Holding Attack?

A German prisoner in Italy told his captors last week that his comrades had orders to hold their present positions for two months. In the retelling, the story got better and better: "many prisoners, captured documents, intercepted orders. . . ." Suddenly the air grew cold along Italy's shin and there were snow flurries on the hilltops. And so, what with the garrulous prisoner and the cold snap, a phrase was born. The Germans, it was said, had taken a stance along a "winter line."

The line was supposed to be defined by the Garigliano River on the west and the Sangro River on the east side of Italy. Between the two rivers the Germans were dug into formidable, tangled mountain positions. But the actions which took place last week, particularly in that central tangle, suggested that the "winter line" was more a journalistic phrase than a military reality.

Sample of the Tangle. Looking forward from a Fifth Army regimental O.P. (observation post), the men could see their problem ahead--mountain ridges converging to a bottleneck, and in the bottleneck two obstructions, a bare rocky spine and a round wooded knoll. These hills squeezed Highway No. 6 into a horseshoe before it could straighten out on its way to Cassino and Rome, 90 miles away. Infantrymen named the hills "Old Baldy" and "The Fat One," and got ready to take them.

Artillery bowled down the valley at 9 a.m., like a giant Rip van Winkle game of tenpins. At 10 it began raining, and the artillery fire halted. Lieut. Colonel Ashton Manhart said: "The poor damn doughboys get it again." The Divisional General at Colonel Manhart's command post said: "I don't know why this artillery lets up just because it's raining." The rain stopped and German artillery started at about noon. The German bursts, guided by observation from advantageous Nazi heights, poked with maddening accuracy into gulleys, behind haystacks, on to houses being used by the Americans.

Germans had blasted positions out of solid rock on Old Baldy. When a battalion was ordered forward across the flats, the enemy opened up with machine guns and mortars. The men walked through a place where the Germans knew they would have to go. The survivors moved against Baldy. E and K Companies got 200 yd. up the hill and hid in the rocks. L Company tried for the top.

The battalion commander. Colonel Crawford, limped back to his C.P. (comand post), stretched flat on the ground, and said wearily: "I've been through a lot of battles. I've been wounded. But this is the toughest position I've ever had to take. Baldy's almost straight up. There's one trail but that's mined. . . ." Then he fell asleep. The next day his companies took Old Baldy and he said to TIME Correspondent Will Lang: ''My companies are thinned down, Will. I should have reinforcements before I make any more commitments. We're going to need some strength to hold the top."

But his troops held Old Baldy against bitter counterattacks. The troops that took The Fat One held it too. It was that way all along the line, mile by bloody, muddy mile.

Samples of Prognosis. The Allies seemed both determined and able to keep inching forward. It took no "winter line" to make their progress painful. The terrain offered the enemy a Thermopylae every five miles. The enemy cut trees down across the road and then shelled the roadblocks so that engineers could not clear them. He planted wooden "fox mines" which defied ordinary detection, and enough ordinary metal mines to kill more men than his shells did. It was not break-through country.

But there was another possible explanation for the slowness of the campaign in Italy, and perhaps it was more important than all the terrain, weather and demolition delays put together. It was possible that the aims and purposes of the campaign had been deliberately obscured, that the whole campaign was really only a diversion.

In any case, the doughboys in Italy, who last spring were always talking about getting home by Christmas, now were wondering whether they would be in Rome by then.

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