Interesting question, @coxjul – It’s actually worth a second to ponder why the Italian campaign doesn’t get more attention in the wargaming community / market.

Ironically, the Italian Army did very little fighting in Italy itself. I know, sounds strange. But almost as soon as the Allies landed at Sicily in July 1943, the Italian government ousted Mussolini, put in a new government, and tried to join the Allies.

The Germans caught wind of this and invaded Italy, sort of a “occupation for your own safety” kind of thing.

So Sicily was bloody but relatively quick, it saw Montgomery put firmly on the rise and Patton damned near ruin his own career – this was the only time Patton and Montgomery were anything near “equals” in the Allied command structure, despite all we hear about this famous rivalry that existed between the two (probably existed more in Patton’s mind than anything else).

But when Italy itself was invaded at Salerno landings, and later supported by further landings at Anzio, things bogged down VERY quickly, for three main reasons.

1) The battlefield itself. Italy, of course, is a long, thin, narrow peninsula with no real open flanks. When the Allies tried to exploit naval superiority to “create” open flanks and land troops around and behind the Germans, as we see at Anzio, quick German responses and confused Allied command result in “beached whales” as Churchill put it.

Also, Italy is very mountainous with many rivers cutting across it. Perfect defensive terrain upon which the Germans took full advantage.

2) Italy was definitely the lower priority on the Allied command list – upcoming prep for D-Day in Normandy was everything. Churchill fought this tooth and nail at the 1943 Tehran Conference, but it was clear Churchill’s proposals were more about preserving the British Empire post-war and beating the Soviets to the Balkans than actually defeating Hitler. So Roosevelt and Stalin overruled him, and Overlord was given every priority in the West. Ergo, Allied commanders in Italy *(Harold Alexander, I think, with XVIII Army Group – comprised of Mark Clark commanding US Fifth Army and ??? commanding British Eighth Army) had to do fight their war with leftovers.

3) The German commander in Italy was absolutely superb, far superior to one-trick ponies like Rommel. This was Field Marshal “Smiling” Albert Kesselring, Rommel’s boss in North Africa (you know, the one you never hear about, the one whose orders Rommel kept ignoring that landed him in a no-win situation at El Alamein). ** sorry, putting away the soap box for now. 😀

Kesselring truly is one of the better German commanders of World War II. He served in the Army before the war and later became a general in the Air Force, giving him a nearly unique perspective on combined operations and air-ground liaison. With vastly outnumbered forces, he was able to make the most of Italian terrain and really fight the Allies to a general standstill.

You ask what would happen if Italy held out . . . the truth is . . . in some ways Italy DID hold out. The Allied armies there never broke out of Italy into the south of France or the Balkans, never invaded Austria into the “soft underbelly of Europe” or any of its initial goals. When V-E Day came in May 1945, Allied armies were still standing in northern Italy.

The caveat is … it wasn’t the Italians holding out, it was the German army in Italy. There was technically a pro-Axis puppet state set up in northern Italy after Mussolini was rescued by Otto Skorzeny and his special forces paratroopers in September 1943, but I don’t think they were able to help the Germans very much on the battlefield. Pro-Allied and Communist partisans in northern Italy were absolutely rampant, I don’t think the Northern fascist Italian police / forces were every able to get them under any kind of control.

Anyway, Italy doesn’t see a lot of tank-on-tank action, it’s mostly a lot of artillery bombardments and massed infantry assaults, frustrating engagements in a gaming sense. But on the smaller, tactical, skirmish-level, I would imagine Italy getting a higher profile. The battles are ALL small infantry skirmishes at this scale, and there are some great German units like fallschirmjaeger paratroopers and 16th Panzer Division, etc.