A Ridge and a Pass

General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery's Eighth led with a crack at the Germans' Adriatic jaw. General Mark Clark's Fifth Army followed with a smash at the Tyrrhenian side. Both blows were aimed ultimately at Rome, where the Allies had once hoped to be before Christmas.

One from the Eighth. Montgomery attacked in the Montgomery manner. On a bridgehead across the swollen Sangro River he massed his British, Indian and New Zealand troops, some still bearing the tan of Africa and Sicily. Then he lined up his artillery. All one day the guns thundered; between breakfast and tea 50,000 shells gouged the Germans crouching behind mines and barbed wire on the ridge above the valley. Clearing weather enabled the Allied Tactical Air Force to help: nine waves of light bombers, 50 formations of fighters and fighter-bombers raked the enemy positions.

The Eighth's veterans said that the barrage reminded them of El Alamein. Under its shield they went forward and uphill, overran a heavy line of Jerry dugouts and trenches, took hundreds of prisoners. Elated Monty sent his men congratulations: "In two days you wrested from the enemy the ridge . . . which was the whole framework of [his] winter line on the Adriatic. . . . A very fine performance."

From captured Sangro Ridge the Eighth ground on. By week's end they had advanced ten miles, were 14 miles from Pescara, where the shortest transpeninsular roads cut westward through the Apennines toward Rome. But the Germans were by no means routed along the Adriatic. They had nasty machine-gun nests on every roadside slope up to Pescara. They posted expendables in every village. They counterattacked; at one place, Orsogna, they turned back an Eighth spearhead.

Two from the Fifth. The Fifth Army's problem was not a ridge but a pass. Through a break in the mountains around Mignano, 15 miles inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea, runs a main highway to Rome, known since ancient days as the Via Casilina. Entrenched on 3,000-ft. height overlooking the Mignano gate, the Germans had stalemated General Clark's weather-logged British and American troops for almost a month.

Now the Fifth, like the Eighth, laid down a barrage, the most concentrated of the Italian campaign. All one day 300 Allied planes shuttled between their south Italian runways and the narrow mountain sector around Mignano, gave the Germans a galling taste of nonstop bombing and strafing. At 5:30 p.m. the land guns opened up, did not rest during the night.

When the Fifth's infantry, operating mostly between midnight and dawn, began the tough job of mopping up the bald, craggy peaks, they came upon Germans stunned, demoralized, even driven insane by the barrage. But enough of the enemy remained to make Allied progress slow. There were hills here--Monastery, La Maggiore, La Difensa--that would go down in the infantry's memory with Tunisia's 609 and Long Stop.

Twelve for the Jerries. In the limited, painfully slow action the Allies were fighting in Italy, they were expending bombs and shells lavishly, men as thriftily as the German hills permitted. If the objective was to pin down German troops and German materiel while other, greater offensives were mounted elsewhere, the Allies were succeeding, to a limited extent. After the Nazis hurried reinforcements down from the north, Montgomery and Clark between them engaged some twelve enemy divisions--probably fewer than the Allies had in Italy, no more than the Germans had in guerrilla-torn Yugoslavia.

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