Operation Fischfang

At dawn on 16 February 1944, after a half-hour artillery preparation, General Eberhard von Mackensen’s German Fourteenth Army launched a general offensive against the Allied beachhead at Anzio. The operation was code-named Fischfang (“Fishing”). Its aim was to break through along the road from Albano to Anzio all the way to the sea, cut the beachhead in two and destroy the Anglo-American VI Corps – so that the landing that was supposed to open the road to Rome for the Allies would end in disaster. In the first three days the Germans drove deep into the positions of the US 45th Infantry Division and reached the beachhead’s last line of defence. On 18 and 19 February the attack was halted by massed fire from artillery, aircraft and warships, and on 20 February Fischfang petered out. It was the most dangerous moment of the entire battle of Anzio, and at the same time the end of German hopes of throwing the Allies back into the sea.

The offensive was the outcome of earlier events: VI Corps going over to the defensive on 2 February, the loss of its forward positions at Campoleone and Aprilia between 3 and 12 February, and pressure from Winston Churchill on the commanders in Italy, including his letter of 10 February to General Harold Alexander.

From attack to defence

Ten days after the landing at Anzio, Major General John Lucas’s VI Corps tried to break out of the beachhead. On 30 January the British 1st Infantry Division attacked the station at Campoleone (PL), while the US 3rd Infantry Division struck towards Cisterna. The attack on Cisterna began with an ambush in which two Ranger battalions were killed or captured; fighting for the town went on until 1–2 February. Neither Cisterna nor Campoleone was taken. The British managed only to push a narrow salient into the German lines along the road from Anzio to Albano.

The frequently encountered statement that on 2 February “the Germans defeated the Americans at the Battle of Cisterna” needs qualifying. The battle itself had been fought since 30 January, and its worst moments – the destruction of the Rangers – came on its first day. 2 February, by contrast, was the day on which Lucas, on the orders of the Fifth Army commander, General Mark Clark, agreed with Alexander, halted the offensive and ordered his troops onto the defensive. The exhausted divisions were to dig in and the beachhead was to prepare for the expected German counter-offensive. Reconnaissance and reports from the front left no doubt that the Germans were concentrating ever larger forces around Anzio.

At the beginning of February the Fourteenth Army numbered about 100,000 men in two corps – General Alfred Schlemm’s I Parachute Corps and General Traugott Herr’s LXXVI Panzer Corps. The Allies had about 76,000 men in the beachhead. The balance of forces, which on the day of the landing had been very much in their favour, had turned against VI Corps within two weeks.

The loss of Campoleone and Aprilia

Mackensen did not wait for his concentration to be complete. At 11 p.m. on 3 February the Germans struck at the base of the British salient at Campoleone. They attacked from both sides, infiltrating along gullies and through scrub, and during the night all but cut off the British 3rd Brigade at its tip. By the morning of 4 February the Irish Guards battalion had only one company left fit to fight, and the Gordon Highlanders battalion had lost three companies taken prisoner. The cut-off battalions were saved only by a counter-attack by the newly landed 168th Brigade of the British 56th Infantry Division, supported by tanks. On the afternoon of 4 February, under cover of artillery fire, the 3rd Brigade withdrew to Aprilia. The Campoleone salient had ceased to exist.

Aprilia – a new town built in the 1930s as part of the draining of the Pontine Marshes – looked from a distance like an industrial plant, which is why Allied soldiers called it “the Factory”. Its brick buildings towered over the flat countryside and dominated the road to Anzio. After two days of artillery duels and air raids the Germans attacked again on the evening of 7 February. They broke in between the battalions of the British 24th Guards Brigade and 2nd Brigade, and over the following days took the Buonriposo ridge west of the road, the station at Carroceto and Aprilia itself. By 10 February the British had been driven out of all their forward positions. The commander of the 1st Division, Major General Ronald Penney, reported to Lucas that his division was down to roughly half strength.

Lucas threw regiments of the US 45th Infantry Division, held in reserve until then, into a counter-attack. The attack on Aprilia on 11 February was badly coordinated – infantry and tanks acted separately – and the Germans, who had learned of it in advance through radio interception, beat it off. On 12 February the last American units left the edge of the town. The Germans now held Aprilia and Carroceto – an ideal jumping-off point for their main offensive.

Churchill presses

In London the course of the fighting at Anzio was followed with growing exasperation. The operation was very largely Churchill’s creation: he had personally lobbied for the landing ships and persuaded the Allies of its value. As early as January he had complained that instead of a “wild cat” a “whale” had been thrown ashore. In February, when instead of marching on Rome the beachhead was fending off German attacks, the prime minister’s irritation grew. He asked how many of the men in the beachhead were busy looking after its many thousands of vehicles, and remarked sarcastically that the Allies must have a great superiority in drivers, since the Germans had more infantry there.

