The Italian Campaign: A Brief Summary, September 1943–May 1945
Map located in the Box 17, 10th Mountain Infantry Division Papers, 1940–1990, United States Army and Heritage Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
We slogged along.
Richard Probyn, 2/7th Gurkha Rifles, 11th Indian Infantry Brigade, 4th Indian Infantry Division
Strategic Context
Sicily’s capture augured well for the Allies in the Mediterranean. Before its liberation, Anglo-American planners hotly debated the next phase of Allied operations in Europe. Should the Allies go all-in on a cross-Channel invasion of France, as the Americans petitioned? Or should they continue to attack Europe’s ‘soft underbelly,’ as Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his advisors reasoned? Such a course, the British claimed, would not only divert pressure from the Russian front, it could force Italy’s very surrender and, ideally, lead to a breakthrough into Austria and Germany itself.
The Americans demurred. Hoping to avoid a peripheral—and prolonged—military venture through the Mediterranean with no promise of strategic success, American planners only slowly relented to the idea of Italian operations conditional on Britain’s continued support preparing for the spring 1944 invasion of France.
The Scramble at Salerno
The Allied landings at Reggio di Calabria, Taranto, and Salerno in early September 1943 marked the beginning of a bitter, attritional, 608-day struggle up the Italian peninsula. At Salerno, what seemed like a successful amphibious landing quickly devolved into a white-knuckled struggle for survival when Anglo-American forces under American General Mark W. Clark met heavy resistance several days later.
Surrounded by dogged German defenders occupying the high ground beyond the beachhead, fierce opposition forced Clark to consider a full evacuation. Their lines held—narrowly. By the end of September, General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army converged with Clark’s weathered Fifth. On September 30, the Allies cleared Naples of enemy resistance.
A Winter of Worry
The fight at Salerno provided glimpses of gruesome combat to come. Far from the cakewalk many expected, Italy’s rugged terrain and severe seasonal changeovers complicated every aspect of modern, mechanized warfare.
During hot, dry summers, tanks, aircraft, and other vehicles operated reasonably well on what open, undamaged roads existed. Caked in layers of white, powdery dust that clogged one’s eyes and provoked immense thirst, average soldiers fared far worse. Most simultaneously praised Italy’s beautiful countryside while cursing its torrid summer climate.
During the autumn and winter, everyone suffered: Long spells of overcast weather limited precious air cover; driving rain and deep snow impaired mobility, flooding rivers and washing out roads. For months on end, strength-sapping mud consumed men and materiel alike. Italy’s mountainous terrain exacerbated these challenges, forcing units to rely on mules and manpower to bring precious supplies, food, and ammunition up to troops in the mountains—and to bring their dead and wounded back down again.
The Axis blocked all Roads to Rome during the winter of 1943–44. German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s defensive schema capitalized on weather-and-terrain-induced delays to hinder Allied movement. After the Sicilian campaign, German and Italian troops embedded a series of defensive lines into Italy’s dense network of rivers, valleys, and mountain ridges. Replete with anti-tank emplacements, concrete bunkers, minefields, machine gun nests, and artillery, each line proved more fickle to bypass than the last.
By the New Year, exhausted Allied forces (then an unwieldy agglomeration of American, British, Canadian, French, French North African, Indian, Italian, Polish, New Zealand, and South African troops) found themselves railing against the Gustav Line. Its lynchpin—a massif known as Monte Cassino capped by a stunning Benedictine Abbey—overlooked the whole of the Liri Valley, the fastest route to Rome. Its adjacent ridges provided excellent cover for German forward observers, who directed pinpoint artillery and mortar fire on exposed Allied columns with frustrating accuracy.
Seizing control of the hill ultimately required four battles stretched across a grueling span of five months—a feat, controversially, which necessitated the wholesale destruction of the city of Cassino and its priceless historical Abbey.
