The Italian Campaign.

First let me say that my original text message, in which I praised the Allied Italian Campaign, was motivated primarily by BATTLEFIELDS description (and of course my prior knowledge) of the hard fighting and immense sacrifice our troops engaged in on the slopes of Italy. Jambo, quite appropriately, assumed I meant it was admirable from a strategic approach (and by the way, we all know he concurs with the bravery demonstrated in that campaign). However, I allowed the strategic dispute to go on to see if it could in fact be "defended" as a necessary campaign, namely because I just couldn't imagine such a monumental strategic disaster on the part of the Allied Forces at that point in the war, or the thought that 300,000 Allied lives were in effect "wasted" or at least "unnecessarily" lost. Thus, I needed to defend this campaign as neccessary.

That being said ... as much as I hate to admit it, the general historical consensus was that it was a strategic mistake, and worse, poorly executed. The Italian peninsula was primed for defense in that the terrain was a natural ally of Field Marshal Kesserling: “A Gefreiter (corporal) with Zeiss binoculars and a field telephone could rain artillery on every living creature in sight” (Rich Atkinson, "Day of Battle"). From the ring of mountains from which Germans could observe every detail of the Salerno landings, to the peaks north of the Garigliano River where they dug in for the winter, the hilltop villages between Rome and the Arno Valley fortified by generations of "condottieri," the mountain range between Florence and Bologna, and the heights overlooking the rivers and canals that the Eighth Army had to cross when it attempted its right hook at the end of 1944, the Germans had every possible terrain advantage.

So, if one of the two primary goals was to get to Berlin "as soon as possible", then it was a failure. And the long slog up the Peninsula could have been avoided by simply landing an amphibian assault force, across the Mediterranean, into Southern Vichy controlled France as a shortcut to Berlin. Seriously, the US and British invaded West North Africa with troops directly all the way from the US and England in "Operation Torch" with 3 Task Forces stretching from south of Casablanca to Algiers. This could have been done, especially given the North African campaigns had hardened the experience of US troops 1000 fold by the time they would have initiated such a campaign.

But with all that said we are left with the second objective of the Italian Campaign - tying up German forces from the Eastern Front and the soon to be tested Atlantic Wall. Many assessments of the Italian campaign primarily assess German forces in Italy alone, and ignore the over all larger deployment in the Mediterranean Theater. Taken as a whole the German commitment was substantial given the fact that massive Soviet forces were driving West toward Berlin and the Allies were preparing the cross-Channel invasion. Thus this limited their ability to focus their dwindling resources on the defense of the Atlantic Wall as well as the Red Army's drive toward Berlin.

The bottom line: the Allies had the resources for the Italian diversions. The Germans did not.

And, as we all know, and Titus previously pointed out, history rewards the winners, and Rome did fall. And the "what if" game which comes into play without the 26 German divisions tied up and 500,000 killed in the Mediterranean vastly complicates everything from Overlord to Paris to the Ardenne to Stalingrad.

So my point is, as bad as the Allied casualty rates were, as bad as the terrain, planning and and still questionable necessity was, I'd hate to imagine the European invasion from June 6th 1944 on, WITHOUT the Italian Campaign consuming those German resources.