The Italian peninsula… not so much.
The Allies didn’t quite recognize that. The Germans, however, did.
A
narrow peninsula across which any front would be too short to easily
deploy overwhelming numbers, which also was heavily mountainous and very
tactically defensible: the state of Italy might have been an easy
target, but the land itself definitely wasn’t.
The
Allies found that out the hard way. Their relatively easy stroll up
from Sicily came to a very abrupt and very bloody end in early December.
Beforehand, the Allies had faced and, through bloody combat, breached
the Volturno and Barbara lines, the first two of the newly found German
defenses across the peninsula. Allied morale was high: although the
German defense was tenacious, they had already breached two defense
lines.
Then they reached the Bernhardt Line.
It
took six weeks for the Allies to breach the Bernhardt Line, defended by
a single corps. Unbeknownst to the Allies, Bernhardt wasn’t a main
defense line either: tougher than Volturno and Barbara it was, better
built and better defended, but far from one of the main lines Kesselring
hedged his bets on. No. Kesselring’s bets were on the line just behind
Bernhardt: the construct of concrete that Volturno, Barbara and
Bernhardt existed just to allow it to be prepared as much as possible.
The Gustav Line.
Germans
had built up the defenses running south of Rome through months of
effort, and manned it with personnel from fifteen divisions. The
infamous monastery of Monte Cassino, soon to be home to the theater’s
worst bloodbath, was there as well.
Having
reached its bulk in January 1944, it took Allies four great offensives
and over four months of battering their heads on the German
fortifications to break through the Gustav Line, and its auxiliary
Senger Line. The four battles of Monte Cassino alone inflicted on the
Allies nearly sixty thousand losses: the total butcher’s bill to breach
the Gustav Line had well exceeded a hundred thousand.
The
Allies stopped and took a deep breather when the Gustav Line fell.
Surely, they had breached the toughest of the defense lines, had
Kesselring’s dreaded 10th Army on the run, and had taken Rome into the
bargain. Surely it would be easier now.
At
first it did seem to be the case: the Allies in their advance northwards
faced only lightly defended, hastily built defense lines, the work of a
delaying action. Surely, it was proof: the German defense of Italy was
failing. Trasimene Line had been tougher than the previous ones since
Gustav: but by the start of July it too was pierced in various places,
and the Allies were once again streaming north.
But
Kesselring hadn’t quit yet. He had one more ace up his sleeve. All the
months the Allies were stuck at Gustav, Caesar, Trasimene lines, using
fifteen thousand labourers, the Germans built up their final redoubt.
Gotenstellung: the
Gothic Line. A behemoth of thousands of concrete-reinforced bunkers,
pillboxes and gun pits, 120.000 meters of barbed wire, miles of
minefields and anti-tank ditches, constructed by tens of thousands of
laborers and manned by the full might of Kesselring’s soldiers.
The
Allies and the Axis clashed across the fortifications of the Gothic
Line for months on end. In various places and times the Allies breached
holes through the line, only to be met with immediate and vigorous
counterattacks that forestalled any breakthrough.
By
April 1945, the Allies still were stuck on the Gothic Line, which
proved nearly unbreakable and resilient beyond imagination. Even cold
concrete seemed bent on preventing passage. But the Gothic Line could
not fight on its own, and the troops that defended it were melting. They
were now outnumbered three to one, outgunned to an immense degree. Many
of the rail lines south to Italy had been bombed to ruins, many passes
and bridges lost to air attack, and as the borders of the Reich itself
were breached, they were becoming gradually ignored by the German
command. The Italians and Germans manning the Gothic Line had been
increasingly bereft of arms, ammunition, heavy weapons, and any tangible
resupply for nearly a month by that point.
Late
1944: an Italian soldier at the Gothic Line. Even though Italy had
switched sides not long after the Allied invasion, in German-controlled
North, many Italians remained loyal to their former allies. By April
1945, they were making up one in four men among the Gothic Line
defenders.
The Allies started the next
phase of combat at the start of April: a wave of preparatory attacks
were followed by the main offensive starting at 6 April. Already
stretched to the brink, the defenders of the Gothic Line fought, hard,
for nearly three weeks: then the German defense, finally, and for the
first time since the war in Italy began, truly snapped.
The
Allies had won in Italy, but at a terrible cost. More than three
hundred thousand personnel, excess of eight thousand aircraft, and near
four thousand armored fighting vehicles were lost in one and a half
years since the Volturno Line. Kesselring’s defenders had tied down
forces far greater than themselves, courtesy of the Allies choosing
perhaps the worst piece of Axis Europe to invade. Let alone giving the
Allies any strategic advantage, it had given Germans said advantage: the
luxury of tying down very formidable forces with relatively little
effort on their behalf. By the endgame, even as the Reich came crashing
down around them, the Germans were tying down what was grown to nearly
one and a half million personnel in Italy with maybe a third of that
number.
And instead of Churchill’s dreams of
racing up the ‘soft belly of Europe’ and striking Germany itself from
underneath, it took the Allied forces until 2 May 1945, merely six days
before Germany’s complete surrender, to simply wrap up the Italian
campaign, let alone being in any position to break out into anywhere.
And it was not that they were in a particularly good position either: if
it were not Germany’s total collapse, for the next step the Allies
would have to cross either the Italian Alps, now undoubtedly fortified
thoroughly, or hedge their bets through the more open terrain of the
Ljubljana Gap, a narrow area that would again prevent the Allies from
bringing heavy numerical superiority to bear and leave them open to all
forms of flanking attacks as they breached the Gap. And in either case,
they would still be a very long way from anywhere critical for the
German war effort.
Many historians say that
the invasion of Italy would not give the Allies any advantage, because
history showed it did not. The Allies came for the soft belly of Europe,
and found a tough old gut: a nightmare of mountains and concrete and
machine guns.
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