The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943

by James Holland

Acclaimed WWII historian James Holland’s new book both recasts the controversial Italian Campaign and sets a new standard in the chronicling of war

Following victory in Sicily, while the central command planned the spring 1944 invasion of France, Allied troops crossed into southern Italy in September 1943, expecting to drive Axis forces north and liberate Rome by Christmas. Italy quickly surrendered but German divisions fiercely resisted, and the hoped-for quick victory descended into one of the most challenging and protracted battles of the entire war.

James Holland’s The Savage Storm, chronicling the dramatic opening months of the Italian Campaign in unflinching and insightful detail, is unlike any campaign history yet written. Holland has always narrated war at ground level, but here goes further by chronicling events almost entirely through the contemporary eyes of those who were there on all sides and at all levels—Allied, Axis, civilians alike. Weaving together a wealth of letters, diaries, and other documents—from the likes of American General Mark Clark, German battalion commander Georg Zellner, Italian politician Filippo Caracciolo, and many others—Holland traces the battles as they were experienced across plains, over mountains, through shattered villages and cities, in intense heat and, towards the end of December 1943, frigid cold and relentless rain.

Such close-up views persuade Holland to recast important aspects of the campaign, reappraising the reputation of Mark Clark himself and other senior commanders of the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth armies. Given the shortage of Allied shipping and materiel allocated to Italy because of the build-up for D-Day, more was expected of Allied troops in Italy than anywhere else, and a huge price was paid by everyone for each bloodily contested mile. Putting readers vividly in the moment as events unfolded, with characters made unforgettable by their own words, The Savage Storm is a defining account of the pivotal months leading to Monte Cassino, and a landmark in the writing about war.

Genres: History, World War II, Nonfiction, Military History, War, Military Fiction, Italy

624 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2023

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

James Holland was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and studied history at Durham University. He has worked for several London publishing houses and has also written for a number of national newspapers and magazines. Married with a son, he lives near Salisbury.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Holland has written another masterful study of a World War II campaign in The Savage Storm: the Battle for Italy 1943. He is as adept at putting the reader in a foxhole with the PBI (poor bloody infantry) as he is showing the decision-making process of the high command on both sides. He clearly shows how the Italian campaign, after Sicily, grew into an unanticipated slugfest that played to the German's advantage given the nature of the mountainous terrain which favored the defender. Highly readable, empathetic, and revealing, especially in terms of how one poor decision can lead to another. Holland is sympathetic to the American General Mark Clark, a view not held by all historians. While I might not agree with his view of Clark's actions (or lack thereof) I was happy to read a differing viewpoint. Overall, highly recommended. I received an electronic ARC of this work from the publisher.

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there is one thing everyone can agree on in 1943 is that everyone was mad at the Italians, even the Italians.

James Holland's The Savage Storm looks at the invasion of Italy in 1943 from various different perspectives. This part of the war does not get nearly as much ink spilled as the invasion of Normandy and Holland drives home a main reason why this is true. The invasion of Italy was an under-supported bit of chaos. The Italians were getting out of the war but lying to everyone about it including themselves. The Allies expected to do a lot with a little and the Germans were just responding to Hitler's changing whims. Holland tells this story from a high level but also leans heavily into smaller stories of soldiers and civilians just trying to survive. There are literally dozens of characters we are introduced to and these are often the best parts of the book.

However, the sheer number of characters can also be a frustrating. There are so many people to keep track of that the reader is often pulled out of the narrative to jump to another character. Multiple times, I wanted to stay with an Italian resistance fighter or a soldier trying to hold a bridge. Instead, the reader is torn out of that thread and dropped back into a different story. It's a testament to Holland that this doesn't ruin the book. It can be irksome but not fatal. Also, this is mainly a problem in the early portions. By the end when the reader has been introduced to nearly everyone, it's less noticeable. In the end, the good far outweighs any of the bad.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Grove Atlantic.)

[Bill Holmes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent World War II history by James Holland, author of Sicily ‘43 and Normandy ‘44. “A Savage Storm” picks up where Sicily ‘43 left off, focusing on the period from the Allied invasion of southern Italy in September 1943, through the capture of Naples and the Foggia airfields in October, and then through the end of that year. The book is in some sense a prequel to Holland’s “Italy’s Sorrow” (2008).

Holland writes well, and his prose is always a pleasure to read. He does a good job of seamlessly integrating strategy, politics and logistics with the experiences of the soldiers on the ground, both Allied and German. His narrative effectively highlights the intricacies of Italy’s surrender, the shortage of landing craft that prevented the Allies from using amphibious assaults to flank the German lines of defense, the strategic importance of the Foggia airfields, and the all-consuming but unmet goal of capturing Rome before Christmas. His descriptions convey how mountainous Italy is, how the Allied line of advance was crisscrossed by rivers, and how the advantage lay with the German defenders. To make matters worse, the winter of 1943 in Italy was particularly cold and rainy, bogging the Allied armies down in mud and largely grounding the air support that had proved so decisive in North Africa and Sicily. Despite all of this, and despite the limits of logistics and the competition with Overlord for resources, the British 8th and American 5th armies made slow, steady and bloody progress up the leg of Italy until halted by prepared German defenses on the Gustav Line.

Holland also explores the performance of the leading commanders, Mark Clark for the Americans, Montgomery for the British, and Albert Kesselring for the Germans. Holland makes a good case for the idea that General Clark and General Montgomery did well given the limited resources allocated to the Italian campaign and argues that Clark’s performance has been underrated and that history has been too kind to Kesselring.

As usual with Holland’s books, he mines diaries and letters of Allied and German soldiers to assemble a zeitgeist of their miserable and brutal experience fighting in the mud and mountains. The immediacy this produces is both a virtue and a vice. The one criticism I have of Holland’s style is that the peripatetic movement between the experiences of different soldiers in different places makes it difficult to keep track of the bigger picture on the ground.

All and all, an excellent addition to the literature about World War II in Europe.

[David Shaffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Holland’s The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 is an outstanding addition to the literature on the Invasion of Italy and is a different approach and more personal than Rick Atkinson Day of Battle. Holland focuses on a series of individuals in command, line officers and soldiers and civilians from the U.S., U.K, Canadian, Anzac, Germany, and Italy. The following of the same individuals provides both command level and personal experiences from all levels to the history.

A 4.5 star book that comes in under 600 pages of reading, Holland provides a needed addition to the literature on the first portion of the Italian campaign.

[Cropredy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holland is a prolific writer on WW II subjects and he has written four books on the Italian campaign

* Sicily '43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe
* The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 - this review
* Cassino '44: The Brutal Battle for Rome
* Italy's Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-1945 - I've read this, my review

Holland is up to his consistent quality here and this book was especially good in that he deliberately decided to tell it from contemporaneous diaries of the participants that included all sides and nationalities, including Italian leaders and civilians. That said, a good deal of the material comes from the PBI - poor bloody infantry - who had a particularly miserable time of it amongst the mountainous terrain, endless rainfall and cold, unrelenting shelling, and the capriciousness of random death. It is amazing the troops didn't mutiny.

