James Holland is Back: The Forgotten Campaign That Shaped the World We Live In

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1:23We're back with historian James Holland, this time diving into his passion for the Italian campaign of World War II. For me, this part of history hits closer to home. It's not just about strategy and battles, but what ordinary Italian families live through. The human story can often get lost behind the bigger headlines of history, and James brings those struggles back into focus. We also explore the brutal reality of the Gustav Line, the gamble of Anzio Beach, and the leadership choices that shaped it all. Like me, James is very passionate about the Italian campaign. We learn a lot about the Italian people, the culture of what was going on at that time, the decline of fascism, fascism as a failed political idea in the country of Italy, and how the Allies generally got along with the Italian people, despite having to fight the Italian soldiers and some of the German soldiers that were stationed there.

2:18So tremendous importance in this book and in your lives about collaboration, the importance of putting a team together despite the disparate nature of the team, potential differences in politics or policy or ethnic heritage. But putting a team together made all the difference in the Second World War, particularly in this brilliant masterpiece that James Holland has written.

2:42Welcome back to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci, and joining us, can't get enough of this man, James Holland, award-winning historian, best-selling writer. He's also a broadcaster, a fellow podcaster, a goal hanger with me. And this was part of his trilogy on the Italian campaign in World War II, and it's the last piece of his trilogy. And I'm going to venture to say that I think it's the best piece. I'm going to explain why in a second. But the title of the book is Casino 44, The Brutal Battle for Rome. First of all, it's great to have you back on. Can't get enough of you, James.

3:22You know I'm a huge fan. But Casino to me was the best because it was the conclusion. You got to see the channels of politics and human behavior all converging together. And you got to see the Italian citizens in terms of the mistakes that they were making. And what a lesson that is actually for today, by the way, James. And so I want to discuss that with you as well. But for me, this was human tragedy, warfare, strategy related to warfare. But it was also about human beings having a reckoning with themselves about what right and wrong in their country. So anyway, sorry I'm being so long winded, but thank you for coming back on.

4:08No, thank you for having me. What kept pulling you back into the Italian campaign, though? Tell me why you decided your love affair with World War II continues, but why Italy, why the Italian campaign, which frankly is not as well written about as the Battle of the Bulge or the Battle of Britain, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I guess that was part of the reason, to be honest. But also, I mean, as you know, I'm a massive Italophile, so I love Italy. And actually, you're right, we love you, and Italy loves you. Well, I've got to say, I mean, it is a trilogy because I wrote Sicily, Savage Storm, Casino, kind of pretty much concurrently together.

4:55But actually, about 20 years ago, I wrote a book which I suppose would be the fourth in the quartet if you were to put them together. but it was such a long time ago and it was such an outlier that it's hard to see it in those terms. But actually that covered the last year of the war in Italy. It was called Italy's Sorrow and it came out, I don't know, maybe best part of 20 years ago now. But what drew me that in the first place was I was reading a story in the Times newspaper over here in the UK. And it was a story about how the then German president, not the chancellor, the president, President Rao had been to Italy, been to Bologna, and he'd been to a little town called Marzabotto, which is about, I don't know, 15 miles south of Bologna.

5:40And there he had publicly apologized for a massacre that had taken place in the mountains overlooking Marzabotto called the Marzabotto Massacre at the end of September 1944. And there was an account of a witness who had survived. And he was saying, I saw a baby being bayoneted, and all these women and children were just lined up and murdered. and it said, you know, it was the biggest civilian massacre in Western Europe outside of, you know, death camps, you know, bigger than La Dice, bigger than Orador, Siglem. I thought, what? You know, how come I don't know about this? So I looked into it and started and tried to find out a bit more about it and just got completely obsessed with it.

