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Dwight Clark

Dwight Edward Clark (January 8, 1957 – June 4, 2018) was an American football wide receiver who played for nine seasons with the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League (NFL) from 1979 to 1987. He was a member of San Francisco's first two Super Bowl championship teams.

He caught the winning touchdown pass thrown by quarterback Joe Montana in the NFC Championship Game on January 10, 1982, against the Dallas Cowboys. The play, immortalized as "the Catch", propelled the 49ers to their first Super Bowl championship. Clark played college football for the Clemson Tigers and was selected by the 49ers in the tenth round of the 1979 NFL draft. He served as the general manager of the 49ers from 1995 to 1998 and in the same capacity with the Cleveland Browns from 1999 to 2001.

Early life
Clark was born on January 8, 1957, in Kinston, North Carolina. He graduated from Garinger High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he played quarterback.

College career
At 6ft 4in, Clark's first love was basketball, but he accepted a scholarship to play college football at Clemson University.

As a freshman, Clark was moved to wide receiver, because the team had recruited four other quarterbacks. As a sophomore, he was named the starter at strong safety, but he disliked the position and left school to go back to his hometown in Charlotte instead. Clark was unhappy and considered transferring to play basketball at Appalachian State University, until he was finally allowed to play offense. After returning to the team, he was a backup wide receiver and finished with five receptions for 99 yards and a 19.8-yard average.

As a junior, Clark was named a starter at wide receiver and was part of the team that qualified Clemson to the Gator Bowl, its first bowl game in 18 years. He was third on the team with 17 receptions for 265 yards and one touchdown.

In Clark's senior season in 1978, the Tigers were 11–1, won the Gator Bowl over Ohio State, and finished sixth in the final AP poll. He was second on the team with 11 receptions for 207 yards and 2 touchdowns, including a career-high 68-yard touchdown catch against the University of Maryland that helped the Tigers win the ACC Championship.

At Clemson, Clark wore #30, posting only 33 catches for 571 yards, three touchdowns and a 17.3-yard average (seventh in school history). Unheralded as a collegian playing alongside wide receiver Jerry Butler, Clark felt fortunate to get to the NFL.

In 1988, Clark was inducted into the Clemson Hall of Fame. In 2018, he was inducted into the South Carolina Football Hall of Fame.

Professional career
The San Francisco 49ers selected Clark with the first pick of the tenth round (249th overall) of the 1979 NFL draft, even though some people in the organization questioned the selection at the time, considering he was seen as an undrafted free agent. New head coach Bill Walsh had visited Clemson to scout quarterback Steve Fuller, Clark's roommate. When the 49er contingent arrived on campus, Clark answered the phone by chance on his way out to play golf and was convinced to participate as Fuller's pass catcher at the workout, where Walsh was impressed with his receiving skills.

The 49ers were 2–14 in 1978 and had the same record in 1979. But they soon greatly improved, winning the Super Bowl at the ends of the 1981 and 1984 seasons, and, starting in 1981, making the playoffs every year Clark was with them except 1982.

Clark tallied 506 catches for 6,750 yards and 48 touchdowns, along with 50 rushing yards in his nine NFL seasons with the 49ers. He led the NFL in receptions (60) during the strike-shortened 1982 season and made the Pro Bowl twice, in 1981 and 1982. Sports Illustrated writer Paul Zimmerman named Clark his Player of the Year for 1982.

The Catch
In the 1981 NFC Championship game, on January 10, 1982, against the Dallas Cowboys, the 49ers trailed 27–21 with 58 seconds to play. On 3rd-and-3, Clark leaped and caught a 6-yard pass from quarterback Joe Montana in the back of the end zone to tie the score, and Ray Wersching's extra-point kick advanced the 49ers to Super Bowl XVI. That play, one of the most famous in the history of the NFL, has been immortalized as "The Catch". Clark finished the game with eight receptions for 120 yards and two touchdowns. During the 1981 season, Walsh had Montana practice that part of the play back in training camp. Montana said, "We'd never thrown the ball to Dwight on that play, at all." In the early 1990s, Clark's catch had become the most requested clip in the archives of NFL Films, which was charging up to $5,000 for its use.

Retirement and legacy
After nine seasons with the 49ers, Clark retired following the 1987 season. He was a member of two Super Bowl-winning teams (XVI and XIX). To honor his contribution to 49ers, the club retired his #87 in 1988. He served as a team executive for the 49ers until 1998, when he resigned to become the first general manager in the expansion era of the Cleveland Browns, after following Carmen Policy who would run the team under the ownership of Al Lerner. In their first draft in 1999, the Browns went for quarterback Tim Couch, deciding to reject the calls from the Saints that offered their entire array of draft picks in order to try and draft Ricky Williams. He was executive vice president and director of football operations from 1999 to 2001. On May 14, 2002, he resigned from his position with the Browns after new head coach Butch Davis requested the right to make personnel decisions. In the 2018 NFL Films documentary Dwight Clark: A Football Life, he was quoted as saying that it was probably a mistake to have accepted the position. He would later return to North Carolina to run his real estate business.

