Italy 1943: The First Invasion of Hitler's Fortress Europe

In 1943 it was one of our strategic aims to draw as many German forces as possible away from the Russian front and French coastal areas and to contain them on the Italian peninsula while liberating as much of Italy as might be possible with the means at our disposal. The Straits of Messina, separating the Italian mainland from the island of Sicily, is one of the most famous bodies of water in history and in the summer of 1943 the eyes of the world fell here as the allied forces gathered on its shores before attempting an invasion of Hitler's Festum Europa. Well what an absolutely beautiful view and it's amazing because we've got the sun shining on us you can see the twinkly Mediterranean sea and you know you can half blink and imagine it's the 17th of August 1943 the very day that the American forces coming from the north British 8th army coming from the south join here at Messina. Look that's the toe of Italy that's Reggio over there Calabria the mainland of Italy and it's so close you can almost touch it. It all looks so incredibly easy but of course it didn't pan out quite that way. The Italian campaign in the summer of 1943 is an often forgotten about and sometimes maligned theatre of the Second World War. The men who fought up the Italian peninsula were often tarred as D-Day Dodgers, dossing about in the Mediterranean sun and missing out on the real fight in France. In reality the men of the British 8th and American 5th armies fought in some of the most inhospitable conditions of the war, over committed, under supplied and fighting a battle hardened and determined enemy. I'm James Holland historian and author and I'm traveling in the footsteps of those men up the spine of Italy from the tip of the toe all the way to Rome to the sites of desperate beach landings and mountaintop battles daring raids and ugly urban warfare. When we think about the savage storm that rolled up through Italy and you think of all those who fought and died here in that bitter battle I wonder whether they deserve some greater understanding. I'm starting my journey just like the men of the British 8th army back on the 3rd of September 1943 by crossing the Straits of Messina. It's amazing seeing Sicily there now already hazy in the in the kind of evening light and almost immediately we're here on the other side and and you're putting the Sicilian campaign behind you and on these very same waters that we're traveling now this is where the long brutal battle for Italy began. At 0345 that morning the fourth anniversary of Britain entering the war the skies over the straits flashed and crackled with heavy gunfire. The allied assault on fortress Europe had begun. With Sicily conquered in the middle of August 1943 the allies were now less than eight miles from the Italian shores and their target for this first operation the city of Reggio Calabria. Leading the invasion was General Bernard Montgomery and the British 8th army. Monty gained fame with his victories in North Africa and was now going to continue his fight against the Germans and Italians who were now no longer defending occupied soil but their homeland 630 guns opened fire from over there on the shores of Sicily firing onto here the toe of Italy around Reggio. This was the launch of Operation Baytown and following that 268 landing craft got into the sea making the crossing and then touching down here the ramps went down and outstormed the infantry. Among those in the first wave landing right here were the second inner skillings part of the British 5th infantry division and in one of the landing craft was Captain David Cole and he was crouching there bracing for Italian machine guns to open fire and mortars to come raining down on him but as the ramp hit and the landing craft landed on this beach out he came and there was just nothing just complete silence until suddenly he heard voices and they were calling out viva inglese. The men could barely believe it they'd spent years slogging across North Africa and Sicily fighting for every grain of sand at times and now as these first troops waited ashore they were being welcomed by some as liberators. You get a sense seeing those soldiers those infantry loading onto the landing craft of just how much kit each personal soldier is having to carry and that's because they haven't got many vehicles normally you'd have 3,000 vehicles per division but obviously you can't bring all those over in the straits in the first wave or even the second or third wave it takes days to build up that amount of vehicles so you've got those 268 landing cars just beetling back and forth back and forth back and forth the whole time 24 7. Look at that look how much they're carrying I mean fly me you've got to get up into the mountains that's not a lot of fun. By 9am things were going so well for the invading British army that Montgomery himself was able to land in Reggio. He found the city in ruins. Well it's a lovely day here in Reggio and walking along the seafront here it's pretty nice it's recovered well since 1943 because back then this place was absolutely pulverised by allied bombers and then on the morning of the 3rd of September 1943 by 630 guns firing across the Straits of Messina here. In retrospect that was a bit over the top because the landings were really easy there was almost no opposition whatsoever but because Montgomery only had enough shipping to land two divisions he wanted to make sure that the operation was a success and so he went a bit heavy on the firepower and as a result of that poor old Reggio