>> Announcer: Production for "Road to Rome" has been made possible by... Additional support has been provided by... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Man: At dawn, landing ships and barges stand offshore.

>> Martinez: The noose around, you know, the Nazi empire is tightening, and Italy's the key.

>> Man: Heavy fighting in the mountains in and around Cassino.

♪♪ >> Winter: The people here in Italy were tired of the war.

They were tired of Fascism.

>> Man: The partisans favored us.

>> Man: A struggle too long, too bitter to be fought to a standstill by an old town in the hands of an enemy.

>> Megellas: We knew we were part of a larger cause.

>> Man: Now the Fifth Army stood the road to Rome.

♪♪ [ Marching ] ♪♪ [ Up-tempo music plays ] >> Man: The people in the cities cheer their liberators.

>> Narrator: In the summer of 1943, following success in North Africa, the Allies eyed a foothold in Europe.

>> Martinez: They wanted to drain the strength of the Axis powers.

Italy was the key.

>> Narrator: Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in July, accomplished this.

>> Man: At last, after weeks of painstaking planning, the invasion is on.

the first leg of the advance into occupied Europe.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: After 39 days, the Germans retreated from the island of Sicily to mainland Italy.

>> Man: This has been a great day for the United Nations.

>> Narrator: As a result, the Italians, disillusioned with their alliance with Germany, surrendered in September 1943.

>> Man: The Italian armed forces and an armistice has been granted.

>> Winter: The Germans, they became a occupying country.

They treated the Italians no different than they treated the Poles, Ukrainians, anywhere else they occupied at that point.

So they took apart -- They took their vengeance on them.

>> Narrator: With the Italians now out of the war, the Allied focus shifted to driving the Germans out of Italy, village by village, mountain by mountain, and city by city.

>> Man: On September 9th, the Fifth Army, composed of American and British troops under General Mark Clark, headed for Salerno, 28 air miles south of Naples.

Despite heavy enemy fire, the first wave swarmed ashore with timetable precision.

[ Gunfire ] >> Clark: In 1943, it was one of our strategic aims to draw as many German forces as possible away from the Russian front and French coastal areas and to contain them on the Italian peninsula, while liberating as much of Italy as might be possible with the means at our disposal.

[ Waves crashing ] >> Martinez: Italy was necessary because at that point, Germany now was facing a two-front war, and she was about to face the third front.

For Churchill, it was absolutely essential that we hit the Germans and Italian forces and push them.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: American and British infantry divisions were among the forces that landed on the shores of Salerno.

♪♪ ♪♪ German defenses at the water line greeted 20-year-old and other 4th Naval Beach Battalion sailors.

>> Plunkett: I went in with the 36th Division Infantry.

Our purpose was to go in, secure the beach, and set up signal lights to bring the troops in.

>> Winter: When they arrived here in Salerno, it wasn't initially what you see Salerno looks like today.

You know, it was a lot smaller.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: Decades later, the scars of the battle remain.

♪♪ ♪♪ A short distance from the Allied landing beaches of Salerno, soldiers and sailors came across ancient archaeological ruins.

The Greek temple of Athena, dating back to 500 BC, still stands, having survived not only World War II, but countless battles throughout history.

Norman Lewis, a British officer attached to an American unit, came across the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Paestum.

>> Lewis: "As the sun began to sink splendidly into the sea at our backs, we wandered at random through this wood full and suddenly found ourselves at the wood's edge.

We looked out into an open space on a scene of unearthly enchantment.

A few hundred yards away stood in a row the three perfect temples of Paestum, pink and glowing and glorious in the sun's last rays.

It came as an illumination, one of the great experiences of life."

Norman Lewis, British Army intelligence officer.

♪♪ >> Winter: When they landed in Salerno, the German Hermann Goering division moved down.

[ Tanks firing ] The battle lasted around 12 days, and it was touch-and-go there for a while.

In the beachhead of Salerno, we lost 2,500 people -- were killed in a two-week battle.

>> Man: We lost a lot of good boys up and down that day.

[ Tanks firing ] Jerry was pretty much entrenched up and down them mountains with his 88s and so forth, and he knew exactly where the water line was.

>> Winter: Many soldiers who came over here were Italian Americans, and they reunited with their relatives who were here during the Second World War.

