Chapter XXXI
An Assessment

In the evaluation of the Italian campaign three questions must be asked: What were its objectives, or rather what was the campaign's place in Allied grand strategy? Did the campaign achieve its objectives or fulfill its intended role in that strategy? Finally, were those objectives worth the cost and effort expended? Or, from another viewpoint, could those objectives have been achieved at less cost? In each case the student of military history is faced with a bewildering variety of answers. Judgments of the campaign range all the way from a harsh characterization as "tactically the most absurd and strategically the most senseless campaign of the whole war," to the more benign, "without Italy [the Italian campaign] OVERLORD might have bogged down as had Anzio and Cassino."¹

At the QUADRANT Conference in late summer of 1943 the Allied chiefs of staff decided, among other things, that military operations in Italy would aim at holding the maximum number of German divisions as far away as possible from what was expected to be the main scene of operations in northwestern France. Measuring how well that objective was accomplished is clouded by the fact that assessing comparative strength on the basis of mere size gives a false picture. The value of a division as a fighting force, never constant, depends on such imponderables as the nature of the fighting morale and on a variety of purely local considerations as much as on numerical strength, mobility, firepower, and equipment. In the absence of other measurable criteria, however, a comparison of the number of available divisions is the only feasible means of arriving at even a rough approximation of relative strength.²

At one time or another in the Italian campaign the Allies employed a total of 30 divisions. When separate brigades and attached Italian units, mainly combat groups, are reckoned in their divisional equivalents, the total comes to about 33. The Germans committed 36, of which 3 were Italian and 1 Russian.

Since at the time of the Allied invasion of Italy in September 1943, the Germans had only six divisions, then south of Naples, the Allies appear to have drawn some 30 enemy divisions from other more critical fronts. Though on the surface it seems that the same could be said of the 30 Allied divisions engaged on the peninsula, in reality there was a marked difference. Most of the Allied divisions were already in the Mediterranean area--indeed, one of the reasons underlying a campaign in Italy was to utilize the resources which had already been assembled in North Africa and Sicily.

Because of limited port capacity in the United Kingdom, the divisions in Italy could have been moved there only by delaying the arrival of divisions from the United States. But such a move was not warranted. By remaining in Italy rather than shifting to an as yet inactive front, the American forces played a worthwhile role. The Germans, on the other hand, kept divisions in Italy that could have been deployed along relatively short interior lines on either the western or eastern fronts, which in both cases had critical need for additional forces.

They failed to send such forces even during the two major crises in the war in northwestern Europe: they pulled no division-size units from Italy to bolster either their defenses against OVERLORD or their counteroffensive in the Ardennes, although in preparation for the latter Field Marshal Walter Model did ask for three or four panzer divisions from other theaters. Hitler refused the request, even though at the time the excellent 26th Panzer Division lay in army group reserve in the Po Valley. All Field Marshal Model got were two third-rate Volksgrenadier Divisions from within the Reich itself.³ Not until the Red Army drove to the approaches of Budapest in March 1945 did the Germans move any divisional-size unit from Italy to reinforce another front.

A question arises, nevertheless, whether the Allies could have contained just as many German divisions if they had managed to bring the campaign to a halt along any of a number of satisfactory holding positions in Italy--the Naples-Foggia area, for example. Naples provided a large enough port through which sufficient forces could have been supported to hold southern Italy, including the Foggia airfield complex. Strategic bombers flying from those fields could reach enemy targets in southern Germany, Austria, northern Italy, and the Balkan peninsula.

The city of Rome and the Viterbo airfield complex, some 20 miles north of Rome, would have been another position from which the Allied armies could have maintained a satisfactory holding operation. Rome would have been an adequate communications center for all of southern Italy, and from the Viterbo airfields Allied bombers could have reached even more enemy targets than from Foggia.

