Cassino to the Alps - US Army Center Of Military History

BREAKfHROUGH ON THE FIFcT'H ARMY'S FRON'I' 485
ing Army Group C, would fight their last
battles, 22
Implicit in Hitler's decision to disperse
OKW was a change in his strategy-if
such it can be described. In the
weeks immediately preceding the decision
the German leader had clung
stubbornly to the hope that his armies
in the west and south could somehow
hold the American and British armies
at bay long enough for the German
forces on the eastern front to check the
Russians and possibly persuade the
Western Allies to join forces with the
Germans to turn back the Red tide
threatening to spill into central Europe.
The Russian crossing of the Oder
changed all that, prompting the Fuehrer
to abandon all hope of persuading
the Western Allies to turn against the
Russians. The German armies in the
west and south were instead to hold out
long enough to permit those retreating
before the Russians in the east to reach
the zones of the Western Allies and
thereby avoid mass surrenders to the
Red Army.
That strategy, or procedure, quickly
became the leitmotif of Kesselring's operations,
but not of Vietinghoffs. For
within Army Group C's headquarters
there soon surfaced a conflict between
the partisans of Hitler's strategy of
desperation and those who had
adopted an attitude of sauve qui peut,
convinced that continued resistance in
Italy or, for that matter, anywhere else,
no longer served a valid purpose. That
conflict would help explain the con-
2' Greiner and Schramm, eds., OKWIWFSt, KTB,
IV(2), pp. 1438-39; Warlimont, Inside Hitler's Headquarters,
p. 513.
fused moves and countermoves that
were to take place within Army Group C
headquarters in the dosing days of the
campaign in Italy. 23
The Byzantine atmosphere at the
German headquarters in Italy would
become murkier with the maturing of
covert surrender negotiations between
the senior SS commander in Italy,
General Wolff, and the head of the
American OSS apparatus in Switzerland,
Allen Dulles. Under way since
early March, those negotiations, like the
military operations on the battlefront,
had also taken a sharp turn on 20
April. For on that date the Allied
Combined Chiefs of Staff ordered Field
Marshal Alexander and Mr. Dulles to
terminate the negotiations. "You
should," the CCS informed the Allied
commander, "consider the matter as
dosed and so inform the Russians."24
After 20 April a crushing military victory
over the Germans seemed in sight,
not only in Italy but on all battlefronts.
To the Allied High Command there
seemed little to be gained in accepting a
capitulation in one of the war's secondary
theaters of operations at the risk of
alienating one of the major Allied governments-the
Soviet Union.
23 In his commentary on the OKW War Diary,
Percy Ernst Schramm observed that in the last
mon'ths of the war Hitler's H •• .leadership had
become more and more an 'Illusionsstrategie: outlined
in red and blue markings on situation maps
but having no relationship to reality, even if executed."
(OKW, KTB, LV[I], 1944-45, p. 32j.
24 Msg WX 70553, CCOS to Alexander. 20 Apr
45, AFHQ OIOO/llcl58. For a narrative of the
negotiations between Dulles and Wolff, see Chapter
XXX. It seems doubtful whether these instructions
were known to Hitler at the time he made his
change of strategy on the 20th.