6:19And that was my start point for writing Italy's Sorin. And I went out to Montessori, this mountain where this incredibly beautiful place where seven, I think it was 785 Five civilians were massacred over a couple of days. And I interviewed some survivors, which was just the most amazing and grueling experience. And one that I will never get. I mean, literally, when I was talking to Cornelia Perzelli, who had lost her twin brother and sister, her mother, her father had seen it all from a mountain above and got demented and died a couple of months later. Her second sister had been raped and badly wounded, but has survived too.

6:55And it was just, I can remember every bit of it. And I've been to that place. You can still go to the little cemetery where she was one of 202 of, you know, because there were massacres within the bigger massacre that were lined up in this little cemetery. And there's still bullet holes on the crosses and stuff and in the walls. I mean, you just can't believe it. I remember there's one thing she told me, which I've never forgotten. She said that they were marched from the church into this walled cemetery. And she said there was one of the old ladies and one of the Germans helped, offered a hand to help her, this old lady, through the gate and into the cemetery.

7:27And she just couldn't understand it. And it really stuck with me. And I wanted to understand what had happened, but I also wanted to understand why that happened. And that then led me to kind of, you know, thinking, well, why does no one know about the end of the war and partisans and fascists and Mussolini and all the allied armies? And, you know, what the heck's going on in Italy, this amazing place that you and I love so much? So then I kind of put it to bed and I didn't do anything for all this time. And then I kind of did Sicily and then the invasion of Italy in 1943. And then, as you say, Casino.

7:59So it was that that kind of sucked me in in the first place. And I just, you know, I visit Italy every year. There's not a year goes by where I don't go there. I love it. And I love the Italian people. And I think, you know, their war experience is just such a tragedy. You know, Mussolini just didn't have the greatest geopolitical understanding. You know, he thought he could pull the wall over everybody. He thought that Britain was beaten, thought he had his main chance, and that he could dominate the Mediterranean and North Africa and East Africa. He thought he could just wrap it all up, be easy peasy.

8:34It was like his on a plate. And he hadn't reckoned on the Brits fighting on in 1940. That took him to various forks in the road. He just kept taking the wrong one. And he ended up being embroiled in a war in the Mediterranean, which ended in Tunisia in May 1943, which then progressed to Sicily, which then progressed to Italy, which he was powerless to do anything about, really, as were the Italian people. I mean, after Mussolini was deposed in the third week of July 1943, the Italian leadership was just crippled. They were between a massive rock and a hard place. You know, what do you do? Do you kind of just go, okay, we'll throw in the towel?

9:11They were also occupied. But if you do that, you know, you're going to be absolutely shafted by the Germans, who do not take kindly. Or do you kind of try and hedge your bets? And also their leadership just wasn't up to it. The king was pathetic. His senior ministers were just repugnant and morally just bankrupt. And the poor Italian people, it might have been a nation since 1860 or whatever, but it wasn't really a nation state as such despite fascism. Fascism was a structure for the cities, for Rome maybe, for the elites. But for your average Italian punter living in this little walled village, you know, somewhere in the back of nowhere in a mountain in the Abruzzi Mountains or something, what do they care about, Mussolini?

10:00You know, what do they care about, Central Authority? You know, the rhythms of daily life of the annual seasons have just been going on year after year after year for centuries. And then suddenly this typhoon of steel arrives in southern Italy, and it's just bulldozes this terrible path up the leg. And, you know, anyone, unfortunately enough to be in the middle of this, is just horrific. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to San Pietro, which is just south of Casino. John Houston made a famous film about it. But there is the village as it was left in December 1943. And it's so wistful, Anthony.

10:36I mean, you're just there and you look into these houses. You can still see paint on the walls. You can see the kitchen sink, you know, all this kind of stuff. You can half-dose your eyes and you can hear the laughter of children and the chatter of an Italian family, but it's gone. There are ghosts. You know, it's gone. And that's the tragedy, and it moves me. Well, just to give you some context from my family. So my family, it was from one of those villages. It wasn't walled because it was up in the mountains. And it was an agrarian village. It was a farming village. and my grandparents obviously left that village because they were impoverished.

