suggap

Anzio (Italian: Lo sbarco di Anzio), also known as The Battle for Anzio (UK title), is a 1968 Technicolor war film in Panavision, an Italian and American co-production, about Operation Shingle, the 1944 Allied seaborne assault on the Italian port of Anzio in World War II. It was adapted from the book Anzio by Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, who had been the BBC war correspondent at the battle.

Plot

During a shipboard meeting with American General Jack Lesley, commander of the Allied forces set to land at Anzio, war correspondent Dick Ennis (a thinly disguised Ernie Pyle) tells Lesley (who has admired Ennis' combat reporting for years) that his journalistic efforts at the front lines has been motivated by his life long quest to discover why men go to war. He confesses he has yet to find an answer but he rejects Lesley's explanation that it is all a matter of survival. Ennis is assigned to accompany US Army Rangers for the upcoming attempt to outflank the tough enemy defenses. The amphibious landing is unopposed, but General Lesley, is too cautious, preferring to fortify his beachhead before advancing inland. Previously, Lesley and General Carson (a thinly disguised US Army General Mark Clark) agreed at an impromptu press conference in Naples that there would be no repeat of the near-fatal landing at Salerno the previous year when the Allied commanders grossly underestimated the German opposition. Ennis and a Ranger drive in a jeep through the countryside, discovering there are few Germans between the beachhead and Rome, but his information is ignored. As a result, the German commander, Field Marshall Kesselring, had time to gather his forces and launch an effective counterattack.