The War in Italy 1942 - 1945

334 pages - Around 156 photographs/pictures - Price £14.99
ISBN 978-1-871448-26-9

The War in Italy - 1942 - 1945
by Bruce Barrymore Halpenny.

As Bruce Barrymore Halpenny puts in his Introduction:

"The War in Italy - 1942-1945, will I trust, go some way to bring home, the momentous events carried out by honest young men and women. Amidst the warmth and beauty of Sicily and Italy, the deep scars of the Second World War, are still visible at many emotive sites; and, I urge you to visit both Sicily and Italy and see the places named in this book, very much so Palermo, Messina and the battlefield town of Ortona.

"One can feel the spiritual forces when battlefields are visited, for the now peaceful countryside, towns and villages, that once shook to the shocks and horrors of war, holds much more than blood beneath their soil.

"It is some mysterious force - an unseen hand - that draws one, into the well-kept military resting places for those who fell in battle in Sicily and Italy.

"One has only to stand and gaze at the rows and rows of graves, to see, and hear, the ghosts of thousands of armed men fighting through a once peaceful countryside, or, walking wounded, limping silently alongside shuffling files of unshaven prisoners of war in tattered uniforms."

To give due recognition to the OSS and other undercover services that were already in Italy in 1942 helping to pave the way for the main invasion, the author has put 1942-1945.

Interestingly the OSS were already making plans and in Sicily even before the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 in which the Allies "officially" decided on an invasion of Italy.