World Battlefronts: Forgotten Front

It was the old story on the forgotten front in Italy, and one that weary, haggard soldiers had intimately known for over a year—rain, mud, wind, high rivers, all but impassable roads and mountains. And always there were the determined, skillful Germans, fighting with professional craft.

For almost seven weeks now the U.S. Fifth Army had been edging, inch by weary inch, toward Bologna, still eight miles away. Eastward the British Eighth* worked painfully along the Bologna-Rimini highway, was still 39 miles southeast of Bologna. To the unshaven, mud-stained dogface, red-eyed from lack of sleep, gaunt from K and C rations,...