Costly and heartbreaking, the Allies' Italian Campaign had been conceived as an opportunity to make what seemed relatively easy inroads into the Nazi-held European mainland while also drawing off German military resources that would otherwise be committed to the Soviet front. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw the invasion of Italy as a means of attacking "the soft underbelly of Europe," and following the successful completion of the North African Campaign, it certainly seemed like the next logical step. From North Africa, the Allies proceeded with the Sicily Campaign and, that completed, jumped off for Italy.

Opportunistic and logical, the Italian Campaign nevertheless did not receive unanimous Allied backing. In general, Churchill favored it, as he favored a concentration of force throughout the Mediterranean, but American military planners, including George C. Marshall and Dwight David Eisenhower, believed that devoting major forces to this theater unnecessarily diluted efforts that should be allocated to Operation Overlord, the Normandy landings (D-day). Soviet premier Joseph Stalin also objected to the concentration on the Italian Campaign, believing that it was an excuse to avoid a major invasion of Europe. Churchill and the British Imperial General Staff countered that the action in Italy would not only draw German strength away from the Soviet front, but also away from France, thereby facilitating the planned invasion. Ultimately, this logic carried the day. What none of the Allies had anticipated, however, was the fierceness of German resistance in Italy. The belief was that Allied forces would advance quickly up the Italian peninsula and would soon be positioned north of Florence, posing a grave menace to the highly vulnerable southern flank of the German army. In fact, progress up the peninsula was a deadly slog, and the southern flank of the German army was not reached until very nearly the end of the war. . .

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