In the Northern Apennines the Allied armies had their last opportunity to halt while still containing large numbers of enemy divisions in Italy with relatively few Allied divisions. For beyond the Apennines the country widens and also beyond the Apennines lies the Po and finally the Alps. The latter offered naturally strong positions which the Germans could themselves have held quite economically, so that it would have been the Germans who would have contained the Allies along that line. It made no strategic sense to drive the Germans from the Apennines and into the Alps unless the Allies had sufficient strength to break through the Alpine defense line and into the mid-Danube basin and southern Germany. An alternative strategy would have been to trap the Germans south of the Po by an aerial assault on bridge and ferry sites, then to encircle and destroy the enemy armies on the Lombard plain.

Another course, one advocated by some senior American officers, would have been to leave a minimum of troops in Italy holding the most favorable defensive position and shift the remainder to southern France.

Until the last offensive in May 1945, the Allies, of course, adopted none of those possibilities. Instead, following the capture of Rome, Alexander's armies conducted a desultory pursuit to the Arno, restricted by the decision already made to shift two army corps and several divisions from the Fifth Army for operations in southern France. When the Allies finally made an effort to drive the enemy from the Northern Apennines with an offensive against the vaunted Gothic Line, Alexander's armies managed to break through but soon bogged down in a campaign of attrition against a series of enemy positions, each about as strong as the other. In late autumn of 1944 in the midst of this frustration the British command shifted several divisions from the Eighth Army to reinforce a British operation to shore up the Greek government in its civil war with communist partisans. And just before the spring offensive in 1945, the Allied command further weakened the Eighth Army by moving several Canadian divisions with a corps headquarters to northwestern Europe. Not surprising then that only two of the major Fifth Army offensives--the drive on Rome in May 1944 and the spring offensive into the Po Valley in April 1945--went according to plan. On the other hand, throughout the entire campaign the Germans were able to go on the offensive on an army-wide scale only twice--at Salerno and Anzio--and they failed both times.

After the Allied armies became established on the Italian mainland in September 1943, Churchill, who resented the American tactic of limiting strategic choices in the Mediterranean to only one of two possibilities--either southern France or Italy--sought to enhance the status of the latter and so keep alive both strategic choices. At British insistence in February 1944 the Americans agreed to delay ANVIL and concentrate on pushing the campaign in Italy at least as far as the capture of Rome.⁴ That goal achieved in early June 1944, the British became even more preoccupied with the potential of the Italian campaign, preferring to employ available resources in the Mediterranean theater for a thrust into northern Italy and an advance, via Venezia Giulia, through the Julian Alps, Ljubljana Gap, and into the mid-Danube basin, there to join forces with (or possibly confront) the Russian troops advancing toward that region.⁵ With the exception of Gen. Devers, senior Allied commanders in Italy, possibly recalling the success of the Napoleonic armies in northern Italy, shared this view. Yet what was possible for lightly equipped 18th and mid-19th century armies was not feasible for the heavy formations of the mid-20th century, which, given the global requirements of Allied strategy, were beyond Allied capabilities.⁶

Stalin, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle, on the other hand, opposed the mid-Danubian venture, each for his own reasons.

Stalin, because he had long since staked out the Balkans, including the Danube basin, as a Russian zone of influence. Roosevelt, with the prospects of major operations still looming in the Far East, was intent on driving directly into the heart of the Reich and getting the war in Europe over with as quickly and cheaply as possible. As for de Gaulle, the political situation in France itself led him to focus his attention there rather than seek further glory for French arms in foreign parts. He was determined that troops loyal to him participate in the liberation of French territory, particularly in the south of France where well-organized Vichyites and a Communist-dominated resistance might attempt to block his efforts to gain control of France.⁷

Able to buttress their own views with such formidable support, Marshall and Eisenhower never yielded to British blandishment or argument. In their eyes France remained the decisive theater, and any attempt to enhance the status of the Italian campaign vis-à-vis that in northwestern Europe the American command saw as an attempt to change a grand strategy already agreed to at the QUADRANT Conference.⁸