On 10 February Churchill wrote to General Alexander, commander of the 15th Army Group – that is, of all Allied forces in Italy. By his own account in his memoirs, he suggested that Alexander might have hesitated to assert his authority firmly over the American commanders – encouraging an attack rather than ordering it – and reminded him that he had every right to give them orders. The prime minister’s appeal was thus in essence an encouragement to Alexander to force greater resolve on the commanders at Anzio and, indirectly, on Clark and Lucas. Historians stress that Churchill, who had pushed the landing so ardently, in his memoirs laid the blame for its failure almost entirely on Lucas’s caution.

Alexander visited the beachhead on 14 February and told Lucas that he expected a breakout as soon as the situation allowed. On his return he wrote to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, that he was disappointed with the VI Corps staff, whom he found passive and depressed. Lucas, aware of his superiors’ displeasure, noted in his diary on 15 February that there had been no military grounds for expecting him to drive the Germans out of Italy – indeed, that there had been no military grounds for Operation Shingle itself. The next day, as the Germans launched their offensive, Alexander, Clark and the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, General Henry Maitland Wilson, decided to give Lucas two deputies: the American Major General Lucian Truscott, until then commander of the 3rd Division, and the British Major General Vyvyan Evelegh.

Hitler’s plan

The counter-offensive at Anzio was to a large extent Hitler’s own undertaking. As early as 28 January he had sent Field Marshal Albert Kesselring a directive in which he called the beachhead an “abscess south of Rome” and demanded its removal. He was counting on a propaganda victory as well: smashing the landing at Anzio was to show the West – and the Germans themselves – that any invasion of the Continent, including the one expected across the Channel, would end in bloody defeat. The soldiers were to be imbued with a “fanatical will” to win.

Hitler also interfered in the details. He demanded an attack on a narrow front a few kilometres wide along the road from Albano to Anzio (the Via Anziate), preceded by a creeping barrage in the manner of the battles of the First World War. The first wave was to be formed by the Infantry Demonstration Regiment (Infanterie-Lehr-Regiment), an elite show unit brought in from Germany on which the Führer particularly relied. Neither Kesselring nor Mackensen was happy with the plan – they believed that packing troops onto a narrow front would expose them to the massed fire of Allied artillery and aircraft – but they carried out the order.

The attack was entrusted to the divisions of LXXVI Panzer Corps: the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division (PL), the 715th Infantry Division and the 114th Jäger Division, supported by tanks, including heavy Tigers. On the flanks units of the 65th Infantry Division and the 4th Parachute Division attacked, while the 26th Panzer Division (PL) and the 29th Panzergrenadier Division stood in reserve, ready to exploit a breakthrough. On the German side there also fought the Nembo parachute battalion of the Italian Social Republic, loyal to Mussolini – one of the first units of Fascist Italy to be committed to the front again.

16–17 February: a wedge in the 45th Division’s line

The attack began on the morning of 16 February. Its main weight fell on Major General William Eagles’s US 45th Infantry Division, whose 157th and 179th Regiments were holding both sides of the road south of Aprilia, and on the neighbouring British 167th Brigade of Major General Gerald Templer’s 56th Division. The British front-line companies were all but wiped out – of some, about 125 strong, one officer and a dozen or so men survived. Among the dead was Second Lieutenant Eric Waters, father of Roger Waters, later of Pink Floyd, who commemorated him in his songs.

The first day, however, brought the Germans no breakthrough. The American infantry, although it fell back in several places, held its main positions, and the showpiece Infantry Demonstration Regiment on which Hitler had pinned such hopes suffered heavy losses and – according to both German and Allied historians – partly broke and fell back in disorder. Kesselring urged Mackensen to commit his reserves at once, but the Fourteenth Army commander decided to wait until morning.

On 17 February the Germans struck again, this time with sixty tanks and fresh panzergrenadier battalions, after preliminary raids by the Luftwaffe. By midday more than a dozen German battalions had driven a wedge nearly 3 kilometres deep into the centre of the 45th Division. The 179th Regiment was shattered, and its remnants fell back in disorder all the way to the beachhead’s last prepared line of defence, the Final Beachhead Line. Its pivot was the overpass where the Albano–Anzio road crossed a lateral road running through the former marshes – the soldiers called it “the Flyover”. On Lucas’s orders command of the shattered regiment was taken over by Colonel William Darby, founder of the Rangers whose battalions had been destroyed at Cisterna. The cut-off 2nd Battalion of the 157th Regiment held out for several days in caves beside the road before its remnants fought their way back to their own lines; only a small fraction of its men returned.

The Allied commanders now faced the threat that the Germans would break the last line and reach the Padiglione woods, and from there the beaches. VI Corps responded with firepower on a scale not yet seen in Italy. According to Italian and American studies, some 400 guns fired on the narrow sector of the attack, together with mortars, tanks and 90 mm anti-aircraft batteries used in the direct-fire role. From the sea the defence was supported by destroyers and cruisers that came in close to the shore. On 17 February Allied aircraft flew about 800 sorties and dropped nearly a thousand tons of bombs on the German troops and their rear areas – in good weather, which had been lacking on the preceding days. According to estimates cited in the literature, the Allied guns in those days fired roughly ten shells for every German one, and broke up German attacks before they even reached the infantry line by striking at their assembly areas.

