The Allies on the Volturno

On 5 October 1943 the first patrols of Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army reached the Volturno, some forty kilometres north of newly captured Naples. Many chronologies state under this date that the Allies “crossed the Volturno Line”. That is not what happened. At the beginning of October the Allied troops were only just approaching the river. They crossed it during the night of 12–13 October, and German rearguards held on along the north bank until 15–16 October. That week of waiting on the river was the first lesson Italy taught the Allies: weather, terrain and demolitions could stop them more effectively than German divisions.

From Salerno to the river

After the crisis in the Salerno beachhead, which ended the Battle of Salerno, the Germans broke contact with the Allies during the night of 18–19 September and began a planned withdrawal northwards. Colonel General Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army fell back slowly, blowing up bridges, culverts and stretches of road, mining the verges and leaving small covering detachments behind. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German Commander-in-Chief in southern Italy, ordered Vietinghoff to retire to the Volturno and hold the river until at least 15 October. The point was to gain time: behind the Volturno German engineers were still building further positions intended to hold the Allies up for longer.

On 1 October the Allies entered Naples, wrecked and without water, electricity or a working port. Lieutenant General Richard McCreery’s British X Corps – the 46th and 56th Infantry Divisions and the 7th Armoured Division – set off from there through Caserta towards the river around Capua and towards its mouth. Major General John Lucas’s US VI Corps advanced inland: the 45th Infantry Division took the ruined town of Benevento on 2 October, and Major General Lucian Truscott’s 3rd Infantry Division reached the river above Capua by way of Cancello and Maddaloni. According to the US official history (Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino), British patrols reached the Volturno around 5 October and American ones by 6 October at the latest, and by 7 October both corps were holding the river bank in strength.

River, rain and mud

The Volturno was not a great river. In the VI Corps sector, according to the same history, it was 45 to 65 metres wide and 1 to 1.5 metres deep, and in many places it could be forded. But the beginning of October brought downpours. The river rose, the current became swift, and the steep banks, several metres high, turned into slippery mud. Beyond the river began mountainous country stretching for several dozen kilometres, cut by narrow, winding roads – all the way to the valleys of the Garigliano and the Rapido. On the Fifth Army’s right flank rose the Matese mountains, an almost impassable ridge of the Apennines separating it from the British Eighth Army.

On the north bank waited General der Panzertruppe Hans-Valentin Hube’s XIV Panzer Corps – according to Blumenson about 35,000 men of the whole Tenth Army, which then numbered some 60,000. From the river mouth to the area of Grazzanise the line was held by the rested 15th Panzergrenadier Division; in the centre, as far as Caiazzo, by the “Hermann Göring” Panzer Division with a large number of assault and anti-aircraft guns; and further upstream by elements of the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division.

Termoli: the other side of the Apennines

The Volturno Line – which the Germans also called the Viktor Line – did not end at the Volturno. From the Matese mountains it ran across the Apennines to the valley of the Biferno and to Termoli on the Adriatic. There General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army was attacking; after landing in Calabria and taking Taranto and Bari it had shifted to the east coast. On the eastern side of the peninsula, then, fighting went on at the same time as the Fifth Army’s advance to the Volturno – and in the first week of October it was the heavier of the two.

During the night of 2–3 October British Commandos landed from the sea at Termoli and seized the port, and on the morning of 3 October infantry of the 78th Infantry Division crossed the Biferno and linked up with them. Kesselring reacted quickly: the 16th Panzer Division, until then on the west coast, drove across the peninsula and on 4 October attacked the bridgehead. The British lacked a heavy bridge over the Biferno – only a few tanks got across by the ford – and on 5 October the defenders were pushed back to the edge of the town. That same night, however, engineers built a Bailey bridge, over which British and Canadian tanks crossed, and another brigade of the 78th Division was brought in by sea. On 6 October the German attack collapsed and the Germans began falling back to the next position, on the River Trigno. The departure of the 16th Panzer Division from the west coast also weakened the defence of the Volturno, which Vietinghoff regarded as a serious blow to his plans.