And the bond was enormous.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: While the fight for Italy began on the beaches of Salerno, the Allies knew it would be in the mountains and low-lying valleys where the Italian campaign would be won or lost.

The Germans always had the high ground.

The Allies were always looking up.

The terrain in Italy in late 1943 made for slow progress, resulting in incredibly high casualties.

>> Man: We blast away at those mountains, then go in and take over.

But it never got monotonous.

>> Narrator: It would take heavy shelling from Allied ships offshore, lots of artillery and bombing from planes to soften the German defenses.

However, the only real way to dislodge the enemy would be to send ground troops into the mountain ranges to clean them out.

There would be no surprising as they could see almost all Allied movement.

>> Winter: If you look at a map of Italy, we have a mountain range in the center of Italy going from the boot all the way up to the Alps, and on either side of the mountain range, you have the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, and just that area is flat plateaus.

So the whole country basically is going from one mountain range to another, from a valley to a high point.

The Germans had the high grounds all the time.

>> Narrator: By the fall of 1943, the Americans and British had fought their way to the ancient Italian city of Naples in the shadow of the famed volcano Mount Vesuvius.

Naples was already in ruins thanks to aerial attacks.

>> Martinez: This is a slugfest.

You don't even have the grand beach to land on.

You can barely get on that beach.

You're going to be trying to decapitate Italy to a point where you can use their ports, like Naples, for instance.

>> Winter: Getting to Naples was a difficult task.

The Germans was doing a strategic retreat.

Here in Naples area, it's a little flat, okay, you know, but the mountains is not too far away from us.

What they did here in Naples, they started destroying the infrastructure, the ports.

They put delayed-fuse bombs throughout the city that would go off two to three weeks after they departed.

One of them went off at the main post office that killed hundreds of people.

So the city was devastated.

The port infrastructure was completely destroyed.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: With much of Naples destroyed by air and Allied and German infantry now fighting in city streets, Neapolitans sought refuge underground to find safety.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Winter: These are ancient Roman catacombs and Greek catacombs that have been here for 3,000-plus years, miles of tunnels underneath the modern-day city of Naples.

During the Second World War, the people lived inside these ancient catacombs because of this continuous bombing, and their homes were destroyed, so they had no other places to go to.

Tens of thousands of people living inside the mountains.

It's very unique when you go inside these tunnels, 'cause you'll see some rusted cars, bicycles, stuff from the Second World War that was left there.

And to this day, we're finding stuff from the Second World War.

Remember, Naples is a volcanic area.

So with Vesuvius over the eons of erupting, the rock, the geography of the rocks is soft, so it's easy for -- to -- to dig tunnels.

So that's how the Romans did this.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: Nearby Naples, the ancient cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii lay exposed.

Both Roman cities were destroyed in 79 AD by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

♪♪ German troops were among the ruins, and the only way to get them out was to bomb them.

The famed archaeological sites became unintended targets of the Allied bombing campaign and suffered damage.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Gunfire ] The Allied goal in 1944 was to liberate Rome, Italy's capital.

Getting through the mountains to the Eternal City would prove almost insurmountable.

After securing Naples, the American Army faced another round of stubborn German resistance in the ancient small mountainous village of San Pietro in the Liri Valley.

The road to Rome was full of small towns like this.

German fortifications here overlooked another deep valley that had to be crossed.

>> Winter: The Americans did not understand the terrain.

San Pietro is a little mountain which has a great vista of the flatland going to the sea.

So it's a strategic outpost for anyone who was occupying the high ground.

[ Explosion, gunshots ] >> Narrator: San Pietro needed to be taken.

The battle began on December 8, 1943, and for nine days, German and American infantry fought among olive trees and ruins.

[ Gunfire ] Combat in the olive groves and the historic village was door to door and often hand to hand.

>> Man: Further back they built pillboxes that concealed artillery just over the crest of the mountains.

To take a position like this, we first had to lay down a tremendous artillery barrage.

[ Explosions ] >> Winter: The Americans went in these little villages with Sherman tanks on roads that are designed for mule and carts.

So they're sitting ducks.

And the Germans had the high ground.

Americans had the low ground, just killed everyone.

[ Distant explosions ] >> Mitchell: It was very fierce because the Germans already had outposts, and they were well-defended.

There wasn't a crossroad or a hilltop or a mountaintop which they didn't already have covered with either -- with artillery and with machine-gun and small-arms fire.

