Interesting quesion. Given the historical example of the German deployments to Sicily and Sardinia when the Italians were still in the Axis, but after the surrender in Tunisia, basically the Germans appear to have thought they needed to jacket the remaining Italians field forces by about 1-2... so it would have been a lot less than 500,000 Germans.sandeepmukherjee196 wrote: ↑07 May 2021 04:33Hi..daveshoup2MD wrote: ↑07 May 2021 04:03Nothing was in play other than throwing away troops in a sideshow or a sideshow without any effective air power or sea power.Sid Guttridge wrote: ↑06 May 2021 06:37Hi dave4shoup,
You may need to do a little more reading on the Aegean to learn what was in play and the roles of the US, Italians, Greeks and Turks before offering such definitive opinions.
In any event, operational losses, wise of otherwise, are an entirely different animal to organizational reshuffling.
Cheers,
Sid.
Everyone agrees that the main effort was required in western Europe to defeat Germany decisively.
Churchill's obsession with Europe's "underbelly" has been criticized. Ultimately the allies got stuck in Italy for a year and a half while they wrapped up the war in less than a year, once they landed in France.
However isn't it worth analyzing what might have been different if Italy stayed in the war and those half a million Germans were available to fight in France ?
Cheers
Sandeep
There's also the not minor issue that once the Italians signed at Cassibile, the Allies had to sustain them ... which took shipping, and specialist troops, and time, and resources ...
As much as the Italians who made the right decision for their country in 1943 deserve credit for doing so, from the perspective of the overall Allied war effort, it's an open question whether the Italians switching sides at that point were a cost or benefit to the Allies for the remainder of the war.