The Battle of Montese

On 17 April 1945, in the ruins of Montese – a mountain town in the northern Apennines on the border between the provinces of Modena and Bologna – Brazilian soldiers were finishing the work of clearing the last German riflemen from its houses and cellars. A battle that Brazil still regards as the hardest in its twentieth-century military history was drawing to a close. War chronologies record under this date that “the Italian town of Montese is liberated by Brazilian forces after the four-day Battle of Montese”. One point needs to be made more precise: the Brazilian 1st Expeditionary Infantry Division had taken the town itself on the very first day of the attack, 14 April, and the following three days were spent fighting for the surrounding hills, beating off counter-attacks and enduring artillery fire. 17 April is therefore the date on which the battle ended, not the date on which the town was entered.

The last offensive

Montese lay on the westward-projecting part of the Gothic Line, on the ridges that separate the valleys of the Reno and the Panaro. From the autumn of 1944 the Germans had fortified the town and the hills around it – Serretto, Montello, Montebuffone and Hill 888 – turning them into a last line of defence before the descent from the mountains into the Po Valley. According to Italian and Brazilian studies, they were held by troops of the 114th Jäger Division of the German 14th Army.

The Brazilian Expeditionary Force, which had arrived in Italy in the summer of 1944, took Monte Castello in February 1945 and Castelnuovo at the beginning of March. From then on its division, commanded by General João Baptista Mascarenhas de Morais, faced Montese as part of General Willis Crittenberger’s US IV Corps, alongside the 10th Mountain Division and the 1st Armored Division.

At the beginning of April the Allies launched their last offensive in Italy; on 9 April the British Eighth Army forced the River Senio. The US Fifth Army under General Lucian Truscott was to move off a few days later, once the Germans had shifted their reserves eastwards. Its attack, planned for 12 April, was postponed to 14 April because of fog and weather unfit for flying. In the days before the assault Brazilian patrols probed the ground in front of their lines; on one of them, on 12 April, Sergeant Max Wolff Filho, one of the best-known soldiers of the force, was killed.

The assault of 14 April

On the morning of 14 April, after air and artillery strikes, IV Corps went over to the attack. The main weight fell on the 10th Mountain Division, which attacked the hills east of Montese in the direction of Tolè. On the first day, according to its own history, it lost more than 550 men killed, wounded and missing. Among those seriously wounded that day near Castel d’Aiano was Second Lieutenant Bob Dole, later a senator and candidate for the presidency of the United States.

The Brazilians attacked in the afternoon, at around 1.30 p.m. The 3rd Battalion of the 11th Infantry Regiment advanced in the centre, with the 1st Battalion on its left and the 2nd Battalion on its right; the commanders watched the attack from Sassomolare, from where the whole town could be seen. The infantry was supported by Brazilian artillery and by tanks of the US 1st Armored Division. German fire cut the telephone lines and the radios failed in the mountainous terrain, so for several hours the platoons fought almost without communications. According to Brazilian tradition, the first to enter Montese was the platoon of Lieutenant Iporan Nunes de Oliveira. By evening the Brazilian infantry held the town and the slopes around it. As its historians stress, the Brazilian division was the only division of IV Corps to reach its assigned objective on the first day.

One of the best-known stories of the Expeditionary Force dates from that day. According to accounts, three Brazilian soldiers from a patrol pushed forward towards the German positions refused to surrender and were killed fighting; the Germans buried them beneath a cross inscribed “Drei brasilianische Helden” (“Three Brazilian heroes”). The Brazilian army commemorates them to this day.

Three days under fire

On the morning of 15 April, as the Brazilians were finishing clearing Montese, heavy German artillery fire came down on the town. The German command had concluded – wrongly, as it turned out – that this was where the main Allied forces in the sector were attacking. According to Brazilian figures, some 1,800 of the 2,800 shells the Germans fired that day against the four Allied divisions in the sector fell on the Brazilian division. The bloodiest fighting was for Montebuffone and Montello: Brazilian companies advanced on these hills several times and suffered heavy losses. The Germans, for their part, tried to retake the town with counter-attacks.

On 16 April the counter-attacks ceased. Until 17 April, with the support of the 6th Infantry Regiment brought up for the purpose, the Brazilians cleared Montese and the surrounding hamlets of snipers, after which their infantry went over to the defensive. Montello and Montebuffone were not taken by storm: their defenders withdrew during the night of 17/18 April, when the 10th Mountain Division broke through the front further east and threatened them with encirclement.

Losses

According to Brazilian and Italian studies, the division lost about 430 men killed, wounded, captured and missing in the Battle of Montese, including several dozen killed. This was the heaviest loss in so short a time in the whole of the Brazilians’ Italian campaign. German losses are estimated at nearly 500 men, most of them taken prisoner.

The highest price was paid by the inhabitants. The town, which had been on the front line since the autumn, was almost razed to the ground in April 1945: according to municipal figures, at least 833 of its 1,121 houses were destroyed, and 189 civilians were killed during the fighting. After the war the Italian state awarded Montese the Bronze Medal for Civil Merit. Italian partisans had also been active in the area throughout the winter, and the Germans and the fascists of the Italian Social Republic carried out reprisal operations against them.

Significance

The Battle of Montese was above all a supporting action: by tying down German artillery and reserves, the Brazilians made it easier for the 10th Mountain Division to achieve the breakthrough that within a few days opened the way into the Po Valley for the Fifth Army. The Germans in this sector, their reserves exhausted and short of fuel, no longer had a line on which they could make a stand.

The Brazilian division set off northwards in pursuit of the retreating enemy. Over the following days it took the road junction of Zocca and came down from the mountains onto the plain, and at the end of April, on the left flank of the Fifth Army, at Collecchio and Fornovo di Taro near Parma, it barred the way to German and Italian units withdrawing from Liguria. There it accepted the surrender of the German 148th Infantry Division – the greatest success in its history.

In Brazil, Montese holds a place in the memory of the war alongside Monte Castello. The anniversaries of both battles are marked by the army, streets and schools bear their names, and in Montese itself stands a monument to the Brazilian soldiers. The remains of the fallen were first buried in the Brazilian war cemetery at Pistoia and in 1960 were moved to Rio de Janeiro, to the monument to the dead of the Second World War.