School of War - Ep 133: James Holland on World War II in Italy, 1943

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

James Holland, author of The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 and host of the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast, joins the show to talk about the Allied campaign in Italy. ▪️ Times      •      02:08 Introduction      •      04:23 “No greater moment of human drama…”     •      11:08 Why go into Italy at all?     •      18:24 Mission to Rome       •      29:33 Baytown and Avalanche     •      32:10 Salerno     •      36:25 rethinking Mark Clark     •      40:50 Very hard fighting       Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

We're the D-Day Dodgers out in Italy, always on the vino, always on the spree, Eighth Army scroungers and their tanks. We live in Rome among the Yanks. We are the D-Day Dodgers over here in Italy. We landed at Salerno, a holiday with pay. Jerry brought the band down to cheer us on our way, showed us the sights and gave us tea. We all sang songs. The beer was free.

We are the D-Day Dodgers way out in Italy. The Volturno and Casino were taken in our strike. We didn't have to fight there. We just went for the ride. Anzio and Sangro were all forlorn. We did not do a thing from dust till dawn, for we are the D-Day Dodgers over here in Italy. When you look round the mountains through the mud and rain, you'll find the crosses, some which bear no name. Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone. The boys beneath them slumber on. They were the D-Day Dodgers who will stay in Italy. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who not see these buildings there. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. James Holland. He is the author most recently of the Savage Storm, the Battle for Italy, 1943. He is a prolific author, in particular regarding the Second World War of History Books, of Historical Fiction. He is also a podcast host. He has a fantastic podcast called We have ways of making you talk. He is the author of a novel that just came out in the UK. We'll hope to see it here in the United States soon enough. Alvesden. James, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for having me on. Can I ask before we get into the war in Italy, which is what

I'd like to focus on today, how did you come to be a man thinking about and writing about the Second World War with so much of your time? What are the origins of that? Well, this is going to sound ridiculous, but actually I was in my late 20s. And although I'd always loved history as a boy and studied at school, and then went on and studied at university, I think the most modern I got was reconstruction after the United States Civil War. So into the kind of 1880s and basically kind of stopped there. So I never did any 20th century at all. And it wasn't, and you know, it's a very small boy. I've been kind of sort of, you know, slightly interested in World War II, I suppose. But but it wasn't until I was playing cricket in my late 20s when suddenly I was playing and there was this

incredible roar over to one side of the cricket field and I looked up and there was this amazing machine pirouetting around the sky and I turned to the umpire and he said that's the spitfire and that was it that was the damsene moment and literally the next weekend was a was a terrific air show that we have in the UK called Flying Legends and I took myself off to that my wife declined the the treat. And so, which was probably a good thing because it meant I could just sort of geek out all on my own. And that was the point. And then I came out with this idea for a novel, a sort of backdrop to the North Africa campaign in the Battle of Britain, particularly. And a sort of love, loss and war novel. And I got very serious about all the research and

rushed off and went around interviewing veterans and stuff and just had the most amazing time. And that was really it. And it just, you know, one thing led to another. And, you know, the more I got into it, the more I got interested, the more I wanted to find out more, the more I was interviewing more veterans and traveling the world seeing these people. And the more I wanted to get into the kind of nuts and bolts of why things happened. And here I am kind of, you know, 20 or years later. Well, let me ask a really big picture question before we zoom into 1943. We're sitting here in 2024.

A lot's happened. A lot's changed. There are nuclear weapons. There was the Cold War. You know, a lot of water under the bridge. Why should we pay so much attention to the same? Second World War, why should we care? Well, first of all, for all the major competent nations, it's the biggest event in their

history, I would say. It's kind of, there's no greater moment of human drama, really, and it affected every man, woman, and child of all those major competent nations in a way that no other conflict has. And also, the tentacles of the Second World War is still being felt to this day. I mean, they absolutely are, the ramifications of it, you know, in everything from some geopolitics to kind of, you know, how the discussions we're having about nuclear weapons, And what I did think, though, is I thought that the scale of the Second World War of World War II was gone. 15 years ago, I wouldn't have believed it possible that there would be another European war in which you're talking about World War II levels of casualties, destruction, burnt out wrecks, all that kind of stuff.

You know, corpses lying on the side of the road. I mean, you know, a lot of that imagery that we're seeing out of Ukraine, if you kind of put that into monochrome, it could be the end in Normandy or, I don't know, U.S. First Army going through Arcus. or I don't know, whatever. But, but, you know, it's much more reminiscent of the Second World War and any of the intervening conflicts that have happened since 1945, I would argue. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how it is in the UK. In the United States, we have a lot of what I will characterize as faddish isolationism

on both the left and the right. It's not, it's not particularly partisan. It pops up on both sides. And I personally attribute it, if not entirely, at least in part, to the disappearance of the World War II generation. I think when you have a very important. around a lot of folks who had fought in the war or been affected by it personally. So they're children in some ways as well, but especially them.

