Many pages have been written by Italian historians to provide a timely and accurate chronicle of the battles fought by the British 8th Army between 1944 and the spring of 1945 in the mountains of the Gothic Line between Marche and Romagna. Less attention has been paid, in our opinion, to the battles fought on the front by the U.S. Va Army, whose divisions attacked the Gothic Line between Tuscany and Emilia from the provinces of Florence, Prato and Pistoia, and then defeated the Germans in the mountains of the high Apennines between the provinces of Bologna and Modena. Similarly, the events underlying the social unrest that later led to the rise of dictatorships, not only on the European continent, have not been dealt with with sufficient intensity, or at least with simple language.
We offer, in simple and understandable language, some food for thought: first, a concise analysis of the economic and social premises that, in the main, pushed the European nations, and later the world, along that inclined plane of destiny that led to the Second World War - Germany between the two wars and Italy between the two wars. The road to war was a long one; years punctuated by precise signals of which no chancellery, European or American, was able to grasp the profound meaning beforehand, let alone decisively steer the events that followed, resorting instead to ever greater compromises;
We then go on to analyse, on the basis of authoritative and direct sources, in the section "The Gothic Line", the picture of the deployments, tactics, technologies, difficulties of the terrain and the many related aspects of the first attack, called Operation Encore, of the IV° Army Corps on the Green Line II on the front west of the Reno River in the upper Apennines, between Bologna and Modena. The twofold objective is to "live" the strategic motivations and the course, both from the tactical point of view of some of the Allied units involved in individual and specific actions, and from how the attack was experienced on the other side of the front, by the soldiers and officers of the German commands.
Enjoy reading and a very brief summary of five years of war ........
The Second World War was the most destructive war in human history.
The damage in human and material terms was catastrophic. Estimates by historians and scholars of the Second World War put the material losses of the countries involved in the conflict at around one trillion. As far as the victims of the conflict are concerned, the number of military victims varies, depending on the source, between 21 and 24 million soldiers, while the number of civilian victims, taking into account that in many countries before the Second World War there had never been a census of the population, varies between 44 and 48.5 million people.
In Italy, out of a population of around 46 million, the total number of victims was almost half a million.
On 1 September 1939, Germany attacked Poland and continued its blitzkrieg tactics, conquering Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark and finally France in less than three months in 1940.
Despite three months of heavy bombing between 10 July and 31 October 1940, the Luftwaffe, or German Air Force, was unable to carry out the attack that was to cripple Britain, despite the assurances of its commander, Hermann Göring, and Hitler was forced to call off the invasion.
On 6 April 1941, German soldiers occupied Yugoslavia and Greece, coming to the aid of their Italian allies who had attacked them, somewhat unprepared, from Albania on 28 October 1940.
On 22 June 1941, Hitler, following in the footsteps of Napoleon Bonaparte, attacked the Soviet Union.
In the Pacific, Japan's aggressive expansionist strategy, which had already begun before the outbreak of the world conflict with the annexation or occupation of several regions of East Asia between 1933 and 1939, met with the firm opposition of the United States, which imposed an embargo in July 1940 and expanded it in the following months in order to stifle the Japanese war economy.
On 7 December 1941, the air force of the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor, provoking America's entry into the war.
At this point, and in light of the Tripartite Pact signed between the three Axis powers in Berlin on 27 December 1940, the war became global.
The war lasted more than five years. Italy surrendered on 3 September 1943, Germany on 7 May 1945, officially in Italy on 2 May, and Japan on 2 September 1945.