Cassino to the Alps - US Army Center Of Military History

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As planning proceeded for the spring
offensive, the same divergent strategies
that underlay the Anglo-American controversy
over ANVIL again came to the
surface. As they had since the beginning
of the Italian campaign, the British
continued to look upon the peninsula
as a promising road into eastern
Europe and the mid-Danube basin. The
Americans, for their part, still regarded
the Italian campaign as a sideshow to
the main drama moving to a denouement
on the plains of northwestern
Europe. For the closing months of the
Italian campaign, the Americans would
continue to think, as their President
had once reminded Churchill during
the ANVIL debates, in terms of the
shortest distance between two pointsin
short, a drive aimed directly at the
Alps. A direct thrust northward via
Bologna, Verona, and Lake Garda to
the Brenner Pass ,,,,ould trap those still
considerable enemv forces left in northwestern
Italy and' afford entry to the
National Redoubt before the enemv
had an opportunity to get set there. ;
Thinking in terms of the post-war
balance of power in Europe, the British
continued to focus much of their attention
on northeastern Italy. Even if there
should be no drive into the mid-Danube
basin, a thrust to the northeast still
might thwart long-held Yugoslav ambitions
to acquire territory along Italy's
northeastern frontier. The Italian pons
of Trieste, Fiume, and Pola lay within
the region coveted by Marshal Tito and
his communist-oriented partisans, and
the British were determined to keep the
ports out of communist hands lest they
become naval bases from v,:hich a Soviet
fleet might dominate the Adriatic. For
several months the British had been
CASSINO TO THE ALPS
intervening actively in the civil war in
Greece in an effort to keep that strategic
Mediterranean land from falling
into communist hands, and loss of
Trieste and control of the Adriatic
would jeopardize that effort. Furthermore,
the British would need the port
of Trieste to support the occupation
forces they eventually expected to deploy
in Austria. The requirements of
British strategy in the Mediterranean
area in general, and the Italian theater
in particular, were, as they had been
since the beginning of the war, considerably
more comprehensive and complicated
than those of the Americans.
Inter-Allied differences were further
complicated when early in the planning
for the spring offensive it became evident
that changes in command had also
altered attitudes and relationships
among command and staff at the three
major Allied headquarters in Italy. Formerly,
Alexander and his Eighth Army
commander had tended to think along
similar lines in developing their operational
concepts, especially during planning
f(H' the offensive south of Rome
and for the Gothic Line, while Clark as
Fifth Army commander sometimes
found himself a lone dissenter in the
triumvirate. When Clark moved up to
become the 15th Army Group commander
in mid-December, that close
identity of views that had so long
characterized relations between that
headquarters and the Eighth Anpy
soon carne to an end. Clark and the
staff that accompanied him from the
Fifth Army continued to see their former
command as the dominant partner
in the Italian enterprise and to view the
Fifth Army's role in the forthcoming
offensive as essentially a continuation of