Allied Invasion of Italy - Aftermath

Aftermath

The German 10th Army had come close to defeating the Salerno beachhead. The stubborn initial resistance by 16th Panzer Division's battlegroups and the Germans' ability to reinforce them by land more quickly than the Allies could land follow-up forces by sea or air had almost tipped the battle. 5th Army planners had concentrated the main weight of its forces in X Corps on its left wing, in line with its major objective of advancing on Naples. This had left its right wing thinly manned to defend X Corps' right flank and left a particular weakness at the corps boundary. In the end, the Germans, aware of the limited time available to deal with the Salerno landings because of the inevitable arrival in due course of Eighth Army, were obliged to make hurried and uncoordinated attempts to force a quick decision and had failed to break through Allied lines and exploit the gains in the face of total Allied air superiority and artillery and naval gunfire support. The Allies had been fortunate that at this time Adolf Hitler had sided with the view of his Army Group commander in Northern Italy, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and decided that defending Italy south of Rome was not a strategic priority. As a result, Kesselring had been forbidden to call upon reserves from the northern Army Group.

The success of the 10th Army in inflicting heavy casualties, and Kesselring's strategic arguments, led Hitler to agree that the Allies should be kept away from German borders and prevented from gaining the oil resources of the Balkans. On 6 November, Hitler withdrew Rommel to oversee the build-up of defenses in northern France and gave Kesselring command of the whole of Italy with a remit to keep Rome in German hands for as long as possible.

By early October, the whole of southern Italy was in Allied hands, and the Allied armies stood facing the Volturno Line, the first of a series of prepared defensive lines running across Italy from which the Germans chose to fight delaying actions, giving ground slowly and buying time to complete their preparation of the Winter Line, their strongest defensive line south of Rome. The next stage of the Italian Campaign became for the Allied armies a grinding and attritional slog against skillful, determined and well-prepared defenses in terrain and weather conditions which favoured defense and hampered the Allied advantages in mechanised equipment and air superiority. It took until mid-January 1944 to fight through the Volturno, Barbara and Bernhardt lines to reach the Gustav Line, the backbone of the Winter Line defenses, setting the scene for the four battles of Monte Cassino which took place between January and May 1944.