It was just harder to make the case from the American perspective that we should wash our hands of Eurasia. Because the cost, the cost of things really going tilt in Europe or Asia was so vivid, was such a vivid lived experience, such an awful lived experience. And the sort of statistics that you refer to, which truly are gutting to contemplate. You know, that's just a thing in a textbook now. It's not alive. That's really interesting. I mean, you know, after 1945, you had the Marshall Plan. I think kind of most America's brought into that. America became the preeminent global nation into the kind of 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, and then kind of emerged sort of triumphant out of the Cold War

and has been the kind of world's kind of, not not police, but kind of has been the kind of the free world's protector ever since and the kind of, you know, the one of the most powerful nation in the world. And I think what you see is, is since 2008 the financial crisis, that has been followed by political upheaval. And the political upheaval has led to a kind of completely recalibrating of a lot of Americans' view of how they sit in the world and what they think is fair. And so you're going through another of these cycles of isolationism, which is exactly what followed the kind of Wall Street crash of the late 1920s and into the 1930s. I mean, Don't forget, the FDR came in in 19, you know, won the 1942 election on an isolationist ticket.

And then in May and June, 1940, had to do the biggest political vault fast in political history. So I don't know. I mean, I think if it gets, and also I think the sphere of influence is changing, isn't it? So American eyes have glanced much more to the Indo-Pacific these days. Yes. Than they are Europe. And I think there is a justifiable belief amongst a lot of Americans that the United States has been carrying a can for too long. it's about time some of these pesky European nations stepped up to the plate.

And in that, I have a certain amount of sympathy. I mean, it really worries me how downgraded United Kingdom's armed forces are. I think, you know, it's unconscionable, frankly. And, you know, it all feels a bit in 1938 at the moment. And, you know, America is surely right that the Germany, Britain and France, particularly, really does need to kind of put his finger out in terms of protecting the West. And I never thought I'd admit that I have anything to. agree with Donald Trump, but I do slightly agree of his take on NATO. I kind of, you know,

I think there's some justification there. And I think it's only right that nations in Europe do kind of contribute a little bit more than just the US. It's, you know, it's very easy to get sort of complacent with these things. But that's interesting. It may have a factor in it, except I think the popularity in the Second World War has only risen, you know, and that's on the back of, you know, saving private Iran, Band of Brothers, Court of Duty, now masters of the air, the specific, you know, it's still very kind of, I mean, it's interesting, you know, on our second World War podcast, I mean, the average age is something like 34, I think, or 35, a lot of a very wide range of people, you know, we see loads and loads of young people getting into it.

And I think the interesting thing about history generally is I don't think it's really, you know, I think when you're a teenager, you tend to kind of only be interested in what's in front of your nose, you know, are you going to get in the sports team? Are you going to kind of get with a girl at the weekend or whatever it might be? What's the next party? What are your mates up to? you know, you're interested in sort of global affairs and who cares. And I think as you get older, I think you become a little bit more interested in your place in the world and history comes back.

I mean, it is the one academic subject that people can return to in later life. I mean, it's very rare that a 29-year-old would suddenly take up physics. But it's very, very common than a 29-year-old would suddenly start reading history books while watching kind of, I don't know, PBS history documentaries or whatever. I've heard it said that when a man turns 40, he needs to either become obsessed with smoked meats or the Second World War. And I personally feel like I have both covers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. False choice.

So, so if, well, that's, that's, that's interesting and heartening your point about the reception of the war as a sort of matter of popular culture and people's embrace of reading history. If there's in the United States, a part of the European war that is less remarked on, it's the Italian campaign. I'm grateful to you for the attention you were showing it. And the American popular memory, in a way only sort of, I don't want to say aggravated, but added to by the Spielberg-Hanks legacy, the American memory of the European war sort of allides North Africa and Italy. It's a bit of a footnote. And then it's Normandy through to Germany that gets the attention. This was a matter of some annoyance to my father. I'm an unusual case at my age. My father actually served in the war. And I was a late arrival. And he fought in Italy and was always annoyed each time the D-Day celebrations get mildly sort of jokingly annoyed, but not completely jokingly. Around the same time, he had been participating in the liberation of Rome, but he didn't notice too many parades or things devoted to that. And then 43 in Italy, I mean, even less, even less remarked upon.

