Stalemate in Italy

By the end of November 1944 the war in Italy had reached deadlock. The Allied armies, which in the summer had broken through the Gothic Line at several points, had come to a halt in the Apennines a dozen or so kilometres from Bologna, while on the Adriatic they were labouring from river to river across the waterlogged plain of Romagna. War chronologies record under 26 November that the war in Italy had reached stalemate, “partly because of torrential rain”. The description is accurate, though it needs filling out in two respects. First, this was not a single day but a state of affairs that had been building up since the end of October. Second, the rain was only one of the causes: just as important were the exhaustion of the troops, the shortage of ammunition and replacements, and the removal of further divisions from the Italian front. Nor did the front fall entirely silent – in November the British Eighth Army and the Polish II Corps were still fighting local, costly battles.

An offensive that never reached Bologna

The great assault on the Gothic Line began on 25 August on the Adriatic, when the Eighth Army, secretly regrouped, struck in Operation Olive. The plan of the Allied commander-in-chief in Italy, General Harold Alexander, was for the British, Canadians and Poles to draw the German reserves onto themselves, after which General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army would break through the weakened centre of the Apennines to Bologna and come out in the rear of the German Tenth Army. In September it seemed the plan would succeed. The Eighth Army took Rimini on 21 September, and in the course of this fighting the Allies even entered the territory of a neutral republic, fighting in San Marino. In mid-September the US II Corps forced the Il Giogo Pass and broke through the main fortifications of the Gothic Line.

Then the offensive began to bog down. Clark first turned east, towards Imola, to cut off the Germans fighting on the Adriatic. On 27 September men of the 350th Infantry Regiment of the US 88th Division, supported by partisans of the 36th Garibaldi Brigade, took the summit of Monte Battaglia, a dozen or so kilometres from the Via Emilia – the main road linking Rimini with Bologna. For several days the Americans beat off furious German counter-attacks there in rain and fog, but they could not break through any further. Clark therefore shifted the main effort back to Highway 65 from Florence to Bologna. II Corps crossed the Raticosa Pass and on 2 October stood at Monghidoro, some 30 kilometres from the city.

By then the weather had already broken. Rain and low cloud ruled out air support, the mountain roads turned to mud, and every shell, every ration and every wounded man had to travel an ever longer route to and from the depots near Florence. From 5 October the Americans attacked on a front more than 20 kilometres wide. The steep escarpment at Livergnano took them almost a week to capture, until 15 October. A last effort, launched on 16 October, brought the capture of Monte Grande by the 88th Division on 20 October, and a few days later the British 78th Division forced its way onto neighbouring Monte Spaduro. From these summits the soldiers could see the Po valley on clear days.

The last few kilometres separating them from the Via Emilia, however, proved impassable. The Germans brought over from Romagna three of their best divisions in Italy – the 29th and 90th Panzergrenadier Divisions and the 1st Parachute Division. The Allies, meanwhile, were suffering a severe shortage of artillery ammunition. According to British and American official histories, the Fifth Army’s batteries were rationed so severely that in the last week of October they fired fewer shells than in a single eight-hour period on 2 October. On 27 October Clark halted the offensive. Bologna, towards which his soldiers had been advancing since August, remained on the other side of the front.

The rivers of Romagna

On the Adriatic the Eighth Army, commanded from October by General Richard McCreery, was fighting a different enemy: water. The plain of Romagna, towards which the Allies had fought for so long, turned out to be a network of rivers, canals and drainage ditches running from the Apennines to the sea across the axis of advance. After every downpour they rose, swept away bridges and flooded the fields, while the Germans defended themselves on the high flood embankments. The British crossed the Savio near Cesena on 21 October, approached Forlì at the end of the month, and on 9 November the British V Corps took the town and crossed the Montone. Forlì had symbolic significance – it lay close to Mussolini’s home country, and Italian historians stress that both Hitler and Churchill attached importance to who would enter it first. The next obstacle, the little river Cosina only a few kilometres further on, the British did not force until 23 November. The pace of the advance was no longer measured in tens of kilometres but in individual rivers.

On the Eighth Army’s left wing, in the mountains south of Forlì, Major General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps had been fighting since 10 October. After heavy fighting on the Adriatic the corps had been moved to the Emilian Apennines, into roadless country where supplies were brought up by mule. According to Polish literature on the subject, in October brigades of the 5th Kresowa Infantry Division took Santa Sofia, Predappio – Mussolini’s birthplace – and the mountain of Monte Grosso. In November the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division moved into the front line. Its 1st Carpathian Rifle Brigade attacked the hill of Monte Fortino above the Montone valley without success from 11 to 19 November, supported by artillery positioned near Rocca San Casciano. Only after the 2nd Brigade was committed did the 4th Carpathian Rifle Battalion take the summit on 21 November, and over the following days the Poles captured further hills. These were struggles for individual ridges and buildings, fought in rain and then in snow, and paid for with losses that the corps could barely make good – mainly with prisoners and deserters from the Wehrmacht, Poles from Silesia and Pomerania who had earlier been forcibly conscripted into the German army.