Clark built his restaurant, Clark's By The Bay, the year he retired and decorated it with sports memorabilia including The Catch. Initially serving Cajun food, it later switched to prime rib and seafood. Located in Redwood City, California, the restaurant was sold in 1993.

Media appearances
Clark joined his 49er teammates Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott, and Riki Ellison in performing backup vocals on Huey Lewis and the News hit songs "Hip to Be Square" and "I Know What I Like" for the band's Fore! album. Huey Lewis later indicated he was impressed by Clark's singing abilities. Clark later took the lead role in the 1993 direct-to-video comedy Kindergarten Ninja. He also appeared in the video game All-Pro Football 2K8. He joined Comcast SportsNet Bay Area in 2011 as an analyst for 49ers Postgame Live. Post-retirement, Clark expressed remorse about the end of Candlestick Park, saying that "It was a dump [but] it was our dump, so we could talk bad about it, but we didn't want anybody else to talk bad about it."

Personal life
Clark dated Miss Universe Shawn Weatherly from 1978 to 1982.

Clark met Ashley Stone in 1982; they married the following year. He had three children with Stone: a daughter, Casey, and two sons, Riley and Mac. They divorced in 2009.

Clark married Kelly Radzikowski in 2011. They moved to Santa Cruz.

Illness and death
On March 19, 2017, Clark announced that he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He stated that he believed he developed ALS as a result of playing football; he suffered three concussions during his playing career. "I've been asked if playing football caused this," Clark wrote. "I don't know for sure. But I certainly suspect it did. And I encourage the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) and the NFL to continue working together in their efforts to make the game of football safer, especially as it relates to head trauma."

Clark died of the disease on June 4, 2018. At the time of his death, Clark lived in Whitefish, Montana, with his wife Kelly. He was the father-in-law of former NHL defenseman Peter Harrold. Clark had a close friendship with former 49ers owner Edward J. DeBartolo Jr. DeBartolo sent Clark to Japan in 2017 to bring back a three-month supply of the drug Radicava before it became available in the United States.

title: Dwight Clark


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Open Document Architecture

The Open Document Architecture (ODA) and interchange format (informally referred to as just ODA) is a free and open international standard document file format maintained by the ITU-T to replace all proprietary document file formats. ODA is detailed in the standards documents CCITT T.411-T.424, which is equivalent to ISO/IEC 8613.

Format
ODA defines a compound document format that can contain raw text, raster images and vector graphics. In the original release the difference between this standard and others like it is that the graphics structures were exclusively defined as CCITT raster image and Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM - ISO/IEC 8632). This was to limit the problem of having word processor and desktop publisher software be required to interpret all known graphics formats.

The documents have both logical and layout structures. Logically the text can be partitioned into chapters, footnotes and other subelements akin to HTML, and the layout fill a function similar to Cascading Style Sheets in the web world. The binary transport format for an ODA-conformant file is called Open Document Interchange Format (ODIF) and is based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language and Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1).

One of the features of this standard could be stored or interchanged in one of three formats: Formatted, Formatted Processable, or Processable. The latter two are editable formats. The first is an uneditable format that is logically similar to Adobe Systems PDF that is in common use today.

History
In 1985, ESPRIT financed a pilot implementation of the ODA concept, involving, among others, Bull corporation, Olivetti, ICL and Siemens AG.

The intent was to have a universal storable and interchangeable document structure that would not go out of date and could be used by any word processor or desktop publisher. The rapid adoption of personal computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s by consumers and small businesses and the relative ease of writing applications for the primitive early PCs had resulted in a huge number of new word processing applications that were then duking it out around the world for market dominance. At the same time, large corporations who had purchased dedicated word processor devices in the 1970s were switching over to the new PCs that could run word processing software and much more. The result was a profusion of constantly evolving proprietary file formats. It was already clear by 1985 that this confusing and often frustrating situation would get much worse before it got better, as desktop publishing and multimedia computing were already on the horizon.

Thus, ODA was intended to solve the problem of software applications whose developers were continually updating their native file formats to accommodate new features, which frequently broke backward compatibility. Older native formats were repeatedly becoming obsolete and therefore unusable after only a few years. This led to a large financial impact on companies that were using ad hoc standard applications, such as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, because their IT departments had to constantly assist frustrated users with transferring content between so many different formats, and also hire employees whose sole job was to import old stored documents into the latest version of applications before they became unreadable. The intended result of the ODA standard was that companies would not have to commit to an ad hoc standard for word processor or desktop publisher applications, because any application adhering to a common open standard could be used to read and edit long stored documents.

