The Story of the 34th Infantry Division
Book II • Pisa to Final Victory

Chapter XXV • HIGHWAY 9
Slashing [pp. 59-70]

   The situation had by this time become so bad for the enemy that it was known that his communications were failing him and units were very disorganized. An exception existed of a group of divisions which had escaped the main Allied attack but which were now retreating northeastward from their mountain defenses near the west coast of Italy and were evidently intending to cross the River Po and to escape into Austria before our troops could contact them. Speed, therefore, was one of the most important considerations in our movements. The 133rd Infantry moved rapidly by truck to the city of Modena, situated on the broad straight highway leading northwest from Bologna to the Po River and northwestern Italy.

   Italian cities renowned in history were located at intervals along this, the Via Emilia, but the wily Germans, foreseeing that an eventual Allied attack might be launched along it, had constructed permanent defenses screening each successive town on the southeast side. These fortifications included solidly built pillboxes of concrete and brick, revetted anti-tank ditches, and large-scale prepared demolitions. To offset these precautionary measures, our troops could count upon assistance from the Partisans who, having been instructed to rise in rebellion against their German oppressors, were ready to prevent the Germans from carrying out a "scorched earth" policy.

   The 133rd Infantry, relieving elements of the 1st Armored Division just west of Modena, moved rapidly along Highway 9 until they established contact with the defense force at Rubiera. After a brief fight the town was taken, and prisoners disclosed that the enemy units who were streaming northward from the Apennines came from a large assortment of combat and service units all hopelessly jumbled, and certain only of the necessity for retreating fast toward their homeland.

   On 24 April our troops had advanced further up Highway 9 to the outskirts of Reggio where an enemy garrison of several hundred men, drawn from a local infantry weapons training school, put up a shrewd defense of the city, falling back slowly from the airfield into the town itself. By the afternoon a few American tanks had arrived on the scene and these, together with a bold encircling movement from the south by the 34th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, resulted in an immediate collapse and the town was captured the same evening. To keep the pursuit fresh, the 168th Infantry now took up the chase. Throughout the night they pushed on to Parma, being slightly delayed by demolished bridges which the Germans had had time to destroy as they fell back.

   By this time certain information had enabled us to gain a clearer picture of what we were up against. An enemy force, consisting on the 232nd Infantry Division, the 148th Infantry Division, and the Italia Infantry Division, together with other Republican Fascist troops and a German armored infantry regiment, were falling back to the north in several columns along the roads leading from the Apennines [at right angles] to Highway 9 and the River Po. Parma was on the line of their retreat. After a fight on the outskirts of the city, the 168th Infantry, together with Partisan brigades within the town and from the surrounding countryside, captured Parma during the evening of 25 April. The Germans, although handicapped by poor communications, realized that our rapid advance up Highway 9 was cutting deeply into the flank of their retreat, and indeed threatening to cut them off altogether. The leading German elements forced the pace as the 34th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, together with tanks, skirted Parma to the south, while the 133rd Infantry cleaned out by-passed German groups to the north.

   Now the 135th Infantry, arriving in high spirits, passed through the 168th Infantry and, dashing in trucks along Highway 9, found that the Germans had failed to destroy an important bridges. Fidenza fell the same day. They advanced at full speed to the Nure River, which they reached by morning on 26 April. After a brisk fire fight, the enemy withdrew from the river to positions inside the town of Piacenza on the same afternoon. It was now evident that the 34th Division had achieved a great breakthrough and had cut clean across the retreating columns of three enemy divisions, so that one of them, the 232nd Infantry Division, was isolated between Highway 9 and the Po River, while the other two had not yet even crossed the main road. However, the situation of the 34th itself meant that with its own resources it had to face both south and north along a distance of about 90 kilometers and was constantly open to the risk of a concerted attack to surround it by means of a double attack of the enemy divisions which had been split. The Divisional plan was to block to the south with limited motorized patrols and road posts, while the 133rd and 135th Infantry Regiments concentrated on the complete elimination of the 232nd Infantry Division in the shortest possible time.

   Fighting between the River Po and Highway 9 was vicious and sometimes confused. As the enemy was compressed into a small pocket in a loop of the river, he desperately tried to force a way out by charging down a road toward Piacenza with a column of infantry and some self-propelled guns. This force succeeded in surrounding a battalion of the 135th Infantry but, quite undaunted, the battalion fought on through the night until, by daybreak, all the enemy had either surrendered or been killed. During the same night, further to the east, a battalion of enemy troops advancing along a straight stretch of road became intermingled with two march units from the 133rd Infantry so that elements of our troops found themselves at either end of the German column. As dawn broke of 27 April the Americans, being the first to realize what the situation was, immediately brought 57 millimeter anti-tank guns, machine guns, rifles, grenades, and any other available weapons into action. Firing at maximum rate over open sights, the 57s enfiladed the German columns from one end to the other.

