Was the Gothic Line offensive the first
battle of the imminent "Cold War" ?
In that fatal Summer truth will out.
Unbelievably by the military point of view the Americans break off the
pursuit of the Germans defeated in the battle for Rome and send the bulk
of their forces away from Italy into Southern France against Churchill's
will. The British Premier, who believes that "it is in Italy where the
future of the Balkans and Europe will be decided" and who had been
informed that in Yugoslavia the situation was still uncertain between the
friendly Serb Mihajlovic and the communist Croat Tito, now thinks that
only Alexander can solve the situation leaping from Italy into the Balkans
and decides to launch a decisive strategic stroke with what is entirely
British and under British command.I hope to turn and break the Gothic
Line, break into the Po valley and ultimately advance to Trieste and the
Ljubljana gap to Vienna".
On 25 August 1944 Churchill himself launches
Alexander's "Summer Offensive", or "offensive of the Gothic Line", which
in its first decisive phase until 30 Sept. 1944 is known as the "Battle of
Rimini". The "important divergence" between Churchill and Roosevelt, the
reluctant will of the Americans to trespass the Gothic Line, together with
the bravery of the German soldiers and tactics, make a failure of the
offensive. "The weakened forces in Italy were stalled and the Russian
armies swept into Eastern Europe". (Churchill)
But Churchill doesn't give up his British plans of a balance of power in
Europe. France and Italy were too weak to forestall the Soviet Armies.
Only Germany could do it. In the 2nd conference of Quebec he is obliged by
Roosevelt to sign the Morgenthau Plan, outlined by the soviet agent Harry
Dexter White, that anticipates the destruction of Germany to a pastoral state which could feed only 30 millions of Germans out of 80, and in
October he goes to Moscow in the vain attempt to get from Stalin a Balkan
compromise. But the soviet dictator, too elated in his presumptuousness of
a total, final victory over his naïve Allies, who in Yugoslavia betray
their friend Mihajlovic to help Tito and in China betray their friend
Chiang Kai Shek to help Mao-tze-tung, makes a pawn of the British
Aristocrat, pretending to give credit to his farcical Balkan agreement.
Then against the Americans' will Churchill decides to attain his Balkan
aims by his most temerarious plan enlarging the Gothic offensive into
Greece that was almost completely in the hands of the red partisans. Later
he wrote: "Alexander's offensive failed.Italy was not to be wholly free
for another eight months, the right-handed drive to Vienna was denied to
us and, except in Greece, our military power to influence the liberation of South-Eastern
Europe was gone." Actually Alexander's offensive was not really a failure.
The Gothic Line offensive though it attained limited aims in Italy, with
the corollary in Greece allowed the Western World to keep the control of
the Mediterranean in the "Cold War" of the war aftermath.
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