Delay

The fluid, disordered German retreat up Italy's boot suddenly hardened. Five new divisions, one each from Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, the Balkans and North Italy had joined the rearguard defense.

They brought the Allied pursuit to a walk halfway between Rome and Florence, gave the battered Tenth and Fourteenth German Armies time to collect their wits. For the first time since the breakthrough below Rome, the Germans made counter attacks.

But their stand. in the center near Lake Trasimeno, where Hannibal once (217 B.C.) bloodily wiped out a Roman army under Flaminius, seemed only temporary. They had been providentially helped by days of rain that gummed down the pursuit, forced the unopposed Allied air fleet to drop from more than 2,000 sorties daily to a piddling 200.

The Allies also had supply trouble. The Fifth and Eighth had moved too fast for their food and munitions.

Slowdown after Victory. The slowdown punctuated what was still a crashing Allied victory in Italy. Already General Harold R.L.G. Alexander's armies had cut down the German forces by 80,000 to 100,000 dead, wounded and captured. Even last week when the enemy threw in all the mines, road blocks, and mobile artillery he could muster, when he had committed eight and a half of his twelve divisions in Italy, the Allies still made gains.

In the ancient lands of Tuscany and Umbria they captured Assisi, where St. Francis lived and preached. British Iancers. now motorized, fought for two days on the outskirts of Perugia, then moved into the almost undamaged city of Gothic buildings and Umbrian paintings.

The highway town of Chiusi, with its ancient Etruscan tombs, was less fortunate. First captured by the British Eighth Army, it was lost again to a German counterattack within 72 hours, remained the center of fighting for days and was heavily battered.

Back to Retreat. By this week the German defense had again begun to waver. The retreat was resumed, in somewhat better order. Seven Allied columns went after them, en route for the next major Allied objectives. One was Ancona, one of the finest ports on the Adriatic, where ships to Dalmatia and Yugoslavia could find good harbor. Another was the Tyrrhenian port of Leghorn, already echoing to German demolition charges.

North of these ports was the Arno River and the German "Gothic" line, largely backed by the Appenines. The weak point was Rimini, in flat land on the Adriatic. If the Allies broke through at Rimini, they could fan out into the Emilian plain, flank the entire line. That would end the Germans in Italy.

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