The initial round of documents that made up ISO 8613 was completed after a multi-year effort at an ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG3 meeting in Paris La Defense, France, around Armistice (Nov. 11) 1987, called "Office Document Architecture" at the time. CCITT picked them up as the T.400 series of recommendations, using the term "Open Document Architecture". Work continued on additional parts for a while, for instance at an ISO working group meeting in Ottawa in February 1989. Improvements and additions were continually being made. The revised standard was finally published in 1999. However, no significant developer of document application software chose to support the format, probably because the conversion from the existing dominant word processor formats such as WordPerfect and Microsoft Word was difficult, offered little fidelity, and would only have weakened their advantage of vendor lock-in over their existing user base. There were also cultural obstacles because ODA was a predominantly European project that took a top-down design approach. It was unable to garner significant interest from the American software developer community or trade press. Finally, it took an extraordinarily long time to release the ODA format (the pilot was financed in 1985, but the final specification not published until 1999). Given a lack of products that supported the format, in part because of the excessive time used to create the specification, few users were interested in using it. Eventually interest in the format faded.

IBM's European Networking Center (ENC) in Heidelberg, Germany, developed prototype extensions to IBM OfficeVision/VM to support ODA, in particular a converter between ODA and Document Content Architecture (DCA) document formats.

It would be improper to call ODA anything but a failure, but its spirit clearly influenced latter-day document formats that were successful in gaining support from many document software developers and users. These include the already-mentioned HTML and CSS as well as XML and XSL leading up to OpenDocument and Office Open XML.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Open Document Architecture


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North African campaign

The North African campaign of World War II took place in North Africa from 10 June 1940 to 13 May 1943. It included campaigns fought in the Libyan and Egyptian deserts (Western Desert campaign, also known as the Desert War), in Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch), and in Tunisia (Tunisia campaign). The campaign was fought between the Allies and the Axis Powers. The Allied war effort was dominated by the British Commonwealth and exiles from German-occupied Europe. The United States officially entered the war in December 1941 and began direct military assistance in North Africa on 11 May 1942.

Fighting in North Africa started with the Italian declaration of war on 10 June 1940. On 14 June, the British 11th Hussars and part of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment, (1st RTR) crossed the border from Egypt into Libya and captured Fort Capuzzo. This was followed by an Italian counter-offensive into Egypt and the capture of Sidi Barrani in September. The British recaptured Sidi Barrani in December during Operation Compass. The Italian 10th Army was destroyed and the German Afrika Korps was dispatched to North Africa in February 1941 in Operation Sonnenblume to reinforce Italians and prevent an Axis defeat.

Battles for control of Libya and Egypt followed, with advances and retreats until the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 when the Eighth Army (Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery) defeated the German–Italian Panzerarmee Afrika and forced its remnants into Tunisia. After Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landings in North-West Africa in November 1942 and fighting against Vichy France forces (which then changed sides), the Allies trapped about 250,000 German and Italian personnel in northern Tunisia, forcing their surrender in May 1943.

Information gleaned via British Ultra code-breaking was important in the Allied victory in North Africa. The Italian campaign followed, which culminated in the downfall of the Fascist government in Italy and the elimination of Germany's main European ally. German and Italian forces committed atrocities against prisoners of war and Jewish, Berber and Arab populations.

Western Desert campaign
On 10 May 1940, the Wehrmacht started the Battle of France (or Westfeldzug). Six weeks later, France surrendered. The Armistice at Compiègne took place on 22 June 1940 leaving the Vichy government in control of French territory not occupied by Germany.

On 10 June, the Kingdom of Italy aligned itself with Nazi Germany and declared war upon France and the United Kingdom. British forces (along with Indian and Rhodesian troops) based in Egypt were ordered to take defensive measures, but to avoid provocation as much as possible. However, on 11 June they began a series of raids against Italian positions in Libya. Following the defeat of France on 25 June, Italian forces in Tripolitania – facing French troops based in Tunisia – redeployed to Cyrenaica to reinforce the Italian Tenth Army. This, coupled with the steadily degrading equipment of the British forces, led General Archibald Wavell to order an end to the raids and place the defence of the Egyptian border with a small screening force.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini ordered the Tenth Army to invade Egypt by 8 August. Two days later, no invasion having been launched, Mussolini ordered Marshal Graziani that, the moment German forces launched Operation Sea Lion to invade Great Britain, he was to attack. Beaten in the Battle of Britain, the German invasion never took place. On 8 September, the Italians – hampered by a lack of transport, enfeebled by the low level of training among officers, and weakened by the state of its supporting equipment – were ordered to invade Egypt the following day. The battle plan was to advance along the coastal road while limited armoured forces operated on the desert flank.