The book covers the invasion of the Italian mainland both at Salerno and on the "toe" right up to January 1, 1944 with Rome uncaptured. Not only uncaptured, but defended by well-entrenched Germans across Italy, notably at Cassino. And with Allied armies exhausted amidst horrendous weather. Liberated Italians led subsistence lives.

It is clear that Holland "walked the ground" to write this book as he does a good job of conveying the rugged terrain that Allied and German forces battered each other over. Without artillery and air power (when usable because of clear weather), the Allies would have gotten nowhere. Every building and village is blasted into rubble.

Holland also takes the Allied senior commanders to task for setting unrealistic goals (unrealistic because they conflicted with each other -- see the enormous diversion of shipping to build up a strategic airbase at Foggia in lieu of providing ground forces for getting to Rome when the weather was better). And the airbase served no real purpose in 1943 because the weather was awful.

Holland also critiques the German strategy that saw division-after-division chewed up against the onslaught of Allied indirect firepower.

A solid read if you're interested in this part of the SWW. Liberal first-hand accounts that draw you into the misery.

Many excellent maps and photos.

[Rob Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The Savage Storm" by James Holland initially piqued my interest with the promise of commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Italy during WWII. Eager to delve into this historical account, I was hopeful for an immersive experience. However, as I delved deeper into the pages, the narrative seemed disjointed and lacked a coherent flow.

The storytelling, rather than guiding me seamlessly through the dramatic opening months of the Italian campaign, left me feeling somewhat lost. Despite the intriguing historical context and the critical events leading up to the Battle of Monte Cassino, I found it challenging to stay engaged. The pacing appeared uneven, and the characters lacked the depth needed for a truly immersive experience.

Ultimately, the disjointed narrative and my struggle to connect with the characters led to my decision not to finish the book. It fell short of delivering the captivating and cohesive storytelling that I had anticipated.

[Florence Ridley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This turned out to be a Christmas book! It spans from August to Christmas 1943 and as such contains possibly the most miserable Christmasses ever had in foxholes and such. A well-written, at times moving account, although it ended rather abruptly. I found it very difficult to understand the layout of the land despite the maps provided, something which is probably more a problem with the landscape of Italy than with Holland's description, but I think the book would have been improved if it had focused more on describing the broad strokes of attacks rather than following specific people. I don't mean reducing the first-person testimony, but rather introducing the attack more generally and then "zooming in" on a situation rather than dumping the reader in and hopping around between little groups. I was largely ignorant of the broader aims of a battalion in every section focused on a single platoon. That is quite likely to be a problem with my own comprehension rather than with the book! It's clear that Holland did his best to clarify what was an unusually messy, complicated, disorderly campaign.

[Jason Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holland’s latest continues his detailed-yet-sprawling accounts of World War II, this time focusing on the first half of the Italian campaign. I respect the hell out of Holland, but the sheer breadth of his work sometimes overwhelms the reader. Here there are so many subjects—American, Canadian, German, Italian, soldiers, political, civilians, generals—one can start to lose the plot. I’d welcome a bit more focus.

But no one writing today conveys the absurd horror of war like he does.

[Chrisorc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Väldigt bra men precis som med hans andra böcker så är bokens främsta styrka också dess svaghet och det är karaktärerna. Det är så många figurer att man lätt tappar bort dem i vimlet och det byta ganska friskt mellan perspektiv. Däremot finns det ingen som slår honom i grod-perspektivet där man byter mellan mikro och makro.
James Holland är i sitt esse. Man hoppas att han skriver den sista delen i hans trilogi om kriget snart.

[Michael G · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean, you read one James Holland book, in a way, besides the characters and setting changing, the format and style remains the same, so you read them all. I didn't enjoy this one as much as the one about the Sicily invasion. And it ends too soon - what happens next? (I mean, obviously the Allies win; but what happens in Italy?) Perhaps Holland is saving it for his next book. But the truth is it's just engrossing and interesting and he writes very well, sharing many perspectives: Allied, German, and Italian civilian. The Italian government and its soldiers come off very badly, justifiably.

[William Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943" (to be published by Grove Atlantic, an imprint of Atlantic Monthly Press) is the latest foray into the military history of World War II by prolific author, James Holland and was recently provided to me in the form of an ARC for review purposes. I am grateful for the opportunity. The book looks at events on the Italian front from the points of view of both the Axis and Allies. For those of you who have not read much on this aspect of the European theater of war, it will prove enlightening I think. The story of the Italian campaign in 1943, is one of bad luck, missed opportunities (for both sides) and above all, intense suffering on the parts of both the primary combatants and the unfortunate Italian civilian (and military) population. The story of the men and women who suffered there reminds me of nothing so much as the similar experience of men and women on the Western Front in World War I. The author's empathy for the subjects of his text comes through on every page. This is the book's greatest accomplishment as well as its Achilles Heel. There is little doubt that this campaign was a kind of seat of the pants response to unfolding events after the success of the Allied Sicilian campaign. The shattered lives of the men and women who were there are its lasting legacy, and a sorry legacy it is. Italy is some of the most defensible territory on earth, and its geography could not have been worse from the point of view of an alliance seeking to minimize casualties by fighting a highly mechanized war. At the same time, it fell to highly trained and very experienced Germans troops lacking anything like Allied material support and without command of the air or sea to fight an essentially fighting withdrawal in the face of their enemies' overwhelming superiority in material support. This was an entirely predictable blueprint for a devastating war of attrition, and it doesn't take hindsight to see it as such. For me, this is the book's greatest flaw. The author's sympathy for the principal Allied leader on the ground, general Mark Clark, is simply unfathomable to me. It is true that Clark was in a close to hopeless situation, but I see no evidence of his attempting to do anything about it. Albert Kesselring, the German commander on the ground, was much more fortunate in his mission (defense rather than offense) than Clark was, but the author seems to see this as somewhat mitigating in examining Clark's responsibility (not exclusive to be sure), but his was the primary responsibility for presiding over the bloodbath that this campaign became. Lest I be remiss, one of the strengths of the book is the way that the author sees clearly the role that "luck" played in the fight, sometimes favoring one side and other times the other. The text is certainly worth reading, but don't leave this subject here. Many other books have been written on this subject, and there are a number of other perspectives that the student might benefit from.
'

[Ben]

The Savage Storm by Max Hastings

Thanks to Net Galley, the author and to the publisher for a free ARC to read and review.

