Coalition Warfare in Italy, 1944: By the Numbers
Because who doesn’t need 33,576 miles of telephone wire and sixteen million maps?
By mid-1944, the Allied campaign up the Italian peninsula was in full swing. After five grueling months hemmed in around Anzio and Monte Cassino, a combined Allied thrust broke the Axis stranglehold and opened the road to Rome. On June 5, Allied forces marched through the streets of the Eternal City. Shortly thereafter, they initiated a pursuit through the Tuscan foothills north to the Arno River before coming up against yet another frustrating defensive matrix: The Gothic Line.
The Allied effort in Italy was by then a cosmopolitan affair. On May 11, 1944, the coalition consisted of 26 divisions — 21 infantry and 5 armored — from more than a dozen nationalities divided between two Anglo-American armies.
That autumn, Allied momentum stalled as grisly mountain warfare in the northern Italian Apennines replaced summertime’s rapid mechanized advance. As commanders reevaluated the coalition’s options ahead of winter, staff officers at Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) quantified and tabulated the campaign thus far, recording their findings ahead of a press conference held with the Allied Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, General Sir Henry Maitland “Jumbo” Wilson.
Their reports — which I recently came across in folder 6831 of the War Office 204 series housed at the British National Archives — are incredibly revealing. As the coalition transported more armed forces to Italy, its lines of communication, support systems, administrative infrastructure, and bureaucratic capacity grew in kind.
Part of my research involves asking how the Allies managed to coordinate such a jumbled admixture of personnel in such a harsh environment. The answer? A lot of materiel, a lot of workers, and a lot of work.
The numbers are mind-boggling. Between May 10 and October 1, 1944, the coalition laid 33,576 miles of overland telephone wire and 117,136 miles of field cable (each of which would theoretically wrap around the entire globe 1 1/2 and 5 times respectively) — all to ensure effective and constant communication front to rear. In the same period, it sent almost a million messages from its signal centers.
To coordinate, plan, and visualize complex operations ranging in size and scale from squad and platoon level engagements to corps and army movements, coalition leaders needed maps.
Lots of maps. So many maps.
Sixteen million maps, in fact — printed by and distributed between AFHQ, the U.S. Fifth Army, and the British Eighth Army. In an age before computers and GPS, the paper trail was tremendous: End to end, that many maps would stretch 6,000 miles from New York to Damascus, stand 6,400 feet tall (five times the height of the Empire State Building), and cover a combined area the size of Austria.
Allied personnel relied heavily on air reconnaissance for intelligence and planning. During this period, 1,500 air sorties captured 750,000 images — of which 4.5 million reprints were prepared and distributed for use by the various Allied commands.
How did Allied soldiers get around? The British Eighth Army alone was using 134,205 vehicles by late 1944. Allied engineers salvaged, recovered, and repaired 10,000 tracked vehicles and 43,000 wheeled vehicles in that time, saving the coalition untold space on precious transatlantic convoys. To connect its soldiers with their families and friends, the Eighth Army received 6,000 tons worth of seagoing mail and 201 tons of air mail during this period.
Soldiers needed rations, ammunition, equipment, clothing, and weapons to fight, too — seven million tons of it. This quantity of materiel was primarily moved by rail, especially as most of the country’s critical infrastructure had been destroyed by German saboteurs as they withdrew up the peninsula. The supplies required 21,759 train cars spread along 2,478 miles of rail lines — all run and operated by the Allied Force Military Railway Service who were, themselves, heavily assisted by Italian state railway personnel.
Facilitating this astonishing effort, a multinational team of 15,000 American, South African, Indian, and British engineers repaired 1,100 miles of demolished or heavily-damaged track, bridges, ties, and railway stations in central and southern Italy. They also rebuilt 15,000 feet-worth of bridging, twenty-four tunnels (twenty miles in length), moved 500,000 cubic yards of dirt to fill craters and gaps, and repaired 750 miles of signal routes.
They owed much of their success to the “invaluable aid” of countless Italian civilian laborers employed by AFHQ to repair and operate these lines. Ultimately, 785 rehabilitated Italian electric and steam trains hauling 28,127 freight and passenger cars were supplemented with 225 steam and diesel locomotives and 200 additional freight cars shipped direct from the United States — a number responsible for moving 45,000 sick and wounded Allied personnel to safety behind the frontlines.
To fuel this and other mechanized transportation, the Allies built pipelines up the Italian peninsula — 863 miles of them — at a rate of 3–4 miles a day. Anyone familiar with Italy’s terrain knows what an incredible a feat this was. Pipelines like these allowed the coalition to consume 371 million gallons of fuel by the autumn of 1944, enough to fill about 562 Olympic swimming pools.
The Allies made use of local resources and manpower, too. Rather than import new building supplies, Allied engineers utilized six million Italian-made bricks to begin rebuilding Italy’s war-torn villages — saving 154,000 tons of import shipping.
Importing goods had been extremely difficult for much of the Italian campaign. Entire ports had been razed and littered with the hulks of sunken ships that hindered crucial offloading operations. Few ports were found in a worse state than that of Naples; yet, somehow, within six days engineers had supplies flowing to inland depots to maintain Allied momentum. Having “developed a technique for turning a tangled mass of sunken ships and rubble into a workable port within a few days of capture,” Allied personnel and Italian civilians went on to offload 1,105,109 tons of goods, 181,160 individuals, and 13,868 vehicles in five short months.
It’s often easy to lose sight of the sheer scale upon which the coalition was operating as it approached the war’s end. From humble beginnings, the exponential growth of the Allied coalition in the Mediterranean enabled it to coordinate the combined supply, training, and fighting efforts of well over a dozen nations simultaneously.
It was this stunning administrative capacity that led one “newly arrived U.S. officer, previously accustomed to the spaces and complexities of Washington’s Pentagon Building” to take one look at AFHQ and exclaim, “It’s a hyperthyroid War Department!”
The Italian campaign is often maligned because it never resulted in a decisive breakthrough or clearly definable strategic outcome like the campaigns through Normandy or the Eastern Front. Data points like these, however, offer a glance at the practical difficulty of projecting and fueling military power across vast distances and rough terrain.
The more you wrestle with the numbers, the harder it gets to see how the coalition could have done more to attain a more palatable outcome given the constraints imposed upon it. In some ways, it is shocking the Allies achieved the results they did in light of the frankly ridiculous logistics effort required.
