Apologies for the delay to the fortnightly schedule. Hell of a bank holiday weekend, so got nothing done week before last.
Ah. What's the quote? "I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale."
Amphibious operations are notoriously complex; there is a great deal of logistical planning and preparation required. Against a mainland target, success depends almost entirely on the amount and speed of reinforcements landed. You did not specify but my impression was that the initial landing forces were not immediately and strongly reinforced... At Anzio there were few reinforcements to send, in Normandy there were entire corps and armies waiting to go. That's certainly not the only reason for success but i think it is a good one. 'The general who holds the last uncommitted reserve may still act'.
And yet... any rational Italian army commander would draw down the Riviera forces as much as possible, so the Viareggio landings may prove indirectly valuable even if they are not the 'Royal Road' to Rome that Churchill promised. (You see what I did there?) In addition, Livorno was a major Italian naval base and shipyard - its capture, and the fact that you don't mention the Italian Navy at all, leads me to think the damage to the Regia Marina's fighting spirit may greatly outweigh the loss of the port. Despite the jokes made at its expense, the Italian Navy in our WW1 and 2 fought hard and well, especially in its smaller forces of cruisers and destroyers, though hampered by lack of resources (particularly fuel). Here... they appear to have simply absented themselves.
"It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition." I believe the Italian Navy may have preserved itself to no great end.
I am puzzled that there was no consideration of an invasion of Sicily. For the same reasons it offered in WW2, Sicily makes for an ideal invasion site - as an island it can be isolated and the defenders reduced in economical fashion. As an Entente base it offers access to all of the Italian coastline... and in our WW2 the Allied conquest of Sicily was the immediate cause of Mussolini's fall and the Italian peace proposals, so its value as leverage on the Italian government is high.
My father served in the US Army and helped liberate the Philippines. Your analysis of Marine doctrine matches his: the Marines go all out, the Army is more cautious about leaving enemies in the rear. He always thought the Marine doctrine was best for smaller islands where they could roll over the entire island in a few days, but he preferred the Army way for larger targets.
My few wandering thoughts aside, that was a fine update. I am pleased to see the Entente roll forward, no matter how creaky the machinery may be.
*whistles* 'From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Italy...'
The landing certainyl wasn't reinforced as much and as quickly as it should have been, and was saved by the elemtn of suprise, as the Italian Army couldn't guite get everything in place before the Americans and British realised they needed to accelerate their reinforcement schedule (as much as it could be without the ports).
I have an update on the war in the Mediterranean more widely in the 'World at War' section of Act Two, and figured I'd leave the fate of the Reggia Marina for that.
I think the key reasons for Sicily not getting attention this time are a) the invasion's genesis being in Churchill's decapitation idea, which was still, ostensibly, the goal despite Viareggio being far too north for it to realyl work, and b) the fact that the Entente controls Southern France, which means you don't need to capture Sicily as a stepping stone because you already have a continental presence.
Hmm. They took the original port; or they took out Rome?
Either way, good progress against Italy. That, a front that Germany can defiantly support, is one they cannot leave to die like in Spain.
France will thus have some pressure relieved, the amercians have a proper front to get worked up about, and the german alliance is in serious trouble everywhere in the west.
The war for the allies seems to be going rather well, to be honest.
Too well, really. Of course, as this update hints, things are not so rosy in France, and the Fall of Rome represents something of a mid-war high point for the Entente. What follows is the final cataclysm that will break the Old World completely.
Seeing as I’m behind a couple of updates, I’ll take each in turn. The Riviera first – and a literary treat!
It is, as you say, odd to think that a front of such staggering brutality could be considered at all forgotten, but such is war. Or Great War, anyway. I could easily imagine Pemberton’s book getting turned into a sort of Oh, What A Lovely War! production: draw you in with its dark year-in-Provence sentimentality, then knock everyone out with the total horror of it all…
Ho ho!
I for one would welcome an account of how the coming of the war snuffs out the promising but unwieldy careers of the Vorticists, who all become disillusioned by the shiny modern future when it turns out to be a lot more muddy and bloody than they’d imagined.
I'm still considering whether to have a chapter in
FAWHA specifically devoted to the cultural shift, or leave that more for the follow-up. Probably will have to have one specifically on culture during the war.
I read the epigraph, and I was very concerned for the prospects of the invasion... but then it seemed to turn out *fine*(well, not for the dead and the wounded). Despite the complexity of the amphibious assault, I wonder if the difference between Viareggio and OTL Gallipoli will simply come down to the distance to the existing front lines.
Yes, the failure of the Viareggio landings is not so much an actual military failure, but rather of spectacularly poor expectations management by Churchill.
A lot of factors at play, but the ability to put reinforce from as close as Marseilles, and to put pressure on the Italians further north as well as at the landing grounds certainly played a major part.
Discovered this gem a couple weeks ago, been devouring updates ever since
Churchill still gets sacked for a less-than-spectacular naval invasion, eh? Some things never do change, although Viareggio still looks set to succeed despite the costly delays. It seems that with the soon-to-be Italian capitulation, Germany will have another frontier to guard to its south, and a drastic reduction of allied forces in the Balkans depending on that situation. The Entente's noose tightens, but who knows what cards Berlin will have left to play...
Happy to have you on board!
As we shall see in this update, following the Fall of Rome, some cards simply fall into Berlin's hand.