The Savage Storm is excellent history. The narrative of the Allies invasion of Italy on 1943 has been told before ( and I have read about it) but this book’ s narrative history was one that captured my complete attention for days.The grand strategical goals are laid out as are the command decisions and political objectives, but the best part of this history is the focus on the men at the point of the spear.
Mr. Holland uses the voices from diaries of the combatants , Allied and German, and of the Italian peasants whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed by the horrors of modern war. Reading the thoughts of a soldier attacking the German line and then the reactions of those German troops on the other side of No Man’s Land illustrates the inhumanity of war and also the human feelings of the fear, despair and exhaustion common to all soldiers. From the soldiers’ recorded thoughts the reader sees some commonality: to survive , to be out of the rain and mud of an uncommonly wet wet winter, to be home. While many diary writers confided their dread of continued combat to their diaries, they tried to spare that to families at home in their letters. Common to both side is the knowledge that they are caught up in a machine that is grinding down the “ PBI”- poor bloody infantry” . The Savage Storm is also valuable to the reader for the recollections of those caught in the middle, Italians whose farms and families were destroyed as they cowered in the rubble. Few histories ever go beyond the conference rooms and show the horrors that come with warfare, occupation and liberation.
The most impressive thing about The Savage Storm is the illustration of the humanity of man in the inhumanity of war is the same on both sides of the front line. There are many insights in the book new to me ( and I have many histories and personal war stories) , one of which was that the casualties, for both Allies and German were as heavy in 1943 as they were in the infamous wholesale slaughters of 1917. Never knew that.
The Savage Storm is a great book and I recommend it without reservation. Now I have to find a copy of Mr. Holland’s “ Italy’s Sorrow 1944-1944” published some years ago to read for the rest of the story.
( Note: since I read a review advance digital copy thee maps and photographs in the print editions and I assume the final digital editions were not included . They would be a further asset.)

[Gregor Thomson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best accounts of any WW2 campaign I have read so far, James Holland manages to piece together often minute by minute the story of the early days of the Italian campaign through the eyes of those who lived it. Using purely diary entries, letters and signals its is a brilliantly detailed account of one of the most brutal campaigns ever fought. James Holland must be one of, if not the most powerful WW2 writer there is.

[Rob Shipman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve really mixed views on this. On the one hand it’s a brilliantly written account of the early Italian campaign, on the other, the use of only letters and diaries as sources really limits the scope. Two of the three divisions at Salerno were British, but they’re barely mentioned for the entire book. I’ve a vested interest as my grandfather was in 46Div, and would love their story told. To me this feels like a missed opportunity to tell the story of what our grandfathers went through.

[Frederik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Udmærket indspark om de allieredes invasion af Italien del af 2. verdenskrig, som ikke er så lige belyst og analyseret, som f.eks. slaget om Stalingrad eller D-Dag, men ikke desto mindre utrolig vigtig ift. til at trække tyske tropper væk fra Nordvesteuropa og østfronten. James Hollands evne til at fange læseren ved både at tale om de store militærstrategiske linjer og de enkelte soldaters hårrejsende krigsberetninger er effektivt, men bliver lidt langtrukkent i længden, og kunne godt være forkortet.

[Mal Simms · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sadly forgotten part of the war and Holland brings the misery and mud to life…but I personally found the style chaotic and intensely hard to follow at times, dipping down to tactical level, bouncing across regiments and corps.

[Callum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Simply excellent.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great work yet again by Mr. Holland. A great mix of perspectives and interspersing of political background, discussions amongst the commanders with the brutal experiences of the front-line troops. I wish this book wasn’t just 1943 but included the whole Italy campaign until May 2nd. I also would have liked some battle maps included.

[MavM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find non-fiction books difficult to grade, as a whole. You can't grade the plot, obviously, only the writing, the judgements, how researched it feels. So how to judge this book, a book about a part of the war so confusing, frustrating and pointless that it gave birth to Catch-22?

The Italian campaign is largely ignored in the shorter histories of WWII. It's not decisive, disastrous not triumphant. It's something that happened in between the Battle of Britain and D-Day. It was bloody, brutal and at times threatened to become a stalemate akin to the Western Front - only avoided by incremental advances by the Allies.

This book captures much of this. James Holland is excellent at drawing first hand accounts together (indeed, here he is deliberately ignoring first hand accounts written after the fact, and solely using accounts written at the time). Where it fails is that lack of big picture, which only appears in the final conclusion. There are many maps at the start, but what I needed was a big picture map - a map of Italy showing the lines of advance, dates etc. I ended up using Google maps for reference.

[Chris · Rating 1 out of 5]

This long book contains so much episodic coverage of numerous individual experiences and minutiae that the narrative is disjointed and both hard to get through and follow in a comprehensive manner, i.e., it is hard to see the forest for the trees. The author should have covered the 1943 portion of the Italian campaign from a higher level and not gotten bogged down in the weeds so much. I do not care that Pvt. A was rained on for x number of days consecutively and went y days without resupply, Sgt. B lost his best friend C at Monte so-and=so, or civilian D and her family had to flee their home for a nearby cave z times and the castle next to her house that acted as a German supply depot was never shelled or bombed. I get it; the Italian campaign was horrendously bad for the combatants and general population. By the end of book, I no longer cared and had resorted to skimming it while losing all interest in Italy 1944 and 1945.

[Benito Vera · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Holland, along with Peter Caddick-Adams and Alex Kershaw, forms my favorite trio of World War II military historians. For me, Holland, in particular, has become a niche writer, covering topics not frequently addressed by other writers (such as the Malta book) and adopting distinctive new angles when interpreting extensively researched battles or campaigns (as seen in the Normandy '44 book or the two tomes on the War in the West, 1940-43). For this reason, I tend to buy and read any new publication by him.

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 is Holland's latest book published in September 2023. As usual by the author, this is a thick tome of circa 600 pages, including a useful map section and lavishly illustrated with both contemporary photos and others taken by the author while walking the main battlefields 

The book epitomizes Holland’s approach. As the author rightly points out in the book's final pages, "the war in Italy is largely forgotten today, except for Cassino and Anzio…" Additionally, he covers in detail the poor design and execution of the campaign by both the Allies and the Germans. The result is a harrowing, brutal, and ultimately futile campaign, with casualty rates in the contending armies surpassing those of the Great War and inflicting a level of suffering on the Italian people hardly seen in other war theaters in the West.

"The Savage Storm" picks up where Holland's previous book, "Sicily '43," left off, with the retreat of Axis forces through the Messina Strait into Calabria, and concludes in December 1943 with the Allies halted at the Gustav Line in west-central Italy and at Ortona on the Adriatic coast. During this period between September and December 1943, the Allied Fifth and Eighth Armies suffered close to 35,000 losses, while the German Tenth Army endured 13,400.

