italian campaign

'I wasn't a great believer in the war. I was a bit cynical about war aims and all the rest of it, but when you're on a tank and there are thousands of Italians milling around, throwing flowers at you and cheering and offering you loaves of bread and glasses of wine, you start to think, Well, perhaps I am a liberator. It goes to your head a bit. But that was the highlight - there was a lot of hard slogging before that happened.'

Gordon Slatter, 441668, Private, 26 Battalion.

Once the crucial political decision to send New Zealand troops to Italy had been made in Wellington in 1943, it ensured that the bulk of New Zealand's active soldiers would see action there until the end of war in Europe. While there, they would fight as part of General Sir Bernard Montgomery's multinational 8th Army, with which they had also been associated in the desert campaigns. For the New Zealanders of the Second Division, though, the only general who really mattered was their own commander, Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg.

Into action at the Sangro River

The 'Div' was soon in action at the end of November. The New Zealanders were assigned the task of joining the Allied effort to breach the Gustav Line by attacking its eastern margins and traversing the Sangro River with the hope of initiating an advance to Rome.

They made good initial progress, suffering about 150 casualties, but capturing several hundred Germans and skilfully using Bailey bridges to ford the Sangro—one of a seemingly endless succession of rivers they would traverse in their long advance up the Italian peninsula. On 2 December, the 'Div' had secured the village of Castelfrentano—a place name memorialised in a popular song of the Italian campaign. They moved on to attack the town of Orsogna and it even seemed possible that they would break the Gustav Line. Although New Zealand infantry actually entered the town on 3 December, they were repulsed by German reinforcements, bolstered by tanks. Despite repeated attacks in the succeeding weeks, the Germans proved immovable. With winter deepening, the whole Allied offensive ground to a halt and spirits were low amongst the New Zealanders when they were finally withdrawn from the stalled front line in January 1944 after suffering some 1600 casualties during their first two months of combat in Italy.

Cassino

The Division was to enjoy only a brief respite before being called upon to participate in a new attack on a strong point which would prove the most tragically elusive prize of the entire campaign for the New Zealanders. They now marched across to the other side of Italy to join the Allied forces massing before the town of Cassino.