So maybe we could start, why do the Allies go to Italy? And what is the nature of the strategic dispute between the Brits and the Americans that ultimately coalesces into this plan as enacted? Well, there's four reasons really for going into Italy. the first reason is to get the Italians out of the war once and for all, because when the go button is being pressed on the 17th of August, 1943, they're in discussions with the Italians, and in fact, actually the first face-to-face discussions with Beatle Smith

and the Italian representatives in Lisbon takes place on the very same day. Also, coincidentally, the Schweinfeld and Regensburg raid at the same time. So it is to accelerate that. The second one is to draw off troops from northwest Europe and indeed the Eastern Front as well, but particularly North West Europe, that's the whole idea, sort of keep the Atlantic Wall as weak as possible. The third reason is to capture Rome, because Rome is a major capital, it's one of the most famous cities in the world, and it's the center of Italian fascism, and psychologically it's

just, you know, to have that an allied hands would be a good thing. And fourthly, perhaps arguably the most important, it would allow them to get their hands on the Fogia airfields. The air of Fodger is about third of the way up on the Adriatic so on the eastern side of the Italian peninsula. It's one of the very few flat bits in Italy, and that particular bit is absolutely flat as a board, so you can have multiple airfields there,

and particularly you can bring in strategic bombers. What I mean by that, of course, is heavy bombers that are operating independently of any ground operations. The idea is to kind of further tighten the news. So the main reason we're going into Italy is to help Operation Overlord, which is being planned at this point, which is going to be accelerated.

And the recognition is that D-Day, Overlord, is a complete non-starter. The understanding about Operation Overlord was an absolute prerequisite was that the Allies have control of their airspace over a large swave of northwest Europe before D-Day is launched, which in the kind of late summer,

early autumn of early fall of 1993 is due for the beginning of May, 1944. And this is an absolute kind of locked-in date and it is also absolutely non-negotiable that they should have control of the skies. Why is that? Well, it's because the moment they land in Normandy, the race is on about who can build up troops and material quickest.

Is it going to be the Allies who have got to come by boat from the UK, or is it going to be the Germans who already have obviously a very big stronghold in continental Europe? So what you need to do is you need to slow down the ability of the Germans to reinforce Normandy. And you do that by destroying their lines of communication. And what I mean by that is destroying marshalling yards, railway lines, bridge. is anything that can get their troops to Normandy quickly. And because the absolute glue that keeps the entire Vermont, the German armed forces together, is the Reichspar, and the German railway system.

Destroying that as much as you possibly can is really, really vital. And also kind of destroying their ability to make synthetic fuel and get real oil from Pleistia and Romania. So that requires very low-level precision bombing because to hit a bridge, which is tiny from 22,000 feet up in the air, is next to impossible. to get it really, really low. The trouble is if you're really, really low, you can only do that if you have control of the skies, because if you've got Measuresmiths and Fokker Wals hovering above you,

you're going to get shot down in droves. And the lower you are as a bomber, the less room you've got to maneuver around the sky should anything go wrong. So it's absolutely essential that you don't have that bothering from German fighter planes trying to shoot you down while you're trying to do this incredibly difficult operation. So that's why you need to destroy the the Luftwaffe as much as you possibly can. The problem is most of the Luftwaffe's factories, are deep inside the Reich, beyond the range of fighter escort. And although pre-war bombing theory and air theory by the Americans suggested that the flying fortress, flying in formation, along with the B-24 Liberator as well, would be enough to kind of withstand

any potential enemy fighter attack, the reality soon proved to the contrary, such as the Schreinford-Regensburg raid and the subsequent series of assault that they made in October, 1943, which the 8th Air Force operating out of East England was absolutely decimated every time they tried to go without fighter escort. So that was a bit of a non-starter. So everyone was talking a bit of a panic on and thinking, well, okay, well, how do we do this? If we can't get to the German aircraft factories without being absolutely hammered, what are we going to do? Well, one of the ways you get around that is by moving into Fogia, which is closer to those aircraft factories in the Southern Reich and kind of Viener Neustadt and Regensburg and, you know, in Austria and so on. So that was

of thinking, and that's one of the great motivations of the Italian campaign. So rather than seeing the Italian campaign as a distraction from an overlord, you should see it as being enthralled to overlord. And in actual fact, I've written quite a lot about what I call the tyranny of overlord. So what's going on, because of the preeminence of the cross-channel invasion set for May and then subsequently June, 1944, everything else plays lip service to that. So whatever you do, overlord comes first. And it's constantly getting in the way of the Italian campaign. And one of the big problems is that the Italian campaign is undertaken for very good reasons

by the Allies, but it is not supported materially to the same extent of many other operations. And one of the big problems is that you've got this very narrow peninsula, which just screams out for lots and lots of amphibious assaults and outflanking assaults. But because of a shortage of landing craft, they can't do that. Now, in actual fact, the Americans alone between May 1943 and April 1944 built well over 8,000 assault craft of varying kinds, but it still wasn't enough because of the full commitment in the Pacific as well and the need for the preparation for Overlord.

