3/8: Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 by James Holland (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Storm-Battle-Italy-1943/dp/080216160X
Following victory in Sicily, while the central command planned the spring 1944 invasion of France, Allied troops crossed into southern Italy in September 1943, expecting to drive Axis forces north and liberate Rome by Christmas. Italy quickly surrendered but German divisions fiercely resisted, and the hoped-for quick victory descended into one of the most challenging and protracted battles of the entire war.
James Holland’s The Savage Storm, chronicling the dramatic opening months of the Italian Campaign in unflinching and insightful detail, is unlike any campaign history yet written. Holland has always narrated war at ground level, but here goes further by chronicling events almost entirely through the contemporary eyes of those who were there on all sides and at all levels—Allied, Axis, civilians alike. Weaving together a wealth of letters, diaries, and other documents—from the likes of American General Mark Clark, German battalion commander Georg Zellner, New Zealand lance-corporal Roger Smith, legendary war reporter Ernie Pyle, and Italian politician Filippo Caracciolo—Holland traces the battles as they were experienced across plains, over mountains, through shattered villages and cities, in intense heat and, towards the end of December 1943, frigid cold and relentless rain.
1943 Italy
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor with James Holland, the author of the new book The Savage Storm |
| 0:09.1 | The Battle for Italy, 1943. |
| 0:11.9 | The rest of the story. The Americans and British have landed Operation |
| 0:16.6 | Avalanche south of Naples between Southwest Salerno. The Germans commanded by Smiling Albert Kesselring, a U.A. Lutvoffa general, who is at this point |
| 0:31.3 | given command of the South of Italy by Hitler. |
| 0:35.0 | We're at the north of Italy in the possession of Rommel and Army Group B. |
| 0:40.0 | What is puzzling here is the politics in Germany. Hitler choosing back and forth always |
| 0:49.2 | uncertain what's coming next around him. |
| 0:53.0 | James, I spend time with the counterattack |
| 0:57.0 | because it shows once again |
| 1:00.0 | how the commanders are always looking over their shoulder to what will Hitler make of my decision |
| 1:06.2 | We need to meet Albert Kesselring what is significant about him? He's not a Prussian |
| 1:20.0 | No, he's not from that traditional kind of aristocratic military elite. He was an artilleryman in the First World War, later out of the Army post-war, then joined the Lufthansa, the civilian |
| 1:29.5 | airline that was formed in the late 1920s, and switched over to the Luftwaffe when it was |
| 1:35.5 | formed in, when it was announced in 1935 and it was a very able administrator, ends up being chief of staff after the death of |
| 1:46.2 | Vable in 1936, I think it was. |
| 1:51.2 | It was an air fleet chief for Poland and then subsequently the attack in the West and then the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940. |
| 1:57.0 | Before moving to in late 1941 was given command of the Luftwaffe forces in the south in the Mediterranean and was responsible for the Blitz of Malta for example. |
| 2:08.0 | And steadily grew in authority and position and became you know by by this time was |
| 2:15.7 | commander-in-chief of German forces in the South which included kind of |
| 2:19.1 | of obviously naval forces but army forces as well and there were two army chiefs in Italy by the end of August, |
| 2:25.0 | 1943, beginning of September by the time of the invasion. |
... |
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