Below is your free Weekly Digest of all things History from me. This is where I tell you about what I’ve been waffling about during the week, what events and programmes I might have coming up, and tell you what next week’s content will include. You’ll see snippets of my articles, and teasers about what is to come. This week there is also an exclusive book preview with a look at just one of many excellent yarns that help make up Catherine Fletcher’s new book The Roads to Rome.
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Last week Catherine Fletcher, with the help of Owen Rees, launched her new book: The Roads to Rome, in Manchester. It’s a step away from what she has published before, because moving on from books like The Beauty and the Terror, which was about her happy place, (Renaissance Italy) she has expanded her coverage and gone on a two thousand year hunt to be able to tell the story of how all roads ended up leading to Rome. Bringing it right up to date, though, she also takes you travelling up and down them with a cast of characters that ranges from Roman armies to Romantic poets. (See the link below for details of a trip you can take with both of us to travel up and down those very roads this autumn)
The story from her book I want to share with you starts on the Via Aurelia, which was constructed in about 241 BC. It was part of a mass construction project in the middle Republic that was intended to link Rome with colonies and allow for swift communications and, of course, moving troops as quickly as possible. Standardised at 15ft wide, so that two chariots might pass each other, these roads were also marked along their length by milestones. The beginning of the route west out of Rome, the Via Aurelia hugged the coastline guiding travellers out towards the Alps, Southern Europe and beyond that, trading centres as far away as Cadiz.
More than 2,000 years later, in January 1944, a man named Peter Tompkins was in hiding just off this famous road, about a hundred miles north of Rome. 25-year-old Peter was a journalist who’d been recruited by the US Office of Strategic Services, and he had found his way into Italy in a rubber dinghy ready to assist the Allied invasion of Italy. The contact who was supposed to collect him was nowhere to be seen.
‘Obliged instead to bribe a pair of limousine chauffeurs, claiming their employer was a friend, Tompkins, an Italian companion, and a boy known as ‘T’, who ran errands between this safe house and Rome, crammed into the car in the unwelcome company of two Italian saboteurs: ‘and off we went into the night, heading down the Aurelia.
Tompkins had with him ‘phoney papers, 300 gold sovereigns… my own secret codes and radio crystals which would produce certain wave lengths, a Beretta 9mm automatic and, foolishly, a small Minox camera.’ The chauffeurs had papers from both the German embassy and the Department of the Fascist Republican Army, and Tompkins wondered if they might, in fact, be working for the German occupiers, but was reassured when one of them recognised one of the saboteurs as a former army comrade. ‘The feeling of relief,’ he wrote, ‘was general.’
140 miles away, on the other side of Rome, this was about the time that their Allies were to begin their relentless slog at Monte Cassino. Tompkins, though was in the back of the car and at that point of exhaustion where it isn’t physically possible to stay awake; head lolling all over the place. A stop for black-market petrol, a nervous few moments as their papers were examined at a checkpoint, and not long after dawn, Peter arrived in occupied Rome. Not everything had gone according to plan so far, but he was ready to begin work. Tompkins’s mission was to link up with partisans who had been leading the resistance since the very outset of the occupation.
Rome, 1944, Peter Tompkins suitcase, filled with secret documents and a pistol (PD Italia)
Resistance was fierce, on October 1943, the largest group of partisans: Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag) had begun work by attacking an Italian Fascist military base looking for weapons:
‘The mission, however, ended with the capture of twelve partisans, of whom eleven were swiftly executed. Subsequent actions were more successful. On one occasion the group succeeded in stopping a set of executions by disguising themselves as German police, setting up a roadblock (control of roads matters) and stealing the uniforms and truck of the Italian Africa Police firing squad as made its way to Fort Bravetta. Fooling both Italian and German guards, the partisans freed the captives, took hostages to secure their safe exit and—back in their stolen truck—screeched up the Via Aurelia to a safe house in Cerveteri. If that was spectacular, even more modest activity could be useful: another group of partisans, the Gappisti, removed the road signs from key routes out of Rome including the Via Casilina in the hope of confusing the enemy.’
This kind of violent opposition was what Peter Tompkins was walking into in in the city itself. To the south, the Allied campaign proceeding towards him was going slowly. The focus here closed in on a different Roman Road. The Via Appia was the Roman road to crown all Roman roads. Running southeast to Brindisi, it’s the one we’re travelling on that tour mentioned above and it dates back nearly two and a half millennia. If you’ve seen Spartacus, it’s where they crucified his slave army, but as the Allies advanced at the beginning of 1944, it was dubbed Highway 7. Highway 8 was the number assigned to the partly parallel Via Casilina and along with all the other major roads leading to Rome, controlling them was pivotal to Allied progress. These, especially the Via Appia, were the crucial routes by which the German defenders moved supplies down the country to man their defensive lines.
