Italy at War and the Allies in the West

Italy at War and the Allies in the West PDF Author: Edward Alexander Powell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Italy at War and the Allies in the West

Italy at War and the Allies in the West PDF Author: Edward Alexander Powell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description


Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania

Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania PDF Author: Flavio G. Conti
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611479983
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
During World War II 51,000 Italian prisoners of war were detained in the United States. When Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, most of these soldiers agreed to swear allegiance to the United States and to collaborate in the fight against Germany. At the Letterkenny Army Depot, located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, more than 1,200 Italian soldiers were detained as co-operators. They arrived in May 1944 to form the 321st Italian Quartermaster Battalion and remained until October 1945. As detainees, the soldiers helped to order, stock, repair, and ship military goods, munitions and equipment to the Pacific and European Theaters of war. Through such labor, they lent their collective energy to the massive home front endeavor to defeat the Axis Powers. The prisoners also helped to construct the depot itself, building roads, sidewalks, and fences, along with individual buildings such as an assembly hall, amphitheater, swimming pool, and a chapel and bell tower. The latter of these two constructions still exist, and together with the assembly hall, bear eloquent testimony to the Italian POW experience. For their work the Italian co-operators received a very modest, regular salary, and they experienced more freedom than regular POWs. In their spare time, they often had liberty to leave the post in groups that American soldiers chaperoned. Additionally, they frequently received or visited large entourages of Italian Americans from the Mid-Atlantic region who were eager to comfort their erstwhile countrymen. The story of these Italian soldiers detained at Letterkenny has never before been told. Now, however, oral histories from surviving POWs, memoirs generously donated by family members of ex-prisoners, and the rich information newly available from archival material in Italy, aided by material found in the U.S., have made it possible to reconstruct this experience in full. All of this historical documentation has also allowed the authors to tell fascinating individual stories from the moment when many POWs were captured to their return to Italy and beyond. More than seventy years since the end of World War II, family members of ex-POWs in both the United States and Italy still enjoy the positive legacy of this encounter.

The Battle for Rome

The Battle for Rome PDF Author: Robert Katz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743216425
Category : Rome (Italy)
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
This landmark work draws on newly released documents and firsthand accounts to tell the dramatic story of Rome's dark days during the German occupation. 8-pages of photos. 2 maps.

Italy's Sorrow

Italy's Sorrow PDF Author: James Holland
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007176457
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
James Holland's ground-breaking account expertly documents the German advance to the stalemate of the Gothic line and a segment of Italian history that has been largely neglected. The war in Italy was the most destructive campaign in the west as the Allies and Germans fought a long, bitter and highly attritional conflict up the mountainous leg of Italy during the last twelve months of the Second World War. While the Allies and Germans were slogging it out through the mountains, the Italians were fighting their own battles, one where Partisans and Fascists were pitted against each other in a bloody civil war. Around them, civilians tried to live through the carnage, terror and anarchy while, in the wake of the Allied advance, beleaguered and impoverished Italians were forced to pick their way through the ruins of their homes and country and often forced into making terrible and heart-rending decisions in order to survive.

Mussolini's War

Mussolini's War PDF Author: John Gooch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 164313549X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
A remarkable new history evoking the centrality of Italy to World War II, outlining the brief rise and triumph of the Fascists, followed by the disastrous fall of the Italian military campaign. While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940. At that moment, with the wholly unexpected and sudden collapse of the French and British armies, Mussolini declared war on the Allies in the hope of making territorial gains in southern France and Africa. This decision proved a horrifying miscalculation, dooming Italy to its own prolonged and unwinnable war, immense casualties, and an Allied invasion in 1943 that ushered in a terrible new era for the country. John Gooch's new history is the definitive account of Italy's war experience. Beginning with the invasion of Abyssinia and ending with Mussolini's arrest, Gooch brilliantly portrays the nightmare of a country with too small an industrial sector, too incompetent a leadership and too many fronts on which to fight. Everywhere—whether in the USSR, the Western Desert, or the Balkans—Italian troops found themselves against either better-equipped or more motivated enemies. The result was a war entirely at odds with the dreams of pre-war Italian planners—a series of desperate improvisations against an allied force who could draw on global resources, and against whom Italy proved helpless.

