Читать книгу Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45 - James Holland, James Holland - Страница 2

For Daisy

By the spring of 1944, the vast reach of Hitler’s Third Reich, chieved so spectacularly in the early part of the war, was diminishing. In the East, the Soviet Red Army was clawing back land lost and was about to regain the Crimea, while in the West, the Western Allies were poised to invade France. Already the Axis powers had lost North Africa and, the previous summer, Sicily. Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, had been deposed, and on 8 September 1943, the Italians surrendered to the Allies. With British troops already on the southern toe of the peninsula, the main Allied invasion force landed at Salerno, south of Naples, the morning after the Italian armistice. Thus began a long and bloody campaign that would cause untold suffering. Seven months of fighting, mostly in the intractable terrain around the town of Cassino, would wreak appalling destruction.

By May 1944, with the Italian winter behind them, the Allies were ready to renew their drive towards Rome. As the battle rolled north, the rest of Italy would become consumed by the campaign raging up its narrow leg. That year, from May 1944 to the war’s end almost exactly twelve months later, would be one of the most terrible in Italy’s history.