Rome was surrounded by terrain favourable to the defender; the Pontine Marshes, mountains; and the problems that the Allies were now facing dated back through two thousands of years of military endeavours when it came to marching on Rome.
A Roman map showing the famous Appian Way (Red) , part of the Via Casilina (Yellow) and the proximity of Monte Cassino (Green Star) (Original map from Wikipedia)
Speaking of defensive lines, unsurprisingly Nazi infrastructure had gone to town. The Gustav Line: ‘began near the mouth of the Garigliano River (about fifty miles north of Naples, the point where the Via Appia turns inland from the coast), and ended eighty-four miles to the east, at the mouth of the Sangro River, about thirty miles south of Pescara on the Adriatic. Combining minefields, earthworks, barbed wire and bunkers, the line also benefited from the natural geography of Italy. Its peaks included the monastery of Monte Cassino, 1,700ft up.’
(Canadian Official History of the War)
The Germans were assured (by themselves) that the Gustave Line would hold for six months, and the Allies soon ran up against it, hard:
‘As Peter Tompkins observed, looking back on the campaign many years later, ‘a head-on attack up the ancient avenues to Rome, the Casilina and Appian highways, previously employed by Hannibal and Belisarius, appeared hopeless’. (He assumed his readers would know that only one of those two—Belisarius—had been successful. Hannibal had resorted to bringing his elephants over the Alps, which was hardly an option for the Allies.)
Here, in Peter’s own words, is how the Allies decided to tackle the problem in the 20th Century:
‘If the Allies could seize the Alban Hills, twenty miles south of Rome, which lay in between the two roads—and overlooked them—their position would be vastly improved. Thus the Allied commanders settled on an amphibious assault, in which their troops would land well north of the Gustav Line. The chosen locations were Anzio and, just along the beach, Nettuno, seventeen miles inland from Cisterna…’
Troops of US Fifth Army come ashore at Anzio, January 23, 1944. (The National WWII Museum, 2002.337.066)
‘Just after midnight, in the early hours of 22 January 1944, the first Allied vessels anchored off Anzio. Their air forces had done their best to cut off communications from the north of Italy to Rome, bombing railway lines and airfields, though these were swiftly repaired. A decoy operation in Corsica and Sardinia would, the Allies hoped, deceive the Germans as to the likely location of their attack. Whether that particular tactic worked, the landings did come as a surprise. The Germans were not, however, entirely unprepared: this was one of a number of Allied options for which they had planned, and as the Allies landed first two divisions, then more, they deployed a scenario known as ‘Case Richard’. In their first three days, the Allies consolidated a beachhead stretching out from Anzio to a twenty-six mile perimeter. With the Germans holding the Alban Hills to their north, however, they were vulnerable to artillery attack.'
Peter Tompkins was in Rome the days before the landing began. He was an observant man, and kept himself fully up to speed in what was happening out the roads:
‘On the night following the Anzio landings, that of 22nd-23rd January, he received a report of ‘intense southbound traffic through Rome, out [by the] Via Appia. All available German units in a radius of 90 kilometres north of Rome have been ordered south… Road followed: Appia Antica, Albano, Via Anziate’. Other units were ‘astride Albano-Anzio road on perimeter of Beachhead’, while ‘trenches and field defences [were] being thrown together just south of Rome (Porta S. Paolo on Ostia road)’. The traffic on the Via Appia amounted to ‘270 vehicles, most intense between 1900 [hours] and dawn’.
In the absence of the ring road that today enables traffic to avoid the city, [Rome] was a bottleneck, not just for road traffic but for rail lines. ‘I realised that… if properly organised,’ he wrote, ‘we could keep a continuous check on them, not only by day but by night (when no air reconnaissance was possible) and that these counts could be quickly and systematically radioed both to Caserta and the beachhead.’ (The enormous eighteenth-century royal palace at Caserta, outside Naples, was currently Allied headquarters.) Partisans from the Socialist party, already organised underground on the basis of city sectors ‘each with a secret headquarters to which members of the various cells could report’, took on the task of watching in shifts.’
By mid-February, 100,000 Allied troops had landed. In turn the Germans built up their defensive positions, moving in 120,000 men themselves. One of them was an eighteen-year-old named Joachim Liebschner, from Silesia. ‘He worked as a runner, carrying messages by bicycle up and down the roads between his own company and headquarters.’ He later recalled:
“We were issued with a bicycle and it was really a great big joke because when we moved forward, the harder the artillery fire became and we were then attacked by aeroplanes. When everybody jumped into the ditches to the left and right I was left with the bicycle. Eventually I went to the Sergeant Major and said look when am I going to use my bicycle here, and he said “You signed for it, you’re responsible for it!” typical German kind of answer to a question… I left it against a tree and thought I could find the tree again when we get to the front line. Not only had the bicycle gone but the tree had gone as well.”’
