The attack on the Winter Line

At the beginning of November 1943 the Allied armies in Italy reached the belt of fortifications that they themselves called the Winter Line. In the west the British X Corps of the American Fifth Army stood on the lower reaches of the Garigliano, and American divisions approached the mountains that barred the road to Rome at the Mignano Gap. In the east the British Eighth Army crossed the Trigno and was approaching the Sangro; on 9 November its units were fighting in the mountains between the two rivers, around the small town of Castiglione Messer Marino. Over the following days the Fifth Army assaulted the Monte Camino massif and the hills above Mignano until, on 15 November, exhausted, it broke off the attack. The first blow against the Winter Line had failed.

The Bernhardt Line and the Gustav Line

After the crossing of the Volturno in mid-October the German Tenth Army fell back from one delaying position to the next. Behind them, sappers and forced labourers were building two main defensive belts. The first was the Bernhardt Line (called the Reinhard Line in some German documents): a chain of field fortifications from the mouth of the Garigliano across the Camino massif, the Mignano Gap and the mountains above Venafro into the Apennines, and then along the Sangro to the Adriatic. A dozen or so kilometres behind it, on the Garigliano and Rapido rivers and on the hills around Monte Cassino, the much stronger Gustav Line was taking shape. The Allies simply called both belts, together with the intermediate positions, the Winter Line.

The decision to defend south of Rome was taken in October. Albert Kesselring persuaded Hitler that in the mountains between Gaeta and Ortona a dozen or so divisions could hold the Allies all winter. On 1 November he ordered the Tenth Army to hold the Bernhardt Line for as long as possible, to allow time to complete the Gustav Line. At the time the army was commanded, in place of the ailing General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, by General Joachim Lemelsen, while the sector facing the Fifth Army was held by the XIV Panzer Corps of General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, a veteran of the fighting at Stalingrad and in Sicily.

The most important point on the whole line was the Mignano Gap. Through it ran Highway 6 and the railway from Naples to Rome, and beyond it opened the valley of the Liri – the only broad route north in this part of Italy along which tanks and supply columns could move. The entrance to the gap was closed on the left by the Camino massif with Monte la Difensa and Monte Maggiore, in the centre by two lower hills, Monte Lungo and Monte Rotondo, above the village of Mignano Monte Lungo, and on the right by the Monte Sammucro massif above the village of San Pietro Infine. Anyone wishing to pass through the gap first had to take the peaks around it.

The British on the Garigliano

On the left wing of Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army advanced the British X Corps of Lieutenant General Richard McCreery, which after the capture of Naples had been moving along the Tyrrhenian coast. On 31 October its three divisions attacked the last German rearguards on the Barbara Line. The 56th Division took Teano and, on 1 November, Roccamonfina; the 46th Division passed through the Cascano pass and secured the area around Sessa Aurunca; the 7th Armoured Division cleared the coastal plain beyond the Monte Massico ridge. According to the American official history (Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino), patrols of the 7th Armoured and 46th Divisions had already reached and reconnoitred the bank of the lower Garigliano on 1 November; over the following days, including 2 November, British units moved up to the river and occupied its southern bank from the mouth up the valley.

This “arrival on the Garigliano”, however, was no breakthrough. The Germans gave up the valley without much resistance because – as Blumenson observes – the river itself and the hills on its far bank formed a better obstacle than the positions they had abandoned. The British attack did not disrupt the XIV Panzer Corps’ planned withdrawal. The Garigliano, swollen by autumn rains and dominated by German artillery in the mountains, was to hold up X Corps for more than two months: the river was not crossed until January 1944. For the moment McCreery turned north, towards the mountains that closed the Mignano Gap on the valley side.