Eventually the American (and majority) view prevailed. Alexander, Clark, and Juin reconciled themselves to the campaign's secondary role in the Mediterranean, Alexander observing in the process that the success of the Allied armies in Italy henceforth would have to be judged not upon ground gained, for that was vital neither to the Allies nor the Germans, but rather "in terms of its [the campaign's] effect upon the war as a whole."⁹

Thus bringing to battle the maximum number of German divisions and denying their use on other, more critical fronts, would from that point constitute the sole mission of the Allied armies in Italy. Actually, as far as the Americans were concerned, that had always been the mission, certainly since the QUADRANT Conference of 1943. In American eyes the British had finally been brought around to recognition of a long-standing reality.

Again, whether this strategy was the right one has been the subject of bitter debate since the war. Americans have contended that it was the correct strategy while the British have generally taken the opposite view.¹⁰ The campaign should have accorded equal status with the one in northwestern Europe, they have argued. Also, according to these British analysts, Alexander's armies in the summer of 1944 should have been kept intact for a drive northward to the Po Valley, thence through the Alps to the mid-Danube basin. That, they claim, would have placed the postwar line of demarcation between the west and the Russian-dominated states of Europe much further east than as finally drawn.¹¹

Whatever the validity of that line of reasoning, its weakness lies primarily in failure to take into account the logistical limitations, particularly the chronic

shortage of shipping that plagued the Allies in the Mediterranean. Under that handicap, it is hardly likely that during the winter of 1944-45 the Allies could have supported such a large-scale advance. No valid grounds seem to exist, furthermore, for believing that the Allied armies could have crossed the Alps and deployed into the mid-Danube region before the late spring of 1945. By that time the Soviet forces had already seized Vienna and lay astride the mid-Danube basin, so that an Allied presence would have served no useful purpose. As one British historian has observed, "an effective case has still to be made out that there could have been any more rapid or economical way of winning the war" than that adopted by the Allies in western Europe.¹²

German Strategy

The Germans too had their difficulties in developing a meaningful and viable Mediterranean and Italian strategy. After the Italians, in an expansion of the war contrary to Germany's overall strategic interests and without any fixed plan, became hopelessly bogged down in an ill-conceived Balkan venture, the Mediterranean soon became for the Germans a theater "of fateful importance for the conduct of the war."¹³

As for the Italian campaign, after Allied landings on the mainland, military wisdom dictated a step by step withdrawal up the peninsula to the Alps, where, during World War I, a relatively small Austro-German force had held a larger Allied force at bay for three years. Instead, Hitler elected to hold all of the peninsula, even as he had done in the Balkans, including the off-shore islands in the eastern Mediterranean, which for several years tied down large numbers of German troops to no purpose.¹⁴

Once the Allies had regained control of the western Mediterranean and ably demonstrated this fact through three successive amphibious operations--HUSKY, AVALANCHE, and SHINGLE--the Germans had no alternative but to assume that the Allies could mount a third or even a fourth amphibious assault elsewhere along either the Ligurian or Adriatic coast and shaped their strategy accordingly. The ANVIL/DRAGOON landings in August 1944 only confirmed the Germans in their assumption. Until the last Allied offensive in 1945 was well advanced, the German command in Italy continued to divert important reserves to watch over what had long since become nonexistent threats to their coastal flanks. Thus did the German High Command play into Allied hands and tie down in the Mediterranean--both in the Balkans and in Italy--German divisions of high fighting quality at a time when they were urgently needed on other fronts, especially after June 1944 in northwestern France.

