Hello and welcome to the Battleground 44 podcast with me, Saul David. Today I'm talking to James

Holland, bestselling a historian and co-host of the hit World War II podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, about his new book, Casino 44, Five Months of Hell in Italy.

James came on the podcast early in the year to talk about the Battle of Anzio, which also features in the book.

But today we're going to concentrate on the even bigger battle that was fought

at the same time to capture the formidable German position at Monte Cassino in southern Italy.

So many congratulations on the new book, Casino 44. It is, of course, your fourth on Italy. You'll

be glad to move to different geographical areas. I'm dumb of it. That's it. Italian campaigned over.

Yeah, it's, as you know, so years ago, when we first got to know each other, I think I was probably

working on Italy's sorrow. That was about the last year of the war, because no one ever really

done anything on it. And I was a bit obsessed with, you know, all the civilian stuff that was going on in the Civil War and which effectively what it was and Protestant's operations and, you know, fascist militias, as well as the kind of the fighting bit in the Apennines and the Gothic line and so on. And then I kind of left it for left the Italian campaign goodbye. But, you know, I've been over to casino so many times and just never written about it. And then I did the Sicily campaign. Then I got a bit carried away last year and did my book on The Savage Storm, which was about the talent campaign in 1943. Just because actually I felt that, you know, it deserved it and no one had, again, no one had ever really done it. People have written a lot about casino, and I wouldn't have

done it had I not felt I had something, you know, fresh to say about it and had I not felt

that a lot of historians had, you know, frankly, got it a bit wrong. Yeah, and you do have a lot to say about it. It's been, it's been really intriguing for me. I'm actually going to, it's, I was looking in my bookshelf actually.

In fact, I'm looking at it now.

Italy's sorrow is there.

And it's covering a period that I'm hoping to cover,

at least in a section's sorrow is there. And it's covering a period that I'm

hoping to cover, at least in a section of a future book, book I'm working on at the moment.

So that intrigues me. But it's the bit leading up to the capture of Rome, which takes place,

as I'm sure the listeners will know, just before D-Day, that you're covering in this book.

Yeah, literally just. Yeah. And it starts at the beginning of 44, where your last book left off, of course. Just bring us up to speed a little bit with what's going on. I mean, we don't need the full details of why the Allies are there. I think most listeners will have some kind of understanding of why they were there in the first place. But tell us where they've got to by the end of the year and what comes next, basically.

Well, basically, they're about 80 miles south of Rome at the closest.

They're drawing up against...

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