The Bitter Fight to Free Italy

The troops who fought their way up through the Italian peninsula in 1943 were labelled the ‘D-Day Dodgers’, but for the tens of thousands of men who were seriously wounded in the first months of the campaign, the mocking phrase was loaded with irony. It had all started so positively on 10 July 1943, when 2,600 ships landed more than 180,000 Commonwealth and American troops on the island of Sicily, part of what Churchill had described as the ‘soft under-belly of Europe’. This amphibious assault, supported by airborne landings, marked the start of the Italian Campaign. The Allies’ military planners thought it might be possible for a concentrated invasion to quickly knock Italy out of the war. The reality, however, was completely different. The situation was compounded by Italy’s surrender on 3 September 1943, an act which forced Hitler to launch Operation Axis, the occupation of Italy. In the months that followed, Allied troops were required to perform multiple amphibious assaults, engage in trench warfare, fight in mud, in freezing rain and snow, in the most challenging terrain imaginable. This book tells the story of the early months of the Italian campaign through the eyes of one 21-year-old private in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, Dennis Neil, who found himself lying severely wounded and near death on an Italian mountain on a bitterly cold day in November 1943. While a surgeon at a Field Hospital fought to save his life, his family received a telegram notifying them of the death of his elder brother in that same campaign. This is a story that traces one soldier’s journey to that mountainside and how his life changed irrevocably as a result of the wounds he suffered that day. It is a dramatic, and harrowing, story that is told in unparalleled detail, with the benefit of contemporary records and unpublished photographs, having been compiled through the memoirs of Dennis Neil by his son, John. Winston Churchill called Italy the ‘soft underbelly of the Axis’. It proved to be quite the opposite.

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