Original subtitles

Winston Churchill once told Stalin:

"The Mediterranean is the soft underbelly of the crocodile."

Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff believed

that attacking German-occupied Europe through Italy

would help shorten the war.

The Americans were not convinced,

preferring to focus on the decisive blow across the English Channel.

Only reluctantly did they agree to join their British allies

on the road to Rome.

November, 1942.

11 months after Pearl Harbour,

the American army prepared for its first encounter with the Wehrmacht.

Operation Torch - codename for the Anglo-American landings

in the French North African colonies of Morocco and Algeria.

They met little or no resistance from the forces of Vichy France.

The French command soon broke with the government of Pétain

and their troops became part of the Allied army.

An American general, Dwight D Eisenhower,

was supreme commander.

The American planners were never keen on the operation,

but President Roosevelt was determined

to get his ground forces into action against Hitler in 1942.

Attacking the Germans in Tunisia

was the next best thing to a second front in Europe.

At Casablanca, within two months of the landings,

an impressive array of British and American top brass assembled.

The Russians were not present,

but everybody there knew they had to do something

to take the pressure off the Red Army.

Churchill and Roosevelt had now to decide where they went from here.

At the beginning of 1943,

the British and Americans were firmly established in North Africa.

Hitler reinforced Rommel's forces in Tunisia,

but with the British Eighth Army closing from the east,

it could only be a matter of time

before the entire African coastline was in Allied hands.

What then?

We have to face the fact that there was a big difference between the two sides

about what the future strategy of the war would be.

The British, the British Chiefs of Staff, Churchill,

were all in favour of the future of the campaign

being carried out through Italy

and hitting at the underside of the underbelly of the Germans,

moving up and eventually joining up with the Russians.

The Americans held exactly the opposite view.

They felt the only way that you could defeat Germany

was to take the shortest way into the centre of Germany, across the Channel,

and advance into the areas of the Ruhr and Saar,

the great industrial areas,

and then destroy the German forces by that means.

The British, led by Sir Alan Brooke,

Chief of the Imperial General Staff,

came to Casablanca determined to have their way. They got it.

The Americans, under Marshall, were persuaded that the next objective

would be the invasion of Sicily,

leading, it was hoped, to the surrender of Italy.

Thus the main second front was postponed for another year.

At the time, however, the big news from the Casablanca conference

was an unexpected pronouncement by the American president.

Mr Roosevelt began by saying that when he was a young man

the great reputation in the American military was General Grant,

who had once sent an order

saying that he would accept no terms but unconditional surrender,

and that these in fact were the terms that the Allies, or the United Nations,

wanted to present to their enemies.

He then went on as though he did not understand

how important a statement he had made.

Mr Churchill looked considerably surprised at this.

And I think that Mr Churchill felt that

it was not the best way to present the Allied position to the enemy.

However, as he said then and later, he was Mr Roosevelt's ardent lieutenant

and he would go along with it.

After the talking, Roosevelt appeared in his other capacity -

commander in chief of the American armed forces.

If this confident-looking American army crossed the Atlantic

expecting to carry all before it,

it was very soon cruelly disillusioned.

In a sudden onslaught through the Kassarine Pass in Tunisia,

Rommel inflicted on the American army one of its worst defeats of the war.

The Afrikakorps was far too well-equipped and experienced

for the lightly armoured and underpowered American tanks.

The morale of these raw young Americans was badly shaken.

Many were taken prisoner.

It brought the troops face to face

with the fact that this was going to be a long war

and a tough one and the Germans were very good.

Armies never learn from other armies, they have to learn by themselves,

and a lot of the tactics that we used disastrously at Kassarine

were those that the British army had used equally disastrously

two years before in the western desert, then discarded.

I think it helped our army and made them realise,

because the British came down from the north and did help,

that this was going to be a cooperative effort, that we couldn't win it alone.

Also, it got the average GI accustomed to the fact

that there would be one battle after another.

But Rommel lacked the strength to exploit his victory.

The Allies, under Alexander, regrouped and within ten days retook the path.

The Germans in Tunisia were now hemmed in.

The Allied sea and air blockade of the coastline

made large-scale evacuation impossible.

In the south, a forward patrol of the Eighth Army

linked up with the American Second Corps.

The trap closed.

Two Allied forces, once separated by 2,000 miles of mountain and desert,

joined hands for the final onslaught on the German position in Africa.

