The capture of Livorno

At 2 a.m. on 19 July 1944 the 3rd Battalion of the 135th Infantry Regiment of the US 34th Infantry Division entered Livorno, a port on the Ligurian Sea known to the British and Americans as Leghorn. More than two hours later two battalions of the 363rd Infantry Regiment reached the city, and in the morning it was entered by the 100th Infantry Battalion, made up of Americans of Japanese descent, which was given the task of keeping order in the city. The Germans had withdrawn the previous night, so there was almost no fighting in Livorno itself. The victors, however, found a city ruined by bombing, mined and riddled with booby traps, and its port destroyed.

Livorno – according to American documents of the time the third-largest port of pre-war Italy – was one of the Fifth Army’s main objectives in the summer of 1944. Its capture, a month and a half after the Allied entry into Rome, meant that the American troops on the western flank of the Italian front stood on the threshold of the Arno valley – the last obstacle before the German Gothic Line in the Apennines.

Along the Tyrrhenian coast

After the capture of Rome General Harold Alexander wanted to reach the Pisa–Rimini line as quickly as possible, and General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army was given as its objective the triangle of Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia on the Arno. On its left, coastal flank advanced Major General Willis Crittenberger’s US IV Corps; further inland the French Expeditionary Corps, which entered Siena on 3 July; and further east still the British Eighth Army, which took Perugia on 20 June. The pursuit, very rapid in June, slowed markedly in July. The Allies had to give up divisions for the planned landing in southern France, supply problems were mounting, and the Germans – General Joachim Lemelsen’s Fourteenth Army – were defending one range of hills after another.

The main weight of the advance on Livorno fell on Major General Charles Ryder’s 34th Infantry Division. It was one of the oldest American divisions in Europe – it had fought in North Africa and, from the autumn of 1943, in Italy: on the Volturno, at Cassino and in the Anzio beachhead. In July 1944 the division, reinforced by numerous attached units, was more than twice its normal size: according to the Fifth Army’s history, on 6 July it had more than 36,000 men on its strength. They included the 442nd Infantry Regiment, made up of Nisei, and on 3 July the division was also given Brigadier General Rufus Ramey’s Task Force Ramey, with the 363rd Regiment of the 91st Infantry Division, which had only just arrived at the front.

On 1 July the 34th Division took the small town of Cecina, at the mouth of the river of the same name, after heavy fighting. Ahead of it stretched more than thirty kilometres of hilly, in places mountainous, country. Along the coast, above the cliffs, ran the Via Aurelia, Highway 1; inland a valley carried the road to Collesalvetti and Pisa, and further east lay wooded hills. The plan was for the division not to assault the port head-on. The main forces were to go north through the hills towards the Arno valley, and only after bypassing Livorno to the east were they to turn west and cut off the German garrison.

Rosignano and the hills (2–17 July)

The German defence in front of Livorno consisted, in the west, of units of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division Reichsführer-SS, which had earlier defended Cecina fiercely, and in the east of the 26th Panzer Division (PL). The strongest point on the western flank was Rosignano Marittimo – a compact little town of stone houses with a castle on a hilltop commanding a view of the whole coastal plain. From 3 July the 3rd Battalion of the 135th Infantry fought for it house by house: the Germans threw grenades from upper floors and fired from cellars, and on 4 July they counter-attacked with tanks. Only on the evening of 7 July did the Americans reach the northern edge of the ruined town. Along the coast, armoured units and tank destroyers advanced very slowly for a week, because the road was mined and the bridges blown.

In the centre, in the valley, the 442nd Regiment attacked. For several days, from 4 to 7 July, its battalions fought for Hill 140 near Castellina Marittima, fortified – as the regiment’s journal recorded – by the Organisation Todt and impervious to the heaviest artillery fire. The 3rd Battalion took it on 8 July. The fighting was bloody: according to the regiment’s journal, the 100th Battalion and the 3rd Battalion lost some 400 killed and wounded in those days, and the rifle companies ran short of officers. Meanwhile, on the eastern flank, the 168th Infantry and the 363rd Regiment were taking one hill after another, and the 133rd Infantry was fighting its way towards the Arno valley. On 13 July the Germans, threatened with being outflanked from the east, began to withdraw on the coast as well.