The first assault on Monte Camino

The Camino massif rises almost a thousand metres above the Garigliano valley. Its highest summit, Hill 963, is crowned by a monastery; a little to the north lie Monte la Difensa (960 m) and Monte la Remetanea, and beyond them Monte Maggiore. The slopes are steep and rocky, the ridges narrow, and the Germans had mined the few paths, blocked them with barbed wire and covered them with machine guns and mortars sited in nests cut into the rock. The massif was defended by the German 15th Panzergrenadier Division, a veteran of the fighting in Sicily.

On 5 November Major General Gerald Templer’s British 56th (London) Division moved against the massif with two brigades. After driving the German outposts from the villages at its foot, its soldiers began climbing the slopes on 6 November; the main burden fell on the 201st Guards Brigade, which attacked a ridge the troops called Hill 819. On 8 November the Germans counter-attacked three times and nearly drove the British off the slope; the Guardsmen held on roughly halfway up. After several days of cold and rain the British battalions were at the end of their strength. An entire battalion was employed solely in carrying food, water and ammunition up the mountain, and bringing down a wounded man took many hours. Two surrounded companies held out for five days with supplies for one before they could be relieved. According to figures given in the literature, the 201st Guards Brigade alone lost about 600 men in this fighting.

Templer was preparing to commit his third brigade on 12 November, but Clark agreed to the division’s withdrawal. On the night of 14–15 November the British came down from Monte Camino; rain and fog meant that the Germans did not interfere. Blumenson concludes that the grenadiers of the 15th Division, still in the summer uniforms they had been issued for “sunny Italy”, had won a defensive victory.

Monte Rotondo and Monte Lungo

To the right of the British advanced the American VI Corps under Major General John Lucas. Its 3rd Infantry Division, under Major General Lucian Truscott, was to open the Mignano Gap. One of its regiments, the 7th Infantry, crossed the corps boundary and from 5 November spent ten days trying to take Monte la Difensa, partly to help the British on neighbouring Camino. The men fought on narrow rock ledges above deep ravines; they needed both hands to climb, so they could not carry much in the way of weapons and ammunition. Supplies dropped from light aircraft ended up at the bottom of inaccessible gullies or on the German side, and carrying a wounded man down the mountain took six hours. Monte la Difensa remained in German hands.

The rest of the division had more luck. At McCreery’s request, to take the pressure off the 56th Division, Clark and Lucas ordered Truscott to use his reserve, the 30th Infantry Regiment, for a wide outflanking move from the east. The first attack on 6 November achieved little. Only on 8 November, in fog and with the support of eight artillery battalions, did the 30th Infantry break through the defences of the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division (PL) and push through dense scrub to the summit of Monte Rotondo, while a battalion of the 15th Infantry took the south-eastern slope of Monte Lungo. Over the following days the Americans beat off counter-attacks, including one by a parachute battalion that Kesselring used specifically to retake Rotondo, even though it was meant to form the nucleus of a new parachute division. To their right, a Ranger battalion fought from 11 November for the ridges of Monte Sammucro above San Pietro; on 13 November the Germans briefly drove it out of the hamlet of Ceppagna.

Further north, in the mountains above Venafro and Pozzilli, the 45th Infantry Division advanced peak by peak, while the 34th Infantry Division fought its way through scrub-covered hills where paths through the minefields were cleared by driving sheep and goats ahead of the troops. A combat group under the assistant division commander, Brigadier General Benjamin Caffey, took the village of Montaquila and made contact with American paratroopers who had crossed the mountains west of Isernia. These local successes did not change the overall picture, however: the Mignano Gap remained closed.

Castiglione and the Eighth Army on the Sangro

On the Adriatic, General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army moved across the Trigno on the night of 1–2 November and broke through the German defences on 3 November. The German LXXVI Panzer Corps fell back to advanced positions in front of the Sangro, and on 4 November units of XIII Corps entered Isernia unopposed. By 8 November the 78th Division was already on the hills above the lower Sangro, while on its left the 8th Indian Infantry Division was coming up, clearing the mountainous belt between the Trigno and the Sangro. On 9 November its brigades stood, among other places, near Atessa, at Gissi and between Torrebruna and Castiglione Messer Marino.

