Sunday,
March 23, 2008
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?
Reviewed by Andrew Roberts
Telegraph.co.uk -
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
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
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
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.'
Yet was that also true of the
Combined Chiefs of Staff of the Western Allies, who at the Casablanca
Conference of January 1943, chose
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
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
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
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