The spring offensive in Italy begins

In the first days of April 1945 the front in Italy, frozen since the autumn in the Apennines and on the sodden plain of the Romagna, began to move again. The Allied troops of General Mark Clark’s 15th Army Group opened the last offensive of the Italian campaign, Operation Grapeshot. Its aim was no longer merely to gain ground but to destroy the German Army Group C south of the Po before it could withdraw across the river and into the Alps.

The offensive had no single starting day. On 1 and 2 April British commandos struck at the spit of Lake Comacchio, on 5 April the American 92nd Infantry Division attacked on the Ligurian coast, and the main assault of the British Eighth Army across the river Senio went in on 9 April. The American Fifth Army entered the battle only on 14 April. The date of 6 April, taken in many accounts as the start of the operation, corresponds to the final phase of preparations: according to some sources, that was when the shelling of the German positions on the Senio began, and the Polish units were regrouping for the attack.

The front in the winter of 1944/1945

In the autumn of 1944 the Allies had broken through the Gothic Line and taken Rimini, but they had failed to break out onto the Po plain. The advance on Bologna bogged down in the mountains and the rain, ending in the autumn stalemate. By December the Eighth Army had also taken Ravenna and Faenza, after which the front came to a halt on the rivers of the Romagna – the Senio and the Santerno – which flow from the Apennines to the Adriatic.

The winter brought changes of command. In December Field Marshal Harold Alexander became Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, and Clark succeeded him in command of the forces in Italy, now renamed the 15th Army Group. The Eighth Army had been led since the autumn by General Richard McCreery, and the Fifth Army was taken over by General Lucian Truscott, who had returned to Italy from France.

The Allied forces in Italy were dwindling. In the autumn a British and an Indian division were sent to Greece, in January 1945 the British 1st Division went to Palestine, and in February I Canadian Corps and the British 5th Division left for the Western Front. Italy had become a secondary theatre: it was to tie down as many Germans as possible without expecting reinforcements. Over the winter the Americans improved their positions in the Apennines – in February the Brazilian division and the newly arrived American 10th Mountain Division took Monte Castello and the neighbouring peaks.

For the soldiers of the Polish II Corps, holding the line of the Senio as part of the Eighth Army, it was a winter of bitterness. The decisions of the Yalta Conference handed eastern Poland, where most of them came from, to the Soviet Union. General Władysław Anders regarded them as a betrayal and considered withdrawing the corps from the fighting; in the end the Poles stayed at the front. From 26 February Anders was acting Commander-in-Chief in London in place of General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, who was in captivity, so in the April battle the corps was commanded in his stead by General Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko. The corps, decimated in the autumn, received some 11,000 replacements in early 1945 – many of them Poles who had earlier been conscripted into the Wehrmacht and taken prisoner in France.

The opposing forces

Despite the departure of several divisions, the Allies’ superiority was overwhelming. According to figures cited in British accounts, the 15th Army Group comprised 17 divisions and eight independent brigades, and its ration strength exceeded 1.3 million men, of whom some 630,000 belonged to the Eighth Army and some 270,000 to the Fifth. It was an army of many nations. Alongside the British and Americans fought Poles, General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealanders, the Indian 8th Infantry Division, the South African 6th Armoured Division, soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, Gurkhas, the Jewish Brigade made up of volunteers from Palestine, and four Italian combat groups of the Royal Army – Cremona, Friuli, Folgore and Legnano – that had grown out of the Italian Liberation Corps (PL). Allied aircraft ruled the skies almost unchallenged, with thousands of planes ready to support the infantry.

On the other side stood Army Group C. Its commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, had been summoned to the west in March to salvage the defence of the Rhine after the loss of the bridge at Remagen. On 10 March command of Army Group C was resumed by Colonel General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who had already led it during the winter while Kesselring was ill. The eastern part of the front, from the Adriatic to the Apennines, was held by General Traugott Herr’s Tenth Army, the central and western parts by General Joachim Lemelsen’s Fourteenth Army. The Ligurian coast and the border with France were covered by Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s Army of Liguria, made up partly of divisions of the Italian Social Republic.

According to the same calculations, the Germans had 21 divisions in Italy, mostly under strength, plus four divisions of Mussolini’s army – in all some 350,000 German and 45,000 Italian soldiers at the front, and tens of thousands more in the rear, in the services and the police. They were short of fuel, tanks and aircraft; transport moved by night, because by day Allied aircraft were destroying the bridges over the Po and the railways through the Brenner Pass. Behind the lines the Italian partisans were growing in strength.

