How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (28 page)

Francis Tuker, commanding 4th Indian, urged an indirect approach on Cassino through the mountains to the north, a plan favored by the French. But Freyberg rejected the proposal, and Tuker, whose division drew the job of tackling Monte Cassino, asked that the historic monastery crowning the height be neutralized by aerial bombardment. There was no evidence the Germans were using the monastery. They had not even entered it, and General Senger had evacuated the monks and works of art. But the structure was a symbolic deterrent to the Allies, and Clark and Alexander authorized the operation.

On February 15, 1944, a tremendous attack dropped 450 tons of bombs that demolished the famous monastery. The Germans now felt they could occupy the rubble. Consequently, the attack actually increased the strength of their defenses. On two successive nights 4th Indian tried in vain to seize a knoll that lay between its position and Monastery Hill. On the night of February 18 the division made a third attempt. Fighting was desperate, and all the men reaching the knoll were killed. Later that night a brigade bypassed the knoll and moved directly toward the monastery, only to encounter a concealed ravine heavily mined and covered by German machine guns. Here the brigade lost heavily and had to retreat. Meanwhile 2nd New Zealand Division crossed the Rapido just below Cassino town, but German tanks counterattacked and forced it back. The direct attack on Cassino had failed.

On the Anzio front the Germans counterattacked on February 16, and on the next two days they threatened to reach the beaches and split the bridgehead in two. The Germans were held only by the desperate defense of the British 1st and 56th and American 45th Divisions. A new attitude appeared within the bridgehead when Lucian K. Truscott arrived, first as Lucas's deputy, then as his successor. The Germans tried once more on February 28, but Allied aircraft broke up the assaults, and on March 4 Mackensen stopped.

The Italian campaign was beginning to resemble the gruesome close-in battles on the western front in World War I, with losses just as great and gains just as minuscule.

On March 15, the Allies launched another direct attack on Cassino. The New Zealand Division was to push through the town, after which 4th Indian Division was to assault Monastery Hill. This time Cassino town was the main target. A thousand tons of bombs and 190,000 shells rained down on town and hill. As the bombers flew away and the cannon fire lifted, the infantry advanced.

“It seemed to me inconceivable,” Alexander said, “that any troops should be left alive after eight hours of such terrific hammering.” But they were. The 1st Parachute Division fought it out amid the rubble with the advancing New Zealanders. By nightfall two-thirds of the town was in Allied hands, while 4th Indian Division came down from the north and, the next day, got two-thirds of the way up Monastery Hill.

But that was the end. British tanks couldn't negotiate the craters made by bombs and shells, the Germans filtered in reinforcements, and the weather broke in storm and rain. On March 23 Alexander halted the operation. Once more stalemate had fallen on Cassino.

The continued failures at Cassino demonstrated the basic mistake of the Allied strategy in Italy. Cassino was important because it barred entry to the valley of the eastward-flowing Liri River, the only route in this part of Italy that could accommodate Allied tanks, artillery, and vehicles. Route 6, the Naples-Rome highway, ran through it.

The Allies tried first to force a crossing of the Rapido a few miles south of Cassino, with the intention of swinging up and around the town and Monastery Hill. This had failed with heavy losses because the Rapido was fast-moving and German artillery could fire from valleys just west of Cassino.

The Allies had also tried to swing around Cassino from the north, but the Apennines in this region consist of rocky escarpments and deep ravines, which limited movement to small bodies of men supplied by mules.

Why did the Allies not swing entirely
around
Rome and the mountains and land farther up the Italian boot, either on the western or eastern coast? Allied sea power was overwhelming, and an invasion could have been made almost anywhere. It would have been easiest along the Adriatic coast, especially around Rimini or Ravenna in the great Po Valley of northern Italy, where there were no mountains to harbor German defenders, and the terrain would have been better for Allied tanks and other vehicles. But any strategic landing beyond major German troop dispositions—that is, beyond where a landing could be easily contested, not close by as Anzio was—would force an enemy withdrawal from points south.

