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I thought we would find them waiting for us. We really surprised the Boche this time, just when we were set for a big show. —Lt. Frederick Speyer With the fall of Naples and the German withdrawal to the Volturno Line, the battle for Italy entered its third phase—the drive to Rome. Unaware that on October 4 Hitler had ordered Field Marshal Albert Kesselring to delay the Allied advance as long as possible at the Volturno Line, Allied commanders Gen. Harold Alexander and Gen. Mark Clark were optimistic about crossing the Trigno and the Volturno rivers and advancing to the Italian capital. However, they had underestimated the difficulty of fighting in the rugged mountains of central Italy in the rain and mud of an Italian autumn.1 The Allies’ five-pronged attack on the Volturno Line, originally set for October 9, was delayed by the weather succinctly described by VI Corps commander Gen. John P. Lucas in his diary as “Rain, rain, rain.” When the operation actually got under way, Allied units were able to crack the Volturno Line, compelling Kesselring to withdraw his troops slowly to the Barbara Line, which marked part of the Bernhardt Line, or in Allied parlance, the Winter Line. But as the fighting continued into November, British Eighth Army troops, exhausted from almost a year of steady combat, found themselves stalled before the Bernhardt Line. Troops of the U.S. Third Division were also stymied in their mission to capture the formidable Mignano Gap, and the U.S. Thirty-fourth and Forty-fifth Divisions found fighting in the rugged mountains slow going. “Conditions on the mountain tops were appalling,” Gen. Lucian Truscott recalled. “All supply was by man and mules, much of it by man. CasualCHAPTER 13 OPERATION SHINGLE THE ANZIO LANDINGS r-Tomblin 13.qx2 6/30/04 1:17 PM Page 315 ties had to be carried out on litters, which required hours in many cases. Hot food was out of the question. Incessant cold rain not only added to discomfort, it reduced visibility almost to nothing, interfered with the scheduled air support, and vastly increased the difficulties of attacking troops.” Fifth Army commander Mark Clark later wrote, “In this period , when the foul November weather and the German delaying tactics made the going tough, we continually were reviewing the situation in an effort to find ways to speed up our advance.” But finally, on November 15, Clark reluctantly gave up and operations temporarily ground to a halt. The pause gave the troops, especially the exhausted Third and Fifty-sixth Divisions, an opportunity to regroup and reorganize.2 On November 20, Prime Minister Churchill and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lord Alanbrooke, joined President Roosevelt in Cairo for another conference of Allied leaders, code-named Sextant. After four days of discussion, however, they were unable reach any real decisions on policy, in part because the Americans preferred to wait until after their meeting with Joseph Stalin at Tehran. The American and British parties then flew six and a half hours to the Tehran Conference, which began on November 28. Stalin expressed concern that Operation Overlord, the long awaited cross-Channel attack, be executed on May 1, 1944, as planned. The Americans agreed that all other operations were subsidiary to Overlord, but Churchill pressed the Allies to capture Rome, induce Turkey to enter the war, aid Yugoslav partisans, and invade either southern France or the Ljubljana Gap in 1944.3 By the conclusion of the Tehran Conference two days later, the conferees had agreed on several key issues. They confirmed Overlord for May, agreed on an invasion of southern France when sufficient landing craft became available, and scheduled a Russian offensive for spring. In addition, the British secured from their American colleagues a major concession—the continuation of the Italian campaign to the capture of Rome and retention of sixty-eight LSTs in the Mediterranean until midJanuary 1944.4 However, by the end of November neither army in Italy had made much progress toward their goal, Rome. British advances had stalled against German positions north of the Sangro River, and the Americans had fared no better against the well-entrenched Germans in the mountainous countryside that barred the Liri valley and guarded Route 6, the only interior road to Rome. German units had also blocked the only other highway north, Route 7, which ran along the coast past Terracina.5 Hoping to break the stalemate, General Clark revived an idea first...

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