The Germans go on the defensive at Anzio

At the beginning of March 1944 the German Fourteenth Army, which for more than five weeks had been trying to drive the Allied troops landed at Anzio and Nettuno back into the sea, went over to the defensive. Its last attack, forced on it by Hitler and launched near Cisterna on 29 February, collapsed within a few days against the positions of the US 3rd Infantry Division. On 3 March an American counter-attack closed this phase of the fighting, and the same day the German high command decided to shelve – for the time being – all plans for another major offensive against the beachhead. A day later Fourteenth Army headquarters ordered its units to hold their positions and develop them for defence as quickly as possible.

So ended the mobile phase of a battle that had begun with the landing at Anzio on 22 January. For the next two and a half months the two sides faced each other from their trenches, exchanging artillery fire, sending out patrols and rebuilding their bled-white divisions. The beachhead, cramped and overlooked by guns in the hills, could not expand, but the Germans no longer had the strength to destroy it.

The last attack (29 February – 3 March)

After the failure of Operation Fischfang on 16–20 February, the commander of the Fourteenth Army, Colonel General Eberhard von Mackensen, and the commander of German forces in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, doubted whether another blow made sense. Adolf Hitler, however, demanded further attacks. This time the attack was to go in not along the Albano road but on the eastern sector of the beachhead, between Carano and Cisterna, held by the US 3rd Infantry Division, commanded until 17 February by Major General Lucian Truscott and now by Brigadier General John O’Daniel.

The attack was entrusted to LXXVI Panzer Corps. According to the American military history of 1947 (Anzio Beachhead, in the American Forces in Action series), Mackensen deployed for the attack, from west to east: the 114th Light Division, reinforced by the 1028th Panzergrenadier Regiment; the newly formed 362nd Infantry Division; the 26th Panzer Division (PL) west of Ponte Rotto; and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division in front of Cisterna, with the 29th Panzergrenadier Division in reserve. Five German divisions were massed against one American division, but all were under strength and – as the same publication admits – the Germans’ overall numerical superiority was not great. The first day’s objective was to break through the outer line of defence from Carano to Isola Bella and, if that succeeded, to reach the west branch of the Mussolini Canal, the beachhead’s last line of defence.

The Americans were expecting the attack. After midnight on 29 February the German artillery shifted its fire to the 3rd Division’s sector, and at 4.30 a.m. the VI Corps artillery replied with an hour-long counter-preparation on the enemy’s assembly areas. According to German calculations cited in the American history, the Allied artillery fired some 66,000 rounds that day – more than twice as many as on any day of the February offensive. At dawn, under cover of a smoke screen, German infantry and tanks attacked at several points at once.

The Germans achieved their only clear success on the sector of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion near Carano, where grenadiers of the 1028th Regiment took a hill held by B Company; only a few dozen men of the company made it back to the main line. West of Ponte Rotto tanks, including Tigers, drove a company of the 7th Infantry Regiment off the bridge on the road from Cisterna, and near Isola Bella the 15th Infantry beat off infantry and armoured attacks all day. On the right flank the 4th Ranger Battalion smashed an attack on the bridge over the Cisterna stream. By midday the attack, delivered by companies and battalions across a wide, open front, had broken against a well-prepared defence; in the afternoon, when the sky cleared for a few hours, more than 240 fighter-bombers joined the action.

On 1 March the fighting centred on the captured bridge near Ponte Rotto. The torrential rain that had grounded the air forces for several days also bogged the German tanks down in sodden fields among the craters and minefields; the road between the bridge and Ponte Rotto turned, as the Americans wrote, into a graveyard of German armour. On 2 March the sky cleared and the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces carried out a large, long-planned raid: according to the American history, 351 B-24 and B-17 heavy bombers escorted by fighters dropped thousands of fragmentation bombs on the areas of Cisterna, Velletri and Carroceto, while medium and light bombers attacked tanks, batteries and assembly areas along the Cisterna–Campoleone railway. The same day two Royal Marines commando units (about 660 men) arrived at the beachhead to reinforce the exhausted British 56th Division.

