Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome - 1944

Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome - 1944
by Lloyd Clark

Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome - 1944
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Book Summary Information

Author: Lloyd Clark
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-10-10
ISBN: 0802143261
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Grove Press

Book Reviews of Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome - 1944

Book Review: A Searing Indictment
Summary: 5 Stars

Clark's excellent work is a searing indictment.

Anzio was the marriage of some of the best Allied troops of the War to a brilliant idea that was executed by egotists and incompetents. At this late stage of the War, the best managerial talent on the Allied side was elsewhere preparing for end games in the Pacific and Northern Europe. This alone was a warning not to proceed.

Churchill must have known that the never strong Alexander was way over his head, which was why he was there and not leading Overlord. Eisenhower could not have failed to see that Mark Clark, as vain and egotistical as MacArthur, but with none of his talent, was operating well beyond his operational limits. Under two useless commanders, a hapless Lucas slouched into a tactical victory and then did his level best to make the worst of it.

Those who suffered terribly, like the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards, were wasted for nothing. What could have quickly exposed Hitler's southern flank, something he never really understood -- see Payne's excellent Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II, and made other theaters somewhat easier to manage, was thrown out the window.

Clark, who thought his MacArthur-like appearance in Rome made history, was soon forgotten and bad memories of Anzio buried in the victories that followed elsewhere.

For some the memories were not so easily erased. My father lost all but five of his company at Anzio and woke up screaming at night for the next several decades. Now he is beyond screaming and I'm not sure if this troubling book would have quieted him any.

The editor could have cleaned up some of the sudden switching back and forth between units on either side -- easy to understand if you were there but not if you were not -- and insisted on better maps and more of them.

Summary of Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome - 1944

“Masterly . . . a heartbreaking, beautifully told story of wasted sacrifice.? —Vince Rinehart, The Washington Post
The Allied attack of Normandy beach and its resultant bloodbath have been immortalized in film and literature, but the U.S. campaign on the beaches of Western Italy reigns as perhaps the deadliest battle of World War II?s western theater. In January 1944, about six months before D-Day, an Allied force of thirty-six thousand soldiers launched one of the first attacks on continental Europe at Anzio, a small coastal city thirty miles south of Rome. The assault was conceived as the first step toward an eventual siege of the Italian capital. But the advance stalled and Anzio beach became a death trap. After five months of brutal fighting and monumental casualties on both sides, the Allies finally cracked the German line and marched into Rome on June 5, the day before D-Day. Richly detailed and fueled by extensive archival research of newspapers, letters, and diaries—as well as scores of original interviews with surviving soldiers on both sides of the trenches—Anzio is a harrowing and incisive true story by one of today?s finest military historians.

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