At War on the Gothic Line by Christian Jennings

Author:Christian Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466871731
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

The Allied Advance Stalls

Then autumn suddenly played its hand. The rains came. In a foretaste of the winter that was to come, the hot Italian summer broke and the troops in and around Rimini were flooded and half drowned under characteristically Italian torrential rain. Half a month’s rainfall seemed to drop out of the sky in four hours. The sandy, red loam of the vineyards turned to a fine liquid glue. The roads submerged in mud: the earth could not cope with the water and the huge traffic of tanks, self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers, trucks, scout cars, and jeeps of two modern armies at war. Small soggy lakes formed on the flat fields. The soldiers were sodden. Moving tanks became almost impossible—although the German Panthers and Tigers, with their wider tracks, had a slight advantage over the Allied Churchills and Shermans. The dried-up streams and white stony riverbeds that zigzagged across the battlefield now roared full of water. A Canadian artillery officer saw the transformation from hot and dry to wet and cold as instantaneous:

We sought shelter in Italian houses or barns. Some fellows dug holes in small haystacks which were often set on fire by German tracer bullets. Some tank troopers took shelter from shell fire and rain by sleeping under their tanks only to have the tank slowly sink into the mud at night and pin them underneath. We tried digging shallow fox holes about 18 inches deep to escape the shrapnel only to have the hole fill with water during the night. The rains lasted about a week and it was a hellish time. We never had dry clothes or feet. Every day we hoped that we would come down with jaundice which meant we would be shipped back to a hospital for several weeks. The outbreak of jaundice was severe and upwards of 100 O.R.’s [other ranks] and officers were evacuated. Some of our men “cracked up” and had to be taken out of the line. Still others thought that shooting themselves in the foot would be a way of getting into the hospital. When the rains finally quit and the hot dry weather returned, the 8th Army, including our 5th Canadian Armoured Division, reopened the offensive. Our objective was Coriano Ridge.”6

Between August 26 and September 4, the Canadians—including the Westminsters—moved their 1st Infantry and 5th Armoured Divisions forward fifteen miles. They were halted by three things. First, by the main body of the German artillery and infantry reinforcements dug in on the two ridges at Coriano and San Fortunato. The Allies couldn’t move toward Rimini before these two pieces of high ground were taken because the German guns could reach out across the whole Allied axis of advance. The San Fortunato Ridge also prevented them from exploiting north and west of Rimini into the plains of Lombardy. The bulk of the German Gothic Line defenses outside Rimini were on these two stretches of high ground. Second, the Adriatic coastal road and the suburb of Riccione were heavily defended by the 1st German Parachute Division.

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