At dawn on 3 March tanks and infantry of the 26th Panzer Division made a last attack on the 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry, south-west of Ponte Rotto and forced it back a short distance. In the afternoon the 3rd Division counter-attacked. Two companies of the 7th Infantry advanced along the road towards Ponte Rotto; one reached its objective, while the other, under tank and artillery fire, lost its commander and most of its men. The bridge was not retaken, but the counter-attack stopped the enemy, and near Isola Bella the 15th Infantry regained without a fight the positions lost on the first day. The American history treats the counter-attacks of the afternoon of 3 March as the end of the third and last major German offensive against the beachhead.

The decision to go over to the defensive

German losses were heavy. According to the American history, between 29 February and 4 March the Fourteenth Army lost more than 3,500 men in combat and at least 30 tanks; more recent studies give a more cautious figure of about 2,500 killed, wounded and missing. The penetrations into the 3rd Division’s outpost line had been almost entirely eliminated, and the beachhead had not shrunk at any significant point.

Kesselring did not wait for the fighting to end. According to German documents cited in the American history, as early as 6.40 p.m. on 1 March he instructed Mackensen to halt the attack on the 3rd Division and confine operations to local counter-attacks. The Germans themselves blamed the failure on the bad weather – four days of rain from 27 February to 1 March had immobilised the tanks, and without them further infantry attacks were pointless – and on the state of the troops. Mackensen pointed above all to the poor training of replacements, the youth and inexperience of the new soldiers, and the exhaustion of units after weeks of heavy fighting.

At the beginning of March Kesselring sent his chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, to Hitler’s headquarters to present the true state of the bled-white divisions. At a conference at the German high command on 3 March it was decided – according to the American history – to abandon, at least for the time being, plans for further major offensive operations at Anzio. On 4 March the Fourteenth Army issued orders to hold its positions and rapidly strengthen them. The American author concluded that the high command had officially acknowledged what the soldiers had been able to see for several days: the attempt to destroy the beachhead had failed.

This did not yet mean giving up for good. On 13 March the Fourteenth Army staff drew up a preliminary plan for a new major attack – along the Albano road or from Cisterna – for 29 March. On 23 March the date was postponed, and on 10 April the plan was dropped. Kesselring was unwilling to commit his best reserves, the 26th Panzer Division and the 29th Panzergrenadier Division, which he needed in case of an Allied offensive in the south or a new landing, and without them Mackensen did not believe in success.

The beachhead in suspense

From March to May the beachhead resembled the Western Front of the First World War. At its deepest it extended about 11 kilometres inland, and every point within it – the port, the beaches, the dumps and the hospitals – was within range of the German artillery, which observed it from the slopes of the Alban Hills. Both sides patrolled actively and carried out harassing raids; Allied aircraft and VI Corps artillery pounded the German positions, and the Germans replied with medium- and long-range guns and night raids on shipping and dumps. In March 83 per cent of the 3rd Division’s battle casualties were caused by shell splinters.

The most famous symbol of this shelling was a pair of German 280 mm K5 railway guns, which Allied soldiers called “Anzio Annie” or the “Anzio Express”. Hidden by day in railway tunnels, they came out at night to fire on the port and the ships in the roadstead. The 1947 American history records the first reports of these heavy guns in action on 24 March, distinguishing them from the smaller railway guns used in February; some studies, however, attribute shelling of the beachhead to the K5 guns at an earlier date.

The only effective protection was to go underground. The beachhead became a honeycomb of trenches, dugouts and shelters; from the air it looked, according to an American description, as though thousands of giant moles had been at work on it. In winter the dugouts flooded with groundwater from the Pontine Marshes, drained before the war and partly reflooded by the Germans when they shut down the pumps. VI Corps headquarters moved into rock-cut wine cellars at Nettuno, and hospital tents were dug a metre into the ground and surrounded by sandbags. Even so, the hospital area remained one of the most dangerous places on the beachhead: over the whole Anzio campaign 92 medical personnel were killed, including six nurses. Smoke screens from generators made German aiming more difficult.

When the sea calmed and the shelling eased in March, conditions improved somewhat: Liberty ships brought fresh meat, mail and recreational equipment. Just behind the front line soldiers played volleyball and baseball, breaking off whenever shelling began, and in their dugouts listened to the Allied forces’ radio station and to German radio propaganda, with a presenter nicknamed “Axis Sally”, at whom they laughed. The civilian population of the area suffered badly: the towns on the reclaimed land lay in ruins, and malaria spread in the villages behind the lines. By the spring the Allies had evacuated from the beachhead – according to the figure most often given – some 22,000 civilians.

