The capture of Perugia

On 20 June 1944 units of the British Eighth Army entered Perugia, the capital of Umbria. The Germans had left the city a few days earlier, so there was no fighting in Perugia itself – but on the roads and hills leading to it the British 6th Armoured Division had been fighting for three days. Nearby, in the valley below Monte Subasio, the Allies had already entered Assisi, the city of St Francis, on 17 June. Both events were part of the pursuit that began after the Allies entered Rome, and of the first fighting on the German delaying line by Lake Trasimene.

The pursuit north of Rome

The breaching of the Gustav Line in May – together with the capture of Monte Cassino by the Polish II Corps – and the breakout from the Anzio beachhead had opened the road to Rome for the Allies, but had not destroyed the German armies. The German Tenth and Fourteenth Armies were withdrawing north: the first through central Italy and along the Adriatic coast, the second along the Tyrrhenian Sea. A gap was opening between them, and in the first days of June the Allies were advancing a dozen or more kilometres a day.

Two days after the capture of Rome, General Harold Alexander, commander of the Allied Armies in Italy, was instructed by his superior, General Henry Maitland Wilson, to reach the Pisa–Rimini line as quickly as possible. The aim was to deny the Germans time to organise a defence in central Italy and to complete the fortifications of the Gothic Line in the Apennines.

On the left, in the west, advanced General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army. On the right came General Oliver Leese’s Eighth Army: its XIII Corps (General Sidney Kirkman) was marching along Highway 3 and up the Tiber valleys towards Terni and Perugia, while General Richard McCreery’s X Corps was coming into the line on its right flank, in the mountainous terrain of the central Apennines.

Kesselring’s manoeuvre and the Trasimene Line

Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had no intention of making a permanent stand in Umbria or Tuscany. What he needed was time: a few weeks to withdraw his troops and man the Gothic Line. Between 4 and 16 June, while keeping in constant contact with the advancing Allies, he shifted his badly depleted divisions so that the flanks of the Tenth Army (Heinrich von Vietinghoff) and the Fourteenth Army (Joachim Lemelsen) joined up again. They took position on a belt of delaying positions that the Allies called the Trasimene Line and the Germans the Albert Line. It ran from the Tyrrhenian coast south of Grosseto, past Chiusi and along the southern shores of Lake Trasimene, past Perugia and on towards the Adriatic.

Kesselring was also helped by upheaval on the Allied side. In mid-June the American II and VI Corps were leaving the front – the latter already earmarked for the planned landing in southern France – and their place was being taken by the American IV Corps and General Alphonse Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps. On the Adriatic the British V Corps relieved General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps. These reliefs, necessary as they were, slowed the pursuit just as the Germans were coming to a halt.

Assisi – a city spared

Assisi lies a dozen or so kilometres south-east of Perugia, on a slope above the valley of the Topino and the Chiascio. According to English-language accounts, armoured cars of the British 12th Royal Lancers drove into the town on 17 June. Some chronicles and chronologies give 18 June – the one-day difference probably reflects when the entry was recorded in reports and communiqués. The Germans withdrew from the town without a fight.

Assisi did not share the fate of Cassino, largely because a German army doctor, Colonel Valentin Müller, a Catholic, secured hospital-town status for it: wounded Wehrmacht soldiers lay in its monasteries and hotels, and combat units were to bypass it. The town’s calm also helped those in hiding – according to Yad Vashem and later studies, several hundred Jews survived the occupation in Assisi. Bishop Giuseppe Placido Nicolini, Father Aldo Brunacci and the Franciscan Father Rufino Niccacci, who organised this help, were recognised after the war by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. The Basilica of St Francis and the medieval town came through the war unscathed. At the end of June the 8th Indian Infantry Division reached Assisi and rested there after the fighting.

Three days before Perugia (18–20 June)

The main burden of the advance on Perugia fell on the British 6th Armoured Division. It moved up the Tiber valley: Todi was taken on 15 June, and on 16 June – according to local Italian studies – Scottish tank crews of the Lothians and Border Horse seized the bridge at Montemolino before German engineers could blow it. This opened the road to Marsciano and on to Perugia.

The city, set on a high hill above the Tiber valley, was screened by German rearguards on the surrounding heights. The fighting lasted from 18 to 20 June and was fought over roads, bridges and hillocks in the approaches, especially west and north-west of the city, between Corciano and Monte Tezio. According to anniversary studies published in Perugia, the Eighth Army lost about 200 men in those three days, including many officers and NCOs – a figure that should be treated as approximate.

On 20 June, a few days after the German units had left the city itself, British troops entered Perugia through the Porta San Pietro. The city had suffered relatively little in the war. The date had an added significance for the people of Perugia: exactly 85 years earlier, on 20 June 1859, papal Swiss troops had bloodily suppressed a rising here by supporters of Italian unification. Help for the persecuted had also been given in Perugia – Father Federico Vincenti, who had hidden Jews, was recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 1997.

The real battle for the Trasimene Line was being fought at the same time west of Perugia. The British 78th Infantry Division of XIII Corps fought for Città della Pieve on 17 June and for San Fatucchio by the lake on 21 June; the 6th South African Armoured Division attacked in the Chiusi area. Only around 24 June did the British get round the lake and reach its northern shore, and the Germans began falling back towards Arezzo. The fighting on the Trasimene Line went on until the end of June.

The Italian front in the shadow of Normandy

The capture of Perugia and Assisi passed almost unnoticed by the wider world. The attention of the Allies and of public opinion was focused on Normandy, and the Italian front was becoming a secondary theatre from which troops were starting to be withdrawn. Wilson and Alexander argued that with full momentum the Gothic Line could still be broken that summer and the Po Valley reached, but the decision to land in southern France was taken over their heads. Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott’s American VI Corps was withdrawn from the front as early as June, and in July Clark began to lose Juin’s French divisions. In all, the Italian front gave up seven experienced divisions – three American and four French – and a large part of its air power to Operation Dragoon in August 1944.

In the west the Allies also took Elba, where the French landed on 17 June; the island no longer covered the German shipping lanes along the coast. On the Adriatic the Polish II Corps was meanwhile pushing north along the coast towards the river Chienti and on towards Ancona, which it took on 18 July. The French entered Siena on 3 July, the British entered Arezzo on 16 July, and at the beginning of August the Allies reached the Arno at Florence.

Place in the war

Perugia was one more stage in the long, costly march north which, after the liberation of Rome, brought no decisive result. Kesselring achieved his aim: the delaying actions by Lake Trasimene, and then on the Arezzo line and the Arno, gave him time to man the Gothic Line. When the Eighth Army attacked it from the Adriatic side at the end of August 1944, it broke through the fortifications but could not reach the Po Valley before winter. The Italian front settled in the Apennines for another winter, and the war in Italy went on until the surrender of the German forces at the beginning of May 1945. For the people of Umbria, however, June 1944 meant the end of occupation and the beginning of the rebuilding of public life under the supervision of the Allied Military Government.