The capture of Rimini

On the morning of 21 September 1944 units of the British Eighth Army entered Rimini, the Adriatic seaside town that anchored the eastern end of the Gothic Line. The Germans had abandoned it during the night, withdrawing behind the Marecchia river. The capture of Rimini is often credited to “British troops”, but in fact the first to enter the town were soldiers of the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade, with Canadians of the 1st Infantry Division, supported by New Zealand tanks, arriving almost simultaneously from the west. All of them were fighting as part of the Eighth Army, commanded by the British General Oliver Leese. The entry into Rimini closed a month of hard fighting in Operation Olive – in Leese’s own words, one of the hardest battles in the history of the Eighth Army.

The gateway to the plain

Rimini lies at the point where the narrow coastal strip between the Apennines and the Adriatic opens onto the plain of Romagna and, beyond it, the Po Valley. Whoever held this “gateway” could, as Allied planners reckoned, bring armoured divisions out onto flat ground and strike at the rear of the German armies in the Apennines. That is why it was here, rather than in the centre of the peninsula, that the commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in Italy, General Harold Alexander, decided to deliver his main blow in the summer of 1944. In August the Eighth Army was secretly regrouped on the Adriatic, and on the night of 25/26 August it began its offensive. The American Fifth Army was to strike later in the centre, towards Bologna.

Rimini itself was by then a largely deserted town. Since November 1943 it had endured several hundred air raids, followed by shelling from the sea and from land. According to Italian figures, of some 40,000 inhabitants only about 3,000 remained in the town; tens of thousands had fled north, inland and to neutral San Marino, where many sheltered in the tunnels of the railway to Rimini. There was an active resistance movement: on 16 August 1944 the Germans hanged three young partisans in the town’s main square.

From the Metauro to the Coriano Ridge

The first phase of Operation Olive went better than expected. Along the coast itself advanced the Polish II Corps of Major General Władysław Anders, with the Canadian I Corps on its left and the British V Corps in the mountains. At the end of August the Canadians and British broke through the main Gothic Line position on the river Foglia, and at the turn of August and September units of the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division took Pesaro. The Polish corps, exhausted by the fighting since Ancona and deprived of replacements, was soon withdrawn into army reserve; on the coast the Canadians took its place. By 3 September the Canadian 1st Infantry Division had advanced another 24 kilometres, to the next defensive position near Riccione.

Then the offensive stalled. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, caught off guard by the blow on the Adriatic, managed to move reinforcements to the threatened sector, among them the elite 1st Parachute Division. The Germans based their defence on the Coriano Ridge – the last serious natural obstacle before Rimini – and on the heights of Croce and Gemmano. The armoured attack on Coriano on 3–4 September broke down after two days with heavy losses on both sides, and torrential rain hampered the movement of tanks. The village of Gemmano, later called the “Cassino of the Adriatic”, was fought over for ten days; the British 56th and 46th Infantry Divisions attacked it eleven times before the 4th Indian Infantry Division took it on 15 September.

Leese prepared a second assault on Coriano. On the night of 12/13 September, after a massive artillery preparation and air attacks, the Canadian 5th Armoured Division and the British 1st Armoured Division went into the attack. By 14 September the ridge was in Allied hands. The road to Rimini seemed open, but the downpours returned: the rivers rose, the air force could not support the advance, and the Germans had time to man another defensive position – the so-called Rimini Line, running from the port of Rimini inland as far as San Marino. On the Eighth Army’s left flank, on the very border of the neutral republic, Indian and British troops were just then driving the Germans out of San Marino and its heights overlooking the plain.

The Greeks, the Canadians and the San Fortunato ridge

The direct advance on Rimini along the coast was entrusted to the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade, placed under the Canadian I Corps. The brigade had been formed in the Middle East in 1944 from several thousand soldiers whom the Greek government-in-exile regarded as loyal – after the mutiny that had swept through the Greek units in Egypt that spring – and was commanded by Colonel Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos. The Italian historian of the Gothic Line, Amedeo Montemaggi, suggested that the Allied command also assigned this sector to the Greeks for political reasons: the Greek government was eager for a prestigious victory, and Rimini lies right next to the Rubicon.

On 13 September the Greeks, supported by tanks and infantry of the 2nd New Zealand Division and by Canadian machine guns and mortars, attacked the hamlets of Monaldini and Monticelli near San Lorenzo in Strada, north-west of Riccione, which were held by paratroopers and a battalion of eastern volunteers in German service. On the first day they lost nearly a hundred men. On 15–17 September, under heavy fire from Panther tank turrets dug into the ground, they captured Rimini airfield near Miramare, and on 18 September they advanced on the town itself from the south-east. At the same time the Canadian 1st Infantry Division was fighting the hardest action of the whole battle for the San Fortunato ridge on the Covignano hill, which dominates Rimini from the west. The Canadians broke through the German defences there on the morning of 20 September. The same day, on their left, the British armoured regiment the Queen’s Bays lost 24 tanks in a failed attack at Montecieco.

