Yet the Italian campaign has enduring resonance, both as a milestone on the road to victory in World War II and as a steppingstone toward a free, stable Europe. Sometimes liberation works as planned: the fight for Italy unshackled that nation from both the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and his blood pact with Nazi Germany. It prompted the transformation of a stunted, totalitarian misfit into a prosperous Western democracy.
Certainly, the lessons learned in Italy paid dividends later in the war, especially through the expertise gained in complex amphibious operations at places like Salerno and Anzio, and in fighting as a large, multinational coalition. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the senior commander overseeing the Italian campaign until the end of 1943, used the multinational headquarters he had built in the Mediterranean as a template both for SHAEF—the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which orchestrated the final victory in Western Europe—and eventually for NATO. The boot also blooded American GIs and their commanders for later campaigns: much of the force that invaded southern France in August 1944 had fought at the Volturno River, the Rapido River, Monte Cassino and Anzio.
The Italian campaign offered valuable experience in occupying a large, fractious, defeated country. Soldiers learned to organize civil society, from rebuilding an electrical grid to stamping out a typhus epidemic. Several generals who later became postwar proconsuls first cut their teeth on civil-military matters in Italy, notably Lt. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., a future military governor of Bavaria, and Gen. Mark W. Clark and Lt. Gen. Geoffrey Keyes, both of whom would serve as Allied high commissioners in Austria.
Italy foretold the war to come. The battle for Ortona, fought mainly by Canadians in that Adriatic coastal town, was the first pitched urban battle in the Mediterranean—a house-to-house, block-to-block struggle that anticipated street fights from Caen, France, to Aachen, Germany, and from Nuremberg to Berlin (as well as more distant battles from Hué, Vietnam, to Fallujah, Iraq).
Italy also hinted at the war that never materialized. In the Adriatic port of Bari, the U.S. military had secreted 1,350 tons of mustard gas as a precautionary stockpile. When Bari was bombed in a surprise German air attack on Dec. 2, 1943, the ship carrying the gas blew up, causing more than 600 mustard casualties among Allied servicemen and countless others among Italian civilians. The catastrophe, hidden from public view for decades after the war, proved cautionary for the Allies and for German intelligence, which quickly learned of the incident.
The capture of Rome on June 4, 1944, was eclipsed two days later by the invasion of Normandy, and Italy slipped forever into the historical shadows. (General Clark, awakened in Rome’s Hotel Excelsior on June 6 with the news from France, complained, “They didn’t even let us have the newspaper headlines for the fall of Rome for one day.”) Yet fighting up the peninsula would grind on for another 11 sanguinary months. “Few of us can ever conjure any truly fond memories of the Italian campaign,” wrote Ernie Pyle—whose greatest dispatches came from Italy—in “Brave Men” in late 1944. “There was little solace for those who had suffered, and none at all for those who had died, in trying to rationalize about why things had happened as they did.”
Three quarters of a million American soldiers would serve in Italy, and 23,501 of them would be killed in action there. And when suffering Italians asked, as they often asked, why it took so long to expel the Germans from their country, the answer, then and now, could only be: because so many of us had to die to set you free.