It was very, very difficult to move, day or night.

>> Winter: Mountain peaks and valleys.

You go -- You're up -- You're up on the peak of one mountain, you look across, you see a valley, and then you have to look up, and you say, "That's a mountain I have to climb again."

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: When the fighting ended in San Pietro, dazed townspeople began to appear.

They emerged from the safety of caves in the mountains.

The survivors, mostly old people and children, were happy to be alive.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Today, San Pietro stands as a living monument, bearing witness to what happens to a village caught up in war.

♪♪ ♪♪ After the 1943 battle, residents moved further into the valley.

Italy preserved the ruins.

The area is often called the Pompeii of World War II.

At its center are the ruins of the Church of San Michele Arcangelo.

♪♪ San Pietro's narrow streets and stone buildings are silent today.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Martinez: There are towns you can go to like San Pietro that are -- they're ghost towns.

♪♪ For the Italian people, they see them as the monuments to a dark past that they will never forget, nor do they want to forget.

So it's a pilgrimage site.

And going there and touching that -- the artifacts of that destruction and seeing it gives one pause to what it must have been like for our forces as they endured themselves in this, you know, house-to-house combat.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: Following the fight at San Pietro, the Allies moved north and came face-to-face with the so-called Gustav Line.

The Gustav Line was a series of German mountain fortifications built to block any Allied advance toward Rome.

The line ran from west to east across mountainous Italy.

There, another ancient town, Monte Cassino, lay astride Highway 6, which led uninterrupted to Rome.

The Allies needed to secure that road to Rome at all costs.

An ancient abbey overlooked the town and the entire valley.

>> D'Amico: There was the only road from Naples to Rome.

They had to go through our town.

>> Man: Between Cassino and the western coast, the powerful blows launched by the British, Poles, French, and Americans shattered the Gustav Line.

By May 17th, only Cassino remained in German hands.

Our plan was to force the Rapido River both to the north and south of the town.

While the southern force maintained pressure, the northern unit was to circle through the mountains behind it, clean the Germans out of their positions there, and storm the town from the north and rear.

>> Megellas: My first combat was in -- was in the mountains of Italy at Monte Cassino and on the so-called Gustav Line.

And the Germans had -- had pulled back from the boot of Italy, were pulled back, and they held up in the Apennine Mountains, rugged mountains.

And -- And they -- And they made position there, and they were -- also had -- the Monte Cassino was in the area.

I mean, it was just static.

Nobody could move.

And it amounted to patrols and sniper actions.

>> Man: Now the Fifth Army stood before Cassino, guarding Highway number 6, the road to Rome.

Here, tall, cliff-faced mountains, like an endless row of fortresses, cut across Italy.

Around this natural barrier, the Germans built a new line.

The main anchor of this line was in the ring of high mountains around Cassino.

The town lay at the foot of Monastery Hill.

At the top of the hill, overlooking the town, was the historic abbey, founded in the year 529.

The enemy denied that the abbey was being used for any military purpose whatsoever.

But with the occupation of the abbey, the Germans were in full control of Cassino, as this captured film shows.

♪♪ >> D'Amico: We stayed up there for probably four months, four or five, you know.

Almost every day there was some bombing, because the Americans -- I would say not just the Americans, but English, Polish, you know, other, they were trying to get the Germans to leave the town and leave -- the monastery was on top of the mountain.

>> Man: Wave after wave of our planes came over Monastery Hill.

We had reached a grim crisis.

Before us, the town, Cassino, blocked our entrance to Highway number 6 and Rome.

Four months of fighting against almost every obstruction known to warfare, a struggle too long, too bitter to be fought to a standstill by an old Italian town in the hands of an enemy.

For the Fifth Army advance to continue, Cassino had to be ours, even if it meant blasting the town off the face of the Earth.

>> Winter: People are concerned about the historical heritage of that structure and stuff.

Unfortunately, that was the Second World War in Europe.

Places were being just literally destroyed, and they had to put an end to this -- this carnage that was going here, because at this point, the Allied forces, the British, the Canadians, the Polish, the Brazilians, Moroccans, they were all fighting in this area of Southern Italy, and they were moving up.

People -- The Allies were getting killed, and the body counts were getting high.

And so they had to bomb it.

>> Martinez: If anybody said, "Well, what is the battle of -- of Italy in that area about?"