The campaign faced numerous problems from the outset on the Allies’ side. The decision-making process was muddled by strategic political considerations and a significant disagreement between Britain and the US regarding where to concentrate the center of gravity in the West.
Political considerations included the fear of losing the initiative after Sicily if Italy was not assaulted, the presence of a powerful but inactive army in the Mediterranean, pressure from the Soviets on the Western Allies to open a second front in Europe, Prime Minister Churchill's ambition to extend British influence in the Mediterranean, British concerns that the US might prioritize the Pacific if no progress was made in Europe, and the opportunity to use Italy as a launching point for Allied air attacks on German and Austrian manufacturing centers.

The disagreement between US and British political and military commanders revolved around the center of gravity of Allied strategy in Europe. The US favored focusing efforts on assaulting France in May 1944, considering Italy as an undesirable distraction that could divert significant military assets from the main campaign. Conversely, for the British, Italy presented an opportunity to attack the Reich from its perceived "soft belly," remove Italy from the war, and force the Germans to divert resources from France.

Ultimately, the Allies greenlit the invasion of Italy but committed half-heartedly to the operation. There were no clear medium-term objectives set at its inception, aside from establishing advanced bases for the Air Force bombing campaign on the Reich or capturing Rome (more a political than a military objective). Many planning assumptions proved unfounded, lacking supporting intelligence evidence, such as the belief that the Germans would retreat to northern defensive lines without contesting Allied landings in the South. Moreover, the allocated resources were insufficient for the task, exemplified by the near disaster of the Salerno landings, and were further constrained by preparations for Operation Overlord.

Allied challenges multiplied as the mountainous terrain, numerous east-west flowing rivers, lack of modern road networks, and deteriorating weather hindered their ability to leverage mechanized mobility and air supremacy.

On the German side, the popular perception of a masterful army conducting strategic retreats and fighting to the last man hardly withstands scrutiny. The reality was an army poorly led by "Smiling Albert" (Kesselring) and hampered by Hitler's political interference and obsession with holding every inch of ground.

The Germans engaged in an unwinnable war of attrition, depleting irreplaceable human resources and diverting forces from other fronts. Once the main airfield at Foggia was captured, the strategic rationale for continuing to fight in southern Italy faded.

Ultimately, it was the Italian civilians who suffered the most, caught in the crossfire between the Allies, the Germans, and the incompetence of fascist leaders. James Holland vividly portrays their suffering, from mass killings and rapes by the Germans to the destruction caused by Allied offensives and the lack of effective Allied planning for the conquered territories, exacerbated by German destruction of infrastructure essential for survival.

There are no reliable statistics on civilian fatalities due to bombings, battle casualties, hunger, and diseases, highlighting the extent of civilian suffering during this brutal campaign, but they are surely counted by tenths of thousands.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Mediterranean front during the Second World War. It provides much-needed information on the subject, and the author has announced on his Twitter account that a follow-up book is coming. The follow-up book will focus on the Monetcassino campaign and the Anzion landings that led to the liberation of Rome. It’s worth noting that Holland has written a book covering the 1944-45 period titled “Italy’s Sorrow,” completing the military history quadrology.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always a most readable historian James Holland’s new book arrives with a sense of eager anticipation. Where many books on World War Two over-promise and under-deliver ‘Savage Storm’ is most definitely a visceral page-turner where the author drills down to the ‘lived experience’ of servicemen bringing the vast emotional complexity of combat vividly to life. Writing in this vein sees him picking up the mantle of historians John Keegan and Dennis Winter who brought to life in vivid and gruesome detail the first hand experience of World War One servicemen in combat.

Not intended as a detailed history there is no great narrative arc to this book but instead easily accessible and intelligible chapters, for instance where he shows his mastery of grand strategy but ‘Savage Storm’ is not intended as top-down history. Instead we see the conflict through the prism of the ordinary soldier, sailor and airman, volunteer, conscript and career soldier, all caught up in a nightmare conflict not of their own choosing. Using diaries, letters and interviews with veterans he provides a vivid and immensely readable ‘first hand’ account of battle.

Historians know the outcome before they start writing so it is difficult to wholly recapture what it felt like in the beginning of the campaign. Decisions taken in haste are forensically examined years later at leisure by historians with hindsight at their disposal. But here we see fresh, the courageous amphib­ious landings undertaken in darkness and fraught with difficulty, in an attempt to maintain the element of surprise. So there was no pre-invasion bombardment to soften up the German shore defences, even though naval and aerial bombardment might have made life easier for the troops coming ashore, who, facing difficult terrain and determined adversaries, already had their work cut out. The whole operation was a huge risk.

Allied High Command took decisions in the heat of battle that with hindsight might be seen as questionable, and some Generals conducted themselves in a manner that today might be thought egotistical or narcissistic and excite derision. Both General Mark Clark and General Bernard Montgomery have been vilified by historians but the author, using contemporaneous accounts, shows these generals excited devotion from the men in their ranks. This view from the ‘boots on the ground’ has immediacy; this was the prism through which the PBI saw their commanders. Reputations were made at the time by officers showing dynamism and swagger even if such bravado might be viewed very differently through the long lens of history. Researchers with forensic eye have more sources at their disposal and the chance to examine flaws and shortcomings.

While some might be critical of using primary sources without providing sufficient context, tone or manner of delivery, the reader can still discover moments in time, frozen in words, cemented in memory and open to the imagination to interpret. That does not mean the storytelling’s anything other than lively and informed. The Allies were struggling to gain a foothold in Salerno Bay and securing the bridgehead was touch and go after the landing was met with fierce opposition. The Fifth Army had their backs to the wall having landed with insufficient men and material, and there were yawning gaps through which the invasion forces were very nearly beaten back by a determined German counter-attack led by officers like Oberst Wilhelm Schmalz, who Holland tells us was:

‘a forty-two-year-old cavalryman from Saxony who by the summer of 1943 had seen a huge amount of action. A career soldier, having joined the Reichswehr in 1919 and becoming an officer in 1923, he was a company commander by the start of the war, then served in Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Eastern Front. He had fought in blazing heat, torrential rain and freezing snow and now part of the Herman Goring Division he was there to stop the Allies breakout from their bridgehead at Salerno. Schmaltz was conspicuously professional in all he did, intelligent, quick-thinking and utterly imperturbable. Such experience could only be spread so far, but while the divisional commanders might be behind the lines Schmalz was always at the front, the consummate fighting commander. Schmalz was determined to hold the main road through the mountains from Salerno to Naples.'

Four days after landing the US Fifth Army was pinned down to a thin bridge­head desper­ately tried clawing its way out of the jaws of defeat and Clark and his staff were looking at a sea­borne eva­cu­a­tion, and formidable opponents like Schmalz meant General Mark Clark was up against it but appreciating the importance of maintaining morale,

‘Leaping out of the Jeep time and time again, he tried to talk to as many men as possible. ‘There mustn’t be any doubt in your mind,’ he told them, ‘we don’t give an inch. This is it so don’t yield anything. We’re here to stay.’

