Let's bear in mind...

Had we stopped at Palermo, and not crossed to mainland Italy... or even stopped with the "front" stretching 55 km north of Naples (many felt Naples a key to Mediterranean control)... the confusion in strategic and command control in Normandy immediately after June 6th would NOT have been there. Rommel wouldn't have NEEDED the release of the 20th Panzer from Calais reserve to Normandy... because he'd have had elements from his former North Africa Corps already in place.

How many more German divisions would have been needed to make the nearly impossible task of landing 100,000 troops on the beach at Normandy an actual impossibility? Six? Eight? Ten? Kesselring could have afforded to spare as many as ten divisions IF he knew the Italian campaign was over, or even stalled indefinitely.

In my eyes, the success of the Italian campaign can't be underscored enough... it tied up needed resources and material that could have done much more for the Nazi cause somewhere else, either in Russia or in France.

I have even thought that a more conservative commander in the theater might have reduced the cost of the Allied advance through the pennisula... but is this true? I'm not convinced that a defensive "holding" action couldn't have been fought with far less than Kesselring had... but Clark was a hard-driving commander who wanted "forward movement" from his units. This forced the Germans (especially Hitler) to keep the troops in Italy, rather than move them to more strategically viable areas of Europe.

I'd also point out that, while I'm not defending each and every action that Clark took in the campaign... his biggest critics were almost ALL the British commanders that demanded the Italian campaign in the first place... ESPECIALLY Alexander (commanding XV Army Group, Europe), whom he eventually REPLACED on the recommendation of both Ike and Churchill!

No, the more I ponder this question, the more I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Clark and the guys on the ground (including the Brits who demanded the invasion). Want to know why?

Because Ike liked him, and Ike ok'd the plan. Ike recognized ability and talent... otherwise, Patten would have been State-side before the Normandy operation ever kicked off. Ike voiced his reservations about such operations as Market-Garden just enough to make sure that Monty and his boys KNEW no one was taking the fall for their poor planning... and he did the same in Italy. If he felt that the mistakes made in Italy were as bad as some critics have made them out to be, he wouldn't have replaced Alexander with Clark. Alexander has the juice, after all... born an Earl, made a Viscount after North Africa, one of only a handfull of British Field Marshalls, and a holder of the Victory Cross from his service with the Irish Guards in WWI... even Rudyard Kipling wrote about him! Is THIS the kind of guy Ike is likely to replace with someone who made "mistake after mistake"?

More importantly, I am more and more convinced that the "mistakes" of the Italian campaign were of the sort that no one has considered the alternatives for. The move on Rome rather than the move to exploit the gap in the German positions (known as the Winter Line) was a direct contradiction to Alexander's orders... and could have cost him his command. Instead, it showed the most substantial "political" gains of the war prior to the June 6th invasion of Normandy (only 2 days before, I admit). Did Clark know the date for Overlord? I don't know... but his taking of Rome on the 4th was a HUGE boost to Allied moral and a HUGE blow to Axis confidence.

Finally, let's look at what we "learned" from the Italian campaign. The most successfull and decorated units of D-Day were units that won their "stripes" in Italy: 2nd Ranger Battallion, 3 Infantry Division, 2nd Armored Division, 82 Airborn Division, et al. Another 7 divisions were redeployed in August of '44 to do exactly what Ryan suggested should have been done without Italy... invade southern France (Operation Dragoon). Would this operation have been as successfull if it were mounted from Algiers rather than Italy? Who can say?

I guess a better question for us all would be: Were the mistakes made in planning and executing operations in Italy any worse than the mistakes made in planning and executing Market-Garden, Overlord, and the drives on Metz, Antwerp, Paris, and Cherbourg? Italy wasn't what history sees as a "road" to Berlin... but that doesn't make it any less of an advantage to fight, does it? For all that went wrong with the British "raid on Diep"... how many lives were saved at Normandy because of what was accomplished at Diep?

I'd define "failure" as something that contributes nothing to the final effort, the ultimate goal. Italy DID get us closer to winning the war in Europe. I can't see comparing it to a "failure" of the sort history shows us in Gallipoli, or Verdun, or Austerlitz, or even Lee's efforts at Gettysburg.