In the
winter of 1943 General Albrecht Kesselring
withdrew his forces to what became known as the Gustav Line on the
Italian peninsula south of Rome. Organized along the Garigliano and
Rapido rivers it included Monte Cassino,
a hilltop site of a sixth-century Benedictine monastery. Defended
by 15 German divisions the line was fortified with gun pits, concrete
bunkers, turreted machine-gun emplacements, barbed-wire and minefields.
In December 1943, the Allied suffered heavy loses while trying to
capture the monastery.
In January
1944, General Dwight D.
Eisenhower and General Harold
Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in Italy,
ordered an amphibious operation at
Anzio, a small port on the west coast of Italy. This was to be combined
with a new offensive on Monte Cassino.
The main objective of the operation was to cut the communication lines
of the German 10th Army and force withdrawal from the Gustav Line.
Attacks on Monte
Cassino on 17th January resulted in the
Germans reserves moving to the Gustav Line and on 22nd January the
6th Corps landed at Anzio.
Lucas decided not to push straight away to the Alban Hills. This enabled
General Heinrich Vietinghoff to order
the 14th Army to return to the area and contain the 6th Corps on the
Anzio bridgehead. General Mackensen counterattacked on 15th February
1944 but this was halted by the American troops.
Winston
Churchill was furious with Lucas and commented "I had hoped
that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was
a stranded whale." General George
Marshall accepted
the criticism and Lucas was replaced
by General Lucian Truscott.
On 18th May, 1944, Allied
troops led by General Wladyslaw Anders
(Polish Corps) and General Alphonse Juin
(French Corps) captured Monte Cassino.
This opened a corridor for Allied troops and they reached Anzio on
24th May. The German defence now disintegrated and General Mark
Clark was able to take his forces direct to Rome which
he liberated on 4th June.
(1)
In his autobiography, Memoirs:
1940-1945 , General
Harold Alexander
wrote about the Anzio Campaign.
Anzio played a vital role
in the capture of Rome by giving me the means to employ a double-handed
punch - from the beachhead and from Cassino - which caught the Germans
in a pincer movement. Without this double-handed punch I do not believe
we should ever have been able to break through the German defences
at Cassino.
Orders for the operation
were issued on 2 January. The objective was defined as to cut the
enemy communications and threaten the German rear. Fifth Army was
ordered to make "as strong a thrust as possible towards Cassino
and Frosinone shortly before the assault landing to draw in enemy
reserves that might be employed against the landing forces and then
to create a breach in his front through which every opportunity will
be taken to link up rapidly with the seaborne operation". Despite
the switch, in all, of five divisions from Eighth Army to the Fifth
Army, German resistance on the main front remained stubborn; and during
the early critical days the British and United States divisions at
Anzio had to fight unaided for their own salvation. Meanwhile, on
the Adriatic sector. General Montgomery had continued with his attempt
to break through the enemy's defensive system; but with even less
success as the weather worsened and the enemy's strength increased.
Against a less formidable
foe an operation such as we had devised would have succeeded; but
I think we may well have underestimated the remarkable resilience
and toughness of the Germans, in expecting them to be frightened by
such a threat to their rear.
Hitler's orders to Kesselring
were to hold on to Cassino at all costs, for political reasons, and
to eliminate the Anzio landing. The withdrawal of the Hermann Goring
division from Italy was cancelled, and Hitler told Kesselring that
he would be reinforced by two motorized divisions, three independent
regiments, two heavy tank battalions and some heavy and medium artillery
units. Thus the enemy refused to weaken his battlefront at Cassino
by drawing back formations to deal with the landings.
Every time we attacked
Kesselring in Italy we took him completely by surprise; but he showed
very great skill in extricating himself from the desperate situations
into which his faulty intelligence had led him. I feel now that he
would not, in these circumstances, have altered his dispositions on
the main front to any great degree until he had tried every means
to eliminate the threat to his rear. Nor need his determination be
doubted. The forces under his command had been engaged in a continuous
retreat for almost a year since November 1942, a retreat that had
brought them just short of Alexandria to just north of Naples - and
it was time to put a stop to it.
(2)
Denis
Healey, The Time of My Life
(1989)
Unlike my operation in Calabria, the landing at Anzio went exactly
according to plan. We lost fewer men than the Americans had lost on
the exercise at Salerno the previous week. The surprise we achieved
was so complete that we even captured some German officers in their
pyjamas. The real trouble came later, in the months when the beach-head
was under siege, so brilliantly described by Raleigh Trevelyan in
Rome 1944.
Though the landing itself
went well, Anzio was a tactical failure. Some of the forces which
should have taken part were withdrawn for the landing in France, so
we never had enough troops to hold both the beachhead and the Colle
Laziale, which dominated the beachhead from a few miles inland. Even
if, as armchair critics have claimed, a bolder commander could have
entered Rome in those first few days, his troops would have been cut
off and wiped out at leisure. But the Germans made greater strategic
mistakes. They gravely weakened their forces on more important fronts
in the vain hope of wiping out the beachhead. So Anzio on balance
turned out to be a success. Victory in war, as in politics, often
goes to the side which makes fewer or less serious mistakes, not to
the side with the greatest positive virtues.
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