Victory has a thousand authors and defeat is an orphan so it is difficult to find anyone who vigorously objected to Avalanche although many afterwards, like Alan Brooke and the War Cabinet, quickly became pessimistic about the outcome of the ‘gamble’ believing the landings might have been undertaken too far north with a fatal under estimation of the rate of build-up of German forces in the bridgehead. Then twenty-four hours later the crisis had passed. Thanks to some well directed artillery fire and a well directed naval bombardment from battleships off shore and the German counter attack was beaten back, and, against the odds, Operation Avalanche succeeded. The Salerno Invasion, a pivotal moment in the Italian campaign, had been a close run thing but to the victor the spoils so General Mark Clark takes the plaudits or does he?

No doubt James Holland will be writing a sequel with Cassino and the fall of Rome, and a conclusion to the Italian Campaign, where Clark’s reputation will be further examined. In his own memoir(1951) he writes controversially :

'My own feeling was that nothing was going to stop us on our push towards the Italian capital. Not only did we intend to become the first army for fifteen centuries to seize Rome from the south, but we intended to see that the people at home knew that it was the Fifth Army that did the job, and knew the price that had been paid for it.'

[Chris Wray · Rating 5 out of 5]

While it would be an exaggeration to characterise the Allies' Italian campaign from 1943 to 1945 as forgotten, it is certainly neglected in the popular imagination compared to the war in North West Europe. On the one hand, Italy was a subsidiary campaign, and could never be the main focus of Allied efforts to defeat Nazi Germany. On the other hand, the fighting there was as brutal as any in the entire war (including on the Eastern Front), and the contribution that the American and DUKE forces in Italy made to Germany’s defeat deserves to be much better understood.

James Holland is one of the best contemporary writers of Second World War popular history and has done a particularly stellar job of narrating, in its full context, the progress of the Allied campaign from North Africa to Sicily and now onto Italy. Having previously written about the final year of the war in Italy, this and his upcoming book, Cassino ‘44, fill in the gap in the timeline following the expulsion of Axis forces from Sicily. Given the theatre’s secondary status, he outlines at least three compelling reasons for the Allies continuing to fight there. The first is simple operational momentum: having built up huge forces in North Africa and then Sicily, it was inconceivable that the Allies would call a halt after the Axis retreat across the Straits of Messina. Therein lies the fatal weakness of the Italian campaign: the forces available were too large to do nothing, but not powerful enough to ensure a decisive victory, especially with the constraints that the terrain in Italy placed on Allied material dominance. A further draw on Allied fighting ability in Italy was the “tyranny of OVERLORD” as more and more men and equipment, and particularly assault landing craft, were drawn off for the upcoming cross-channel invasion. The second reason to invade was the very attractive likelihood of knocking one of the Axis powers out of the war, and of capturing their capital. The subsequent inevitable drawing of German forces into Italy to replace those of their defeated ally would benefit both the Soviets and the eventual Allied front in North West Europe by drawing significant numbers of troops away from those theatres. The third and final reason for invasion was the potential that Italy held as a base of strategic air operations into the southern part of the Reich and the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. This latter consideration was on the minds of Allied commanders even before the invasion of Sicily, as Holland comments: “the opportunities for establishing a strategic air force in Italy began to emerge. Spaatz, for one, was above all a bomber man, and now wedded to the POINTBLANK concept of destroying the Luftwaffe as soon as possible…with Sicily successfully invaded, Spaatz urged Arnold to back his plans for operating strategic air forces from Italy.”

As the invasion of Sicily drew to a close, and the Allies mulled what to do next, the difference in approach of the British and Americans came to the fore. Holland’s articulation of this warrants quoting at length: “The British way, ever since France had collapsed in June 1940, tended to approach strategy opportunistically, responding to various crises and trying to exploit their enemy's weaknesses. North Africa had been a case in point. Germany's strength had lain primarily in its land power and, to an extent, air power. What it lacked was shipping, especially of the freighter variety. Militarily, Britain's focus had been its dominant maritime power and burgeoning air power, so it had made sense to fight in far-off places which were much harder for the Axis forces to supply. The British also firmly believed that Germany-first strategy meant that winning the war in Europe was the top priority, and that the Japanese could be held at bay until the Nazis were no more and then dealt with…By contrast, the Americans wanted to go all-out with a different strategic approach, which was, in essence, to draw a straight line to Berlin, attack along the shortest route and work out what they needed to make that happen. Obviously, this meant launching an assault from Britain across the English Channel and into occupied northern France. There was very sound good sense to this. Britain could become an enormous base camp from which to launch - and then maintain - such an operation. The Mediterranean, on the other hand, was quite a long way from Britain, even further from the United States, and if the Allies now invaded Italy the logistical challenges would be suddenly switched; supplying Italy overland from the Reich was obviously more straightforward than sailing literally every bullet and box of bully beef through the Mediterranean or from the Middle East. What's more, dealing with Japan as quickly as possible was the highest priority for Admiral Ernest King, the C-in-C of the US Navy, for the President and for the US Chiefs of Staff. So from the American perspective there were some very obvious stumbling blocks in continuing an ongoing strategy in the Mediterranean. Churchill had grandiose plans to secure the entire Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, bring in Turkey and support the partisans although, as he made clear, an invasion of Italy was the centrepiece of these intentions; and, in fairness, there were some logical reasons for that. Italy was only an inch away from Sicily across the Straits of Messina and then Allied forces would be on mainland Europe. If Italy could be forced out of the war, that would mean German troops would have to either retreat - which seemed unlikely, because Hitler has proved time and again his reluctance to ever do so - or replace the Italian troops with Germans.” As Holland succinctly and articulately concludes, “This was the awful conundrum the allies now found themselves in on that Tuesday, 17 August 1943, when giant events all seemed to be converging. They had too many troops in the Mediterranean to do nothing and very many good strategic reasons to invade Italy, but they did not have enough to win these prizes easily or even with anything like a guarantee of success. Yet the stone had already begun to roll down the hill. Strategic momentum had taken root.”

This book also shows Holland at his best as a writer and storyteller. Ultimately, war history is all about people, and Holland is a master of weaving together a clear and coherent campaign narrative around a core cast of characters. This allows us to grow more familiar with them throughout the book, and unlike in previous books, Holland has almost exclusively used contemporary letters, diaries and journals from the men and women he follows. This has the twofold effect of adding immediacy to the narrative, and also dramatic tension as we don’t know the final fate of any of them. When some are inevitably killed, the effect is devastating (the death of one young German officer in particular came as a punch to the gut). I’ve also noticed a development in Holland's writing style, as he tends to up the tempo in passages describing action, and slows down in between. This makes the book even more enjoyable, as the ebb and flow of rhythm and pace keeps the reader fully engaged.

