The Battle of Monte Castello

At half past five in the afternoon of 21 February 1945, soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the Brazilian 1st Infantry Regiment reached the summit of Monte Castello – a wooded ridge just under a thousand metres high in the northern Apennines, on the border between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. It was the fifth attack on the mountain since November 1944 and the first to succeed. War chronologies record for that day that “Brazilian forces and the US Army win the Battle of Monte Castello”. This matches the course of events, with one qualification: the summit itself was taken by the Brazilian 1st Expeditionary Infantry Division, while over the same days the Americans – above all the fresh 10th Mountain Division – seized the neighbouring peaks, without which the attack on Monte Castello would have stood no chance. Both divisions were operating within a single operation of the US Fifth Army, codenamed Encore.

For Brazil it was a symbolic day. The Brazilian Expeditionary Force (Força Expedicionária Brasileira, FEB) – the only South American ground force to fight in Europe – had been thrown back from this mountain three times, losing hundreds killed and wounded. In Brazilian memory the capture of Monte Castello became the greatest victory of the “Smoking Snakes”, as the men of the force called themselves.

A mountain above the road to Bologna

Monte Castello lies in the municipality of Gaggio Montano, a few dozen kilometres south-west of Bologna and north of Pistoia. Together with the neighbouring heights – Monte Belvedere, Monte Gorgolesco and Monte della Torraccia – it forms a ridge overlooking the valley of the Reno and Highway 64, the so-called Porrettana, which runs along it. This was one of the few roads across the Apennines that remained passable in winter, leading from Pistoia straight to Bologna and the Po Valley. Whoever held the ridge could see the whole valley: from it, German artillery observers watched every movement on the Allied side.

In the autumn of 1944 the Allies broke through the Gothic Line in several places, but their advance on Bologna stalled in the Apennines a dozen or so kilometres short of its objective. The Fifth Army’s left wing, west of the main roads from Florence, was held by General Willis Crittenberger’s overstretched IV Corps, made up of units not needed elsewhere. At the beginning of November the Brazilian division of General João Baptista Mascarenhas de Morais, which had been arriving in Italy since July, was transferred to it from the Serchio valley. Mascarenhas set up a forward command post at Porretta Terme, facing the German positions on the ridge.

These were held chiefly by the German LI Mountain Corps of the Fourteenth Army, and on the Monte Castello sector itself by Generalleutnant Eccard von Gablenz’s 232nd Infantry Division. Formed in the summer of 1944 from recruits and convalescents from the Eastern Front, it was rated by the Germans as a second-class unit, but it was well dug in: shelters, machine-gun nests and minefields had been built on the ridge, and the artillery had registered on every approach.

Four failed attacks

The Allied command wanted to open the road to Bologna before winter set in and judged that the ridge could be taken with a few battalions. On 24 November 1944 the American Task Force 45 under Brigadier General Paul Rutledge, made up mainly of anti-aircraft gunners retrained as infantry, advanced on Monte Castello together with the Brazilian 3rd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, and a reconnaissance squadron. The Americans took Monte Belvedere, and the next day their patrols got close to the summit of Monte Castello, but a German counter-attack drove the attackers back to their start line. Belvedere was held for only a few days: during the night of 28–29 November the Germans retook that mountain too.

Despite losing their cover on the left, the Brazilians attacked as planned on the morning of 29 November, this time with three battalions of their own supported by three platoons of American tanks. It was raining, the cloud ruled out air support and the tanks got stuck in the mud. The force under General Euclides Zenóbio da Costa, the division’s infantry commander, initially gained some ground, but fire from the German positions halted the attack, and in the afternoon the battalions were ordered back. According to figures cited in the Brazilian literature, it cost some 190 killed, wounded and missing.

A third attempt, on 12 December, made by two battalions of the 1st Infantry Regiment, ended the same way, with losses of some 150 men, 20 of them killed. The Brazilians remembered that day as one of the hardest of the whole campaign. Depending on how they are counted, sources speak of three or four failed attacks – in the latter case Task Force 45’s two days of fighting, 24 and 25 November, are counted separately. After the December defeat Mascarenhas de Morais argued to his superiors that the mountain could not be taken by single battalions, but only by an attack by the whole division, backed by a simultaneous assault on the neighbouring peaks, from which the Germans were raking the attackers’ flank.

Meanwhile winter arrived. The Italian front went over to the defensive, and the Brazilian soldiers, mostly men from a tropical country, spent it in snow-covered trenches and in the houses of mountain villages a few hundred metres from the Germans. Their morale suffered, and in Brazil the failed attacks were used to criticise the whole expedition. The command changed too: in December General Mark Wayne Clark took over the 15th Army Group, that is, all the Allied ground forces in Italy, and the Fifth Army passed to General Lucian Truscott. On the German side, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring returned to command Army Group C in January after an accident.

Operation Encore

The plan Mascarenhas had pressed for could be carried out only once a new division reached the front. The US 10th Mountain Division under Major General George Hays – the US Army’s only mountain division, in which many skiers and climbers served – arrived in Naples between 22 December 1944 and mid-January 1945, and in January took over a sector of IV Corps to the left of the Brazilians. With its participation Truscott planned a limited offensive that was to wrest the ridge above the Porrettana from the Germans and prepare start lines for the spring offensive on Bologna.

