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of Italy for a year, and the autumnal rain brought more dreadful weather conditions that would shock present-day visitors to Italy who confine their tours of Tuscany and Umbria to the summer months. Even once the Allies reached north-eastern Italy, there was a series of east–west-running rivers to cross if they were to achieve Alexander’s plan to destroy the twenty German divisions in front of the Alps. Even as late as December 1944, Hitler was capable of putting together a twenty-six-division surprise attack in the Ardennes without having to remove troops from Italy, although he did remove Kesselring in March 1945 to defend western Germany.

The last stage of the Allied campaign was easily its best tactically, with the Gothic Line breached with vigour and a pursuit of the Germans that has been described as ‘tactically superb’.61 Much of the credit for this must go to Clark, who commanded 15th Army Group, Truscott of the Fifth Army and Sir Richard McCreery, who in November 1944 had taken over command of the Eighth Army from Oliver Leese. Refusing Vietinghoff permission to retreat into the Alps, but instead ordering his troops to ‘Stand or die’, Hitler condemned the by then demoralized German forces to fight north of the Po, where they were comprehensively defeated between 14 and 20 April 1945. Vietinghoff surrendered German Army Group South-west to Alexander, who was by then supreme commander Mediterranean, on Wednesday, 2 May 1945.

Although the attritional warfare on the slim peninsula – which might have been specifically designed for a long retreat – had cost the Fifth Army 188,746 casualties and the Eighth Army 123,254, a total of 312,000, it had cost the Germans as many as 434,646.62 Yet despite constant inferiority of numbers in the air, and being always on the defensive, Kesselring and Vietinghoff had held up the Allies for nineteen months before the final collapse. It is hard to see what the continued Allied assaults from Rome to the Po Valley really achieved considering the cost, except that they kept many German divisions away from the Western Front, and some historians assert that ‘The Allied Italian campaign was a necessary component of the giant ring that squeezed the life out of the Nazi state.’63

The Italian campaign also provides a perfect illustration of how well the Germans could fight when not interfered with strategically by Hitler. Kesselring, Vietinghoff, Mackensen and Senger hardly made a serious error in their masterly withdrawal northwards up the entire length of Italy, and had Hitler permitted a retreat into the Alps they could have extricated their armies further. From the spring of 1944 the Allies had more than ten times as many warplanes in Italy as the Luftwaffe, but had the Nazis organized aircraft and tank production efficiently enough for the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht to be able to contest the skies and plains, there is no reason to suppose that they would have been expelled from the country in the first place. ‘May I give you a word of advice?’ the urbane General Senger joked to Michael Howard ten years after the war ended. ‘Next time you invade Italy, do not start at the bottom.’64

Back on 12 September 1943, Mussolini had been rescued on Hitler’s orders from the mountainside hotel in which he was being held, in a sensational German glider operation commanded by Colonel Otto Skorzeny. ‘The liberation of the Duce has caused a great sensation at home and abroad,’ crowed Goebbels to his diary two days later. ‘Even upon the enemy the effect of his melodramatic deliverance is enormous.’65 After meeting Hitler, Mussolini was set up as dictator of the so-called Republic of Salò, ruling from Gargagno on Lake Garda for nineteen months until the German collapse. Attempting to escape across the Swiss border on 26 April 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci, her brother Marcello and fifteen others were captured by the Italian partisans. On Saturday the 28th Mussolini and Petacci were executed by sub-machine gun in front of a low stone wall by the gates of a villa outside the village of Giulino