During the
Italian campaign in the Second World War the Allied forces lost over 300,000
men, the Germans perhaps half a million. Probably over a million Italians were
killed or wounded, to say nothing of the destruction inflicted on virtually
every town and village between Sicily
and the Po Valley.
No battlefield
could have been worse chosen. For nearly two years the Allied armies had to
fight for mountain after mountain, hill after hill, in a theatre
that might have been specifically designed for defensive war. The decision
to invade the Italian mainland was taken at only six weeks notice, and had
to be carried out by armies neither equipped nor trained for the mountain
warfare that lay ahead of them.
Likewise, the
decision to defend the peninsula was made only after the campaign had begun,
when the German commander on the spot, Albert Kesselring, persuaded Hitler to
abandon the original intention to pull back to the Apennines and allow him to
defend the mountains south of Rome.
The result was two years of fighting in a theatre at best secondary, and one
in which the Allies always found themselves at a disadvantage. Was it worth it?
A superficial
reading of the two works under review might lead to the conclusion that it was
not. Both are solid volumes, each over 500 pages of text, by writers, one
American, one British, who have already published comparable studies of the
earlier fighting in North Africa. Each
concentrates on the campaigns of their own armies, while dealing fully and
fairly with those of their ally. They neatly complement one another: the
American, Rick Atkinson, ends "The
Day of Battle" with the
fall of Rome in June 1944, which James Holland
takes as his starting point in "Italys
Sorrow".
Both provide
vivid and comprehensive narratives that cover the planning by the High
Command on both sides to the experiences of the units who had to
carry them out and the even less
fortunate civilians who were caught in the crossfire, usually of heavy
artillery and air bombardment, that indiscriminately
destroyed their dwellings and killed their children. And both are full of
horrors; from Atkinsons terrifying account of the shambolic air-landings
in Sicily when many of the airborne forces
were brought down by their own fire, to Hollands
narrative of the massacre of the Italian resistance groups and the villagers
who gave them shelter on the slopes of Monte Sole.
About one aspect
of the Allied campaign both authors are in complete agreement: the appalling
relations that existed between the British and American High Commands. The
British and American generals might have come from different planets. Apart
from the prima donna Bernard Montgomery, whose performance both in Sicily and
Italy was at best lacklustre, and the charming and
equable Harold Alexander, whose talents, like those of Dwight D. Eisenhower,
were diplomatic rather than military, the British generals were competent if
rather characterless professionals who were averse to personal display and
careful of the lives of their men. Their attitude to their American
counterparts was well summed up by Alexander, who described his allies as
not professional soldiers not as we understand the term.
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It was a
revealing remark. In fact, West Point produced what were probably the best
professional soldiers in the world outside Germany. But they were more than
that. They were warriors. They were killers, and proud of it. And they were
hard-wired with a dislike of their British counterparts whom they regarded as
namby-pamby, self-indulgent, and far too averse to casualties. Of no one was
this more true than the commander of the
Anglo-American Fifth Army, General Mark Clark, whose blatant egocentricity ensured
that the dislike was heartily reciprocated by his British colleagues.
So intense was
the friction that Clark blatantly disobeyed the orders of his British superior
Alexander to ensure that the capture of Rome should be a purely American
triumph;
while, a few months later, Alexander scrapped the plans for a joint advance
through the Apennines north of Florence to give the British Eighth Army a quite
separate theatre of operations on the Adriatic coast; with a resulting delay
and confusion that put paid to any hope of securing victory before the onset of
another winter.
But it must be
said that even the most efficient and cooperative of Allied leadership was not
likely to have produced much better results in terrain where, as Atkinson well
puts it, a Gefreiter (corporal) with Zeiss binoculars and a field telephone could rain artillery
on every living creature in sight. At every point, the Germans held the
high ground: the ring of mountains from which they could observe every
detail of the Salerno landings, the peaks north of the Garigliano
river where they dug in for the winter, the hilltop villages between Rome and
the Arno Valley fortified by generations of condottieri, the mountain range
between Florence and Bologna, and the heights overlooking the rivers and canals
that the Eighth Army had to cross when it attempted its right hook at the end
of 1944. The Allies certainly possessed complete command of the air, without
which their armies could not have moved at all, together with huge quantities
of artillery. But guns were of l imited value in
mountains, and demanded vast supply convoys that slowed down all movement even
when this became possible.