Resistance did not die out, however. On the evening of 15 July, in the hills south-east of Livorno, the Germans launched a strong counter-attack against the 3rd Battalion of the 135th Infantry, whose left flank had been exposed because the coastal armoured column could not keep up with the infantry. The attack was beaten off only with all the artillery available, including 36 guns of the British 66th Anti-Aircraft Brigade. On 16 July the 135th Infantry took Monte Maggiore, while the 442nd fought for the village of Luciana, which it cleared of Germans late on the evening of 17 July. Far to the east the 168th Infantry fought a hard battle for Fauglia, in which the Germans counter-attacked with Tiger tanks.

Entering the city (18–19 July)

On 18 July the 363rd Regiment returned to the 34th Division’s zone, this time as Brigadier General Raymond Williamson’s Task Force Williamson. The plan provided for a double thrust: the 135th Infantry was to attack the south-eastern part of the city, and the 363rd was to enter it from the east. The 135th committed all three of its battalions; two of them advanced north-west to cut off the fleeing Germans. Only the 2nd Battalion met serious resistance – white phosphorus shells set fire to the scrub in which the enemy was hiding, and the Germans fled. The terrain, however, was so difficult that the Americans could not close the escape route in time, and the main body of the garrison slipped away north, across the Arno.

At 5 a.m. the 363rd Regiment attacked the village of Casone, which guarded a side road to Livorno, and took it in the afternoon after heavy artillery fire. In the evening, at 8.45 p.m., its 1st Battalion, with tanks of the 752nd Tank Battalion, reached the eastern outskirts of the city, while tank destroyers of the 804th Battalion pushed through to Montenero, a hill with a sanctuary a few kilometres from the centre, and cleared the coastal strip. At 2 a.m. on 19 July the 3rd Battalion of the 135th Infantry entered Livorno, followed more than two hours later by battalions of the 363rd. At 8 a.m. the 100th Battalion marched into the city, with the task of keeping order there.

The Fifth Army’s history recorded that in the city “there was little fighting, but it proved to be heavily mined and booby-trapped”. The Germans had had enough time for demolitions and carried them out thoroughly: they blew up almost all the port installations, blocked the entrances to the basins with sunken ships, and mined the quays and streets. Italian sources state that the Americans entered the city between 18 and 19 July; 19 July is taken as the date of its capture.

A ruined city

Livorno was one of the most heavily damaged cities in Tuscany. From 1943, as a port, an industrial centre and home of the Orlando shipyard, it endured, according to Italian tallies, some ninety Allied air raids. The heaviest fell on 28 May and 28 June 1943 on the port, the maritime station and the Naval Academy, on 25 July 1943 on the industrial district, on 14 April 1944 on the railway station, and on 19 May 1944 on the historic centre, which, according to these accounts, was almost completely destroyed; on 7 June 1944 bombs razed the industrial zone. Many civilians were killed, and most of the inhabitants left the city. Among the buildings reduced to rubble were the cathedral and the famous old synagogue – since the 16th century Livorno had been renowned for its large Jewish community, brought there by the Medici.

The clearing of mines from some districts of the city centre went on until the 1950s, and as late as the 1960s homeless people were living in huts in the 16th-century Fortezza Nuova. Post-war reconstruction, fast and carried out with little respect for the old street plan, meant that today’s centre of Livorno bears little resemblance to the pre-war city.

For the Allies, however, the port mattered most. In the first days after the capture of the city the engineers were occupied almost exclusively with mine clearance, while German long-range artillery, including 280 mm guns, shelled the harbour basin from beyond the Arno. Once the quays had been cleared and rebuilt, Livorno became one of the main supply ports for American troops in Italy during the fighting on the Gothic Line in the autumn and winter of 1944.