And a further spanner in the works is that hovering over the horizon is also a potential of an operation in southern France in conjunction with Operation Overlord, the Cross-Channel invasion, which is something which is sort of agreed upon by the end of 1943. So there's all these conflicting different demands for the same source, i.e. assault craft. And the Italian campaign is just undertaken with just not enough. So there's only 263, I think, for the eighth armies crossing across the Straits in Messina, which is absolutely tiny little narrow straits on the 3rd of September, 1943. But there's only 359 available for Mark Clark's Fifth Army assault of the Salerno, the Bay of Salerno, south of Salerno, on the 9th of September, 1933.

And it's just not enough to be able to guarantee success. Yeah. Well, so we'll talk about the landings in a moment, but first, if you wouldn't mind, talk about the pathetic demise of fascist Italy at this moment. I mean, it's really remarkable to consider, I mean, this is the senior partner in the fascist axis, amongst fascist nations, what, 10 years prior, something like that, now going out of the war in a negotiated armistice, which itself, is muddled and executed very poorly on the Italian side. The negotiations, you do a magnificent

job in the book, I have to say, of addressing the contacts and negotiations between the Allies and the Italians to include, and I mean, the shows that I'm not a specialist in these things, but I confess, I did not know and was astonished at the story that you told of Maxwell Taylor's mission to Rome and this planned 82nd Airborne Landing, which is meant to be in September, 43 outside of Rome, which is obviously suicide. in retrospect, but tell this tale, if you would. Well, yes. So the Italians are just spent. I mean, they should never have gone to war in the first place. The only reason they do go to war in the first place is because of Mussolini, Benito Mussolini,

the Al-Duchet, the fascist dictators since 1920, because of his woeful lack of geopolitical understanding and being a global player. One has to understand that Italy between the wars is a poor country. It doesn't have much industry. It doesn't have any natural resources of its own. And it's kind of, you know, it's trapped in the depths of the Mediterranean, doesn't have ocean-going access, really. It's got this territory in East Africa and also in Libya. And Mussolini's plans are to just sort of, you know, have this new Roman Empire, which basically controls most of the Mediterranean.

And what he thinks is that when France is looking beaten, he thinks Britain's going to be beaten, so there's going to be a very, very easy offings for him. And it's much better to be on the side of the Nazis who are the up and coming kind of, you know, winners in town rather than on the losers. And politically, obviously, he's more aligned to Hitler than he is to the democracies. But he just completely misreads it because, you know, he rather like Hitler, he underpreciates the fact that Britain's senior services in Navy, that it has all sorts of bargaining chips, that, you know, Britain has been supplying a lot of a lot of food and other

resources to Italy between the wars. And Britain has no intention of kind of throwing in the towel whatsoever. And so it all starts to unravel very, very quickly. That's all right. And that's all right. And then he goes into, tries to push into Egypt, which is a British protectorate. That goes horribly wrong as well, which is what brings Germany into the North Africa sphere in Mediterranean sphere in the first place.

The whole point about the packs of steel between Britain, between Italy and Germany is that the two completely separate. You know, so Italy is like, I'll look after southern Europe. I'll do that. You don't need to get involved. Nazis are kind of, you know, Hitler's thinking, well, I'll have the whole of kind of northern Europe. That means my southern flank is secure.

I don't need to worry about it. So it's a kind of sort of a mutually convenient alliance in which there are no plans for them to fight alongside each other whatsoever. And obviously, that all goes pear-shaped when the Italians get beaten so badly by the British in early 1941. You know, it's a tune of kind of 131,000 or 30,000-plus troops in the back. So from that moment on, it's that gamble that Mussolini takes is just gone complete pear-shade. And really, they should have got out of the war there and then. But Germany won't let them because Germany needs its southern flank protected. So they're stuck.

And enthusiasm for the war is going down, downhill, and downhill. And then when you have the collapse in Tunisia of Axis forces and the catastrophic defeat of the Axis forces in Northwest Africa in May, 1943, they're done. The population just doesn't have any stomach for it at all. And he might be a fascist dictator. He might be an autocrat. But it's not enough, particularly in a country,

where his power isn't complete because there's a kick. It's a monarchy, King Victor Emmanuel III. So it's just absolutely hopeless. And the kind of sort of grotesque kind of selfishness and narcissism of the king and the serious, you know, the senior players in the Italian kind of high command are what they're trying to do in the summer of 1943, once the Allies invade in Sicily on the 10th of July, right through to the beginning of the surrender negotiations at the middle of August, right through to the eventual armistice on the 9th of September, is there between,

a rock and a hard place. They know that if they get it wrong, German retribution will be very, very intense and heavy and they'll suffer. But equally, if they don't get out of the war, the Allies will also retribution will be incredibly intense and they'll suffer. So they're kind of trying to plow a middle of thorough and just completely cocking it up because of their own self-interest. So where they really, really pulls it up is their inability and unwillingness to fight on the side of the Allies, even though they're protesting it. And there are certain people in the senior command who are keen to kind of take the fight to the fight to the Germans, should it come to it and show a bit of metal and all the rest of it.