The divisions that left

The deadlock was not caused by rain and mountains alone. Since the summer the Italian front had been losing importance in the eyes of the Americans, for whom the decisive battles were being fought in France. As early as July and August Alexander had had to give up seven divisions – the US VI Corps and the French Expeditionary Corps – for the landings in Provence: the very soldiers who in the spring had broken the front at Monte Cassino and taken Rome. They were only partly replaced by the Brazilian Expeditionary Force and the US 92nd Division, made up of Black soldiers. Replacements for British battalions were now sent mainly to north-west Europe; after the losses of Operation Olive – according to British sources some 14,000 men up to the capture of Rimini – one company was disbanded in some infantry battalions.

In the autumn Greece was added to this. As the Germans withdrew from the Balkans, the British entered Athens and then Salonika. The growing conflict with the left-wing resistance meant that more units were sent away from Italy – in November and December these included the 4th Indian Infantry Division, and at the turn of the year the British 4th and 46th Divisions as well. At the Moscow Conference in October Churchill was still speaking of a further advance from Italy through the “Ljubljana Gap” towards Vienna, but by the end of the year these plans had in practice collapsed.

On the other side of the front

For the Germans the autumn fighting was a defensive success, but a costly one. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring gained what he had been counting on since August – time until the autumn rains arrived – and managed to hold Bologna and the routes into the Po Valley. He himself, however, was put out of action: on the night of 23 October his car collided with a towed gun, and the badly injured field marshal did not return to duty until January 1945. Command of Army Group C was temporarily taken over by General Heinrich von Vietinghoff. In the autumn German commanders proposed a withdrawal behind the Po and to the Alps, which would have shortened the front and freed divisions for other theatres, but Hitler refused – Army Group C was to defend every inch of northern Italy, not least as an industrial and agricultural hinterland for the Reich.

The front also ran through a country divided by civil war. Behind the German lines operated units of the Italian resistance, subordinate to the National Liberation Committee and fighting both the Germans and the troops of the Fascist Italian Social Republic. In the summer and September many partisans had counted on the Allies arriving soon, and in some regions were preparing an uprising. The Germans responded to their activities with brutal operations against the civilian population: the bloodiest of these, the Marzabotto massacre on the slopes of Monte Sole south of Bologna, claimed several hundred victims at the turn of September and October – some 770 according to Italian research.

On 13 November 1944 Alexander addressed the Italian partisans over Radio “Italia Combatte”, through which the Allied command kept in contact with them. According to the surviving text of the appeal, he called on them to cease large-scale operations, to conserve their strength, weapons and ammunition, and to await new orders – in effect announcing that there would be no major Allied offensive before the spring. The appeal, known in Italy as the “Alexander proclamation”, caused bitterness: many partisans took it as a call to disperse to their homes just as the Germans and Fascists were preparing winter sweeps and the Allies were cutting back their supply drops. The command of the Volunteers of Freedom Corps, which united the partisan formations, did not, however, disband its units – it recommended that they regroup and survive the winter, and some of the partisans crossed the front line to the Allied side.

The winter line

Despite the deadlock, the Allies had not yet given up their last attempts. Clark planned a new thrust on Bologna for December, but it was postponed because of the weather and the shortage of ammunition and was eventually called off. At the beginning of December the Eighth Army took Ravenna, which the Canadians entered together with Italian partisans, and in mid-December the New Zealanders cleared Faenza. In the same period the Polish divisions advanced west of Brisighella to the river Senio. On its high embankments the Germans stabilised a front that in Romagna would not move again until April 1945. At the end of December a German-Italian attack in the Serchio valley took the US 92nd Division by surprise, but it did not change the situation on the front.

What did change was the command. After the death of General John Dill in Washington, his place at the head of the British military mission in the United States was taken by the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, General Henry Maitland Wilson. In December he was succeeded by Alexander, promoted to field marshal, while Clark took over command of the 15th Army Group, that is, all Allied land forces in Italy. General Lucian Truscott took command of the Fifth Army.

Place in the history of the war

The stalemate of autumn 1944 closed the most ambitious chapter of the Italian campaign. In the summer the Allies had hoped that breaking the Gothic Line would open the way into the Po Valley, and perhaps further, towards Vienna; in the autumn they had to accept that Italy would remain a secondary front whose task was to tie down German divisions. That task was fulfilled – more than twenty German divisions remained in northern Italy through the winter, going neither to the Ardennes nor to the Vistula – but at a price paid by the soldiers in the trenches on the Senio and in the Apennines, and by Italian civilians and partisans. At the beginning of 1945 the Canadian I Corps also left Italy, transferred to the Netherlands. Only the spring offensive launched in April 1945 shattered the German armies: on 21 April soldiers of the Polish II Corps were the first to enter Bologna, and on 2 May the surrender of Army Group C, signed at Caserta, came into effect. Bologna, which the Allies had seen from the peaks of the Apennines in October 1944, had kept them waiting for almost six months.