And it's terrain.

And it's torturous and it's difficult and it gives the defender the utmost advantage.

>> Narrator: While the battle for Monte Cassino intensified, Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that erupted in 79 AD, erupted again near Naples on March 18, 1944.

Allied soldiers witnessed the event, an extraordinary backdrop to the ongoing fight in Italy.

>> Winter: The ashes covered a lot of the equipment and stuff and even down here in downtown Naples.

Neapolitans are very superstitious.

They thought it as a omen of victory or doom, depending on who you talk to.

So the eruption of Vesuvius was a surprise by everyone.

And the ones who thought it was doom because they have this -- the blood of Saint Gennaro.

[ Tanks firing ] >> Narrator: Back at Monte Cassino, along Highway 6, the battle that began in January 1944 raged into mid-May.

Cassino proved to be the costliest fight of the entire Italian campaign, with 55,000 Allied soldiers becoming casualties and roughly 20,000 Germans ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Palilla: We didn't know what we were getting into.

It was a very rough terrain, all mountains, and -- and that -- that made it very difficult.

Everything was just... just destroyed.

>> Man: In four hours, 500 tons of bombs were dropped to level the abbey.

[ Explosions ] The enemy waited until the bombs stopped falling and our guns were silent, then crawled out of their holes and filtered back into the ruins of the abbey.

>> D'Amico: In May, they bombed for six days and six nights, I think, and the whole mountain was just a piece of charcoal.

>> Mitchell: What we finally learned was that there were no Germans in the abbey.

They were around the abbey.

And -- But after the bombing, they went into the rubble, to get them out than it had been before.

>> Winter: When you go out and visit Monte Cassino and look down on the Liri Valley, you can understand why the Americans did what they did.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: Today, a fully rebuilt abbey stands guard over the Liri Valley.

♪♪ ♪♪ The scars of the battle remain visible on the monastery's foundation.

♪♪ Nearby, cemeteries honor Polish troops engaged in fierce fighting and British soldiers who fought in waves to take the abbey's high ground.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ An earlier attempt to breach the Gustav Line was made in late January 1944.

That's when the American 36th and then the 34th Infantry divisions attempted to cross the Rapido River, or Rapid River, which flows directly east of Monte Cassino.

The 36th Infantry was hit hard, suffering some 2,000 casualties in just 48 hours while trying to get across.

Today, monuments near the Rapido River recognize this battle, including the actions of the 100th Battalion, Nisei, or second-generation who fought alongside the 34th Division.

>> Cox: Cross the Rapido River.

Historians certainly know about it.

Well, they -- of my battalion, about 2,000 men went over there, and about 300 or 400 got back.

The rest of them didn't make it.

And then when we started towards the front, we heard something sounded like thunder, sounded like a storm over there somewhere.

No, that was artillery.

First time we'd heard that.

Everybody got quiet.

We were listening.

♪♪ >> Winter: Italy was a -- was something that the American military really didn't want to talk about because of the casualty rates, the high casualty rates and how it became a quagmire they could not get out.

♪♪ >> Man: To break the stalemate, we tried an end run -- amphibious landings at Anzio and Nettuno.

The Germans were caught off guard, and for several days, American and British troops encountered only light opposition as they landed and consolidated the beachhead.

>> Narrator: To relieve pressure on Monte Cassino and fast-track the advance on Rome, Allied leaders decided to land infantry at Anzio, Italy, on January 22, 1944.

Anzio is roughly 32 miles south of Rome.

Like all decisions in the Italian campaign, this move cost the Allies thousands of casualties, 43,000 to be exact.

>> Man: And it was a good beachhead.

It wasn't really a bad D-day.

but the destroyers cleared them up pretty quick.

>> Simpson: I landed in Naples, Italy, and that was a staging area for this invasion of Anzio.

Winston Churchill and some of the people responsible for planning of the war figured it would be wise to make an end run around the Gustav Line and come in behind the Germans.

I was part of the assault force that made the invasion of Anzio.

What Anzio turned out to be was a total nightmare, with no rest for the combat soldier.

I mean, it was -- you were always under fire for four months we did this -- four months.

You look up there at night, and the German planes would be flying back and forth across the beachhead, and the Americans would be shooting their guns up at the airplanes.

And every fourth round would be a tracer bullet.

And the sky would literally be filled with bullets.