But those thoughts and that idea is not shared by the king, by Bedoglio, who is the current kind of, you know, prime minister. They're not shared by Ambrosio, who is the head of the armed forces, or Oato, who's out of the army. They're just, all they want to do is get out of their necks still intact. And so they're putting themselves above everybody else. And the consequence of that is, you know, 750,000 Germans put in the back. by the Italians, rather, put in the bag or executed or imprisoned or sent off the slave labor in Germany,

totally ineffective support of the Allies, I mean, just non-existent whatsoever, and total collapse of the entire regime. So it's incredibly unedifying. And, you know, history hasn't been kind to the King or Bedoglio or Ambrosio or any of his mob. And quite rightly so, because they are artily, feckless, cowardly, out of themselves, just doing everything that they shouldn't do in terms of looking after the nation on which they have been entrusted. So speak, if you would, about this plan, which, you know, sitting here knowing how the war plays out, knowing how difficult it is to move up the Italian peninsula, how difficult it is even when the Allies do land at Anzio the following year, to make it to Rome, takes months

and months to make it to Rome. At one point here in the summer into fall of 43, we, the Allies are contemplating landing the 82nd Airborne Division in the vicinity of Rome to somehow catalyze the Italian departure from the Axis. Maxwell Taylor, I guess he's the deputy commander of the division at the time, goes to Rome on a submarine. I mean, the whole thing is bonkers. Yeah, it really, really is. Well, what's going on is that the Allies don't trust the Italians.

And although they've signed an armistice at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon on the 3rd September. The whole point is that this will be a two, you know, they'll get that done and then that same day, the third of September, eight farming starts crossing the straits of Messina, which is right in the tip of Italy. And the plan is that at some point, some days later, the main Allied strike force will land further up the boot to try and outflank the southern part of Italy entirely. The reason the Allies want to do this and are prepared to risk it is because they've had intelligence, which is incredibly flimsy, incidentally, that should the Allies land in Italy, Hitler will retreat to the Pisa Rimini Light,

which is about 200 miles north of Rome. So the presumption is that for not very much effort, they'll get Rome and they'll get the Fodger Airfields and all the rest of it, and two-thirds of Italy without too much strength. But the emphasis, as I say, the intelligence is very flimsy. It's an interceptive message that Hitler sends the previous May. and the world of General Castellone, who is one of the negotiator. But, I mean, can he be trusted?

You know, he would say that, wouldn't he? Because he's saying, what, the Allies want to hear, because he wants to get Italy out of the war. So it's not entirely kind of foolproof that Hitler is going to do this. As it happens, that is exactly Hitler's plan. And he intends to do this on the 9th of September, which ironically is the very same day that Operation Avalanche, the landing South of Sloan, takes place,

which, of course, then cancels that. that retreat on. But the problem is, is the Allies, until they land, they can't trust the Italians. They may have signed this armist, but who's to say they're not going to then go behind their backs and tell the Germans what the ally plans are, if they tell them? So they've got to keep it secret. And the Italians take it upon themselves to assume from no basis whatsoever that the Italians, the Allies won't land before the 12th of September, when in actual fact they're intending to land in the early hours of the 9th September.

There is no reason for them thinking this, but they've just got it into their heads and no one has disabused them of it. So that's what they think. And they just don't feel they're ready up until that point. What they do want is they want some allied reassurances and they want some help. And what they really want to do is secure Rome as quickly as possible. So this is where the plan for dropping in the 82nd Airborne comes in. But Maxwell Taylor gets their first of all by submarine and then transferring to an Italian

boat, going in under the noses of the Germans, you know, clandestinely. and it's very clear that once he starts talking to the Italians, they're absolutely poles apart in what they think is realistic. And what is amazing about the Italians is they have no idea that the 80-second airboard could not be landed in one division in one drop. They have no idea that the Allies require air cover, close air support, on any invasion place, which, you know, puts Rome out of the pitch because it's too far north from bases in Sicily and Malta and all the rest of it.

