Review today in the NY Times:
The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
By Rick Atkinson
After chasing Erwin Rommel and the German Army out of North Africa in May 1943, American and British commanders were left with a difficult question. What to do? Operation Overlord, the planned invasion of France, could not be undertaken until the spring of 1944, and in any case, there were not enough ships to transport the Allied forces in Africa to Britain. With the Russians clamoring for the Allies to open a second front, leaving vast forces idle was not an option. And so the Allies looked across the Mediterranean to “the soft underbelly of Europe,” in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase. Italy would be next.
In “The Day of Battle,” Rick Atkinson picks up where he left off in “An Army at Dawn,” his history of the North African campaign, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. A planned third volume, on the Normandy invasion and the war in Europe, will complete “The Liberation Trilogy,” which is shaping up as a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable description and rooted in the sights and sounds of battle.
For American troops, Italy was “the middle leg of the race,” Mr. Atkinson writes. It would turn out to be a marathon, run under the most grueling conditions, for a prize whose value historians still debate. Italy was, in the broader scheme of things, a sideshow. To the extent that the Allies had a coherent strategy, it was to wage a war of attrition and tie down as many German forces as possible, to support Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion.
To Allied troops on the ground, Italy felt very much like the main event. After taking Sicily in a matter of weeks, but failing, in a disastrous piece of miscalculation by Allied commanders, to stop retreating German forces from hopping across the Strait of Messina to the toe of the Italian boot, they embarked on a punishing campaign against an implacable enemy. Italy, an endless series of mountain ridges, favored the defense. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the architect of Allied misery, took full advantage, occupying high ground, bloodying the enemy and then, at the last possible moment, retreating to yet another mountain citadel to start the process all over again.
Mr. Atkinson presents the war as a clash not only of impersonal forces but also of individual characters and wills, captured deftly through interwoven snippets from letters, diaries, memoirs and face-to-face encounters among the principal actors. His cast of characters is a film director’s dream, with figures like Audie Murphy, Ernie Pyle, Gen. George S. Patton and Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery in the thick of the action.
He excels at describing the furor of battle, and the Italian campaign provides him with abundant raw material. From Salerno to San Pietro to Anzio to Cassino and onward to Rome, Allied forces experienced hell in all its varieties, as they struggled, with appalling losses, to break a seemingly unbreakable foe.
“The Tommies will have to chew their way through us, inch by inch,” a German paratrooper wrote in a letter home, “and we will surely make hard chewing for them.”
At times the Italian campaign degenerated into a war of position, reminiscent of World War I, as soldiers went over the top and made impossible frontal assaults, only to be raked by machine gun fire that cut them down like wheat. Ortona and Cassino, by contrast, were little Stalingrads, with house-to-house fighting. Malaria, venereal disease and psychological breakdowns took thousands off the battlefield. Poor leadership, misguided strategy and bickering among Allied generals also took a toll.
Mr. Atkinson, a longtime correspondent and editor for The Washington Post, conveys all of this with sharp-edged immediacy and a keen eye for the monstrous and the absurd. At Salerno, a frightening preview of the Normandy landings, medics operated by flashlight at night, often with both doctor and patient under a blanket. When shells hit, patients under the knife “displayed unusual agility in jumping from operating tables into foxholes,” a battalion history recorded. Mr. Atkinson manages to squeeze in the detail that soldiers liked to massage their sore feet with Barbasol shaving cream.
On occasion combat takes on an infernal beauty, like the amphibious landing illuminated when “a constellation of silver flares hissed overhead, bathing the beaches in cold brilliance,” followed by the “sawmill sound” of German machine guns. “Mortars crumped, and from the high ground to the east and south came the shriek of 88-millimeter shells, green fireballs that whizzed through the dunes at half a mile a second, trailing golden plumes of dust.”
Was Italy worth it? Mr. Atkinson, like many historians, is of two minds. Italy relieved pressure on Russian forces, took a heavy toll on German ones and provided painful lessons to Allies on how (or how not) to stage amphibious landings and how to organize joint operations.
On the other hand, Allied losses were horrendous, and the war would be decided elsewhere, on the eastern and western fronts. Two days after the first Americans entered Rome, D-Day began, and Italy was forgotten.
“How do you like that?” Gen. Mark W. Clark, commander of the forces in Italy, said, hearing the news of Normandy over the radio on June 6. “They didn’t even let us have the newspaper headlines for the fall of Rome for one day.”