Salerno 1943

Salerno 1943 PDF Author: Angus Konstam
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473817854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
A compelling account of the fierce ten-day battle that led to the end of Mussolini’s rule, with maps and photos. In September 1943, in the first weeks of the Allied campaign to liberate Italy, an Anglo-American invasion force of over 80,000 men was nearly beaten back into the sea by the German defenders in a ferocious ten-day battle at Salerno, south of Naples. This is the story of the tense, bitter struggle around the Salerno beachhead which decided the issue and changed the course of the campaign. For those ten critical days, the fate of Italy hung in the balance. Using documentary records, memoirs, and eyewitness accounts from all sides, Angus Konstam re-creates every stage of the battle at every level as it happened, day by day, hour by hour. His painstakingly researched account offers a fresh perspective on a decisive battle that has been neglected by British and American historians in recent years, and it gives a fascinating insight into the realities of warfare in Europe eighty years ago. Praise for Angus Konstam’s previous books “Wonderful details.” —Publishers Weekly “Riveting.” —History of War "Interesting and exciting . . . thoroughly enjoyable.” —Booklist

Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis

Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis PDF Author: Robert M. Edsel
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393240452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Monuments Men: "An astonishing account of a little-known American effort to save Italy's…art during World War II." —Tom Brokaw When Hitler’s armies occupied Italy in 1943, they also seized control of mankind’s greatest cultural treasures. As they had done throughout Europe, the Nazis could now plunder the masterpieces of the Renaissance, the treasures of the Vatican, and the antiquities of the Roman Empire. On the eve of the Allied invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower empowered a new kind of soldier to protect these historic riches. In May 1944 two unlikely American heroes—artist Deane Keller and scholar Fred Hartt—embarked from Naples on the treasure hunt of a lifetime, tracking billions of dollars of missing art, including works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Caravaggio, and Botticelli. With the German army retreating up the Italian peninsula, orders came from the highest levels of the Nazi government to transport truckloads of art north across the border into the Reich. Standing in the way was General Karl Wolff, a top-level Nazi officer. As German forces blew up the magnificent bridges of Florence, General Wolff commandeered the great collections of the Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace, later risking his life to negotiate a secret Nazi surrender with American spymaster Allen Dulles. Brilliantly researched and vividly written, the New York Times bestselling Saving Italy brings readers from Milan and the near destruction of The Last Supper to the inner sanctum of the Vatican and behind closed doors with the preeminent Allied and Axis leaders: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Churchill; Hitler, Göring, and Himmler. An unforgettable story of epic thievery and political intrigue, Saving Italy is a testament to heroism on behalf of art, culture, and history.

Panzer Commander

Panzer Commander PDF Author: Hans von Luck
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1783830174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
“This unique memoir tells the story of one of the field-grade officers whose martial skills sustained the Third Reich against a world in arms.”—Library Journal Panzer Commander is one of the classic memoirs of the Second World War. A professional soldier, Hans von Luck joined the Panzerwaffe in its earliest days, where he served under Erwin Rommel, and went on to fight in the Blitzkrieg in Poland, France and the Soviet Union. He then served with the Afrika Korps in the Western Desert and tells of the sometimes chivalrous relationship with the British 8th Army. After the collapse in Africa, he returned to Europe and fought throughout the Normandy campaign and was responsible for the failure of the British breakout attempt, Operation Goodwood. He then took part in the final desperate battles on the Eastern Front. Captured by the Soviets at the end of the war, he was held for five years in a prison camp in the Caucasus. After the war, he formed friendships with those who had been his opponents during it, including Major John Howard, who had led the capture of Pegasus Bridge in Normandy. With a new preface by the author’s widow, this unique and valuable account of one man’s war and its aftermath is required reading for all those interested in the Second World War. “One of the few books that MUST be part of any library . . . It is vivid and engaging. It paints the finest of verbal pictures and it does so without demonstrations of ego . . . it is one of the building blocks of knowledge that creates the palace of history.”—Firetrench

The Day of Battle

The Day of Battle PDF Author: Rick Atkinson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805088618
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 852

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Book Description
In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy.

At War on the Gothic Line

At War on the Gothic Line PDF Author: Christian Jennings
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466871733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Christian Jennings's At War on the Gothic Line tells the little-known story of the Allied effort to break the German defenses in Northern Italy—told through the eyes of the multi-national force that fought it. In the autumn of 1944, as Patton’s army paraded through Paris, another Allied force was gathering in southern Italy. Spearheaded by over 100,000 American troops, this vast, international army was faced with a grim task—break The Gothic Line, a series of interconnected German fortifications that stretched across the mountains of northern Italy. Striving to reach Europe’s vulnerable underbelly before the Red Army, these Allied soldiers fought uphill against entrenched enemies in some of the final and most brutal battles of the Second World War. In At War on the Gothic Line, veteran war correspondent and historian Christian Jennings provides an unprecedented look inside this unsung but highly significant campaign. Through the eyes of thirteen men and women from seven different countries, Jennings brings history to life as he vividly recounts the courageous acts of valor performed by these soldiers facing overwhelming odds, even as many experienced discrimination at the hands of their allies and superiors. Witness the courage of a young Japanese-American officer willing to die for those under his command. Lie in wait with a troop of Canadian fur trappers turned snipers. Creep along mountain paths with Indian warriors as they assault fortified positions in the dead of night. Learn to fear a one-armed SS-Major guilty of some of the most atrocious war-crimes in the European theater. All these stories and more pack the pages of this faced-paced, action-heavy history, taking readers inside one of the most important, and least discussed, campaigns of World War Two.