godsat donald blazia

[Maureen Quartaro]

The Winter Line was a series of German and Italian military fortifications in Italy, constructed during World War II by Organisation Todt and commanded by Albert Kesselring. The series of three lines was designed to defend a western section of Italy, focused around the town of Monte Cassino, through which ran the important Highway 6 which led uninterrupted to Rome. The primary Gustav Line ran across Italy from just north of where the Garigliano River flows into the Tyrrhenian Sea in the west, through the Apennine Mountains to the mouth of the Sangro River on the Adriatic coast in the east. The two subsidiary lines, the Bernhardt Line and the Hitler Line, ran much shorter distances from the Tyrrehnian Sea to just northeast of Cassino where they would merge into the Gustav Line. Relative to the Gustav Line, the Hitler Line stood to the northwest and the Bernhardt Line to the southeast of the primary defenses.

Before being ultimately broken, the Gustav Line effectively slowed the Allied advance for months between December 1943 and June 1944. Major battles in the assault on the Winter Line at Monte Cassino and Anzio alone resulted in 98,000 Allied casualties and 60,000 Axis casualties.[1][2]

The Gustav Line stretched across the Italian Peninsula and barred the way to Rome for the two Allied armies in Italy: the U.S. Fifth Army in the west and the British Eighth Army[a] in the east. The Allies' grand strategy in the autumn of 1943 was for the Eighth Army to advance through the Sangro River defences, then hook south at Avezzano and enter Rome from the rear while the Fifth Army approached from the south.

The center of the Gustav Line crossed the main route north to Rome at strategically crucial Highway 6. It followed the Liri valley and was anchored around the mountains behind the town of Cassino. Above it stood the ancient Benedictine sanctuary of Monte Cassino, which dominated the valley entrance, and Monte Cassino, which gave the defenders clear observation of potential attackers advancing towards the valley mouth. The U.S. 5th Army was held up in front of these positions through the winter of 1943-44. They attempted to flank the position by the landings at Anzio but bogged down quickly there. A bloody and protracted battle was waged over the monastery, known as the Battle of Monte Cassino.

The eastern end of the line was held by the coastal town of Ortona, captured by Canadian forces in the fierce Battle of Ortona in December 1943 which became known as "the little Stalingrad." Failure by the 8th Army to capture Orsogna however put an end to the Allied plans of a strong drive up the eastern coast. Rain, flooded rivers, and high casualties, as well as the departure of General Montgomery, all put a halt to Allied plans until the spring of 1944. The Gustav Line thus fulfilled the wishes of Field Marshal Kesselring, the commander of German forces in Italy, of keeping the Allies south of the so-called Winter Line.

On the western side of the Apennines were two subsidiary lines, the Bernhardt Line in front of the main Gustav positions, and the Hitler Line some 8 kilometres (5 mi) to the rear. The Winter Line was fortified with gun pits, concrete bunkers, turreted machine-gun emplacements, barbed wire and minefields. It was the strongest of the German defensive lines south of Rome. About 15 German divisions were employed in the defence. It took the Allies from mid-November 1943 to June 1944 to fight through all the various elements of the Winter Line, including the well-known battles at Monte Cassino and Anzio.

The offensive on the Bernhardt Line was launched on December 1, 1943, as part of Operation Raincoat. British and American troops took the terrain around Monte Camino and the Mignano Gap within a week and a half of launching the assault but German operations persisted in the area for months.

Some authorities define the Bernhardt Line as crossing Italy from coast to coast following not just the western defensive positions described above but incorporating also the eastern defences of the Gustav Line. Other authorities use the Winter Line name interchangeably with the Gustav Line .

GamesBeat is excited to partner with Lil Snack to have customized games just for our audience! We know as gamers ourselves, this is an exciting way to engage through play with the GamesBeat content you have already come to love. Start playing games now!

You play as Rommel, who became known as the Desert Fox for his wily tactics in beating enemies with larger forces and better supplies. In still-frame cut scenes, the game conveys the viewpoint of Libyan families who rebelled against the Nazi and Italian occupiers.

