The capture of Ravenna

On 5 December 1944 Allied communiqués announced that Ravenna – the former capital of the Western Roman Empire, of the Ostrogothic kingdom and of the Byzantine exarchate – was in Allied hands. Popular chronologies also record the event under that date. The city itself, however, had been entered a day earlier, on 4 December: from the south came patrols of the Canadian 4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards – a former reconnaissance regiment converted in the summer of 1944 into an infantry battalion of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division – and from the north and east Italian partisans of the 28th Garibaldi Brigade “Mario Gordini” under the command of Arrigo Boldrini, known by the nom de guerre “Bulow”. According to Italian accounts the partisans were in the centre a few hours before the Canadians; the Canadian official history speaks rather of the simultaneous arrival of both detachments and of a British battle group known as “Porterforce”. Either way, the city was liberated in a joint, pre-arranged operation by regular Allied troops and Italian partisans – and almost without damage.

A city on the edge of the front

After the capture of Rimini on 21 September 1944, the British Eighth Army expected that on the plain of Romagna its armoured divisions would at last gather momentum. The autumn rains, however, turned the lowlands into a swamp, and each of the dozens of rivers and canals flowing from the Apennines to the Adriatic became yet another line of defence. The Germans fell back slowly, from river to river, blowing up bridges and flooding the fields. The offensive that in the summer was to have carried the Allies out into the Po Valley turned in the autumn into a crawl of a few kilometres a week – the stalemate in Italy.

At the beginning of October command of the Eighth Army passed to General Richard McCreery, Oliver Leese’s successor. His troops advanced along the Via Emilia – the ancient road from Rimini to Bologna – and on 9 November took Forlì. On the right wing, between the Via Emilia and the sea, stretched flat country criss-crossed by canals and marshes, with Ravenna in the middle. The city lay a few kilometres from the coast, bordered to the north by the lagoons and marshes of the Valli di Comacchio and to the south by the pine woods of the pineta. The Germans held it as a forward bastion of their line, but did not intend to defend it at any cost: for Army Group C, temporarily commanded by General Heinrich von Vietinghoff after Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s car accident in October, holding the river lines in front of Bologna was more important.

Ravenna was by then an exhausted city. Since 1943 bombs had been falling on it – the Allies attacked the railway junction, the port and the refinery – and a strong underground was active in the city and its surroundings. Romagna was one of the most left-wing regions of Italy, with a strong socialist, republican and communist tradition, and it was here that the resistance took the form of a struggle on the plain, not just in the mountains.

“Bulow” and the plain

Arrigo Boldrini, born in 1915, came from Ravenna. In September 1943, at the time of the Italian surrender, he was a young army officer; only a few days later he organised the first armed action in the area – the seizure of weapons from a military depot. Linked to the Italian Communist Party, he became one of the partisan commanders in the province of Ravenna and the author of a concept he himself called the “flattening” of partisan warfare (Italian pianurizzazione): the conviction that it was possible to fight not only in the Apennines but also on the densely populated plain, relying on the support of the countryside. The partisans hid in dugouts beneath the fields and in the reeds of the marshes, and carried out sabotage, attacks on outposts and operations to protect the harvest from requisitioning.

In July 1944 the units of the province were formed into the 28th Garibaldi Brigade, named after Mario Gordini, an anti-fascist activist shot by the Fascists in Forlì in January 1944. Like the other Garibaldi brigades, it was subordinate to the National Liberation Committee and its military command, and its ranks included – alongside communists – socialists, republicans, members of the Action Party and Catholics. In the autumn of 1944 Boldrini commanded all the armed forces of the National Liberation Committee in the province.

After the fall of Forlì “Bulow” took an extraordinary step: he crossed the front line by boat and presented the Allied command with a plan for a joint attack. The partisans were to attack the German positions north and east of Ravenna, in the area of the lagoons, while the Allied forces struck from the south and west. According to partisan sources the plan bore the code name “Theodora” – after the empress in the mosaics of the Basilica of San Vitale – and had from the outset one further aim: to persuade the Allies not to bomb or shell the historic city. The plan was accepted, and from then on a liaison officer, Captain D. W. Healey, worked with the Canadians, gathering information from the partisans about German reserves.

Operation Chuckle

At the end of November the Canadian I Corps, which had been resting since October after the fighting on the Adriatic, was moved to the Eighth Army’s right wing. Since November it had been commanded by Lieutenant General Charles Foulkes. Along the coast, between the corps and the sea, operated Porterforce – a scratch collection of units under Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Horsbrugh-Porter of the British cavalry regiment the 27th Lancers. It included, among others, the Canadian reconnaissance regiment the Royal Canadian Dragoons, Canadian and British artillery, sappers, and the small commando unit “Popski’s Private Army” of the Belgian-born Russian émigré Vladimir Peniakoff. Since the autumn Peniakoff had been operating together with Boldrini’s partisans in the pine woods and marshes, and soon afterwards he lost his left hand in action.