To counter the Italian advance, Wavell ordered his screening forces to harass the advancing Italians, falling back towards Mersa Matruh, where the main British infantry force was based. Positioned on the desert flank was the 7th Armoured Division, which would strike at the flank of the Italian force.

By 16 September, the Italian force had advanced to Maktila, around 80 mi west of Mersa Matruh, where they halted due to supply problems. Despite Mussolini urging them to carry on, Graziani ordered his men to dig in around Sidi Barrani, and fortified camps were established in forward locations; additional troops were also positioned behind the main force. In response to the dispersed Italian camps, the British planned a limited five-day attack, Operation Compass, to strike at these fortified camps one by one. The British Commonwealth force, totalling 36,000 men, attacked the forward elements of the 10-division-strong Italian army on 9 December. Following their initial success, the forces of Operation Compass pursued the retreating Italian forces. In January, the small port at Bardia was taken, soon followed by the seizure of the fortified port of Tobruk.

Some 40,000 Italians were captured in and around the two ports, with the remainder of the Tenth Army retreating along the coast road back to El Agheila. Richard O'Connor sent the 7th Armoured Division across the desert with a small reconnaissance group. It reached Beda Fomm some ninety minutes before the Italians, cutting off their retreat. Although they tried desperately to overcome the British force at the Battle of Beda Fomm, the Italians were unable to break through, and the remnants of the retreating army surrendered. Over ten weeks Allied forces had destroyed the Italian Tenth Army and reached El Agheila, taking 130,000 prisoners of war in the process.

Mussolini requested help from his German allies, while the Italian Comando Supremo ("high command") speedily sent several large motorized and armoured forces to protect their colonies in North Africa. This greatly expanded reinforcement included the soon-to-be-renowned Ariete Armoured division under General Ettore Baldassarre. Meanwhile, the Germans hastily assembled a motorized force, whose lead elements arrived in Tripoli in February. This relatively small expeditionary force, termed the Afrika Korps by Adolf Hitler, was placed under the command of Erwin Rommel. His orders were to reinforce the Italians and block Allied attempts to drive them out of the region. However, the initial commitment of only one panzer division and subsequently, no more than two panzer and one motorized divisions, indicated the limited extent of German involvement and commitment to this theatre of operations. The bulk of the reinforcements were Italian and therefore it was up to the Italians to do the bulk of the fighting. The forward Allied force – now named XIII Corps – adopted a defensive posture and over the coming months was built up, before most of its veteran forces were redeployed to Greece to counter the German invasion there. In addition, the 7th Armoured Division was withdrawn to the Nile delta. The veteran forces were replaced by inexperienced newcomers, ill-equipped to face German armour.

Although Rommel had been ordered to simply hold the line, an armoured reconnaissance soon became a full-fledged offensive from El Agheila in March. In March–April, Allied forces were forced back and leading general officers captured. The Australian 9th Infantry Division fell back to the fortress port of Tobruk, and the remaining British and Commonwealth forces withdrew a further 100 mi east to the Libyan–Egyptian border. With Tobruk under siege by the main Italian-German force, a small battlegroup continued to press eastwards. Capturing Fort Capuzzo and Bardia in passing, it then advanced into Egypt, and by the end of April it had taken Sollum and the tactically important Halfaya Pass. Rommel garrisoned these positions, reinforcing the battle-group and ordering it onto the defensive.

Though isolated on land, Tobruk's garrison continued to receive supplies and replacements, delivered by the Royal Navy at night. Rommel's forces did not have the strength or training to take the fortress. This created a supply problem for his forward units. His front-line positions at Sollum were at the end of an extended supply chain that stretched back to Tripoli and had to bypass the coast road at Tobruk. Further, he was constantly threatened with a breakout of the British forces at Tobruk. Without Tobruk in Axis hands, further advances into Egypt were impractical.

The Allies launched a small-scale counter-attack called Operation Brevity in an attempt to push Axis forces off the key passes at the border, with some initial success. However they could not hold the advance positions and followed Brevity up with a much larger-scale offensive, Operation Battleaxe intended to relieve the siege at Tobruk, but this operation also failed.

Following the failure of Operation Battleaxe, Archibald Wavell was relieved of command and replaced by Claude Auchinleck. The Western Desert Force was reinforced with a second corps, XXX Corps, with the two corps forming the Eighth Army. Eighth Army was made up of army forces from the Commonwealth nations, including the British Army, the Australian Army, the Indian Army, the New Zealand Army, the South African Army, and the Sudan Defence Force. There was also a brigade of Free French under Marie-Pierre Koenig.

