Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45

Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45
James Holland

Today Italy is a land of beauty and prosperity but in 1944-45 it had become a place of nightmares, a land of violence, war, and destruction. James Holland's ground-breaking account expertly documents the German advance to the stalemate of the Gothic line and a segment of Italian history that has been largely neglected.The war in Italy was the most destructive campaign in the west as the Allies and Germans fought a long, bitter and highly attritional conflict up the mountainous leg of Italy during the last twelve months of the Second World War. For front-line troops, casualties rates at Cassino and then along the notorious Gothic Line were as high as they had been along the Western Front in the First World War. There were further similarities too: blasted landscapes, rain and mud. For the men who fought there, Italy really was the hardest campaign.And while the Allies and Germans were slogging it out through the mountains, the Italians were fighting their own battles, one where Partisans and Fascists were pitted against each other in a bloody civil war. Around them, civilians tried to live through the carnage, terror and anarchy while, in the wake of the Allied advance, beleaguered and impoverished Italians were forced to pick their way through the ruins of their homes and country and often forced into making terrible and heart-rending decisions in order to survive.'Italy's Sorrow' is the first account of the war in that most beautiful of countries to tell the story from all sides and to include the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. Offering extensive new research, it weaves together the drama and tragedy of a terrible year of war with new perspectives and material on some of the most debated episodes to have emerged from the Second World War. It is a magnificent achievement by one of our finest young military historians.

ITALY’S SORROW

A Year of War, 1944–1945

JAMES HOLLAND

For Daisy

By the spring of 1944, the vast reach of Hitler’s Third Reich, chieved so spectacularly in the early part of the war, was diminishing. In the East, the Soviet Red Army was clawing back land lost and was about to regain the Crimea, while in the West, the Western Allies were poised to invade France. Already the Axis powers had lost North Africa and, the previous summer, Sicily. Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, had been deposed, and on 8 September 1943, the Italians surrendered to the Allies. With British troops already on the southern toe of the peninsula, the main Allied invasion force landed at Salerno, south of Naples, the morning after the Italian armistice. Thus began a long and bloody campaign that would cause untold suffering. Seven months of fighting, mostly in the intractable terrain around the town of Cassino, would wreak appalling destruction.

By May 1944, with the Italian winter behind them, the Allies were ready to renew their drive towards Rome. As the battle rolled north, the rest of Italy would become consumed by the campaign raging up its narrow leg. That year, from May 1944 to the war’s end almost exactly twelve months later, would be one of the most terrible in Italy’s history.

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Note on the Text

Principal Personalities

Prologue

Part I: The Road To Rome

1 The Eve of Battle: May 1944

2 Battle Begins: 11–12 May 1944

3 Churchill’s Opportunism

4 The Slow Retreat

5 Frustrations

6 Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

7 Masters of the Skies

8 The Battle Rages: 13–16 May 1944

9 New Order

10 Breaking the Gustav Line: 17–18 May 1944

11 Achtung Banditen!

12 The Fog of War: 18–23 May 1944

13 Break-out: 23–26 May 1944

14 General Clark and the Big Switch: 26–30 May 1944

15 The Fall of Rome: 1–5 June 1944

Part II: The Brutal Summer

16 The North

17 The Problems of Generalship: June 1944

18 The Typhoon Rolls North

19 Breaking the Albert Line: 20–30 June 1944

20 The Politics of War

21 Differences of Opinion

22 Summer Heat: July 1944

23 Crossing the Arno: July–August 1944

24 A Change of Plan: August 1944

25 Despair: August 1944

26 The Gothic Line: 25 August–1 September 1944

27 The Tragedy of Gemmano: 1–12 September 1944

28 Mountain Passes and Bloody Ridges: 12–21 September 1944

Part III: The Winter of Discontent

29 Death in the Mountains: 22–29 September 1944

30 The Reason Why

31 Rain, Mud and Misery, Part I: 1–14 October 1944

32 Rain, Mud and Misery, Part II: 15–31 October 1944

33 The Infantryman’s Lot: November 1944

34 The Partisan Crisis: November–December 1944