Collapse & Cleanup

Suddenly the fight went out of the Nazi armies in Italy. Their lines had collapsed. Allied armor, spearing through masses of bewildered Germans, spread out over northern Italy, reached toward the Swiss border near Como, cut retreat lines and started the final mop-up.

Warplanes roamed the skies, found holes in the cloud banks to dive on milling Nazi columns and add the finishing touches to the job. A winter and spring of ceaseless air attack had left the Germans weak, immobile, unable either to fight or get away.

Now the Allies seemed to be taking a warlike census of historic Italian cities. Lieut. General Lucian K. Truscott's Fifth Army swept northward from Bologna, spanned the Po's yellow waters and raced for the mountains. They bypassed Mantua, Virgil's homeland Verona, the town of Romeo and Juliet. Milan, Italy's No. 1 industrial city, was occupied; so was Turin.

Along the Ligurian coast Major General Edward Almond's task force, among them Negro and Japanese-American troops, captured Italy's chief naval base of La Spezia. Farther north, Genoa, Italy's first commercial port, was freed.

Lieut. General Sir Richard L. McCreery's Eighth Army, working the Adriatic coast, captured Ferrara and Padua, "the city of millionaires." With the 56th (London) Division in the van they entered historic Venice. Other units sped on to block the Udine and Belluno escape routes through the Tirolean Alps.

Partisans Up. There was little resistance. Fortified positions were found abandoned. Yugoslav Partisans captured Trieste. Everywhere Italian partisan units emerged from hiding. At Milan, Genoa and many another place they forced the surrender of German garrisons before Allied troops arrived. Near Como they caught and shot Benito Mussolini (see FOREIGN NEWS).

The Germans tried only to get away. Near Ferrara they abandoned more than 1,000 fuel-starved motor vehicles and fled on foot. At other places they harnessed up horses, oxen, cows and even human beings to move heavy equipment.

Confusion spread through their forces. A Messerschmitt pilot landed near Verona, found himself looking into the guns of a squad of U.S. soldiers and heard a Yankee voice drawl, "Climb down, brother, it's old-home week." Cabled TIME Correspondent Reg Ingraham : "At a road junction I saw a dozen dead Germans sprawled grotesquely in the dust beside wrecked vehicles and one dead mule. They had run into an American road block while trying to escape north ward." By the 21st day of the offensive, 120,000 of the estimated 250,000 Germans in Italy were prisoners. The chance of escape for the rest grew slimmer by the hour.

General Mark Clark, whose polyglot Fifteenth Army Group won the victory, announced: "The military power of Germany in Italy has . . . ceased, even though scattered fighting may continue. . . ." The glory was shared by Britons, Americans, New Zealanders, South Africans, British Indians, Poles, Jews, Brazilians and Italians. Joyously Prime Minister Winston Churchill cabled Field Marshal Sir Harold R.L.G. Alexander, Allied Mediterranean commander: "Never, I suppose, have so many nations advanced and maneuvered in one line victoriously. . . ."

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