Churchill was not a great strategist, but he saw the opportunity plainly. He telegraphed Alan Brooke on December 19, 1943: “There is no doubt that the stagnation of the whole campaign on the Italian front is becoming scandalous. . . . The total neglect to provide amphibious action on the Adriatic side and the failure to strike any similar blow on the west have been disastrous.”

But the Allies had elected to conduct a straight-ahead, direct campaign right through the mountains of Italy, and at Cassino they experienced the bloody consequences of that strategy in full measure.

In cooperation with British General H. Maitland Wilson, who had taken a new post as supreme commander, Mediterranean, in January 1944, Alexander developed another plan to break through the Gustav line. He shifted most of 8th Army westward to take over the Cassino–Liri Valley sector, leaving only a single corps on the Adriatic side of the Apennines. Clark's 5th Army, along with the French corps, assumed responsibility for the Garigliano River sector along the coast and the Anzio beachhead.

Alexander's plan was another brute-force effort, to be launched May 11. It called for 8th Army to crack through at Cassino, 5th Army to thrust across the Garigliano, and the Anzio force to break out toward Valmontone on Route 6. Alexander assembled sixteen Allied divisions along the Gustav line against six German divisions (with one in reserve). Twelve were lined up from Cassino to the mouth of the Garigliano, and four were close behind to exploit any breakthrough by thrusting up the Liri Valley in hopes of piercing a second defensive line, six miles in the rear, before the Germans could occupy it.

Three of 8th Army's nine divisions were armored. Because dry weather had come, the tanks would have far better going than in the wet and muddy winter. In the attack, a Polish Corps of two divisions was to tackle Cassino, while the British 13th Corps of four divisions was to advance about three miles south toward St. Angelo. The attack was supported by 2,000 guns, while all available Allied aircraft made heavy attacks on the German rail and road network.

The offensive opened at 11 P.M., May 11, with a massive artillery barrage. For the first three days the attack made little progress. The Polish Corps suffered heavily, and the American 2nd Corps on the coast and the British 13th Corps likewise had little to show for their efforts. However, General Juin's French corps, lying between the two, found only one division opposing its four, and made some progress in mountains where the Germans had not expected a serious thrust. On May 14 the French broke into the valley of the small Ausente River, and the German 71st Division fell back fast before them. This relieved pressure on 2nd Corps, and it began to move along the coast road after the German 94th Division. The two German forces were now separated by the roadless Aurunci Mountains. General Juin, sensing the opportunity, sent a division-sized force of Moroccan Goums, natives of the Atlas Mountains, across these mountains to break into the German rear.

The Moroccans pierced the Germans' second defensive line. The flank along the sea now collapsed, breaking the Gustav line, and the German paratroops at Cassino withdrew on May 17—leaving 4,000 Polish dead in the town and on the slopes of Cassino.

Alexander had ordered forces driving out of the Anzio beachhead to rush past the Alban Hills and block Route 6 at Valmontone, thus cutting off most of the German 10th Army. But Mark Clark wanted the Americans to be first into Rome. When, on May 25, the U.S. 1st Armored and 3rd Infantry Divisions from Anzio linked up with 2nd Corps at Cori, beyond Route 7 but ten miles short of Valmontone, Clark turned three American divisions north along Route 7 toward Rome, sending only one toward Valmontone. Three German divisions held up this division three miles short of Route 6.

Clark found he could not rush into Rome after all, for he was slowed by German resistance on the “Caesar line” of defenses just south of Rome. And 8th Army's armored divisions were unable to pin the retreating German divisions against the Apennines. They slipped away on roads through the mountains. It looked for a while that General Senger would be able to stop the Allies along the Caesar line, but the U.S. 36th Division pierced it at Velletri on Route 7 on May 30. Clark at once ordered a general offensive—2nd Corps took Valmontone and thrust up Route 6, while 6th Corps rushed along Route 7.

