This year marks the 80th anniversary of a number of bloody engagements which, eventually, brought about the downfall of Hitler’s Nazis. The recent publicity surrounding the events to commemorate the Normandy invasion of June 1944 was hard to miss – but it is easier to forget the parallel campaign in Italy, or that it caused even more casualties to both the Allies and the Axis powers than operations in France, the Low Countries, or Germany.
Even when the Italy campaign does get taken into account, attention is understandably often focused on the infamous yet photogenic destruction of the great monastery of Monte Cassino – which seems to hold people’s imaginations much more readily than, say, the fighting around Salerno or Anzio. Then, even further down the list, come the great battles of the ‘Gothic Line’ – the Germans’ last major line of defence, which stretched right across the northern summits of the Apennines, north of Florence and south of Bologna and the Po Valley. It was the operations there that would sweep the Nazis right to the northern borders of Italy and beyond, before Berlin capitulated. Here, we will examine just a small part of this mighty sequence of events that took place among the mountains, vines, dust, and mud as final victory beckoned.
Drawing the Line
Once Sicily had fallen in the late summer of 1943, there were a number of courses open to the Allies. An invasion of mainland Italy might have been avoided altogether by a series of amphibious operations aimed at Sardinia and Corsica – leading, eventually, to the southern coast of France. There were many in the Axis high command who expected just that – but the planning conferences in Casablanca in January and Washington in May 1943 had underlined the Allies’ key aims: to tie down and defeat as many German forces as possible, and by so doing to take some pressure off the Soviets; to buy time for the build up of forces in Britain for the invasion of France; and, most importantly, to inflict a crushing physical and psychological blow on the enemy by forcing Italy to surrender. All of these were eventually achieved, not by island-hopping, but by grinding slowly and lethally all the way up the leg of Italy.
Collapse and decline