What Price Success?

Back home in the U.S., in Britain, barbed doubts arose over the Italian campaign. Was the Allied enterprise worth the cost? Had Allied strategy failed? Was it, as a carping British M.P. had said, "like an old man approaching a young bride: fascinated, sluggish, apprehensive?"

Up at the muddy mountain front, General Dwight Eisenhower himself played the part of apologist for the campaign which he was soon to leave for a bigger one. Flanked by the Fifth Army's Mark Clark and other high officers, the well-spoken man who was still Mediterranean commander in chief talked to correspondents. He took a swing at "armchair critics," then conceded that all had not gone according to plan. His argument covered familiar ground:

-- Sure, the Allies had hoped to be in Rome sooner than is now possible.

--Yes, the armistice with the Badoglio Government had not brought the full military benefits expected.

But:.............The campaign had eliminated the Italian Fleet.

--It had won the great port of Naples and the great airfields of Foggia. The General's implication: these, more than any other prize, put Anglo-American forces in position for a flank attack on southern France and/or the Balkan Adriatic coast. Presumably from Foggia's web of runways last week, Allied planes thrust an arm over Marshal Tito's troops, hammered the Nazi rail junction at Sofia and dromes near Athens.

-- The campaign, said the General, pinned down at least 27 German divisions. The General did not specify that only twelve of the 27 divisions actually stood in the Italian line. The remainder were a reserve held in northern Italy and recently tapped to reinforce the Wehrmacht in the Balkans. Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito and his ragged, resolute Liberation Army engaged more Germans (at least 14 divisions) than the British and Americans together engaged in Italy.

General Eisenhower did not go into what-might-have-been. But the Mediterranean campaign, viewed as a whole, had the look of an enterprise which had been started with a bang in North Africa, carried on through Sicily to the very shores of Italy, then abruptly reduced in scale and objectives. If so, the original plans had gone askew at some point; decisions in mid-campaign to concentrate elsewhere may account, partly, for the slow pace in Italy.

According to Plan. But there was another reason. The General's men in the line were sure of one thing: Germany's soldiers and Germany's commanders, including Marshals Erwin Rommel and Albert Kesselring, had a great deal to do with the Allies' troubles. The Germans in Italy did not know that Germany had lost the war; they were fighting as shrewdly and fiercely as the British fought after Dunkirk.

In Italy the Wehrmacht's generalship and soldiery had been superb. However badly the Allied command may have miscalculated the total effects, the sudden Italian surrender last September dangerously exposed the Nazi line across southern Europe. But the Wehrmacht had anticipated the Anglo-American landing at Salerno, thereby scotched the Allied plan for a sweep to Rome. It accurately gauged the Badoglio Government's weakness. It understood the possibilities of terrain and weather, knew how to capitalize on them. It won time to build a vicious, vexing defense in depth.

Now, apparently, it guessed that the Allied Italian drive had become a limited offensive, that Allied amphibious forces, perhaps reserved for other theaters, would not yet try to outflank the Nazi mountain line. Just as important, the Germans had patched their rampart in the Balkans: they replaced Italian garrisons, chased the British from the Dodecanese.

The Wehrmacht could not claim the initiative on Europe's third front. But among Italy's peaks it remembered Clausewitz's dictum: though mountainous ground is not favorable for "decisive battle," it is "very useful . . . to gain time . . . [and to] repulse . . . a minor enterprise of the enemy."

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