many ways, Kesselring was a rather untypical German field marshal. There was none of the patrician austerity, for example, that was a feature of many of the highest-ranking German commanders – no monocled scowl or stiff-backed swagger. Rather, he was known for being genial and good-humoured: not for nothing was he nicknamed ‘Smiling Albert’. He was also diplomatically adept, getting on well with his Italian partners and doing much more than most of his fellow Germans to forge a good working relationship with them. Shrewd both tactically and strategically, he fully understood modern warfare in all its facets, far more so than Rommel, for instance, his subordinate in North Africa. Yet there were paradoxes to Kesselring. Despite his obvious skills as a commander, he had a reputation for over-optimism. In September 1940, for example, he mistakenly believed that the Luftwaffe had all but destroyed RAF Fighter Command, while at the height of the Siege of Malta in the spring of 1942, as Commander-in-Chief of Axis Forces in the Mediterranean, he believed he had successfully brought the tiny British island to its knees only for it to recover more quickly than he had anticipated. In Tunisia, he repeatedly told Hitler the Axis forces could hold on long after his commanders had realised the game was up, and his optimism came to the fore again during the crisis of the Italian collapse, when he had refused to accept that the Italians would betray them. ‘That fellow Kesselring is too honest for those born traitors,’ Hitler said of him.25 Fine diplomatic skills had been offset by political naïvety.
Yet Kesselring always claimed he was nothing more than a simple soldier. Unlike many of the German senior commanders, his background was far from aristocratic and nor did he come from a family steeped in military tradition. Indeed, despite becoming one of the first three Luftwaffe officers – after Göring – to be made a Feldmarschall in July 1940, his had been an unremarkable upbringing, and it says much about the man that his rise was so comparatively rapid.
Born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, in 1885, where his father was a schoolmaster and town councillor, Kesselring came from solid middle-class stock. From an early age, however, he was determined to pursue a career in the army, and after matriculating from his local grammar school in 1904, he became a Fahnenjunker – an aspiring officer – in the 2nd Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment. Serving in the unglamorous foot artillery during the First World War, he gained valuable battlefield experience, and then in 1917 became a staff officer first at divisional, and by the war’s end, at corps level – a sure sign that he was beginning to stand out.
Indeed, he was one of comparatively few officers – along with Frido von Senger – to keep their jobs in the tiny post-war army, where he demonstrated his further aptitude as a staff officer, and where he rose to the rank of colonel with the command of a division. In 1933, Hitler came to power and immediately announced the clandestine formation of the Luftwaffe. Kesselring was retired from the army and given a civilian post in the new air force where he set to work running the administration and airfield development of the Luftwaffe. He also learnt to fly and worked hard to develop the Luftwaffe strategically and tactically. By 1936, he was back in uniform, both as a general and as the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff.
At the onset of war, Kesselring was in charge of the 1st Air Fleet that helped launch the blitzkrieg on Poland with such devastating results. He took over the 2nd Air Fleet, commanding it with great success in the Netherlands and France, and against Britain in 1940, and in Russia in 1941. During this time, he pioneered the theory of mass air assaults and did much to develop the use of the Luftwaffe as a tactical air force working in close co-operation with the German ground forces.
In December 1941, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Axis Forces in the Mediterranean, but despite his elevated position he had had a difficult time handling both his Italian partners and his subordinate, General Rommel. No inter-Axis staff had been established, while the chain of command had remained typically muddled, so that Rommel, commanding the Axis army in North Africa, had been, officially at least, under the command of the Italian Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, General Bastico, who in turn had been subordinate to the Italian Chief of Staff, General Cavallero. Further complicating matters had been Cavallero’s deep resentment of Kesselring’s appointment. Undeterred, however, Kesselring, from his base in Rome, had worked hard to improve relations with his allies, and in this had been highly successful. Showing both respect and sensitivity towards them, his diplomacy and brilliant organisational skills had done much to ease the difficult supply situation faced by the Axis forces in North Africa.
His inability to tame Rommel had had disastrous results for the Axis, although the blame had hardly lain with Kesselring. Whilst Rommel was directly appealing to Hitler to allow him to make his dash for Alexandria and the Suez Canal in the summer of 1942, Kesselring had been urging the Führer to first capture Malta and secure the Axis supply lines. Hitler deferred to Rommel with fatal consequences. As it happened, neither Kesselring’s subsequent misjudgement of the situation in Tunisia nor his gullibility over Badoglio had made much difference to the course of events. It had been Hitler who had insisted on pouring troops and supplies into North Africa, not Kesselring; and it had also been Hitler and the German High Command who had ordered the steady flow of troops into Italy from the moment Mussolini was forced from power.
Yet it was Kesselring who had done so much to confound the Allied assault on Italy the previous September. After extricating the majority of his troops from Sicily, he had begun to see that there was much to be gained by making a firm stand in the south of Italy, rather than retreating far north of Rome as favoured by Rommel and the High Command. He had already seen that Britain had become ‘the aircraft carrier from where powerful attacks were launched against northern Germany’ and feared what would happen if the Allies were to take a firm grasp of most of Italy.26 He had also correctly recognised that Italy’s economic capacity was important for the German war effort, but that it would be harder to sustain the further the Allies climbed up the leg of the peninsula. Furthermore, he had argued that other parts of Germany’s southern domains would be far more vulnerable if much of Italy were to be lost. All were sound arguments.
With regard to the Allies’ intentions, he had also correctly guessed that General Alexander would choose the Gulf of Salerno with the nearby major port of Naples as their objective. Nonetheless, at that point, with Hitler vacillating, the view of the High Command that they should withdraw north of Rome still held firm, so that despite repeated requests for urgent reinforcements from Rommel’s Army Group B in northern Italy, Kesselring’s pleas had been ignored. He had been left to defend the Allied invasion with only those troops still in the south.
Had Rommel come to his aid, events might have been very different in Italy. As it was, Kesselring had only retreated from Salerno once it had become clear the Allies had established a firm foothold. He had then begun a careful and highly effective retreat, blowing up much of Naples’ infrastructure and leaving barely a single bridge or road intact. In addition, the advancing Allies had been greeted at every turn with a network of minefields and debilitating booby traps. And while his troops had fought this rearguard action, Italian labourers had been set to work building up a defensive system across Italy – a series of lines that had originally been singled out by the Italians but which had then been massively strengthened on Kesselring’s orders.
These orders were based on three entirely correct assumptions – first, that Rome must surely be the Allies’ next goal, and second, that a modern army in winter could only effectively reach it from the south using one of the main Italian roads as the axis of their advance. There was no such road through the mountainous middle of the peninsula, and if the Allies attacked up the Adriatic, they would then have to cross back to the west coast to reach Rome. This meant that realistically there were only two routes open to them, either Route7–the ViaAppia–or Route 6, the Via Casilina. The Allies, he guessed, would be unlikely to use the former as the Via Appia ran along the coast, was narrow and easily defendable as it passed around the Aurunci Mountains, and then cut through the now-flooded Pontine Marshes. The Via Casilina, however, ran into the Liri Valley and so his third assumption was that this offered the most likely route of advance for the Allies.
