End of a Line

''You drove through heavy waves of sweet-smelling air where hundreds of dead Germans, pocketed in mountain hideouts, had been pulverized by the artillery barrage. Whole hillsides were reduced to rubble. The crests of the rocky knolls strung out along the entire breadth of the Gothic Line were sprayed with dead Germans wiped out by long-range artillery and bypassed by hard-pushing infantry."

Thus TIME Correspondent Tom Durrance described a drive through Futa Pass, following Fifth Army troops driving downhill to Bologna.

Two days before, after a month's battering, Canadians, British, Indians and Greeks of the Eighth Army broke the Gothic Line at its Adriatic end. There in heavy rain they had taken Rimini, where modern Italians bathed on hot summer days. Now it was a dismal memory of a town; (still erect were the gallows where partisans were hanged the week-before), opening the way into the flat plains behind the Gothic Line.

Yet now the capture of Rimini was no longer important. The Fifth Army in the center, having fought its way across the Apennines in ten days of as rough fighting as any at Cassino, had really wrecked the Line. From the foothills above Bologna they were only 80 miles across the plain from Verona and Padua. The German troops retiring from Rimini, on the eastern end of the Gothic Line, and those holding the western end of the Line near La Spezia now had to race northward or be cut off, for Verona and Padua are their only ways out.

The Germans lost 10,000 prisoners. Five of their divisions were badly mauled. The Po River offered a possible defense line, but rivers through broad plains do not compare in strength with mountains, especially if the attacker has overwhelming air power. For Field Marshal Albert Kesselring the end of his long, skillful campaign in Italy was now in sight. The only possible salvage still open to him was to withdraw his small army successfully to the fierce crags of the Dolomites, which form a better defense line than any he has held heretofore. There, on the frontier, he should be able to keep General Sir Harold Alexander from penetrating into Austria. But then Milan, Turin, Genoa, the whole Po Valley would have to be abandoned. And the war in Italy would be over.

Cheerful, green-uniformed soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, fighting on the western end of the Allied line in Italy, completed their first weeks under fire with gains of four to eight miles, capture of several towns and some prisoners.

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