Seventy-five years ago, Italy was the scene of the most extensive and most effective close air support operation in history. It was necessary due to a combination of political misjudgement and military ineptitude: it succeeded due to the bravery of Allied soldiers and the remarkable performance of the air forces, notably the Desert Air Force.
In January 1943, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with their advisers in Casablanca to determine their strategy for pursuing the war. Soviet premier Josef Stalin was applying pressure on the western Allies to mount a second front. The Americans favoured an immediate invasion of France across the English Channel, for which the Allies were not ready, while Churchill preferred to see an invasion of Italy — what he described as “the soft under-belly of Europe”. The justification was that it would pin down German and Italian divisions, and give access to the airfields from where strategic bombers could reach eastern Europe to complement those based in the UK.