was completely hammered. But whilst Monty drew the crowds the men of Eighth Army got to work. Thousands of men and tons of equipment were being ferried over the water and the lead elements of the army started to push inland to secure their first objectives. Just like those men I'm leaving the landing beaches and heading inland too. My first stop is this 19th century Italian fortress the Fortino Pellizzeri. It was known as simply .305 to a unit of Canadian infantrymen who headed here on the morning of the 3rd and just like the beaches and town below they found it abandoned. Well it's absolutely great to get this high point there's no question about that you can see the commanding position it has over the over the port and Reggio and the straits but you know when you look at the map you realize the reality of the task ahead of them because we're here just on the edge you know we've barely got past the toenail of the big toe and they say that all roads lead to Rome well that's as may be but there's a heck of a long way to go some 430 miles and nearly all of it is through mountains. After the conquest of Sicily in July and August 1943 the invasion of Italy may have seemed like a logical next step a mere skip over the water but in the eyes of many Sicily was the closing of the North African campaign rather than necessarily the beginning of a new European front. In fact before the invasion of Italy was planned various other operations were suggested a clearing out of Sardinia and Corsica was considered as was an invasion of Greece and the Balkans putting pressure on Germany's control of the Romanian oil fields but in the end an invasion of Italy would prove both most feasible and most effective but what exactly were the objectives of the invasion? So for the allies there were four main benefits for invading Italy. The first one was to finally get Italy out of the war once and for all. The second was to draw off large numbers of German troops because without Italy German troops would have to occupy Greece, the Mediterranean and of course all of Italy as well and that meant drawing away from the eastern front in the Soviet Union but also the western front where Operation Overlord was going to take place. The third reason was for capturing the Foggia airfields which could house strategic bombers, heavy bombers that could further tighten the noose around the Third Reich and the fourth reason was for capturing Rome. To achieve these aims a grand Italian strategy was devised consisting of three major landings. The first was Baytown at Reggio. This was then to be followed up a week later on the 9th of September with the hastily organized slapstick landing at Taranto on Italy's heel and on the same day the main allied force led by the US Fifth Army would land on the plain of Salerno in Operation Avalanche. Baytown landing a week ahead of Avalanche was given the specific aim of securing a bridgehead on the toe of Italy to enable our naval forces to operate through the Straits of Messina and to follow up an enemy withdrawal with such force as you can make available, bearing in mind that the greater the extent to which you can engage the enemy forces in the southern toe of Italy the more assistance you will be giving to Avalanche. But in a country as mountainous as Italy tying up enemy forces and rushing north to assist with Avalanche would be easier said than done. To get a sense of just how tough the terrain was for the advancing Commonwealth troops I'm heading into the mountainous Aspromonte National Park which rears up just a few miles inland from Reggio. The mountains here form the southern tip of the Apennines, the mountain chain that snakes down the spine of Italy and would come to be a defining feature of the entire campaign. And just hours into the invasion the mountains were already starting to take a toll on the men of the Eighth Army. David Cole was one of those who was tackling this landscape on foot. In his diary he said that toiling up the mountain under a burning sun and weighed down by a barrow load of personal military hardware I felt less like a mountain goat than a kebab on a grill. Late in the afternoon though he finally reached the outskirts of his first destination Orti. From here he could look back and see where just a few hours earlier he had started. Cole was quite overawed by the view and he talks in his journal about the Homeric landscape the kind of blue hazy mountains of Sicily on the other side and of the landing craft beetling back and forth across the straits. It really is a quite a stunning view but Cole was also worried because so far it was all just a little bit too easy and he was very aware that 40,000 Germans had also just earlier escaped across the very same straits but where were they? The man in charge of the German forces facing the invasion was Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. He had overseen the evacuation of Sicily just a couple of weeks ahead of the Allied advance and now would alongside his Italian colleagues oversee the defense of mainland Italy too. But Kesselring wasn't going to wait for the Allies on the beaches and risk his forces being overwhelmed after just a few short days. Instead he devised a skillful defensive strategy designed to trap the British army in the toe of Italy. Bridges were blown up, roads blocked and pathways mined. Italy was to be turned into a fortress. When you see roads like that you can see why Italy is such a defender's paradise and why the German combat engineers had such a vital role to play. One of those battling through these mountains was Farley