Report on the crossing to Italy (USEAAR, #18)

This post is part of an after-action report of Unconditional Surrender! (Salvatore Vasta, GMT Games) and therefore entirely fictitious.

Written by Salvatore Graniti, Secretary of Legation in the Italian diplomatic service, assigned as liaison officer to the staff of the British Army in Italy

Palmi, November 1, 1941

To his Excellency the Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of Italy
Sir,
the following report on the military progress of the forces of the Kingdom of Italy and those of our esteemed ally, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in the Italian theater of war is most humbly submitted to you.
I am pleased to report that we have taken the initiative and crossed an entire army into Calabria. The German forces have been forced to retreat. The commander of the British Army in Italy, Lt. Gen. Bernard Montgomery, is confident that we can hold the bridgehead over the winter and threaten flanking attacks either into Lazio or into Apulia early in 1942.

Norman Sicily

Recently, there has been no hotter theme for board games than Vikings. No matter if you were looking for a light wargame, a classic economic Eurogame or an ameritrash-euro hybrid, Vikings got you covered. After all the raiding, drinking beer and worshipping pagan deities, some of these “men from the north” or “Normans” settled down in the part of modern France which was named after them Normandy. The Viking knack for conquest was however not completely lost. One Norman duke took England for himself in 1066, which did not only give him the kingdom, but also the nickname William the Conqueror.^[1] Other Normans went south. One thousand years ago, in the year 1017, a band of mercenaries under the Norman noble Rainulf Drengot arrived in lower Italy to fight for Pope Benedict VIII against the Byzantines. They and their successors would go on to conquer large parts of southern Italy, rule over a multicultural kingdom, and inherit the title of Holy Roman Emperor.