11:16Interestingly enough, my grandmother's brother stayed in the village. So when I was a young man, I used to go back to the village and see him and the house that my grandmother was born in and so forth. And that part of the family stayed there. But when they talked about the war, that's how they talked about it, which is what I found so fascinating about your book. You captured what the Italian people that were living outside of Rome felt about the war. Like, what the hell is going on? And why are we doing this? And you know this about Bob Dole, the former senator from Kansas. He was severely wounded in April of 1945 in the mountains.

12:00He was serving as a second lieutenant in the 10th Mountain Division. 10th Mountain, yep. Yep. When he was wounded and he has a limited use of his right arm. When he went against Richard Nixon in the 1970s and they asked him why, he said, well, you know, I was wounded in Italy fighting for the Constitution. Imagine these people today. Fast forward, James, right? So no, no, Richard Nixon has broken the constitution. I watched several of my friends die in these battles in Italy fighting for the constitution. So even though he's part of my party, the constitution, uber alis, the constitution is more important than everything else.

12:45And so this stuff is gone now, James. And this is the sadness that I feel about it. When I read your books, the books are about valor. The book represents confusion from some of the Italian citizens, some hope, some despair. But the books are really about valor and what people did during the war, personal sacrifices they were making for the greater good of something, the rejection of fascism and the pursuit of freedom. But I want to go to the Gustav line. What is the Gustav line? Tell us what it is. Tell us why it was so important. Talk about the morale. Talk about the weather during the period of time.

13:29But start with the Gustav line, if you don't mind. Well, it's your thing. Well, the Gustav Line is the second part of a kind of like a double lock. Think of like the most secure safe you can think of. You know, you've got the first cage, you know, outside the front. You've got to let through that. Then you've got to get through the next door before you can get to your mula. And that's the first line is the Bernhardt Line. And U.S. Fifth Army, under the command of General Mark W. Clark, bashes its way through this. And by the way, this is an international army as well. It might be the U.S. Army, but it's got British troops.

14:01It's got Indian troops. It's got North African troops, French troops in it, and Canadians, for that matter, as well, all fighting under the banner of U.S. Fifth Army. They get their way through the Bernhardt line, and then literally eight miles further on is the Gustav line. The Gustav line is not like the Great Wall of China or anything like that. It's not like a solid wall of defense. It's a series of interlocking defenses. So it's a series of, you know, you'd have kind of machine gun posts and mortar positions up in the mountains, interlocking fires. So they're all crossing every little bit covered.

14:39You'd have observers on the high ground looking down on the valleys. That's where the roads are. So those are your key arteries if you're attacking and trying to push north to Rome. You'd have lots of minefields around the rivers, lots of barbed wire. You know, it's pretty solidly defended. And the big problem is, is when you've got these artillery observers on the high ground, they are looking down on the roads and they are directing artillery fire, which is further back, indirect fire. So they're lobbing shells in an arc over the mountains onto this road. It's all been zeroed. So what that means is they've already worked out the coordinates of where they've got to drop their shells.

15:16So anything that moves along that road is just going to get absolutely trashed unless you cleared the observer from the high ground above. But the trouble is the observers are then defended by infantry. also in the mountains above. And the big problem for the Allies is they're very mechanized. That's their kind of USP is you steal our flesh to do a lot of the hard jobs as you possibly can. But in winter, in mountains, there's a limit to how many Shermans you can set up a mountain or dodge trucks or GMCs or half tracks or whatever. This ends up being a foot slogger's war, augmented by the use of mules, which Americans and British and French are not really trained to use in the first place, to get up there.

16:00And it just, it's brutal. I mean, it is absolutely brutal. These mountains are really high. They're kind of 3 ,000 foot high plus. Lots of jagged peaks, lots of gullies where mortars and machine guns can hide. Lots of very, very thin soil. And what that means is that when a mortar round comes down, which is a fairly small explosive, or a bigger shell from an artillery piece comes down. It chips lots of, not only does it splinter and spray shrapnel, bits of metal all over the place, it also smashes the rock because there's no soil to absorb the explosion. And razor shards of stone also kind of fly around the place.

