The Gustav Line

Rome

As the Fifteenth Air Force pounded strategic targets in central and southern Europe, Allied leaders in Italy looked north to Rome and saw a major psychological symbol: liberating that city would mark the fall of the first Axis capital. Rome's capture also promised strategic advantages by providing airfields closer to Germany and forcing the enemy back to defensive positions in the northern Apennines. Predictably, the experienced and resourceful German commander in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, also realized Rome's significance. As the U.S.
Fifth Army landed at Salerno, he ordered construction of a defensive line across the width of the country south of Rome. Initially, Kesselring intended merely to delay the Allied advance; later, hoping to halt it completely, he directed expansion of the fortifications, which he designated the Gustav Line. Taking maximum advantage of the mountainous terrain, his engineers sank thick concrete bunkers into the steep slopes, blasted artillery pits from the rocky faces, and carefully placed hundreds of deadly machine-gun nests. They strung miles of barbed wire and sowed thousands of mines. To reach Rome, the Allies had to either breach this line or go around it. 

Allied armies began their drive on Rome shortly after the Salerno landings. The British Eighth Army moved up the eastern side of the Italian peninsula; the U.S. Fifth Army moved up the west. In October 1943, the Fifth Army crossed the raging Volturno River and approached Cassino. The airmen teamed with ground forces at the river by creating roadblocks and snarling enemy traffic along the coast and further inland. Roaming fighters then destroyed hundreds of German vehicles in the stalled columns.

During this period, however, the greatest concern of Allied airmen was not the enemy but the weather that all too frequently grounded Allied aircraft for days at a time. But the weather failed to stop Clark's Fifth Army. After consolidating its bridgeheads across the Volturno, the Fifth Army confronted Kesselring's Gustav Line. 

Eisenhower and other Allied leaders dreaded a bloody frontal attack on the Gustav Line and they searched for alternatives. Following British success with an amphibious assault at Termoli on the Adriatic Sea, a similar move on Italy's west coast seemed feasible. A surprise landing behind the German defenders might draw them away from their deadly line and allow the Allies to punch through and race for Rome. 

After examining possible landing sites, Allied commanders chose Anzio. The former seaside resort was the only location both close to Rome and within range of friendly aircover. On November 8, the first an niversary of Allied landings in North Africa, Gen. Sir Harold R.L.G. Alexander of Britain, commanding the I5th Army Group, gave Clark and his Fifth Army staff six weeks to plan and execute a landing. Lack of troops and shipping temporarily shelved the plan, but a stagnating front revived the idea in January 1944. Under strong British pressure, Clark's staff reviewed and expanded the original concept and scraped together an invasion force.

The Anzio operation would represent a major effort behind enemy lines. An Anglo-American force of infantry, armored, airborne, comman do, and ranger units would make up the initial assault. Overhead, approxi mately twenty-six hundred aircraft of the XII Tactical Air Command, British Desert Air Force, Coastal Air Force, and Tactical Bomber Force would patrol the skies. 

In a prelude to the landings, the British and French struck the right side of the Gustav Line on January 12, and eight days later the American II Corps, at the center of the Fifth Army front, attempted a forced crossing of the Rapido River. In the face of intense German fire, both attacks quickly bogged down with heavy casualties. On January 21, the Anzio landing force sailed from Naples.

Anzio

When the Allies approached Anzio in the early hours of January 22, 1944, they enjoyed complete surprise. German regional reserves had de parted earlier to defend the threatened Gustav Line and left behind only a single company to face the unexpected onslaught. As the Allies came ashore, friendly fighters overhead spoiled the Luftwaffe's midmoming appearance over the beaches: they shot down seven aircraft, damaged several others, and scattered the rest. Throughout the day, medium bombers cut road junctions beyond the beachhead and heavy bombers slowed a delayed German response by pounding transportation targets near Florence, Rome, and in the Liri Valley.

