Churchill got up before a map with his pointer, and he kept pointing to Gibraltar, North Africa,

the Mediterranean, Sicily, and Italy.

Finally, he said, we should slit the soft belly of the Mediterranean.

Well, my friends, I assure you, when I landed at Salerno, I found it was a tough old gut.

U.S. Army General Mark Clark.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music history. ...andahs. ...you know... Episode 416, The Iron Gut of Europe

When we last talked about Italy, I left off at the end of September

1943 and noted that the Allied force in that country had gotten bogged down by an able German

defense led by field marshal Albert Kesselring. His fellow field marshal, Ervin

Rommel, had recommended the Vermacht abandon the Italian peninsula and draw its defensive line in

the northern part of the country. Kesselring thought that would miss an opportunity. The rugged

terrain of the peninsula was a defender's dream,

and Kesselring believed he could hold off the Allies in southern Italy for a long time.

Hitler had to make the call, and at first he was inclined to take the advice of Rommel,

who was his favorite commander, until the SS advised him they had reason to believe Romel was politically unreliable, and so Kesselring got his way.

On the Allied side, their troubles in Italy reopened old arguments between British and American

leaders. From the get-go, Churchill had

favored nibbling at the edges of Axis-occupied Europe, so to speak, a long-standing British strategy

for intervening in continental conflicts. While the Americans were gung-ho about taking the Germans

head on with an invasion somewhere in

Western Europe, most likely France. The British had to talk the Americans into the invasion of

...