Cassino to the Alps - US Army Center Of Military History

TO THE ALPS
groups of officers and enlisted men
straggled into von Senger's headquarters,
among them elements of a signal
battalion with critically needed communications
equipment and wire. By the
evening of 26 April, XlV Panzer Corps
headquarters was again operational, but
all that it controlled were three Kampf
gruppen, made up of the consolidated
remnants of four divisions, all together
not more than 2,000 men. This small
force was to hold a 20-mile sector
extending from the Pasubio pass, southeast
of Ala on Highway 46, westward to
Lake Garda. Since the pre-World War I
Austro-Italian frontier had run approximately
along that line, some of the old
border fortifications could be used. Assigning
Group Klotz to the right, Group
Steinmetz to the center, and Group
Schricker to the left, General von Senger
prepared to fight his last battle. As
General von Vietinghoff outlined it, the
objective was to gain time so that the
capitulation of Army Group C woud
coincide as closely as possible with that
of Army Group G north of the Alps and
Army Group E withdrawing through
Croatia to the Julian Alps. {;
The plan was Vietinghoffs, the strategy
Kesselring's. Since 27 April the
former commander of German forces
in Italy had been commander-in-chief
of all German forces in southwestern
Europe, including Army Groups C, G,
and E. Kesselring meant for all three
army groups to fall back on the Alpine
massif, there to hold out long enough
to allow those forces retreating before
the Russians to reach the American and
British armies and surrender not to the
6 MS # T-lb (Westphaletal.).
505
dreaded Russians but to the Western
Allies. 7
Victory on the Flanks
As German forces retreated toward
the Alps, Allied headquarters issued a
call for a general uprising throughout
northern Italy. In most towns and cities
of Lombardy neo-Fascist authority had
all but ceased to exist, in any case.
Town after town fell under partisan
control, often days before the arrival of
the Allied forces. In many places the
Allied advance involved much less fighting
than it did a series of enthusiastic
civic receptions.
The 88th Division on 28 April entered
Vicenza, northeast of Verona, to
find that city already held by partisans.
Passing quickly through crowded
streets, the division continued its march
toward the valleys of the Brenta and
Piave Rivers, flowing southward h'om
the Alps to enter the Adriatic near
Venice. On the 30th, Truscott shifted
the 85th Division fium the IV to the II
Corps where it deployed alongside the
88th, which was to advance up the
Brenta while the 85th moved up the
Piave to an eventual junction on 4 May
with the U.S. Seventh Army. The two
divisions thus would end the campaign
in Italy as they had begun it twelve
months before, moving fe:mvard side by
side.
To the right of those two divisions in
the corps center the 91 st Division ad-
7 Kesselring, A Soldier's Record, p. 87. Although
Kesselring's strategy had nothing to do with a socalled
National Redoubt, it tends to lend credence
to that myth among Allied commanders. For a
discussion of the National Redoubt and final operations
in Germany and Austria see MacDonald, The
Last Offensive.