Anticlimax

Fifth Army headquarters in Italy had confidently announced that the Gothic Line was pierced in the center. But some how the Germans were not running. Some how there seemed to be more mountains just ahead. Somehow the Fifth was just inching along.

Part of the explanation was filthy weather -- cold, autumn rain that fouled up artillery observation, left tanks struggling soggily with the mud, kept planes dripping idly on the ground, made cursing doughboys fight and sleep in the cold and wet. Even the mules, the only transport to front lines in the crags, were more than usually reluctant. But that was only part of the story. The other part was that Lieut. General Mark W. Clark's press headquarters had been guilty of wishful thinking.

New York Herald Tribune Correspondent John Chabot Smith made the serious charge that on two successive days official announcements of Fifth Army progress failed to jibe with the operational maps. Headquarters lamely explained that patrols had reached forward points, then came back. Even the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes dared to raise the question with the headline: "Is or Isn't the Gothic Line Cracked?" Wrote Correspond ent Sergeant Jack Foisie:

"Why has the Fifth Army advance been slowed down to the same grudging ad vance of hill to hill -- when a breakthrough of the Gothic Line has definitely been claimed? That is the question being heard from armchair strategists and also from front-line fighters who could not help but be amazed when they read: Fifth Army Cracks Gothic Line Defenses." Rivers & Rain. While the controversy stirred the rear, G.Ls in the front struggled patiently with the tenacious Ger mans. The Americans fell back before a counterattack, riposted to regain lost ground and more. By week's end, Raticosa Pass was captured, the Fifth was over the crest of the mountains, could at last look down at Bologna 20 miles away.

Eastward on the Adriatic, the British Eighth Army, which had actually been the first to break the Gothic Line (by capturing Rimini), was making slow prog ress across a lacework of canals and rivers. Home-front strategists who had talked of "debouching into the plain" with tanks had failed to consider these obstacles, failed to consider the skill and determination of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's armies. German tanks were still able to counterattack. They contrived to drive the Eighth from a small bridgehead across the Fiumicino River swollen into a deep, swift torrent by steady rains.

Facing the Winter. The truth was that with the arrival of the autumnal equinox no more prolonged periods of good fighting weather could be expected. In Italy there was less talk of "annihilating" the German Army, a sober realization that no magic carpet would take the Allies to the Po River. Now it was a battle of roads. The prospect of at least part of a second winter in Italy was gradually becoming a reality.

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