case in the autumn of 1942. There were few people more determined to see, for instance, the cross-Channel invasion take place in 1943, something Churchill stuck to longer than most. But he was the arch-opportunist, a man who never lost sight of the ultimate goal, but who was always open to new ways and different approaches to achieving that final victory.
By January 1943, with the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa looking to be inevitable – even if it was taking considerably longer than originally envisaged – a more concrete Mediterranean strategy was agreed. At the Casablanca Conference that month, the decision was made to follow success in North Africa with an invasion of Sicily. This, it was argued, would knock out Axis airfields threatening Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, but more importantly would provide the Allies with the greatest chance of forcing Italy out of the war, and, for the time being, was considered the best way to continue closing the ring around Germany – even if that meant postponing the invasion of northern France for yet another year.
This time it had been General Brooke who successfully manipulated the Americans into following the British way of thinking, and with the subsequent capture of more than 250,000 Axis troops in Tunisia, Churchill finally began to start looking towards the long and mountainous leg of Italy.
The news of the victory in North Africa in May 1943 came as the Prime Minister was steaming his way across the Atlantic for yet more talks, and in the flush of so emphatic a triumph both he and the British Chiefs of Staff were unsurprisingly gung-ho about what might still be achieved that year. German forces, they argued, were now widely stretched, not just in Russia, where the tide seemed to be turning in the wake of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad in February, but elsewhere too: trouble was brewing in the Balkans; in France, which since the Allied invasion of North Africa was now entirely, rather than partially, occupied; resistance was also growing in Norway; and Italy appeared to be on the point of collapse. If and when Italy was out of the war, Germany would have to replace the half-million Italian troops in Greece and the Balkans, not to mention the figure that would surely be diverted to Italy itself, as well as the French Riviera and other borders now vulnerable to Allied attack. This kind of dispersal of forces, they suggested, was just what was needed to help the Allies get a toe-hold in France for 1944.
With this in mind, the British pressed their case to follow an invasion of Sicily with an invasion of southern Italy. This would open up yet further airfields from which to attack the German Reich, and could lead to exploitation eastwards into the Balkans and Aegean. At the very least, they argued, this use of their massed forces would be of greater help to the cross-Channel invasion than transferring most of the troops in the Mediterranean back to Britain. And in the best-case scenario, who was to say such operations might not prove decisive?
If the British were getting carried away with themselves, it was hardly surprising. Not only had they fought through a long, three-and-a-half-year campaign in North Africa, they had had interests in the Mediterranean dating back to Nelson’s day, nearly a hundred and fifty years before. The Americans, however, had none of these emotional attachments and had so far played a far smaller role in the theatre. ‘The Mediterranean,’ General Marshall said at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs in May 1943, was ‘a vacuum into which America’s great military might could be drawn off until there was nothing left with which to deal the decisive blow on the Continent.’18 They had agreed to North Africa, and had been persuaded there was sense to the invasion of Sicily, but they were damned if British over-enthusiasm for the Mediterranean was going to get in the way of the stated and original Number One Goal: the invasion of France.
Determined not to be outmanoeuvred, as they had been at Casablanca, General Marshall insisted that a date for the cross-Channel invasion be decided upon and that this should be the priority over and above any other operations. Only when the British had agreed to 1 May, 1944, for what he now appropriately renamed Operation OVERLORD, and had accepted that a certain number of troops would have to be withdrawn back to Britain to help with that task, would Marshall acquiesce to any further Allied action in the Mediterranean, whether it be the invasion of Italy or anywhere else.
The British agreed with the American terms – after all, they still believed in the invasion of France too – but to Churchill’s great frustration, no definite plan was made about what should follow the successful conquest of Sicily and by 10 July 1943, the day the Allies made their landings on the southern Italian island, the matter had still not been resolved.
The decision to go on and invade southern Italy was finally taken on 16 July. It had, in fact, been prompted by none other than Marshall himself, who proposed an amphibious operation to take Naples and then to push on as quickly as possible to Rome. Needless to say, the British Prime Minister jumped at this suggestion. ‘I am with you,’ Churchill cabled to Marshall on hearing this plan of action, ‘heart and soul.’19
No one was under any illusion, however, that Italy would be an easy place to fight a campaign should the Germans make a stand – not since Belisarius in the sixth century had Rome been captured from the south. Yet despite General Marshall’s lack of enthusiasm for any further Mediterranean strategy, he recognised the necessity of both knocking Italy out of the war for good and drawing German troops away from northern France and Russia; and Italy was the only feasible place in which they could do this. Air superiority was a prerequisite for any seaborne landing, so this ruled out southern France; capturing Sardinia and Corsica were possibilities but would not draw enemy troops or necessarily prompt Italy’s collapse; while an invasion of Greece and the Balkans carried the same risks as Italy, the roads and lines of communication there were considerably worse, nor would there be the benefits of a sizeable launch pad such as Sicily close at hand.
And anyway, both Marshall and the Allied chiefs had good cause for optimism. Momentum was with them, and the gutful of intelligence at their fingertips suggested Germany had no plans to defend southern Italy at all. Rather, it looked as though they intended to fall back to a line more than 150 miles north of Rome. With luck, the invasions would be as lightly defended as those on Sicily. Italy’s southern airfields would be captured and there was no real reason to doubt that some time before Christmas, Rome would be theirs.
All too quickly, however, these high hopes were dashed. Only the occupation of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica – two of the pre-invasion objectives of the Allies – had brought any cause for cheer and these had both been abandoned by the Germans as part of their plans to deal with the Italians’ collapse. In Italy itself, the strong and determined resistance shown by the Germans at Salerno in September 1943 had demonstrated there would be no easy victory. The Italian armed forces – with the exception of a large part of the navy and some of the air force – had been swiftly and efficiently disarmed by the Germans, not just in Italy but throughout the Balkans, Greece and the Aegean as well. In fact all but a few of the Dodecanese islands were soon in German hands, and most of those that were not were quickly taken back from the Allies. In Italy itself the Allies had discovered that it was a truly terrible place to fight a war. Running down three-quarters of the narrow peninsula were the Apennine Mountains – for the most part, high, jagged peaks that in places rose more than 10,000 feet. All too frequently sheer cliffs and narrow ridges towered over the narrow valleys below. And where there are mountains, there are always rivers, which in Italy generally ran down towards the sea and across the path of the Allied advance. Even where there were no mountains, there were still plenty of hills, such as in Tuscany, and although there were some flat coastal plains – like that around Anzio – these were criss-crossed with yet more rivers, canals, dikes and other water courses. In the north, there was the open country of the Po Valley, but then the mountains rose again – this time the even higher Alps. Furthermore, despite being a Mediterranean country, the winter climate was harsh – often freezing cold and wet, and to make matters worse, the winter of 1943/44 was especially bad.
Compounding the problem was Italy’s relative economic backwardness and poor infrastructure. Certainly, there