The Nisei at Livorno

A special place in the history of the fighting for Livorno belongs to the soldiers of the 442nd Regiment and the 100th Battalion – Americans of Japanese descent, most of them from Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. The 100th Battalion, formed from soldiers of the Hawaii National Guard, had been fighting in Italy since September 1943 and at Cassino earned the nickname “the Purple Heart Battalion” for the number of its wounded. The 442nd Regiment, formed in 1943 from volunteers – many of whom had volunteered from the camps in which their families were held after Executive Order 9066 – arrived in Italy in May 1944, and in June the 100th Battalion was incorporated into it as its 1st Battalion, keeping its old name. At Livorno the regiment went through its first long, hard battle.

The Fifth Army command’s commendation on the regiment’s departure from its order of battle, preserved in the regiment’s records, emphasised the Nisei’s part in the capture of Livorno and their “exemplary conduct on the battlefield and in the rear”. For many of them the fight in Italy was also proof of loyalty to a country that had put their families behind barbed wire. In the autumn of 1944 the regiment was transferred to France, where in the Vosges it won fame above all for rescuing an encircled battalion from Texas, and in the spring of 1945 it returned to Italy. Among the soldiers of the 442nd was Daniel Inouye, later a senator from Hawaii; the regiment is regarded as one of the most decorated units in the history of the US Army relative to its size.

Towards the Arno and the Gothic Line

On 19 July patrols of the 363rd Regiment moved north of Livorno, towards the canals between the city and the Arno; they met only small German outposts, as the enemy’s main forces had already withdrawn across the river. On 21 July General Ryder handed over command of the 34th Division to Major General Charles Bolte. Early on 23 July soldiers of the 363rd reached Marina di Pisa at the mouth of the Arno, and in the afternoon entered the southern part of Pisa. The Germans had blown all the bridges over the river and were shelling the city from the north bank. On 27 July, during an exchange of artillery fire, the roof of the Camposanto by the cathedral square caught fire, and lead from the melting roof destroyed much of the medieval frescoes. The Leaning Tower survived; the Allies took the northern part of Pisa only at the beginning of September.

Further east, the troops of the Fifth and Eighth Armies also reached the Arno: the Polish II Corps took Ancona on the Adriatic on 18 July, and the British were approaching Florence, which they entered at the beginning of August. Meanwhile the first soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force arrived in Naples; in the autumn it was to fight in the Serchio valley, north of Pisa and Lucca. At the end of July Clark and Alexander halted the advance to rest divisions that had been fighting without a break since May and to prepare the assault on the Gothic Line.

Place in the war

The capture of Livorno closed for the Fifth Army the phase of pursuit that had begun in May with the breaching of the Gustav Line. In less than two months the Allies had advanced from Rome to the Arno, but they had failed to destroy the German armies, which withdrew in good order and took up positions on the river and then in the Apennines. Livorno gave the Fifth Army a port close to the front, without which supplying the troops north of the Arno by road from Naples and Civitavecchia would have been far more difficult.

July 1944 was also the month in which the Italian front was finally relegated to a secondary role. The best French divisions and the US VI Corps were leaving to land in Provence in mid-August in Operation Dragoon, and from then on Alexander’s armies had to content themselves with tying down as many German divisions as possible. The offensive against the Gothic Line began at the end of August on the Adriatic coast; the Fifth Army attacked the Apennine passes in September. The front came to a halt for the winter north of Florence, short of Bologna, and moved again only in the spring of 1945.

The SS division that had defended Rosignano went down in Tuscan history over the following weeks for its crimes against civilians: on 12 August its soldiers carried out the Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre, and later further killings in the Apennines. Livorno itself took years to rebuild, and the US military settled permanently in the area around the city and Pisa, where its logistics base operates to this day.