The Allied armies, vastly superior in numbers, drove the enemy,

now without Rommel who had been invalided home, back towards the sea.

The Allied air forces had undisputed control.

In seven days it was all over.

Finally, the Afrikakorps saw no point in fighting to the last man.

They surrendered in droves.

The unfortunate General von Arnim, who succeeded Rommel,

also surrendered with all his staff.

Nearly a quarter of a million men were taken prisoner -

a victory to rank alongside Stalingrad.

This was a major boost for the British and their Mediterranean strategy.

Sicily, as agreed at Casablanca, was the next item on the agenda.

Only two months after the German collapse in Tunisia,

the British and Americans began landing troops on Sicilian beaches.

The British were led by Montgomery, the Americans by General Patton -

the first time these egocentric personalities

had been involved in the same campaign.

It was the British Eighth Army which met the fiercest German resistance.

On their left, Patton's Americans swept across Sicily in style.

They found useful allies in the Mafia

and family connections among the civilian population.

The situation was relieved somewhat

by the fact that there was hardly a family in Sicily

that didn't have relatives in the United States.

The Sicilian landing, bringing the war on to their own soil,

convinced most Italians that theirs was a lost cause.

Giving themselves up, if possible by the regiment,

became the first objective of Italy's armed forces.

Allied raids on Rome provided another argument for getting out of the war.

Benito Mussolini, il Duce for 20 years,

was outvoted in his own Fascist Grand Council.

On July 25th, he was toppled from power.

King Victor Emmanuel approved the elderly Marshal Badoglio

as head of the government.

Badoglio declared publicly that the war would go on,

but immediately began secret negotiations

with the Allies for surrender.

By now Sicily, after only a few weeks, was almost all in Allied hands.

This time there was to be no great haul of German prisoners.

German evacuation across the narrow Straits of Messina was very successful.

Most of the Wehrmacht's personnel got away to the mainland.

Even the last guard dog.

General Patton beat Montgomery into Messina.

The Allies had landed in Sicily not knowing where they would go next.

At the prospect of Italian collapse, the British were for attacking the mainland.

The Americans agreed, but insisted that Overlord, the invasion of Normandy,

must take priority for resources.

A secret envoy, General Castellano, was sent by Badoglio

to find out on what terms Italy could join the Allies.

But the Allies simply wanted Italian surrender

and refused to tell Castellano of their invasion plans -

partly because they didn't want the Italians to know

how limited their forces were.

All we could say to General Castellano was this:

"Well, we will tell you two or three hours before it happens,

so that you can give any assistance you can

to the British... to the Allied operations.

Eventually, on the 3rd September, these terms were signed.

On that day, the Allies invaded.

Montgomery went across the Straits of Messina to attack the toe of Italy,

but found no resistance.

The Germans had moved north

to counter the threat of an Allied landing further up the coast.

The Italians had wanted a landing to safeguard Rome from German attack,

but this was impossible.

The furthest north the Americans and British felt it prudent to land

was nowhere near Rome, but at Salerno,

as far as the Allied air cover operating from Sicily could stretch.

The operation had been mounted at great speed

to take advantage of the confusion in Italy.

The forces of the American general Mark Clark

were barely adequate for the job they had to do.

On the way, the troops heard a broadcast

- by General Eisenhower. - The Italian government

has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally.

As Allied commander in chief, I have granted a military armistice.

The armistice was signed by my representatives

and the representative of Marshal Badoglio.

And it becomes effective this instant.

The surrender of his allies did not take Hitler by surprise.

He'd already moved reinforcements into northern Italy.

Here the Italians were quickly disarmed

under a plan ironically codenamed Operation Axis.

At this point, Hitler had not decided just where he would hold the line.

The Germans entered Rome to find it a capital without a government.

Badoglio and his ministers had avoided the risk of being shot for treachery

by leaping into their cars and driving away.

South of Rome, Clark's invasion force was nearing the beaches.

Salerno, if you go in on a boat,

you look at the mountains that hem you in and the passes through which you go.

The enemy would be looking down your throat.

The Germans were ready and waiting.

After 48 hours, the Germans launched a furious counterattack.

The situation became so precarious,

Clark ordered plans for possible re-embarkation.

But with massive support from air and sea,

the Salerno invaders just managed to hold on.

After a week of savage fighting, the Germans withdrew.

It required the intervention of all the air forces

to save us at Salerno.

