REVIEW BY JONATHAN EATON
James Holland has established a firm reputation as one of the leading British historians of the Second World War. He has published a series of books that have transformed our understanding of the conflict, most recently Brothers in Arms: one legendary tank regiment’s bloody war from D-Day to VE-Day, which tracked the Sherwood Rangers from Operation Overlord to the end of the war. Holland also co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast with comedian Al Murray, which has successfully increased the knowledge, understanding, and interest of the general public in World War II.
Holland’s latest book, The Savage Storm: the battle for Italy 1943, seeks to explore the campaign to seize Italy from the build-up of the landings at Salerno in September through to the end of the Battle of Ortona in December 1943. Holland’s narrow chronological frame allows him to explore the dynamics of combat in more detail than previous treatments, which have tended to focus on major battles (such as Monte Cassino) rather than the granular actions that made up the larger campaign.
Indeed, the invasion of Italy has arguably been considerably overlooked by modern historians, in favour of the campaigns in Normandy and the Eastern Front. An unfortunate consequence of this is that the Italian campaign is poorly understood among the general public, despite the noble sacrifices of so many soldiers and civilians in opening this front against Nazi Germany. As Holland points out, when troops desperately fought and died for bare metres of mud in the Italian countryside, they did not have the luxury of knowing whether they fought in a location that would be commemorated for decades to come, or in places that would be condemned to anonymity and rapidly forgotten.