Turning to the invasion and the start of the Italian campaign itself, Holland unpacks the two-pronged approach the Allies undertake. Montgomery’s invasion into the toe and the slow progress from there is an aspect of the war I was almost entirely unfamiliar with, while the Salerno invasion under Clarke is a point of exquisite drama and tension. Mark Clark is often maligned, but Holland has clearly grown to have considerable respect for him through his research and writing. Concerning Salerno, he writes that, “Clark and his men, with the help of Allied naval and air forces, had pulled off a remarkable victory in an operation that had been blighted from the outset by wider political pressure, insufficient shipping, a lack of planning time and the ludicrous machinations that surrounded the Italian armistice…Ironically, that same day a patrol from the 36th Texans made contact with leading reconnaissance troops from the Eighth Army at Vallo, twenty miles to the south. So much expectation had been pinned on this link-up since the landings, and yet when it finally happened the battle at Salerno had already been turned. The truth was that Fifth Army had landed at Salerno back on 9 September without anything like enough men, materiel and firepower to ensure success. At a time when the Allies were very sensibly trying to eschew any kind of high-risk, very damaging setback, AVALANCHE was about as high-risk an operation as could have possibly been conceived, spurred on by an Allied urgency to accelerate the war that was totally out of the hands of those expected to do the
fighting on the ground. Credit, rightly, was being given to the naval and air effort, but in many ways that was a given. The Allied naval forces in the Mediterranean were immensely experienced and the Royal Navy, especially, had always been Britain's most polished arm; after all, it had been the largest navy in the world in 1939 and its professionalism ran deep. Similarly, the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces had also developed into a huge and well-honed machine. At the very top it was led by people of immense experience - commanders who had been developing both tactical and strategic air power in the theatre for two years and more, and at a more junior level by group, wing and squadron commanders who were tough, combat-hardened and had learned about combat flying in multiple theatres…The air forces were also operating against a fading Luftwaffe that was no longer their equal in either numbers or skill. The task of the Allied air forces, then, had been a formidable one, but it was also a challenge to which they were more obviously able to successfully rise.”

The risk that the Allies took in landing at Salerno when they did, in particular, is an aspect of the story that I had not appreciated before. Now that the southernmost part of the Italian peninsula was secured, the focus began to switch to the drive towards Rome, even as it became increasingly clear that this was unlikely to be either quick or easy because of the constraints already described. “The invasion of Italy - conceived in August in the heat and sun of a Mediterranean summer and based on dubious intelligence that Hitler planned to swiftly retreat north of Rome - had been launched on the understanding that its objectives would be quickly achieved, that the capital would be in Allied hands in a trice and that it would be a limited operation to keep Allied troops in the fight on land until the second front opened up in northern France early the following summer. Having the Germans contest every inch of the way, with Allied armies slogging their way through mud, rain and all manner of blown bridges and mine-strewn roads, had not really featured in the planning phase - a phase that Clark had been a witness and party to. The President and Prime Minister wanted swift results, and the Chiefs of Staff wanted swift results, and that meant being in Rome by Christmas. Clark, understandably, felt the heat.” The tyranny of OVERLORD also continued to bite, as “seven Allied divisions were to be withdrawn and also 170 heavy bombers - still currently operating from North Africa - plus most troop-carrying aircraft and almost all landing craft, except a skeleton number that could lift, at a push, one division. Alexander's troops on the ground now faced the prospect of attacking an army superior in numbers and in terrain that favoured the defender in every single way. Sure, the Allies had a massive advantage in air power, but, as the recent rains had demonstrated, they might as well not be there at all when it was raining buckets and the skies were bruised with ten-tenths cloud. Autumn had been like late summer; now, it seemed, the weather had turned to winter overnight.”

Nevertheless, “Foggia was captured by the British 1st Airborne on 27 September, and with it thirteen precious airfields, all of which were in theory equipped to take heavy four-engine bombers. It would take a little time to move the strategic air forces across, with all the supplies, spare parts, fuel, ordnance and ground crew that would be needed, but at a stroke the Allies had a complex of bases from which they could further tighten the aerial noose around the Third Reich. Ploesti, Germany's only source of oil, was within even closer range. So too were aircraft plants in southern Germany and Austria. At the Quebec Conference, capturing these airfields had been a major factor in the decision to invade Italy, from where the POINTBLANK directive - to destroy the Luftwaffe - could be further prosecuted. In fact, three of the prime motivations for invading Italy had already been accomplished: the Allies had the Foggia airfield complex, Italy was out of the war, and they had drawn German divisions away from the Western and Eastern Fronts. So, judged by the goals the Allies had set themselves, the Italian campaign was already a notable success; the only objective that still eluded them was Rome.” Additionally, the German withdrawal from Taranto, Brindisi and Bari was a considerable boon in accelerating the effort to get Foggia operational: “For the landing craft-starved Allies, the almost cost-free capture of the three Apulian ports was a considerable own goal on the part of the Germans because it meant that DUKE divisions could be landed in large troopships directly on to the quayside, with no limit to the size of the ship being used. This ensured that the build-up of supplies would be quicker too, both for Eighth Army divisions but also for the air forces moving to Foggia.”

Meanwhile, further North, Allied infantry and armour continued to slog their way through worsening weather conditions, in highly defensible terrain, and against a resilient and determined enemy: “Clark headed to Caserta to inspect the 6th Grenadier Guards, one of the battalions that had tried to take Monte Camino earlier in November. The battalion should have been 845 men-strong, but it currently had just 315 - and it was about to be flung at Camino again. This was the debilitating effect the Italian campaign was having and was atypical of the Allied approach to war, in which normally units were regularly rotated and kept up to strength. That perennial issue - shipping - and the Allied strategy higher up the chain was being felt most harshly by the infantry battalions who were expected to simply do more with less…In no other theatre was more demanded of Allied front-line troops. They were not being supplied with the normal levels of materiel or replacements. The conditions were appalling: the mud, the rain, the freezing temperatures, disease, the inability to deploy armour, mechaization and air power. In the valley floor the mud was knee-deep. Even in the jungle or on Pacific atolls, the men could at least dig in. In the mountains the soil was thin or non-existent, making mortars and shells even more lethal and shelter harder to come by.”