Of all General Eisenhower's battles,

that is the one where I think we were nearest to a tactical defeat.

I've never had any doubts in my mind

that it was a completely successful operation.

We were ordered to go in there,

we were ordered to seize a bridgehead. We did it.

We were ordered to capture the port of Naples - we did that within three weeks.

So far, so good.

At least a large part of southern Italy was in Allied hands.

Naples was desperately short of food.

There were bread riots.

Water was scarce.

There was a typhus epidemic.

The advance continued, but just ahead lay the line of real German resistance.

The Allied commanders had hoped Hitler would withdraw further north.

Instead, greatly encouraged by his near-victory at Salerno,

he had decided to fight here, in the mountains south of Rome.

Like a bad lira, Mussolini turned up again.

He was hoisted from his hiding place by a German rescue party

and taken to Hitler.

The Führer was aghast at his appearance,

but thought he might come in useful

to encourage the Fascists in German-occupied Italy.

The German forces in Italy were led by Kesselring,

one of the war's ablest defensive commanders.

Kesselring had a lot going for him.

The rocky spine which runs almost the whole length of Italy

meant the Allies had to advance along the coastal plains on either side.

The only way to outflank the Germans was by amphibious landings.

But by now the necessary landing craft were earmarked for Normandy.

As they went north to their prepared defensive positions,

Kesselring's men destroyed the only lines of communication.

In the towns, the Germans left booby traps. This was Naples.

They were well-trained troops. They were tenacious troops, they were well led.

And one point I like to make is they were homogenous -

they were all of one nationality.

They were all equipped with the same weapons and ammunition.

They ate the same food. They believed pretty much in the same god.

I had 16 different nationalities with me,

some of whom couldn't eat this and couldn't eat that,

and some that didn't want to fight on Fridays or some other day of the week,

and the British, with their infantry weapons

and your artillery completely different from ours.

You couldn't move them with ease from front to front like the Germans could.

Winter. The Allied ground commander Alexander and his colleagues

were faced with the unpleasant realities of their Mediterranean strategy.

The Eighth Army, accustomed to swift advances across the desert,

could only manage a few hundred yards a day.

Across the mountain, Clark's Fifth Army was also mud-bound.

They issued us galoshes after the rains had stopped.

If anybody was in the galoshes business,

he could have found millions along the roadside,

because you couldn't walk with them.

It was impossible to go through that mud.

This was not the sunny Italy of the travel posters.

The only way an infantryman was coming out of those mountains

was to be carried out.

That's why it was actually desirable to get wounded.

Dreadful weather, difficult terrain, determined German resistance.

To the men in the mud, this combination did not match up to Churchill's vision.

I can see him now at his map and his persuasive way with his pointer,

pointing out the "soft belly" of the Mediterranean.

After we got in there, I often thought of what a tough old gut it was,

instead of the soft belly he had led us to believe.

Before the end of 1943,

the Allies were hammering at Kesselring's Winter Line.

Alexander had 11 divisions, Kesselring nine, with eight more in reserve.

Every small mountain village had to be fought for.

In December, the American 36th Division tried to take San Pietro.

It was one of the things that most of our fighting was in Italy.

You got into a position, you dug in and you just stayed.

I mean, we'd shoot at them and they'd shoot at us.

And it was only when they were ready to leave that we moved forward.

After ten days, the Americans took San Pietro -

at heavy cost.

In any unit, you would have a Graves Registration Unit,

and their job was to go round picking up bodies.

And what they would do, if someone had been hastily buried,

they would disinter him, or if he was just lying there,

they'd pick him up and slide them into the mattress covers,

pile them up into the trucks

and take them off to a temporary cemetery somewhere.

I suppose some people got buried as many as four or five times that way,

which is kind of unfortunate, really.

I always thought people should be left where they were.

The Italian people had once been told by Mussolini:

"War puts the stamp of nobility on those who have the courage to meet it."

At Tehran in November 1943,

Roosevelt and Stalin overruled Churchill

and at last fixed a definite date for the landing in France:

May 1944.

Italy was to become a sideshow.

But after Tehran, Churchill refused to accept the deadlock in Italy.

He got on to Roosevelt and persuaded him to lend landing craft

for a new amphibious landing.

The plan was in two stages.

First, Mark Clark's Fifth Army would attack the Germans at Cassino,

draw their forces southward, drain their reserves.

Then the amphibious troops would strike behind their lines at Anzio,

just 22 miles south of Rome.

