The Second World War Italian campaign is often less well remembered than the struggle of the Germans against the western Allies in north-west Europe and against the Soviet Union in the east. But, as this book demonstrates in over 300 photographs, the Italian peninsula was a major theater of the war in itself.

More than a million Allied troops fought there, more than half a million Germans and Italians; there were over 600,00 casualties and well over 100,000 dead. The soldiers of many nations took part – Americans, Australians, Brazilians, British, Canadians, French, Germans, Greeks, Indians, Italians, Poles, South Africans – in a grueling and protracted sequence of battles across rocky, mountainous terrain that made a mockery of Churchill’s description of it as the ‘soft underbelly’ of occupied Europe.

Every stage of the campaign is represented in the photographs – from the Allied landings in Sicily in 1943, through the tenacious defense by the Germans of a series of fortified lines as the Allies struggled north, to the final Allied advance across the Po in April 1945 and the German surrender. As well as showing the soldiers on all sides and the towns and Italian landscapes in which the fighting took place, the photographs record the appalling devastation the warfare left in its wake.

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• German Defence Lines in Italy 1943–45
• Introduction: Italy 1943–45 – The ‘Soft Underbelly’
• Chapter 1: Sicily 1943 – Build-up to Invasion
• Chapter 2: ‘Operation Husky’ 1943 – The Sicilian Campaign
• Chapter 3: September–October 1943 – Southern Italy
• Chapter 4: October–December 1943 – Moving North
• Chapter 5: January–May 1944 – The Gustav Line
• Chapter 6: January–May 1944 – The Battles for Cassino
• Chapter 7: January–May 1944 – Anzio
• Chapter 8: June–August 1944 – Into Central Italy
• Chapter 9: 1943–45 – The Air War Over Italy
• Chapter 10: August–September 1944 – The Gothic Line
• Chapter 11: 1943–45 – Italy’s Civil War
• Chapter 12: September 1944–January 1945 – The Last Winter
• Chapter 13: April 1945 – The Allied Spring Offensive