The bombing of Cassino Monastery and town, May 1944, by Peter McIntyre, an official Second World War artist. (Wikimedia Commons/Archives New Zealand)
In a bid to bypass the quagmire at Cassino, in January 1944 the Allies staged another amphibious landing up the coast at Anzio. That operation, like Cassino, quickly stalled when Axis leaders scrambled forces south from Rome to encircle the beachhead. Digging into Anzio’s plains and foothills, Allied forces endured five months of hellacious, stagnant combat reminiscent of the gritty trench warfare that typified World War I.
Rome’s Capture and Pursuit to the Arno
The Germans and their remaining fascist Italian allies proved themselves astute defenders during the Italian campaign. However, severely lacking in air cover, supplies, and mechanized vehicles, it was only a matter of time before the Allies exploited material advantages and improving weather conditions in their quest to liberate Rome.
By spring 1944, the Allies finally captured Monte Cassino and broke out of the Anzio beachhead. With the British Eight Army advancing up Italy’s eastern littoral, the U.S. Fifth Army drove on Rome. On June 4, the first Allied troops reached the outskirts of the Eternal City; on June 5, cheering throngs welcomed the Allies as liberators as slow-moving columns snaked north through its ancient streets.
The next morning, June 6, 1944, Allies forces landed in Normandy. From that moment on, global interest in the Italian campaign began fading. Eager to celebrate their hard-fought triumph, news of the D-Day landings soon convinced most Allied soldiers in Italy that theirs was destined to become “a forgotten front”—a peripheral struggle waged between the dregs of the Axis war machine and the “D-Day Dodgers”—a term of derision used to characterize Allied soldiers left to slog up the Italian peninsula for the remainder of the war.
And what a slog it was. Familiar patterns repeated themselves as each month bore a frustrating resemblance to the last: Organize, reinforce, and resupply weary formations; advance exposed up a heavily-defended hill; seize the hill (or don’t); rise and repeat.
The August 1944 invasion of southern France diverted many experienced Allied forces from Italy. That summer, multiple divisions departed, leaving experienced Allied formations understrength and exposed for prolonged periods. Manpower constraints forced Allied leaders to improvise. Some integrated their formations in novel—sometimes experimental ways—often out of necessity. Additional manpower slowly arrived to bolster the depleted Fifth and Eighth Armies—some from as far afield as Brazil. It was not enough to produce the decisive breakthrough Allied leaders had long yearned for.
Throughout the summer and early autumn months, Allied forces swept through Italy’s sun-drenched foothills north of Rome in pursuit of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s retreating German columns. With the Eighth Army mirroring their progress on Italy’s Adriatic coastline, by late July elements of the Fifth Army captured Pisa and the vital port of Livorno, halting at the Arno River within view of the imposing peaks of the northern Apennines.
Allied soldiers overlook an Italian village under fire. Photo courtesy of USAHEC.
Winter, Again
By late-autumn 1944, the Allies in Italy found themselves waging a bitter offensive to penetrate Germany’s Gothic Line and gain entrance to the Po River Valley—a productive industrial region and logistics lifeline for the Axis. Capturing Florence and breaching the Gothic line, their forward momentum soon stalled when extreme weather conditions descended on Italy.
Predictably, goals to end the campaign by Christmas proved misguided. Once again, rugged terrain, a stubborn enemy, and one of the harshest winters on record transformed the battlefield into a quagmire. Convinced of the futility of penetrating the Northern Apennines in such conditions, the Allies held fast, shifting to a defensive posture to shore up their exhausted formations.
Another demoralizing winter in Italy beckoned; the spring offensive could not come soon enough.
The Final Offensive
By early 1945, the Allies were eager to end their savage bloodletting odyssey through Italy. Preparing all winter for a spring breakout into the Po River Valley, in mid-April Allied forces along the Adriatic drove forward in a diversionary attack while the U.S. Fifth Army launched its primary assault through the Apennines. Storming into the Po Valley by April 20, German forces knew their position was untenable. In the subsequent chaotic pursuit to the Alps, Allied fighter-bombers and armored vehicles hunted exposed German columns in retreat, most of whom began surrendering en-masse by the end of the month.
On April 28, German commanders agreed to end armed resistance in Italy, formalizing their decision in a special ceremony the following day. The official cessation of hostilities in Italy came on May 2, 1945—six days before V-E Day.