Yes. So you were saying that Kesselring, his newfound prominence means he's now got Hitler's eye on him and it makes it more difficult for him to manoeuvre. What do he and the other German high command, what do they think they're going to get out of this campaign? So, for example, they don't give up Rome. People thought they might withdraw north of Rome. You might have made an argument for them withdrawing right up to the north of Italy, withdrawing to the foothills of the Alps or something. Yeah, very good argument, I'd say. Why don't they do that? Do they think that they can basically tie down the Allies and bleed them dry as they move up the peninsula?

No, it all goes back to that early stage of the early plan when Salerno happens, Operation Avalanche happens, that Castel Ring is planning to kick them back into sea, then clear out. And he thinks he can hold the whole of Italy. Well, if you can hold the whole of Italy, then there is a reason for fighting south of Rome. If you can't hold the whole of Italy, then there is no reason for fighting south of Rome at all, because you've lost Foggia, which is so important. That is the crucial bit. That's where the Allies strategic airpower can come in and make a firm base. You've lost all those ports, Brindisi, Bari, Taranto, Naples, Soleno itself. You've lost all those ports. There's no point. And what you really want is to be shortening your lines of supply. And the Pisa-Rimini line, which is where Hitler is originally going to retreat to, should the Allies invade, that's his original plan earlier in the year, should it happen. And it is certainly the one that Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, who is in charge of German forces in the north of Italy when the Allies invade at the start of September, that is his recommendation, having been on the receiving end of the Allies. But Kesselring is a sort of relentless optimist. I mean, he's not sort of half full. He's brimming over all the time. And actually, that's not a particularly good asset to have if you're a kind of a senior high commander. You want to have a sort of healthy dose of realism. And when his big plan fails at Salerno, the whole strategy for reclaiming the whole of Italy falls down like skittles. And then he gets stuck because he's got the Hitlerians in the spotlight. There is no sense, no strategic sense whatsoever for fighting south of Rome once you've lost Foggia. And the German commanders are absolutely logheads. Most of them absolutely loathe Kesselring because he's a Luftwaffe field marshal, not a ground commander. And he's taken on this role as an army group commander and has all the kind of prestige that that allows, but without the kind of training and knowledge to be able to pull it off. He's got, broadly speaking in history, he's seen as a reasonably good German and has got a reasonably good press, but I think he was absolutely crap. Okay. Punchy take there. So this is terrible for everybody. Everybody.

It's terrible for the Germans. Awful for the Germans. Who end up having to use heated child's urine as antiseptic, which I think is always a sign that the war isn't going well, if you're in that state of play. It's terrible for the Italians, who are caught in the middle of these two meat grinders going at each other. You have an awful description of two women who are machine gunned while going to fetch water from a stream that runs at the bottom of the village. Rosa Fuoco. Nobody can go and get the water and say the whole village kind of dies of thirst. This is San Pietro, yeah. I mean, that's kind of awful. And it's awful for the Allies who are having to slog the passage that Dominic read at the head of this second half. And again, you've written so much about the Second World War, and yet you seem kind of overwhelmed by the horror of the fighting here. So you write about the conditions. I continue to be in awe of how the Allies kept going. Why should a Texan boy be fighting up a mountain in a desolate corner of Italy, or a New Zealander be wading across the icy sand grove? It is astonishing that they did so.

Yeah, I think the scale of destruction and the scale of the violence was shocking. And I think largely because when one thinks of the Italian campaign, most people think of sort of Anzio and Casino, and I suppose ultimately the fall of Rome, and then don't give it much further thought. So there's not much after Casino, and there's not much before Casino either. And I would say these very crucial months in the back end of 1943, where Allied strategy is sort of taking a little bit of a hiccup because of the kind of huge global weight that they put upon their shoulders, and for the preparation for Overlord and all the rest of it, means that Italy falls short. There's very good reasons for going in still. There's very good reasons for staying there, but they're not able to do it at kind of the normal levels of support, material support and shipping support, crucially, that they would normally expect. And I'll give you an example of this. Once they do get into Normandy, Allied Infantry Battalions, which is your sort of basic unit, sort of 845 men or something, you wouldn't expect them to fight in the front line for more than four to six days max. But in Italy, they're fighting for kind of two weeks solidly. The physical and mental strain of that is just enormous, particularly when you've got sort of endless rain and all the privations you get of kind of operating in extreme mud in the valley floors and in extremely bare and naked positions on the top of mountains. So I was shocked, but I think the other main reason is that for the first time, I've really focused all my personal accounts on contemporary sources, diaries, letters, and so on, rather than post-war oral testimonies, which actually I'm sort of now questioning a little bit because what does someone remember 60 years after the day? I mean, they can remember sort of key things, but you can't remember that specific detail of what you were feeling on that particular day. Whereas a diary and a letter tells you what was going on on that particular moment. And I suppose the vividness of those recollections really brings into sharp focus the scales of destruction

and violence in a way that I'd probably underestimated

before.