The Germans gave way, and the Americans entered Rome on June 4. Kesselring had declared it an open city in order to prevent destruction.

Alexander's offensive had gained Rome but little else. The Americans lost 18,000 men in the operation, the British 14,000, and the French 10,000. The Germans sustained about 10,000 killed and wounded, but about 20,000 became prisoners of war. The Italian campaign had not proved a good investment for the Allies. They had committed two soldiers to every German. No Germans had been drawn away from northern France, though without Italy, German strength could have been increased there.

Churchill and Alan Brooke pushed for a campaign to drive into northern Italy, and press through the Ljubljana Gap into Austria, but General Marshall and President Roosevelt ruled instead for Operation Anvil (renamed Dragoon) on August 15—the invasion of southern France, to aid the Normandy operation.

The Italian campaign vanished from the front pages. The fighting was not over. The Allies slowly slogged their way northward. But the killing and the maiming that continued apace no longer played a decisive factor in the war.

21 NORMANDY

IRONICALLY, THE TWO GREATEST ARMORED COMMANDERS IN HISTORY—HEINZ Guderian and Erwin Rommel—clashed on the proper way to meet the Allied invasion of France. Adolf Hitler's response to that collision largely determined the outcome of the war.

Guderian came to his position from his experiences in the east with the Red Army, Rommel from his experiences in Africa with the western Allies. They proposed diametrically opposite solutions.

In February 1944 Guderian went to St.-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, to visit Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander in chief west, and General Leo Geyr von Schweppenberg, in charge of panzer training in the west. Together they came to agreement on handling armor.

Panzer and panzergrenadier divisions, Guderian wrote, “must be stationed far enough inland from the so-called Atlantic Wall so that they could be switched easily to the main invasion front once it had been recognized.”

Guderian and Geyr proposed that the ten fast divisions Hitler had allocated to defend the west be concentrated in two groups, one north and the other south of Paris. Both officers recognized the immense superiority of Allied air power, and that it gravely affected German ability to shift armor. But they believed the problem could be overcome by moving at night.

When Guderian got back to supreme headquarters, he discovered that Rommel, who had taken over defense of the Atlantic Wall in November 1943 as commander of Army Group B, was stationing panzer divisions very near the coast.

To Guderian this was a fundamental error. “They could not be withdrawn and committed elsewhere with sufficient rapidity should the enemy land at any other point.” When he complained to Hitler, the Fuehrer told him to discuss the matter with Rommel. Guderian hit a stone wall when he met Rommel at his headquarters at La Roche Guyon, a magnificent château west of Paris. Because of Allied air supremacy, Rommel said, there could be no question of moving large formations, even at night.

To Rommel the day of mobile warfare for Germany had passed, not only because of Anglo-American air power but because Germany had not kept up with the western Allies in production of tanks and armored vehicles—a result due more to the shortage of oil than to Allied bombing.

Implicit in Rommel's theory was that the Germans must guess right where the Allies were going to land. If German forces could not move, they had to be in place close to the invasion site. Rommel decided that the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais opposite Dover.

Rommel ruled out other landing places, especially because the Allies could provide greater air cover there than anywhere else. Rommel wrote Hitler on December 31, 1943, listing the Pas de Calais as the probable landing site. “The enemy's main concern,” he wrote, “will be to get the quickest possible possession of a port or ports capable of handling large ships.”

Guderian did not conjecture precisely where the Allies might invade. He thought they should be allowed to land and make a penetration, so that their forces could be destroyed and thrown back into the sea by a counteroffensive on a grand scale. This was in keeping with successful German movements in Russia. Although Rundstedt and Geyr accepted the idea, neither they nor Guderian had any idea how Anglo-American command of the air could restrict panzer movement.

Rommel did, and to him Guderian's proposal was nonsense. “If the enemy once gets his foot in, he'll put every antitank gun and tank he can into the bridgehead and let us beat our heads against it,” he told General Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division.

