Review of The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943

Book by James Holland

Review by Richard Howe

One of my ongoing Lowell history projects is to document each of the memorial squares spread throughout the city. Until the early 1990s, these squares were mostly dedicated to individuals from Lowell who died while serving in the military during wartime. That investigation in turn led me to the list of more than 400 men from Lowell who died in the service during World War II. I was struck by how many of them died in Italy. Popular culture’s depiction of World War II has focused on Northern Europe and the Pacific with Italy and other theaters being mostly neglected. But the quantity of Lowell residents who died in the Italian campaign opened my eyes to the scale and cost of that operation.

Consequently, I welcomed receiving The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 by James Holland, a new history of the first year of Allied operations in Italy. Before getting into the particulars of this book, here’s a quick synopsis of the big picture in Italy.

The Italian Campaign (1943–1945) was a major Allied effort during World War II to invade and liberate Italy. Beginning with the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky) on July 10, 1943, it forced Italy’s surrender on September 8, 1943. The Allies faced fierce German resistance, including at Monte Cassino (January–May 1944), before breaking through at Anzio (January–June 1944). Rome was liberated on June 4, 1944, but fighting persisted until Germany’s surrender in Italy on May 2, 1945, marking the campaign’s conclusion.

Holland’s book covers the first year of that operation in considerable detail. The author of more than a dozen nonfiction works on World War II and the co-host of the popular World War II podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, Holland makes extensive use of letters and diaries to bring individual participants in the fight to life on the page while at the same time putting the strategic motivation and consequences of this campaign in a broader context.

The disagreement between the Americans and the British on how to prosecute the war in Europe is well known. Seeking to avoid a replay of the trench warfare that characterized World War I and devastated a generation of young men, Britain sought a different approach. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously used the term “the soft underbelly of the Axis” in reference to Italy and the Mediterranean region as the Axis powers’ most vulnerable area, suggesting that an Allied invasion there could yield significant strategic benefits with less resistance compared to a direct assault on Nazi-occupied France or Germany. Churchill believed that attacking Italy, a weaker Axis member, would destabilize German defenses and open a pathway into Europe.

In contrast, the Americans were determined to land forces in Northern Europe as rapidly as possible since that was the most direct route to the heart of Germany and victory. However, the Americans acceded to Churchill’s desire to first invade Italy due to several factors: Mussolini had already been overthrown and a new Italian government was secretly negotiating with the Allies to switch sides in the war; the  Allies expected that the Germans would choose not to defend Italy south of Rome but would instead fortify the passes through the Alps to economize the forces required; and the Americans wanted to keep peace among the Allies. However, the Americans put strict limits on the amount of Allied combat forces and landing craft that could be committed to the Italian operation, lest they be taken from the buildup for the invasion of France.

Prosecuting the strategic air campaign against Germany was another factor the Americans considered. The number one goal of that campaign was to gain air superiority over Northern Europe which was seen as a precondition to the invasion of France. To accomplish that, German aircraft manufacturing plants became the primary targets of American and British heavy bombers flying from England. However, as the effectiveness of this bombing campaign increased, the Germans moved their manufacturing base further east, often to the outskirts of Vienna. This made for extremely long and costly bomber flights all the way from England. If Italy and its airfield could be seized by the Allies, heavy bombers could be stationed there and have a shorter trip to bomb the manufacturing plants in Austria. For the Americans, this desire for Italian airbases became an after-the-invasion basis for continuing to prosecute the Italian campaign further north, rather than just holding the line at Rome.

The Allied estimate that the Germans would only defend northern Italy was initially correct, but by the time of the first landings Hitler had changed his mind and decreed that a maximum effort would be made to fight the length of Italy. As a result, the Germans ended up with more divisions in this theater than did the Allies, which is not how it’s supposed to work when you are attacking. Add to that the mountainous terrain that characterizes most of Italy and the country’s many rivers, and the Allies faced a tough, costly slog that took much longer than expected.

The Savage Storm does an excellent job of setting this strategic stage while depicting the cost paid by those individuals fighting for and living on this disputed terrain.