During the Italian campaign in the Second World War the Allied forces lost over 300,000 men, the Germans perhaps half a million. Probably over a million Italians were killed or wounded, to say nothing of the destruction inflicted on virtually every town and village between Sicily and the Po Valley.

No battlefield could have been worse chosen. For nearly two years the Allied armies had to fight for mountain after mountain, hill after hill, in a theatre that might have been specifically designed for defensive war. The decision to invade the Italian mainland was taken at only six weeks’ notice, and had to be carried out by armies neither equipped nor trained for the mountain warfare that lay ahead of them. Likewise, the decision to defend the peninsula was made only after the campaign had begun, when the German commander on the spot, Albert Kesselring, persuaded Hitler to abandon the original intention to pull back to the Apennines and allow him to defend the mountains south of Rome. The result was two years of fighting in a theatre at best secondary, and one in which the Allies always found themselves at a disadvantage. Was it worth it?

A superficial reading of the two works under review might lead to the conclusion that it was not. Both are solid volumes, each over 500 pages of text, by writers, one American, one British, who have already published comparable studies of the earlier fighting in North Africa. Each concentrates on the campaigns of their own armies, while dealing fully and fairly with those of their ally. They neatly complement one another: the American, Rick Atkinson, ends The Day of Battle with the fall of Rome in June 1944, which James Holland takes as his starting point in Italy’s Sorrow. Both provide vivid and comprehensive narratives that cover the planning by the High Command on both sides to the experiences of the units who had to carry them out – and the even less fortunate civilians who were caught in the crossfire, usually of heavy artillery and air bombardment, that indiscriminately destroyed their dwellings and killed their children. And both are full of horrors; from Atkinson’s terrifying account of the shambolic air-landings in Sicily when many of the airborne forces were brought down by their own fire, to Holland’s narrative of the massacre of the Italian resistance groups and the villagers who gave them shelter on the slopes of Monte Sole.

About one aspect of the Allied campaign both authors are in complete agreement: the appalling relations that existed between the British and American High Commands. The British and American generals might have come from different planets. Apart from the prima donna Bernard Montgomery, whose performance both in Sicily and Italy was at best lacklustre, and the charming and equable Harold Alexander, whose talents, like those of Dwight D. Eisenhower, were diplomatic rather than military, the British generals were competent if rather characterless professionals who were averse to personal display and careful of the lives of their men. Their attitude to their American counterparts was well summed up by Alexander, who described his allies as “not professional soldiers – not as we understand the term”.

It was a revealing remark. In fact, West Point produced what were probably the best professional soldiers in the world outside Germany. But they were more than that. They were warriors. They were killers, and proud of it. And they were hard-wired with a dislike of their British counterparts whom they regarded as namby-pamby, self-indulgent, and far too averse to casualties. Of no one was this more true than the commander of the Anglo-American Fifth Army, General Mark Clark, whose blatant egocentricity ensured that the dislike was heartily reciprocated by his British colleagues. So intense was the friction that Clark blatantly disobeyed the orders of his British superior Alexander to ensure that the capture of Rome should be a purely American triumph; while, a few months later, Alexander scrapped the plans for a joint advance through the Apennines north of Florence to give the British Eighth Army a quite separate theatre of operations on the Adriatic coast; with a resulting delay and confusion that put paid to any hope of securing victory before the onset of another winter.

But it must be said that even the most efficient and cooperative of Allied leadership was not likely to have produced much better results in terrain where, as Atkinson well puts it, “a Gefreiter (corporal) with Zeiss binoculars and a field telephone could rain artillery on every living creature in sight”. At every point, the Germans held the high ground: the ring of mountains from which they could observe every detail of the Salerno landings, the peaks north of the Garigliano river where they dug in for the winter, the hilltop villages between Rome and the Arno Valley fortified by generations of condottieri, the mountain range between Florence and Bologna, and the heights overlooking the rivers and canals that the Eighth Army had to cross when it attempted its right hook at the end of 1944. The Allies certainly possessed complete command of the air, without which their armies could not have moved at all, together with huge quantities of artillery. But guns were of limited value in mountains, and demanded vast supply convoys that slowed down all movement even when this became possible.