The new formation launched a new offensive, Operation Crusader, in November. After a see-saw battle, the 70th Division garrisoning Tobruk was relieved and the Axis forces were forced to fall back. By January 1942, the front line was again at El Agheila.

After receiving supplies and reinforcements from Tripoli, the Axis attacked again, defeating the Allies in the Battle of Gazala in June and capturing Tobruk. The Axis forces drove the Eighth Army back over the Egyptian border, but their advance was stopped in July only 90 mi from Alexandria in the First Battle of El Alamein.

Of great significance, on 29 June reports of British military operations in North Africa sent to Washington by the US military attaché in Cairo, Bonner Fellers, no longer used the compromised "Black Code" which the Axis forces had been reading, so the Axis could no longer learn of British "strengths, positions, losses, reinforcements, supply, situation, plans, morale etc" as they had since 1940.

General Auchinleck, although he had checked Rommel's advance at the First Battle of El Alamein, was replaced by General Harold Alexander. Lieutenant-General William Gott was promoted from XIII Corps commander to command of the entire Eighth Army, but he was killed when his aircraft was intercepted and shot down over Egypt. He was replaced by Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery.

At the end of June, Axis forces made a second attempt to break through the Allied defences at El Alamein at Alam Halfa, but were unsuccessful. After a lengthy period of build-up and training, the Eighth Army launched a major offensive, decisively defeating the Italian-German army in the Second Battle of El Alamein in late October, driving Axis forces west and capturing Tripoli in mid-January 1943. By February, the Eighth Army was facing the Italian-German Panzer Army near the Mareth Line and came under command of Alexander's 18th Army Group for the concluding phase of the war in North Africa – the Tunisia campaign.

Operation Torch

Operation Torch in November 1942 was a compromise operation that met the British objective of securing victory in North Africa while allowing American armed forces the opportunity to engage in the fight against Nazi Germany on a limited scale. In addition, as Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, had long been pleading for a second front to be opened to engage the Wehrmacht and relieve pressure on the Red Army, it provided some degree of relief for the Red Army on the Eastern Front by diverting Axis forces to the North African theatre. Over half the German Ju 52 transport planes that were needed to supply the encircled Axis forces at Stalingrad were tied up supplying Axis forces in North Africa.

Senior U.S. commanders were strongly opposed to proposed landings in North-West Africa. After the western Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) met in London on 30 July 1942 General George Marshall and Admiral Ernest King declined to approve the plan. Marshall and other U.S. generals advocated the invasion of northern Europe later that year, which the British rejected. After Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressed for a landing in French North Africa in 1942, Marshall suggested instead to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the U.S. abandon the Germany first strategy and take the offensive in the Pacific. Roosevelt said it would do nothing to help Russia. With Marshall unable to persuade the British to change their minds, President Roosevelt gave a direct order that Operation Torch was to have precedence over other operations and was to take place at the earliest possible date, one of only two direct orders he gave to military commanders during the war.

The landings started on 8 November, and finished on 16 November. In an attempt to pincer German and Italian forces, Allied forces (American and British Commonwealth) landed in Vichy-held French North Africa under the assumption that there would be little to no resistance. Nevertheless, Vichy French forces put up a strong and bloody resistance to the Allies in Oran and Morocco, but not in Algiers, where a coup d'état by the French resistance on 8 November succeeded in neutralizing the French XIX Corps before the landing and arresting the Vichy commanders. Consequently, the landings met no practical opposition in Algiers, and the city was captured on the first day along with the entire Vichy African command. After three days of talks and threats, Generals Mark Clark and Dwight Eisenhower compelled Vichy Admiral François Darlan and General Alphonse Juin to order the cessation on 10–11 November of armed resistance from Vichy forces in Oran and Morocco, promising to make Darlan the head of a Free French administration. During Operation Torch, Americans fought Vichy French and German navy vessels in the Naval Battle of Casablanca, which ended in an American victory.

The Allied landings prompted the Axis occupation of Vichy France (Case Anton) including an attempt to capture the French fleet at Toulon, which did them little good, as the main portion of the fleet was scuttled to prevent their use by the Axis.

The Vichy Army in North Africa joined the Allies.

Tunisian campaign
Following the Operation Torch landings – from early November 1942 – the Germans and Italians initiated a buildup of troops in Tunisia to fill the vacuum left by Vichy troops which had withdrawn. During this period of weakness, the Allies decided against a rapid advance into Tunisia while they wrestled with the Vichy authorities. Many of the Allied soldiers were tied up in garrison duties because of the uncertain status and intentions of the Vichy forces.