Changing divisions

Going over to the defensive allowed both sides to regroup. The Germans reduced the number of units around the beachhead perimeter: in March the Hermann Göring Panzer Division was sent to rest and refit near Livorno, the 114th Light Division was moved to the Adriatic front, and the Fourteenth Army’s two best divisions – the 26th Panzer and the 29th Panzergrenadier – were withdrawn south of Rome as a reserve, soon placed directly under the army group. Replacements reached the line, including units of the Italian Social Republic – the Barbarigo battalion of the Decima Flottiglia MAS took up positions on the Mussolini Canal in March, and Italian SS battalions fought interspersed among German units. Despite the regrouping, the Fourteenth Army was larger in mid-March than during the February attacks: on 14 March it reported almost 136,000 men, of whom about 66,000 were German combat troops. At the same time Kesselring ordered the construction behind the beachhead, and on across Italy to the Adriatic, of the Caesar Line, to which the Fourteenth and Tenth Armies could fall back.

On the Allied side, the bled-white British 56th Division was relieved in March by the 5th Division, and the British Guards Brigade, which in less than two months had lost nearly 2,000 of its more than 2,500 men, was replaced by the 18th Brigade. The US 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment sailed for Britain at the end of March to rejoin the 82nd Airborne Division, and the 509th Battalion left the beachhead on 1 April. From 21 March the 34th Infantry Division, a veteran of the fighting in Tunisia and at Cassino, was coming ashore; on 28 March it relieved the 3rd Division at Cisterna after 67 days of continuous service in the line. Fourteen thousand replacements arrived in March; by the end of the month the combat units of VI Corps numbered some 90,000 men, the equivalent of six full divisions, and outnumbered the Fourteenth Army facing them.

Truscott’s preparations

Truscott, who had commanded VI Corps since 23 February after Lucas was relieved, also considered resuming the offensive in March. Preliminary instructions were issued on 11 March, and on 18 March Operations Instruction No. 18 provided for an attack by the British 1st and 5th Divisions on the German salient along the Albano road, a thrust by the US 45th Division towards the Aprilia factory and Carroceto, and the commitment of the 1st Armored Division. The plan was not carried out – both VI Corps and the Germans were waiting for a decision on the southern front, where the third battle of Monte Cassino was being fought in March. Truscott confined himself to patrols and local raids while building up stocks: every day convoys of landing ships carrying loaded lorries arrived from Naples, and the heavy artillery that arrived in April made counter-battery fire against the German guns more effective.

In April and May, on the instructions of the commander of the Fifth Army, General Mark Clark, the VI Corps staff drew up several plans for breaking out of the beachhead as part of the great spring offensive of the Allied commander in Italy, General Harold Alexander. The most important of them, Buffalo, envisaged a thrust through Cisterna to Valmontone to cut Route 6 – the main line of retreat of the German Tenth Army from Cassino. The second, Turtle, provided for an advance west of the Alban Hills, straight on Rome.

Its place in the war

The German switch to the defensive at Anzio closed a period in which both sides had hoped for a quick decision. The Anzio landing had not fulfilled Winston Churchill’s hopes – it had not opened the road to Rome or forced the Germans to abandon the Gustav Line. But the Germans had also failed to achieve Hitler’s aim of using the beachhead to show the Allies that any invasion of the Continent would end in bloody defeat. Three great attacks – at the beginning of February, in Operation Fischfang and at Cisterna – had broken against the superiority of Allied artillery, air power and naval forces. For the Allies, who were preparing the invasion of France, this was important proof that a beachhead, once established, could be held even against a strong opponent.

The beachhead also tied down several German divisions that Kesselring lacked in the south and that in other circumstances might have gone to the Eastern Front or to France. The decision came only in the spring. On 11 May the Allied offensive against the Gustav Line began, and on 18 May the monastery on Monte Cassino was taken by soldiers of General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps. On 23 May VI Corps broke out of the beachhead, carrying out Operation Buffalo, and on 25 May linked up with the forces advancing from the south. Clark, however, turned his main forces towards Rome instead of Valmontone, which allowed the German Tenth Army to escape. On 4 June the Americans entered Rome – two days before the Normandy landings, which overshadowed their success.