Red Spring

In Italy Field Marshal Albert Kesselring could smell spring in the air. For the Field Marshal, spring and better weather might mean an all-out assault upon his lines. Already, at some points, the Allies were attacking. Using tactics old when General James Wolfe scaled Quebec's heights in 1759, Major General George P. Hayes's roth Mountain Division was jolting the German loose from the Apennine positions upon which he had based the center of his line. South of Bologna expert climbers set ropes on sheer cliff faces. Up those ropes swarmed the troops to catch the Nazis by surprise, smash them back five miles through jagged country. U.S. troops, supported by Brazilians, drove against the defenses of the Panara Valley, reached for the highway junction of Vergato.

Helping prepare for the spring were Twelfth Air Force medium bombers, pounding the Brenner Pass supply route. Allied officers estimated that recently it took Kesselring ten days to move a single division through the pass under Allied attack.

There were no signs that Kesselring proposed to retreat. With an estimated 27 divisions, aided by some of the toughest terrain in Europe, he continues a formidable opponent. The spring in Italy might well be red.

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