ISBN 988 1 4728 5569 5
It was called Italy’s ‘Little Stalingrad’, the battle for Ortona on the Adriatic coast. Some 350 Fallschirmjäger and non-combatant elements fought two battalions of 1st Canadian Division supported by Shermans of Three Rivers Regiment, part of British Eighth Army. Rubble pile blocked roads diverted attackers into ‘killing zones’; defenders infiltrated through underground tunnels to re-occupy buildings. Booby-trapped house entrances and machine-gun swept streets were circumvented by ‘mouseholing’ - blowing holes through walls between adjacent buildings.
After nine days of street fighting the Germans withdrew. Typically these Italian battles were brigade and company level encounters and handfuls of tanks battling in difficult terrain. Elsewhere, in the assault against the Bernhardt (Winter) Line, one of three German defence lines across the narrowest part of mountainous central Italy, there was equally tough fighting.
At San Pietro Infine close to the Mignano Gap, US Fifth Army troops and tanks and attached Italian 1° Raggruppamento Motorizzato fought for dominating mountain peaks and narrow roads among terraced olive groves against panzers and panzergrenadiers of XIV.Panzer-Korps, eventually capturing the town after several battles; but Cassino lay ahead. New Zealand 2nd Division supported by New Zealand 4th Armoured Brigade Shermans, after numerous attempts, failed to take Orsogna; the town fell May 1944. After making good progress advancing north through Italy, Allied commanders confidently expected to be in Rome by Christmas 1943, but someone had erred – it would be 1944.