ITALY'S SORROW: A YEAR OF WAR 1944-45.

Del Boy

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ITALY'S TORMENT REVEALED


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POWER: Mussolini with Hitler in Munich, 1937


Friday April 11,2008

By Christopher Silvester


ITALY'S SORROW: A YEAR OF WAR, 1944-45 By James Holland (Harper Press) £25

LAST year, Indigènes (Days Of Glory), a Moroccan film released here, depicted the segregationist treatment of Moroccan soldiers in the Free French Army during the Second World War.

The section dealing with their participation in the Italian campaign delicately sidestepped one of the more shameful episodes of depravity. While the Moroccan Goumiers fought doughtily against the German forces, they had been recruited for low wages on the understanding that they were granted the right to rape and pillage.

Their victims were villagers and peasants living in the settlements of the Ausoni Mountains south of Rome. By
a conservative reckoning, some 3,100 Italians were raped by these troops (naturally, many did not care to publicly declare their shame). Husbands were shot if they tried to resist; earrings were ripped from the earlobes of despoiled women.

“Gold, linen and livestock which had been left by the Germans was taken away by the Moroccans,” one witness recalled.

The Allies drew a veil over the affair, says James Holland, “because it was far easier to brush it to one side when
the victims were disempowered Italians”.

Holland’s impeccably researched and ingeniously structured narrative is a salutary reminder that the Italians suffered more than the French in the final year of the Second World War.

The main culprits, of course, were the Germans and their fascist allies. The massacres at Sant’ Anna, Monte Sole and in the Ardeatine Caves in Rome (in reprisal for a guerrilla attack against the SS) were only the most notable among 700 recorded atrocities.




Overall, the Italian campaign claimed 536,000 German and 313,500 Allied casualties, with the Italians themselves taking the toll above a million; furthermore, the war spilled into a civil war which claimed perhaps another 30,000.

The purpose of the campaign had been simple enough: to invade continental Europe and take the pressure off the Soviet Union while preparations for D-Day were getting under way; and on the eve of D-Day and in its immediate
aftermath, to draw German forces away from France.

Under the leadership of Field Marshal Kesselring, one of Hitler’s ablest senior commanders, the German Army proved dogged in their resistance.

“Germans, it appeared, could survive four or five days on the same tonnage the Allies consumed in a day.”

The German soldier, noted Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, “doesn’t worry about ENSA shows or V cigarettes, Coca-Cola or chewing gum, the masses of motor vehicles or all the luxuries without which it is assumed
that the modern British and American soldier cannot wage war”.

The main Allied commanders, General Mark Clark of the US Army and General Sir Harold Alexander of the British Army, worked well together, despite their very different styles. Holland goes against the conventional wisdom of historians who have criticised Clark as arrogant and Alexander as “lacking grip”.

Instead, he praises Clark for his superlative operational planning and Alexander for “bringing a polyglot force of some 17 nations together”.

Clark and Alexander might have achieved victory in Italy sooner had not six (French) divisions been taken away from them mid-campaign and redeployed. Similarly, Kesselring (who had 26 divisions to the Allies’ 20) might have mounted a successful counter-attack if Hitler had not insisted that his troops refuse to cede an inch of territory without a fight, thus preventing them from regrouping effectively.

For although the Allies enjoyed formidable air superiority, with almost 4,000 aircraft against the Luftwaffe’s 300-odd, this was a campaign that turned on tanks and infantry fighting.

Italy’s Sorrow is a splendid account of an often overshadowed campaign by a historian who has already given us excellent studies of the Siege of Malta and the Desert War. Holland masters all aspects of his brief from high strategy to the perils of combat, following several characters from both sides but, above all, he never forgets the extraordinary sufferings of the country where the battles were fought.



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Looks like a lesser-known, interesting aspect of WW11 - thought you might like to know of it.


**This is an edit - apologies for the double entry - I lost the first one at the title stage and I did not realise that it stood.
 
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