The transfer of the Second New Zealand Division to Tuscany - July 1944

Il trasferimento della Seconda Divisione neozelandese in Toscana - luglio 1944

Il terzo trasferimento in Italia della Seconda Divisione Neozelandese, nell’estate del 1944, a conclusione della battaglia di Cassino, la portò in Toscana, dove avrebbe svolto un ruolo importante nella liberazione di Arezzo e di Firenze. Le truppe neozelandesi lasciarono la zona di Cassino fra il 9 e il 12 di luglio. Fu un trasferimento tranquillo, attraverso un territorio già in mano agli Alleati, e in parte non toccato dalla guerra. Ogni unità mise tre giorni per completare il viaggio; per spostare l’intera Divisione ci vollero due settimane. Quando le ultime arrivarono, la 6^ Brigata fu già in azione a sud di Arezzo.

Con la prima tappa del viaggio, salirono il Lazio sulla SS 6 Casilina fino a Roma, passando per Frosinone e Valmontone, per proseguire poi verso nord sulla SS 3 Flaminia per pernottare nei pressi di Civita Castellana. Il secondo giorno, continuarono il viaggio, attraversando Narni e Orvieto, fino a Città della Pieve, per molte unità la fine della tappa. Altre si spinsero fino a Paciano a sudovest del Lago di Trasimeno.  Il terzo giorno, le unità destinate ad entrare subito al fronte salirono la sponda occidentale del lago fino ai pendii sotto Cortona. Da qui sarebbero partiti per l’attacco contro la Linea Gotica, combattendo sulle alture di Monte Lignano la battaglia decisiva per la liberazione di Arezzo nei giorni 15-17 luglio, 1944.

Conclusa questa breve e cruenta missione, la Divisione si spostò circa 80 km ad ovest, passando per Monte San Savino e Colonna di Grillo fino alle dolci colline a nord di Siena. Fecero base attorno a Castellina in Chianti, da dove  entrarono nella battaglia di Firenze.

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Rome had fallen to the Allies on 4 June 1944, just two days before the second front was opened in France with the Normandy landings. The Allied forces in Italy had already been reduced and further troops were about to be diverted from Italy for the attack in southern France on July 26. For the battle-weary and depleted Allied forces in Italy, ten more arduous months lay ahead.

After the hard-won Allied victory at Cassino, the men of the 2^nd New Zealand Division enjoyed a brief period of relaxation in their rest areas north of the town, until summoned to their next assignment: destination Tuscany. In the blistering heat of July 1944, the Division began the three-day trek north.  The first part of the journey was on paved roads, the national highways 6 and 3; the rest was on unsealed gravel roads amid clouds of dust.  It took two weeks to complete the transfer of the entire Division. The first units of the Division began the transfer north on 9 July 1944, arriving before the last units left the Cassino area, and 6th Brigade was in action south of Arezzo before the whole Division had completed the transfer. 

The SS6 towards Frosinone

The first leg of the journey took the Division directly to Rome on SS 6 Via Casilina (approximately one hundred and fifty kilometres), through the Eternal City without pause, and then a further sixty-five kilometres north along SS 3 Via Flaminia, to a hot overnight stage near Civita Castellana, sixty-five kilometres further north. The SS 6 is a narrow, winding 2-lane road, for much of the route running alongside the railway. The Liri valley is still largely agricultural, a landscape of olive plantations and vineyards, and fields of corn. After Frosinone the route descends into the valley of the Sacco River, crossing some minor streams before rising again to Ferentino (400 m), which still has remnants of its ancient Roman walls, and the medieval town of Anagni.

