The Allied attack of Normandy beach has been immortalized in film and literature, but it was the Allied campaign on the beaches of Western Italy, at Anzio, that reigns as the bloodiest battle in the Second World Wars western theater. One of the worlds leading military historians, Lloyd Clark, delivers a gripping narrative and fresh interpretation of this remarkable but overshadowed battle. About six months before D-Day, in January 1944, a united force of 36,000 soldiers launched one of the first attacks on continental Europe at Anzio, a small coastal city thirty miles south of Rome. But the advance stalled, and the Allies were unable to exploit initial German weakness that could have led to a decisive strike to liberate the undefended Italian capital.