Architect of the strategy to defend all of Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring by virtue of his personality and skill largely determined the stubborn nature of the German defense. Tagged with

the sobriquet "Smiling Al," Kesselring throughout the long campaign maintained, in spite of every ground for despair, that indomitable optimism so important to a commander of troops. Brilliant soldier that he was, however, his optimism never blinded him to the realities of the battlefield.¹⁵

In support of his strategy, the German commander argued that to have evacuated the peninsula without a fight and withdrawn to the line of the Alps would not have allowed the Germans to release a significant number of troops for other fronts. In view of the defensive potential of the alpine terrain, that argument seems a tenuous one. A possibly more valid argument is that abandonment of the peninsula would have given the Allies untrammeled freedom of movement either in the direction of France or of the Balkans. Here again, at least as far as France was concerned, the Allied command of the western Mediterranean had already made it possible to invade southern France whenever desired. As for the Balkans peninsula, it turned out that except for British intervention in Greece following German withdrawal from that country, the Allies chose to do little in the area other than to supply Tito's partisans with arms, ammunition, and foodstuffs.

The argument that to yield the Italian peninsula would mean the sacrifice of an indispensably deep battle zone and unleash the air war on Austria and southern Germany ignores the fact of Allied control of the Foggia airfields and later those in Sardinia and Corsica. Those fields had already opened up all of Italy and the southern regions of the Reich to Allied aerial attack. Nevertheless, Kesselring never lost his conviction that the Italian campaign "was not only justified but even imperative, and the problem one of simply doing whatever seemed best for one's own theater irrespective of the general strategic plan."¹⁶

A marked parochialism characterized the approaches of both sides to Mediterranean strategy in general and the Italian campaign in particular. Both the Allied and the German commands became so locked into their respective campaigns that they appeared incapable of turning away from their own operation maps long enough to reflect upon just what part the continuation of operations in the peninsula played in the overall strategic plan of their respective high commands.

The Commanders

In contrast with Allied operations in northern Europe, those in the Mediterranean theater were under overall British command. The American strategic viewpoint, however, was represented by Devers, the theater commander's deputy, and by Lemnitzer, Alexander's deputy chief of staff. Clark, on the other hand, was eventually to become an advocate of the British belief in the primacy of the Italian campaign in the Mediterranean.

Clark saw no need for the landing in southern France in August of 1944. American and French divisions withdrawn from the Fifth Army for that purpose could, he claimed, have been

employed to better advantage in Italy. Although in the advance from Rome to the Arno the Fifth Army's narrow front would have permitted the employment of no more divisions than Clark already had in Italy, he nevertheless contended that the divisions given up could have been used to alternate with those in line to afford his weary troops much needed rest. That would have enabled the Fifth Army, he argued, to maintain the momentum of the pursuit and drive the Germans more rapidly from central Italy. As for General Marshall's position that the port of Marseilles was needed for funneling additional divisions into France for Eisenhower's use, Clark later observed that the port could have been captured just as readily by sending troops into southern France from northwestern Italy. Had the momentum of the Allied spring offensive been sustained beyond Rome, the Fifth Army, he claimed, would have been in a position to do so by the end of July 1944.

The Alexander-Clark entente on strategy did not, however, extend to tactical matters. Yet differences in this area, while chronic, never threatened to rupture the close working relationship between Allied Armies headquarters and the U.S. Fifth Army. The relationship between Alexander and Clark resembled the one between Alexander and Montgomery in the North African campaign, during which Alexander gave his talented subordinate what was almost tantamount to free rein in the conduct of military operations and exercised only a general, albeit decisive, control over strategic planning. That was Alexander's style of command--a style which undoubtedly helped account for the success of Allied coalition warfare in the Italian campaign.

Inter-Allied tactical disagreements during the course of the campaign arose mainly from a British determination to avoid a repetition of the large-scale frontal attacks typical of World War I, whose enormous costs Britain could no longer afford to pay. Those differences came to a head in May after Truscott's VI Corps had broken free of the Anzio beachhead and prepared for the final drive on Rome.

