The Italian Campaign, 1943–1945
From the armistice and Salerno to the surrender in the Alps — the slow, brutal climb up the peninsula, and the only front where Italians fought on both sides.
Italy’s armistice was announced on 8 September 1943, and the war on the peninsula began the next morning: the battleship Roma, steaming to hand herself over, was sunk by a German Fritz X guided bomb with 1,393 of her crew, and the Allied Fifth Army waded ashore at Salerno into a counterattack that nearly threw it back into the sea. What followed was not the quick march on Rome the planners had hoped for but a twenty-month climb against the grain of the Apennines — the Volturno, the four battles of Cassino, and the landing at Anzio on 22 January 1944 that was meant to unhinge the front and instead became a besieged beachhead.
Rome fell on 4 June 1944, two days before D-Day stole the headlines; the Gothic Line consumed the autumn; and the German armies in Italy surrendered on 2 May 1945, the first complete capitulation of the war in the West. It was also Italy’s most painful front: while the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana and Italian armour under German control fought on in the north, Co-Belligerent squadrons flew for the Allies from the liberated south — the same machines, on both sides of the line. Every machine below has its own page in the archive.