And it is mystifying that these senior military commanders, the Italian high command don't know this after all these years of war, but seemingly they don't. So there's an awful lot of wishful thinking going on all around. It's wishful thinking from the Allies, so the Germans are going to retreat the piece of Rimini line, 200 miles north of Rome. There's wishful thinking from the Italians are far stronger and far more able to do amphibious assaults or airborne assaults far from their bases, and the reality is actually the case. And so you get into this just total, total crosswires. And as I say, you know, when Maxwell Taylor turns up and starts talking to these people,

it becomes very, very clear to him in very quick order, as it does to General Carboni, who is the commander of the Corps that's protecting Rome and also the commander of the Italian SQL Service, that they're so far off what can be done. You know, the two views are so different that it's completely hopeless. And so the 80-second, the back-a-second airborne plan for Rome gets axed and quite right so.

And Taylor heads back to, you know, back to Algiers. It's astonishing that the Allies even indulged the idea. I mean, it has a bit of a flavor of Putin making a play directly for Kiev in 2022, and it would have likely met with similar results. And this sort of this, this, this military plan that's based on a series of really political assumptions that will probably prove to be quite false the moment the troops are on the ground. It's remarkable.

Well, yes. I learned about it for the first time from your book. Well, yes. So, you know, from the Italian point of view, they're thinking, well, this would be great to have this extra support. and completely misreading the military situation and reality about, you know, air cover and all that kind of stuff.

From the ally point of view, the whole idea, what makes this, they know they're undercooked, they know they haven't got enough assault craft, they know this is touch and go. But on the other hand, if they can harness the Italians as well, you know,

400,000 Italian troops in mainland Italy itself, that's quite a big bonus, you know, and the Germans, they know roughly what the German strength is, that combination would make all the difference. but as I say, the kind of the views on how this is going, they're just sort of poles apart. I mean, it's absolutely woeful from both sides, really. Yeah.

So let's talk about the operations themselves, Baytown in the toe of Italy right across from Messina and then avalanche up in the vicinity of Salerno. How do we end up with two landings quite a ways apart from each other with Montgomery down in the south and Clark up in the north? What's the concept that's being pursued there? Well, the idea is to kind of keep, you know, by 8th Army going in, is to kind of keep the Germans distracted and then come in around the back door with the main effort.

It's a classic allied two-fisted punch, really. The problem is, is they've only got enough shipping to send over two divisions and understrength divisions with not enough vehicles, because, again, they haven't got enough shipping. And the problem is with the operation in the Toad, it's just very mountainous there, so it's very difficult to get through, and it's very easy for the Germans when they're retreating, to kind of blow up lots of culvists and bridges

and mountain passes and all the rest of it, which they do with alacrity. But that's the thinking behind it. I mean, the whole Italian campaign is launched on the understanding that a whole host of assumptions which don't prove to be true. You know, Hitler doesn't retreat to the piece of Rimmany line, et cetera, et cetera.

The Italians don't come in on their side. They're completely factless and surrender in droves, blah, blah, blah. The Germans do decide to fight south of Rome for every yard on the basis of Kessel Rings, Phil Marshall Kessarings, counterattack and Soleno, and so on. And so a lot of the assumptions of which they're going in, they know it's undercooked, but they can only do what they can do with the shipping they've got. And the shipping, it's just, you know, Italy is lower priority than the Pacific and is lower priority than Operation Overlord. So, you know, whatever they, whatever they have for that operation has to be supplied elsewhere.

And so that's why they're kind of entertaining this series of optimism about what might happen if they go into Italy. But, you know, the bottom line is, within three weeks, they do get three of those original aims under their bells. So they do absolutely draw lots and lots of troops into Italy. Italy does get out of the war on the 9th of September. And most importantly, they do get to the Fogger Airfields on the 27th of September. So within three weeks of the landing,

they've achieved three out of the four objectives. The only one that hasn't been taken is capturing Rome. But again, that's a kind of, you know, questionable importance. So let's talk about Salerno where I think it is not, it is not well remembered how close run a thing that is, or the mark that it left on the men who fought there as an incredibly, incredibly intense battle. You have Mark Clark, you do a really nice job of giving a sort of a sense of the man in your book, faced off against Kesselreen. How do those landings proceed? How close to the Germans actually close? come to essentially repulsing it. I mean, it's, you know, as a point to land, it's an absolute nightmare because it's this

semicircle kind of, you know, alluvial plane surrounded by hills. And the allies are landing into that. And because of the shortage of shipping, they can only land three divisions and a handful of special forces, Rangers and Commandos as well on the first day, which isn't enough for what they want to do. And so they're constantly, you know, the onus is very heavily on the infantry. You know, they get as many artillery pieces and guns and stuff and tanks as sure as they quickly as quickly as they possibly can, but it's never enough.