The only way to prevent this, Rommel wrote, was to fight the battle in the coastal strip. This required operational reserves close behind the beaches that could intervene quickly. Bringing reserves up from inland would force them to run a gauntlet of Allied air power, and take so much time the Allies could organize a solid defense or drive farther inland.

Rommel set about building a fortified mined zone extending five or six miles inland. He also built underwater obstacles along the shore—including stakes (“Rommel's asparagus”) carrying antitank mines, concrete structures equipped with steel blades or antitank mines, and other snares. But his efforts came too late to be fully effective, and they were concentrated in the Pas de Calais, though some work extended to Normandy.

Rommel and Guderian were both wrong, of course. The Allies were
not
bound to take the shortest route to seize the closest port. Rommel did not understand the vastness of Allied maritime resources, and he was not aware of British ingenuity in building two artificial harbors (Mulberries) which could serve as temporary ports. The Mulberries veiled the biggest secret of all: the Allies did
not
have to capture a port to invade the Continent. This made possible a landing at the least likely place still under the Allied air umbrella: the beaches of Normandy.

Guderian was wrong in his belief that the Germans could duplicate anything like the vast sweeping panzer movements they practiced in Russia. There the Luftwaffe generally had parity with the Red air force, and could achieve temporary local superiority to carry out a specific mission. In the west, Allied air power was overwhelming and permanent. In the winter of 1944, the Luftwaffe was virtually swept from the skies, primarily because of the American P-51 Mustang fighter. The Mustang surpassed all German fighters, yet the Luftwaffe was forced to challenge it since the P-51 was now escorting B-17 bombers in daylight raids over Germany. The Germans lost large numbers of fighters, and by March were reluctant to come up and engage the Mustangs.

Another reason Allied air power was decisive in France was that forests, rivers, and cities forced traffic along predictable arteries, which could be bombed and strafed, and bridges broken, unlike in Russia where panzers could often strike out across open plains.

The two generals should have sought a compromise. There
was
one: dividing the armor and placing one segment behind
each
of the invasion sites the Allies might choose, and making each segment available on call to Rommel or the commander of the invasion site directly ahead. Such a compromise would have answered most of Rommel's concerns, and it would have provided a partial answer to the mobile armored reserve Guderian wanted—in the form of the armor behind the sites
not
attacked by the Allies.

The actual number of potential invasion sites was three, and they could have been figured out by logic. The Allies would insist on heavy fighter coverage over the landing sites. The Allies were certain to land within the maximum range of their principal ground-support aircraft, Spitfires, P-38 Lightnings, and P-47 Thunderbolts, or about 200 miles from the main fighter bases in southeastern England. A strike into Holland would encounter hard-to-cross rivers and canals, and land below sea level that could be flooded. On the Brittany peninsula an invasion might be sealed off, and the French coast south of the Loire River was much too far. Both were beyond 200 miles of the English fighter bases.

This left just the Pas de Calais, the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy, and the beaches of Normandy as the only possible invasion places.

If Rommel, Guderian, Rundstedt, and Geyr had agreed that the invasion could strike one of these places, and none other, then allocation of armor equally to each of the three would have been sensible. Since Hitler had assigned only ten fast divisions to the defense of western Europe, it was imperative to decide
where
the landings might occur and locate armor at these places.

But this did not happen. Rommel persisted in believing, until a month or two before the landing, that the Pas de Calais was the only possible site. And since Guderian, Rundstedt, and Geyr believed otherwise, the final decision on where to locate the fast divisions fell to Adolf Hitler. He, in his characteristic indecisive and uncertain fashion, spread the ten panzer and panzergrenadier divisions from northern Belgium to the south of France.

Hitler refused to settle on even a
region
that the Allies might invade, let alone specific sites. In a meeting with senior commanders on March 20, 1944, he listed potential invasion places from Norway to southern France. In the final allocation, he stationed six fast divisions north of the Loire River, and four south of the river, three of them near the Spanish frontier or close to Marseilles along the Mediterranean coast.