You could see them up there, just a big stream of bullets.

>> Man: On the second day, dive bombers appear.

[ Explosion ] [ Engine roaring ] [ Gunfire ] [ Explosions ] >> Winter: The invasion of Nettuno and Anzio was two phases.

>> Megellas: We were up against a bitter enemy.

And -- And it was us against them.

>> Winter: Also, it was marshland.

There was several developments by Mussolini of the canal water system.

So what the Germans did, they opened up the floodgates and flooded a lot of this area.

During the initial invasion, we had the upper hand.

We surprised them, because the Germans were caught completely off guard.

When the invasion happened, they had roughly around 3,000 Germans in the general area.

By the time of week two, the Germans had over 40,000 to 50,000 troops there, plus artillery.

They brought in these huge railroad guns, the siege railroad guns that the Germans used in the Eastern Front in Sevastopol and in Leningrad.

And they were just lobbing these shells that were the size of a Volkswagen onto the Americans.

Because the Americans did not move, they were easy targets.

But also, when you look at Anzio, you see in the distance a ring of mountains, too.

So once again, the Germans had the observation points and advantage of artillery to shell down.

>> Man: This action on the beaches south of Rome may prove a decisive factor in the United Nations' campaign against the Nazis in Italy.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Gunshots ] >> Megellas: The Battle of Anzio, that was -- that was -- that was brutal.

I was wounded twice.

We were surrounded by the enemy, or as I like to put it, we had them surrounded from the inside, and we were about out of ammunition.

I had a limp arm.

[ Gunfire ] When we went into Anzio, there were seven officers and 125 men.

When we were surrounded by the Germans, pushed -- trying to push us off the beach.

>> Mitchell: The problem was we had insufficient ammunition and insufficient men to really cover the territories.

♪♪ Anzio was flat, very, very flat.

And being a wireman, we had to lay lines day and night.

The Germans had most of our frequencies, so we didn't use radio very often, so they wanted telephone lines to all of the outlying battalions and companies.

And being in a wire section, I had to be out almost every day.

And you were fired at as soon as you got out of your hole, and you couldn't stay on a road because they had them all lined up to fire on you.

And you go out across the field, but you might be running into mines.

And suddenly I began to hear Germans speaking, and I said, "What in the heck am I going to do?

I'm going to turn and run."

And they were too close for me to do that.

And so I hid the wire and my telephone under some bushes, and along with my -- by that time, I had a carbine, and there was a hollow tree, and I squeezed into the hollow tree, but I could still see out through a knothole, and six Germans came by.

They didn't even look at the tree.

They went by.

And I stood very still.

And in about 20 minutes, they came back past the tree again, still talking.

♪♪ >> Megellas: What motivated us was to get the enemy.

They were -- They were our enemy.

They were out to kill us.

And that's what war is all about.

And we were also in for the duration of the war.

I wasn't in for a tour.

I wasn't going to be at Anzio, and then I'd be rotated home.

An end to the war -- An end to the war was not in sight.

And we knew the end of the war is we had a lot of hard fighting, so we were prepared.

And Anzio prepared me for everything that happened.

♪♪ >> Brown: On Anzio beachhead, I watched.

There were two Ranger battalions wiped out by the Germans.

The Germans had them lined with tanks and artillery and everything.

They just cut them down.

Men against tanks, they didn't have a chance.

♪♪ >> Sims: And that is when I'm surprised that I survived the war.

You know, we both got hit on Anzio, and there was -- we were hit with an 88.

It wasn't -- I mean a fragment from the 88, not the 88 itself.

♪♪ >> Megellas: I learned more at Anzio and in the mountains of Italy about combat than I did in all the previous training I'd had for years before that in ROTC and all the rest.

♪♪ My MOS, military occupational specialty, and that of the men who fought with me was, simply stated, killing Germans.

Nothing more, nothing less.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Aaron: And on January the 22nd, 1944, we made a little end run behind the front lines at Anzio.

That's where I knew I'm going to heaven, because I spent four -- three months in hell at Anzio.

♪♪ We were pinned down for about three months.

We couldn't go forward and we couldn't go backwards.

But the Germans told us they was going to push us back into the ocean, and they almost succeeded.

♪♪ >> Megellas: I came to terms with that when I went to paratroopers, that I could die.