Towards Valmontone, however, the landscape changes. Thereafter, very little has survived of the Roman countryside that once fed the capital, as vineyards and cultivated fields give way to an almost continuous post-war urban development. In the distance, the soldiers would have seen the great arches of the Acqua Claudio, one of the eleven original aqueducts which carried the water supply of ancient Rome. The Division travelled straight into Rome on what is now designated Via Casilina Vecchia (literally the old Casilina road) passing grimy, small houses, factories and workshops, still visible along the old SS 6 even before reaching the Aurelian walls. This last stretch is cramped between the railway and ancient walls which incorporate part of another, much more recent aqueduct (the Acquedotto Felice, built in the sixteenth century by Pope Sixtus V). It snakes under its mighty arches, some of which then served as wretched slum dwellings for poverty-stricken families. The old SS 6 Casilina comes to the great defensive wall, built by the Emperor Aurelius in the fourth century to protect Rome from the barbarians, at the Porta Maggiore, one of the main gateways into the city. From here, it is likely that the Division skirted the Aurelian walls on a kind of ring road, to Porta del Popolo, where they picked up Route 3, Via Flaminia another Roman road, to the north. 

In recording this journey, most unit histories omit Rome altogether, or mention only crossing ‘the outskirts of Rome’. Certainly, the sights of central Rome were not on the soldiers’ agenda on this first journey through the Italian capital. Only a few lucky ones, like the men of the Ammunition Company, who had been posted ahead to Valmontone, managed to enter the city on the way north, and described with awe their unforgettable first experience of Rome.

Porta Maggiore, gateway to central Rome from SS 6

  

The 4th-century Aurelian walls

The first section of SS 3 (Route 3), the Via Flamina, is now totally urbanized, but beyond the city, like the Casilina south of Rome, the Via Flaminia is still an ordinary two-lane single-carriageway road which winds across a gently rolling countryside, with trees sometimes shading the road. As one travels north, clumps of low woods, the inevitable olive groves, tilled fields and vineyards take the place of the tall oaks and marine pines. In 1944, the 18 Battalion historian recorded that the journey was “… through a country of rolling hills and farms and many towns, almost unscarred by the war except for blown bridges”.

Civita Castellana, the Division’s first staging point is a small town divided in two by a natural chasm in the characteristic tufa formations. The old town perches on a cliff overlooking the via Flaminia, a bridge across the gulley linking it to the newer part. For centuries prey to attackers for its strategic and commanding position, the town - still dominated by the fort built in 1494 at the will of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI - was undisturbed by the brief and peaceful passage of the New Zealand troops in July 1944.

The SS 3 Via Flaminia north of Rome

Civita Castellana

  

On the second day, the journey took the Division, by a rather roundabout route, another 140-150 km to the concentration area near Lake Trasimene, mostly on rough, dusty roads.  After Civita Castellana, the Division continued along the old, two-lane, single-carriageway Via Flaminia, as far as Narni, in Umbria. Today downgraded in this section to a regional road SR 3 (not SS 3), it winds past the tiny locality of Borghetto, crosses over the Tiber, and meanders north past the small hilltop town of Otricoli.  Sometimes, the route offers grand vistas across the broad, fertile Tiber River valley; at other times, the view is cut off by a sheer rock wall. For most of this section, the road is flanked on both sides by colourful vegetation, and the occasional isolated old farmhouse can still be seen. While the predominantly rural landscape is still recognizable, the countryside is now dotted with modern houses and there are the inevitable patches of roadside clutter near the villages.

On this section of the journey, the Division travelled north through battlefields and the all too familiar scenes of destruction. The roads were often strewn with wrecked military vehicles, and flanked by abandoned and semi-destroyed farmhouses, and neglected fields. Some 37 kilometres further north, the Division reached the medieval town of Narni, dominated by a sixteenth century fortress on the slope below the town. Narni had been liberated by Eighth Army on 13 June 1944. The 2^nd Lothian Division - who are suitably remembered in the local museum - cleared the way through the town a month before the New Zealand Division transited there. The Division thus found the Roman gateway exiting the town already conveniently ‘widened’ to allow the passage of tanks!

