On a topographic map of Europe, Italy is a 700-mile mountain range with cities along its edges. The Apennines run down the spine. Every fifty miles or so, a river cuts east-to-west across the peninsula. From a German defender’s standpoint, the country is a series of natural fortresses, each higher than the one before. From an Allied attacker’s standpoint, it is uphill, in winter, in the rain, against a competent enemy with prepared positions, all the way up the peninsula.
Winston Churchill called Italy the “soft underbelly of Europe.” The U.S. 5th Army, which fought from Salerno to the Po Valley between September 1943 and May 1945, sustained 109,642 casualties getting through it. The campaign lasted 20 months. Germany surrendered in Italy on May 2, 1945 — six days before V-E Day.
This is the war Bill Mauldin drew, Ernie Pyle covered, and Robert Capa photographed. It was fought by an Allied force as multinational as any in the war. American 5th Army and British 8th Army; Canadians at Ortona; New Zealanders, Indians, and Gurkhas at Cassino; Free French Moroccan and Algerian troops who flanked Cassino through ground the Germans had thought impassable; the Polish II Corps that finally took the abbey; the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in the northern Apennines; and after September 1943, Italian co-belligerent troops and a hundreds-of-thousands-strong partisan resistance fighting alongside them.
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander, was one of the most competent defensive generals of the war. He fought for every river, every ridge, and every village, until Germany itself surrendered out from under him.
This tour is 13 days long, from Sicily to Rome, the same route the Allies took, in roughly the same order, between July 1943 and June 1944. Along the way, you will:
- Walk the landing beaches at Gela, where on July 10, 1943, the U.S. 7th Army under Patton came ashore in Operation Husky — the largest amphibious operation the war had seen, on a 105-mile front. Within 48 hours the 1st Infantry Division had pushed inland against an attempted German counterattack near the “Y” crossroads.
- Stand at the Dirillo Bridge, where on July 11, 1943, Col. James Gavin and the men of his 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne held the high ground against the Hermann Göring Division. Gavin won the Distinguished Service Cross and his promotion to Brigadier General that December, at 36, one of the youngest in the war.
- Drive the slopes of Mt. Etna, the active volcano around which the British 8th Army fought the climax of the Sicilian campaign in August 1943. Stop in Cassibile, where on September 3, 1943, Italy signed the secret armistice with the Allies. When it was announced five days later, German forces seized mainland Italy overnight.
- Walk the Salerno landing beach, where on September 9, 1943 — the day after the Italian armistice was announced — the U.S. 5th Army under Mark Clark hit a beach they had been told would be lightly defended. The 16th Panzer Division was waiting. Four days later, with German armor less than half a mile from the water, Clark privately considered re-embarking.
- Cross the Rapido River, where in January 1944 the U.S. 36th “Texas” Infantry Division lost more than 2,000 men in 48 hours, forcing a crossing under fire. Walk the ruins of San Pietro Infine nearby, the village John Huston filmed for his 1945 documentary The Battle of San Pietro — a film the Army initially restricted for showing too much of what infantry combat actually looked like.
- Climb to the Abbey of Monte Cassino, the ancient Benedictine monastery on a 1,700-foot ridge that Allied bombers destroyed on February 15, 1944, in the belief that German troops were inside. They were not. Four costly assaults on the ridge followed. The Polish II Corps under Gen. Władysław Anders finally took it on May 18, 1944. Visit the Polish Cemetery on the slope, where 1,072 Poles are buried.
- Walk the Anzio landing beach, where on January 22, 1944, the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division and British 1st Infantry Division came ashore behind the German line, hoping to break the Cassino stalemate. Maj. Gen. John Lucas, the corps commander, did not push inland. Within days, the Germans had encircled the beachhead. The Allies stayed pinned against the sea for four months.
- Visit the battlefield at Cisterna and Isola Bella, where in the early morning of January 30, 1944, the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions of Col. William Darby’s Force were sent to infiltrate the German line and seize Cisterna. They walked into a German armored counterattack already moving south. Of the 767 Rangers who set out, six came back.
- Walk the Wadis at the Anzio beachhead — the deep volcanic ravines where men of both sides fought from inside the dirt for weeks at a time. At Buon Riposo, 2nd Lt. Eric Fletcher Waters of the 8th Royal Fusiliers was killed in February 1944. His son, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, was five months old. He has spent much of his career writing songs about it.
- Pay your respects at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, where 7,862 American war dead from the Sicilian and Italian campaigns are buried, and 3,095 names of the missing are inscribed on the Wall of the Missing. Most died on the beaches, and in the hills the tour has just walked through.
- Visit the Fosse Ardeatine Mausoleum outside Rome, where on March 24, 1944, SS troops executed 335 Italian civilians and political prisoners in retaliation for a partisan attack the day before that had killed 33 SS men. Then walk through the SS interrogation center on Via Tasso, where most of the murdered prisoners had been held. The building is now a museum of the Roman resistance.
- End the tour in Rome, the first Axis capital liberated by the Allies. American troops of the 5th Army entered the city on June 4, 1944. For one day, the headlines belonged to Rome. On June 6, the headlines belonged to Normandy — and the Italian Campaign began the long process of being forgotten. The fighting in Italy continued for another 11 months.
The campaign that begins on these beaches lasts 20 months — the longest continuous Allied campaign in any theater of the war. It produces the journalism Americans actually read about WWII (Ernie Pyle’s columns, Bill Mauldin’s cartoons, Robert Capa’s photographs) and the amphibious operations doctrine that becomes Normandy. The 5th U.S. Army alone takes more casualties in Italy than the U.S. does at the Bulge. And then, two days after Rome falls, the Allies land at Normandy, and the cameras turn north — and the war in Italy is left to grind through another eleven months in mountains nobody is reading about. This tour is the corrective.
By the end of these 13 days, you will have walked the beaches at Gela, climbed the slope at Cassino, stood in the wadis at Anzio, and read the names at Nettuno. You will know what “soft underbelly” actually meant on the ground, in the mountains, on the rivers, and in the rain, against an enemy who fought for every yard. And the next time someone tells you the war in Europe really began on D-Day, you will also think of the men who had been fighting in Italy for nine months by then, and who would still be fighting there for another eleven months after.
