Saturday, September 29

Book: The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson.-Must Read!

The ANNOTICO Report

 

PREFACE:

 

FIRST:  Italy would never have been Hitler's Ally if it hadn't been for Anthony Eden, Britain's Foreign Secretary 1935-1938, who resigned  because he could not accept Chamberlain's opening of negotiations with Italy. Negotiations that Mussolini pursued in order to become a member of the Allies, and distance himself from Hitler. Eden was notoriously and unapologetically ANTI-ITALIAN. Eden's PETTY and  RIDICULOUS attitude RESULTED in WW!!. [Eden later served as Prime Minister from 1955- 57. and he is generally ranked among the least successful British PMs of the 20th century.]

 

SECOND: The Incredibly Destructive Sicilian and Italy Campaign by the Allies should have, and never would have taken place,

if it hadn't been for Churchill's irrational decision, which seems to have been influenced by British Foreign Secretary Anthony  Eden,  who wanted to use the Invasion as a way of punishing Italy.! 

 

BACK TO THE BOOK:    "The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944"

 

FDR, Stalin, Eisenhower  ALL felt that the Best and quickest way to Defeat Germany was to Cross the Channel FIRST, and ignore and bypass North Africa, and the Italian Peninsula, and Threaten and Cut off the Head /Germany through France from the West, while providing Russia with much needed Relief. North Africa and the Italian Peninsula as the Extremities would be of no consequence.   

 

BUT Churchill prevailed, and the Italian campaign became a tragedy for the Italy and it's citizens, AND the Allies!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

The Allies thought the Italian Campaign would last only a couple of weeks. Rather the Italian Campaign  lasted  September 9, 1943 - May 8, 1945, TWENTY ONE MONTHS!!!!!   It would take the Allies 9 Months just to get to ROME. [This ALL despite the Italian resistance assisted with over  300,000 members !!!!!!]

 

The previous invasion of Sicily took 38 days, with Patton entering Messina on August 17, 1943.  On July 25, King Victor Emmanuel had Il Duce arrested and replaced him with Marshal Pietro Bagdoglio, the Army Chief of Staff. Bagdoglio immediately started secret negotiations with the Allies to take Italy out of the war, which were concluded with  US Gen Maxwell Taylor on September 3, announced on September 8, while the Eighth Army landed in Southern Italy.

 

On the Italian Peninsula, the Allies encountered Impossible Mountainous Terrain, Cold Winters,  the Shortage of Shipping -  the Slow Buildup of Troops and Matériel, the Tactical Mistake of Not  taking advantage of Italy’s 5,000-mile coastline, the Series of German Fortified Lines, the German Tenacity, the Blunders of Gen Mark Clark at Anzio, both of hesitation, and defying orders and heading toward Rome rather than following orders and  outflanking the  Germans at Cassino. German General Kesselring made the Allied Generals look like bureaucrats.

 

Ironically, Tragically, and Pathetically the Allies conducted their Invasion of Normandy France  just 9 months after the Italian Invasion,     June 6, 1944, and Paris liberated itself on August 25th, and the Allies were threatening the Rhine and German homeland in December '44.

 

Also, Churchill was fine with Long distance Amphibious landings in North Africa, and Sicily, yet was queasy about crossing the English Channel that is only 21 miles wide at the Dover Straits. Additionally, the Americans conducted Nothing but Successful Long distance  Amphibious Campaigns in the Pacific, starting with Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942. and the Solomons Campaign on February 1943.

 

All this deserves a book: "Anthony Eden, and the WW that Didn't Need to Happen" !! :(

The Italian Job

New York Times

Review by James Holland

September 30, 2007

"THE DAY OF BATTLE"

The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy.

Authored by Rick Atkinson.

Illustrated. 791 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $35.

In the 62 years since its end, thousands of books have been written about World War II, yet a new in-depth work on the major battles and campaigns is always to be welcomed. In an age when travel is easier than it has ever been, and technology increasingly helpful to the historical sleuth, it is possible - with the solace of a half-decent publisher’s advance - to visit battlefields and archives around the world, and then to produce a book containing genuinely new material and perspectives.

Rick Atkinson proved what a determined and assiduous researcher could achieve in "An Army at Dawn", his best-selling account of the North Africa campaign, and he has been no less thorough in "The Day of Battle",  the second part of a projected "liberation" trilogy. But while there is new material here - like information about the deaths of Allied servicemen from American mustard gas at Bari - it is his ability to ferret out astonishing amounts of detail and marshal it into a highly readable whole that gives Atkinson the edge over most writers in this field.