By mid-November, the Allies were able to advance into Tunisia, but only in single division strength. By early December, the Eastern Task Force – which had been redesignated as the British First Army under Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson – was composed of the British 78th Infantry Division, British 6th Armoured Division, 1st Parachute Brigade, No. 6 Commando and elements of US 1st Armored Division. But by this time, one German and five Italian divisions had been shipped from Europe and the remoteness of Allied airfields from the front line gave the Axis clear air superiority over the battlefield. The Allies were halted and pushed back having advanced eastwards to within 30 km of Tunis.

In early December, the Allies were met with the reality that they would not be successful in capturing the key cities of Tunis and Bizerta. The air campaigns by the Axis forces proved to be a difficult challenge for the British forces. However, the Allies were left with the advantage of having secured the island of Malta, enabling the Allies to carry out future aerial operations. Additionally, on land, allied British and American forces were able to hold onto their possessions. On December 4, 1942, the Allied Force Headquarters in North Africa reported that military operations were ongoing in the Tebourba area. The Axis powers attempted a second counter-attack in the neighborhood of Tebourba following their failed attempt on December 1. The attack was successfully repulsed by the Allied powers, and the enemy sustained significant damage to their weaponry. During the winter, there followed a period of stalemate during which time both sides continued to build up their forces. By the new year, the British First Army had one British, one US and one French Corps (a second British Corps headquarters was activated in April). In the second half of February, in eastern Tunisia, Rommel and von Arnim had some successes against the mainly inexperienced French and US troops, most notably in routing the US II Corps commanded by Major General Lloyd Fredendall at the Battle of Kasserine Pass.

By the beginning of March, the British Eighth Army – advancing westward along the North African coast – had reached the Tunisian border. Rommel and von Arnim found themselves in an Allied "two army" pincer. They were outflanked, outmanned and outgunned. Rommel went back to Germany for health reasons and was substituted by the Italian general Messe.

The British Eighth Army bypassed the Axis defence on the Mareth Line in late March after harsh fighting and First Army in central Tunisia launched their main offensive in mid-April to squeeze the Axis forces until their resistance in Africa collapsed. The Axis forces surrendered on 13 May 1943 yielding over 275,000 prisoners of war. The last Axis force to surrender in North Africa was the 1st Italian Army of general Messe. This huge loss of experienced troops greatly reduced the military capacity of the Axis powers, although some Axis troops escaped Tunisia. This defeat in Africa led to all Italian colonies in Africa being captured.

Axis
The Axis had considerable success in intelligence gathering through radio communication intercepts and monitoring unit radio traffic. The most important success came through intercepting the reports of Fellers, the US military attaché in Egypt. He had been tasked by Marshall with providing detailed reports on the military situation in Africa. Fellers talked with British military and civilian headquarters personnel, read documents and visited the battlefront. Known to the Germans as "die gute Quelle" (the good source) or more jokingly as 'the little fellow', he transmitted his reports back to Washington using the "Black Code" of the US State Department. However, in September 1941, the Italians had stolen a code book containing the Black Code, photographed it and returned it to the US embassy in Rome. The Italians shared parts of their intercepts with their German allies. In addition the "Chiffrierabteilung" (German military cipher branch) were soon able to break the code. Fellers' reports were very detailed and played a significant role in informing the Germans of allied strength and intentions between January and June 1942

In addition, the Italian Servizio Informazioni Segrete or SIS code-breakers were able to successfully intercept much radio encrypted signals intelligence (SIGINT) from British aircraft traffic as well as first-class ciphers from British vessels and land bases, providing Supermarina (Regia Marina) with timely warnings of Allied intentions in the Mediterranean. Indeed, so successful was the Italian SIS in handling the bulk of Axis naval intelligence in the Mediterranean, that "Britain's offensive use of SIGINT was largely negated by Italy's defensive SIGINT."

The Afrika Korps had the intelligence services of the 621st Signals Battalion mobile monitoring element which arrived in North Africa in late April 1941, commanded by Hauptmann Alfred Seeböhm. The 621st Signals Battalion monitored radio communications among British units. Unfortunately for the Allies, the British not only failed to change their codes with any frequency, they were also prone to poor radio discipline in combat. Their officers made frequent open, uncoded transmissions to their commands, allowing the Germans to more easily identify British units and deployments. The situation changed after a counterattack during the Battle of Gazala resulted in the 621st Signals Battalion being overrun and destroyed, and a number of their documents captured, alerting British intelligence to the problem. The British responded by instituting an improved call signal procedure, introducing radiotelephonic codes, imposing rigid wireless silence on reserve formations, padding out real messages with dummy traffic, tightening up on their radio discipline in combat and creating an entire fake signals network in the southern sector.

