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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading WW II books since forever. Italy was basically a gift to Hitler -- it's a country made for defense. But I'm not sure the Balkans, like Churchill wanted, would have been any better. And Stalin would have been very unhappy about it.

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The Allies had enough troops and supplies later in the war that made sense to attack everywhere to force Germany to commit troops. The Germans had 27 divisions in Italy in 1944. The Allies could have been more aggressive like not letting German forces escape at Anzio. But could have been less aggressive in attacking defensive lines wasting troops for slow advance.

Also, the 15th Air Force operating from Italy brought lots of Eastern Europe in range of bombers.

True enough. I don't have a better alternative, as an armchair strategist.

The Italian campaign was a meat grinder.

Stalin was also pushing for the allies to do something constructive.

Michael Howard (who served in Italy) wrote a book I remember as The Mediterranean Strategy of the Allies During WW II. Quite interesting.

The Balkans would have been hard to get at without having Italy in hand. Where would one have attacked, when the British couldn't take and hold the Dodecanese?

Look at a terrain map of the Balkans. With Italy, you at least have usable coastal highways that let you theoretically push forward no matter where you land [1], but the Balkans don't really have any coast-to-interior routes that can support a large force, and they don't offer that much worth capturing.

[1] But there's so few of them and the chokepoints so obvious that it's relatively easy to defend them.

Yep. Churchill mastered a lot of topics but "military strategy" wasn't one.

If Spain had been in the war that would have been the obvious choice, but they were "neutral."

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