Operation Chuckle – an attack by the Canadian corps on a front of some 16 kilometres – began on 2 December. Its aim was ambitious: to take Ravenna, cross the Lamone, Senio and Santerno rivers, reach Massa Lombarda and so threaten the flank of the German positions at Imola, and beyond them Bologna. On the right wing, nearer the sea and Ravenna, Major General Bert Hoffmeister’s 5th Canadian Armoured Division attacked – its advance led by battalions of the 12th Infantry Brigade, among them the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards and the Lanark and Renfrew Scottish – and on the left, further inland, Major General Harry Foster’s 1st Infantry Division. At the same time partisans of the 28th Brigade attacked German outposts on the lagoons north of the city – in Italian accounts this clash is called the “battle of the marshes”.

The Germans, threatened with encirclement from the south and from the sea, did not fight for the city itself. On 4 December patrols of the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards, men of the 27th Lancers and partisans entered the centre of Ravenna; over the following days the Canadians and Porterforce cleared the surrounding area as far as the Lamone, and the partisans took the villages north of the city, by the marshes towards Comacchio.

The mosaics saved

The most important consequence of this course of events was that Ravenna – unlike Rimini, Pesaro or Forlì – was not razed to the ground in street fighting. The city was a treasure house of late antique and Byzantine art: the fifth-century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the Basilica of San Vitale with its mosaics of the Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodora, the basilicas of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo and Sant’Apollinare in Classe, the baptisteries and the Mausoleum of Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths. Here too was the tomb of Dante, who died in exile in Ravenna in 1321.

Even so, the war did not spare the city entirely. Earlier air raids had badly damaged, among other buildings, the medieval Basilica of San Giovanni Evangelista near the station, and the mosaics in the most precious buildings were protected with sandbags and wooden screens. Dante’s remains, according to Italian sources, were hidden in 1944 in a mound of earth in the garden next to the tomb, from where they were returned to their place only at the end of 1945. As the front approached the city, the partisans and Peniakoff’s men – as Italian accounts emphasise – prevented the Germans from destroying the basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe on the outskirts, whose bell tower served as an observation post. San Vitale, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and the other monuments of early Christian Ravenna survived, and in 1996 they were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The rivers of Romagna

The capture of Ravenna was the greatest success of Operation Chuckle, but it did not open the way to Bologna. Beyond the city stretched a network of rivers confined between high embankments: the Lamone, the Senio, the Santerno. The first attempt to force the Lamone, by the Canadian 1st Infantry Brigade on the night of 5–6 December, was hastily prepared and ended in disaster: according to Canadian figures it cost some 200 killed, wounded and missing, some of them from their own artillery. Only on 10 and 11 December did both Canadian divisions cross the river in a carefully prepared attack – with assault boats, footbridges and air support – against the German 356th Infantry Division. Then came the fighting for the Naviglio canal and the small town of Bagnacavallo, which did not fall until 21 December.

To the left of the Canadians the British V Corps was advancing along the Via Emilia on Faenza; the town was cleared on 16–17 December by the 2nd New Zealand Division and the 43rd Gurkha Brigade. Further left still, in the foothills of the Apennines, Major General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps was fighting: its divisions crossed the Lamone near Brisighella and by the end of December had reached the river Senio. The Poles thus took no part in the capture of Ravenna itself, but they fought on the same sector of the front, a few dozen kilometres to the south-west.

The Canadians paid a high price for the December fighting: some 2,000 killed, wounded and missing. At the end of the month the Eighth Army came to a halt on the Senio line, where the river’s high embankments gave the Germans excellent defensive positions. The new attack on Bologna planned for December was called off, and Field Marshal Harold Alexander, who at this time became Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, switched the Italian front to winter defence.

Place in the history of the war

Ravenna closed the autumn campaign that had begun in the summer with the assault on the Gothic Line and was meant to end with a breakout into the Po Valley. That aim was not achieved: instead of a breakthrough, the Allies captured the towns of Romagna one after another, at the cost of heavy losses and with ever weaker forces, as divisions and equipment were sent away to France and Greece. The Senio line, on which the front came to a halt in December, held throughout the winter.

The liberation of Ravenna was, however, significant for the Italian resistance. The 28th Garibaldi Brigade was not – as had usually happened to partisan units once the front had passed – disarmed and disbanded. From mid-December 1944 it fought on as a recognised unit within the Eighth Army, attached to the Italian Combat Group “Cremona”, with Boldrini elected as its commander. On 4 February 1945, in the crowded Piazza Garibaldi in Ravenna, General McCreery personally decorated “Bulow” with the Gold Medal of Military Valour – an expression of Allied recognition of the partisans as a regular armed force. The brigade then fought on the Senio and in the Po delta until the end of the war in Italy at the beginning of May 1945. Boldrini later became a member of the Constituent Assembly, a long-serving parliamentarian and president of the former partisans’ association, ANPI; he died in 2008.

The Canadians fought in Italy for only a few more weeks. In February and March 1945 the Canadian I Corps was secretly transferred to north-west Europe, where for the first time in the war the whole Canadian army fought together – in the liberation of the Netherlands. For the Eighth Army, and with it the Polish II Corps, the decisive offensive came only in April 1945: the breaking of the Senio line, the capture of Bologna and the advance to the Po ended a campaign of which the December entry into Ravenna had been one of the stages.