There remained the small matter for the Allies of ploughing through Monte Cassino and on to Rome.
‘On 22 February Allied commander Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas was replaced by General Lucian Truscott. The campaign settled into stalemate. The Germans turned off the drainage pumps and reflooded the Pontine Marshes. That provided a sound natural defence for the Axis army. It also encouraged the malarial mosquitoes, with devastating consequences for civilians returning after the war. Peter Tompkins, writing forty years later, was among the critics of the conduct of the Anzio campaign. Kesselring, he noted, had observed that ‘only a miracle’ could save the Germans, and yet in their lack of boldness the Allied generals Alexander and Clark had failed to take advantage. Rather than heading for the Alban Hills, they had focused on consolidating the beachhead.’
‘The stalemate at Anzio ended on the night of 11/12th May. The Allies had built up their forces: on the beachhead alone were seven divisions; a further eighteen were south of the Gustav Line. Although the commanders were principally British and American, the troops involved included multiple nationalities: from Canadians to Indians to Algerians, South Africans and New Zealanders as well as French, Italian and Polish. Joachim Liebschner thought at first he had held off an American advance:
I was given 10 youngsters and one experienced man and two heavy machine guns and was ordered to defend, or stop the onslaught along the Via Appia - Route 7 … I took over very good fortified positions already dug. I put a machine gun nest either side of the road and stayed with one on the right hand side… At between 8 and 9 the following morning the whole field in front of us was filled with hundreds of Americans, their rifles slung across their shoulders or at their hip, walking towards us as though it were peacetime. We held our fire until they were 100 to 120 yards on top of us. Then we let go and caused an incredible amount of havoc. They were just falling like nine pins and the rest withdrew back into the woods. It took them about half an hour to sort out where we were and then they hammered us with their artillery… I had never lived through anything like this.
Moroccan soldier, part of Free French forces, guards a German prisoner of war in the Castelforte area, May 15, 1944. (The National WWII Museum, 2002.337.187)
The Roads to Rome were a chaotic sight during these weeks; stuffed full of obstacles. Of one, a witness wrote:
‘Tanks, guns, half-tracks and ambulances were mixed up with three-ton lorries, carriers and more tanks. An endless column, nose to tail, either waiting with engines running in the overpowering heat and dust or tearing through narrow lanes trying to catch the vehicle in front. Trees and bushes are smashed and twisted. Houses are either completely collapsed or have huge rents in them. Civilians in ragged clothes stand in small groups staring pathetically at the never-ending stream. Enemy equipment is everywhere. Broken trucks, burned-out tanks, guns upside down are scattered about. Great broken cobwebs of barbed wire and telephone lines are tangled in the hedgerows and above all hangs a thick, nauseating blanket of dust and the stench of the dead.’
Monte Cassino finally fell on 18th May. The monastery had ceased to exist. 'When Paul Kennedy, the field surgeon, took a trip to Cassino, ‘or rather what was Cassino’, he described it as ‘nothing more than a disorganised rock pile. I have never seen such complete destruction.’ Victory is mine. (and Catherine’s) You’ve just been suckered into reading a piece on military logistics without realising it. Without unsexy subjects like mapping and logistics, there are no fascinating battles to study. This is the way. Literally, in this case, the Aurelian, the Casilina and the Appian Way.
This online magazine is a reader-supported publication. To help facilitate my history habit, thereby giving me the chance to convert this addiction into shiny articles for you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For the cost of a single take-away coffee each month, you save me from doing some turgid office job and giving up history to be a grown up. It also accelerates you to the top of my favourites list, and puts you in line for prizes!
THIS WEEK
On Monday I gave you the monthly feature, which features a long article that’s required more research. This one marked the anniversary of the first mass transport to Auschwitz in 1940 by examining the beginnings of the camp and how different it looked from later in the war.
Then on Thursday, I released the latest episode of the After Hours podcast looking at the Sex Lives of Royals. This month Charly and I were joined by Miranda Malins to take a look at how Oliver Cromwell can’t have been a complete killjoy if you examine the amount of children he had. The revelation this time? Thin walls in the interregnum.
EVENTS/UPCOMING:
By the time you read this I will be out on Istoria’s first trip of the year, which looks at Chelsea Football Club’s contribution to the First World War. Expect pictures next week.
NEXT WEEK:
Next week I’m ditching the Second World War for a bit as it’s been hogging the limelight lately. First off, you’ll be getting the next instalment of Vanished Occupations. (Find the last one here) Expect bewigged douchebags, bloodshed and mayhem. I’ll also be digging into some yarns about Britain’s smuggling history, introducing you to some colourful characters.