41.9°N 12.5°E Southern Europe Italian Campaign
Briefing
The invasion of Sicily in July 1943 knocked Mussolini from power within weeks, but the campaign that followed became one of the war's cruellest slogs — Salerno, the Gustav Line, Monte Cassino, Anzio — as Allied armies ground up the mountainous peninsula against skilful German defence until the final days of the war.
Books Covering This Event (15)
Popular History
Four battles, four months, and the destruction of a 1,400-year-old abbey — the hardest fighting of the western war.
The invasion of Sicily and the brutal Allied advance up the Italian peninsula.
British intelligence floats a corpse with fake invasion plans to convince Hitler that Sicily was a feint.
The war of Felix Sparks and the 157th Infantry — from Sicily to Dachau.
Historical Fiction
An Italian-American major governs a liberated Sicilian town and replaces the bell the fascists melted down.
Five saboteurs climb an impossible cliff to silence the German guns commanding the Aegean.
A darkly comic novel about a bombardier trapped by the absurd logic of military bureaucracy.
A burned man in a ruined Italian villa, a Canadian nurse, a Sikh sapper, and a thief — four lives wrecked by the desert war.
An Italian officer garrisons a Greek island with a mandolin and falls in love — until Italy surrenders and his German allies turn their guns.
A teenager guides Jews over the Alps, then becomes the personal driver — and spy — inside the German command in Milan.
Memoir
Pyle's dispatches from Sicily, Italy, and Normandy — the war at the level of one tired man at a time.
Willie and Joe — the unshaven, exhausted dogfaces of the infantry — in the Pulitzer-winning cartoons that defined the GI's war.
Patton's war diary from Morocco to the Rhine, published two years after his death.
The Supreme Commander's own account of the war in the West, from Torch to the German surrender.
A British intelligence officer's diary of a year in liberated, starving, magnificent Naples.
This Event on Screen
Screen adaptations of books on this page, each linked to the book it came from: Catch-22 (1970).
The War in Books: The Italian Campaign
Mountains, mud and hunger, and the war’s funniest and bleakest books.
Italy was the campaign that looked easier on the map than it was. Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle, the middle volume of his Liberation Trilogy, is the history to read: a clear-eyed narrative of Sicily, Salerno, Cassino and Anzio that does not hide its cost or the Allied quarrels over strategy. Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat covers the deception that opened it, in which British intelligence planted false invasion plans on a corpse, and it reads like a thriller.
What makes this shelf unusual is its range of tone. Ernie Pyle’s Brave Men and Bill Mauldin’s Up Front both record the infantryman’s war, one in prose and the other in Willie and Joe cartoons with his own dry commentary, and their tired humour says as much as any history. Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 is a British Field Security sergeant’s diary of a starving, resourceful city, and it is among the finest pieces of writing to come from the whole war. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, set among American airmen on a Mediterranean island, turned the bureaucracy of the war into a joke that has lasted. Read Atkinson for the campaign, and Lewis for everything no campaign history can hold.