The end of the fighting in Italy

At 6.05 a.m. on 21 April 1945 – according to Polish accounts – soldiers of the 9th Carpathian Rifle Battalion marched into Bologna and hung a Polish flag on the town hall. The city, which the Allies had been trying in vain to take since the autumn of 1944, fell almost without a fight – the Germans had abandoned it during the night to escape encirclement. Three days later, on 24 April, the leading units of the US Fifth Army were already standing on the north bank of the Po, while the remnants of German divisions that had not managed to cross the river were abandoning tanks, guns and lorries on its south bank.

It was these days – from the breaking of the positions at Argenta to the crossing of the Po – that decided the fate of the war in Italy. Formally the fighting went on for more than another week, and the surrender of the German Army Group C came into force only on 2 May. In practice, however, after 24 April there was no longer any coherent German front on the Italian peninsula.

From the Senio to Argenta

The spring offensive of the 15th Army Group, commanded by General Mark Clark, began according to the plan drawn up on 18 March. Its first days belonged to General Richard McCreery’s British Eighth Army: at dusk on 9 April, after a raid by more than 800 heavy bombers and five artillery barrages, the 8th Indian Infantry Division, the 2nd New Zealand Division and the Polish 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division forced the River Senio. For the Poles the day began tragically – some of the bombs fell on their own positions; according to Polish sources 34 soldiers were killed and 188 wounded (other sources give 38 killed).

Clark’s plan envisaged a great pincer movement. The Eighth Army was to break through north-westwards along the Via Adriatica, through the so-called Argenta Gap – a narrow strip of dry ground between fields flooded by the Germans and the Comacchio lagoon – and advance on Ferrara and Bondeno. General Lucian Truscott’s US Fifth Army was to come out of the Apennines into the Po Valley west of Bologna. The two armies were to meet in the Bondeno area, cutting the Germans off from the river crossings. The planners regarded the capture of Bologna itself as a secondary objective.

The Argenta Gap, in places barely five kilometres wide, was the most difficult sector of the whole offensive. The British 78th Infantry Division, supported by a landing across the lagoon by the 56th Division, spent several days gnawing its way into the German defences on the Reno and the Fossa Marina canal. On 17 and 18 April the British took Argenta, and by 19 April the gap had been forced. That day the Allies were pushing towards the Po Valley along the whole width of the front – from the Adriatic coast to the Apennines west of Bologna. The British 6th Armoured Division moved through the breach, heading along the Reno towards Bondeno.

At the same time the Polish II Corps was pushing west along Route 9, the ancient Via Emilia. The corps was then commanded by Anders’s deputy, Brigadier General Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko, because since 26 February Major General Władysław Anders had been acting Commander-in-Chief in London. After the Senio the Poles forced the Santerno; on 14 April Colonel Klemens Rudnicki’s group took Imola, and on 17 April Castel San Pietro. They were fighting German paratroopers of the 1st and 4th Parachute Divisions, among the toughest opponents on the entire Italian front.

Into the Po Valley

The US Fifth Army attacked on 14 April, two days late because of the weather. The first move was made by IV Corps – the 10th Mountain Division, the 1st Armored Division and the Brazilian 1st Infantry Division of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, which had taken Monte Castello in February and now won Montese. During the night of 15/16 April II Corps moved off along Routes 64 and 65 leading to Bologna. For the first few days progress was measured in hundreds of metres: the Germans defended every ridge, and American losses were high.

Around 19 April the German defence in the mountains began to crumble. The commander of Army Group C, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, had for several weeks been demanding permission for a flexible withdrawal behind the Po; Hitler refused it. When on 20 April Vietinghoff finally ordered a retreat on his own responsibility, it was too late – Allied aircraft had been destroying the bridges over the Po for weeks, and his divisions had neither fuel nor transport.

On that same 20 April the 10th Mountain Division came out of the Apennines onto the plain west of Bologna. Rather than becoming tied down in the fight for the city, its motorised task force under Brigadier General Robinson Duff drove straight north, bypassing shattered German units. At 6 p.m. on 22 April the Americans held San Benedetto Po on the bank of the Po – the first Allied unit to reach the river. The next day the 1st Battalion of the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment crossed to the far bank in assault boats without losing a single man, although the Germans were firing on the crossing with 20 mm cannon and 88 mm guns. On 24 April further regiments of the division were crossing the river, and by 25 April pontoon bridges were in operation.

Bologna, 21 April

Bologna, the largest city in Emilia, had since the autumn of 1944 been an objective the Allies had failed to reach. In the winter the front came to a halt a dozen or so kilometres from its outskirts, in the stalemate in Italy, and Polish units manned positions on the Senio throughout the winter. Now the city was taken almost without a fight: the Germans, threatened with encirclement from the north-east by the Eighth Army and from the south-west by the Fifth Army, withdrew during the night of 20/21 April.

The first to enter the city were the Poles: the 9th Carpathian Rifle Battalion of the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Brigade, part of General Bolesław Bronisław Duch’s 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division. The battalion was later given the honorific “Bologna”. Polish flags were hung on the town hall – the Palazzo d’Accursio – and on the Asinelli tower. The inhabitants gave the soldiers a rapturous welcome. Coming in from the east together with the Eighth Army were the Italian Friuli Combat Group of General Arturo Scattini, from the Italian Co-Belligerent Army, and partisans of the Maiella Brigade.

