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positions for days before their own infantry advanced into machine-gun, artillery and mortar fire. After days or weeks of attrition, the Germans made a measured withdrawal to a new mountain or river line, protected by demolition of bridges, rail links and access roads. Everything of value to the civilian population as well as to the Allies was pillaged or destroyed. It was estimated that 92 per cent of all sheep and cattle in southern Italy together with 86 per cent of poultry were taken or killed by the retreating army. With the malice that so often characterised German behaviour, Kesselring’s men destroyed much of Naples’s cultural heritage before abandoning the city, burning whole medieval libraries, including the university’s 50,000 volumes. Delayed-action bombs were laid in prominent buildings, where they inflicted severe casualties after the city’s liberation. Some Allied soldiers behaved no better than their enemies, vandalising priceless artefacts.

Churchill remained wedded to a belief, indeed an obsession, that a big campaign in Italy could open a path into Germany. The Americans, however, decided that further Mediterranean operations offered only bitter fruits; once some good bomber airfields had been secured, they sought to divert forces as swiftly as possible to the invasion of France, and they were surely correct. British enthusiasm for a southern strategy was justified in 1942–43, but forfeited credibility as the cross-Channel attack loomed, and as the difficulties of achieving a breakthrough in Italy became apparent. Allied forces must stay there, to tie down Germans who would otherwise fight in France or Russia. But no important victory was achievable, certainly not by field commanders of such meagre abilities as Alexander and Clark.

By the end of September, thirteen Allied divisions confronted seven German, while a further eleven of Kesselring’s formations secured the country behind the front, employing the most brutal methods everywhere that partisans attempted to challenge their mastery. Through the autumn months the Allies battered their way slowly up southern Italy, checked at every turn by demolitions, ambushes, stubbornly defended river crossings and hill features. ‘If the “liberation” of Italy goes on at this rate,’ Countess Iris Origo wrote bitterly from occupied territory in October, ‘there will be little enough left to free; district by district, the Germans are leaving a wasteland.’ The ‘Gustav line’ along the Garigliano and Sangro rivers was contested for weeks, during which torrential storms reduced the battlefield to a quagmire. ‘I don’t think we can get any spectacular results so long as it goes on raining,’ Montgomery reported to Brooke shortly before relinquishing command of Eighth Army to return to England to direct the Normandy invasion. ‘The whole country becomes a sea of mud and nothing on wheels can move off the roads.’

Morale slumped. ‘Italy would break their backs, their bones, and nearly their spirits,’ American historian Rick Atkinson has written. ‘All roads lead to Rome,’ said Alexander ruefully, ‘but all the roads are mined.’ Booby-traps and anti-personnel devices inflicted a steady toll of casualties. ‘A man’s foot is usually blown loose at the ankle,’ a US Army doctor noted, ‘leaving the mangled foot dangling on shredded tendons. Additional puncture wounds of both legs and groin make the agony worse.’ Evacuating casualties from the mountains was a nightmare task, four men being required to carry each stretcher. The Germans created imaginative obstacles: north of the Sangro, they felled a half-mile-long line of roadside poplars. Before Allied armour could pass, these had to be cleared by bulldozers at the rate of one tree an hour.

Most men’s memories of the campaign were dominated not by the sun and natural beauty with which popular imagination endowed Italy, but by the horror of winter conditions. ‘The ground for fifty yards outside is MUD – six inches deep, glistening, sticky, holding pools of water,’ gunner officer John Guest wrote home. ‘Great excavations in the mud,