Allies
Allied codebreakers read much enciphered German message traffic, especially that encrypted with the Enigma machine. The Allies' Ultra programme was initially of limited value, as it took too long to get the information to the commanders in the field, and at times provided information that was less than helpful. In terms of anticipating the next move the Germans would make, reliance on Ultra sometimes backfired. Part of the reason the initial German attacks in March 1941 were so successful was that Ultra intercepts had informed Wavell that OKW had clearly directed Rommel not to take any offensive action, but to wait until he was further reinforced with the 15th Panzer Division in May. Rommel received this information, but placed more value on his own assessment of the situation. Trusting that the Germans had no intention of taking major action, the British command did not respond until it was too late. Furthermore, Rommel did not generally provide OKW or the Italian Comando Supremo details of his planned operations, for he thought the Italians too prone to leak the information. Thus on 21 January 1942, when Rommel struck out on his second offensive from El Agheila, Comando Supremo was just as surprised to learn of it as the British were. Ultra intercepts provided the British with such information as the name of the new German commander, his time of arrival, and the numbers and condition of the Axis forces, but they might not correctly reveal Rommel's intentions.

The primary benefit of Ultra intercepts to the effort in North Africa was to aid in cutting the Axis supply line to Tunisia. Ultra intercepts provided valuable information about the times and routes of Axis supply shipments across the Mediterranean. This was critical in providing the British with the opportunity to intercept and destroy them. During the time when Malta was under heavy air attack, the ability to act on this information was limited, but as Allied air and naval strength improved, the information became instrumental to Allied success. It is estimated that 40% to 60% of Axis supply shipping was located and destroyed due to decrypted information. However, this claim is strongly disputed by the authors Vincent P. O'Hara and Enrico Cernuschi (2013) who claim that historians like F.H. Hinsley have greatly exaggerated the effects of Ultra. For example, they claim that intelligence provided by Ultra had little impact in stopping Italian convoys reaching North Africa. Of the 2.67 million tons of materiel, fuel, and munitions shipped to Africa – nearly all in Italian vessels and under Italian escort – 2.24 million tons managed to arrive despite the best efforts of Ultra and the British Navy to prevent it. In effect, "Ultra did not deny the Axis armies the supplies they needed to reach the Nile."

Heavy losses of German paratroopers during the Battle of Crete, made possible by Ultra warnings of the drop times and locations, meant that Hitler hesitated in attacking Malta, which aided the British in gaining control of the Mediterranean, as did the losses of the Italian Navy at the Battle of Cape Matapan. To conceal the fact that German coded messages were being read, a fact critical to the overall Allied war effort, British command required a flyover mission be carried out before a convoy could be attacked in order to give the appearance that a reconnaissance flight had discovered the target.

Atrocities
The North African campaign was often labeled a "war without hate", a pure military clash in the desert without the partisan murders and ethnic cleansing that was occurring across Europe. This view has been challenged by recent historians, given that there were indeed many civilians who lived in the region, and the campaign was marked by numerous atrocities and abuses by both Italian and German forces towards Allied prisoners of war and local Jewish, Berber, and Arab populations. These acts were often motivated by racism and antisemitism.

Aftermath
After victory by the Allies in the North African campaign, the stage was set for the Italian campaign to begin. The invasion of Sicily followed two months later. Nearly 400,000 Axis and Allied troops were lost, injured or died of disease by the end of the North African campaign.

title: North African campaign


text:
Talk:OpenDoc

OpenDocument disambig
Is OpenDoc based on the Open Document Architecture from ITU-T? Apple are told to have joined the piloting project for ODA. Nixdorf 20:09, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

No, OpenDoc is not a document format, rather an interoperability environment, like OLE on Windows. The underlying technology is based on IBM's CORBA specs. Graham 11:59, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

WAV disambig
A little confused...

The link for "WAV" as in the "WAV Word Processor" points to the .wav sound file format and nothing to do with the title of the application - right? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mproud (talk • contribs) 07:58, April 21, 2004 (UTC)

 * Fixed. Dysprosia 07:59, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Insider's Take needs rewrite
That part is very interesting, but has no signature and is not very "encyclopediac". It needs a rewrite for style. Stormwatch 18:04, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

 * The sumary attributes it to Daniel Barbalace, whoever he is. --Error 23:18, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

i like the style, it has a personal feel but it's also very informing. Minor changes should be made, but it should stay because it makes for very good reading. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.74.9.227 (talk • contribs) 03:40, January 6, 2006 (UTC)

I recommend a disambiguation page now
Very interesting info but obsolete. I came here and read it to find Opendocument data and I enjoyed the hour I wasted but an hour is an hour. I think there should be a disambig. page -- but I added a bold heading to the steering statement at the top. Thanks.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Xgenei (talk • contribs) 09:24, 29 March 2007 (UTC).

