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Chapter X: Tipping the Balance, December 1941-April 1943.
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During the First Washington Conference in December 1941/January 1942 – attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and the ambassadors of the USSR, Italy, and France – the US agreed to a “Europe first” policy to the relief of London, Moscow, Rome and Paris. They, however, disagreed about the approach. Western Allied commanders, other than the Americans, still espoused Churchill’s vision, which consisted of breaking out into the Po Valley and the Venetian-Friulian Plain. This would be followed by an assault on the Lubljana Gap and a breakout into the Slovenian Plateau, after which the Allies could move on to Vienna and Prague, cutting the Reich in half (as well as keeping the Soviets out of Central Europe). During the Second Washington Conference in June 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt made the Italian front the main priority. In August 1942, Churchill and US special envoy William Averell Harriman arrived in Moscow to motivate the choice of the Western Allies for a campaign via Italy to a frustrated Stalin. The paranoid Soviet tyrant wanted a front in northern France to relieve his beleaguered forces sooner rather than later. At this point, however, that just wasn’t an option.
To compensate for the absence of a new front in France, the British and Americans stepped up their strategic bombing campaign, using Corsica and Sardinia as large, unsinkable aircraft carriers. They allowed for bombing raids on southern Germany while raids on western Germany could continue from British airfields, forcing the Luftwaffe to disperse its defensive forces further. For example, the first raid launched from Sardinia took off on August 8th 1942 and targeted Ulm, devastating the city centre as well as some barracks, supply depots and the lorry factories of Magirus-Deutz and Kässbohrer (hampering the production of both trucks and the necessary spare parts that were desperately needed in the east). Secondly, some PBY Catalina maritime patrol seaplanes and B-24 Liberator medium bombers were allocated to Corsica and Sardinia and further diminished the already modest U-boat presence in the western Mediterranean (when compared to the Atlantic Ocean). The most important strategic aspect, however, was that southern France, the Italian Tyrrhenian, the Italian Adriatic and the Yugoslav coasts were completely open to invasion. German commanders had little clues as to where the anticipated Allied invasion would come, more so with Allied disinformation, and they had to spread out their forces.
German lines were heavily defended, including 75, 88 and a handful of 105 mm anti-tank guns dug in as casemates (which were very effective against Allied tanks). The Allies launched several offensives to capture the Futa and Il Giogo passes in early 1942 to break out into the Po Valley, but German defences proved to be too strong to breach with a simple frontal assault. They were designed with plenty of tank traps, obstacles, overlapping fields of fire etc. and were hard to hit by air attack, quickly reducing this to a war of attrition like the one the Italians had fought before in WW I. The Comando Supremo had no interest in a repeat of that demoralizing, exhausting slugging match and neither did other Western military leaders. Mussolini proposed the use of chemical weapons to force a breakthrough, but the other Western leaders didn’t want to open up that particular can of worms. Besides their fear of retaliation, they remembered how ineffective chemical weapons had been at breaking the stalemate in WW I. So the solution was to go around German defences in Italy rather than through them by landing an amphibious force behind them, which would also give the Allies a practice run for a future landing in France. It was as Kesselring feared, but Hitler chose to believe a trickle of false Allied intelligence – sizeable enough to be noticed, but not big enough to appear obviously false – concerning a landing at the Pas-de-Calais and waved away any evidence to the contrary.
The Allied offensive was codenamed Operation Sword Bearer and encompassed a landing at Rimini, on the extreme southern edge of the Po Valley, Rimini being the most suitable port in the province of Romagna, Mussolini’s home province (which, in turn, had been identified as a much more optimal landing area than the largely mountainous province of Liguria). It commenced at 5:00 AM on November 15th 1942 with the first major Allied airborne operation, conducted by the US 82nd Airborne Division. The 82nd had only been recalled to active service in March 1942 and was rushed to the Italian front in October 1942: it was therefore mostly composed of soldiers with no combat experience whatsoever, and commanding officer Major General Ridgway complained that he had been given insufficient time to prepare his men for this assignment (only seven months). The parachutists were dispersed by the wind and grossly overshot their landing zones, but they performed beyond expectations and maximized their opportunities, attacking patrols and creating confusion wherever possible.