Erich von Manstein had won the campaign in the west in 1940 by convincing Hitler to concentrate his armor. Now, at the moment of Germany's greatest military peril, Hitler was
dispersing
his armor—all across the map. Furthermore, he kept a firm rein on most of these divisions, intending to direct the battle from Berchtesgaden.

If, instead, three or four fast divisions had been stationed directly behind the beaches at each of the potential sites, they very likely could have crushed any invasion on the first day.

From March 1944 onward Hitler had a “hunch” the invasion would come at Normandy, though he thought it would be only a diversion to the main assault on the Pas de Calais. He arrived at this hunch because Americans were concentrated in southwest England, thus were closer to Normandy, and because an exercise took place in Devon on a beach similar to Norman beaches. Rommel came around to the same belief, but, despite frantic efforts, it was too late to build adequate defenses along the Norman coast.

Whether the landing on Normandy (Operation Overlord) was actually going to take place was the call of the three Allied leaders, not the generals. They did so at the Teheran conference in late November 1943.

Roosevelt was not as set on Overlord as Marshall, but if Stalin wanted it, he would demand it. Stalin still had the power to sign a cease-fire with Hitler. This was increasingly unlikely with the German retreat after Operation Citadel, but Roosevelt sought to avoid a separate peace at all costs. Beyond that, he was seeking a “constructive relationship” with Stalin after the war—a Soviet Union as a responsible member of the world community, not an agent of further disorder and war.

Consequently, at Teheran, when Stalin contested diversions in the Mediterranean that Churchill was seeking, Roosevelt announced he opposed any delay in the cross-Channel invasion. With that, the die was cast for Overlord.

Because American forces would predominate in an invasion of France, Roosevelt insisted that the commander be an American. Churchill had to accept, dashing the hopes of Alan Brooke to get the job. In partial compensation, Churchill arranged for British General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson to become supreme commander of the Mediterranean theater.

Early in December on his return from Teheran, FDR met Dwight Eisenhower at Tunis. The president was scarcely seated in the automobile when he said: “Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.”

General Marshall had expected to receive this choicest of all commands, and Roosevelt had planned to give it to him. But he finally decided that Marshall could not be spared, telling him: “I could not sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.”

Eisenhower, fifty-four years old, was probably the best possible choice. He was not a combat commander, but he was able to build consensus and cooperation among two quite different sorts of armies and officers. He quelled disputes and animosities by reason and with what Max Hastings called an “extraordinary generosity of spirit to his difficult subordinates.”

Eisenhower secured British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder as his deputy. He had hoped to get General Alexander, whom the Americans liked despite his critical views of American soldiers, as British ground commander. But Alan Brooke favored Montgomery, and Churchill, deciding he needed Alexander in the Mediterranean, gave Montgomery the job. For American ground commander, Eisenhower selected Omar Bradley, a stable, discreet, but colorless fifty-year-old West Pointer. Because the slapping incidents in Sicily had revealed a serious character flaw in George Patton, Eisenhower refused to consider him for any post higher than commanding an army.

An enormous buildup commenced in southern England, and by the spring of 1944 much of the country had become a vast military encampment. Tank and vehicle parks covered thousands of acres. Most obvious were the troops who made up one French, one Polish, three Canadian, fourteen British, and twenty American divisions.

To permit rehearsal of landings with live ammunition, the British evacuated the entire population of a 25-square-mile region along the Devonshire coast between Appledore and Woolacombe. Great tented cantonments arose in the assembly areas. The initial American landing force comprised 130,000 men, with 1.2 million more to follow in ninety days. With them would go 137,000 wheeled vehicles, 4,200 fully tracked vehicles, and 3,500 cannons. Also assembled were prodigious amounts of supplies. Each American soldier in Normandy got six and one-quarter pounds of rations a day, each German three and one-third. On the other hand, a German rifle company's small-arms ammunition scale was 56,000 rounds, an American company's 21,000.