Fifth Army in Italy 1943–1945: A Coalition at War

325 Pages·2014·5.89 MB·English

by  Blackwell

First published in Great Britain in 2012
By Pen and Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen and Sword Books Ltd
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Barnsley
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Copyright © Ian Blackwell, 2012
9781783032440

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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - Rome
Notes
PART I - BUILDING A COALITION
CHAPTER 2 - Coalition Warfare
CHAPTER 3 - The British Commonwealth
CHAPTER 4 - The Americans
CHAPTER 5 - The French
PART II - THE COALITION AT WAR
CHAPTER 6 - The Commanders
CHAPTER 7 - The Fifth US Army
CHAPTER 8 - Naples to Cassino
CHAPTER 9 - Cassino to Rome
CHAPTER 10 - The Road to the Alps
CHAPTER 11 - Endnote
ANNEX - Coalition Warfare: The Nationalities that Fought for the Allied
Cause in Italy
Bibliography
Index
Photographs used in the plate section are from the United States National
Archives.
Introduction
There is a widespread perception that the Second World War was fought
between two groups of partners: on one side, the Germans, Italians and Japanese
- the Axis; and opposing them the British, Americans and Russians - the Allies.
This somewhat limited view is even more restricted by some of the school
textbooks used in the United Kingdom, where coverage of what was essentially
the most destructive war in history has been reduced to a comparatively few
pages.1
Part of the reason for this brevity lies with the designers of the examination
syllabus, of course, who have to be selective about what can be crammed into a
limited amount of classroom time and the relative priority of competing
historical topics, but the net result has been to leave the majority of today’s
school-leavers with a woefully inadequate understanding of events which have
shaped the world in which they now live. A degree of parochialism is inevitable
when students from a particular country are taught what their forefathers did
over sixty years ago; still more so when history is being used for nationalistic
and political purposes. By and large, spokesmen are inclined to portray their
home states in the most positive and sometimes heroic light, and one way of
doing this is to ensure that only the ‘official’ version of history is taught.
Nonetheless, the net result can be a general ignorance of the extent to which the
conflict was a ‘world’ war, covering not only great geographical areas but also
involving people from a large number of nations.
Several years’ experience of organizing battlefield studies for the British
Army has driven home the fact that it is all too easy to make assumptions about
the level of background knowledge of even the most senior officers, let alone
that of youthful junior ranks fresh from school. I include myself in the former
category - senior in age, if not in rank - for in preparing briefing packages for
battlefield studies, the limitations of my own knowledge became ever clearer.
The number of nationalities that fought in the Italian campaign grew with each
book and official history I read, and the ‘soundbite’ approach to history served
up by many accounts became ever more inadequate. Far from having two
armies, the British Eighth and the American Fifth, composed of British and
armies, the British Eighth and the American Fifth, composed of British and
American soldiers respectively, slogging their way northwards up the leg of
Italy, there were many contingents from other nationalities playing their part in
the fighting. The armies were not ‘British’ or ‘American’ except in name and in
the nationalities of the commanders. The exact number of different countries that
contributed men and women to the Allied cause in this campaign is far from
straightforward to determine. Since the war ended boundaries have been
redefined; for example the India that existed in 1943-45 is now three countries:
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Newfoundland was a dominion in its own right
until it became part of Canada in 1949, and what were then colonies of the
United Kingdom and France - with the variations in government that each power
employed for their overseas possessions - are now largely independent and often
with different names. Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ has swept through more
than Africa since the end of the Second World War.
That there were many nationalities involved is of more than academic interest.
Their presence brought all sorts of difficulties for leadership, administration,
command, control and communication, and just about every other facet of
warfighting. The war in Italy has often attracted the comment that it was hard-
fought, frustrating, and possibly irrelevant to final victory. To appreciate why
this observation should have been made, it is necessary to understand the nature
of coalition warfare - and in Italy during the last two years of the Second World
War those who opposed the Germans were a coalition of an unprecedented
number of nations. Their experiences have become increasingly relevant for
today’s armed forces during the past few years as reliance on allies has grown,
and the topic has engendered many battlefield study discussions for today’s
officers.
The reason that coalition operations should be regarded as relevant today is
straightforward: the end of the Cold War led NATO members to reduce the
strength of their armed forces, using the diminished threat of a major conflict as
the stated reason, which - particularly since the economic downturn after the turn
of the twentieth century - was more accurately explained by financial
constraints. It is extremely unlikely that the individual European members of
NATO will again be capable of acting independently in anything other than the
smallest of conflicts, but for several years after the process of contraction began
they were able to look to the United States for leadership and the provision of
the great bulk of manpower, matériel and capability resources. The post-Cold
War heritage was to leave the Europeans with comparatively immobile armed
forces that were located on or near the anticipated battlegrounds on which they
would have faced the Warsaw Pact, while the Americans retained the ability to
deploy significant troop numbers swiftly across the Atlantic to man and to
deploy significant troop numbers swiftly across the Atlantic to man and to
reinforce pre-positioned equipment. Becoming involved in conflicts such as Iraq
and Afghanistan highlighted the differences in the ability of NATO’s European
partners to project their power overseas.
Many of the European nations have been accused of relying upon the United
States to provide their defences while they were able to reduce their expenditure
in that area: in terms of the Alliance, they have not been pulling their weight. As
long as Americans were relatively content to play the leading role and saw their
own interests as being furthered this situation was broadly acceptable, but
changing international and strategic circumstances since the invasion of Kuwait
in 1990, and then the events of 11 September 2001, which turned American
attention from Europe to the Middle East, combined with the rise of Chinese
power, have led them to redefine their priorities. The commitment of great
manpower and equipment resources to Western Europe has been questioned
when America is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and having to look at a
potential threat across the Pacific Ocean, and the other NATO members are
being asked to play a greater part in the affairs that affect them directly. The
2011 Libyan situation is a prime example of this growing American reluctance
to be drawn into events which they see as being increasingly the responsibility of
the Europeans - or at least, that the Europeans should not be able to start a
conflict and automatically rely upon their transatlantic partner for the means to
carry it out. That Britain pushed for intervention in Libya within months of
making heavy defence cuts under the Strategic Defence and Security Review,
which was published on 19 October 2010 highlights the point; that Britain
continued to announce defence cuts before the country’s involvement in
Afghanistan and Libya was resolved raises the highlight to a glare.
The combined effect of reduced national military capabilities and pressure for
individual nations to play their full part in operations which affect their security
leads almost inevitably to a greater cooperation between those states, a
cooperation which encompasses training, equipment procurement, operational
procedures, and so on. Reduced budgets lead to reduced capabilities, which in
turn lead to a degree of reliance on partners to fill the gaps in the armoury. Some
progress has been made in areas such as joint equipment development, but
improvement has been sporadic. Against the imperative for co-ordination and
cooperation other interests come into play, such as pressures to maintain national
defence industries rather than purchase equipment from other countries. While
pooling and sharing resources may appear commonsensical and beneficial, they
are not always seen in those lights by powerful interest groups in the individual
countries, and politicians seeking re-election are unlikely to sacrifice votes by