Page 90 - All About History 48 - 2017 UK

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AT WAR ON THE

FIGHTING
IN ITALY
GOTHIC LINE: 1944-45

The criminally overlooked campaign gets a thrilling retelling
Author Christian Jennings Publisher Osprey Price £20 Released Out now

n 1943, having defeated the Axis Powers diehard supporters joined forces with elite
in North Africa, the Allies launched an German troops, including SS divisions and
invasion of Europe from the south that paratroopers, to halt the Allied advance,
would see them push up into the heart and for the next ten months held a force
I of the Nazi Empire. At least that was of 15 different nations in check on what
Churchill’s plan. The British prime minister became known as the Gothic Line.
had long been obsessed with what he It is this hugely neglected aspect
called Europe’s “soft underbelly”, and was of World War II that comes under
convinced that a pan-European conflict examination in Christian Jennings’ highly
could be won by invading the continent readable book At War On The Gothic Line.
from its sunny Mediterranean south, where The author weaves together events using
the people were somehow less resolved. first-hand accounts of 13 men and women
Indeed he had pushed for this idea before. who fought on both sides, including
In 1915, during World War I and while Germans, Italians, Britons, Americans,
first lord of the Admiralty, he green-lit Indians, Canadians and Poles.
the Allies sea-borne assault on Turkey While Jennings doesn’t quite nail the
at Gallipoli. It resulted in 141,000 Allied epic sweep this narrative demands, he
casualties and achieved absolutely nothing. has found some fascinating characters
His endorsement of the Allied invasion of to grace his grand stage. These include a
Italy in 1943 was to prove an even more young Japanese-American officer from
protracted and no-less-hazardous affair. Pearl Harbor who loses an arm attacking
The Italian peninsula is slender and a machine-gun nest (and whom – due to
mountainous. Tactically this makes it discrimination – is only decorated for doing
difficult for any invader to conquer, as so 56 years later), an African-American
the defender is able to dominate the clerk in a segregated division who finds
high ground and hard to outflank. Italy’s himself taking on the ‘supermen’ of
unique geography was one of the reasons Hitler’s SS, an Indian officer from Mumbai
the Roman Empire dominated for almost who leads a mission to save Renaissance
1,500 years. So when Allied troops jumped artworks, and a female teenage Italian
from landing crafts on to Italy’s southern partisan who helps to blow up a crucial
shores in September 1943, they entered railway bridge.
into a grinding war of attrition that would Dismissed as D-Day dodgers by some,
see them trapped on the peninsula until the men and women who struggled to “Jennings has found some
the end of the conflict. Sure, Rome fell overcome fascism in southern Europe in
on 5 June 1944 – by which time Italy’s the last years of the war fought as hard as fascinating characters to grace
Fascist dictatorship had collapsed – but anyone. This engrossing book does a fine
the fighting was far from over. Mussolini’s job of painting them back into history. his grand stage”
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