Mowat, a junior officer in the Hastings and Prince Edward's regiment known as the Hasty Peas and he like all of his fellows were getting really really fed up with this. Now Mowat wrote a brilliant account of his time and he wrote, although the Germans did not at first oppose us in the flesh, they had done as far a job of demolition as has been seen in modern warfare. Not a bridge along the few snake-gutted highways, byways and even mountain tracks remained undestroyed. There were mines, mines and more mines. It was a devastatingly effective strategy and soon the Allied advance ground down to a brutal slog and as if the blockages weren't bad enough it was swelteringly hot and the mountainous terrain meant the distances on a map often ended up being double in reality. Yes the Allies were in Italy but they might as well have been on the moon for all the good it was doing them. The men in the tow of Italy were lucky to advance 10 miles a day through the rugged terrain. On the evening of the 8th of September just over 60 miles from Reggio, lead elements of Eighth Army reached the little town of Pizzo. In the car today it takes just over an hour but it took the men of Eighth Army five days. Now Eighth Army have had a huge amount of criticism over the years for being just too slow and too ponderous but I think that criticism is really harsh. I mean let's just think about what they've got to do. You've got 16,000 men just in one division and Eighth Army have got two here in the tow. You've got 3,000 vehicles per division. Just think about all the ammunition, fuel, food, supplies that are needed to keep that in the field and then think about this terrain. Lots of mountains, lots of German demolitions, mines, every bridge destroyed. It's an absolute nightmare so actually I reckon they've done pretty well to get here in just five days. Salerno was 200 miles away and that's where Fifth Army were due to be landing the following day, 9th of September. But look at that, it's mountains all the way so Eighth Army just aren't going to get there to support them anytime soon. Fifth Army had to pray their landings were going to be just as easy as those of the Eighth. I'm now making that same journey north to Salerno, covering those 200 miles, thankfully along modern autostrada and not mountain mule tracks. It was on these beaches that the Allies would launch Operation Avalanche, their main thrust onto the European mainland. The man in charge of the landing was General Mark Clark, the commander of the US Fifth Army and the plan he was overseeing for Operation Avalanche was daring to say the least. Clark himself admitted, we may get hurt but you can't play with fire without the risk of burning your fingers. In many ways he was lucky, the beaches around Salerno were ideal for a landing. The sand sloped gently, there was good access off the beaches and they lay just within range of air cover from Sicily. But Clark also faced some serious obstacles. So I'm just driving along the coast road at the moment which goes along the whole 15 to 20 mile long beach stretch of the Bay of Salerno and this bit here we're in the alluvial plain but all around fringing everywhere it's the mountains you know they're never very far away. Well the Bay of Salerno is a really tricky place for the Allies to land because of all this high ground and you know they know perfectly well that the Germans are going to have observation posts and artillery you know wherever there's a hill that's where they're going to be and you look at it all you know you can see in all these mountains and these hills they're just everywhere. To compound Clark's problems, just like Operation Baytown, Avalanche faced a chronic shortage of shipping meaning only a limited number of men could be landed at one time. Clark had a decision to make. Land all his men in one place and he risked them being bottled up by the enemy, split them and they risked becoming isolated and weak. In the end with so much ground to cover Clark had no choice but to split his force in two. The British 10th Corps attached to the American 5th Army would land in the north of the bay near the city of Salerno and the men of the American 6th Corps would land around the ancient Greek temples of Paestum. Between them were miles of beach and rivers, the Selle and Calore. Succeed and the Allies would get a foothold halfway to Rome. Fail and Clark risked losing an entire army. But while the American commander had been planning for the invasion, Kesselring had been furiously making his own plans to counter it. He had identified Salerno as a likely landing ground for the main Allied assault so he prepped his men in the area for an imminent invasion. So I'm winding my way up the hills above Salerno to a German observation post and which was being held by a young officer in the 16th Panzer Division reconnaissance battalion called Leutnant Rockall. Rockall kept a little diary of these dramatic days and this is where he was and there's quite some view I have to say. On the 8th of September the defenders were in their positions, still in the dark as to when the Allied landing might come. Down on the beaches, manned mostly by Italian troops, there were bunker complexes, mines and barbed wire. Rockall and the rest of the men of the 16th Panzer Division were Their tanks were roaming the plains, ready to deploy whenever an Allied force might land. The orders from Kesselring were simple. Defend your ground, wait for reinforcements to flood the plains and then destroy the invaders. As the German and Italian troops waited, on board the massive ships out at