Rome changed hands two days before the Normandy invasion, and just like that, the Italian campaign dropped off the world’s front page. A sideshow, newspaper editors decided. Barely worth a mention. Four hundred thousand men, forgotten.
They’d get letters from the folks at home. “Is the fighting finished there? We never hear anything about Italy.” Soldiers would try to tell them what it was like on the Gothic Line, but the words would fail, or disappear beneath a censor’s thick black lines. So they wrote back about the mud.
Once the autumn rain began, it never stopped for long. Bridges washed out. Rivers flooded their banks, and fields disappeared under water. Torrents roared down mountainsides, and mud sloped by the ton onto civilian highways already hammered by heavy military equipment. Engineering battalions worked day and night, digging drainage ditches, plowing the syrupy mess to the sides of roads. They blasted rock from Apennine crags, crushed it, shoveled gravel into gouges and potholes, getting sloshed with sheets of mud for their trouble as trucks roared by carrying food and ammunition, casualties or replacements.
Wet for weeks, feet would swell something awful. Men would limp into a town hoping for shelter from the endless goddamned rain, and there’d be nothing left. Not a building untouched. Whole houses blown to hell: splinters and gravel, that’s all. Nothing alive except maybe one poor damned cow, udder full to bursting, bellowing as she roamed through the muddy wreckage.
And then they’d get to the front. Christ— even the air was muddy there, but nobody at home would read about that. The censors wouldn’t let them tell how mines and shells sent geysers of the stuff into the sky, how mud-covered birds fell to earth with bits of man meat and twisted metal. Boots and socks, bearings grease, blood, crankcase oil, vomit, shattered corpses— everything churned, liquefied, sucked into the mud.
A few days of that, and everybody began to break down. Madman-hero or chickenshit draftee, they couldn’t think straight, couldn’t follow what the officers were saying. Men were court-martialed for disobeying orders they couldn’t remember having heard.
In General Headquarters, topography and armies were represented on maps by tightly packed contour lines and geometric shapes, but armies didn’t fight in that campaign. It was companies at best. Platoons. Squads. Clusters of individual men struggling up narrow fingers of steep and stony mountains toward dug-in troops who could see them coming, and defended every goddamned inch.
In that murderous, soul-killing, relentless way, the American Fifth took one mountain after another, while the British Eighth fought its way through the vast watery maze of Romagna’s swamps. By October, Highway 65 to Bologna was wide open and the Brenner Pass was blocked by debris from bombs. The German retreat was cut off, and behind their lines, the Italian Resistance was at work, disrupting communications, transportation, supply lines; blowing up bridges, ambushing troops, assassinating officials. Action by action, partisans took possession of the countryside, the forests, the high ground, and the night. No city, no building, no household in Italy was safe for Fascists.
They could see the end. That was the hell of it. Whether they looked for victory or defeat, they could see the end. A breakthrough was days away, and then—
Supplies and reinforcements were diverted from Italy to other theaters. The Allies reassigned their best generals to the western front and Greece. A few nights later, Kesselring’s staff car collided with a piece of towed artillery, and he was out of action, damned near killed. The sideshow was handed over to second-tier generals: the Allies’ colorless Leese, the Reich’s lackluster von Vietinghoff.
Neither could win. Neither would yield. And then it began to snow.
Across Europe, dense fog and deep cold encased every branch and twig in icy armor. Generals used the bone-chilling, heart-freezing winter of ’45 to consolidate broken units and hurl them against the enemy again, and again, and again. The infantry’s dream of “home by Christmas” became the Great War’s nightmare of stagnant lines and pointless slaughter.
And every night more fine young ghosts whispered in a knife-blade wind: Welcome to hell, brother. Damn the generals. Damn the politicians. Damn them all. Damn everyone who is warm, and dry, and alive tonight.