The Americans arrived from the south about two hours later: units of the 133rd Infantry Regiment of II Corps’ 34th Infantry Division entered the city and then took over its garrison. Some American accounts give them precedence, but most studies, Italian ones included, name the Poles. South of the city, in II Corps’ sector, a second Italian combat group – Legnano – was also fighting. The Bologna authorities made 17 Polish commanders honorary citizens, and the soldiers were presented with 215 commemorative medals inscribed “Al liberatori che primi entrarono in Bologna” (“To the liberators who were the first to enter Bologna”).

Polish losses in the Battle of Bologna, from the crossing of the Senio on 9 April to the entry into the city, amounted according to various sources to between about 230 and 300 killed and more than a thousand wounded; General Gustaw Łowczowski gave 234 killed (including 17 officers), 1,228 wounded and 7 missing. It was II Corps’ last battle. On McCreery’s orders the Poles remained in the Bologna area and took no further part in the pursuit. The victory was deeply bittersweet: in February, at the Yalta Conference, the great powers had decided that Lwów (Lviv) and Wilno (Vilnius) – the home regions of thousands of the corps’ soldiers – would remain in the USSR. Anders had then demanded that the corps be withdrawn from the front; in the end the Poles fought on because, as their commanders argued, the honour of the Polish soldier and Poland’s standing among the Allies were at stake.

The pocket on the Po

After the fall of Bologna the pursuit turned into a race for the river. On 22 April British tanks reached Bondeno, and on 23 April the British 6th Armoured Division of the Eighth Army met the 6th South African Armoured Division of US II Corps at Finale Emilia (some studies give 24 April). The pincers had closed. South of the Po were left tens of thousands of German soldiers who had not managed to reach the crossings.

The river, which the Germans had no means of crossing, proved a trap. In the spring of 1945 the water level in the Po was exceptionally low, but the bridges lay in ruins and the ferries and boats became targets for Allied fighter-bombers. Columns of abandoned vehicles, guns and horses were left on the bank. Those who could swam across or crossed on improvised rafts, leaving their heavy weapons behind. On 23 April alone the US 88th Infantry Division took some 11,000 prisoners on the Po, among them General Friedrich von Schellwitz; the headquarters of General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin’s XIV Panzer Corps hastily crossed to the far bank. On 25 April the commander of LXXVI Panzer Corps, General Gerhard von Schwerin, surrendered to the British.

The crossing of the Po proper went quickly. The British XIII Corps crossed at Ficarolo, and V Corps by 25 April; on the American side further divisions followed the 10th Mountain Division across, partly in captured boats and in amphibious vehicles. On 26 April the Americans entered Verona, closing the most important line of retreat towards the Brenner Pass.

The “encirclement of the last German armies near Bologna” mentioned in popular chronologies therefore needs some clarification. There was no single pocket at the city itself – the Germans left Bologna on 21 April. The pincers of the Eighth and Fifth Armies closed on 23–24 April several dozen kilometres to the north, on the Po and the Panaro, and the German 10th Army and 14th Army were smashed in them, though not entirely surrounded; part of their forces got across the river, by then without heavy weapons. The fighting continued until 2 May.

The rising in the north

The collapse of the front on the Po was the signal for the Italian resistance. The National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy (CLNAI) had been calling for a general insurrection since 19 April, and on 25 April – now celebrated in Italy as Liberation Day – the partisans took power in Milan, where the Germans were preparing to withdraw. In Genoa, after several days of fighting, General Günther Meinhold signed a surrender to the liberation committee on the evening of 25 April; some ten thousand or more German soldiers laid down their arms, although some units held out until 27 April. The fighting for Turin lasted several days before the German columns left the city. The Allies found many northern cities – Parma, Reggio Emilia, Padua – already in partisan hands.

At the same time talks were going on of which the soldiers at the front knew nothing. Since March SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff had been negotiating in Switzerland with Allen Dulles of American intelligence (the OSS) over the surrender of the German forces in Italy. The defeat on the Po settled their outcome.

What came next

The entry into Bologna and the crossing of the Po ended the twenty-month Italian campaign, which since the landing at Salerno in September 1943 had cost both sides hundreds of thousands of killed and wounded. After 24 April the Allies in Italy were no longer fighting battles but conducting a pursuit: the Brazilians trapped German and Italian units at Fornovo, the Americans entered Milan, and the British advanced on Padua, Venice and Trieste. On 29 April at Caserta the surrender of all German forces in Italy was signed, effective from 2 May – the first surrender of an entire German front in the war.

For the Poles, Bologna was the last victory of II Corps, whose road had led from Monte Cassino through Ancona and the Gothic Line. After 1990 the inscription “BOLONIA 9 – 21 IV 1945” was placed on one of the tablets of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw. Most of the soldiers who had liberated Italian cities could not, however, return home – their homeland, in accordance with the Yalta decisions, had ended up in the Soviet sphere of influence.