Codebreakers Victory (32 page)

Against these strong professionals was a mixed bag of Allied commanders. Under Eisenhower as overall commander and Alexander in charge of the Italian campaign, Montgomery was again to lead his Eighth Army. The Americans had a new leader. Patton was out of it because, in two separate incidents at hospitals in Sicily, he had slapped the faces of GIs he'd thought of as malingerers, arousing an outrage that forced Ike to put him temporarily in officerial limbo.

The new face was that of Mark Clark, commanding the Fifth Army. Eric Sevareid, a radio reporter covering the campaign, included in his memoir
Not So Wild a Dream
an insightful assessment of Clark. He had met both Clark and Eisenhower when they had just been made general officers. "I was to see one of them," he wrote, "become the victim of the natural pressures of his position and fame, while the other became their master." Sevareid noted how the jeep carrying Clark was always closely followed by another bearing his photographer, who knew he must not fail to shoot the general's preferred left profile.

Vanity of this sort might be accepted if, as in the case of Patton or MacArthur, it was accompanied by command brilliance. With Clark the evidence suggests otherwise. Worse, his cupidity for acclaim was to lead, late in the campaign, to one of the war's more deplorable decisions.

The Allied plan called for each of Montgomery's and Clark's armies to spread out from its beachhead, jointly cover the two hundred miles separating the forces and, it was hoped, entrap hordes of retreating Germans. It was a plan that called for bold action. But the boldness was all on the German side.

Montgomery had once again shown his cautious nature even before the Eighth's landing on the toe of Italy. He had delayed the invasion until British battleships, American bombers and six hundred field guns had bombarded the coast at Messina for three days—almost enough, it was said, to blow the toe off the boot. When his army did land, they found nothing but some dazed Italians who hurried forward to help unload the assault boats.

He was supposed to launch his attack well before Clark's so that he would be in a position to help Clark if the more vulnerable Salemo landings ran into trouble. But by delaying his start until September 3, Montgomery had too short a period in which to establish his beachhead before Clark made his landing, on schedule, in the early hours of September 9.

Knowing his enemy, Kesselring gambled. He left only one division to block Montgomery while shifting all his other troops, including thousands who had escaped from Sicily, to bottle up Clark's Fifth Army. An Allied decrypt warned of Kesselring's scheme, but Montgomery did not take advantage of the information. When the Germans pinned down both armies, a gap of 140 miles still yawned between them.

Clark's plan for the Salerno landings had one serious flaw. A predominantly British corps was to come ashore in the north while an American corps landed in the south. Between them was a ten-mile gap, which Kesselring quickly seized upon as an opportunity to drive a wedge between the two forces and push them separately back into the sea.

Under a tremendous naval and aerial bombardment, the landings met only moderate opposition. Kesselring had but one division in the immediate area to counter the invasion. But when the Allied attackers did not move aggressively enough to capture the high ground shutting in the Salerno plain, Kesselring's artillery and tanks seized it and used the advantage to ravage the Allied troops. With two German divisions rushed in from the line opposing Montgomery and other thousands of soldiers assembled from elsewhere in Italy, Kesselring thrust his troops into the gap. His plans for the counterattack were minutely detailed in a report to Hitler—the BP decrypt runs five pages long and tells exactly where the German general would strike, what units he would commit and how he hoped to mop up the sundered U.S. and English armies.

He came perilously close to succeeding. Clark in his 1950 memoir,
Calculated Risk,
called Salerno "a near disaster" and wrote of having to consider a lesser Dunkirk.

While Bletchley's decrypt seems not to have had any effect, other factors did. One was pure American grit. Two artillery battalions joined up to place their guns in a deadly row facing the oncoming Germans. While the battalions' officers put rifles into the hands of artillerymen not essential to the firing and rounded up an improvised infantry made up of clerks, cooks and other headquarters troops, the gunners fired eight rounds per minute per gun—an astonishing rate of firepower that, together with the rifle fire of the dug-in GIs, turned back the German thrust not much more than a mile from the beach.

Also helping to stop the Germans was another devastating round of naval gunnery and additional waves of aerial bombers. To secure the beachhead, Clark ordered a landing of paratroop reinforcements. Men of the 82nd Airborne Division were flown in from Sicily and dropped on the beach.