Allied forces met only scattered German resistance and pushed seven miles inland over the next few days. British and American troops captured the town of Aprilia, and the Americans closed to within three miles of Cisterna. Then, Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas, commander of the invasion force, cautiously halted the entire offensive, dug in, and awaited reinforcements. To his south, the Fifth Army had failed to crack the Gustav Line after ten days of bloody fighting.

Kesselring anticipated a landing behind the Gustav Line, but during the first few days of the attack on Anzio he lacked the reserves to respond. This situation changed quickly. While the Allies regrouped, Kesselring assembled reinforcements. Troops came from Rome to block exits in the Al ban Hills. At Armed Forces High Command in Berlin, Hitler agreed to send in units from Yugoslavia, France, and Germany. A swelling enemy tide soon flowed toward Anzio. Allied airmen desperately battled the buildup, flying hundreds of sorties in appalling weather, but the Germans were unstoppable.

On February 4, Kesselring launched a massive assault. He hit the British hard near Campoleone, but he could not break the stubborn de fenders. The German commander continued attacking throughout February, at one point ripping a gaping hole in the American lines and driving within a few miles of the beach. But the Americans desperately fought back and plugged the gap, using fliers of the XII Air Support Command, artillery, naval gunfire, and armored units.

While the beleaguered Anzio defenders held on, the Allies continued to hurl themselves against the Gustav Line. Concentrated German defenses, rugged terrain, and miserable weather allowed little progress. A key Ger man position in the line, the town of Cassino and the nearby hill, Monte Cassino, commanded the surrounding ground. A world-famous abbey at the top of Monte Cassino soon drew Allied attention as a possible enemy observation post. Following considerable debate, the Allied command ordered the abbey destroyed. On February 15, Allied bombers reduced the abbey to ruins. The Germans took maximum defensive advantage of the rubble, repeatedly holding off carefully planned and courageously executed attacks from the valley below. Slowly the battle ebbed at Cassino and elsewhere along the Gustav Line, as both sides neared exhaustion. By mid-March, an uneasy, three-month lull settled in after weeks of inconclusive fighting.

Operation Strangle

Allied airmen soon devised their own bold plan to help crack the Gustav Line: use air power to severely restrict enemy resupply. The air offensive, appropriately named Operation Strangle, called for thousands of strategic and tactical aircraft to attack every rail route the Germans used, thereby forcing them to rely on an inadequate network of roads. Planners hoped that the weakened defenders, starved of supplies and pressured by a renewed Allied ground offensive, would be unable to hold the Gustav Line, the key to central Italy.

On March 19, the Mediterranean Allied Tactical Air Force struck tar gets from the Gustav Line to the Swiss frontier. Medium bombers wrecked marshaling yards and repair facilities. Fighters and fighter- bombers of the XII Air Support Command and the Desert Air Force cut rail lines radiating from Rome to cities in central Italy. As trains stacked up north and south of Rome, heavy bombers borrowed from the air war over Germany hit distant rail centers in northern Italian cities and scram bled enemy troops and supplies from beyond the Alps. 

Operation Strangle differed from earlier endeavors in that Allied air men simultaneously targeted whole systems of bridges, yards, tunnels, and even open stretches of track. Beginning in March, for example, medium bombers flew 176 missions against bridges between Rome and Florence, destroying or damaging at least nineteen bridges. They also dropped three spans on a principal route between Genoa and southern France. By March 24, medium bombers had cut every major line that sup plied the German front. Meanwhile, the fighter-bombers attacked bridges, stretches of track, supply centers, tunnels, and viaducts. Fighter-bombers, in particular, proved surprisingly successful as bridge busters: in a single day, P-47 Thunderbolts from the 57th Fighter Group destroyed six bridges. 

Contemporaneously, B-17s and B-24s of the Fifteenth Air Force pounded northern Italian transportation centers. A series of missions flown in the final days of March rained destruction on marshaling yards and adjacent industrial areas at Verona, Turin, Milan, and Bologna.

