A Death in San Pietro by Tim Brady

Author:Tim Brady [Brady, Tim]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780306822155
Publisher: Da Capo Press

THE POSITIONS of the German Panzer troops stood squarely in front of the Fifth Army at Caserta. It was here that the American divisions that had swept through Sicily—the 3rd, the 34th, the 45th— took the lead in the October fight in Italy. Lucian Truscott’s 3rd Division stepped off on October 13 and soon splashed into the Volturno itself. To their left flank, nearer the Tyrrhenian Coast, British divisions from the X Corps headed out through the boggy and mine-filled grounds.

With virtually every bridge across the meandering river blown, Truscott found it was easier to get troops across the river than his tanks and other vehicles. The Volturno flowed in a winding northeast-to-southwest direction, at a slight angle to Truscott’s northerly march. The river snaked back on itself so often that in order for troops to move forward in some semblance of a straight line, they had to cross and re-cross the river, as if they were working their way up a coiled spring. That meant that engineers were forced to bridge and re-bridge the river as well. Engineers worked feverishly to construct and keep open the flow of vehicle traffic over the Volturno even as German artillery landed around their labors. Despite all of the difficulties, by the afternoon of October 14, a good flow of equipment was streaming across the river.

It wasn’t the river alone that provided engineering challenges for Lucian Truscott’s advance. Cold, wet weather moved into the region and settled, soon making a quagmire of the low-lying areas leading up to the first line of hills north of the Volturno. Allied vehicles using the limited number of roads heading northeast towards Rome were either mired in mud, or susceptible to German sabotage. They had mined everything. Or as British High Commander Harold Alexander put it, “All roads lead to Rome, but all roads are mined.”6

The Volturno and its tributaries kept overflowing their banks in the autumn rain, destroying just built Allied pontoon bridges and the corduroy roads that had been constructed to negotiate the mire. The Germans blocked village streets by blowing up stone buildings; they cratered roads; they hid mines on footpaths and farm trails, river fords and back alleys. The mines didn’t just slow vehicle traffic: they took their toll on the infantry as well. Booby traps took life and limb. The muck and mire sapped spirit. Every step forward was slowed either by mud or the need for caution.

For all the headaches and difficulties, the push north of the Volturno toward the mountains, slowly continued. The Germans yielded ground, delaying but not halting the Allied advance, allowing it closer to those hills, where even as Truscott and his divisions came nearer, the Germans were fine-tuning their next impediments at the Bernhardt Line.

Since early October, the Germans had stripped the village of San Pietro of its manpower and draft animals to labor on defenses. Two hundred men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were forced to haul supplies up the mountains and build entrenchments for the Germans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.