Anyone who devoured "An Army at Dawn" with relish will be delighted with his account of the Sicilian and Italian campaign. All the same ingredients are here, from sharp one-liners ("Camaraderie and good fun", he says of the resumption of negotiations at the Trident conference in Washington, "promptly popped like soap bubbles") to brilliantly observed character portraits.

Take, for example, his description of Dwight Eisenhower on the eve of the Sicily landings, chain-smoking damp cigarettes in the sticky, humid underground command headquarters on Malta, desperately trying to pass time after sending the invasion fleet into the Mediterranean in potentially catastrophic stormy conditions. The minutiae of events combined with telling character observation enables Atkinson to write about Eisenhower - and others, like Generals Patton, Clark and Truscott - in a way that makes readers feel they knew these men personally.

Opening with a fine account of the Trident conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and their chiefs of staff, Atkinson notes that the Italian campaign was really all about Allied strategy, or rather diverging views on strategy between America and Britain. The United States believed nothing should hinder its original aim of invading northwest Europe at the earliest possible date. Britain felt just as strongly that Italy should also be invaded after a successful conquest of Sicily.

A compromise of sorts was achieved. Following Sicily, Eisenhower, as supreme commander in the Mediterranean, was to plan whatever operation was most likely to knock Italy out of the war and contain the maximum number of German forces.This, the Americans eventually conceded, was the invasion of Italy, even though Italian surrender terms had been agreed before the British crossed into the boot of the peninsula. Inevitably, problems soon materialized. The terrain hugely favored the defender, Hitler decided to fight for every yard north of Naples, the winter conditions were far harsher than anyone had anticipated and the Americans’ hearts were not really in the invasion anyway.

As in any war where miscalculations have been made at the top, it is the frontline troops and unfortunate civilians in the way who suffer the most, and Atkinson has an admirable sympathy and understanding of both. Among the most powerful passages in the book are his descriptions of the hellhole that Naples became and the desperate fight for San Pietro. The sounds, smells, violence and idiocy of war are all here. "Perhaps only a battlefield before the battle is quieter than the same field after the shooting stops",  he writes of the aftermath of the Salerno landings."The former is silent with anticipation, the latter with a pure absence of noise".

With these descriptions of the dirty business of war on the ground, along with his accounts of matters of higher politics and strategy, Atkinson is at his best. Although he is perhaps overly hard on General Alexander, he is, for the most part, evenhanded in his treatment of the senior Allied commanders, whose characters and decisions take up so much of the book. Clark, for example, receives a justifiably more generous assessment than has often been the case.

Yet, while Atkinson discusses all the big debating points - the Rapido crossing, Anzio, Cassino, Rome and so on - he tends to do so in terms of generals blaming one another for the various setbacks. There is not enough analysis of the issues and circumstances dictating those often difficult command decisions. For instance, a fuller explanation of how and why the terrain was so treacherous for the attacker would have been useful. The shortage of shipping - which meant the Allies could not take advantage of Italy’s one redeeming feature, namely its 5,000-mile coastline - was not Alexander’s or Clark’s fault. The other big problem facing Alexander and his generals in the early months in Italy was the slow buildup of troops and matériel. This was caused primarily by American insistence that formation of the 15th Air Force in Italy take priority over troops on the ground, thus using up much of the limited transport available. In fact, one of the prime reasons the American chiefs were finally persuaded to support the invasion of Italy was the promise of airfields from which the strategic bombing of Germany and the German war effort could be increased.

All Allied men and matériel had to cross the sea; the Germans, on the other hand, were already in place and could supply the front by land, hence with greater speed. Not until May 1944 did Alexander have the three-to-one advantage in troops he felt he needed for victory. These factors are not really examined. Indeed, the enormous contribution of the Allied air forces is greatly underplayed.

....."The American Army and the War in Sicily and Italy"  would have been a more appropriate subtitle for this book. It is also questionable whether, in the 21st century and with the current troubles in Iraq and elsewhere, continuing to view history almost entirely through the prism of the United States is serving Americans well.

Despite these quibbles, there are few to match Atkinson’s writing style. "The Day of Battle" is a very fine book indeed. "Here the dreamless dead would lie", Atkinson writes in a very moving passage about the aftermath of the bloody Rapido, "leached to bone by the passing seasons, and waiting, as all the dead would wait, for doomsday’s horn". Even the great Ernie Pyle would have liked to have written that one.

James Holland is the author of "Together We Stand: America, Britain and the Forging of an Alliance".

 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:

Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com [Formerly Italy at St Louis] (7 years)

Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com (3 years)

Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net