Operation BUFFALO, based upon Alexander's predilection for the wide-swinging outflanking maneuver--the one-two boxing punch, the phrase so often used by Alexander--assumed that the maneuver would entrap large numbers of enemy troops south of Rome. With attention focused on Rome, Clark had objected to that assumption (and the plan) on the grounds that there were just too many avenues of escape available to the enemy for a thrust from the beachhead to Highway 6 to cut off major German units in the Liri-Sacco valley. Furthermore, Clark regarded Truscott's VI Corps as insufficiently strong to cut and effectively block the highway in the first place. Even after the bulk of Truscott's corps had turned northward into the Alban Hills, however, General O'Daniel succeeded in cutting the highway, even if only with artillery fire.

Earlier Clark had refused Alexander's request that elements of the Fifth Army slip behind the Germans opposing the Eighth Army and thereby weaken the enemy's resistance to the British advance up the Liri valley, observing that Allied aerial reconnaissance had shown that the enemy had

already withdrawn the bulk of his forces from the valley and that very few Germans would be trapped by sending the Fifth Army, or a major part of it, toward the Liri. That argument was similar to the one Clark was to use later against Operation BUFFALO. The most that Clark had been willing to agree to was to send the FEC toward Ceprano, even though he was convinced, apparently correctly, that few enemy troops would be trapped by the move.

While acknowledging that the Eighth Army had a tough assignment in the Liri valley and that Alexander's request thus had some justification, Clark intimated both in his wartime diary and in postwar interviews that, in his view, the Eighth Army was simply not trying as hard as it should. For that, Clark was inclined to blame what he called poor leadership, although the British had to work within far greater manpower restrictions than did the Americans and were therefore more chary about casualties.

Underlying much of Clark's reluctance to divert part of his Fifth Army to assist the Eighth Army's advance was a determination not to share with others the glory of the capture of the first of the Axis capitals. After being told the approximate date of the Normandy invasion, General Clark was anxious to take Rome before the invasion captured world attention.

Even though both French and British wanted to be in on the capture of Rome, Clark was determined to make it exclusively an American show. So strong was his determination not to allow his allies to share in the capture that, he revealed in a postwar interview, he told Alexander he would, if ordered to permit the Eighth Army to participate, not only refuse but would fire on any Eighth Army troops who tried to do so. At any rate, in keeping with a long-standing tendency to go along with the desires of his more assertive subordinates, Alexander did back down, and Clark had his Roman triumph.¹⁷

Allied Tactics

Except for invaluable air artillery control techniques and refinements in the use of the tank-infantry team, the Allies developed few tactical innovations during the campaign. They usually resorted to the frontal assault, for despite Alexander's partiality for the wide-sweeping outflanking maneuver, the rugged, sharply compartmented Italian terrain imposed upon operations characteristics reminiscent of World War I--slow, grinding, costly battles of attrition--and undoubtedly helped account for Kesselring's success in holding the Allies to a long, slow advance up the peninsula.

In the rare instances when the Allies did resort to less conventional tactics, such as several skillfully devised deception plans and an occasional unorthodox use of troops and equipment, as during the final offensive in the Po Valley, the results were rewarding. Field Marshal Alexander's reliance on deception, for example, on several occasions drew German reserves far out of position. These tactics were aided by the intelligence that came from breaking the German code and by the fact that enemy commanders lacked reconnaissance aircraft to detect large-scale

Allied troop movements preceding an operation. This proved especially valuable in Operation DIADEM in the spring of 1944 and Operation OLIVE in the autumn of the same year. In the same way the Eighth Army imaginative use of amphibious-tracked (Fantails) vehicles as in crossing the flooded plains near the mouth of the Reno to outflank a very formidable enemy position in the Argenta Gap, helped assure success in the early stages of the final offensive. That tactic was matched in ingenuity by the Fifth Army's employment of mountain troops to move across rugged terrain so rapidly as to confound the Germans, who did not expect such an Allied move. The consequent surprise, much like that achieved by the FEC over similar terrain in the Aurunci mountains a year before, resulted in a breakthrough into the Po Valley.

