Lemaymiami:
I just finished one of the trilogy by Rick Atkinson this one covers the N.Africa/Italyicon conflict "The Day of Battle". What happened there is nothing that I was led to believe. The 1st Div was there, regular army but the 36 and 45th were just untrained National Guard divisions and they died by the thousands. They were up against the Germans that had a lot of Ostfront veterans and were expert killers at defense warfare. These US divisions had civilian officers, guys who had the gas station on the corner or ran a business. It was a disaster landing at N.Africa. Sicily was just as bad in spite of relieving many of the officers. The landing at Salerno and Anzio turned into disasters as well. It was conflict run by politicians and egotistical Generals like Clark and Montgomery. Run up Italy to Rome caused 36,000 US casualties. This is just one of the little secrets that nobody wanted to hear. This author mixes in a ton of statistics that are not common knowledge. As an example the Germans had 66,000 locomotives, they had so many that it would have been possible to just drive them down to Monte Casino and abandon them. The numbers are stunning. I did my year in II Corps in 66-67 and the waste was ridiculous then, imagine what ww2 was like.