World Battlefronts: Forli’s Fall

Forli is an ancient, undistinguished town in Italy’s Romagna region, where Benito Mussolini first preached socialism, and only ten miles from where he was born. Last week it became the first important capture in Italy in more than seven weeks. With it into Allied hands passed the first airfield in the northern Italian plain, soon to be cleared of its battle litter of smashed tanks, dead horses and men.

Punishing weather in Italy had lightened a little, permitted the British Eighth Army, struggling northwest from Rimini toward Bologna, to batter the Germans out of their trenches and from behind rivers and canals. Then, as troops captured Forli and stalled again before German defense lines, a fall of unseasonable snow dropped a white curtain over the advance.

Limited as it was, the surge forward marked the arrival of the new Eighth Army commander, severe, demanding Lieut. General Sir Richard L. McCreery, by reputation a more daring operator than his predecessor. Lieut. General Sir Oliver W. H. Leese. McCreery, a good friend of the Fifth Army’s Lieut. General Mark Clark (they even sign their official correspondence “Dick” and “Mark”), will probably enforce closer cooperation with the Fifth.

For Clark and many of his men it was now the third year of active fighting. Some of the soldiers now patrolling in the heights of the Apennines had landed in North Africa Nov. 8, 1942. They had been blooded in the African campaign, tempered in the attack on Sicily, pounded into tough, battlewise, battle-weary veterans in the painful crawl up the Italian boot. As the third year began there was still the hard prospect of another winter on the bitter soil of Italy.