James Holland is a hard man to keep up with. One of a new generation of World War 2 historians bringing a fresh perspective to the greatest conflict of our age, he has written, in the past 20 years or so, 13 non-fiction books on the war, eight explaining it to children and 10 novels, two of them for young adults. That’s aside from all his television work, podcasting, organising a popular history festival each year, running one cricket club and trying not to lose his place in the batting order of another.
Last Christmas his third book on the Italian campaign, The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943, arrived in SA. This northern spring a fourth is due, bringing to a conclusion one of the great battles, Monte Cassino, which ended 80 years ago this week. It will wrap up the last months of the war in Italy, which Holland says “is definitely undersold”. It certainly is in SA, where politics of the apartheid era played a role in shutting down a history of its own troops’ participation.
From the start, the National Party, which came to power in 1948, had been against SA joining Commonwealth allies in the war. With strong pro-Nazi elements, it carried on its antipathy in government, attempting to eliminate much of the British influence in the defence force and even closing a project to record SA soldiers’ role in defeating Germany in World War 2.
Wartime prime minister Jan Smuts had established the War Histories project, which he staffed with outstanding academic historians, researchers, reporters in the field and editors. Among those who worked on it were SA authors Guy Butler and Uys Krige, academic Eric Axelson and Laurence Gandar, who would later, as editor, set the tone for the country’s great liberal paper, The Rand Daily Mail.
The War Histories project produced three notable publications: Crisis in the Desert and Sidi Rezegh Battles 1941, which became seminal works of Allied setbacks and triumphs in the North African war up to the turning-point Battle of El Alamein, and War in the Southern Oceans, which dealt with German U-boats and surface raiders like the cruiser Graf Spee.
But when it came to writing about SA involvement in Italy, the apartheid government, through notorious pro-Nazi defence minister Frans Erasmus, abruptly shut down the project in 1961. Erasmus came to the defence ministry in 1948 with a like-minded protégé in tow. Col RC Hiemstra, an air force officer who had refused to serve against Germany (as was his right at the time), was quickly promoted to be chief of the defence force, where he was able to indulge his taste for sky-blue uniforms that closely resembled those of Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s heir presumptive (Göring’s own presumption).
The closing down of history by Erasmus “effectively [meant] that, in SA, the official study of the Second World War would come to an end”, writes Ian van der Waag, a former professor of history at Stellenbosch University and the Military Academy in Saldanha. There have since been single-book histories, a dry semi-official series published by Purnell, and significant chapters in 20 Battles: Searching for a South African Way of War 1913-2013 by military historians David Katz and Evert Kleynhans.
Katz and Kleynhans deal in separate chapters with two contrasting battles involving SA troops: victory in the Battle of Celleno and tragedy in the Battle of Chiusi.
Celleno, which lasted just 12 hours, was the only time in the Italian war that the SA Sixth Armoured Division’s 11th Armoured Brigade (in their new Sherman tanks) fought as a full entity. Two weeks later, the division’s infantry received a bloody nose at Chuisi, where they were let down by “no thorough reconnaissance, detailed preparation or adequate support”, according to the authors.
SA came late to Italy, arriving in April 1944, but the war still had more than a year to run and there would be little respite. Because of this scant history on SA’s war in Italy, there emerged an impression by those back home in a semblance of peacetime that the operations amounted to merely mopping up remnants of what had been the rampant Panzerarmee of Erwin Rommel in the Western Desert.
In many respects, this is understandable. SA troops had been withdrawn after the Allied victory at Alamein. The defeat at Sidi Rezegh and the surrender at Tobruk in 1942 had severely reduced the country’s fighting manpower at a time when only white men were put under arms (unlike World War 1 where coloured soldiers had fought with distinction, but under British command). The news from the front was either heavily censored reports by correspondents in the field or the usual uplifting, rose-tinted propaganda.
What Holland’s books now do, 80 years later, is tell the story of the war in Italy in its full horror and brutality, and the stories of the combatants as well as civilians caught up in it.
The Allies brought unprecedented firepower to their invasion in artillery and aircraft. One of Holland’s sources, Capt Roswell Doughty, a Bostonian serving as an intelligence officer in a Texan division, tells of rounding a hairpin bend in his jeep “to see an Italian woman sprawled face down on the road and beside her a little girl with long brown curls and a blue dress. Both were dead.” It was one of the most upsetting sights he had ever seen, writes Holland, especially since they’d clearly been left there for a while. “In the town itself he discovered a shambles with collapsed houses, shattered trees and dead animals everywhere. The Allies were liberators but, as with Sicily, they also brought with them winds of immense destruction.” It was as grim as Gaza today, only over a greater area and involving millions of people.
Before SA troops landed in Italy, Sicily needed to be invaded and overcome, followed by the mainland. The difficulties were not only the enemy but also the topography. Along the path of the invaders, writes Holland in Savage Storm, “were a number of rivers, and hilltop and coastal towns that needed crossing and capturing — the unavoidable geographical nuisance of fighting up a narrow country, with a long, mountainous spine”. In other words, no “soft underbelly of Europe”, as Winston Churchill was alleged to have said, but which no source confirms him being the originator.
