Neil, John/Neil, Dennis The bitter Fight to free Italy

A D-Day Dodger's Experiences of the Italian Campaign in 1943

The troops who fought their way across the Italian peninsula in 1943 were dubbed D-Day Dodgers, but for the tens of thousands of men who were seriously wounded in the early months of the campaign, this derisive term was deeply ironic. Everything had started so positively on 10 July 1943, when 2,600 ships landed more than 180,000 Commonwealth and American troops on the island of Sicily, which Churchill had called the soft underbelly of Europe. This amphibious assault, supported by airborne landings, marked the beginning of the Italian campaign. Allied military strategists believed that a concentrated invasion could quickly knock Italy out of the war. However, the reality was quite different. The situation was exacerbated by Italy's surrender on 3 September 1943, which forced Hitler to launch Operation Achse, the occupation of Italy. In the months that followed, Allied troops had to carry out several amphibious assaults, engage in trench warfare, and fight in mud, freezing rain and snow, and extremely difficult terrain. This book tells the story of the first months of the Italian campaign from the perspective of a 21-year-old private in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, Dennis Neil, who found himself seriously wounded and near death on an Italian mountain on a bitterly cold day in November 1943. While a surgeon fought to save his life in a field hospital, his family received a telegram informing them of the death of his older brother in the same campaign. This story traces a soldier's journey to that mountainside and describes how his life was irrevocably changed by the injuries he sustained that day. It is a dramatic and harrowing story, told with unprecedented detail thanks to contemporary records and unpublished photographs compiled from the memoirs of Dennis Neil by his son John. Winston Churchill described Italy as the soft underbelly of the Axis powers. However, it turned out that the exact opposite was true.