Word: volturno
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lanky Lieut. General Mark Clark of the British-American Fifth Army rode his familiar jeep up to the front again. The Italian autumn rains had eased a bit. The spongy volcanic soil of the Volturno meadows firmed rapidly; it was possible now to drive off the roads. From a forward post the General peered across a calm, river-and ditch-ribbed valley to the German positions...
Frontal Assault. One hour after midnight the Battle of the Volturno began. From the river's south bank, on both sides of Capua, the Fifth's artillery laid down the heaviest barrage of the Italian campaign. In thinner volume the German guns spoke back. A bright moon silvered the darkness. Under it, shellfire flashed red, tracers brushed glowing orbits, mortars chopped the river into a watery hell...
...muddy, determined Fifth inched forward, mopped up the hard knots of resistance. One day it trudged into steepled Capua, where Hannibal and his Carthaginians had wintered after slaughtering the Romans at Cannae. There Mark Clark's men stood in a strategic bend of the Volturno River. Across 200 yards of rushing water lay the German line. By week's end the Fifth had moved up to the Volturno on both sides of Capua, along a front stretching 40 miles inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea. Patrols nudged across the stream, engaged the enemy in sharp skirmishes...
...caught the Germans by surprise, so completely that a major had been captured in bed. The enemy's next reaction had been alarm, for the Eighth's rapid advance could develop into a flank attack against the Germans on the peninsula's other side. From the Volturno front Field Marshal Albert Kesselring rushed the 16th Armored Division, veteran of Stalingrad and Salerno, to counterattack at Termoli...
...Above Naples the Germans might make a stand behind the Volturno River, where the old Romans posted a garrison and Garibaldi beat the Neapolitans. Above Rome, they might run a barricade along the Apennines, from La Spezia on the Ligurian Sea to Rimini on the Adriatic. Above that barrier the land sloped down to the Po Valley, and beyond towered the Alps. Napoleon once had hacked a way across that rampart of nature, via Tarvis and Klagenfurt, toward Vienna. But it was formidable. Rather than a direct road to Germany, Italy might be a flank for other bridgeheads. > Italy leads...