A walking tour of Italy's WWII battlefields : from the Salerno landings to San Pietro Infine / Frank de Planta de Wildenberg and Robert Irving Desourdis.

Includes bibliographies and index.

"The Italian Campaign is an amazing, and often heartbreaking, story, and it certainly generates sympathy as well as respect for the soldiers who fought there, particularly the sacrificed Texas and Polish soldiers as well as the British "D-Day Dodgers." In addition to the British soldiers, you gain a new and far greater appreciation of the men in the 36th Texas and Polish Divisions because of their commitment, heroism and sacrifice in these battles, much less the many others from multiple nations who fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944. This book is the first title in the NOVA Science Publishers Homeland Security Series presenting a walking tour of World War II battle sites in mainland Italy: 1. A Walking Tour of Italy's WWII Battlefields: From the Salerno Landings to San Pietro Infine 2. A Walking Tour of Italy's WWII Battlefields: Breaking the Gustav and Hitler Lines 3. A Walking Tour of Italy's WWII Battlefields: From the Anzio Landings to Rome. These books were derived from the sights and sounds I experienced while on Marty Gane's South Mountain Expeditions tour called WWII Invasion of Italy: From Sicily to Rome, which she conducted in September 2014. The late Edwin Cole Bearss was the lead South Mountain historian for the tour, and helped select our expert history guide British Lt Col (Retd) Frank de Planta de Wildenberg, a deservedly renown Italian battlefield tour leader. Franks designed the tour route, providing the specific strategic and tactical on-the-ground details we experienced at each stand (tour location) we visited. Ed Bearss provided insightful color commentary and likened situations to his own combat experience as a Marine in the WWII Pacific theater. This book provides the images and narration of Frank and Ed as we were taken from the Allied seaborne landings at Salerno to the fights for the high ground surrounding the beachhead to the devastation wrought at San Pietro Infine, the subject of a well-known period film by John Houston. During the development of the Ed Bearss memoir trilogy books (see Footnote 7 above), I created the preliminary Italian tour history that has been reviewed, vastly improved and supplemented by Frank de Planta, necessarily and deservedly the book's first author. Working with someone like Frank de Planta, as with both Ed Bearss and Barney Nolan in their memoirs, has proven (almost) as enjoyable as touring the Italian battlefields. Creating this book series brought back many emotive sights, sounds, stories and emotions (unfortunately, not the food) felt while on the tour. We hope it provides some sense of that experience for the reader"--

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