Sunday, March 23, 2008

Italy's Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-45 by James Holland - Was it worth it?

The ANNOTICO Report

 

The Italian Campaign cost  536,000 German casualties, 313,500 Allied ones and a grim total of over one million Italians.

 

The additional pity of the war beyond the devastation of the entire Italian peninsula was beyond comprehension, as was the 700 atrocities that resulted in the massacre of 20,000 Italians by the Germans,  and the savage French Moroccan Goumier troops (who raped and murdered 3,000 Italians in hot blood) with the consent of Allied Command.

 

To this day, Historians question the Strategic wisdom of this campaign, when the the Invasion of Normandy commenced before the Italian Campaign was half completed. The Long narrow peninsula was an enormous advantage for the German Defenders who set up a continuum of defensible fortified lines that were a nightmare for the allied Invaders.

 

Was the Italian Campaign Worth It?

 

Italy's Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-45 by James Holland

Reviewed by  Andrew Roberts

Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom
March 23, 2008

'It was mind-numbing!' recalled Private Stan Scislowski, of the Canadian 11th Infantry Brigade, of the opening Allied barrage against the Senger Line south of Anzio at 6am on 23 May 1944. 'It was a cross between a howling coyote, a car running on its rims, and the banshee wail of a London Blitz air-raid siren.'

Scislowski is only one of many witnesses whose superbly well-expressed emotions bring alive James Holland's history of the last year of the war in Italy. Interviews with British and US veterans, hours trawling through the archives at the Imperial War Museum and the Second World War Experience Centre at Leeds, weeks spent walking the battlefields (Holland is a badged member of the highly respected Guild of Battlefield Guides), combined with a fascination with the campaign from the often-overlooked German point of view, has produced a work that is the Italian version of Armageddon, Max Hastings's history of France and Germany between D-Day and VE-Day.

The Senger Line was only one of many defensive lines that the Germans threw up to try to halt the Allies as they fought for every mile from Salerno, south of Naples, in September 1943 up to the River Po by the end of the war. Those that stretched all the way across the wasp waist of Italy acted like giant tourniquets across the country and saw fighting at times as attritional as in the trenches of the First World War.

When Churchill told Stalin and Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference that 'He who holds Rome, holds the title deeds of Italy', he was wrong. The Allies took Rome on 5 June 1944, the day before D-Day, but it merely won them the title deeds to continue fighting on up to Tuscany and beyond.

Holland is refreshingly revisionist in his estimation of the two senior Allied commanders, General Sir Harold Alexander and General Mark Clark, seeing much to admire in both, in a way that few recent military historians have done.

Of Alexander he writes: 'The enormous difficulties facing him, the repeated cuts in manpower and equipment, and the vast challenge of bringing a polyglot force of 17 nations together, are often forgotten.' Clark meanwhile is accused of arrogance and ambition - neither of which preclude military greatness - but he adds: 'Not only was he tough, forthright, and prepared to make difficult decisions, his operational planning was always superlative.'

Yet was that also true of the Combined Chiefs of Staff of the Western Allies, who at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, chose Italy - a thin, mountainous, highly defensible peninsula far from Berlin - as their main offensive of that year?

Holland fails to engage in the great debate that has been raging ever since the end of the war. In the introduction to his seminal Hitler's Mediterranean Gamble, Douglas Porch concluded that although the Mediterranean was not the decisive theatre of the war, it was none the less the 'pivotal' one. Holland's views on the macro-role of the Italian campaign would have been equally welcome.

Holland does tell us that it cost 536,000 German casualties, 313,500 Allied ones and a grim total of over one million Italians.

The pity of the war as it affected Italian non-combatants is an ever-present feature of this profoundly decent and occasionally moving book. When he visits mountain cemeteries, he tells us: 'These are beautiful, yet haunting, places, melancholy dripping from the abundant oaks and chestnuts all around.'

They would not be such full places had Hitler not demanded the fanatical defence of every inch of Italian soil, even when tactical withdrawals would have suited Germany's overall planning better. The German commander-in-chief in Italy, Air Marshal Albert Kesselring, was, in the author's view, 'no less impressive' than Alexander and Clark as a general, and his frustration at having to follow his F|hrer's absurd, ideologically driven orders of 'no retreat' was evident. Holland does not fail to detail the 700 atrocities that Kesselring's troops carried out against partisans and innocent civilians, however, for which the jovial 'Smiling Albert' should have been hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg.

Holland is particularly good at telling the story of a nationality through a few interlocutors, including New Zealand Maoris storming Monte Cassino, Polish infantrymen, volunteer South Africans, French mountain corps, savage Moroccan Goumier troops (who raped and murdered 3,000 Italians in hot blood), German Fallschirmjdger (paratroopers), British squaddies and their officers, such as the gentlemanly ADC Ion Calvocoressi.

All are portrayed with a remarkably engaging touch, yet the sorrow is ultimately reserved for the poor, un-martial Italians whose ancient towns and villages were laid waste by both sides.

Was it worthwhile to carry the war north of Rome - let alone all the way to the Po - after the Allies had successfully landed in northern France and taken the direct route to the heart of the Third Reich?   We are not told.

Can all that mud and blood, all those civilians massacred in reprisal for partisan ambushes, those mountain cemeteries, rats in foxholes and viciously contested river crossings, as 'the Allies clawed their way up the peninsula', actually all have been a catastrophic waste of lives and effort after June 1944?

Perhaps even now it's best not to know.   [But it seems as if the obvious answer is that it was one of the bigger dumber strategic blunders of the war]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/23/bohol123.xml

 

 

 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (With Archives*) on:

Italia USA: www.ItaliaUSA.com * [Formerly Italy at St Louis]

Italia Mia: www.ItaliaMia.com *

 

Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net