What was needed
were the more primitive skills of the
French goumiers from Algeria, who
melted through the mountains north of the Garigliano
to outflank the German defences at Monte Cassino; and who subsequently claimed their reward in an orgy of rape
and plunder (of Italian Civilians) that put the worst excesses committed by the
SS units in the shade. As for Churchills solution, the
landings at Anzio
behind the German lines, this only showed up the Allied High Command at its
worst. Alexander accepted the idea without any attempt to think through
its implications. The responsible commanders were given no clear
directive nor did they ask
for one as to its objectives.
As a result the wretched units involved failed totally to shake the German defences and endured four months of misery comparable to
the worst experiences on the Western Front in the First World War.
All this is
described by Rick Atkinson with a brilliance that makes his book one of the
truly outstanding records of the Second World War. But at least his story has a
happy ending with the fall of Rome.
James Holland has an altogether more melancholy tale to tell. Once Rome had been taken, the
Italian campaign had fulfilled its role in Allied grand strategy, of pinning
down enough German forces to make possible the landings in North-West Europe. Alexander
now gallantly if implausibly hoped that he might continue with a great thrust
to Vienna, but he was not left with enough forces to make this remotely
possible. Many of his units were detached for a landing in the South of France,
including the all-important French mountain divisions (just as well, perhaps,
for the civil population of North Italy and Austria); to be replaced by a
medley of Greek, Polish, Brazilian, Indian and American black units of very
varying quality including some
Free Italian units. For no w the Italians appear on the scene as
actors in their own right.
James
Hollands volume gives full value to the Italian dimension of the campaign,
and as his title suggests, this was not a happy one. In parallel with the
conflict between the Allied and German armies that was ravaging their country, the Italians were fighting their own civil war.
South of Rome they could do little but keep their heads down and survive as
best they could survival at a very
marginal level, and, in Naples,
in an environment of ruin, starvation, criminality and disease. But further
north a Fascist government of a kind survived, if only as a mask for German
Occupation and a government often
supported, as Holland makes clear, by many Italians who thought it dishonourable to betray their allies. But there also
existed a resistance movement that grew in strength as the Allies advanced
further north and as German conscription of labour
drove more young men into the maquis. It was a
movement that the Allies supported inadequately an d
tentatively, and the Germans suppressed with an efficient brutality learned on
the Eastern Front. Holland
is very fair also to the Germans: apart from explicit orders emanating from
Hitler, which they disobeyed at their peril, they could hardly fight while
their communications were being harassed by francs-tireurs.
But the methods the Germans used turned Italian dislike into
detestation, while the failure of the Allies to provide more help
resulted in an abiding mistrust that the Communist Parties were able
effectively to exploit after the war.
In his
admirable determination to give full weight to the efforts and sufferings of
the Italians themselves as well as to provide a detailed military narrative at every
level for both the Allies and the Wehrmacht, James
Holland bites off rather more than he can chew. Nonetheless it was worth
the effort. No other work that I have read conveys so effectively the tragedy of this
most frustrating of campaigns, as the Allied armies drew what Churchill so
grimly described as the hot rake of war through this loveliest of
countries.
[Then there were the
terrible blunders made during the landings on Sicily, at Salerno and at Anzio ]
Rick Atkinson
THE DAY OF BATTLE
The war in Sicily and Italy 19431944
791pp. Little, Brown. #25 (US $35).
978 0 316 72560 6
James Holland
ITALYS SORROW
A year of war, 19441945
606pp. HarperPress. #25 (US
$39.95).
978 0 00 717645 8
Michael Howards recent books include his autobiography Captain
Professor: A life in war and peace, 2006, and Liberation or Catastrophe?: Reflections on the history of the twentieth century,
2007. He is the author of The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War,
1968.