Filled with personal account of the action, this book details the USAAF's tactical and strategic campaigns in the skies over Italy in World War II.
The Italian campaign has been called "forgotten" by many, including many of those who fought it at the time. All eyes were on the coming invasion everyone knew would take place in France.
The air war in the Italian campaign is a study in the successful application of tactical air power. Once the Allies took Corsica in late 1943, it became the site of so many airfields that its nickname was "USS Corsica," the unsinkable aircraft carrier in the western Mediterranean, positioned such that the enemy in northern Italy and southern France were vulnerable to attack. It was also an international effort, with Free French and Italian co-belligerent forces, alongside British Commonwealth units and a squadron of the Brazilian Air Force.
The fighter-bomber war happened alongside the most successful battlefield air interdiction bombing campaign every carried out by the U.S. Air Forces. Operation Bingo, flown between the onset of winter in November 1944 and the coming of spring in April 1945, reduced German supplies to the army fighting on the Gothic Line in the Apennines by 80 percent.
While this tactical air battle went on, a second strategic air force, the 15th Air Force, came into being in November 1943. Between April and July 1944, the B-17s and B-24s and their escorting fighter groups took on the "oil campaign" against the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti. The campaign was bloody and brutal as the Germans threw everything they could into the defense of their sole remaining source of oil. The loss of Ploesti in July, combined with the attack on the synthetic oil industry in Germany by the Eighth Air Force was the body blow that ended any chance for the German armed forces to do more than delay the inevitable.