sea, thousands of British and American men were preparing their final bits of kit ahead of boarding their landing craft and awaiting H-hour. But as dusk started to fall, an astonishing announcement was made on the radio. This is General Gleit D. Eisenhower, commander-in-chief of the Allied force. The Italian government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally. As Allied commander-in-chief, I have granted a military armistice. Hostilities between the armed forces of the United Nations and those of Italy terminate at once. All Italians who now act to help eject the German aggressor from Italian soil will have the assistance and the support of the United Nations. Eisenhower's announcement of the armistice was like a lightning rod and a little over an hour later Badoglio, the Italian political leader, also made his own announcement and immediately the Germans instigated Operation Access, a swift disarming of the entire Italian armed forces. And one of those at the forefront was Leutnant Rockel and he was ordered up here with his armoured cars to disarm an Italian gun position, which he did with what he thought was shameful ease on the part of the Italians. Kesselring needed to disarm the Italian armed forces quickly so he could then hurl all his available German forces towards Salerno and throw the Allies back into the sea. Meanwhile the men of the Fifth Army could only hope they would land and get a big enough toehold before the full weight of the Germans descended upon them. I'm on the beaches in the southern sector of the Bay of Salerno. In the darkness before the dawn of the 9th of September, the landing craft of the 36th Texan Division approached these very shores in almost total silence. Clark had opted not to pre-bombard the landing beaches, hoping for an element of surprise. The Texans had no idea what was about to face them. Well this is an old gun position here. There's not a lot along the beaches at all, I mean mainly we're talking wires, mines, snipers. Later on in the day, armour as well, tanks and assault guns. And you can tell this is an Italian built, it's not got the kind of solid concrete that you'd expect from a German bunker, but this is where a gun position would have been. You've got little kind of places to keep your ammunition and the men. And you can see that from a Texan point of view, you've got to get off that beach and you've got to get onto that high ground just as quickly as you possibly can, because all around there you're going to have observation posts. The Germans will be able to see absolutely everything you're doing, and from there you can then rain down artillery shells. And that's the point, when you can see what your enemy's doing, that's a huge advantage. Here as the ramps went down on the American landing craft, the Germans fired off flares and machine gun tracers tore up the beaches. It was carnage. The Texans had been unlucky. The armistice, which eliminated thousands of Italian troops, had left patchy enemy defences. But here the Germans had quickly reinforced and they put up a withering defence of the shoreline. In the other sectors, however, Allied troops were able to wade ashore virtually unopposed. But as wave after wave landed, slowly the Allies began to make some progress. Back in September 1943, this tower could clearly be seen from the beaches, and it formed part of the German defences here, the forward defences. So there was machine gun up there and snipers and so on. But despite this, the Americans did manage to kind of overwhelm these forward positions of the Germans quite quickly and then started to push inland. But then they're confronted with the hills and the stronger German positions. And of course, just on D-Day, it's only the 16th Panzer Division that's here. But that all changes the moment the invasion begins when Kessering had ordered a whole load more divisions down to Salerno as quickly as possible. The fight here was only going to get tougher. By the end of the 9th of September, the Allied forces were just about holding on to their toehold in Salerno. But their tiny beachheads were still dominated by the German forces. What began now was a week of some of the bitterest fighting British or American troops had endured in the war so far. To find out more about the battle that took place here, I'm meeting with historian Giuseppe Freseloni. So Giuseppe, where are we at the moment? What is this place? So all this damage here, this was caused during the battle of Salerno? So when the Allies landed, there was just the 16th Panzer Division here covering this whole stretch. But how quickly was Kessering able to reinforce? We know the Germans are going to counter-attack, but where are they coming from? Which direction? The German domination of the landscape had kept the Allies pinned in pockets across the plains and had stifled American and British attempts to bring reinforcements and supplies of equipment and ammunition into the bridgehead. Meanwhile, probing German attacks stretched Allied lines to breaking point. All the while, Kessering poured ever more men and resources into the plains. The Allies had come up against just one German division when they'd landed. But now, four days on, they faced six and elements of a seventh. On the 13th, Kessering launched his savage counter-attack. German battle groups exploited the gap in between the Allied forces and smashed through Allied lines, pressing down towards the coast. Some of the heaviest of the fighting once again falling on the shoulders of the Texans. Mark Clark, who by now had his HQ on Italian soil, ordered