On the afternoon of 20 September the Greeks reached the southern outskirts of the town. Kesselring wanted Rimini held for as long as possible so as to inflict the greatest possible losses on the attackers, but the commander of the German Tenth Army, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, persuaded him – partly in view of the downpour that broke that evening – that an isolated defence of the town would not last long. That evening the order was given to withdraw behind the Marecchia. As they pulled out, the Germans blew up the corners of buildings to block the streets, and almost all the bridges over the river. Two monuments from the age of Augustus survived: the Arch of Augustus and the Roman Bridge of Tiberius, also known as the Bridge of Augustus. According to the post-war account of a German NCO, Willi Trageser, who had been ordered to destroy them, he decided on his own to spare the arch, while the charges under the bridge failed to go off because of faulty connections; other German officers claimed that the command had ordered the bridge to be saved.

21 September: a ghost town

On the morning of 21 September the 2nd Battalion of the Greek brigade approached the bridge over the river Ausa outside the town gates. Two inhabitants told the Greeks that the Germans had gone; they entered the centre through the Arch of Augustus and called up the New Zealand tanks. The Canadians, advancing from the west, had reached the Bridge of Tiberius even before the Greeks. Rimini was a ghost town, with few inhabitants left among the ruins. The Greeks hung their flag from the balcony of the town hall, and at 7.45 a.m. a representative of the municipal authorities surrendered the town unconditionally to the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade; the record was drawn up in Greek, English and Italian. In the afternoon a ceremony was held with Allied units taking part, and in the evening a Canadian flag was raised over the town hall beside the Greek one – borrowed in haste, according to Canadian accounts, from the auxiliary services.

The same day the Canadian infantry crossed the Marecchia, while the Greeks cleared the ruins of the last German rearguards. The Rimini Line, and with it the whole Gothic Line in the coastal sector, had been broken. For the fighting for the town the brigade received the honorary title of the “Rimini Brigade”. A total of 114 Greek soldiers are buried in the war cemetery at Riccione.

Losses and destruction

Rimini was among the most heavily damaged towns in Italy. According to Italian calculations, between November 1943 and September 1944 it was subjected to a total of 396 bombardments – from the air, from the sea and by artillery – and about 82 per cent of its buildings were destroyed or damaged, the highest proportion of any Italian town with more than 50,000 inhabitants. After the war the town was awarded the Gold Medal for Civil Valour. Officially, 6,668 civilian and military deaths were recorded in the battle for Rimini; these figures, however, cover different periods and are not fully comparable. Large Allied war cemeteries were laid out around Rimini and Coriano, among them the cemetery on the Coriano Ridge with nearly two thousand graves.

From the start of Operation Olive to the end of September, the Eighth Army lost – according to figures cited in the literature – some 14,000 killed, wounded and missing. The shortage of replacements was so acute that one rifle company was disbanded in each British infantry battalion. Facing the Eighth Army, the German LXXVI Panzer Corps lost around 16,000 men in the same period.

Place in the war

The capture of Rimini was a success, but not the breakthrough Alexander had hoped for. Kesselring gained what he needed most: time until the autumn rains arrived. When the Eighth Army finally emerged onto the plain of Romagna, it found it cut by dozens of rivers and canals which, after the downpours, burst their banks and turned the countryside into a swamp. The tanks that were supposed to break into the enemy’s rear bogged down in the mud, and the infantry had to force one watercourse after another: at the end of September the British and Canadians crossed the river Uso and reached the Fiumicino – generally taken to be the historical Rubicon – after which the rains halted the advance once again. General Leese soon left for South-East Asia, and command of the Eighth Army passed to General Richard McCreery.

The American Fifth Army, which had struck in the central Apennines on 10 September, stalled in October some fifteen kilometres from Bologna. The Polish II Corps, rested after the fighting on the Adriatic, returned to the front in October in the Emilian Apennines, advancing towards Forlì and Faenza. The 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade returned to liberated Greece in the autumn of 1944, and in December it took part in the fighting in Athens against units of the left-wing resistance. The Italian front froze for the winter along the rivers of Romagna and the ridges of the Apennines. Only the spring offensive of April 1945 – in which soldiers of the II Corps were the first to enter Bologna, on 21 April – shattered the German armies in the Po Valley, and on 2 May 1945 the surrender of the German Army Group C, signed at Caserta, came into effect. Rimini, which in September 1944 had been the “gateway” to northern Italy, turned out in practice to be merely the entrance to another, equally difficult battlefield.