At 6:00 AM, 110.000 men landed which were spearheaded by 35.000 US troops commanded by General Patton, interspersed with three elite, veteran Italian assault brigades. A true baptism of fire it was not because the 15 kilometre long and 200 metre wide beach was only lightly defended by a handful of machine gun posts and 37 mm anti-tank guns protected by little more than sand bags. There were some 50 mm PaK 38 and some 75 mm PaK anti-tank guns, a few minefields and some bunkers around strategic locations, but there were huge undefended gaps in between. German defences were in fact planned to be completed in 1944, and even that was doubtful, which meant that in many cases Allied soldiers could just walk off the beach. The only trouble came at the port of Rimini because the Germans had built a number of pillboxes and casemates to protect it. But there was little that the mighty 381 mm (15 inch) guns of battleships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto couldn’t take care of. Indeed, the Regia Marina provided plentiful artillery support while aircraft carriers HMS Eagle and USS Ranger provided air cover.
When Hitler got out of his bedroom past noon at the Berghof after a serious migraine attack, the Allies had already established a beachhead that was 15 kilometres wide and two kilometres deep. Hitler ordered an immediate counterattack and the Allies got to deal with Tiger tanks for the first time. The Tigers scored some spectacular tactical victories against M4 Shermans, but they didn’t push the Allies back into the sea, not surprising since the Allies were backed up by devastating naval gunfire and major air support. German resistance was nonetheless much more fierce than expected and it took the Allies an entire week to take Cesena (a city about 30 kilometres from Rimini that was planned to have been captured within 36 hours). The Allies renewed their offensive against the Futa and Il Giogo passes and seized them from the Germans. The Germans had to withdraw to avoid being outflanked by the troops that had landed at Rimini and were advancing north-westward to Bologna. The decisive breakthrough had finally been achieved, but poor winter weather from December onward made armoured manoeuvres and the exploitation of air superiority impossible. Kesselring, who had replaced Von Manstein, withdrew in good order to a line that followed the Reno River and then the foothills of the Apennines before swinging south and ending just east of Genoa. Rimini, Ravenna, Faenza, Forli, Bologna and La Spezia had been liberated by late 1942.
In the meantime, in December 1942, the Soviets had recovered from the massive losses sustained in the summer in a way that only such a giant country could. They launched the massive Dnieper-Dniester Offensive Operation in Ukraine against a Wehrmacht weakened by a successful Soviet defensive campaign that had swamped the Germans with superior numbers. Over 1.5 million troops, 20.000 artillery guns, 2.000 armoured fighting vehicles and 2.750 aircraft of the Red Army stood opposite 1 million men, 12.000 guns, 1.500 AFVs and 1.800 aircraft. The German frontline was overwhelmed by parallel as well as successive attacks – in line with the Deep Battle doctrine – and the Germans were driven across the Dnieper in days with the Soviets hot behind them. After that Red Army troops skated across the river, which had frozen solid due to temperatures as low as -25 °C, and established beachheads north and south of Kiev. The counterattack ordered by Hitler failed to dislodge these beachheads, which continued to grow, and in February 1943 the Red Army finally liberated Kiev, the third largest city of the USSR. The Germans commanded by Von Manstein conducted a brilliant riposte at Zhytomir in late February, in part due to overextended Soviet supply lines. The reprieve was short and in another two months time, the Red Army advanced to the Dniester River, liberating an area bigger than France and reaching the doorstep of Romania. The balance had decisively been tipped in favour of the Allies, for a large part due to the massive efforts of the USSR, which almost put those of the Western Allies to shame.
.Chapter X: Tipping the Balance, December 1941-April 1943.