every available man to a position. Cooks, drivers, clerks, anyone who could hold a weapon would hold a weapon. Clark himself made his way down the line, telling his men, There mustn't be any doubt in your minds. We don't give an inch. We're here to stay. But at the same time, he had also begun to plan for the unthinkable, an evacuation. For almost two days, the Allied lines were pummeled by the German onslaught. The men in the bridgehead were pushed to their limits, Allied guns firing virtually non-stop, trying to halt the German attack. Finally, on the morning of the 15th of September, after wave after wave of immense German pressure, the counter-attacks finally subsided. Somehow, the Allies had managed to hold off the German assault and hold on to their bridgehead at Salerno. I'm heading to the critical point on the battlefield, where the main German attack ground to a halt, just outside the village of Ponte Barizzo. Well, this is really exciting. This is somewhere where I've always really wanted to come, because I haven't quite worked out how it was that the American gunners were able to stop the Germans quite so successfully. So you can see here, here's the river Selle, and here's the Calore. The Calore merging into the Selle, and there's this kind of triangle, and it's into that triangle that the mass of the German of five battle groups is converging, because they need to forward it so they can get onto the southern side of the Selle. They're trying to push back the Americans on the southern side of the Selle. And here's this road here, this straight road. That's this road here, and this is where two battalions of American 105mm field guns were. And that's quite a lot. That's like 48 guns, you know, stretched out all along here. Now you can see it. You can see how they would have fired over, down into where the Germans were, beyond that tree line. And of course, because you're quite perched up here, this is the alluvial plain, but it's still much elevated from over there. That's why the Germans can't hit them, because they can't reach them. They can't elevate their own guns up to here. So suddenly it all makes sense, which is exactly why one always needs to walk the ground. But what I need to do now is go down and have a look at that kill zone. So the road is back there above that little ridgeline there, really pronounced little ridgeline, not massive, but pronounced. The Colonne is just there. And beyond that, in the fields beyond, that's where the mass of these five Kampfgruppe, these battle groups of German armour, that's where they were all concentrated. And you can see that if you're in a tank and you're all about direct fire, you cannot hit those field guns which are up on the road, because you just can't see them. But a field gun is lobbing a shell, so it's pouring them down on top of that massed German armour over there. But the other thing is that the Colonne is actually quite deep. There's no really obvious fordable places, and even if there is a fordable place, that means they're all going to be canalised to it, which is going to make an even greater concentration. And so they've got there and they've got stuck. Now, obviously, if you're Americans and, you know, you've got a mass of German armour just a mile away from 5th Army headquarters where Mark Clark is, that seems pretty tense and pretty scary. But actually, they might have been 20 miles away for all the good it was going to do them. Kesselring had thrown everything at Avalanche, but had failed to throw the Allies back into the sea. His men were exhausted, and so at 0630 on the 17th of September, he ordered their retreat. Intense action continued in the mountains and the valleys as the Allies broke out of the plain. And it was in one of these fights that Lieutenant Rockall, who had witnessed the landings on the 9th of September from his observation post up above Salerno, was killed, just one of the thousands of victims of the bitter fighting. On the 16th of September, lead elements of Montgomery's British 8th Army finally made contact with the men of the American 5th, along with the men who had landed unopposed at Taranto on the 9th of September. This was now a united force that could begin to roll up the boot of Italy. But the cost for the men of the American 5th Army had been terrible. This is the Commonwealth War Grave Cemetery at Salerno. At no point in the war to this date had the Allies faced such a concentration of German divisions as they did here at Salerno. It had been a brutal, bitter battle as the 1,744 British and Commonwealth graves here at Salerno testify. Overall, the British lost around 4,000 casualties, the Americans a similar number, and the Germans double that. It had been a terrible fight, and yet the Allies had prevailed. Even so, no one was fooled into thinking that the Germans were a spent force. Clearly, the Italian campaign had a long way to run. With the Salerno battle over, the Allies could now turn to their next objectives, the Foggia airfield complex over there, beyond those mountains, and to the great port city of Naples, beyond those mountains there. And that's where I'm heading next. Next time, I'm going to be hot on the heels of the Allied advance up through Italy. I'll be heading to the great city of Naples to find out about the astonishing uprising of the people against the Nazi occupation. See why the airfields on the plains of Foggia were such a key Allied objective. And head north, in the footsteps of the Eighth Army, to the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the campaign, the Stalingrad of Italy, or Tona.