And, you know, the Germans have the eyes on them the whole time because they've got observers up in the mountains that are ringing this attack zone. And it's incredibly difficult. And the only thing that works in the Allies' favour is that Kassarring decides to throw all his eggs into one basket and chuck everything at Salerno. So he takes his eye off the ball elsewhere. He withdraws £29 a ground in deer division from me. engaging 8th Army, for example. The whole southeast of Italy, including the airfields of

Fodger, is handed over to just a portion of the first Faustra Reager division, who are, by their very nature, very lightly armed. Lots of small arms, but no heavy armaments at all. And there's a limit to what they can do. And he encourages these German units heading to Salerno to just attack literally as soon as they get there. So on the afternoon of the 13th of September, so kind of four days in, there's this big kind of armoured counterattack, but none of these German troops have arrived have had any chance to reconnoiter the area, apart from the ones who've already there in the first place.

And, you know, it's just, it's badly planned, badly executed, hurriedly executed. And that gives Mark Clark an opportunity to, you know, manage all his troops in such a way that every single infantry battalion has been committed, which is something you never want to be. So in a normal regiment, you'd have three infantry battalions, you'd have maybe one or two up and one in reserve.

So you're never kind of wiping out an entire regiment. That's not the case of Slearno. It's literally everybody is put to work. You know, whether you be a rifleman or whether you be a cook or a truck driver or whatever. And what does for the Germans in the end is the stoic defense in the heart of the bridgehead, which is coincidentally where Clark's Fifth Army headquarters are. But it is also the fact that they haven't had a chance to kind of wrecking the land and they get stuck. little V between the confluence of two rivers. And unfortunately for them, they would have just

thought, oh, well, there's a river in September. There won't be any water in it. Not realizing that the river flow is a bit faster and a bit heavier than they anticipated, but more of the point that the banks either side are really, really steep and are complete anti-tank obstacles. There's no way that you could for it. You could only bridge it, and they don't have the bridging equipment with them. So what then happens is two battalions of American artillery, field artillery, is on a road which is looking down on this confluence of the two rivers. And the German armour in that triangle can't see the field guns because they're higher. And so the field guns are able to just lob these shells.

And they fire 3,700 shells, you know, 105mm shells into this concentration of German armor in the space of a couple of hours and it's game over. But fortunately, because Clark doesn't come and run, because he holds a line, because he gives everyone a rifle and tells them to kind of dig in and all the rest of and gets these two. field battalion up in the right place and the right time, they're saved. And, you know, that is the biggest single counterattack and it doesn't work. And, you know, three days later, it's kind of all over for Kesslerang and, you know, he's having to pull back. Yeah, you have this observation back to your point about the landing craft that you've made a number of times as we talk today, that just the sort of the operational analysis math of the Salerno landings is quite foreboding in terms of just the massive, I mean, we tend to think of the Allies

you know, as this as a group of nations possessing an overwhelming industrial advantage and economic advantage in a certain potential sense that was true even at the moment that we're speaking, but as in the actual sense, it certainly did not come to pass Salerno. And the restrictions imposed by the landing craft that you described meant that essentially, and I may mingled details here, so feel free to rephrase this, the Germans can mass forces more rapidly into a greater quantity than we can echelon the minimum. which is a bad situation, I would think, if you're planning an amphibious assault. I mean, you've got to feel for Mark Clark because, you know, he's formed the first U.S. Army

outside the United States and Fifth Army, he's credited it. But, I mean, the last time he's commanding troops in battle is in 1918. And, you know, he's had long years as a captain, then as a major, then a half colonel. You know, his promotions have come rapidly but comparatively late in his career, even though he's still only 47 of the time of Salerno, you know, so very young for a senior commander. But, you know, there's no other U.S. general in the war who is expected to do so much of so little or suddenly then finds himself with so many coalition troops. I mean, generally speaking, American generals command Americans, but Clark doesn't.

You know, I mean, I'm sort of pushing on beyond Salerno now. But, I mean, by the beginning of 1944, he's got, you know, French, Brits, variously, New Zealanders, Indians, Rajputs, Gerkers, Moroccans, Algerians, Algerians, Tunisians all fighting under his banner. And he's, you know, that comes with kind of politics as well, which he's got to kind of take on board, which is sometimes quite restrictive. It can be, you know, in the case of having General Freiburg, for example, the New Zealander and New Zealand Corps under his command, you know, that's like having an arm put behind your back and tied. He never, you know, he is the man with the single largest army of any American commander in the Second World War as well.