By summer 1942, the Italian Campaign didn’t seem like it was going anywhere. During the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) meetings, constituted from the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, British and American officers had bitter arguments. The Americans wanted a landing in northern France in 1942 to complement the Red Army coming in from the east. They wanted to capture the ports of Cherbourg or Brest and hold the beachhead on the Cotentin Peninsula through the winter of 1942 and into 1943. It was a stratagem which British, Italian and French politicians and military commanders viewed as impractical and foolish for a number of reasons. In 1942, the Luftwaffe’s air superiority hadn’t been broken yet, amphibious warfare equipment wasn’t available in the necessary quantities, there weren’t enough troops, and adequate supplies were also absent. The British could have landed only six divisions at most, whereas the Germans had 25 divisions in Western Europe. Assuming it could be established in the first place, a beachhead on the Cotentin peninsula would be blocked off and attacked by land, sea and air. Cherbourg, the only suitable port would undoubtedly be mined, while aircraft and artillery would be expected to attack the town in strength, while German armoured forces were brought to bear.
During the First Washington Conference in December 1941/January 1942 – attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and the ambassadors of the USSR, Italy, and France – the US agreed to a “Europe first” policy to the relief of London, Moscow, Rome and Paris. They, however, disagreed about the approach. Western Allied commanders, other than the Americans, still espoused Churchill’s vision, which consisted of breaking out into the Po Valley and the Venetian-Friulian Plain. This would be followed by an assault on the Lubljana Gap and a breakout into the Slovenian Plateau, after which the Allies could move on to Vienna and Prague, cutting the Reich in half (as well as keeping the Soviets out of Central Europe). During the Second Washington Conference in June 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt made the Italian front the main priority. In August 1942, Churchill and US special envoy William Averell Harriman arrived in Moscow to motivate the choice of the Western Allies for a campaign via Italy to a frustrated Stalin. The paranoid Soviet tyrant wanted a front in northern France to relieve his beleaguered forces sooner rather than later. At this point, however, that just wasn’t an option.
To compensate for the absence of a new front in France, the British and Americans stepped up their strategic bombing campaign, using Corsica and Sardinia as large, unsinkable aircraft carriers. They allowed for bombing raids on southern Germany while raids on western Germany could continue from British airfields, forcing the Luftwaffe to disperse its defensive forces further. For example, the first raid launched from Sardinia took off on August 8th 1942 and targeted Ulm, devastating the city centre as well as some barracks, supply depots and the lorry factories of Magirus-Deutz and Kässbohrer (hampering the production of both trucks and the necessary spare parts that were desperately needed in the east). Secondly, some PBY Catalina maritime patrol seaplanes and B-24 Liberator medium bombers were allocated to Corsica and Sardinia and further diminished the already modest U-boat presence in the western Mediterranean (when compared to the Atlantic Ocean). The most important strategic aspect, however, was that southern France, the Italian Tyrrhenian, the Italian Adriatic and the Yugoslav coasts were completely open to invasion. German commanders had little clues as to where the anticipated Allied invasion would come, more so with Allied disinformation, and they had to spread out their forces.
German lines were heavily defended, including 75, 88 and a handful of 105 mm anti-tank guns dug in as casemates (which were very effective against Allied tanks). The Allies launched several offensives to capture the Futa and Il Giogo passes in early 1942 to break out into the Po Valley, but German defences proved to be too strong to breach with a simple frontal assault. They were designed with plenty of tank traps, obstacles, overlapping fields of fire etc. and were hard to hit by air attack, quickly reducing this to a war of attrition like the one the Italians had fought before in WW I. The Comando Supremo had no interest in a repeat of that demoralizing, exhausting slugging match and neither did other Western military leaders. Mussolini proposed the use of chemical weapons to force a breakthrough, but the other Western leaders didn’t want to open up that particular can of worms. Besides their fear of retaliation, they remembered how ineffective chemical weapons had been at breaking the stalemate in WW I. So the solution was to go around German defences in Italy rather than through them by landing an amphibious force behind them, which would also give the Allies a practice run for a future landing in France. It was as Kesselring feared, but Hitler chose to believe a trickle of false Allied intelligence – sizeable enough to be noticed, but not big enough to appear obviously false – concerning a landing at the Pas-de-Calais and waved away any evidence to the contrary.