At Cassino, the Germans held the high ground.

They could see everything that moved in the valley below.

The Fifth Army attacked on January 20th.

Its troops had not been reinforced. They were cold, wet, exhausted.

The attack failed disastrously.

But the second stage of the plan went ahead two days later -

the assault on Anzio.

Having gone into Salerno with not enough troops -

no commander ever has what he thinks he ought to have -

I was determined that if I was to be the commander going into Anzio,

or be the overall commander, that we should not go in on a shoestring.

I went in with one and two-thirds division, which was totally inadequate.

But that's the way the ball bounces in war.

You do what you're told to do,

or they'll get somebody else that will do it.

The Germans expected the landing,

but had no idea where it would come.

They did not have enough troops to cover all possible beaches.

The Anzio force was completely unopposed.

Nothing. An odd bang in the distance, but nothing.

And when dawn broke, we'd got complete surprise.

And a few minutes later, along the road, there came a marvellous drunken car,

swaying back and forth,

full of happy Germans who'd had a night out in Rome and were staggering back,

and couldn't believe they were captured.

They said, "Kameraden" and they kept on embracing me.

Finally they put them in the clink too.

And that was the landing - complete surprise.

The Anzio beachhead was consolidated in an eerie calm.

After Salerno, it seemed incredible that there was no instant German riposte.

Perhaps now was the time for a lightning dash,

in the style of General Patton, for the gates of Rome.

But the American commander at Anzio was no Patton.

General Lucas was a cautious man

who believed the beachhead must be secured before striking inland.

Alexander did not overrule him.

Churchill complained, "I thought we'd flung a wildcat into the Alban Hills,

but instead we got a whale floundering on the beach."

There were only two battalions

and some very old-fashioned coast batteries

at the coast for defending.

If the Americans

had realised the situation,

they could stay on the evening of the landing day in Rome.

General Lucas could, but he would have soon been met by an overwhelming force

which would have defeated him, no question about it.

So we had to dig in on the biggest perimeter we could possibly digest,

and wait for the onslaught which came.

Caught off-balance, as he often was by Alexander,

Kesselring recovered fast.

Spurred on by Hitler's demands

for the immediate liquidation of the "Anzio abscess",

he threw all he had into the counterattack.

If Anzio were eliminated,

perhaps the Allies would think again about crossing the English Channel.

Allied advance units which had spread out from the beaches

were overwhelmed by the weight of the German attack.

There was one unit that simply packed in -

folded their coats and handed themselves over.

They couldn't take it any more.

They were young and hadn't seen this sort of thing before.

And I don't blame them one little scrap.

Two American Ranger battalions were captured

and humiliatingly paraded through the streets of Rome.

The beachhead could only be relieved

by breaking through the German defensive line

which ran through the monastery of Monte Cassino.

Perched high above the valley,

an observation post here could see everything that moved for miles around.

The Allies believed, wrongly, that the monastery had been fortified.

It was the general view

and the general belief of the troops involved on that front

that the monastery at Cassino

was being used for military purposes by the Germans.

That being the case,

and it also being part of my military philosophy,

and a great many other people's,

that you must not put troops into battle

without giving them all possible physical and material support you can

to give them the best chance of getting a success.

On February 15th, 1944,

over 200 Allied bombers pounded the monastery into rubble.

The air and ground attacks were badly coordinated,

giving the Germans time to swarm into the rubble - ideal cover for defence.

The Gustav Line was held.

At Anzio, Kesselring flung ten German divisions

against the Allies' four and a half.

Hitler hoped Anzio would be a turning point in Germany's fortunes.

He promised the unit that broke through

the honour of escorting Allied prisoners through the streets of Berlin.

Massed waves of German infantry were flung in.

They came over a moon landscape, pitted, wrecked tanks,

abandoned Jeeps along the road,

and I still to this day don't understand the German tactics.

There was a moment you could see them leaving their lines

like the old films of the Somme battle,

and falling down as our machine guns took them.

The German offensive lasted four days.

In the end, the Allied superiority in heavy guns tipped the balance.

It was finally beaten back.

The Germans had pulled back,

but the Allies still lacked the strength to break out.

It was stalemate.

We then had to form trenches,

and Anzio then became an old-fashioned World War I trench system.

And they were bombed and they were mortared

and then they had to do trench patrols

and occasionally, keen generals used to send up people to try and find out

who was opposite us and do a trench raid.

