Italy, campaign in (WW II) This was the result of the US acceptance of a British strategy in 1942. The British favoured an ‘indirect approach’, fighting in the Mediterranean theatre. By contrast, the Americans preferred to build up their forces in England and attack the Germans by the shortest route, a cross-Channel assault on occupied France. They invaded French North Africa in November 1942 and with the collapse of Axis resistance in Tunisia the following May, Anglo-American forces were no longer in contact with the enemy. Logistic realities meant that it was not possible to return these troops to England and launch an invasion of France in 1943 and the only alternative was to attack Italy.
On 10 July 1943, Fifteenth Army Group under Alexander, consisting of the US Seventh Army under Patton and Montgomery's British Eighth Army, landed in Sicily. The Sicilian campaign showed the Allies in a bad light. Poor combat performance and lack of co-ordination permitted the evacuation of over 100, 000 Axis troops, 40, 000 of whom were Germans, with much of their equipment. Bitter inter-Allied and inter-service rivalries, failures to make best use of ULTRA, the painfully slow advances of Eighth Army, and the skill and tenacity of the German defenders all contributed to the disappointing result of the campaign.
Mussolini was deposed in July 1943 and the new Italian government opened negotiations to surrender, keen for the Allies to occupy as much of their country as possible to forestall German moves. But while the Anglo-Americans hesitated the Germans did not, rushing troops into Italy and ensuring that the Allies would have to fight every step of the way. Eighth Army landed unopposed at Reggio di Calabria on 3 September, and Clark's US Fifth Army (which included British troops) landed at Salerno on 9 September. The strategy of Kesselring, the German commander in Italy, was to conduct a forward defence, forcing the Allies to fight every step of the way. He held a series of strong defensive lines and turned the campaign into a grim war of attrition. SHINGLE, the Allied attempt at Anzio in January 1944 to use sea power to outflank his Gustav Line before the landing craft were withdrawn for the Normandy invasion, was a miserable failure that never broke out until the main force advanced from the south.
Between 12 January and 18 May 1944 the Allies launched the four battles of Cassino, akin to a Passchendaele fought up a steep mountain. Before the second offensive the battlefield-dominating 6th-century Benedictine monastery, previously used by the Germans only for artillery-spotting, was bombed to rubble, which made it an even better defensive position than when it was intact. The fourth battle (DIADEM) was rather better planned and executed than previous efforts and the forces of two of the smaller Allied powers played a starring role. Anders's II Polish Corps captured the ruins of the monastery and Juin's French Expeditionary Corps breached the outlying Hitler Line. On 25 May the Anzio force, which had been penned into the beachhead since January, finally linked up with the advancing Fifth Army. There was a fleeting chance that the retreating Germans might be surrounded, but a combination of Alexander's weak leadership and Clark's egocentric determination to take Rome before the Normandy landings denied him the prospect of headlines let the last chance for a decisive victory slip away. Instead the Germans fell back to the Gothic Line, which wound from Ancona to south of Bologna via Pisa and Florence.
The campaign in Italy, WW II.
(Click to enlarge)
After D-Day in Normandy, Italy became very much a secondary front, with six divisions taken away to take part in the largely ceremonial landings in the south of France. In September 1944 the Eighth Army under Gen Leese launched OLIVE, an offensive on the Adriatic coast which turned into the now usual attrition. The Eighth (now under McCreery) and the US Fifth Army (now under Truscott) had to contend with a second bitter winter facing a still formidable enemy in well-chosen and ever-hardening positions.
In March 1945, with the Third Reich collapsing, Gen von Vietinghoff assumed command of German forces in Italy. This coincided with the preparations for GRAPESHOT, the final Allied push. On 9 April McCreery began Eighth Army's final offensive, and on 14 April the US Fifth Army joined in. Von Vietinghoff's forces began to crumble, and on 25 April Eighth and Fifth Armies linked up at finale in Emilia. On 2 May 1945, the German forces in Italy surrendered after twenty months of resistance.
Opinions differ on the usefulness of the Italian campaign to the Allied cause. Its defenders argue that it tied down German forces and resources that could have been deployed in more decisive theatres, and as a battle of attrition it was fairly cost-effective, inflicting 434, 000 casualties in exchange for 312, 000. By contrast the US official history fairly questions who was tying down whom. The performance of Allied forces in Sicily was fairly dismal even under the command of the ‘A’ team of Montgomery and Patton. Under less prominent commanders it did no worse against much tougher defences and with greatly reduced resources.
While a campaign in the Mediterranean was all that was available in 1942-3 and may have been of crucial importance in working out the modalities of inter-Allied co-operation and doctrine for the later Normandy campaign, it is probable that after the failure at Anzio a more limited campaign might have been just as successful in tying down German forces. Although the troops under Slim in the Burma campaign called themselves the ‘forgotten army’, it was a description that could be claimed with equal justification by the men who fought their way up Italy against geography and one of Nazi Germany's best field commanders.
Bibliography
- Graham, D., and Bidwell, S., Tug of War: The Battle for Italy, 1943-1945 (London, 1986)
— Gary Sheffield
