Product Description

Richard Lamb, one of the few Italian-speaking officers in the British Army during World War II, has relied in part on newly opened Italian archives to present a surprising and unprecedented history of the war in Italy from Mussolini's fall until the final victory. Chronicling an unbroken sequence of Nazi infamies, Lamb reveals how German troops massacred thousands of surrendering Italians in the Aegean islands, deported Italian Jews to Auschwitz, and slaughtered Italian hostages and POWs. Had it not been for Mussolini's frenzied attempts to protect his countrymen, Italy would have been treated even worse than Poland. Lamb answers important and controversial questions, such as why the Allies did not land unopposed in Italy before the Germans poured over the Brenner Pass, and why Pope Pius XII did not take a stronger stand on behalf of Jews and the victims of the Ardeatine massacre. He details Anthony Edens opposition to an aid for Italian partisans, and the disastrous order form the War Office that British POWs should stay in their camps. He unfolds the extraordinary stories of the Cossack settlement in the Fruili, the attempted annexation of northern Italy by de Gaulle and Tito, the contributions of the Royalist Army to the Allied cause, the Italian civilians who helped Allied POWs escape, and the German generals who failed to obey Hitler's order to "scorch" all of Northern Italy. War in Italy will long remain the most complete account ever published of one of the most terrible dramas of World War II.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57990 in Books
• Published on: 1996-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Customer Reviews

Authentic account of Italy in the last two years of war
This book is not a campaign history of the Allied conquest of Italy, but rather a multi-themed account of how the Italians fought the war after they "changed sides" in 1943.

Of course, not all Italians changed over. Mussolini led a puppet government in Salo and Lamb highlights both the pitiful attempts made by the Duce to restore something of his former power by the creation of a new Italian army and his patchy, yet still crucial to the lives of thousands, interventions in the brutal German running of his country. Lamb, who served with the Italians fighting on the Allied side (it's confusing isn't it), is fair on Mussolini and the Pope - vilified ever since for doing nothing about the slaughter of Italians and the deportation of Jews. This is a complicated issue and Lamb clearly has sympathy for the Papal dilemma as literally thousands of refugees were crammed into the Vatican, all of whom might be killed if the Germans were "provoked" to take over (as was in Hitler's mind).

Lamb makes a couple of personal interventions which makes me think a straight auto-biography by him would also be good, notably when Italian troops liberate Bologna and when he describes, with vehemence, how British troops on the ground, despite the views of their generals, were prepared to fight the Yugoslavs who had taken over Trieste and were behaving with a murderous brutality the Nazis would have been proud of.

An excellent book for anyone interested in Italy, particularly during the Second World War.