Holland is fairly glowing in his assessment of both Clark and Alexander, commenting that “Brooke's concern about a lack of grip was really a reflection of his own dissatisfaction with how far the Italian campaign was going awry. As the senior military general in the British armed forces, it was he and his fellow Combined Chiefs who were not gripping the situation. It wasn't the fault of Alexander, or Montgomery, or Clark that they had been so poorly served by the Combined Chiefs. Nor was it the commanders in 15th Army Group who were deciding what landing craft and shipping was available, or who were insisting that the strategic air forces should have the priority of the logistic chain. They could only do what they could with what they had been given and, frankly, that was simply not enough for the truly monumental task in hand…What's more, Alexander had been telling the Combined Chiefs nothing less than the truth when he predicted the discrepancy in the number of divisions. The division was the unit size by which the scale of armies was judged at this time. It was true that the Allies had more artillery and considerably more air forces than the Germans, and substantially greater numbers of vehicles. The trouble was, the combination of the weather and the terrain was limiting the use of vehicles and aircraft, and so it was being largely left to the infantry to do the hard yards - the PBI as Jack Ward referred to them. In other words, the huge material advantage of the Allies was being offset by the rain, mud and mountains. As a result, the playing field was levelling considerably.”

Again, Holland continues, “The military rule of thumb might have been a manpower advantage of three to one as a bare minimum in any attack, but here in Italy, where the mountains and terrain and weather so heavily favoured the defender, that figure needed to be higher. Normally, Allied armies could operate with less front-line infantry than, say, the Germans or the Red Army, because they were very well supported both technologically and mechanically; but that model wasn't working anything like as effectively now, in winter, in the mountains and mud of Italy. The trouble was, even taking establishment figures for divisions at face value, the Allied armies did not have a three-to-one advantage. At the coalface it was closer to parity, although precise numbers depended on at what stage of the fighting comparisons were being made. With this in mind, that the Allies were making any headway at all was hugely impressive, especially since they were unable to fight in the way that had been successfully developed over the previous twelve months in North Africa and then in Sicily…This fire-heavy, methodical way of war had proved very effective since it had been more consciously introduced in August 1942 and dovetailed well into broader principles of using steel rather than flesh wherever possible. The shortcomings of this approach had been exposed in recent weeks. The Allied infantry now needed to adapt swiftly and become more tactically flexible for the mountains, mud and flooded ground over which they were now fighting.”

The Savage Storm ends as 1943 turns into 1944, with the Allies still south of Rome and the terrible battle of Monte Cassino lying ahead. The Italian campaign may have been hastily designed and ill-prepared for, but it was being fought with a determination and grit that shows the Allies at their best. Holland’s writing and insights do justice to an epic tale that deserves to be much better understood, and I can’t wait to read his follow-up later in the year.

[Budge Burgess · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this immediately after finishing Holland's "Sicily '43". I found it a better read - it has a more coherently 'storified' quality to it, a more linear narrative and logic. His account of what was, to say the least, a strategically volatile situation for both Allies and Germans ... well, it seemed to juggle the tensions more coherently. And you do feel that politically and militarily, there were a lot of balls in the air and a lot of indecision about which ones could safely be dropped.
Both sides faced major logistical problems - the Red Army had driven the Nazis from Soviet territory and was poised to invade Germany and take Berlin. Faced with the inevitable, even if he wouldn't admit to himself that the war was lost, Hitler couldn't afford to commit too many resources to Italy. And the Allies were, themselves, torn between the possibilities of a major thrust up through Italy, through Rome and onwards into Germany ... and the conservation of resources and withdrawal of ships, planes and men in order to open the 'Second' Front in France.
So we get the military and political leadership of both sides wrestling with strategic decisions, we get the military leadership on both sides deprived of resources as men and machines were pulled away to tackle other fronts or prospective fronts.
Italy surrenders. What happens next? Holland brings home the poverty of the country, a country impoverished before Mussolini came to power but plunged into deeper straits once he began exercising his ambitions to be a major European power ... launching disastrous invasions in Greece and the Balkans, launching disastrous adventures in Africa. In 1943 the Italian people were trapped, spectators and partipants in a war fought in mountainous country with few roads and limited resources.
And Holland ties in the strategic and political questions with accounts left by the men and women who were there, the front line soldiers, aircrew and sailors, the civilians caught up in the war. You get a sense of the cosmopolitan nature of this nightmare. Don't imagine that the Allied forces comprised only men from Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales and their American Allies. The Canadians were there in numbers. And New Zealanders. Frenchmen and Moroccans. Indians. Poles. South Africans. Brazilians! There was even a regiment of Hawaian Japanese! And my apologies to those I've missed off the list.
And, of course, there were the Italians. Some were mobilised to fight alongside the Allies, some to fight against. The Resistance movement armed itself and took an increasingly active part in the fighting. The World's War was paralleled by a civil and political war.
Densely packed, not a book which you could even contemplate reading at a sitting, if it does have a major flaw it's the absence of maps. As the invasion moves up-country it would have been helpful to have the odd map or several every chapter or two to remind you where the fighting has reached and to give you a visual perspective on the problems faced.
But an engaging piece of scholarship which has given me a far better insight into the latter stages of the Eurpean war. Holland takes us to the end of 1943. The war in Italy would continue - 1944 would see Cassino, Anzio, the fall of Rome. Holland appears to have written another couple of books about the war in Italy, I may get round to them some day.

[Eric Zadravec · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a general trope that military history is dry and uninteresting: "17th Regiment moved 10 km, encountered the enemy 116th company, and decamped for the night at Villers-Brie-Bretonoux-Chapel", or writing along those lines. Interest is the subject is usually relegated to the elderly; that, or it borders on an autistic hyperfixation. Fortunately for general readership, and unfortunately for those of us in the latter category, Holland's writing almost entirely avoids these tropes.

Instead of a top-down, unit based view, Holland writes by weaving together seperate narratives of participants directly involved in the fighting: soldiers, civilians, generals, and the like. As well, there is no assumption of the future in Holland's writing - I'm the edge of my seat wondering if that Hitler guy will win the war - bringing the reader as close to the events in Italy as possible, through the view of those who lived through it.

His book on Italy reveals some fascinating aspects about the campaign: the Allies' ill-conceived strategy, the brutal impact on Italian civilians, and the sheer misery of the frontline soldier. The brutality of the Italian front is often glossed over in histories of WW2, yet there was fighting through mountain, mud, rain, and a lack of supplies, with entire companies and divisions chewed to pieces in repeated offensives. The stories bear similarity to the frontlines of WW1, and Holland brings it all alive with a wealth of primary sources of voices from the front.

However, the lack of a top-down approach is also a shortcoming at times. For example, the Germans massacre an Italian village towards the end of the book, yet no information is provided on the motive or unit responsible. In history, we have the benefit of hindsight; if I wanted to find out how the plot progresses, I would read a novel. Despite Holland avoiding it, more use of numerical military designations would help organize the fighting and the voices of those involved - sometimes it helps to know where 17th Regiment is moving. There is also no discussion of the Holocaust in Italy, which began in the book's time frame, something necessary to discuss in any military history of the Second World War.

Overall though, this was an excellent read, and a great introduction to a lesser-known front of WW2.

And for God's sake, where was 17th Regiment going?