Vietinghoff, like Kesselring before him, wanted to give up the Romagna without a fight and withdraw to the line of the Po, and then the Adige, where the front would be shorter. Adolf Hitler refused: Army Group C was to defend every inch of ground in the positions it held. At the same time the SS and police commander in Italy, General Karl Wolff, had since March been holding secret talks in Switzerland with Allen Dulles of American intelligence on the surrender of the German forces in Italy – talks already under way at the time of the Rhine crossing at Wesel. By early April nothing had come of them beyond a sharp exchange of letters between Stalin and Roosevelt, and the soldiers on both sides of the front knew nothing of them.

Clark’s plan

Clark presented his plan for the offensive on 18 March. It provided for “the destruction of the maximum enemy forces south of the Po”, the crossing of the river and the capture of Verona. The Eighth Army was to strike first in the east (Operation Buckland). Its corps had to cross the Senio and the Santerno – small rivers, but confined between artificial embankments 6–12 metres high, which the Germans had honeycombed with tunnels and shelters. Beyond them the ground narrowed into the so-called Argenta Gap: a strip of dry land a few kilometres wide between fields flooded by the Germans and the lagoons of Lake Comacchio. Whoever got through Argenta opened the road to Ferrara and the crossings of the Po.

The British V Corps was to force the Senio near Lugo with the Indian 8th Infantry Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division, and then commit the British 78th Division towards Argenta; the 56th (London) Division was to outflank the German positions from the lagoon side in amphibious vehicles. To their left, along Route 9 (the Via Emilia) from Faenza to Imola and Bologna, the Polish II Corps was to advance. The corps command decided to break through the defences on the Senio with General Bronisław Duch’s 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division, exploit the success with General Nikodem Sulik’s 5th Kresowa Infantry Division and, with the help of the 2nd Armoured Brigade, break out north of Bologna. The Poles were given a British Gurkha brigade, a brigade of Churchill tanks, flame-thrower tanks, assault engineers and Kangaroo armoured personnel carriers.

The American Fifth Army (Operation Craftsman) was to move a few days later, once the Germans had thrown their reserves east. Its IV Corps under General Willis Crittenberger, with the 10th Mountain Division, the Brazilian 1st Division and the 1st Armored Division, was to come down from the Apennines west of Bologna, while II Corps advanced along Route 65 straight on the city. The capture of Bologna itself was considered a secondary objective: more important was to encircle the Germans before they crossed the Po, with the Fifth and Eighth Armies meeting in the Bondeno area.

Comacchio and the Ligurian coast

The offensive was preceded by attacks on the flanks intended to mislead the Germans about the direction of the main thrust. On the night of 1/2 April Brigadier Ronnie Tod’s British 2nd Commando Brigade attacked the spit separating Lake Comacchio from the Adriatic (Operation Roast). The commandos, who had to drag their boats through the mud of the shallow lagoon, reached the shore several hours late, but within a few days they had cleared the spit as far as the canal at its northern end and, according to British figures, taken 946 prisoners. They were supported by Italian partisans of the 28th Garibaldi Brigade. Corporal Thomas Hunter of 43 Commando, Royal Marines, who on 2 April single-handedly took buildings defended by three German machine guns and then drew fire onto himself to cover his unit, was killed and posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

At the other end of the front, on the Ligurian Sea, General Edward Almond’s American 92nd Infantry Division attacked on 5 April – a division of Black soldiers, still commanded mainly by white officers, as the rules of segregation in the US Army required. It was reinforced by the Japanese-American 442nd Infantry Regiment, which had returned to Italy from France. In the fighting for positions in the hills above Massa, Lieutenant Vernon Baker distinguished himself; more than half a century later, in 1997, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for it. The advance was slow, but on 10 April the Americans took Massa and the next day Carrara, heading for La Spezia.

6 April – the final preparations

In the Eighth Army’s sector the first days of April were spent regrouping. According to some accounts, on 6 April the artillery began systematically shelling the German positions on the Senio embankments. That same day, in the Polish II Corps, the newly formed 3rd Carpathian Rifle Brigade and 4th Volhynian Infantry Brigade, combined into Group Rud under Colonel Klemens Rudnicki, relieved units of both divisions in the front line. Under their cover the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division and the 5th Kresowa Infantry Division withdrew to the rear to prepare for the attack. Group Rud was later to feint an attack along Route 9 and follow the Germans when they began to retreat.