But what I thought about more than anything was that I would get maimed and become an amputee or something and be shipped home and the sorrow and the grief I would cause my family.

>> Narrator: The fighting at Anzio ended in very early June 1944, and the Allies made their final dash for Rome on Highway 6.

There were no Germans left in their way.

>> Dziabas: And our orders were to get to Rome as fast as possible and have nothing stop or slow us down.

♪♪ ♪♪ Came over that steep hill.

And there was Rome laid out before us, and the church bells start ringing all over Rome.

[ Bells ringing ] >> Man: June 4, 1944.

Rome was free, liberated after 21 years of Fascist rule.

♪♪ The Allied Fifth Army entered the Eternal City from the south, acclaimed by cheering multitudes.

[ Crowd cheering ] ♪♪ >> Dziabas: And all of a sudden, I felt somebody tugging on my elbow.

I looked down, it was a paisano.

And he says, "Tedeschi?"

which means "German."

I said, "No."

He says, "Inglese?"

I says, "No, Americano."

And the minute I said Americano, he start yelling at the top of his voice, "Americano!

Americano!"

And I could hear the shutters and doors open up.

The streets lit up, and I could hear the word "Americano" going all the way across Rome.

They came out with wine and liquor, every drink imaginable.

♪♪ ♪♪ I knew Mussolini's balcony was right around there.

I tried to find it, but I couldn't find it.

And all of a sudden we came to the Colosseum, and it was -- it was like a dream, just what I'd seen pictures of.

♪♪ >> Simpson: In June, I was part of the force that moved on to capture Rome, and our troops were among the first to enter the Vatican.

♪♪ I didn't see any major damage in Rome.

I thought that it had been well-preserved.

Some of the historic things had not been bothered, and I don't think there was a whole lot of combat activity inside the city itself.

>> Aaron: And on the 4th day of June, my -- my outfit marched into Rome, Italy, and we occupied the city of Rome for two weeks.

>> Man: Through the streets where the chariots of the Caesars once rolled, tanks and trucks rumbled past historic landmarks.

The road to Rome was lined with the wreckage of Nazi legions.

After 21 years, a free Rome laughs again, a free Rome speaks again... a free Rome reads again.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Simpson: So I went to Rome, and I was greeted by all the people with wine and fruit, flowers, and they seemed so happy to see Americans, and I-I just -- they all ran out into the street as we came by, wanted to reach up and shake your hand.

>> Martinez: It's a sluggish campaign, and it doesn't have the flamboyant leader.

It has commanders that are very business-like.

There's not any personality that -- of a Patton or of a -- of a -- of a MacArthur or -- or, for that matter, even Eisenhower.

>> Narrator: The fight in Italy didn't end with the capture of Rome on June 4, 1944.

>> Winter: At that point, the Germans were retreating to establish -- to already established defensive lines north of Rome, between Rome and Florence.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Narrator: The road to Rome through the mountains, ridges, valleys, villages, towns, Americans and Allies roughly 125,000 casualties.

♪♪ It is at cemeteries such as this one in Nettuno, just south of Rome, where the casualties become names.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Winter: When you go there and see the manicured lawns, the crosses, and so tranquil and quiet, but 80 years ago, it was not that way.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Because there's almost 8,000 people that are buried in Nettuno alone.

And then there's the British cemetery, the German cemetery, the Canadian cemetery, the Italian cemetery.

So the casualty rate over there was enormous.

♪♪ >> Martinez: The Italian campaign was one of the most unique and most difficult and frustrating offensive moves that they made in Europe.

The casualty lists were staggering on both sides.

♪♪ >> Tamberlani: The cemetery was built here because this was the site of advance of the Third Division after the landing.

So the landing took place on January the 22nd, 1944.

On the 24th, there was already the need, unfortunately, to find a burial site.

So they thought that this could be a suitable place.

And in the advance to Rome, they thought that this could be a good site where to build a cemetery.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Martinez: For the Italian people, it was an ordeal of pain and sorrow and destruction.

There's towns that were never repaired.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ When I go there, I go there with, you know, a heavy heart, and such a sacrifice, you know, what they did, because when you look at these gravestones, you know, they're in their 20s.

>> Narrator: There would be no end to the fighting in Italy until the last days of World War II in Europe, even after the road to Rome had been secured.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Announcer: Production for "Road to Rome" has been made possible by... Additional support has been provided by... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