James Holland · 2008 · overland
James Holland's history of the last year of the war in Italy, from the Sicily landings to the Po - told through soldiers on both sides, partisans, and the Italian civilians caught between them. His argument is that the campaign everyone treats as a sideshow is where the German army was actually broken.
- 1Sicily
July 1943, and the largest amphibious landing yet attempted puts Allied armies on European soil - and Holland's argument starts here: that the Italian campaign was not a sideshow but the place the Wehrmacht was ground down.
- 2Salerno
September 1943, and the landing that nearly went back into the sea - Italy surrendering the day before, the Germans occupying the country overnight, and an Allied beachhead held by the skin of its teeth.
- 3Naples
Taken in October, wrecked, typhus-ridden and starving - and the beginning of what Holland's subtitle calls a year of war, death and survival, told as much through Italian civilians as through soldiers.
- 4Monte Cassino
Four battles between January and May 1944 for a mountain and an abbey, and the bombing of the monastery that made the position more defensible rather than less - the worst-managed episode of the campaign.
- 5Anzio
January 1944, a landing behind the line meant to unlock it - and a beachhead that stalled for four months and cost more than the position was worth, with the Germans looking down on it the whole time.
- 6Rome
4 June 1944, and the first Axis capital to fall - two days before Normandy, which took the headlines and most of the reinforcements, and left the Italian theatre to finish a war nobody was watching.
- 7The Gothic Line
The Apennine defences through the winter of 1944, and the partisan war behind them - reprisals, massacres and a civil war among Italians that Holland puts at the centre rather than in the footnotes.
- 8The Po
April 1945, the line finally broken and the armies into the plain - a campaign that ran twenty months from Sicily and is remembered, when it is remembered, as the slow one.