His decision allowed a sizable German army to escape and possibly squandered an opportunity for a quick resolution of the grinding Italian Campaign. General Mark Clark (1896-1984) contravened his orders by moving northwest to capture Rome instead of cutting off the German soldiers retreating from Cassino. However, in a controversial and little-understood decision, U.S. The Allied breakout in May 1944 exposed Kesselring’s main forces to a potential trap by advancing Allied armies from Anzio and Cassino. Despite Allied air superiority across Italy, it took Allied soldiers four grueling battles over several months to break through heavily fortified Monte Cassino and the Gustav Line. The southernmost of these, the Gustav Line, ran just behind Monte Cassino. Under the resourceful Commander Kesselring, German forces set up several defensive lines across the narrow Italian peninsula. An intended quick push inland at Anzio became bogged down in driving rains, German air raids and command hesitation, prompting Churchill to complain, “I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.” Where the mountains receded, there were still muddy rolling hills, flooded rivers and washed-out roads to hamper the Allied advance and assist the German defenders. Germans entrenched in the high Apennine Mountains at Cassino brought the mobile Allied army to a grinding halt for four months. On September 9, 1943, when American troops landed on the Italian coast at Salerno, the German army, which was rapidly taking over the defense of Italy, nearly drove them back into the Tyrrhenian Sea. He instructed his army group commander in southern Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring (1885-1960), to make the Allies pay dearly for every inch of their advance. German leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) did not want to let the Allies establish air bases in Italy that could threaten Germany’s southern cities as well as its primary oil supplies in Romania. Meanwhile, the German command deployed 16 new divisions on the Italian mainland. The battle for Sicily was complete, but German losses had not been severe, and the Allies’ failure to capture the fleeing Axis armies undermined their victory. On August 17, 1943, Allied forces marched on the major port city of Messina, expecting to fight one final battle instead, they discovered some 100,000 German and Italian troops had managed to escape to the Italian mainland. A new provisional government was set up under Marshal Pietro Badoglio (1871-1956), who had opposed Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany and who immediately began secret discussions with the Allies about an armistice. On July 24, 1943, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was deposed and arrested. Jarred by the Allied invasion, the Italian fascist regime fell rapidly into disrepute, as the Allies had hoped.
Map of the world after ww2 code#
On July 10, 1943, Operation Husky, the code name for the invasion of Sicily, began with airborne and amphibious landings on the island’s southern shores. Churchill argued that as long as the Allies maintained the initiative, these troops could battle their way up the Italian peninsula relatively quickly and benefit the Normandy operation in the process. But Italy lay just across the Mediterranean from the North African theater where plentiful Allied forces could be redeployed. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) had long been clamoring for the other Allies to relieve his armies fighting Germany in the east by undertaking an Allied invasion from the west, and American commanders were reluctant to divert any resources away from Normandy. The decision to attack Italy was not made without debate. In Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943, Allied leaders decided to use their massive military resources in the Mediterranean to launch an invasion of Italy, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) called the “soft underbelly of Europe.” The objectives were to remove Italy from World War II, secure the Mediterranean Sea and force Germany to divert some divisions from the Russian front and other German divisions from northern France, where the Allies were planning their cross-Channel landing at Normandy, France.ĭid you know? Among the British and American Allied troops fighting in the Italian Campaign were Algerians, Indians, French, Moroccans, Poles, Canadians, New Zealanders, African Americans and Japanese Americans.
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