Cassino to the Alps - US Army Center Of Military History

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the sobriquet "Smiling AI," Kesselring
throughout the long campaign maintained,
in spite of every ground for
despair, that indomitable optimism so
important to a commander of troops.
Brilliant soldier that he was, however,
his optimism never blinded him to the
realities of the battlefield. 15
In support of his strategy, the German
commander argued that to have
evacuated the peninsula without a fight
and withdrawn to the line of the Alps
would not have allowed the Germans to
release a significant number of troops
for other fronts. In view of the defensive
potential of the alpine terrain, that
argument seems a tenuous one. A
possibly more valid argument is that
abandonment of the peninsula would
have given the Allies untrammeled
freedom of movement either in the
direction of France or of the Balkans.
Here again, at least as far as France was
concerned, the Allied command of the
western Mediterranean had already
made it possible to invade souther;l
France whenever desired. As for the
Balkans peninsula, it turned out that
except for British intervention in
Greece following German withdrawal
from that country, the Allies chose to
do little in the' area other than to
supply Tito's partisans with arms, ammunition,
and foodstuffs.
The argument that to yield the Italian
peninsula would mean the sacrifice
of an indispensably deep battle zone
and unleash the air war on Austria and
southern Germany ignores the fact of
Allied control of the Foggia airfields
and later those in Sardinia and Corsica.
15 B.H. Liddell-Han, Why Don', We Learn From
History? (New York; 1971), p. 25.
CASSINO TO THE ALPS
Those fields had already opened up all
of Italy and the southern regions of the
Reich to Allied aerial attack. Nevertheless,
Kesselring never lost his conviction
that the Italian campaign "was not only
justified but even imperative, and the
problem one of simply doing whatever
seemed best f