Although tactical innovations were few, the Italian campaign did see the development and testing of several technical innovations that later were to prove their worth in northwestern Europe. Among these were artificial harbors (Mulberries), first employed during the landings in Sicily and later vital in the Normandy invasion, and highly specialized airborne direction of artillery fire by spotter aircraft.¹⁸

Another technical innovation was the proximity fuze for artillery shells. Long used in antiaircraft fire, it was first released for ground use in the Ardennes counteroffensive (in December 1944) and was also employed in Italy in the latter stages of the campaign. Still another, radar-directed bombing through darkness and overcast, stripped the enemy of his only remaining protection from Allied aerial harassment. In situations where practicable, Allied ground forces effectively employed offshore naval gunfire support requiring a high degree of interservice co-ordination.

An assessment of the role of airpower in the campaign leads to the conclusion that, while it was helpful, it was not decisive, either in close support of ground operations or in tactical interdiction and isolation of the battlefield, as in Operation STRANGLE. General Clark, for one, pointed out that air force claims that close air support would assist the taking of objectives at little cost to ground forces was not demonstrated at Monte Cassino.¹⁹

The Surrender Negotiations

In the closing weeks of the war the German High Command, or what remained of it, sought grimly to avoid large-scale capitulation to the Russians. On this effort hung the fate of over two million German soldiers, including Army Group E in Croatia and Army Groups South and Center in Czechoslovakia. (Trapped along the Baltic and already lost to the Russians were the 230,000-man Army Kurland and the 150,000-man Army Ost-Preussen.) Aware that Soviet suspicions had already been aroused by the protracted and covert negotiations leading to the German capitulation in Italy and by oft-repeated attempts by the common foe to divide the Allies, the British and the Americans pointed out to the Russians that a German surrender in Italy was

little different from a separate German surrender on the Russian front, as, for example, at Stalingrad.

At the same time, the western Allies sought further to avoid friction by emphasizing that where feasible, surrender in every instance had to be made to representatives of all the major Allies. In the end, however, the Germans succeeded in extricating the bulk of their forces from the Eastern Front, with the exception of Army Group Center, by surrendering them to the western Allies.

The German surrender in Italy set a pattern for a series of piecemeal surrenders to the British and Americans. On 2 May, the same day that Vietinghoff capitulated, Grossadmiral Doenitz sent emissaries to Field Marshal Montgomery's headquarters with an offer to surrender to the British the German forces remaining in northwestern Germany, Denmark, and the German islands. Two days later, General Eisenhower told Montgomery to accept the offer in much the same way as Alexander had reacted to the offer in Italy.

On the same day, 4 May, emissaries from the German 19th Army to General Patch's U.S. Seventh Army headquarters near Munich offered to surrender what would eventually include all of Army Group G in southern Germany. Three days later the final German surrender took place at Rheims and on 9 May the ceremony was restaged in Berlin for the benefit of the Russians.²⁰

Rightly regarded as a secondary or subsidiary operation, the Italian campaign in terms of the number of men involved, casualties, ground gained, and matériel consumed was nonetheless a major undertaking. Allied forces in Italy advanced 1,140 miles by road from Cape Pessaro on Sicily's southernmost tip to the Brenner Pass on Italy's Alpine frontier. From the first landings on the mainland in September 1943, they traveled 480 airline miles, about the same distance covered by Eisenhower's armies from Normandy to the Elbe. Because of the winding roads that vein much of the Italan peninsula, the actual ground distance was of course much longer. In the advance the two Allied armies crossed some of the most challenging terrain in Europe, alternating between hot and humid plains, forested mountains, and high, rocky, almost pathless summits. The weather ranged from the oppressive summer heat of the Mediterranean littoral to the almost arctic cold of the Central and Northern Apennines. During the campaign the Allied forces completed four assault landings and three major offensives.