16:42So it's just absolutely horrendous. And what the Allies discovered was that when you attack these positions, there's only so many men you can attack with at one time and it ends up being quite a narrow front because you physically can't fit more than let's say for example a company strength attack should be about 100 men on one place and they get mowed down or cut down or kind of cut to pieces or whatever you know about 30 % wounded 10 % dead you know suddenly you're kind of 60 % down on where you are can't really function and then you send the next 100 in and then the next 100 it just rotates and you can never attack on mass.

17:20And that's the problem they have. But they're so close at the end of January, beginning of February, 1944, despite the awful weather, despite the conditions, despite being very much kind of bottom of the pile in terms of priorities in the war in Europe. They're so close to the breakthrough, but they just can't quite do it. And that's the tragedy for all concerned, including the Germans, I used to add, They were also having an absolutely horrific time. You know, again, it's as brutal as Normandy. It's as brutal as anything else that we've seen in the war. And yet it's fairly underreported. You know, when I was a kid, my grandmother, I used to collect these models, you know, put these models together.

18:09I'm going to send you a picture of the box. but it was a 1968 vintage Aurora, the model company, Anzio Beach. Okay. Nice. My grandmother said, okay, you have to learn about Anzio Beach. And I was seven years old. What the hell is Anzio Beach? And then when I read your book about Anzio Beach, I didn't realize the stalemate that took place at Anzio Beach. So tell us a little bit about this, This is obviously the Allies are coming into the beach. The beach is incredibly well fortified, in some ways even more well fortified than Normandy Beach. And they're stuck on the beach. Tell us a little bit about that.

18:54Yeah, so the idea with Anzio is to do an invasion behind the Gustav Line, kind of about 30 miles south of Rome, and kind of hopefully unlock the Gustav Line. So the plan is to hammer the Gustav Line in lots of different places all at once, or in sequence rather. draw lots of German troops away from that, and then at the same time, do this attack around the back. And hopefully the combination of this huge pressure on the Gustav line combined with kind of the risk of being attacked around the back would kind of turn, would persuade the Germans to abandon that position and retreat back to the north.

19:31And I have to say, literally every single German commander in Italy thought that that was definitely the right course of action. The only person who didn't was the guy who was our overall commander in chief, a chap called Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who was a Luftwaffe Field Marshal. But he was also the overall ground commander, well, the overall military commander in Italy at that time. And he was sort of slavishly devoted to his oath to Hitler. And Hitler had turned his eagle eye onto the Italian campaign. And when the Hitlerian spotlight falls on you, that's pretty bad news because it means you can run, but you can't hide.

20:05Well, you can't run and you can't hide either. and it means no reverses you know no you know you can't retreat so you just have to keep going even though your your men are absolutely a breaking point so everyone else was going i really think we should pull back um herr general failed marshal and customers going no i can't because the fear won't let me so so it could have worked the big problem that the allies have is the obvious thing to do in italy where it's long and narrow and it's got lots of mountains and it really doesn't sort of encourage an overland approach, is to outflank it by sea. And, you know, all Allied operations are, by their nature, amphibious, because they've got to come from America or from Britain, and they've got to get across oceans and seas and stuff.

20:48So they all are. But it doesn't matter the fact that, well, first of all, there were no landing craft in 1939, and there weren't really many, even until 1941. And so the landing craft, the assault craft, the Higgins boat, but also the much bigger landing ships, which are about 120 yards long. Those are the really key things. They were new to warfare in the early part of the 1940s. And Americans alone, between May 1942 and April 1943, built 8 ,719 assault craft of varying kind, which seems like a huge number. But then you have to think, oh, yeah, but hang on a minute. They're also fighting an island-hopping war in the Pacific.

