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This book looks at the long air campaign over Italy, which lasted for almost two years and played a major part in the eventual Allied victory, as well as helping to prevent them from suffering potential defeats at Salerno and Anzio. It is now most famous as the setting for the novel ‘Catch 22’, inspired by the way the length of a tour of duty kept increasing, until eventually it was ‘for the duration’.
The book combines an overview of the campaign with detailed accounts of daily combats, giving us both aspects of the air campaign. We see how the nature of the opposition changed during the campaign, with the Luftwaffe very active at first, before fading away. By the end flak was the main danger, especially during the campaign to cut the Brenner Pass, where the Germans were able to use the mountainous terrain to bring flak guns up to high altitude, and knew where the attacks were going to come. A recurring feature of the daily accounts are the losses, a reminder that despite the Allies generally having air superioty, that still came with a heavy cost.
One area of this campaign I didn’t know much about was the Allied use of Corsica as an airbase. The island was liberated by a combination of an uprising by the local French resistance and a limited Free French intervention, and a number of Allied airfields were soon operating from the island. These bases allowed the Allied airforces to support the landings at Anzio and later the landings in the south of France, although at first the island was also in range of German air attack.
The author is quite judgemental on occasions, and I don’t always agree with his views. The main example of this is his view that a more skilful Allied response to the overthrow of Mussolini and the Italian attempts to make peace could have cut more than a year off the length of the war. Here I think he rather underestimates the Germans, who were already suspicious of their wavering allies, and had troops moving into Italy. Plans for a possible Allied landing or airborne assault near Rome look like they would always have ended in disaster. As it was there was only three weeks between the end of the Sicilian campaign and the start of the invasion of mainland Italy, and even that gap was big enough to allow Kesselring to come close to defeating the landing at Salerno.
I do agree with his views on Anzio, where a more vigorous commander could have won a major victory (something supported here by evidence from the German side – it was only after Kesselring saw how slowly the Allies were moving that he ordered an attempt to hold them), and with his attack on General Clarke’s decision to his ignore his orders to cut off the German armies retreating from the Winter line and instead seek the glory of capturing Rome. This decision, which was controversial with his own generals, allowed large parts of the German army to escape north to help defend the Gothic Line. The decision certainly extended the war in Italy into 1945.
We follow Joseph Heller’s career in some detail, including the ironic detail that his tour ended after sixty missions, despite the official target having risen by that point. Having a consistant voice for a significant part of the campaign is a useful concept, allowing us to see how his attitudes changed.
We also get a look at the two rival Italian Air Forces that developed after the Italian surrender, pro-Axis and pro-Allied. One interesting feature here is that the Allied version wasn’t used over Italy, to avoid any clashes between Italian aircrew, but instead operated over the Balkans.
This is another impressive work from McKelvey Cleaver, covering one of the less familiar air campaigns in great detail.
Chapters
1 – Opening Bell
2 – Italy Surrenders
3 – The Near Disaster of Operation Avalanche
4 – Kesselring’s Toll
5 – Anzio – The Lost Opportunity
6 – ‘USS Corsica’
7 – The Colossal Mistake
8 – Pursuing the Wehrmacht
9 – Those Little Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky
10 – The Italian Air Forces
11 – Victory in Italy
Author: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
Edition: Hardcover
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Publisher: Osprey
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