Rommel narrates the pre-battle briefing to tell you about the mission you need to pull off, using your own tactics. This campaign serves to educate players about the German forces, their weaponry and tactics.

There was one particular tutorial mission that was hard to win and very well balanced, as the British come at you in multiple waves. Setting up a defense involves using engineers to plant mines, laying down wire, positioning your machine guns and anti-tank forces well, and creating a defense-in-depth to hold on if the enemy breaks through against any part of your line.

The invasion of Italy, starting on July 9, 1943, is the main event of Company of Heroes 3, with dozens of maps and lots of missions to fight through. This game took longer to make because it had 40 different detailed maps, compared to 22 for Company of Heroes 2.

The heads-up display is easier to use. You can see all of your special capabilities that have cooled down and are ready to use, like calling in more reinforcement tanks or air strikes. You can pause the battle by hitting a space bar and queue up commands to put your squads into action.

The campaign map and the tactical maps are beautiful, and it makes it so much more pleasant to play the game. The campaign map has strategic unit information and notifications that keep it busy, but you still get the bulk of the screen to look at the gorgeous colors on the map. I played it on a machine with a 3080 graphics card, and it slowed down at times and still managed to get the job done.

At the same time, the tactical maps have lots of detail. One of the greatest features here is destruction. Buildings can be blown up and barbed wire can be torn up by tanks. These create new tactical opportunities and ways to protect your troops.

As the head of the invasion forces, you have to please different factions. The British general Norton is careful about supply lines and pushing forward in his region. But the American commander Buckram is brash and wants to get to Rome first, reflecting the real world tensions of the allies. And the head of the Italian partisans wants you to liberate towns, help the spies and guerillas, and avoid unnecessary destruction of towns like the bombing of the abbey at Monte Cassino, one of the great tragedies of the war.

The one where you land at the beach in Salerno is pretty mild as far as beach landings go. You can fight your way ashore simply by flanking the Germans, finding a flamethrower, and then attacking everyone from behind. But the counterattack was one of the most difficult early missions.

I enjoyed missions at the airport at Pomigliano, the landing and German counterattack at Naples, the capture of Potenza, the battle of Minturno, the rescue at the Anzio beachhead, the assault on Monte Cassino, the taking of the Bari seaport, a mission where you destroy three coastal guns, and the final attack on the Winter Line.

The scale of the game seems a bit off. In the early part of the campaign, I had control of just a few units. At one point, I was trying to drive to the eastern coast of Italy and drive north on a couple of prongs. And so a single company served as the spearhead of an entire campaign to the east. When I lost such a unit far from the beaches in the west, the only thing I could do was drop paratroopers into the same general vicinity to keep the campaign going.

I noted that at one point in the early campaign, I could have had one bomber, one recon plane, one fighter, and one transport plane and that would have constituted two-thirds of all of the units I had on the map.

That was kind of maddening because there were so many vectors to attack and I could only pursue one, two or three strategic goals at a time. As time passed and more supplies came into the seaport or airfield, I could add more. But I always seemed starved for resources. I had many avenues of attack, but there was no point in sending troops into alternative paths as demanded by small local missions.

I simply multiplied my forces as fast as possible and got the advantage in gathering resources. Then I concentrated my forces wherever the enemy attacked. I won these battles easily with a formulaic strategy. The only tough trick was to figure out when to switch over my production to armor and anti-armor units to head off surprise attacks.

The main reason was that it was often just one squad against another in a battle for a capture point.
That sort of defeats the combined arms concept of air, armor, infantry, machine guns, mortars and bazookas. To dislodge enemies from entrenched positions, you need all of those things. But the most valuable way to swing a duel is to manually have your infantry toss a grenade over at the enemy.

I would note that I played it on standard difficulty, and I could increase the difficulty levels in my future campaigns. On top of that, the battles that involved missions in the story of the campaign were almost always well-orchestrated and more difficult to beat.

And while my resource-gathering focus worked fine in single-player battles, the human enemy would be quicker than the AI by far in adapting to my fast-moving strategy. While I focused on weak units, I would inevitably be surprised by a human who would show up with multiple tanks against my forces or would take back a capture point as soon as I left it.

c01484d022