BATTLE OF ITALY: In Hannibal’s Camp

General Mark Clark’s British-American Fifth Army put on its raincoats. Day after day, as the Yanks and Tommies sloshed northward from Naples, the sky drenched the earth. The flat, brown Campania, hard and powder-dusty a fortnight ago, softened into a mire. Rivers swelled, spilled into the meadows along their banks.

Skillful German rearguards fitted the rains into the pattern of delaying action. Mines under the firm roads forced Allied columns to flounder in the gumbo beside the highways. Demolition charges toppled bridges into angry streams. Shielded by low clouds from strafing planes, the rear guards huddled in orchards and behind stone walls, sniped viciously with rifle, machine gun and mortar.

The muddy, determined Fifth inched forward, mopped up the hard knots of resistance. One day it trudged into steepled Capua, where Hannibal and his Carthaginians had wintered after slaughtering the Romans at Cannae. There Mark Clark’s men stood in a strategic bend of the Volturno River. Across 200 yards of rushing water lay the German line. By week’s end the Fifth had moved up to the Volturno on both sides of Capua, along a front stretching 40 miles inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea. Patrols nudged across the stream, engaged the enemy in sharp skirmishes.

The Germans might here be ready to make their first major stand since Salerno. They had now fallen back 20 miles north of Naples, 105 miles south of Rome.

Touch & Go. General Sir Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army had leapfrogged by sea up the Adriatic to Termoli. The amphibious landing in their rear had caught the Germans by surprise, so completely that a major had been captured in bed. The enemy’s next reaction had been alarm, for the Eighth’s rapid advance could develop into a flank attack against the Germans on the peninsula’s other side. From the Volturno front Field Marshal Albert Kesselring rushed the 16th Armored Division, veteran of Stalingrad and Salerno, to counterattack at Termoli.

For two days it was touch & go. The Germans tried to drive the Eighth’s amphibious column back into the sea. Their tanks crunched into Termoli, came within 200 yards of the railway station, where British headquarters and a field hospital were pitched. The show was at its stickiest when suddenly British tank reinforcements appeared, broke the German assault.

By week’s end the Eighth had consolidated its hold on Termoli. One hundred and thirty miles across Italy’s boot lay the hills of Rome.

Hit & Run. The Allied divisions in Italy had reached an estimated 20, numbering 300,000 troops. The Germans appeared to have 20 to 25 divisions, totaling 300,000 to 375,000 men, with the bulk posted above Rome. For both sides there were perils behind the lines.

> The Allies contended with delayed-action mines planted by the retreating enemy and set to explode any time within three weeks. In Naples these infernal contraptions blew up the post office and other buildings; hundreds of Italian civilians, dozens of Allied soldiers were killed or injured.

> The Germans contended with a slowly organizing Italian guerrilla force, most active in the woods and mountains of northern Italy. They might not yet be a major threat to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s garrisons. But they diverted German troops badly needed elsewhere, and they were growing. They were led by Italian Army officers, stiffened by escaped British prisoners of war, aided by the countryside’s peasantry. They controlled villages ungarrisoned by the enemy. They sabotaged rail and road communications vital to German transport. Against them the Nazis rallied the bedraggled remnant of Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts, decreed the death penalty. In Italy, too, the Germans were fighting a two-front war.