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Saturday 22 November 2008

The scars of war

Andrew Roberts is moved by the battlefields of southern Italy and the sacrifices made there

I suspect that most Spectator readers want more from a holiday than simply a beach and a paperback, and in touring the second world war battlefields south of Rome — principally Anzio, Monte Cassino and the Winter and Gustav Lines — they will certainly get much more. The Allies’ great assaults ultimately culminated in the capture of Rome on 4 June 1944, two days before D-Day, but the sacrifice had been immense and is today superbly commemorated in moving cemeteries and unspoilt battlefields.

So pack some powerful (i.e. more than eight-times magnification) field-glasses, plenty of suncream for the mid-to-upper thirties temperatures, and at least one pair of long trousers and socks for the brambles and mosquitoes of the ‘wadi’ country outside Anzio, where vicious, hand-to-hand, night-and-day engagements were fought over three months before the final Anzio beachhead breakout in May 1944.

For about £15 on Amazon you can buy Lloyd Clark’s excellent Anzio: The Friction of War, Raleigh Trevelyan’s superb two volumes of memoirs of the campaign, Fortress and Rome ’44, and Alan Whicker’s masterly Whicker’s War. For the true aficionado, Alan Morehead’s Eclipse and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas’s Anzio also bring home the horrors of a second world war campaign that recalled the attritional trench war of its predecessor, except it was often fought in wondrous vistas of beautiful countryside (albeit in foul weather conditions).

Land at Rome’s Ciampino airport rather than Fiumicino, which gives far easier access to the Alban Hills an hour or so due south. Pause in the attractive village of Remi to reconnoitre the ground as it would have appeared to a Wehrmacht defender when the Allies landed at Nettuno and Anzio on 22 January 1944. Looking through your field-glasses, consider whether the American commander of the VI Corps invasion force, General John Lucas, ought to have tried harder to move further inland before Operation Richard, the massive German counter-attack, had time to develop.

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