Autumn rains in Italy

At the end of October 1943 the campaign in Italy changed character. After the landing at Salerno, the capture of Naples and the crossing of the Volturno, the Allies had hoped to be in Rome by Christmas. Instead, the autumn downpours turned the roads of southern Italy into mud, the rivers into torrents and the mountain tracks into slippery gullies. On 31 October, when the US 3rd Infantry Division moved against yet another German position, it was already clear that the road to Rome would be no pursuit, but a long and costly climb from ridge to ridge. The common description – that heavy rains slowed the Allied advance south of Rome – captures the situation well, with one caveat: the rain was merely an ally of the German defence, whose foundations were the mountains, demolitions and a carefully thought-out plan of delay.

From the Volturno to the Barbara Line

After the crossing of the Volturno on the night of 12–13 October, Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army entered the belt of mountains between the Volturno valley and the valleys of the Garigliano and the Rapido. The German XIV Panzer Corps fell back slowly there, leaving rearguards on every hill and mines and blown bridges on the roads. Its engineers had prepared three successive positions. The first was the Barbara Line – according to the American official history (Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino), more a belt of strong outposts than a true defensive line – running from Monte Massico on the Tyrrhenian Sea through Teano and Presenzano into the Matese mountains. Behind it lay the much stronger Bernhardt Line, anchored on the Camino, la Difensa, Maggiore and Sammucro massifs, and further still the strongest of them, the Gustav Line on the Garigliano and the Rapido, with the hill of Monte Cassino. In the east, beyond the Apennines, the same line ran along the river Trigno, while the main positions were being built on the Sangro.

In the last ten days of October the British of X Corps and the Americans of VI Corps fought their way through the Barbara Line. On 29 October the British 56th Division was less than two kilometres from Teano, and at the turn of the month it took the town; the 46th Division entered the Cascano pass, while the 7th Armoured Division on the coastal plain could barely move, its vehicles bogging down in the mud. On 31 October Major General Lucian Truscott’s 3rd Division attacked north-westwards from Dragoni and cut the road from Raviscanina to Highway 6, heading for the pass at Mignano – the gateway to the Liri valley and to Rome. The attack went more easily than expected, because the Germans were just then withdrawing to the next position. In the first days of November the Barbara Line was broken, and British patrols reached the lower Garigliano.

The Adriatic: the Eighth Army on the Trigno

On the other side of the Apennines, General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, which at the beginning of October had beaten off a German counter-attack at Termoli, came up to the river Trigno. There it had to halt for several weeks. Its supplies came along poor roads from the ports of Bari and Taranto, some 190 and 270 kilometres away, and the rain washed out the diversions around the demolished bridges. The attack across the Trigno began only on the night of 1–2 November; on 3 November the 78th Division took San Salvo, and the Germans fell back to the Sangro.

Hitler chooses Kesselring

The German way of waging the war in Italy depended on a dispute between two field marshals. Erwin Rommel, commanding Army Group B in northern Italy, believed that the south of the peninsula could not be held against Allied superiority in the air and at sea, and advised making a stand only in the Apennines north of Rome. Albert Kesselring argued that in the mountains south of Rome a dozen or so divisions would suffice to hold the Allies for many months, far from the borders of the Reich and from airfields from which Allied bombers could attack southern Germany and the Balkans. Hitler hesitated for several weeks. At the beginning of October he ordered the Bernhardt Line to be defended, and according to some accounts he decided on 19 October to give Kesselring the entire command in Italy. The order to that effect was issued on 6 November; on 21 November Kesselring took command of the new Army Group C, and Rommel left for France to take charge of the defence of the Atlantic Wall.

That decision determined the shape of the campaign. The Germans no longer meant merely to delay the Allies on their way north, but to hold them for as long as possible in the mountains of Campania and the Abruzzi. On 1 November Kesselring ordered the Tenth Army to concentrate on a stubborn defence of the Bernhardt Line until the Gustav Line was completed. The autumn rains worked in favour of this plan: every day on which Allied tanks stood in the mud and aircraft could not take off from waterlogged airfields was another working day for the German engineers.

Overlord takes the resources

The Allies, meanwhile, could not throw everything they had into Italy. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943 it had been agreed that priority would go to preparing the cross-Channel invasion – Operation Overlord. In the autumn the Mediterranean was to give up seven experienced divisions, which had to be shipped to Britain, as well as some of its bombers and transport aircraft. The most painful loss was that of landing craft: most of the landing ships and craft in the Mediterranean were to sail for England in the autumn, while most of the new vessels from American yards were going to the Pacific. According to Blumenson, what was to remain would have sufficed to lift at most a single division. Without them the Allies could not easily outflank the German lines with landings from the sea, as they had done at Termoli – they had to fight their way straight through the mountains.

War in the mud

For the soldiers, the autumn of 1943 in Italy was above all a struggle against the weather and the terrain. Rain fell for days on end, the nights in the mountains grew cold, and towards the end of the year snow fell on the high ridges. The Germans blew up the roads – often the only ones in the area – in gorges and on hairpin bends; engineers built diversions and bridges, which the next downpour swept away. Where the roads ended, ammunition, water and food were carried up into the mountains on pack mules, and on the last stretches on the backs of soldiers and Italian porters; the wounded and the dead were brought down the same way. For weeks the infantry had no dry boots or socks, which encouraged trench foot, and all the while they had to attack hill after hill under the fire of mortars and machine guns from well-concealed positions on the reverse slopes.

This picture was fixed in the public mind by two Americans who made the daily life of front-line infantry a subject for millions of readers. Bill Mauldin, a sergeant in the 45th Infantry Division, drew Willie and Joe – two unshaven, soaked and weary infantrymen who endure mud, rain and orders with bitter humour – first for the divisional newspaper and then for the army daily Stars and Stripes. Ernie Pyle, the most popular American war correspondent, returned to the Italian front at the end of 1943 and described the war from the ordinary soldier’s point of view; his report on the death of Captain Henry Waskow, killed in December in the mountains near San Pietro, appeared in January 1944 and is among the most famous pieces of war journalism. Each in his own way, both showed that in Italy there were no quick victories – only the next ridge.

Significance

The autumn rains did not stop the Allies on their own, but together with the mountains, the demolitions and Hitler’s decision to defend south of Rome, they turned the Italian campaign into a war of attrition. In November and December 1943 the Fifth Army fought hard battles for the Camino massif, Monte la Difensa and San Pietro on the Bernhardt Line, while the Eighth Army crossed the Sangro and fought for Ortona. By the end of the year the Allies had not even reached the Gustav Line. Seeking a way to outflank it, in January 1944 they landed at Anzio (Operation Shingle), keeping back in the Mediterranean for this purpose some of the landing craft earmarked for Overlord. They took Rome only on 4 June 1944, after four battles for Monte Cassino; in the last of them the ruins of the monastery were captured by the 2nd Polish Corps.

From then on the Italian front became a secondary theatre in the course of the war as a whole, but not an insignificant one. It tied down a dozen or more German divisions, gave the Allies airfields around Foggia from which bombers could reach southern Germany, Austria and Romania, and showed how dearly an offensive in the mountains costs against an enemy who knows how to defend himself. For the soldiers who in the autumn of 1943 slogged through the mud between the Volturno and the Garigliano, it was a war of which less and less was heard at home, and which grew harder with every week.