The first objective was the chain of peaks south-west of Monte Belvedere, which the Americans called Riva Ridge. Hays had noticed that it was from here that German observers had directed fire onto the slopes of Belvedere during the autumn attacks. During the night of 18–19 February the 1st Battalion of the 86th Mountain Infantry Regiment, reinforced by one company, climbed steep, icy slopes several hundred metres high, partly using ropes fixed beforehand by scouts. The Germans had not expected an attack from that direction and were taken by surprise; for the next day and a half they tried in vain to drive the Americans off the ridge.

The following night, 19–20 February, the division’s two other regiments – the 85th and 87th – attacked Monte Belvedere and Monte Gorgolesco, deliberately without a preliminary bombardment so as not to lose surprise. By dawn on 20 February both peaks were in American hands. The Germans brought up reinforcements – a regiment of the 114th Jäger Division and a mountain training battalion from Mittenwald – and counter-attacked for several days. The 85th Regiment’s advance along the ridge towards the last peak, Monte della Torraccia, stalled a few hundred metres short of its objective; it was taken only on 24 February by a battalion of the 86th Regiment in hand-to-hand fighting.

The assault of 21 February

The Brazilians moved into their start positions on 20 February, on the right of the American division. This time the whole division went into the attack: the main thrust was made by the 1st Infantry Regiment from Rio de Janeiro, known as the “Sampaio Regiment”, whose three battalions were known in the division by their commanders’ names – Major Franklin, Major Uzeda and Major Sizeno Sarmento. The attack began at dawn on 21 February. Franklin’s battalion went straight for the summit, Uzeda’s battalion outflanked it on the right, and Sarmento’s battalion, which had moved closer during the night, was to join in during the fighting.

According to the IV Corps plan, the Brazilians were not to go for the summit until the Americans had taken Monte della Torraccia, which dominated Monte Castello from the west. Torraccia, however, remained in German hands, and all day the Brazilians advanced under mortar and machine-gun fire, clearing one position after another. Success was largely due to General Osvaldo Cordeiro de Farias’s divisional artillery, which between 4 and 5 p.m. laid a concentrated barrage on the summit. At about 5.30 p.m. the first men of Franklin’s battalion stood on the top. The Germans withdrew to neighbouring positions, and the Brazilians occupied the captured shelters. According to accounts cited in the Italian and Brazilian literature, they found beside them the unidentified bodies of comrades killed in the November attacks.

Losses were incomparably lower than in the autumn. According to figures cited in the English-language literature, the Brazilians lost 22 killed and 137 wounded in the February fighting, and the 10th Mountain Division some 200 killed and more than 700 wounded between 18 and 25 February. German losses are not known precisely; the Americans took more than 400 prisoners in those days.

Brazil at the front

The capture of Monte Castello came at a moment when the question of Latin America’s part in the war had taken on new significance. Brazil had been at war with Germany and Italy since August 1942 and was the only country in the region to send troops to Europe. In February 1945, after the decision at Yalta that only states that had declared war on the Axis by 1 March would be invited to the founding conference of the United Nations, other Latin American countries hurriedly made such declarations. President Getúlio Vargas’s government, by contrast, could point to soldiers fighting in the Apennines and to Brazilian pilots who since the autumn of 1944 had been flying P-47 Thunderbolts over northern Italy as part of an American fighter group. The Brazilian press and the propaganda of the Estado Novo gave the victory enormous publicity.

Historians judge it more cautiously. Monte Castello was a task for a division, not a turning point in the campaign, and its capture became possible because the Americans simultaneously took the neighbouring peaks from the Germans and drew their reserves onto themselves. At the same time, a division that had arrived in the autumn without experience carried out, in February, an efficient attack with all its forces and well-organised artillery support – something it had not been given the chance to do in November and December.

At the other end of the front, in the Apennine foothills on the Senio river, Major General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps was serving at that time as part of the British Eighth Army. For its soldiers February 1945 was a time of despondency: the Yalta decisions handed over to the Soviet Union the eastern territories of the Polish Republic, from which most of them came. Anders regarded them as a betrayal and considered withdrawing the corps from the front. According to his memoirs, it was on 21 February that he discussed this in London with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who is said to have replied that the Allies had enough troops and could do without the Polish divisions. In the end the corps stayed at the front and fought until the end of the campaign.

Significance

Monte Castello brought to an end a three-month struggle for the ridge above the Porrettana. After a pause of several days, in the second phase of Operation Encore on 3–5 March 1945, the 10th Mountain Division took the area of Castel d’Aiano, and on 5 March the Brazilians took Castelnuovo; the front moved a few kilometres north, overlooking the road to Bologna. From these positions the Fifth Army set off in April on the last offensive in Italy. On 14 April, its first day, the Brazilians took Montese after heavy fighting, and at the end of the month, near Collecchio and Fornovo di Taro, they accepted the surrender of the German 148th Infantry Division together with the remnants of Italian divisions. On 21 April the first troops to enter Bologna, the objective of the failed autumn offensives, were soldiers of the Polish II Corps, followed a few hours later by Americans of the Fifth Army.

The Brazilian Expeditionary Force lost some 450 killed in Italy. After returning home in the summer of 1945 it was quickly disbanded, and the veterans of the war against fascism became – as Brazilian historians emphasise – one of the factors that contributed to the fall of Vargas’s dictatorship in October 1945. Monte Castello remains the best-known place of that war in Brazil: streets, squares and schools bear its name, and at Abetaia near Gaggio Montano, by the road below the summit, stands a memorial to the Brazilian dead.