Admiral Ernest J. King was the Navy's principal architect of victory. A stern sailor of commanding presence, vast sea-knowledge, and keen strategic s… - Samuel Eliot Morison

Theodore Roosevelt in his presidential address before the American Historical Association in 1912 made a ringing plea to the young historian to do better: “He must ever remember that while the worst offense of which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he cannot write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the truth.”

Was President Roosevelt right when he predicted at the TRIDENT Conference in May 1943 that committing large armies to Italy "might result in attrition for the United Nations and play into Germany's hands"? Was Admiral King wrong in predicting that the invasion of Italy would "create a vacuum into which Allied forces would be sucked"? Before that campaign was over- and it was not finished until eleven months after the liberation of Rome- an army contributed by ten Allied nations faced Vietinghoff's Southwestern Army Group; and the Germans were still on Italian soil when that group surrendered on 2 May 1945.
Yet there is much to be said in defense of the Italian campaign, in the light of its other object as stated in the original directive to General Eisenhower: - "To contain the maximum number of German forces." Granted that the Allies had to fight Germans somewhere during the ten months that would elapse between the conquest of Sicily and D-day in Normandy, where else could they have fought them with any prospect of success? What was the alternative to Italy? Search the coasts of Europe and the Near East as you will, there was none, other than invading islands of slight strategic value, which the Germans would probably have evacuated in any case; or taking the long and torturous Balkans route which every military commander regarded as impracticable. We instinctively resent military campaigns in which there is great suffering with little result, as the American public in 1864 resented Grant's Wilderness campaign. But let us admit that the Italian campaign, like Grant's, was fought because it had to be fought.

A few days before General Eisenhower disbanded SHAEF, General MacArthur announced the liberation of the Philippines. Okinawa was almost secured, and the Navy was drawing a cordon tight about Japan. Nobody- even those in on the secret of the atomic bomb- could guess what the immediate future might bring.