The Italian Campaign was a Stupid Idea, that was insisted upon by Churchill, the "Goat of Gallipoli". Churchill felt the Italian Campaign on the so called "soft underbelly" of Europe, would be a " walk in the park", when starting in July 1943, it fact was a grueling  "grind" up the  500 miles of increasingly difficult terrain, the Apennini Mountains, that form a spine along the Italian peninsula, and encouraged the Germans to set up 6 (Six) successive Formidable Defensive lines,  the Volturno, the Barbara, the Gustav, the Gothic, the Bernhardt and the Hitler.. 

It was not until later that the US realized that Churchill felt that with US help, the Allies would eventually win the war, he then turned to devising strategy that would better benefit Britain after the war.

So, a year later, The Allies had STILL  only advanced as far as Rome, and the Invasion of Normandy FINALLY began, June 1944,and it took another year before  the Germans surrendered in  Italy, May 1945  What a fiasco, blunder, miscalculation. 

Prior to Rome, Churchill had again devised the Anzio Landing, with American Generals Clark, and Truscott opposed, because they didn't have sufficient troops or landing craft, to both establish a beachhead and breakout, resulting in a disaster, including the Cisterna battle that resulted in  250-300 Elite US Rangers died and eight escaped, leaving hundreds of others captured. 

Italian Town Commemorates World War II Tragedy
Washington Post; By Victor, L. Simpson; The Associated Press; Friday, March 19, 2010 

CISTERNA di LATINA, Italy -- For American forces fighting their way north to Rome, it was the site of a heroic but hopeless stand, where only eight men out of two Ranger battalions escaped German troops. 

For the Italians caught in the fighting, it was the place where they lived underground for months before being sent on a forced march north by the Germans. 
On Friday, the anniversary of the roundup in 1944, this town between Anzio and Rome held its annual commemoration of the bloody events of World War II with ceremonies held beside a monument to victims of all wars and school children visiting the grottoes where their grandparents took shelter from the bombing. 

This town of 32,000 people, once a manufacturing center but now the heart of kiwi production in Italy, has not forgotten the elite U.S. Army Rangers, who fought to liberate them from the Nazi occupiers. There is a Via dei Rangers, a school named after the Rangers' commander William O. Darby and signs noting Cisterna is twinned with Darby's hometown, Fort Smith, Arkansas. 

The site of the Cisterna battle, alongside a canal on the road to Nettuno, is recorded by a plaque in English, German and Italy recalling those who "fought and died." 
"It is an ugly memory but we can't forget it because it is part of the history of our country," Mayor Antonello Merolla said at the ceremony 
By all accounts, the Cisterna battle was a disaster for the Americans. 

The Rangers were used as a spearhead after the landing at Anzio, but because of poor intelligence met unexpected, fierce resistance at Cisterna and by authoritative accounts did not have the support weapons to overcome it as they battled through mud and drainage ditches. 

Rick Atkinson, in the book "Day of Battle" said 250-300 Rangers died and eight escaped, leaving hundreds of others captured. 

According to Marsha Henry Goff, an unofficial historian for the Rangers whose father served in the elite corps, "Col. Darby, who had protested the use of his Rangers as conventional troops - contending they were trained for a different type of fighting - had gone into a room alone and sobbed" after learning of the casualties. 
She said the first word of the disaster came in an Associated Press war dispatch from Naples on March 8 - five weeks after the battle. 

"A grim secret kept locked in the hearts of allied troops in Italy for over a month now has been placed in the record of heroic but hopeless `last stands,'" it began. 
The breakout from the beaches of Anzio had been stalled and the liberation of Rome, the first Axis capital to fall, would have to wait until June.      This was also grim news for Italian civilians. 

"We lived for months underground," Bruno Fieramonte, 75, a retired school teacher, told school children taken down to the dark and dank grottoes of a 16th-century palace on the main square, recalling the fighting and bombing that destroyed 90 percent of the town's buildings - with only few scarred and blackened homes from that era still standing. 

Then, on March 19, the Germans, increasingly worried about resistance, rounded up the entire town and marched them north. Many ended in labor camps and farms as far north as Tuscany. 

Felice Paliani, who was 13 at the time, said he was taken in as a mascot by the Americans when Cisterna was finally liberated. "We survived because we were united," he said. 

Surviving Rangers, mostly in their 80s, generally visit around American Memorial Day, combining it with a stop at the military cemetery in Anzio-Nettuno.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/
19/AR2010031901710.html
 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (With Archives) on:
[Formerly Italy at St Louis]