A view across the Tiber valley

 

Approaching Narni

After crossing over the Nera, Supply Company and Ammunition Company continued along the Via Flaminia, travelling eastwards via Terni and Foligno to Spoleto, then on to Perugia, and across the northern shore of Lake Trasimene to their destination at Cortona.  The main body of the Division, however, branched westward along the narrow SS 205 across a landscape of low industrial buildings and scattered houses, the small villages along the way almost indistinguishable from the more-or-less continuous urban or industrial development.  One of the most interesting towns along the route, Amelia (406 m), said to be the most ancient town in Umbria dating back to around 1100 BC, is no longer an isolated hilltop town, and the approach is not as picturesque as it would have been eighty years ago. After Amelia, the road continues through a stretch of unbroken forest, often on both sides of the road, up to Lugnano in Teverina, then winds on to Guardea through a landscape of olive plantations and wooded hillsides. Almost all the lateral roads are still gravel or dirt roads, as would have been the entire route from Narni through to Orvieto, back in 1944.  If uncomfortable because of the heat and the dust, this part of the route did not pose great challenges in terms of alignment. The mountains to the east reach modest altitudes of 800-1000 m, while to the west, the countryside is flatter and increasingly open, offering vistas of cultivated fields and vineyards across the Tiber valley.

At San Lorenzo, the route turns more sharply north and descends slowly to the Tiber River, then follows the river up to and beyond Baschi. After a short while the route crosses over the A1 motorway and the Tiber, just below its confluence with the Paglia River, and before veering north, the sloping tree-clad banks largely concealing the river from view. In the last section to Orvieto, the SS 205 continues up the Paglia River valley, on the right bank, with the motorway on the right and the railway on the left.  

Orvieto, in the extreme south-west corner of Umbria, offers the traveller startling and even breath-taking views of the old town from most approaches, but presents a disappointing face from this southern route.  Indistinguishable in colour from the tufa rock out of which it seems to grow, on first sight one needs to look closely at Orvieto to see where the rock ends and the town starts! Eighty years ago, when the Division climbed the corkscrew road up to the town centre and out the other side to pick up the SS 71 towards Lake Trasimene, Orvieto was already a major road junction.  In passing there they could not have missed noting the enormous Duomo, built between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries later, perhaps the finest medieval cathedral in Italy and a splendid example of Italian Gothic architecture.  The polychromatic marble façade with its gleaming mosaics, bas-reliefs, and statues, is itself a marvel. 

The spectacular approach to Orvieto

From Orvieto, the Division proceeds north along SS 71 – a gentle, up-hill-and-down-dale road, with new vistas around every bend: fields of corn, fruit trees, vineyards, olive trees and, these days, sunflowers – probably not much different from 80 years ago. Occasionally there are isolated stone farmhouses and traces of older parts of the villages, but much of the building is new, or certainly post-war. The road still passes through Ficulle with its two-storey stone houses along the roadside and its impressive round tower. Soon after, is the beautiful walled, medieval town of Città della Pieve, about 15 km south-west of the Lake Trasimene, the second staging points for several units of the Division. Best known for being the birthplace of the famous Renaissance painter Pietro di Cristoforo Vanucci (1446-1523), called ‘the Perugino’, Città della Pieve is distinctive for its red brick buildings, including a grand Romanesque Cathedral.

Città delle Pieve 

 

The other units moved some twenty km further north, to a quiet rural setting around the pretty medieval village of Paciano just off the SS 71, nestling on the slopes of Monte Petrarvella, a modest hill of 391 m. The countryside around is open and gently rolling, grassy fields alternating with small woods, while taller trees sometimes flank the road or shelter an isolated farmhouse. A tiny village even today, Paciano, a medieval fief which passed under the authority of the Papal States early sixteenth century is not without interest, boasting a fine Palazzo del Comune (Town Hall) and a medieval wall with three gateways.

A glance away from Paciano is Lake Trasimene - the largest Italian lake in terms of surface area (128 km2) but very shallow - in the Province of Perugia (Umbria). It was certainly a pleasant area to relax, but this was not on the programme. Urgent business awaited the Division further north. 

The south-western shore of Lake Trasimene

On the third day, those bound for immediate action continued some thirty kilometres north to Cortona, the final destination before their first engagement in Tuscany.