Churchill's Hellraisers. Damien Lewis
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had declared himself satisfied, contemplating any Allied assault on the Gotenstellung ‘with a certain confidence’.
Sure enough, by the autumn of 1944 Allied forces had fought themselves to a standstill on the Gotenstellung. With combat losses mounting and the harsh winter weather setting in, General Harold Alexander, Kesselring’s opposite number, had accepted that the Allied push through Italy had hit a major stumbling block. ‘The last battles in Italy were just as fierce as any we had experienced . . .’ General Alexander remarked. ‘I was not faced with a broken and disintegrating Army . . .’ No breakthrough was going to be possible, at least not before the spring.
The partisans’ decrepit truck coughed and backfired spasmodically, but after an hour’s tortuous drive it made it to that first obstacle. There, Lees and his four-man party dismounted and clambered across what remained of the demolished bridge. They pushed ahead on a road cut into the sheer side of the mountain, one that had been built to service the rearmost defences of the Gotenstellung.
The first massive bunkers hove into view. Lees was astounded at the sheer impregnability of those fortifications. The last line of defence, they looked to be deserted at present, but once manned by German troops they would constitute a veritable mountain fortress. As the partisan leader had warned, the only possible route ahead lay along a thin ribbon of road, and they were forced to pass below the giant, gaping, eyeless sockets of those concrete bunkers.
It was an eerie, shadowed place and Lees was hugely relieved to reach the ridge that lay on the far side. It was midday by now and their partisan guide pointed out the main road that cut through the valley below. Lees gazed upon that highway: what he saw was not encouraging. To either side of the twisting ribbon of black rose grey-walled mountains, slashed through by precipitous ravines. The terrain looked utterly daunting.
Here and there tiny white puffs of smoke revealed where Allied shells were bursting amid the hidden defences. The noise of battle drifted across to them, echoing confusingly around the rocky slopes.
‘It’s going to be difficult,’ Salvi, one of the resistance leaders, ventured.
‘Very,’ Lees confirmed, grimly.
Salvi found a cleft in the rock-face via which he assured Lees they could descend. The Italians led the way, Lees and Dobson following. Big, heavy and ungainly at heights, Lees found the next hour or so hellish, as he clung to the rock with aching fingertips and with his Sten slung across his shoulders. Each glance down was rewarded by a fresh surge of nausea, and by the time he reached the bottom his legs were shaking uncontrollably.
From there, they followed a faint track that led to a small patch of woodland, lying just above the road. It was late afternoon by now, and Lees reckoned dusk was no more than two hours away. Already the highway was busy with trucks motoring to and fro. Come nightfall, it would become packed with traffic, for the enemy tended to use the cloak of darkness to shield their convoys from marauding Allied warplanes.
The guide from Pigna village was still with them, but he would go no further than the road. He was dressed like a local villager and carried ID papers, which meant that he should be able to pass freely through enemy positions. Lees persuaded him to press on to the nearest village, a small place called Fanghetto, which lay just before the road.
An hour later he was back. What he reported underscored the futility of trying to make it across anywhere hereabouts. The village was full of enemy troops whose job it was to patrol the road. Even if Lees and his men did sneak through undetected, on the far side lay a fierce mountain river. It was fast, deep and treacherous, and only one bridge spanned its breadth, which was under permanent guard. Beyond that lay a road snaking into the high-ground, but it was a heavily used supply route for German front-line troops.
In short, there was no way through.
With heavy hearts Lees and his men retraced their steps, arriving back at the cliff-face that they had descended earlier. Too exhausted to attempt the ascent, they found a deserted shepherd’s hut in which to spend the night. At dawn the following morning, the climb up the sheer rock-face proved even more terrifying than the descent had done.
Once at the top, an exhausted Lees and Salvi took stock. They were all out of water and running low on food. They questioned the guide, but he had few viable suggestions. As Lees gazed out over the enemy-infested terrain, he felt utterly spent and close to beaten. His eyes drifted further south, to the beguiling shimmer of the Mediterranean. It was little more than a couple of miles away.
A British warship was steaming up the coast, shelling what had to be the Gotenstellung’s defences. A thought suddenly struck Lees: the sea. Why not use the sea? The sea was owned by the Allies, British warships keeping up a steady barrage of fire against the enemy. Surely, crossing the lines would be far easier if attempted by sea. In essence, if they rowed across they could outflank the enemy’s defences. Surely, there lay the answer?
Lees turned to the guide. Did he know any fishermen, he demanded, ones who were friendly to the partisan cause? He did, the guide replied, but the Germans had confiscated all of their oars. Could any be found, Lees asked. The guide thought they could, with the right kind of incentive. A plan was hatched. The guide would get a letter through to his fisherman friend, offering a bundle of cash if he could get a boat ready and meet with Lees and his men that afternoon. The letter would have to be bicycled through to the fisherman, to make it into his hands in time.
‘What if he fails to show or gives us away?’ Salvi asked Lees.
Lees shrugged. ‘We’ll have to take our chances . . . If he fails to make it, we can’t wait another night. We’ll just have to risk trying to get across near the coast.’
The plan set, Lees felt a surge of renewed energy. They set off, keeping to the cover of woodland and descending by a gentler slope. By midday, they were in sight of the fisherman’s village. With little food remaining, they gorged on bunches of juicy black grapes plucked from a nearby vineyard.
The meeting point was a small quarry, set in a patch of woodland about two miles from the beckoning sea. They approached it with caution. As luck would have it, the place was occupied. A gypsy family were using it as a site for making charcoal. Typically no friends to the enemy – along with the Jews, Slavic peoples, the disabled and others, gypsies were also classed as Untermensch (subhuman) by the Nazis – they proved decidedly welcoming, once they understood who Lees and his party were.
They offered food and wine, but Lees was more interested in what intelligence they might furnish. The elder of the family led Lees to a small knoll on the fringes of the woodland. He pointed out two steep-sided hills that lay before them, each like a mini-volcano and covered in dense scrub. Each was fortified by hidden German positions, he explained.
Beneath their vantage point the road was busy with horse-drawn carts, laden with artillery shells: to one side of the woodland lay a camouflaged gun battery. Every now and then Lees heard the whine of a passing shell, followed shortly by the crack of the gun firing. He realised then that some of the enemy artillery was positioned behind them, lobbing shells high into the air at the Allied lines. Somehow, unwittingly, Lees and his men must have slipped through the rearmost enemy defences that morning.
Lees sketched out all the positions the gypsy could identify. If they did make it across the lines this would constitute priceless intelligence for planning bombing raids with pinpoint accuracy. They returned to the quarry. By four o’clock there was still no sign of the fisherman, and Lees was getting worried. With the approach of dusk no one doubted that he wasn’t coming. Something had gone wrong. Maybe the message hadn’t even reached him.
Lees turned to the gypsy. Was he able to guide them at all, he demanded? The man said that he could, but only as far as the road. Beyond that, he knew little if anything of the terrain. Lees figured if they could reach the scrub that cloaked the first of the two fortified hillocks, from there they might spy a route ahead and try to sneak onwards in the gathering darkness.
‘Our objective after that?’ Salvi queried.
Good question. Lees eyed the distant wall of mountains. Somewhere among those towering peaks lay the Allied front line. Even via his binoculars,