On the other side of the front the Germans expected an attack but did not know where the main blow would fall. The operations at Comacchio and in Liguria confirmed some commanders in their belief that the Allies would again try a landing on the coast, as at Anzio a year earlier. Army Group C’s reserves – two panzergrenadier divisions and a few armoured units – were positioned so that they could hurry to different sectors, but without fuel and under constant air attack their movements were slow.

Across the Senio

In the early afternoon of 9 April, according to Allied figures, 825 heavy bombers of the American Fifteenth Air Force flew over the German positions behind the Senio. They dropped fragmentation bombs on the rear area so as not to leave craters that would later hamper the advance. They were followed by medium bombers and fighter-bombers. From 3.20 to 7.10 p.m. the artillery fired five concentrations of half an hour each, while in the intervals aircraft attacked the river embankments so that the defenders would not know when the infantry would go in. One wave of bombers mistook its target and dropped its bombs on the start lines of the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division; according to Polish figures, 34 soldiers were killed and 188 wounded.

At dusk the soldiers of the Indian 8th Division, the New Zealanders and the Poles went in. The Senio embankments were drenched with fire from Crocodile flame-thrower tanks and Wasp carriers – more than 150 of them were used in the New Zealand attack. In the fighting on the Senio two soldiers of the Indian 8th Division, Sepoys Ali Haidar and Namdeo Jadhav, won the Victoria Cross. A day earlier, on the night of 8/9 April, the Danish officer in British service Anders Lassen of the Special Boat Service was killed on Lake Comacchio; he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for that action, one of the few foreigners in the ranks of the British Army to receive it.

The Poles, despite the losses inflicted by their own bombers, crossed the Senio and pressed on towards the Santerno. The New Zealanders reached it on the evening of 10 April and crossed at dawn on 11 April, the Indian division had built a bridgehead by the morning of 12 April, and the Poles reached the river on the night of 11/12 April. At the same time Group Rud advanced along the Via Emilia: on 12 April it took Castel Bolognese and on 14 April Imola. The British 78th Division passed through the bridgehead on the Santerno, heading for Bastia and Argenta, while the 56th Division landed from amphibious vehicles on the flooded ground to the right of the Argenta Gap.

Bologna and the Po

The Fifth Army went into action on 14 April, two days later than planned, because fog over the airfields prevented the aircraft from taking off. IV Corps struck first with the 10th Mountain Division, which suffered heavy losses on the very first day in the mountains west of Route 64; on the night of 15/16 April II Corps joined in. The Germans resisted fiercely, but they had already used up their reserves against the Eighth Army. By 19 April the British 78th and 56th Divisions had broken through the defences in the Argenta Gap, and on 20 April the 10th Mountain Division came down from the Apennines onto the plain.

At dawn on 21 April the first units of the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division entered Bologna – according to Polish accounts, the first in was the 9th Carpathian Rifle Battalion at 6.05 a.m., which raised the white-and-red flag over the city. Together with the Poles, along the Via Emilia, came the Italian Friuli combat group, and about two hours later Americans of II Corps entered from the south. The inhabitants greeted the soldiers with flowers; the city later made the Polish commanders honorary citizens. According to various sources, the II Corps lost between about 230 and about 300 killed and more than 1,000 wounded in the battle of Bologna.

After the capture of Bologna the offensive turned into a pursuit. Allied armoured columns and the 10th Mountain Division reached the Po on 22 April, overtaking the shattered German units, which abandoned their equipment on the banks and crossed on whatever they could find. The Italian resistance proclaimed an uprising in the cities of the north; Milan, Turin and Genoa were largely liberated by the partisans before the Allies arrived. At the end of the month, when Benito Mussolini had died at the hands of partisans and the remnants of Army Group C were disintegrating on the Po plain, emissaries of Vietinghoff and Wolff signed at Caserta, on 29 April, the instrument of surrender of the German forces in Italy, which came into force on 2 May.

Significance

The spring offensive ended the Italian campaign, fought since the landing in Sicily in July 1943 – the longest and one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Western Allies in Europe. In less than four weeks it destroyed forces that for a year and a half had held one defensive line after another in the mountains, and it did so while the talks on their surrender were still going on. The speed of the victory resulted not only from material superiority but also from a plan that forced the battle to be fought south of the Po, and from Hitler’s decision forbidding a withdrawal to a shorter defensive line while there was still time.

For the Poles the battle of Bologna was the last battle of the II Corps and the last great victory of the Polish Armed Forces in the West in this war. It was won by soldiers who, after Yalta, knew that many of them would have nowhere to return to. A year after the capture of Monte Cassino they ended their fighting road in a city which – as the inscription on the medals presented to them proclaimed – welcomed them as “the liberators who were the first to enter Bologna”.