An armoured Balaklava: Lessons from the Gothic Line

This article is from Military History Matters issue 141

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This year marks the 80th anniversary of a number of bloody engagements which, eventually, brought about the downfall of Hitler’s Nazis. The recent publicity surrounding the events to commemorate the Normandy invasion of June 1944 was hard to miss – but it is easier to forget the parallel campaign in Italy, or that it caused even more casualties to both the Allies and the Axis powers than operations in France, the Low Countries, or Germany.

Even when the Italy campaign does get taken into account, attention is understandably often focused on the infamous yet photogenic destruction of the great monastery of Monte Cassino – which seems to hold people’s imaginations much more readily than, say, the fighting around Salerno or Anzio. Then, even further down the list, come the great battles of the ‘Gothic Line’ – the Germans’ last major line of defence, which stretched right across the northern summits of the Apennines, north of Florence and south of Bologna and the Po Valley. It was the operations there that would sweep the Nazis right to the northern borders of Italy and beyond, before Berlin capitulated. Here, we will examine just a small part of this mighty sequence of events that took place among the mountains, vines, dust, and mud as final victory beckoned.

Drawing the Line

Once Sicily had fallen in the late summer of 1943, there were a number of courses open to the Allies. An invasion of mainland Italy might have been avoided altogether by a series of amphibious operations aimed at Sardinia and Corsica – leading, eventually, to the southern coast of France. There were many in the Axis high command who expected just that – but the planning conferences in Casablanca in January and Washington in May 1943 had underlined the Allies’ key aims: to tie down and defeat as many German forces as possible, and by so doing to take some pressure off the Soviets; to buy time for the build up of forces in Britain for the invasion of France; and, most importantly, to inflict a crushing physical and psychological blow on the enemy by forcing Italy to surrender. All of these were eventually achieved, not by island-hopping, but by grinding slowly and lethally all the way up the leg of Italy.

It is not certain whether it was the advice of Erwin Rommel or Albert Kesselring – Hitler’s two most-trusted generals – that won the day. Rommel advocated a light defence along the body of Italy, which would delay and disrupt the Allies, while winning time to build a deep series of redoubts, stretching from the Ligurian port of La Spezia all the way across the north of the country to Rimini on the Adriatic. Kesselring, meanwhile, certainly agreed with such a line, but proposed a series of other defences, like rungs on a ladder, that would kill and blunt the invaders at every step. The resources for this ‘Gothic Line’ (as it was eventually dubbed) would certainly be diminished – but it would provide opportunity for disastrous delays to be imposed on the Allies, disrupting the timetable for the invasion of France, and dismaying the Soviets.

It is now thought that if the landings in early September 1943 of US General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army at Salerno and Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army at Reggio di Calabria – both in the south of Italy – had been delayed a little, and the Italian collapse had happened even a week later than 8 September, Rommel’s advice might have been followed. If that had been the case, the subsequent, costly odyssey of violence – of Salerno and the Volturno, the Winter Line, the Barbara and Gustav Lines, Ortona, Anzio, and a host of other blood-lettings on Italian soil – might have been avoided. Certainly, the first Axis capital, Rome, would have fallen, but the Americans, British, Canadians, Poles, Free French, and all the others would have arrived in Northern Italy with horribly stretched lines of communications and uncertain air cover to face a formidably prepared series of strongpoints manned by experienced, and fresh, troops.

As it was, by August 1944, an exhausted ‘Tommy’ and ‘Tex’ were nudging up to the sangars (stone-built fighting posts) and foxholes of a scarcely finished Gothic Line manned by equally spent ‘Teds’ (a common nickname, from the Italian word for German: tedeschi). In the end, it matters little whether Rommel or Kesselring was right – as we will see by looking more closely at just one tiny but brutal part of the vast struggle that followed across the breadth of Italy, which illustrates perfectly how both sides fought and died.