Out of the Mountains

To the desperate men gathered about the map tables at German supreme headquarters the reports must have been coming in like hammer blows to the heart. Now their Italian line collapsed. Two of their last, best armies, driven from the Apennines, were scurrying northward toward the Po River and Lombardy's plains. Bologna, pivot of German resistance, was gone.

The Nazi troops, who had fought with fanatical skill through the long winter months, broke suddenly as General Mark Clark sent his armies forward. Down from the mountains came Lieut. General Lucian K. Truscott's Fifth Army. Its leading divisions wheeled east toward Bologna. Lieut. General Richard L. McCreery's Eighth Army drove up from the Adriatic coast, blocked escape routes from Bologna and sent a column west for the city.

In Bologna the two armies met. Almost simultaneously Eighth Army Polish troops under Major General Bohusz-Szyszko moved in from the southeast, while Fifth Army Americans, supported by Italian partisans, entered from the southwest. They found a city almost undamaged, soberly rounding up its Fascists, Italian and German.

There was no time to celebrate. Northward the German armies were stretched out on the roads, vulnerable to attack. Brazilian Expeditionary Corps troops and U.S. units swung by Bologna, bypassed the road center of Modena and drove to the Po. Overhead Allied flyers roared, flashed down to strafe the marching enemy; in one day 1,700 Nazi vehicles were destroyed or damaged.

For Colonel General Heinrich von Vietinghoff these were critical hours. With luck he might still get his troops safely across the Po, but German luck was wearing thin.

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