The Allied offensive was codenamed Operation Sword Bearer and encompassed a landing at Rimini, on the extreme southern edge of the Po Valley, Rimini being the most suitable port in the province of Romagna, Mussolini’s home province (which, in turn, had been identified as a much more optimal landing area than the largely mountainous province of Liguria). It commenced at 5:00 AM on November 15th 1942 with the first major Allied airborne operation, conducted by the US 82nd Airborne Division. The 82nd had only been recalled to active service in March 1942 and was rushed to the Italian front in October 1942: it was therefore mostly composed of soldiers with no combat experience whatsoever, and commanding officer Major General Ridgway complained that he had been given insufficient time to prepare his men for this assignment (only seven months). The parachutists were dispersed by the wind and grossly overshot their landing zones, but they performed beyond expectations and maximized their opportunities, attacking patrols and creating confusion wherever possible.
At 6:00 AM, 110.000 men landed which were spearheaded by 35.000 US troops commanded by General Patton, interspersed with three elite, veteran Italian assault brigades. A true baptism of fire it was not because the 15 kilometre long and 200 metre wide beach was only lightly defended by a handful of machine gun posts and 37 mm anti-tank guns protected by little more than sand bags. There were some 50 mm PaK 38 and some 75 mm PaK anti-tank guns, a few minefields and some bunkers around strategic locations, but there were huge undefended gaps in between. German defences were in fact planned to be completed in 1944, and even that was doubtful, which meant that in many cases Allied soldiers could just walk off the beach. The only trouble came at the port of Rimini because the Germans had built a number of pillboxes and casemates to protect it. But there was little that the mighty 381 mm (15 inch) guns of battleships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto couldn’t take care of. Indeed, the Regia Marina provided plentiful artillery support while aircraft carriers HMS Eagle and USS Ranger provided air cover.
When Hitler got out of his bedroom past noon at the Berghof after a serious migraine attack, the Allies had already established a beachhead that was 15 kilometres wide and two kilometres deep. Hitler ordered an immediate counterattack and the Allies got to deal with Tiger tanks for the first time. The Tigers scored some spectacular tactical victories against M4 Shermans, but they didn’t push the Allies back into the sea, not surprising since the Allies were backed up by devastating naval gunfire and major air support. German resistance was nonetheless much more fierce than expected and it took the Allies an entire week to take Cesena (a city about 30 kilometres from Rimini that was planned to have been captured within 36 hours). The Allies renewed their offensive against the Futa and Il Giogo passes and seized them from the Germans. The Germans had to withdraw to avoid being outflanked by the troops that had landed at Rimini and were advancing north-westward to Bologna. The decisive breakthrough had finally been achieved, but poor winter weather from December onward made armoured manoeuvres and the exploitation of air superiority impossible. Kesselring, who had replaced Von Manstein, withdrew in good order to a line that followed the Reno River and then the foothills of the Apennines before swinging south and ending just east of Genoa. Rimini, Ravenna, Faenza, Forli, Bologna and La Spezia had been liberated by late 1942.
In the meantime, in December 1942, the Soviets had recovered from the massive losses sustained in the summer in a way that only such a giant country could. They launched the massive Dnieper-Dniester Offensive Operation in Ukraine against a Wehrmacht weakened by a successful Soviet defensive campaign that had swamped the Germans with superior numbers. Over 1.5 million troops, 20.000 artillery guns, 2.000 armoured fighting vehicles and 2.750 aircraft of the Red Army stood opposite 1 million men, 12.000 guns, 1.500 AFVs and 1.800 aircraft. The German frontline was overwhelmed by parallel as well as successive attacks – in line with the Deep Battle doctrine – and the Germans were driven across the Dnieper in days with the Soviets hot behind them. After that Red Army troops skated across the river, which had frozen solid due to temperatures as low as -25 °C, and established beachheads north and south of Kiev. The counterattack ordered by Hitler failed to dislodge these beachheads, which continued to grow, and in February 1943 the Red Army finally liberated Kiev, the third largest city of the USSR. The Germans commanded by Von Manstein conducted a brilliant riposte at Zhytomir in late February, in part due to overextended Soviet supply lines. The reprieve was short and in another two months time, the Red Army advanced to the Dniester River, liberating an area bigger than France and reaching the doorstep of Romania. The balance had decisively been tipped in favour of the Allies, for a large part due to the massive efforts of the USSR, which almost put those of the Western Allies to shame.
- Onkel Willie
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