What was needed were the more primitive skills of the French goumiers from Algeria, who melted through the mountains north of the Garigliano to outflank the German defences at Monte Cassino; and who subsequently claimed their reward in an orgy of rape and plunder that put the worst excesses committed by the SS units in the shade. As for Churchill’s solution, the landings at Anzio behind the German lines, this only showed up the Allied High Command at its worst. Alexander accepted the idea without any attempt to think through its implications. The responsible commanders were given no clear directive – nor did they ask for one – as to its objectives. As a result the wretched units involved failed totally to shake the German defences and endured four months of misery comparable to the worst experiences on the Western Front in the First World War.

All this is described by Rick Atkinson with a brilliance that makes his book one of the truly outstanding records of the Second World War. But at least his story has a happy ending with the fall of Rome. James Holland has an altogether more melancholy tale to tell. Once Rome had been taken, the Italian campaign had fulfilled its role in Allied grand strategy, of pinning down enough German forces to make possible the landings in North-West Europe. Alexander now gallantly if implausibly hoped that he might continue with a great thrust to Vienna, but he was not left with enough forces to make this remotely possible. Many of his units were detached for a landing in the South of France, including the all-important French mountain divisions (just as well, perhaps, for the civil population of North Italy and Austria); to be replaced by a medley of Greek, Polish, Jewish, Brazilian, Indian and American black units of very varying quality – including some “Free” Italian units. For now the Italians appear on the scene as actors in their own right.

James Holland’s volume gives full value to the Italian dimension of the campaign, and as his title suggests, this was not a happy one. In parallel with the conflict between the Allied and German armies that was ravaging their country, the Italians were fighting their own civil war. South of Rome they could do little but keep their heads down and survive as best they could – survival at a very marginal level, and, in Naples, in an environment of ruin, starvation, criminality and disease. But further north a Fascist government of a kind survived, if only as a mask for German Occupation – and a government often supported, as Holland makes clear, by many Italians who thought it dishonourable to betray their allies. But there also existed a resistance movement that grew in strength as the Allies advanced further north and as German conscription of labour drove more young men into the maquis. It was a movement that the Allies supported inadequately and tentatively, and the Germans suppressed with an efficient brutality learned on the Eastern Front. Holland is very fair also to the Germans: apart from explicit orders emanating from Hitler, which they disobeyed at their peril, they could hardly fight while their communications were being harassed by francs-tireurs. But the methods they used turned Italian dislike into detestation, while the failure of the Allies to provide more help resulted in an abiding mistrust that the Communist Parties were able effectively to exploit after the war.

In his admirable determination to give full weight to the efforts and sufferings of the Italians themselves as well as to provide a detailed military narrative at every level for both the Allies and the Wehrmacht, James Holland bites off rather more than he can chew. From his somewhat pointilliste treatment no very clear narrative emerges. Nonetheless it was worth the effort. No other work that I have read conveys so effectively the tragedy of this most frustrating of campaigns, as the Allied armies drew what Churchill so grimly described as “the hot rake of war” through this loveliest of countries.

But in response to the question whether it was worth it, the counter-question has to be asked: where else were the Allies to fight, until the defeat of the U-boat campaign and the training of their armies made it possible for them to land in North-West France? The Russians could hardly be left unsupported for another year; while, apart from anything else, the terrible blunders made during the landings on Sicily, at Salerno and at Anzio provided lessons without which the Allied armies might never have got ashore on Normandy when the time came.

Finally, if I can speak as one of the dwindling number of those who took part in the campaign, although Italy was a perfectly bloody place to have to fight, it never occurred to any of us that we should not be fighting there at all.

Rick Atkinson
THE DAY OF BATTLE
The war in Sicily and Italy 1943–1944
791pp. Little, Brown. £25 (US $35).
978 0 316 72560 6

James Holland
ITALY’S SORROW
A year of war, 1944–1945
606pp. HarperPress. £25 (US $39.95).
978 0 00 717645 8

Michael Howard’s recent books include his autobiography Captain Professor: A life in war and peace, 2006, and Liberation or Catastrophe?: Reflections on the history of the twentieth century, 2007. He is the author of The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War, 1968.

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