War chronicles carry a brief entry under 9 November: “Allies take Castiglione”. Several dozen places in Italy bear that name, and the entry does not say which is meant. Most probably it is Castiglione Messer Marino, a mountain town in the Abruzzi on the road from the Trigno valley to the Sangro. According to John Rickard’s study (Battle of the Sangro), it was taken by the 17th Indian Infantry Brigade – not on 9 but on 10 November; a day later the brigade entered Casalanguida. In the Fifth Army’s sector no place of that name played any part in those days, although it cannot be ruled out that one of the hamlets or hills is meant.

By 15 November the whole southern bank of the Sangro had been cleared of Germans. Beyond the river, on the ridges above the valley, began the eastern part of the Gustav Line. Montgomery halted to bring up supplies and prepare a major attack across the river, due to begin on 20 November.

The pause from 15 November

What worried the Germans most was the attack near Mignano, since it threatened to open the road to Rome. Around 10 November Lemelsen regrouped the Tenth Army: XIV Panzer Corps received five divisions, while some forces were taken from the Adriatic, leaving only three there. Senger believed that all reserves had to be thrown into the fight at once, since a breakthrough seemed to him imminent. Then the Fifth Army’s attack suddenly stopped.

On the Allied side exhaustion was just as great. Clark’s divisions had been fighting almost without a break since the landing at Salerno in September; battalions were melting away from battle casualties, sickness, constant soaking, exposure and trench foot, and replacements were in short supply. Supplies were carried into the mountains on mules and on soldiers’ backs, and where the mules could not go, they did not arrive at all. According to American studies, the Fifth Army had lost some 10,000 killed, wounded and missing since the crossing of the Volturno. On 13 November Clark wrote to the commander of the 15th Army Group, General Harold Alexander, that further frontal attacks would wear the divisions down, particularly the British 56th and the American 3rd, to a dangerous degree. Alexander agreed, and on 15 November the Fifth Army suspended offensive operations for two weeks.

The pause was used for reorganisation. In the second half of November (on 18 November, according to the Fifth Army’s history) the American II Corps under Major General Geoffrey Keyes, with the fresh 36th Infantry Division, took over the centre of the front opposite the gap; VI Corps shifted into the mountains on the right wing. New units were also arriving in Italy – the American-Canadian 1st Special Service Force and, soon afterwards, the French Expeditionary Corps – while several experienced divisions, in line with the decisions to prepare the invasion of France, were getting ready to leave for Britain. Both sides dug in, and ever colder rain fell over the front.

Significance

The first attack on the Winter Line showed what the Italian campaign would be like in the winter of 1943–1944: a struggle for every peak, in which the Allies’ superiority in tanks and aircraft counted for little against mountains, mud and well-concealed defences. Kesselring achieved his aim – he gained time to complete the Gustav Line. When he took command of the whole Italian front on 21 November, the Bernhardt Line was still holding.

The Fifth Army resumed the offensive at the beginning of December. In Operation Raincoat the British 46th and 56th Divisions finally took Monte Camino, and the 1st Special Service Force scaled the cliffs of Monte la Difensa by night. In mid-December, after bloody fighting for San Pietro Infine, the Americans took Monte Lungo, and in January 1944 they pushed through the rest of the gap as far as Monte Trocchio and the Rapido. Only on 17 January 1944 did X Corps cross the lower Garigliano, opening the first of the four battles of Monte Cassino; a few days later the Allies landed at Anzio (Operation Shingle) in an attempt to outflank the Gustav Line from the sea. It was not broken until May 1944, in the last battle of Monte Cassino, in which the abbey was taken by the Polish II Corps. The road that the Allies had hoped to cover in a few weeks in the autumn of 1943 took them more than six months and cost tens of thousands killed and wounded on both sides.