"By the end of 1943 the Allied campaign in Italy had become a stalemate as German forces stopped the Allied advance cold at Cassino. In a country where the fighting front could be no longer than the eighty-mile width of the Italian peninsula, in a region where rugged mountains impeded maneuvers and favored the defense, in an effort where Allied resources were sharply restricted and winter was looming, prospects for a swift and decisive victory were slim. Battling their way up the Italian mainland promised to be a slow and bloody affair. ". "In January 1944 the Allies, prodded by an eager Churchill, decided to circumvent the Germans' frontal opposition by making an amphibious landing at Anzio, a small town about an hour's drive from Rome. The resulting four-month battle has been adjudged by some as one of the most ill-conceived operations of the war and by others as one of the notorious lost opportunities of the Allied war effort. But for the thousands of Allied soldiers desperately fighting and dying in mud and freezing rain, Anzio became an epic stand on a lonely beachhead. "--BOOK JACKET.