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally finished this excellent book! I always find James Holland’s histories interesting and well-written, and this one stands out as really benefiting from contemporary accounts and sources. The first half of the book is absolutely brilliant, shedding light on a whole bunch of things I didn’t know in a really engaging way. I must admit, the latter half of the book bogged down a little bit, but this absolutely reflects the fighting which also bogged down into a war of attrition, with a greater casualty rate than the Western Front in the First World War. The Italy campaign generally seems very neglected (then and now), which is a shame considering all that happened and its significance in drawing away German forces from Normandy, knocking Italy out of the war, and opening up new airfields for the strategic bombing campaign. This book does a good job in rectifying this neglect. It stands as part of a trilogy, and covers the few months from summer 1943 and the landings in the toe and then Salerno, until the end of the year when the fighting reached the Gustav Line and Monte Cassino.

I didn’t appreciate how under-resourced the Allied campaign in Italy was, and a particular limitation was lack of landing craft. Production was insufficient, and Normandy was the priority. And so Salerno was a close-fought gamble because the Allies couldn’t land all the troops they wanted, and then instead of staging amphibians landings on up the coast, which the Germans would have struggled to defend, they had to slog it through the mountains. The fighting was horrendous, and I’m amazed both sides kept fighting through awful weather and terrain, which prevented the Allies from using their strengths in air power and tanks, and it seems like the motivations for both sides were weak or unclear. I was also struck by how multinational the campaign in Italy was. I think I recall more than 30 nationalities participating on the Allied side.

My own grandad fought at Salerno, where he was taken prisoner, and I can’t help think that that saved his life. The chances of him having survived the rest of the campaign seemed slim indeed.

[Huw Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1943, Italy was invaded by the Allied forces to try and bring the power of their airforce to a point where it could hit targets throughout Germany and to try and bring power to bear on the southern front of the German hegemony, tying up as many of their troops as possible, preventing them from being involved in the Overlord invasion of France. In the former it was not terribly successful, in the latter it was almost too successful. It was, possibly the division and lack of trust amongst the German generals, that prevented the Italian campaign being a disaster. In the midst of this the Italians were trying to surrender to the Allies, having had enough of Mussolini and his brand of Fascism.

Holland lays out the horrendous campaign that took place with inadequate men and lack of logistical support. Somehow, the landings took place across the Straits of Messina and at Salerno and were not thrown back into the sea. Having acheived footholds (feetshold?) in southern Italy the Allies had to fight their way northwards, when all the rivers they had to cross ran East-West, or vice versa. The centre of Italy is full of mountains which created ideal positions for defence and advances could only happen with intensive bombardment prior to the Poor Bloody Infantry moving into mined and booby trapped positions. The death toll was immense for minimal progress (in fact there is a Nazi propaganda poster from the period that demonstrated a snail could have advanced faster - though a snail was not being mown down by well placed machine gun emplacments and mortars). The recollections of the PBI in their letters and diaries make you wonder how anybody survived.

Remorseless, exhausting, undermanned, under-supplied, with a high casualty rate this was a campaign without glamour, in danger of becoming trench warfare in places this has become a 'forgotten' campaign, partly because of its lack of glamour and, I suspect, because it does not fulfil the narrative of allied successes. It deserves to be better remembered for the bravery displayed, repeatedly, on both sides.

[Richard Olney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suppose this counts as the second part of James Holland's four part history of the invasion/liberation of Italy during the Second World War; Sicily '43, Savage Storm, Casino '44 and Italy's Sorrow. Of the four, i'm only yet to read the Cassino volume.

We begin with the Italian state negotiating its way out of the War, and here there is a lot of politics. And then we have a lot of action as the Germans look to rationalise their position in Italy and the Allies weigh up how best to liberate Italy. Very roughly while Rome is the goal for all combatants, the Allies decide to clear the peninsular from South to North. Very broadly American forces fight on the left hand side of the Italian Peninsular, with the British, Commonwealth and Empire troops on the right.

And it's a hard hard slog, the defending Germans suffer trying to defend without enough people or supplies and the Allies suffer trying to advance through terrain which favours the defenders. But those who suffer most are the Italian civilians whose towns and villages in the path are routinely destroyed. There is great bravery and terrible atrocities. Not for the first time with Holland's books, i felt myself not quite alongside the participants but certainly watching from a safe distance.

There are elements of humanity, for all the logistical difficulties, the US soldiers by and large don't miss out on their Thanksgiving Dinner, and all the Allies get a Christmas Dinner, of sorts.

I am glad i read it, even glad that i put it to one side to read in the depths of Winter, reading of freezing cold, dark wet days while looking out on almost freezing, sometimes wet, definitely dark days has i think added to the experience. My admiration for those who went through this, especially the poor Italian civilians was already high, it's higher now.

[Mr John · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book about a generally not so well known campaign of WW2. It is fascinating to read German soldiers’ accounts as well those of the Allies which display the tragedy of men obliged to try to kill their adversaries, many of whom share the same basic human feelings about the horrors of war. Those conscripted into the “poor bloody infantry” suffered the most casualties. There are some poignant tales from both sides relating to Christmas 1943 and especially a heart wrenching story of one British officer with some prowess as a poet who charged out from his relatively safe position, seemingly under stress, in the suicidal expectation and fulfilment of being killed.

The widespread devastation of beautiful towns and villages and the loss of many civilian lives comes across, perhaps relevant in the comparative context of more recent and current wars.

Some minor criticisms are that the detailed terminology of the numerous fighting units is rather difficult to assimilate and the maps and many photographs do not reproduce well on my old Kindle (although I am not sure if this is applicable to more modern devices). On a purely pedantic point, reference is made in the Selected Sources in the copious appendices to the “Second World War Experience Centre” in “Otley, Lancashire” which is a mild affront to Yorkshiremen as Otley lies in their domain.

[Steven Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

All in all another solid book from a solid author. Holland takes you through the whole bloody slog, step by step and his copious use of quotes from the poor bastards at the tip of the spear really draws you into the narrative in ways non-fiction books would probably give their right epilogue for.

It goes without saying that it basically reads and feels like his previous book Sicily 43, it's essentially a sequel to the point some familiar names pop up. The book spends time explaining the why of the fighting but it seems to take great pains to avoid getting bogged down with it. This isn't a case study for or against the merits of invading Italy. It discusses it but Holland seems content to let other historians chew on that subject. Instead here he does what he does best, in basically every other book he's written. What Clark or Alexander is thinking about how to capture Rome, or push the Germans out of Italy or whatever high level thinking Generals do. It's interesting.... but that's not why we're here. Instead he's narrative the stories and thoughts of people like Jack Ward, Alan Moorehead, Wilhelm Mauss, Georg Zellner, Lina Caruso. People that fought, bled and perhaps even died. People caught up in quite literally a hell on earth. That's the strength of what James Holland brings in his writing. He draws you in, he makes it personal. A superb story teller of such a terrible subject as war.