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lost 44,000 casualties, a sacrifice that might have been easier to justify if the German army had not been permitted to escape in relatively good order to continue the struggle in central and northern Italy, and especially on the Gothic Line. General von Vietinghoff himself had no doubts that ‘If the Allies, as in previous days, had directed their attack against Valmontone, the initially weak forces of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division would not have been able to prevent a breakthrough. The fall of Rome, the separation of both German armies, and the bottling up of the bulk of their units would have been unavoidable.’

Alexander confined himself in his memoirs to the caustic comment that he could ‘only assume that the immediate lure of Rome for its publicity persuaded Mark Clark to switch the direction of his advance’, and Harding agreed, saying: ‘By diverting his axis to advance from almost due east to north-east he missed an opportunity of cutting off some forces, but he was attracted, I think, by the magnet of Rome.’58 To make matters worse, Clark actually informed Alexander that, if the British tried to approach Rome before the Americans, he would order ‘his troops to fire on the Eighth Army’, and once Rome had fallen – or rather was evacuated in relatively good order by the retreating Germans – American Military Police refused British units permission to enter the city.59 It was, Harding recalled, the nearest that the British ever got to ‘coming to blows’ with General Mark Clark.

Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin at the Teheran Conference of November 1943 that ‘He who holds Rome holds the title-deeds to Italy,’ but he was wrong. The fall of Rome proved to be just another step on the long and bloody journey up the peninsula. If Rome had fallen in the autumn of 1943 it might have been a significant moment in the history of the Second World War, but coming so late, and so soon before D-Day, it makes little more than a footnote. Thereafter the entire Italian campaign became a sideshow, kept alive by Churchill’s faith that victory there could open up opportunities in Yugoslavia, Austria and France, each of which was heavily discounted by Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Alexander’s pursuit of the Germans northwards, where the Gothic Line had been constructed between La Spezia and Pesaro, has been described as ‘wooden and hesitant’, leading one historian to state, with reference to North Africa as well as Italy, that ‘This failure in the pursuit was the most marked feature of the Western Allies in the Second World War.’60 It is true that the Germans managed to get their forces up to the Gothic Line without being overtaken, but Harding estimated that on 1 July 1944 the Germans had between eighteen and twenty-one divisions, against the Allies’ fourteen infantry and four armoured, and moreover they had mini-defensive lines such as the Albert Line behind Perugia and Chiusi, and lines in front of Arezzo and Siena, and the Arno Line centred on Florence and Bibbiena. All these had to be mastered before the Allies even reached the Gothic Line itself.

It was to be a phenomenally hard slog up the Apennines before reaching the plains of the Po Valley. Small wonder that the fellow officers of Coldstream Guards Lieutenant (later Professor Sir) Michael Howard, who won the Military Cross at Salerno, wondered whether the General Staff had used a map that featured contours when they had planned the campaign. Alexander’s chances of a glorious breakthrough of the Gothic Line were severely weakened when six divisions were withdrawn from his command in order to take part in the invasion of southern France on 15 August 1944, while Kesselring was simultaneously being reinforced. The Fifth Army crossed the Arno on 2 August, and the Eighth Army took Rimini on 21 September, but the focus of the Second World War had long since moved to north-west Europe, where the life or death of the Third Reich would be decided, rather than in northern Italy. By the time Romagna fell on 20 September 1944, Eighth Army had been fighting in the mountains