There is no bigger army than fifth army at certain points in 1944. He also later on in 1944 has two fronts in which he's got to, we've got to coexist, the one at Anzio, which itself is kind of army-sized by kind of spring of 1944, as well as the main battlefront on the Alom of Gustav Line, South of Casino. Later on in the war, he is Alexander, who is his army group commander, is bumped upstairs to Supreme Allied commander. and Alexander has to appoint a new army group commander, and Ithley, by that stage, is very much a kind of predominantly British show, even though there are huge numbers of American troops involved in theatre. And there is no pressure for Alexander to pick an American commander at all. And yeah, he picks Clark, and that's because Clark's really, really good.

And I just don't really understand the kind of ongoing, longgoing criticism of Clark. I mean, he's a prickly character. He's quite arrogant at times. He can be a bit brusque, whatever, but he is a supremely good planner. And his tactical judgment is pretty good. His operational sense is good. His strategic vision is pretty good. And he handles all these problems and these potential challenges with unbelievable panache.

I mean, you know, he gets a hell of a lot more right than he gets wrong. And just to go back to Salerno, I mean, Salerno is a really, really tough hand that he's been dealt. And yet he prevails. And, you know, that is very much, I would say, to his. credit. You know, he handles and marshals the comparatively meager forces on the ground that he's got with terrific skill and frankly, imperturbability. I mean, you know, which is what you want. You want to have that kind of big overview. And again, even in Salerno, he's commanding British troops for the first time as well as Americans, as well as airborne troops, as well as rangers and commandos.

So, you know, he's running the gamut, really. And while it is true that the Allied navies and air forces, to a certain extent, come to the rescue in terms of firepower, it's still his ground troops, his infantry that have got to do a lot of engineers and artillerymen, that have got to do a lot of the hard yards. And, you know, they put it off. So let's talk about them and let's talk about the war for them as the fall proceeds. You know, we get off the beachhead at Salerno, eighth Army proceeds, Foggia has taken and things then become increasingly positional along the area of the Gustav line.

I have a personal connection to this. This is where my father enters the war as a young replacement soldier in the 30th infantry, third division. Wow. First fighting he sees is around Monte Rotundo. There's actually a bit of confusion about the details of that, about whether or not he fights in the actual assault on Monte Rotundo or the paperwork's not entirely clear. And unfortunately, he's no longer around to ask.

But that's where he begins. And he goes to Anzio and everything else. What is it like, what is it like for those young men? It's an absolute horror story. It's totally horrific. I mean, Normandy and Northwest Europe are horrific, as was Guadalcanal, Saipan, Palilu, and everything else. I mean, you know, all these battlefields and all these theatres are awful if you're frontline troops. But Italy is particularly brutal because it's winter and the winters in the Second World War in Europe were absolutely terrible.

I mean, they were very, very cold, very, very wet. and it's incredibly mountainous and you know the whole way of the ally way of war is to use firepower and mechanisation as much as you possibly can to kind of limit the amount of frontline troops that you have on the ground

and for the most part in the war that works really really well but it doesn't in Italy in the winter of 1943-44 because you know you can't drive a truck up a 3,000 foot mountain and of course the problem is why do you've got these mountains you've then got narrow passes down below

and on top of the mountains the Germans have got their OPs their observation post and observers, and they're protected by infantry. And the only way to get those OPs off, those observers off, and get rid of those infantry is to go up yourself on foot or with the help of mules and prize them off. And that involves incredibly bloody, brutal fighting because, you know, up there, the soil is thin on these mountains, and so the blast effect of mortars and artillery rounds are exaggerated

as a result, so they're much more leafhole. if you are down in the valley, then you're contesting with huge amounts of mud and broken bridges and, you know, etc., etc. So it's a terrible place in which to fight. And, you know, the reason I want to do the book, particularly and particularly focus on 1943, because no one else has. And, you know, you were saying that the kind of narrative of the American effort in Italy

is kind of shadowed by, overshadowed by what happened on D-Day and North West Europe, and all this of it. But it shouldn't be because you're doing a disservice to all those many, many Americans who answered the call and went over to Italy and fought there. I mean, there were huge numbers of Americans, both airmen, engineers, tank men, service troops, and of course, riflemen as well, all involved in Italy in a very, very big way. And it was a totally horrific, brutal campaign. Are you working on 1944 right now? Yeah, I nearly done it, actually.

I'm just going through the page fruits at the moment. Congratulations. Well, maybe when that comes out, you'll come back. 16-0-44 is coming out later on this year. Oh, fantastic. Well, please come back and we can continue the conversation. And when that's out, we could continue to debate Mark Clark and everything else. But thank you so much for making the time today, James Holland, author of The Savage Storm, the Battle for Italy, 1943.

Also, Alvesden, a new novel available in the UK, a host of We Have Ways of Making You Talk. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you having me on. This is a nebulous media. production, find us wherever you get your podcasts.