Cassino

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Italian campaign of 1943-45 was controversial, and a potential cause of continuing disagreement between the war leaders of Britain and the United States, from its first discussion. Winston Churchill urged an invasion following the Allied victory in Tunisia in spring 1943, to take Fascist Italy out of the war and open a new and distracting front for the German Wehrmacht. Broadly, America's generals favoured concentrating all available Allied resources on the main effort - the landings in Normandy planned for spring 1944. They finally agreed to the Italian invasion with reservations; and the priority given to the operations in North-West Europe was to have a baleful effect on the armies in Italy throughout the campaign.

Far from being the 'soft underbelly' of the Axis which had been predicted, the Italian peninsula proved to be a nightmare battlefield for modern mechanised armies, frustrated in their advance northwards by appalling winter weather and by successive mountain and river barriers brilliantly exploited by the German commander Field Marshal Kesselring. And no barrier was more daunting, nor more costly in blood and time, than the Cassino massif guarding the southern end of the Liri valley - the road to Rome.

Expertly fortified and stubbornly defended by some of Germany's finest troops, the glowering mountain and the devastated town at its foot defied assault by American, British, French, Indian, New Zealand and Polish troops from January until May 1944. When the Gustav and Hitler Line defences were finally swept aside by Field Marshal Alexander's great Operation 'Diadem' in May - in which troops of all these nations, as well as Canadians, played their parts - General Mark Clark's controversial decision to drive on Rome itself rather than cutting off the retreating German Tenth Army cast into question the prize actually gained by those five months of bloodletting.