Why didn't we attack France from Italy in World War 2?

Answer 1

The goal was to defeat Germany. If France was liberated in the process, it was an incidental benefit. The shortest route to Berlin lay across northern France from the coast.

The British preferred a strategy of hitting into the "soft underbelly" of Europe by attacking northward through Italy or the Balkans. The British were able to persuade the US to follow along this path for some ways, before Allied strength was sufficient to mount the cross-channel attack, in order to be doing something. The soft underbelly turned out not to be so soft. American and British troops landed in southern Italy in September, 1943. The Italians surrendered, but there were already many German combat troops in Italy, and more were sent, and they kept fighting. By the end of the war Allied troops in Italy had only managed to reach northern Italy. Admittedly, this was only a small portion of Allied strength, but they were opposed by only a small portion of German strength, never more than 10% of the German war effort. Had they reached northern Italy earlier, they would still have confronted the Alps, a well-nigh impassable military barrier, and neutral Switzerland was on the other side. If they had turned left from northern Italy, operations would have been restricted to a narrow strip between the coast and the Alps, easily defended. Only a small portion of Allied strength could have been at the front of the effort on such a narrow front. And this would have been taking the Allies west, toward France, instead of north toward Germany.

The Allies captured Sicily before invading Italy. Had they instead captured Sardinia or Corsica, this would have been much better. Those islands could have been used to invade Italy NORTH of Rome, or southern France. This would have given the Germans the problem of trying to defend everything within reach of Sardinia or Corsica. Invading Italy north of Rome would have saved nine months or more of bloodshed just to get as far north as Rome. The British browbeat the Americans at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 into making the next step after North Africa to be Sicily. They later admitted this was the wrong move, and Corsica or Sardinia would have been much better. From Sicily, the only place to go was on to the toe and the ankle of the Italian boot, and chew on that for months.

The Americans and French eventually did make a landing in southern France, two months after the Normandy landings. Most German reserves by that time had already been committed to containing the Normandy landings, so these forces had a relatively easy time. But it was still four hundred miles north from the beaches of southern France to get past Switzerland on the right, and even then, that part of Germany then on the right was the Black Forest, with no targets of military value, and no road to Berlin.

What the Allies wanted to get at were the German industrial regions of the Saar and the Ruhr, near the Franco-German border by the Rhine, and Berlin, to knock Germany out of the war. The closest path was the one taken from Normandy.