Counting both sides, approximately a million men were at one time or another involved. Allied strength ranged from 400,000 to 500,000 men, the Fifth Army from a high of 370,000 men at the time of the capture of Rome in June 1944 to a low of 266,000 at the beginning of the final offensive in April 1945. German strength generally was somewhat lower, declining more or less steadily throughout the campaign as the manpower situation in the Reich grew desperate.

Enemy losses, mainly men taken prisoner,

were much higher than Allied. From September 1943 to May 1945 the two Allied armies incurred 312,000 casualties of all types, 188,746 of them by the Fifth Army.²¹

German casualties for the campaign totaled 434,646, of which 48,067 were killed and 214,048 missing. Generally forced to yield the ground fought over, the Germans were unable to determine how many of the missing had been killed, although the percentage probably was high.²²

When the Germans laid down their arms, the longest sustained Allied campaign of World War II came to an end. A total of 570 days had passed from the landings in Italy on 9 September 1943 to the capitulation on 2 May 1945. Each day had seemed an eternity, as many a veteran of the campaign on both sides has testified. Almost always at a foot-slogger's pace--a pace rendered all the more interminable by the infrequent exhilaration of pursuit--and seemingly always approaching precipitous heights controlled by a well-concealed enemy, Allied troops, under a broiling sun or in numbing cold, had slowly pushed ahead. Nowhere on the far-flung battlefronts could the end have brought more relief than to those who fought the prolonged fight in a cruel, bitter campaign that all too often seemed to be going nowhere.

Footnotes

1. See J. F. C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1939-45: A Strategical and Tactical History (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947), p. 265; and Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, pp. 455-56.

2. AFHQ, G-2, 11 Nov 1944, Review of Enemy Strength in Italian Combat Zone as of 7 Nov 1944, 0100/11E/77.

3. See Hugh M. Cole, The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge, U.S. ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1965), p. 671.

4. Ehrman, Grand Strategy, Vol. V, p. 361, app. vii, Ismay's memo to P.M. 28 Apr 44.

5. Ibid., pp. 347-356; Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command, U.S. ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1954), p. 218.

6. See Le Goyet, La Participation Française a la Campagne d'Italie, pp. 189-91.

7. Ibid.

8. Ehrman, Grand Strategy, pp. 349-50.

9. Quoted in The Battle for Italy, by W. G. F. Jackson, New York, 1967, p. 317.

10. Two distinguished British historians of the Second World War, however, have argued that the strategic mission was essentially correct. See Ehrman, Grand Strategy, vols. V & VI, and Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War.

11. See Clark, Calculated Risk, pp. 370-72.

12. Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy, p. 71. See also Le Goyet, La Participation Française a la Campagne d'Italie, pp. 189-91.

13. Concluding Remarks on the Mediterranean Campaign, by Albert Kesselring MS # C-014, typescript in CMH files.

14. Ibid.

15. B. H. Liddell-Hart, Why Don't We Learn From History? (New York: 1971), p. 25.

16. Kesselring, A Soldier's Record, p. 267.

17. Interv. Mathews with Gen. Clark, 18 May 1948, in CMH files.

18. Although the Germans had been the first to use these, they were unable to continue to do so after losing control of the skies to the Allies.

19. Interv. Mathews with Gen. Clark, 10-21 May 1948, in CMH files.

20. For details of the several surrenders see Pogue, The Supreme Command, pp. 480ff; MacDonald, The Last Offensive, Chapter XXIX; The Seventh Army, Report of Operations, pp. 856-65; Schramm, KTB/OKW, Vol. IV (2), pp. 1478 ff.

21. Compared to 766,294 Allied casualties in northwestern Europe, of which American casualties were 586,628. See MacDonald, The Last Offensive, Chapter XX.

22. The official German sources for battle losses, Der Heeresartz Oberkommando des Heeres, Gen. St.d. H/Org. Abt., 26 Apr 45, lists only casualties for the army. Casualties for the Waffen SS, the Luftwaffe, and the Kriegsmarine are unavailable but would constitute a much smaller percentage since the bulk of German forces in Italy was army.