WW II Gothic Line ghosts haunt modern day Italy, Europe

``The further backward you can look, the further forward you can see,'' former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the importance of understanding history. By Joe Kirwin When Italy pulled out of its alliance with Germany on Sept.8, 1943, Hitler's generals gave more than two million Italian military personnel an ultimatum: fight with the Nazis or go to prison. Some actually chos...

``The further backwards you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history By Joe Kirwin It is known as the ``the choice'' in Italian military history annals. When Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini was arrested in July of 1943 and the country declared a WWII Armistice against Allied Forces two months later, the soldiers of the Italian Armed Forces faced...

``The farther backward you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill. If you spend much time listening to European conservative politicians and increasingly those from the center-left pontificate about immigration one would think the flow of migrants coming into Europe is the root of all the woes the continent faces. Or as Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni put it recently...

``The further backward you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history. More than 50,000 Indian and Gurkha soldiers fought as part of the British Eighth Army during the WWII Allied campaign in Italy. They played a vital role in the Gothic Line offensive, especially in the Apennine mountains where they together in close combat with Scottish Hig...

``The further backwards you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill and the need to know history. At the top of the hillside U.S. military cemetery on the fringe of the Italian city of Florence there is a large wall that describes the Allied Force troop movements that fought on the Gothic Line from August 1944 to April 1945. There is a dizzying array of arrows that p...

``The further backward you can look the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history. Welcome again to the podcast and this second of a three-part series where we will look back at the story of African American soldiers who braved Nazi and Italian Fascist attacks but also white U.S. Army officer racist abuse while fighting on the Gothic Line. The first episo...

``The further backward you can look the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history. There are many Gothic Line heroes who helped free Italy from Nazi and Italian Fascist tyranny but arguably some of the most unsung soldiers who fought and died for democracy even though they did not have it at home were the 50,000 Indians troops. They played a pivotal in th...

``The further backward you can look, the further foward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the benefit of studying history By Joe Kirwin From an early age 34-year-old Marco Dalmonte accompanied his father on field trips combing the Adriatic coastal plain and Apennine mountains searching for WWII artifacts and even body parts of soldiers that remained unidentified decades after the Allied...

``The further backward you can look, the furher forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history. By Joe Kirwin Eighty some years before the Israeli Defense Force became one of the most powerful armies in the Middle East, it was a flelging, disparate group of volunteers that were part of the Zionist movement in what was the Palestine Mandate established by the League of...

``The further backward you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history. By Joe Kirwin When you learn the story of some Polish soldiers and civilians' WWII saga including being imprisoned in the Soviet Union at the start of WWII, then escaping down through what is today central Russia, Iran, Syria, Palestine and Libya before arriving in Ita...

``The further backwards you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history. By Joe Kirwin When Leone Singer escaped Austria and Hitler's Jewish genocide the ever changing national borders in central Europe confused a bureaucratic in the city of Trieste. As a result he issued iin 1938 an identity card that determined Leone's nationality as...

``The further backwards you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history By Joe Kirwin The story of war and the refugees it provokes is a story as old as homo sapiens. But few are as complicated, confusing and enduring as the story of how more than 100,000 Polish soldiers ended up fighting as part of the British Eighth Army in Italy in 1944-45...

War and politics can make for strange bedfellows and that axiom was as true 80 years ago in WW II in Italy as it is today. One prominent example of that was Brazil joining the Allied Forces to end Nazi and Italian Fascist tyranny in Italy on the Gothic Line Offensive. Before and during WW II, Brazil was led by dictator Getulio Vargas who took power in Brazil via a coup d'etat in the 1930s. His...

Ivy League envy is a familiar theme that has occasionally surfaced in American public and political life since the elite universities such as Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, Yale and others opened more than 200 years ago. The current resentment wave led by U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA mob is a particularly pernicious, unwarranted inquisition and will surely backfire - just as happened in...

By Joe Kirwin There are numerous Gothic Line Offensive stories that are obscure and nearly lost to history but none more so than the more 7,000 South African black soldiers who helped to end Nazi and Italian Fascists tyranny in Italy. Fighting in Tuscany between American and Brazilian troops in the mountains above the city of Montemurlo, the Black South African troops' role was restricted to menia...

The ferocious 4-month battle that took place at Monte Cassino when Allied Forces attempted to break through the mountains between Naples and Rome and drive the German and Italian Fascist forces out of Italy will always be remembered as the bloodiest and most brutal chapter of the 1943-45 WW II Allied campaign in Italy. Later in 1944, when Allied armies launched the Gothic Line offensive after the...

By Joe Kirwin Soon after the surprise Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii when Japanese forces destroyed much of the U.S. Navy and Air Force Pacific Ocean presence, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the arrest of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living in the United States. They were forced from their homes, farms and businesses and locked up in internment camps in the desert...

By Joe Kirwin Over the past decade, author and U.S. Marine veteran Andrew Biggio interviewed more than 30 U.S. Army soldiers who fought on the Gothic Line as part of his research for his best-selling books The Rifle and The Rifle 2. Many were in their late 90s or older. But they had vivid, emotionally distraught recall of what happened from Sept. 1944 to April 1945 in the northern ItaIian Apennine...

By Joe Kirwin When the U.S. Fifth Army launched its part of the Allied Force Gothic Line one-two punch pincer movement to capture Bologna it began with a one of WW II's most daunting tasks: conquer the imposing heights of Monte Altuzzo 50 kilometers north of Florence. After initial success the offensive bogged down and turned into a WW I type of trench warfare because of a snowy, frigid winter...

By Joe Kirwin More than 60,000 Indian troops served in the Allied Force armies that fought and died to free Italy from German and Italian Fascist tyranny even though the soldiers from India did not have democracy in their homeland. Serving as volunteers under British command in the Adriatic sector of the Gothic Line offensive, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Gurkhas and others fought side by side - primar...

By Joe Kirwin After U.S. Fifth Army General Mark Clark deviated from an Allied Force plan in early June 1944 to trap retreating Germans in central Italy and instead moved his troops to liberate Rome, the controversial decision outraged British commanders, especially Lt. General Oliver Leese. As a result, Leese rejected the original Gothic Line offensive plan for a joint American-British attack up...

By Joe Kirwin When U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January of 2025 one of the first things his newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did was ban books in the Pentagon and Armed Forces academies and other libraries and schools that tell the story of institutional racism faced by segregated African American soldiers during WW II and when they returned to the United States. Whe...

By Joe Kirwin 85 years ago Italy was on the wrong side of history after joining Adolf Hitler in declaring war against Allied countries including the United States and the United Kingdom. It took the most multinational and multiracial army ever assembled to finally end Nazi and Italy Fascist tyranny in Italy in April of 1945 when the nine-month Gothic Line offensive concluded and WW II ended in Eur...

Russian emigre and Prague-based history professor Sergei Medvedev explains how the past is present in Europe as Russian President Vladimir Putin makes no secret of his plans to rebuild the Iron Curtain. In addition just as Hitler had European and Asian allies so does Putin. Today in Europe a growing list of far-right, far-left and centrist politicians either support Putin or are apologists. Wherea...

By Joe Kirwin Nazi and Italian Fascist troops committed more than 200 civilian massacres in WW II in Italy between July of 1944 and April of 1945. Few were held accountable for the cold-blooded murders, especially in Italy. Eighty years later the issue festers as Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni's political party Brothers of Italy has neo-fascist roots linked to Hitler's ally Benito M...