   After about forty minutes of the most bloody fighting the German column was completely wiped out, with heavy casualties to the enemy and much equipment lost. As the day wore on, the single German commander left alive, a colonel commanding a regiment of the 232nd Infantry Division, realized that his position was hopeless and, by the evening of 27 April surrendered his remaining officers and all enlisted personnel to the American troops.

   During this fighting the enemy garrison in Piacenza, which included some Italian SS troops, abandoned its duty of holding open the crossing of the River Po within the city and completely melted away.

   Throughout the two-day period from 26 to 28 April, while the 34th Division was annihilating the enemy to the north of it, the situation was extremely tense to the south of Highway 9. Rain and low clouds on 26 April prevented observation from AOPs [light aircraft] on the progress of the enemy retreat out of the Apennines toward us. All we knew was that it was a numerically strong enemy force getting nearer and nearer. As the weather improved during the afternoon of 27 April long columns of troops, including artillery and half-tracks, were seen only a few miles away from our weak road blocks. Partisans reported that they had harassed the enemy columns constantly, during their journey through the mountain roads but, according to prisoners, they still consisted of between 6,000 and 8,000 Germans and Italians. The first element to contact our troops was the armored infantry regiment which made a half-hearted attempt to force its way past our road block to enter the town of Parma, which, it will be recalled, was at that time a good 35 miles to the rear of our most advanced elements. Failing to enter the city and having suffered casualties, the enemy columns turned aside and moved northwestward into some high ground south of the highway, where contact was lost. To meet a possible attack by this enemy force, the only resources which we could spare consisted of the 168th Infantry Regiment, the 34th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, a company from the 894th Tank Destroyers, and five light tanks, all spread out for a distance of 45 miles. Yet so vigorous were the parrying blows which were struck at the enemy spearheads as they tried to probe northward, that the Germans and Italians did not have the heart to attempt to cross Highway 9. The initiative remained throughout with the 34th.

   On 29 April the Division was ordered to withdraw from the scene of its triumph in the Highway 9 area and to move in one day 145 miles - down to Modena, thence northward across the Po, and then westward again to a village near Cremona where it was originally intended to commit the Division in a sweeping movement to clear the Germans out of northwest Italy. It was left to the Brazilian Expeditionary Force to accept the surrender of the shaken German-Italian forces south of Highway 9 the day after the 34th left the sector.

   No sooner had the leading Regiment deployed in the Cremona area, where it succeeded in rounding up several hundred Germans, including the Commanding General of the famous 90th Light Division, when the Division's orders were changed, and a further move of 80 miles was executed to close the Division into an area between Brescia and Bergamo. Thus by dint of skillful planning and use of all available transportation (and also by the old-fashioned method of traveling light), the Division had moved a total of over 330 miles in nine days [roughly the straight-line distance from Anzio to Bologna over the preceding thirteen months], enabling the High Command to count upon the readiness of the Division for combat far in advance of what the enemy believed feasible. In the new zone, several thousand prisoners, many of them captured by Partisans, were rounded up. It was here that the first unmistakable signs of the impending German collapse were seen, as complete convoys of German vehicles loaded with Germans and driven by Germans careened down the highway towards the prisoner of war cages, guarded by only a handful of American soldiers.

   In praising the fighting troops - above all the tired, footsore infantrymen - for their work in this, the last, maddest chase of Germans in the Italian campaign, let us not forget the achievements of the service troops. Aptly named, they, in the closing stages, made it possible to exploit to the full the terrible collapse of the German armies.

   Consider the 34th Signal Company, which hauled, and then laid, wire day and night for hundreds of miles, tying-in the various units to a central directing point; the radiomen who welded into a flexible whole, what would otherwise have been a disjointed and aimless group of small forces. Remember the Division Military Police whose job, already complicated by the unprecedented distances and complications of a road net several hundred miles long, was made doubly difficult by the hordes of German PWs who flocked to the cages, at the end even in their own transport

   Think of the Quartermaster, the Medics, The Ordnance, the truck drivers of all units, who for days on end had no rest, and little food; who kept their vehicles going although grossly and deliberately overloaded; who were the physical agents making possible the achievement of the mission beginning, "The Division will move ...".

   Perhaps also the staffs at all echelons may not go unnoticed, for the achievements of the 34th Division did not happen by mere accident.

Chapter XXIV BOLOGNA Smashing	Chapter XXVI BRESCIA - IVREA Triumphing
Return to the beginning, The Story of the 34th Infantry Division Introduction, Foreword, Contents

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