Surprise attack sees Austrian collapse

By the 20th June the German assault on the British positions around Trieste had pushed the British back to the city, cutting them off from all but seaborne resupply. However, naval artillery support had forced the Germans to reduce their forward positions to a thin screen of infantry and obersevers. Intending to destroy the British forces in Trieste, the Germans planned a massive assault on the city, lead by the Tigers of several Schwerepanzerabteilung.

Ultra intercepts alerted the Allies to this move, and the RAF and USAF were unleashed on the roads leading to Trieste, littering the German line of march with scores of wrecked soft skinned vehicles, and forcing the Tigers to make long marches 'on track', where their notorious unreliability slowed them even further. Meanwhile, the allies had landed a division of US armour. Striking before the Germans could react, the Shermans overran the German forward positions and reached the Tigers' start lines before the Tigers themselves.

Thrown into disorder by this, the German army was forced to retreat, away from the pocket that closed as the US armour linked up with the British to the west. By the end of June the allied forces of Britain and the US had reached the mountain passes of the Austrian alps, and in the east, had reached Yugoslavia. Then the Russians had attacked in strength in the east.

The result of this was a major redeployment of forces. Thousands of Germans were transferred east to shore up the defences in Russia, while the southern front was stripped bare of resources and elite troops. Only a few schwere abteilung divisions remained to bolster the defences, which now mostly consisted of a few German grenadier divisions, Croats, Rumanians and Austrians, as well as a mixture of other second or third rate outfits.
Fearing invasion across the channel, an operation Hitler was convinced would eventually occur, the Atlantic wall was kept at strength, further reducing the defenders in Austria and southern Germany. Even so, German high command considered an all out attack in Austria as almost impossible, given the mountainous and forested terrain, forgetting their own lessons from the attack in the Ardennes back in 1940.

And so on 1st July 1944 the British and American forces attacked. British Infantry and American armour was flung at the defenders of the Austrian passes, but the lightly armed defenders had little trouble in holding the allies at bay. Three days later the main attack came, with five armoured divisions spearheading an advance in the direction of Graz and Vienna.

At the same time an overwhelming air armada bombed the supply routes into Austria, causing chaos behind the German lines. Still the German generals failed to understand the objective of the allied advance and poured more and more of their defensive forces into the mountains near Innsbruck and south of Salzburg, not realising that just as the British and French had walked into the Belgian trap in 1940, so they were doing in Austria, in 1944.

On the 10th July the British and American forces finally reached Graz, facing little resistance, while the holding actions in the alps tied down as many axis defenders as they could. Then the main thrust turned north towards Vienna, and as the allies had hoped more forces were sent to the Austrian capital to defend it. This was also not the allied objective.

When the allied armoured thrust was reported at Linz on the 12th, the Germans finally saw the intention, and the danger. Hitler was contacted, but refused to entertain such “ridiculous” notions and denied the army’s requests for more troops. The Wehrmacht would have to stop the allies with the forces at its disposal. As the allies travelled along the Danube the German army desperately tried to withdraw their forces from the closing trap, while sending in heavy tank divisions to halt the allied advance towards Munich.

Pulling back to avoid the US armoured spearheads, the tankers of the 502nd Schwerepanzerabteilung were surprised by the sight of a fleet of allied transport aircraft. In a daring assault, the US airborne dropped directly on several strategic mountain passes, fragmenting the German defences even further. The Germans immediately attacked, but with the paratroops dug into good defensive terrain the counterattacks failed with heavy losses.

The US armour, fresh from their victories north of Trieste, passed through the airborne positions and onto the plains north of the alps, OKW had no reserves in position to block an offensive so deep in their rear, and the Shermans reached the Swiss border in record time, cutting off an entire German army group in the Austrian Alps. OKW had reckoned on needing 3 divisions to hold the alps in a war with the Italians. Faced with a far stronger defence, the Allies had simply gone around it.

Meanwhile in the mountains the German grenadiers had fought tenaciously, desperately calling for reinforcement while they attempted to keep the US and British tanks at bay. Hundreds of US tanks were destroyed as the Americans tried to batter their way up the passes, while overall command knew that their sacrifice was a necessary diversion, one which, in the end, nearly succeeded on its own.

Near Innsbruck the German infantry held out until they found themselves with no anti-tank weapons left, such was the scarcity of resources in the southern theatre. Only Marder IIIs and Sturmgeschutz assault guns were available for the defence which faced literally thousands of Shermans. By the 20th July the outflanking manoeuvre had been completed, and the entirety of Army Group C, some 300,000 men under Heinrich von Vietinghoff had been surrounded. Less than 20% were able to escape the pocket and form a defence on the Danube, and most surrendered or headed for Switzerland, who was obliged to close her border. The Swiss made a formal protest to the allies over this incident, which was ignored.

Hitler sacked von Vietinghoff, despite the fact he’d already surrendered to the allies, and ordered that the allies be thrown out of Austria and southern Germany. Realising, finally, that the Italian offensive was the main event, Hitler transferred several divisions from the atlantic wall to face the British and Americans in the south, and began planning a counter attack to trap them in Austria.