A week of waiting

Clark wanted to attack as soon as possible, before the Germans dug in on the north bank. McCreery and Lucas, however, said they would not be ready before 9 October; the date was then put back to the 11th and then to 12 October. “Rain, rain, rain,” Lucas wrote in his diary at the time, adding that the enemy’s resistance was much less than that of “Mother Nature”. The downpours washed away the diversions around the blown bridges, lorries carrying ammunition and pontoons sank into the mud, and supplies had to come through the still unusable port of Naples and over the beaches at Salerno. According to Blumenson, on 6 October the Fifth Army had only four days’ worth of supplies. In the mountains, where the roads ran out, ammunition and food were increasingly carried by porters and pack mules. For three days the 45th Division on the right flank “fought the terrain more than the enemy” – as the official history put it.

Hitler, meanwhile, was still hesitating over where to defend Italy. Erwin Rommel, commanding Army Group B in the north, advised falling back all the way behind the Apennines; Kesselring advised holding on as far south of Rome as possible. On 4 October Hitler made a preliminary decision to defend a position south of Rome and ordered Rommel to send reinforcements to Kesselring. For the soldiers on the Volturno this meant that what awaited them beyond the river was no longer just a retreat, but further lines in preparation.

The crossing on the night of 12–13 October

Clark decided to attack along the whole length of the river at once, so that the Germans could not concentrate their reserves in one place. VI Corps’ main effort fell to Truscott’s 3rd Division, in the sector between Monte Triflisco and Caiazzo. At midnight on 12 October the Americans launched a feint attack near Triflisco; an hour later the artillery opened fire along the whole front, and at 2 a.m. on 13 October the first companies of the 7th Infantry Regiment entered the water. The men strung ropes across the river and crossed in assault boats, on rafts and by wading, holding their weapons above their heads; some of the boats were carried away by the current. By evening the 3rd Division had won a bridgehead, and by the morning of 14 October it was already several kilometres deep. To its right the 34th Division forced the river; its engineers, having lost their pontoons under German fire, put up a bridge at a new site on the morning of 14 October. At the same time the 45th Division was taking Monte Acero on the northern edge of the valley.

The British fared much worse. At Capua, by the demolished railway bridge, the 56th Division ran into heavy fire from the Triflisco ridge; some of its boats sank, and the divisional commander judged a crossing at that point impracticable. The 7th Armoured Division established only a small bridgehead near Grazzanise. At the river mouth the 46th Division, supported by naval gunfire, crossed in assault boats; one of its battalions was driven back across the river, but two others held on to the north bank, and landing craft brought them a dozen or so tanks by sea, around the mouth of the Volturno. On the morning of 14 October Clark shifted the boundary between the corps and gave the 56th Division one of the bridges built by the Americans, so that it could cross the river in the 3rd Division’s sector. According to German reports cited by Blumenson, the 15th Panzergrenadier Division alone took more than 900 prisoners in this fighting and counted over 400 British dead and wounded.

By the afternoon of 14 October the outcome of the battle was decided. Vietinghoff, who had promised Kesselring to hold the river until 15 October, kept his word, and no longer. He agreed to Hube’s request to withdraw and, with his flanks threatened, ordered a withdrawal along the whole front in Italy. XIV Panzer Corps fell back slowly into the mountains between the Volturno and the Garigliano valley, leaving rearguards and mines on every ridge; in the east LXXVI Panzer Corps retired towards the Sangro. Around 16 October the last German units left the Volturno Line.

Significance

The crossing of the Volturno was a successful operation: the Fifth Army crossed a swollen river at moderate cost and opened its way northwards. But the Germans achieved their aim. They had gained almost four weeks since breaking away from Salerno and at least ten days on the river itself, and in that time their engineers were digging further positions: the makeshift Barbara Line from Monte Massico through Teano and Presenzano, the much stronger Bernhardt Line on the Camino, La Difensa and Sammucro massifs, and – strongest of all – the Gustav Line, anchored on the Garigliano, the Rapido and the hill of Monte Cassino.

This was to be the rhythm of the Italian campaign from then on. General Harold Alexander, commanding the 15th Army Group, had hoped in the autumn for a swift entry into Rome, but every river and every ridge meant fresh preparations, new bridges and new losses, and the autumn rains only grew heavier. From mid-October the Allies fought their way through the Barbara Line; at the end of the month they approached the Bernhardt Line, and in November they stood before Monte Camino and on the Sangro. For the winter of 1943–1944 the front came to a halt on positions that would go down in history as the Gustav Line and Monte Cassino – where in May 1944 the Polish II Corps would also fight.