After U.S. Fifth Army General Mark Clark deviated from an Allied Force plan in early June 1944 to trap retreating Germans in central Italy and instead moved his troops to liberate Rome, the controversial decision outraged British commanders, especially Lt. General Oliver Leese. As a result, Leese rejected the original Gothic Line offensive plan for a joint American-British attack up the center of Italy in the Apennine mountains to liberate Bologna from Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation.

Instead, Leese launched one of the most complex and dangerous logistical exercises in WW II by moving at night in August 1944 approximately 100,000 British Eighth Army troops - an amount equal to those in the D-Day landing in Normandy. The convoy traveled from central Italy across a primitive, hilly road network to the Adriatic coastal plain. The coalition of soldiers under Leese's command included troops from India, Scotland, Poland, Greece, Palestine, New Zealand and Canada.

On Aug. 28, 1944, they launched the first wave of the Gothic Line offensive, which was part of a one-two punch, pincer movement instead of the original full-frontal, central Italy thrust. The U.S.-led Fifth Army, commanded by Clark, would launch two weeks later the second part of the one-two punch plan up the Giogo Pass north of Florence.

Author Mike Sommerville's father was part of the Sherwood Foresters infantry regiment of the British Eighth Army. Sommerville, a military historian, described how ``The Sherwood Boys'' - as his book is titled - had been transferred out of Italy to Palestine in February 1944 to rest and retrain before returning to Italy for the Gothic Line offensive.

However, like much of the Allied Force campaign in Italy that started in 1943 with a landing in Sicily, little went to plan. The British-led army suffered significant casualties from the start of the offensive and was often bogged down because of rain-swollen rivers and mud. In September, fierce fighting claimed the lives of more than 80,000 German and Allied soldiers. Low morale problems soon became an issue, especially after the British troops learned politicians and the tabloid press in the U.K. had labeled them as ``D-Day dodgers '' vacationing on the Adriatic Sea. The desertion rate multiplied as soldiers went AWOL to avoid being killed or injured when it had become clear the war was nearing an end. Ultimately, the British-led offensive ground to a halt in December 1944 on the Senio River because of limited and exhausted troops, low ammunition, poor weather as well as relentless German resistance made it impossible to achieve the planned Christmas-time victory celebration. As a result, they would spend nearly three months hunkered down on the fringe of a no-man's land by the Senio amidst constant artillery exchanges with German troops on other side of the river bank. Three and a half months later, the British Eighth Army under Leese's command would renew the offensive in April. The American-led Fifth Army, which also stalled for months, broke through from the west. After three weeks the German forces agreed to surrender at the end of April despite Hitler's order to fight to the death.