It was right out of Journey's End.

The two front lines were only yards apart.

A couple of fellows were cleaning this machine gun, got it all to pieces and...

An Irish fellow named Tommy McGough was there and he looked up and said:

"Bloody Jesus Christ!"

He rushed for this gun, trying to put the barrel back on,

he put it on upside down and all sorts.

Of course, I just looked and I said, "Quite all right, Tommy."

I could see this fellow was... I go down to the wire. He speaks good English.

He says, "Where's Fred?" I said, "He's gone."

I said, "It's quite all right, what have you got?"

Danish pork and fresh lemons.

Of course, I gave him a tin of bully beef.

We got talking to him about the position and the war and all that.

- He come from a place near Emden? - Emden, yes.

And at the time, this city had a thousand-bomber raid.

I said, "Oh, you've had the bugger then?"

"You've had it."

"No, no," he said, "I come from a little village near Emden. Me OK."

He showed me his photos of his wife. She was a bus conductor in Emden and that.

And I said, "Why don't you pack in? You've had it now."

He said, "No, Germany will not be beat."

"We shall go right down like that, till we get near to the bottom,

and then we shall join forces with Britain and America and fight Russia."

After that he just went. I never seen him any more.

He must've got relieved the next night.

At meal time, the cooks would shout, "Grub up."

You'd go with your mess tins down for your grub.

Before you could get down to the cookhouse,

Anzio Annie would send one over, a big one,

one of these clouds raised, you know,

and you automatically, as soon as that burst, you'd drop to the floor.

You were always used to it. You walked crouched.

They called it, when you were walking about, you'd got "the Anzio crouch".

And as you lay there,

you used to tune in - on the radios that you shouldn't have had -

and... to the voice of Sally.

Sally lived in Rome and she was a great...

Well, she sounded the most wonderful, sexy female ever.

And she gave messages to the troops.

"Hello, hello..."

Women always think that the lower they speak, the more sexy they sound.

And she had the lowest register of any woman.

She said, "Hello, this is Sally. Why don't you come over and see me?"

"Private Fox - you remember him last night? He stepped on a shoe mine."

"Nasty things, shoe mines."

"You could hear Private Fox yelling for most of the night."

"Don't be like Private Fox, come over to see Sally."

There would be a smart crack overhead,

and down would flutter propaganda pamphlets,

saying, "The Yanks are lease-lending your women."

"They're having a lovely time in jolly old England."

A picture of a naked woman embracing an American,

or an American tactfully knotting his tie while she did up her panties.

At Cassino, the Allies maintained the pressure,

their aim to tie up as many German troops there as possible.

A third attempt to take the monastery

opened with a massive bombing attack on Cassino town.

500 planes went in under the sporting codeword "Bradman Batting Tomorrow".

Among the places knocked for six was the headquarters of the British Eighth Army.

Once again, there was poor coordination between air and ground forces.

After the bombing, the Germans came out of the ground

and were in position again before the New Zealanders launched their attack.

The German defenders were elite paratroops.

The battle raged from house to house, room to room, cellar to cellar.

The New Zealanders lost 4,000 men.

The Germans still held out.

Three assaults on Monte Cassino, three bloody failures.

Allied commanders realised they must crush the defence by weight of numbers.

They massively reinforced the Fifth Army.

They used, too, an elaborate deception plan

to make the Germans think

they were preparing another amphibious landing north of Rome.

The Germans weakened their mountain defences to prepare for it.

In May, the Allies at last outnumbered the Germans at Cassino by three to one.

After an artillery barrage by 2,000 guns, the monastery fell.

Polish troops were the first to reach the ruins,

where they raised their national flag.

The eyes of the captured Germans told the story of their ordeal.

The Germans were now in headlong retreat.

Kesselring declared Rome an open city

and attempted to regroup north of the capital.

On the 25th of May, the Cassino front linked up with the Anzio beachhead.

Alexander's plan was for Clark to cut off the Germans' retreat.

Instead, Clark threw everything into a drive for Rome.

He was determined to get there before anyone else, and he did.

On the evening of June 4, 1944,

the first Allied troops entered the city.

Those Romans who had backed the wrong side now paid the price.

Clark's Roman triumph was short-lived.

Kesselring would succeed in regrouping.

Another Italian winter lay ahead.

And in less than 48 hours

the world's attention would turn to another theatre of war -

the beaches of Normandy.