A Peculiar Kind of War

Even though Pisa and Florence were monuments of European culture they were astride a military line, and that line the Germans were bent on holding if they could. Through both cities the Arno flowed between masonry banks, making it a perfect tank trap and barrier to infantry. The Allies held the south bank, the Germans the north. So the war in Italy became a peculiar kind of delicate slugging match among the museums, with world-famous art in no man's land (see ART).

Into Florence. The Fifth Army had been pinned in the southern part of Pisa more than a week while the Eighth Army fought its way up to Florence in one of the hardest advances since Rome. Aggressive, gun-happy New Zealanders under Lieut. General Bernard L. Freyberg took the brunt of this fighting and made the most advances.

They wore rakish straw and panama hats gleaned on the march. One Maori wheeled his Bren gun in a streamlined perambulator. Another wore a silk hat and carried a walking stick, his Bren gun strapped across his back. One company marched into a village, captured outlying houses in the midst of their own barrage. Complained a prisoner: "We didn't think you would come until the barrage lifted."

With British Guards and South Africans, the New Zealanders reached the southern gates of Florence, sent patrols into the old city to the southern bank of the Arno. They found every evidence that the Germans would make a fight for it despite their declaration that Florence was an open city.

"Sadistic . . . Wanton." Allied headquarters roundly denounced the Germans for wrecking five of the six bridges across the Arno, called the "wanton destruction" another example of "Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's order to his troops to carry out demolitions with sadistic imagination." The enemy "has seen fit to use it [Florence] for his military traffic. . . . His paratroops are posted along the northern bank of the Arno within city limits. ... It is clear that the enemy intends to oppose the crossing of the Arno on both sides of the city, which remains in no man's land."

Now Allied Commander General Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander might regroup, force the Arno as he did the Rapido. There would still lie ahead the mountains and pillboxes of the Gothic Line.

But there was always the sea on the flanks: the Allies could still use the Tyrrhenian or Adriatic for amphibious bypasses of the Gothic Line. The Germans saw the possibility. A DNB broadcaster told the Herrenvolk: there are concentrations of Allied landing craft "in the area of several embarkation points."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.