Botjer, George F. Sideshow War: The Italian Campaign, 1943-1945. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1996.

Preface; photos; maps; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

226 pages
ISBN 0-89096-718-0

In the fifty-plus years since the conclusion of the Allied campaign in Italy in 1943-1945, hundreds if not thousands of books have been written and published describing the theater. Some have encompassed the entire bloody march from the beaches of Sicily to the Po and the Alps. Others have focused on individual battles or incidents or personalities. Few aspects have been left completely untouched, but as yet we have no single volume which does for the war in Italy what Seaton does for the Russian Front, or Blair does for the US submarine campaign against Japan, or Weigley does for the western front. That is, there is no one book which can be called the definitive account.

Into this vacuum comes Professor George F. Botjer. "The fact that there was still an identifiable fighting front in Italy when the Battle of Berlin got underway deserved more attention, I thought, than it had heretofore been given. It seemed incongruous, or at least somewhat unique, and deserved an explanation." The author thus set about exploring that incongruity, studying the military and non-military issues and producing what he calls a "social history" of the campaign.

Botjer builds a framework of military operations and drapes it with "social" discussions concerning politics, the overthrow of Mussolini, partisans, economics, the local home front, secret surrender negotiations in 1945, and so on. While the social "flesh" is not without its virtues, the military bones of the book -- a substantial proportion of the text, and still important to the volume as a whole -- leave much to be desired. As the author calls this a "social history", I don't want to be overly critical of the military material. Still, it was rather frustrating and alarming to find within the first few pages that he had confused the terms ULTRA and Enigma, that he misused "knots" as "knots per hour", and that he misidentified the US Navy's light cruiser Savannah as a destroyer. Similar errors elsewhere (such as placing the nonexistent "93rd Panzer-Grenadier Division" on the outskirts of Rome in September 1943 and his remarkably ill-informed comments in the Conclusion about minor Allies, or the lack thereof, in France in 1944) made me wonder about the author's grasp of his subject.

While Professor Botjer is correct insofar as there is no single definitive account of the Italian campaign to resolve his original incongruity, a look at his bibliography shows that he may have missed a few sources which would have helped. Most importantly, he apparently did not refer to the excellent four volumes of British official history by Molony (and then Jackson) which go far toward explaining the resiliency of the Germans and their north Italian allies while underscoring the Allied limitations which permitted opportunities to slip away. For that matter, the valuable New Zealand, Canadian, South African, Indian, and French histories are overlooked in favor of some rather derivative, mostly US-centric accounts.

Whatever Professor Botjer hoped to accomplish with this volume is in my opinion fatally undermined by its flaws. If there are so many errors, gaps, and misstatements in the material with which I'm familiar, how reliable is the material with which I'm less familiar?

Unfortunately, I can't recommend this book.

And I still await the definitive account of the campaign.

You can judge the book for yourself by acquiring it from a mail order bookseller, your local bookshop, or directly from Texas A & M for $29.95.

Thanks to Texas A & M for providing this review copy.