex improved the administrative and supply situation, played a vital buffering role between his forces and London, as well as adding his military advice on the ground; El Alamein was his victory too. By the beginning of 1943, with the Allied campaign in Tunisia stalling badly, Alex was given command of the newly formed 18th Army Group and took over direct control of the campaign. In a little over ten weeks after taking command, he had improved almost every aspect of the Allied war effort in Tunisia and had won a great victory, with the capture of more than a quarter of a million troops.

      When he had taken over in Tunisia, Alex had been justifiably concerned about the greenness of American troops, but had handled the firebrand, General Patton, with firmness and skill and had earned the respect of not only Patton, but another future star, General Omar Bradley. By the time of the Sicily invasion, however, he had still had certain reservations about the effectiveness of American troops, and this had led to a potentially damaging dispute in which he had allowed Montgomery and Eighth Army to gain a priority over the American troops that they did not deserve. That it was Montgomery who bore the brunt of understandable American grousing says much about Alex’s personal charm and charisma. To Bradley, Alex carried ‘the top rating among Allied professionals’,27 while to General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean, he was not only an outstanding soldier but also personable and easy to get along with. ‘Americans,’ he noted, ‘instinctively liked him.’28

      So did almost everyone else. He had an ability to speak freely with anyone and to make them feel at ease. He never swore – describing something as ‘tiresome’ was the closest he came to cursing – and only once was he seen to have lost his temper, and that apparently was when some of his men refused to give two dying Germans a drink of water during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. He drank but was never drunk; he liked to sketch and paint whenever he had the chance, spoke a number of languages including German, French, and Russian, and when in Burma even made an effort to learn Urdu.

      Moreover, he looked the part. Despite his modesty – bragging was anathema to him – he had something of the dandy about him. Dressed immaculately at all times, he liked to wear a high-peaked cap, with its visor dropping over his eyes – a style he had spotted on a Russian officer in 1919 and which he had liked so much he had asked his hatter in St James’s to copy.

      He was universally admired by his men. General John Harding, his Chief of Staff, wrote that Alex’s soldiers ‘thought of him as one of themselves, as a soldier. That’s what I call the magic; he’d got that.’29 During some of the darkest moments at Salerno, he had joined Clark, striding amongst the troops and exuding a sense of unruffled calm and resolve. Never one to stay stuck away miles behind the lines, he was seen at the front most days, talking to commanders and troops and surveying the battlefield for himself. Whilst maybe not a brilliant tactician, he developed a very sound judgement and understood the men under his command, from privates to generals, and how to get the best from them all. He understood how much men could endure and what could be expected of them. He understood that armies need confidence and experience in combat, and that the approach to battle – the preparation and the removal of potential stumbling blocks – was the key to success. And he understood that any attacking fighting force needs both balance and momentum.

      The problem facing Alex in Italy had been that right up until the late spring of 1944, he had had neither balance nor momentum, and far too many stumbling blocks, none of which had been of his making. From the moment Allied troops had landed at Salerno, Alex had been plagued by the slow build-up of his forces. In Italy, the German build-up, begun way back in July, had been far faster than anything the Allies had been able to achieve. Supplying their forces by land – on rail and by road – was a huge advantage. The Allies, on the other hand, had only been able to do so by air and sea – and mostly the latter. The frustration was that the shipping that was so desperately needed simply had not been available; nor had there been enough landing craft. ‘The reduction in craft,’ Alex had written, ‘already decreased by wear and tear, has been so serious as to preclude us from taking advantage, other than with minor forces, of the enemy’s inherent weakness, which is the exposure of his two flanks to turning movements from the sea.’30 In other words, rather than playing to the advantages Italy offered the attacker, the Allies had been forced to play to its massive disadvantages instead. As any German commander was aware – not least Kesselring – there were more than 2,000 miles of Italian coastline for them to defend. Fortunately for them, the Allies simply did not have the shipping to make the most of this defensive weakness.

      The Allies were fighting in far more corners of the globe than Germany. Not only had there been the continuing build-up of troops and supplies in Britain, there had been their commitments in the Far East, and, at Churchill’s urging, in the Aegean, where British forces had humiliatingly lost the battle for the Dodecanese Islands. With the huge losses of shipping so far in the war – in the Pacific, the Atlantic, Arctic and Mediterranean – resources had been stretched to breaking point.

      Furthermore, the US Chiefs of Staff had decided that the build-up of an effective bomber force in Italy at the airfields around Foggia in central southern Italy should be the first priority. Six heavy bomber groups of around forty-eight aircraft each had been sent over the moment Foggia had been captured at the end of September, forming the embryonic US Fifteenth Air Force, with twelve more and a further four fighter groups operating from Italy by the end of 1943. By March 1944, there had been twenty-one heavy bomber groups in Italy and seven long-range fighter groups – some 1,300 aircraft.

      On the face of it, this had been a sensible idea, especially as part of the reason for invading Italy had been the prospect of bombing Germany from the south. However, transporting the men, parts, ammunition, ordnance and fuel necessary for such an air force took up vast tonnages of shipping that could have otherwise been used to strengthen the ground forces. Alex had requested that the Fifteenth Army Group be built up properly first. This had been refused.

      Compounding the problem had been the removal of a large number of his more experienced troops to Britain in preparation for the invasion of France. Their transfer had long been planned for November 1943, but even so, when it took place it had been felt particularly keenly because German resistance was stiffening all the time. The slow build-up and shortage of Allied troops had put a greater strain on those already in place in Italy. Clark’s Fifth Army had struggled to recover quickly from the losses they had suffered at Salerno and the fighting that had followed first at the River Volturno and then as they had struggled through the Mignano Gap. Unfortunately, however, as pressure on the Germans had lessened, so the enemy had been able to spend more time on improving defences and making the Allied troops’ task even harder, thus creating a vicious circle. For the kind of speedy campaign the Allies had envisaged, far greater commitment had been needed. Yet because Italy had always been seen, by the Americans at least, as a secondary theatre, this commitment had not been forthcoming. Although the Normandy invasion had not yet occurred, the Allies had – in logistical terms – already begun fighting on two fronts in the West. Had they hit Italy hard with everything they had from the outset, the situation by the spring of 1944 might have been very different.

      As it was, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had won important but costly and hard-fought gains on the Adriatic coast, and the US Fifth Army had continued to push northwards, eventually breaking through the first German line of defence, the so-called Winter – or Bernhardt – Line, before running out of steam around Cassino where in January they hit the more formidable Gustav Line. In the mud, cold, and rain, the fighting had suddenly seemed horribly familiar to all those who had experienced the Western Front in the First World War – and that had been the majority of British commanders. For Churchill and the British chiefs, the opportunity for glorious exploitation in the Mediterranean and Balkans had passed; it was as though a glittering prize had somehow slipped through their hands. Meanwhile, as far as the American chiefs had been concerned, Italy had become the millstone of their worst fears, a drain that was distracting their efforts from the most important operation of all: the invasion of France.