21:26Oh, and by the way, you've got to do Sicily. and they're all taking a huge amount of punishment because these landing craft aren't just depositing people on the day of the invasion. They're going back every single day, all day, every day, day and night, dropping supplies off. And every time a landing craft hits the beach, it's a crash landing. You're coming onto the beach. And these things are really cheaply made, so they cause damage, which then means you've got to repair them. And at the same time, by the way, you've also got to prepare for Operation Overlord, which is the priority in the main event.

21:54So what sounds like a huge number of landing craft actually means there isn't much left for an operation in Anzio. There's enough to make it a punt worth taking, but there isn't enough to guarantee decisive victory. And that's the problem. And that is not the fault of General Alexander, who is the overall commander-in-chief of the Allies in Italy. It's certainly not the fault of Mark Clark, who was the US Fifth Army commander. It's certainly not the fault of the troops. It's just the way it is. You can only do what you can do with what you've got. And the Allies constantly throughout the Second World War are constantly fighting this battle between got to get a move on, got to get the war over and done with.

22:29But at the same time, we don't want to have catastrophic losses. So it's a kind of, you know, and we've only got X number of supplies. I mean, everyone always wants more than they've got. And that is absolutely the case for Italy. And the real problem with Italy is that there's enough to do something to make it worth invading Sicily, but there's not enough to secure a victory easily and convincingly. And that's the fate of the poor bastards that end up having to kind of slog out mountains or land on the andio beachhead and they just don't quite have enough and the commander of the of the american corps that goes in which again is a is a polyglot force of british and americans um us6 corps he's not kind of he's not a thruster he's not a kind of tactical genius he's not a kind of a part right this is general clark right no this is john lucas i think he's superb i'm a big fan of no i was gonna say you write very favorably of mark clark yeah i think he's great.

23:21I think he, you know, no man has, in the US army ever has a larger army, a single army. I mean, there are commanders like Bradley or rather, say Eisenhower, who have armies under their command, but no one has a larger single army than Mark Clark. And not a single American army commander has the nationalities that he has to deal with, you know, which makes life a lot more complicated because you're dealing with lots of cultural differences and all sorts of stuff and politics come into play in a way they don't if it's just your own nation, own national force. So he does all that. And, you know, he's broken through the Bernhard line in winter, which is an amazing feat.

24:00He's very closely, nearly broken through the Gustav line. He's not given enough landing craft to be comfortable for Anzio, but it kind of almost works. And what it does do is draw off a huge amount of German troops. And when they counter attack at Anzio, they get rebuffed. So that's both tying down lots of German troops and destroying them, attritting them at the same time. And when you're then planning your big effort, which is Operation Diadem, which is finally launched on the evening of the 11th of May 1944, which is a big, big concentrated effort. Now the rains have dried out and the mud has turned to dust and all the rest of it.

24:35You can bring to bear your superiority in air power and mechanization, and all the rest of it. Suddenly, having that foothold in the Anzio Bridgehead, 30 miles south of Rome and kind of 40 miles north of the Gustav Line, is really damn useful. So, you know, I'm broadly in favor of, I think the Anzio Bridgehead was a good idea, and I don't think it was the fault of the ground commanders. If you want to do any finger pointing for the failures of the Italian campaign, point them at the combined chiefs of staff who authorized it in the first place without the proper kind of backing and support and prioritization.

25:11Well, you may remember this. You know, Churchill wanted more of an attack through the Mediterranean. Roosevelt didn't want it. He wanted to wait for the Normandy invasion. And so you can see some of the implications here in these battles. So I'm going to implore you to look at the text that I sent you and look at the copywriting on the instruction manual for the model because it's 1968, James, and this is copywriting for a seven-year-old's model. And the density of history that's in the copywriting is extraordinary. I went back and looked at it in preparation for this interview, and the copywriter knew the story as rendered in your book.