On May 13th, the Hard-fought North African campaign was won by the allies.
Despite the fact the German general Erwin Rommel was one of the best who ever lived,
Nazi high command had decided they couldn’t sustain a battlefront in Africa
and decided to withdraw troops back to Europe for a desperate defense for the Motherland.
The allies were now knocking at the door, and strategists faced two options on what they should
do with their new foothold and forces in North Africa. They faced a choice of either moving their
troops north and buffing up the planned Normandy invasions, or they open a second Front in Italy,
hoping to slowly but surely squeeze the Germans to their defeat. As history tells, the allies chose
the second option, with this option almost proving disastrous for the invading force.
First things first, I don’t think the Italian campaign gets much
recognition at all. Although Normandy, rightfully so, was the main event,
the Italian theatre of the war was just as important and correspondingly so,
the Germans sent a huge force under Erwin Rommel and Albert Kesserling to defend thee
country at all costs, a country I might add, that had only just surrendered to the allies.
After months of planning, the first wave of attacks started in the toe of Italy
on the 3rd of September under General Bernard Montgomery. The Germans however,
were not expecting an attack to the South and frankly didn’t find it important, and
the allies who landed there were met with little to no resistance at all. With that said however,
the Germans were preparing for an invasion of the mainland, and had dug themselves in at Salerno,
a spot they figured would make perfect sense for the allies to attack. And proving them right,
on the 9th of September 1943, the American Fifth Army under Commander Mark Clark did indeed attack
the little town just South of Naples, and it was absolute bloodshed from the get go.
Although, the British army to South had opened up another Front in Italy, they would take a while
to reach the Allies, and their progress was being slowed by increasing German resistance.
The yanks were on their own, for now anyway. After 2 weeks vicious fighting on the beachfront
of Italy, on the 9th of September it was looking like the allies had finally won their
extremely important beach head at Salerno. The Germans however had no plan to let the
beach head go so easily, and on the 12th of September, Kesserling’s forces struck back
with such a furious counter-attack that Commander Mark Clarke was about to call
of the entire invasion and withdraw his troops entirely. The casualties were dire.
Just as all hope seemed lost and the ocean was running red, because of the over 2000 allied
airstrikes and repeated bombardment by offshore Navy ships, the desperate German counter-attack
was stemmed and Albert Kesserling decided he simply did not have enough Luftwaffe support to
push the allies back and send them fleeing, even though he was so close to doing it.
Although by some miracle, the 5th army had just barely survived their landing at Salerno and
established a foothold on the country, German resistance stayed stubborn all the way up until
the end of the war in 1945. Richard Plunkett, an American Sailor present on a U.S light cruiser
as the invasion was taking place stated in his diary that “The Fifth Army would have
been pushed back to the ocean if it had not been for the Navy”, and he was most definitely right,
as it could be argued that the German defense in Italy was the most stubborn of the war,
partly due to the fact that military genius Erwin Rommel helped orchestrate the defense,
even though his loyalties had all but shrivelled up by 1944.
So guys, that was a taster of the first moments of the invasion on the Italian mainland at Palmero,
and I don’t think calling it a miracle is a hyperbole, as from all historical reports,
that beach head was a nightmare to take and was defended by some of the Wehrmachts
most experienced soldiers, something every allied soldier feared to face. To put it into
perspective, the invasions at Normandy, although brutal, were not defended by the Wehrmacht’s best
due to ingenious British intelligence that diverted them mainly to the south of France.
This allowed the allied landing forces at the majority of the beaches to gather a clean foothold
before facing the best troops of the Germans, a luxury not afforded in the Italian campaign.
Be sure to let me know if you want to hear more about the Italian campaign or even North African
campaign as there are a tonne of stories nestled in these battlefronts that are rarely told.
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