With the German counterattack blunted, Kesselring and Vietinghoff had to settle for a slow, grudging withdrawal northward. On September 16, spearheads from Montgomery's Eighth met with an outward push from Salemo to establish a continuous offensive line across Italy.

The codebreakers kept Allied leaders informed about another important development. A September 9 decrypt detailed orders to the German army to take over Italian warships and merchant vessels—a capture that would have added more than two hundred ships to the German arsenal. The order came too late. On September 8 the Italians fulfilled one of the terms of their withdrawal agreement with the Allies by ordering their navy to surrender. The fleet took off from its ports. Ships on the west coast fled to North Africa; those at Taranto steamed for Malta. The Germans were reduced to trying to destroy the vessels of their late allies. Using new radio-guided glider bombs, they sank an Italian battleship and damaged other vessels. Most of the ships, however, escaped. A longtime worry crease was removed from the Allied brow.

Decrypts also discovered Hitler's plans to rescue Mussolini, imprisoned in the north. The plans were executed in a daring raid on September 10, and II Duce was set up as the head of a puppet state, ostensibly commanding the handful of Italian soldiers still loyal to him.

Finally, the codebreakers traced one more development, one that meant bad news for the campaign in Italy. The Germans had adroitly evacuated Sardinia and Corsica, adding nearly forty thousand troops to their defenders on the mainland.

 

 

Italy 1943-44: A Winter of Discontent

 

For a time after the Fifth and Eighth Armies had linked up, decrypts indicated that Hitler might order Kesselring to evacuate southern Italy and make a staged withdrawal to the Rome area. The slow pace of the Allied advance changed the führer's mind. Kesselring and Vietinghoff organized their defenses to check the Allies from reaching a primary goal: the wide Liri Valley, lying beyond the mountain barriers and offering access to Rome. Allied troops made heroic sacrificial efforts to cross the rivers, climb the mountains and dislodge the Germans from their strongholds only to be thrown back. The battle settled into a bitter, bloody stalemate.

Eisenhower and his fellow generals began to consider an amphibious end run that would reach around and beyond the German lines. This landing would take place at Anzio, a coastal town thirty-five miles south of Rome. As with Salemo, Anzio would be preceded by a drive by the armies inland meant to draw the German troops away from the landings. And again, the inland troops were to link up with the invaders. This first Anzio plan came to nought, however, when neither Montgomery's nor Clark's armies could, despite more examples of incredible heroism and tremendous losses, dislodge the Germans from their mountain redoubts. Eisenhower gave up on the idea of an Anzio landing.

Then Churchill weighed in. Obsessed by the calendar that had the invasion of Normandy scheduled for May or June and that of southern France to coincide, the prime minister felt he couldn't allow the Italian campaign to drag on inconclusively. He pressed for what he called a "cat-claw," another reach around the Germans in the west. Coerced from on high, the Allied commanders agreed to organize a new try at Anzio.

Signals intelligence gave a favorable forecast for the mission, set for January 22, 1944. The codebreakers advised, accurately as it turned out, that the only German forces in place to oppose the landings would be at most two divisions, some tanks and a couple of parachute battalions. Decrypts also advised that no strong reinforcements were available within forty-eight hours' journey. Bold and decisive action would catch the Germans unprepared not only at the beach but further inland.

Once again, bold and decisive action was what Clark did not deliver. He seemed to have doubts about the landing's success. He cautioned his general in command of the operation, John P. Lucas, "Don't stick your neck out, Johnny. I did at Salerno and got into trouble." Clark gave Lucas limited objectives: to seize and hold a beachhead, yes, but to risk an inland dash only after getting firmly established ashore. Lucas was sent in without the mechanized troops for a rapid advance, and shortages of landing craft kept him from receiving armor when he most needed it. Kesselring later said of Anzio that it had seemed to him "a half-hearted measure."

The landings began well enough. With their air reconnaissance decimated by Allied fliers, the Germans did not detect the approach of the invasion fleet. The landings met with little opposition, and the first drive inland encountered only two exhausted battalions which had been pulled out of the mountain defenses to rest and refit. They were quickly overrun.

