The Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 was envisaged as a swift push on Rome. Yet, as James Holland explains, by the end of the year, the campaign was stymied by German defences far from the capital
Jerry sending shells over. Deathly chatter of machine-guns. Rumbling of falling buildings.” Major Roy Durnford, padre of the Canadian Seaforth Highlanders, was writing his diary in a church in what remained of Ortona, a small town midway down Italy’s Adriatic coast. Ortona was by then a smashed wreck, as was the countryside immediately to the south. Just a few weeks earlier, this had been a lush region of vineyards and peaceful olive groves. Now it was a hell of churned-up mud, vines and tree stumps punctuated by scores of dead, bloated bodies, shattered buildings, grotesquely torn metal and blackened tank hulks. It was Christmas Day, 1943.
Durnford recorded those observations more than three months after Allied forces had launched their invasion of Italy with landings in Calabria and at Salerno, on the west coast, south-east of Naples. They had confidently expected to be masters of Rome by now, and for the front line to be at least 50 miles north of the capital. Yet even adjusted ambitions had not been met. Two days later, on 27 December, the wreck of Ortona would finally be taken – still some way south of Pescara, the revised year-end target for the British Eighth Army.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, the Fifth Army – a multinational force of US, British and French troops under the command of US general Mark Clark – was also struggling to make much headway. At the beginning of November, it had come up against the first of two formidable German defensive lines. The Bernhardt Line – or Winter Line, as the Americans called it – across the peninsula was strongest at one of the very few routes through the mountains. This was the Mignano Gap, through which ran a railway line and the Via Casilina – Highway 6 – from Naples to Rome. The long, low saddle of Monte Lungo sat in this gap, flanked by Monte Sammucro and Monte Camino standing sentinel like monstrous gate guardians, the former soaring well over 1,000m. Either side of these loomed a phalanx of yet more mountains – huge, forbidding, seemingly impassable.
The Bernhardt Line had finally been broken 10 days before Ortona fell – but only after