As Operation Strangle progressed, the Germans tried to repair rail lines, construct bypasses, ship around breaks, and shuttle trains over usable segments of track. Nothing worked. The enemy was unable to overcome the rail damage inflicted by MAAF's aircraft and so began to rely on motor transport. Italian roads, soon clogged with trucks, drew swarms of American fighters and fighter-bombers that ripped into the exposed Ger man columns and left hundreds of blazing wrecks. 

Kesselring found it difficult to meet his front's demands for men and materiel. German units moving down from the north reached the battle area only after sustaining heavy casualties and losing much of their equipment. Stocks of motor fuel, heavy ammunition, and equipment dropped alarmingly. But a static battlefield permitted the Germans to maintain their forces in central Italy by strict rationing, foraging for food, and moving supplies and reinforcements after dark.

As the air campaign neared the two-month mark in early May, rested and refitted Allied ground forces once again prepared to assault the Gustav Line. On May II, one hour before midnight, soldiers of the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies heard the barrage of a thousand Allied guns cross the narrow front from Cassino westward to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Early the next morning, the troops attacked. Against stubborn German resistance, Polish forces on the right moved into the ruins of the abbey at Monte Cassino, British and Canadian troopers in the center crossed the Rapido River, and the Americans on the left pressed forward into the Liri Valley.

The MAAF directly supported the assault while maintaining pressure against German lines of communication in the rear. Heavy bombers first struck Kesselring's headquarters and those of the German Tenth Army, then targeted enemy-controlled marshaling yards and ports in central Italy. Medium bombers and fighter-bombers concentrated on command posts, strongpoints, troop concentrations, bridges, and towns, while newly organized jeep-borne ground spotters directed air strikes on enemy positions in the Liri Valley. These coordinated MAAF attacks wreaked havoc on the German defenders. 

As the ground forces moved forward, so did the aviation engineers, who repaired captured airfields and built new ones for Allied aircraft, some in less than five days. They moved so fast that a forward patrol of the Fifth Army once captured an engineer survey team and held it prisoner, refusing to believe that any outfit could get ahead of the infantry. With this type of enthusiastic air support, equally eager ground forces smashed through the Gustav Line and forced Kesselring into headlong retreat. This stunning success justified the faith that Allied planners placed in the men and planes of Operation Strangle; in part, the breakthrough came because of them. 

Meanwhile, on May 23, the American VI Corps, with the help of more than seven hundred air sorties, finally broke free from its five months of misery at Anzio. By June I, the full impact of the air interdiction campaign hit the Germans. Their reserves of fuel and ammunition fell far below the danger point, and inadequate transport made distribution from depots impossible. These factors, together with air attacks on reserve units, broke the enemy's back. On the evening of June 4, 1944, American patrols entered Rome.

Under Eisenhower's command, the Normandy invasion two days later quickly overshadowed Rome's liberation and severely affected the future of the Italian campaign, as Allied leaders shifted men and materiel from the Mediterranean to the battle in France. But, even as units withdrew, Alexander kept pushing the Germans north. 

The Allies progressed steadily despite increasing resistance, and by June 21 they stood 110 miles north of Rome. Allied air power speeded the advance by bombing bridges, road transport, and troop concentrations, and by flying close air support missions. Still rolling north, the Fifth Army's 442d Regimental Combat Team, a Japanese-American unit des tined to become one of the most heavily decorated of the war, took the port of Leghorn on July 19 and reached the banks of the Arno River a few days later.

Meanwhile, the port of Ancona fell to the British Eighth Army's Polish Corps, and British forces entered the city of Florence in early August. Allied forces, exhausted from months of continuous combat, halted to rest, refit, and prepare for future fighting. Unfortunately, this pause gave the Germans time to complete their newest defensive obstacle in Italy, the Gothic Line.