That same day Clark appointed Truscott deputy commander of VI Corps. Command of the 3rd Division passed to Brigadier General John O’Daniel.

18–20 February: the attack collapses

The decisive day was 18 February. Mackensen committed his reserves and attacked all day against the Flyover line and against the positions of the British 1st Division west of the road, where a battalion of the Loyal Regiment lost a company and about 200 men. The weather deteriorated and most Allied aircraft could not take off, but a single observation plane sent up on reconnaissance kept directing the artillery onto fresh targets. According to Italian studies, a column of about 2,500 Germans marching south from Carroceto was destroyed by the concentrated fire of more than 220 guns. An afternoon attack from the east was beaten off by the US 180th Infantry Regiment. That day General Penney was wounded by shell splinters; Templer temporarily took over command of the 1st Division while retaining command of his own 56th Division.

By the evening of 18 February the German battalions had bled themselves white and broke off the attack. On 19 February the Allies seized the initiative. A strike force under Major General Ernest Harmon, commander of the US 1st Armored Division, made up of its armoured infantry, a regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division and Sherman tanks, hit the flank of the German wedge, advanced about one and a half kilometres and took several hundred prisoners. The Germans tried for two more days to hold the ground they had won and to renew the attack, but by 20 February Fischfang had effectively petered out. Kesselring, with Hitler’s consent, called off the operation.

Figures for the losses on both sides vary. According to the most frequently cited estimates, the Fourteenth Army lost about 5,400 men killed, wounded and captured between 16 and 20 February, and VI Corps about 3,500; other studies speak of more than 4,500 Germans and more than 5,000 Allied troops. Some German divisions were all but destroyed – the 65th Infantry Division, according to Italian authors, was down to just 673 men on 23 February. Since the day of the landing each side had lost close to 20,000 men at Anzio. The fighting at Anzio and the simultaneous destruction of the abbey of Monte Cassino, which preceded the second Allied assault on the Gustav Line, made up one of the bloodiest periods of the Italian campaign, and the Anzio beachhead is sometimes described as the place where destruction was most concentrated in the whole of that campaign. It was, moreover, so cramped that shellfire reached every part of it – field hospitals, the port and the beaches.

Civilians, too, fell victim to the fighting. The inhabitants of the settlements around the beachhead found themselves in the front line, and according to Italian sources German soldiers murdered 16 residents of Cisterna on 18 February in reprisal for shots fired at two Germans, and on 25 February shot six inhabitants of a nearby settlement. After the fighting in March the Allied command evacuated about 22,000 civilians from the beachhead.

A change of command

Repelling Fischfang did not save Lucas. On 22 February Clark, under pressure from Alexander and Churchill, relieved him of command of VI Corps and gave it to Truscott. Lucas formally became deputy commander of the Fifth Army and in March returned to the United States. Both then and later it was emphasised that it was under his command that the beachhead had survived the heaviest assault – Kesselring himself judged after the war that the landing force had been too weak from the outset and that too deep a thrust inland would have spelled the Allies’ doom. Alexander later conceded in his official report that the actual course of events had probably proved the most advantageous in the end. Truscott, energetic and popular with the troops, was to restore confidence in the corps command and prepare it for the breakout.

Place in the war

Operation Fischfang was the last serious attempt to destroy the Anzio beachhead and one of the last great German offensives against the Western Allies before the Ardennes. Hitler, who in those same weeks was watching the Korsun pocket in Ukraine with alarm, hoped that a bloody Allied defeat in Italy would deter them from invading France. The opposite happened: the German attack, planned in the spirit of the First World War, broke against the superiority of Allied artillery, air power and naval forces – the same kind of superiority that proved decisive in Normandy a few months later.

On Hitler’s orders the Fourteenth Army made one more attack, from 29 February into early March, this time against the US 3rd Division near Cisterna. It achieved nothing but thousands more dead and wounded. At the beginning of March Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, described the state of the exhausted divisions to Hitler, and the Führer accepted that the beachhead could not be eliminated. For more than two months the Anzio front froze into positional warfare reminiscent of the trenches of 1914–1918: both sides dug in, and life in the beachhead went on under constant shellfire.

The decision came only in the spring. After the four battles of Monte Cassino and the breaching of the Gustav Line in May 1944, Truscott’s VI Corps broke out of the beachhead on 23 May, and on 4 June Clark’s troops entered Rome. Clark, however, directed his main forces towards the Italian capital instead of cutting off the retreat of the German Tenth Army, a decision that remains controversial to this day. For the Allies the defence of the beachhead in February 1944 confirmed that a landing, once established ashore, could be held even against a strong enemy – which mattered in the preparations for the Normandy landings. For the Germans it was proof that they were no longer able to destroy an Allied beachhead when the enemy commanded the air and the sea.