When Rome fell to the Allies on 5 June 1944 General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army, calculated that he would need just 12 weeks to reach the river Po and liberate Italy from the Germans. It took him nearly a year. Christian Jennings’s new book chronicles the months of heavy fighting, the advances and retreats and the enormous losses on both sides as the Allied forces stalled, and the enemy attacked.
It was never going to be easy. Once the Italians signed the armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943, turning their backs on their former Axis partners, the Germans moved quickly to occupy the whole of Italy. While the British and the Americans were arguing over their policy towards the defeated Italians, Hitler dispatched nine divisions down through the Brenner Pass. Rome collapsed and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, in charge of the German Army Command South, put in place the first of a series of defensive lines to stop the Allies from breaking through into central Europe. The most formidable of these was the Gothic Line, stretching from La Spezia on the Mediterranean coast to Rimini on the Adriatic. It was, as Jennings writes, one of the ‘biggest, best constructed man-made and natural defensive positions of the second world war’.
Two hundred miles long, the Gothic Line made the most of every hill, ravine and river, and it was easily dominated by the high Apennines. Along the crests of the mountains, Kesselring positioned his mortars, tanks and machine guns; in the valleys, he laid mines, placed anti-tank guns and erected barbed-wire fences. More small mines were sown over roads and tracks, in verges and fields. And there, in the late summer of 1944, until the spring of 1945, the Allies stopped and the Germans dug in.
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