8/8: 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
⏱️ 6 minutes
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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 Montgomery
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor with James Holland. His new book is The Savage Storm, the Battle for Italy |
| 0:09.4 | 1943. It is Christmas, It is Christmas, 1943, and all of the players' diaries are intact except for those who are KIA or WIA, and ahead of them is a nightmare and we need to build a nightmare because that comes |
| 0:28.1 | next in James's presentation the next book or whatever book it comes, I want to get to Rome, but we're well short |
| 0:36.3 | of Rome right now and above them all, above the Liri Valley that they've penetrated |
| 0:42.2 | through is Monte Cassino. |
| 0:44.4 | What is that, James? |
| 0:46.4 | Well, Monte Cassino is the, uh, is a little sort of mountain massive, which runs down |
| 0:50.9 | to a little kind of sort of peak and a little point that sticks out |
| 0:56.0 | over the Leary Valley which is this sort of valley floor, wide valley floor, which |
| 1:00.3 | is basically the route up to Rome along which the Via Kazulina, the Highway 6, runs from Naples all the way to the Eternal City. |
| 1:10.0 | But right at the edge of this massive is a Benedictine Moncery, which was Abbey, which was founded in the sixth century by St Benedict, and it's still there. |
| 1:22.0 | And it towers over the Nury Valley and over the town of |
| 1:27.2 | Casino which lies at the foot of the mountains below and it's an obvious |
| 1:31.4 | strong point because it overlooks the valley below and particularly the road which hugs the mountains on that side of the valley. |
| 1:39.0 | And of course again, the Germans are there and they've got observers up there and they make this the |
| 1:43.4 | absolute kind of sort of bulwark of the next defensive line the Gustav line which |
| 1:48.0 | follows the the cracking open of the Bernhard line the winter line which the Americans managed to prize open with the support of the British |
| 1:57.6 | late December, 1943. |
| 1:59.7 | So having got through this terrible battle from the kind of you know back end of |
| 2:05.0 | from the beginning of November two months worth of trying to hammer their way through |
| 2:09.1 | the Bernard line the winter line the start of 1944 they find themselves confronted with this next |
| 2:17.0 | part of the kind of double lock system here which is the Gustav line around Monte |
... |
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