Posted on 06/05/2014 9:35:27 AM PDT by rktman
Battles such as Anzio, Salerno, and Monte Cassino would be burned into the history books. The fighting cost some 300,000 American and British casualties and would not cease until the formal end of WWII in May of 1945. Pictured, British troops scramble through the rubble in Catania, August 1943.
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My dad still hasn’t gotten over Montecassino. And he to this day remembers the young German soldiers breaking down in tears as they went to die on the front.
Sorta tempered my otherwise rah-rah attitude about WWII.
But we all owe a debt of gratitude to your dad and all the others who battled every inch of that mess and then gave it all back to the Italians.
I just remembered something that is incredibly ironic.
The reason that I had to rush out of the reunion of the WWII vets of my 36th Infantry Division, was because I had to catch a flight to Germany to do some training with German Special Forces, and get my German jump wings.
My own father had been part of D-Day, and I had plenty to think about as I was boarding Luftwaffe planes surrounded by German paratroopers only a couple of weeks after the reunion.
How is it that the Italians and Italy escape being identified as part of the Nazi war machine, and Hitler allies?
Somehow Italy has disappeared from WWII almost entirely.
Not sure. Maybe because Italy didn’t do well militarily and had to be bailed out by Germany? Or more likely because Italians embraced the Allied invasion rather than fight them tooth and nail?
I’m sure it would have been different if Americans were fighting Italians rather than Germans up the peninsula.
It’s always been a mystery to me, I wonder if it is related to the focus on race, the same reason that Hitler is history’s boogieman to the western media, and Communism was the media’s protected cause.
Although Nazism was never a threat of becoming a global or important Ism, and Hitler and his ism were killed off by 1945, and Communism is a global Ism and enslaved half the world, the media seemed to want to undercut Western Civilization by concentrating on race, and Hitler’s racial purity, etc., I guess Italy would have diluted the Super Race, theme.
You may be on to something there. I think the Nazis did not view Italian blood too favorably.
And of course the whole Teutonic thing probably played like a lead balloon south of Alps. All that “reviving the glory of Rome” that Mussolini was on about could only reinforce the historical reality that when Rome was the capital of the world, the “Germani” were barbarians. So “Master Race”...mm.....not so much.
Probably the Italians were mostly bemused by the racial pretenses of Naziism.
Tell you what though, talk to a Greek and they’ll likely be less forgiving of Italy’s role in the Axis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohi_Day
I was thinking more of Western liberals not wanting to dilute their post WWII anti-Western Civ war, by diluting Nazism with anyone other than the pure Aryan blonds that they like to portray the Axis forces as.
They wanted WWII to become a war about the white race itself being evil, so the imagery is very important.
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