But then the successes stopped. Lucas was only too willing to accede to the warnings of caution. He concentrated on organizing his thumbnail of a beachhead instead of maintaining the momentum of his attack. Kesselring observed "the hesitant advance of those troops which had landed," and wrote, "That morning I already had the feeling that the worst danger had been staved off."

By the time Lucas was ready, on the ninth day, to push toward Rome, his German opponent had put together a formidable defensive cordon around the Anzio beachhead. Hitler helped by rushing in reinforcements from Yugoslavia, Germany, France and northern Italy. Decrypts warned of these transfers and also of the shift of bombers to harass the beachhead.

Lucas's belated offensive was quickly checked, with grim losses. Clark and Alexander ordered him to abandon the attack and dig in. Now it was the Germans' turn. Kesselring planned another of his powerful counterattacks meant to split the beachhead forces and either encircle the fragments or drive them back into the sea. Then occurred what Hinsley termed "one of the most valuable decrypts of the whole war," a revelation that is credited with converting even Mark Clark into a believer in Ultra. It forewarned of the counterattack and predicted precisely where it would hit. When the Germans came, the Allied troops were ready for them. The advance was met by withering fire from Lucas's artillery, tanks, tank destroyers and mortars as well as by some seven hundred sorties by Allied aircraft and shelling by two navy cruisers.

The Germans pressed their first attack for five days, only to be held off by American firepower and GI will. Decrypts pointed up the moment, on February 21, when Kesselring admitted that the offensive had failed. Clark came ashore and relieved Lucas, replacing him with the more aggressive Lucian K. Truscott.

The Germans refused to give up their attempts to smash the Anzio toehold. Further decrypts gave notice that they were organizing another counterattack. Again the Allies knew what to expect and where to mass their power. The German attackers were mauled. On March 1 they sent messages reporting that they were withdrawing to their starting line. A long report from Kesselring advised Berlin that he could not hope to eliminate the beachhead with the forces at his command; the best he could do was to keep it bottled up. For prudence's sake he was rushing the construction of a new defense line to which he could fall back and still prevent the Allies from reaching Rome.

That was the end of German attempts to eradicate Anzio. Kesselring was content to pin in the invaders, keep them separated from the main Allied forces and make life on the beachhead perilous and miserable. His heavy guns and Luftwaffe bombers forced the Allied soldiery to burrow underground and live like beleaguered moles. German radio called Anzio "a prison camp where the inmates feed themselves."

Churchill lamented, "I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we had got was a stranded whale."

The inland attack ordered by Clark to draw Germans away from the Anzio landing was an assault across the Rapido River. Clark persisted in carrying out the attack even though he was warned that the strong German defenses and zeroed-in artillery on the far side of the deep, swift-flowing stream doomed it to failure. For the GIs involved, the Rapido crossing quickly turned into a hopeless death trap. So overwhelming was the defeat that it was investigated after the war by a Congressional committee.

With the repulse at the Rapido, with Anzio a stranded whale, a virtual stalemate continued all through March and April and early May. The center and symbol of Allied frustration became the monastery of Monte Cassino. Its great two hundred-yard-long bulk of masonry sat atop the Cassino massif and looked down from a height of seventeen hundred feet on the approaches to it. Below the abbey was Castle Hill, another rugged promontory, and on the banks of the Rapido River the armed town of Cassino itself. By placing heavy guns and artillery spotters on the brow of the massif, by turning the lower reaches into a vast warren of concrete pillboxes, fortified stone houses, minefields and barbed wire entanglements, and by diverting the Rapido to flood the plain below into a quagmire in which armor bogged down, the Germans had made the whole into an impregnable natural fortress.

Allied commanders waged three major battles trying to take the monastery, only to have each of them driven back with severe casualties. Although German gunners placed themselves close to the abbey's walls on either side, their general scrupulously avoided using the structure itself as a fortification, a nicety that Allied commanders refused to accept. Eighth Army commanders called for it to be destroyed—a decision that, to his credit, Clark strongly opposed. The plan went ahead, with heavy artillery combining with a raid by U.S. bombers to reduce the historic structure to rubble.