Rome-Sicily American Cemetery and Memorial (Nettuno)

 memorial, Second World War 1939-1945, cemetery

On 3 September 1943 the Allies invaded the Italian mainland, the invasion coinciding with an armistice made with the Italians who then re-entered the war on the Allied side. Progress through southern Italy was rapid despite stiff resistance, but by the end of October, the Allies were facing the German winter defensive position known as the Gustav Line, which stretched from the river Garigliano in the west to the Sangro in the east. Initial attempts to breach the western end of the line were unsuccessful.
On 22 January 1944 the Allies launched an attack on the coast south of Rome, turning the low-lying plain around Aprilia into a battlefield.
The Allies met with little resistance when they landed, but after that almost everything went wrong.
German Gen. Field Marshall Albert Kesselring obtained a copy of the invasion plan. Then the Allies waited near the beach heads, consolidating their forces, before moving inland.
The delay gave Kesselring time to pour troops into the region, resulting in 125 days of desperate struggle often likened to the trench warfare of World War I.
The operations in January 1944 landed troops behind the German lines here at Anzio, but Kesselring'sdefences were so well organised a breakthrough was not actually achieved until May.
The site for this cemetery was selected not long after the landings at Anzio and the burials here date from the period immediately following the landings.
The 77-acre graveyard about a mile from the ocean was once a vineyard, then a hospital and then a "temporary" cemetery through which many newly landed troops had to march on their way to battle, knowing that some soldiers among them would be returning to this cemetery all too soon.
Like the other American Battle Monuments Commission sites in Europe, this cemetery is meticulously maintained, a place apart from everyday life.
The front gate yields to a large reflecting pool and mall leading to a memorial of travertine and marble, with a bronze-colored statue of a U.S. soldier and sailor, marching together, their arms around each others' shoulders.
The statue, by sculptor Paul Manship, is entitled "Brothers in Arms."
Curving rows of headstones flow away from both sides of the mall, marking the graves of 7,861 Americans.
Inscriptions on the stones show that many of them died in the area in early 1944, including men from two battalions of U.S. Rangers decimated in the battle for the town of Cisterna.
Others died in the U.S. sweep across Sicily in the summer of 1943 and around the 6th century Benedictine Abbey of Montecassino north of Naples, destroyed by American bombers on Feb. 15, 1944.
You can spend a some time studying the map panels in the memorial to much better understand the battle here. (War analysts have viewed it as a sideshow misconceived by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or a practice run for D-day six months later.) Then you can seek out some of the places marked on the map.
Agood place to begin is the beach in nearby Nettuno, where the Americans under Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas and later Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr. concentrated while the British grouped in Anzio to the north. A plaque on a storefront in the Nettuno market square marks the commanders' living quarters. Another in the woods south of town shows where the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division hit the beach.