75th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino and Northern Italy (Gaming The Battles)

I spent a large part of my 2018 hobby building up to this project. You can see the progress of this with the two sister projects I created. In those, I painted the necessary armies and terrain for playing out these battles. These projects are not yet complete and will continue to run in parallel with this one.

You can find the Terrain Build project here:

https://www.beastsofwar.com/project/1222955/

And the army build project here:

https://www.beastsofwar.com/project/1224831/

So why the Italian campaign? Partly it’s because it is a little (not much) off the beaten track of WW2 gaming and understanding. Partly it’s due to the hard fought battles and heroic actions on all sides that took place there. Partly the setting and my fondness for Italy. There’s also the fact that the local Royal Sussex Regiment fought there alongside a huge number of nationalities – indeed, if there is one theatre of operation in WW2 that was truly global, Italy must be it. French, Algerian, Canadian, US, British, Polish, New Zealand, Italian, Indian, German, Nepalese, Moroccan and Brazilian soldiers all fought on the Italian mainland, many at Cassino. So it is hard to explain exactly why, but the Italian campaign sparked my interest and led me down the historical wargaming road – a road that I had not trodden before….

Before I start this project in earnest, I will point out that I’m not an amateur historian, more of an ‘interested bystander’. With this in mind, I expect that there will be many errors and inaccuracies. I also expect that there will be some grossly incorrect assumptions. For all of these, I apologise in advance and hope that the errors will be pointed out in the comments.