One of Holland’s contemporary eye witnesses in Savage Storm was “awe inspired by the combination of immense natural scenery and the enormity of the Germans’ capacity for destruction. Huge slices of road were missing, while bridges lay in scattered heaps hundreds of feet below. Much of the time was spent precariously inching around shattered cliff edges, and up and down scraggy gorges”.
And it wasn’t only the topography that made it easier for the Germans to defend and difficult for the Allies to attack. There was also the weather. When it rained — and it poured in the winters — the Allied way of war was often neutralised. They used their “industrial power, global reach, technology and mechanisation to do as much of the hard yards of fighting as possible … to limit the number of men who were forced to fight at the coalface of war”, writes Holland. “It was an entirely sensible approach and far less wasteful of life than the way in which the Axis forces and Soviet Union approached the conflict.” After the carnage of World War 1, the Allies were determined to fling steel rather than flesh at the enemy — if the weather played ball.
Holland’s four books on the Italian campaign were written almost back to front. His first, Italy’s Sorrows, deals with the last months and he was drawn to it by a report in The Times of London of a visit by German president Johannes Rau to pay his respects and to apologise for the massacre of Monte Sole in the mountains south of Bologna. In late 1944, SS troops murdered 770 civilians there, the largest such massacre in western Europe in the war.
“I couldn’t believe that I didn’t know about this,” says Holland. “I was amazed. I got the bit between my teeth and got to know more about this.” Such a tragedy was the start of “a deep, deep love affair with Italy”. He’s been back almost every year since he started work on Italy’s Sorrows, which he finished in 2005/06. “Fortunately, it’s a peaceful place these days and you can enjoy the beauty, its food and its wine.”
So he started to write about Italy’s war from the bottom up, starting with the invasion of Sicily between early July and August 1943. “The Sicilian campaign is a very interesting period because it’s an island. It’s got air, land and sea [forces]. It’s got Patton in it, it’s got Monty in it … it’s got Spitfires and Messerschmitts in it, it’s got special forces, it’s got Paddy Mayne. It’s got claymore-wearing German generals. Beautiful landscape and history … It’s a great story.”
George Patton and Bernard Montgomery were colourful and controversial Allied commanders and bitter rivals. Paddy Mayne may not be as well known but was one of the original SAS men from the desert war whose daring exploits are now legendary. Almost as famous, or notorious, was his visit to SA in 1938 with the British Lions rugby team. He was inclined to take hotel doors off hinges if he found them locked, once sprang a group of convicts from their lock-up at Ellis Park where they had been working on erecting temporary stands for a Test match and went hunting — and shooting a springbok — while dressed in his evening suit, cummerbund and all.
Once Holland was done with Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, it was time to tackle the rest of 1943. “I had all this incredible material.” So he wrote Savage Storm, to be followed by its sequel, which will be out later this year. And Holland displays a grip on all that material that might have impressed Monty himself. Much of it is down to his approach: a historian of war rather than a military historian.
“I can’t bear the phrase ‘military historian’,” he says. “It suggests I’m only interested in the military side of it. When you’re studying war, you’re looking at political history, social history, economic history — and military history, of course, as well. But it’s a much bigger picture. I want to know what it’s like to live through such tumultuous times.”
To do this, Holland tries to use contemporary sources as much as he can. “Published memoirs are fine as long as they are based on contemporary diaries. What I have moved away from is oral history,” says Holland, who was lucky to find survivors on all sides of the war for his earlier books; today there are fewer, if any. “Diaries, memos, journals, Italian war diaries, contemporary diaries by civilians, letters put you absolutely in the moment. They don’t know when Rome is going to fall [one of the principal objectives of the invasion].”
He uses such sources to bring to life his stories and those of others who lived and died in the heat of battle, civilians and soldiers alike. One of the most vivid is the diary of Maj George Zellner, a Wehrmacht battalion commander who was a career soldier, having joined the Reichswehr in 1926. Holland discovered the diary in a “tiny little archive” in the town of Emmendingen in the Black Forest.
It is one of many sources that he uses to enrich a story of dread, fear, amazing courage and desperate cowardice, and turncoats (such as a New York mobster from the 1920s and 1930s, Vito Genovese, who fled to Italy to escape murder charges, threw in his lot with the fascists but changed sides to the Americans, then cornered the black market in Naples). It tells of a typically passionate Italian love affair between two partisans, of larger -than-life characters and bit players, like the baby-faced Texan who fled a dysfunctional family as a 16-year-old and lied about his age to join the army, becoming America’s most decorated war hero and a Hollywood star: Audie Murphy.
After all that action, you almost feel relief on Holland’s part. But now he is busy organising the annual Chalke Valley history festival opening in late June. It’s a week of interviews (some with celebrities), discussions, battle re-enactments and a celebration of the past. And there’s the Chalke Valley cricket team to play for and also the Authors XI, one of the oldest “wandering” cricket teams that was established in 1891 and revived in 2011. For Holland, there is still a lot to play for, and a lot to keep writing about.
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