 * I don't think a disambiguation page is necessary - there's already a link to OpenDocument on the first line. It's unfortunate that you skipped that line and read the whole article before realizing it, but I think the note at the top is sufficient. "OpenDoc" is not an official abbreviation of OpenDocument, to my knowledge. MFNickster 13:44, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

The icon...
...looks squished. Anyone know how to fix it? Maury 22:33, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Last system to support it?
I've spent about half an hour searching the web without success - what was the last system to support OpenDoc? Was it 8.6? --John_Abbe 10:38, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

 * OpenDoc was dropped in Mac OS 8.5, making OS 8.1 the last version to include it. MFNickster 06:00, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. So, will it run under 8.5 and 8.6? --John_Abbe 06:18, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Star?
Someone added that OD was inspired by the Star. I don't believe the Star had real compound documents, and I'm even more skeptical that it was the inspiration for OD. Anyone have a source for this? Maury 20:43, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

 * The Xerox Star was a MAJOR inspiration for OpenDoc. I know, because I was the lead human interface designer for OpenDoc and I worked on Xerox Star. David C. Smith, inventor of a lot of the Xerox Star UI was also an early member of the OpenDoc HI Team. Kurt Piersol (architect) and Joshua Susser (early engineering team member) were familiar with Star, partially because they used it while they worked at another branch of Xerox. And, I think Jed Harris worked briefly at PARC, although I'm not certain of this. Many of the terms in the API and UI came from Star.

 * The Xerox Star compound document editor was much better than anything I've seen, except for OpenDoc. The initial version of the Document Editor only supported a limited, pre-defined kinds of content, but a version released in 1986 or 1987 had a "generic frame" mechanism that allowed arbitrary kinds of content to be embedded within a document. Each frame was always "live" and the user could edit the content in place. For more info see http://www.digibarn.com/collections/xerox-all.html

 * David Curbow —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.180.82.153 (talk • contribs) 04:17, July 7, 2006 (UTC)

 * Those videos are great! You can really see how the "document-centric" model of computing was supposed to work. There are no obvious applications being launched, just document elements being edited. Kind of makes you wonder where we'd be today if Apple had gone that route from the beginning. MFNickster 05:55, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

AJAX?
"With the advent of modern web technologies like AJAX, such documents are far more common now than they were at the time, and the integration is performed using javascript and the imaging model of standard browsers."

How is this at all relevant to OpenDoc? Even the best AJAX document editors pale in comparison to things like WordPerfect for DOS. This comment is just feeding the hype surrounding AJAX and has nothing to do with the topic. It should be removed.

Web apps and Java
"They were inherently cross-platform, as well as riding a massive Java hype fest."

The phrasing of this is poor, especially the word 'fest'. Additionally, its not true. Java didnt compete in the document editing world at all, ESPECIALLY in this time period. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.24.117.190 (talk) 03:36, 25 April 2007 (UTC).

PC Windows Version
Hello,

I know that a PC Windows version actually exists, because I had once downloaded it from the IBM site. But - this isn't mentioned anywhere. I suggest that it might be added. IBM had once kind of a sub-site called "Club OpenDoc", there the downloadable package was located. Alrik Fassbauer 18:33, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

 * Wasn't that an OS/2 version rather than Windows? I can't remember offhand. MFNickster 20:26, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

 * Here is a newspost from IBM which references it.

 * BTW, the article fails to mention that WordPerfect stopped development on OpenDoc/Windows and threw it to IBM. This was one of the more important reasons that OpenDoc never saw any major adoption. 64.171.162.77 04:36, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

WordPerfect was an orginal member of the CILabs consortium and signed up to produce the version for Windows. IBM, another member of CILabs, produced a version for OS/2 and AIX -- although I can't remember if the AIX version ever shipped. IBM named their developer effort "Club OpenDoc". --Dcurbow 18:00, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Page layouts and spreadsheets
"For instance, it seems unlikely that anyone would want to include a page layout view inside their spreadsheet, or spreadsheet inside their page layout."

Interestingly, Apple's Numbers spreadsheet application is exactly that. iWork '08 has very little to do with OpenDoc, except in concept -- each of the applications (presentation, spreadsheet, document) is able to hold and layout the same types of content; it's just the focus of the app and the container controls that differ between them. --Jellyvista 00:51, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

 * I removed the offending sentence. Remember ClarisWorks? One of its strengths was being able to embed any kind of view in any other view, for example a spreadsheet in a word processing doc, or vice versa. Anyone who used ClarisWorks heavily remembers how powerful that was. --User:tooki 84.253.11.96 (talk) 10:53, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

There's a speculative statement in the article under the 'problems' header stating that compound documents aren't very useful. But that statement seems flatly inaccurate when one considers web pages, which, of course, combine a myriad of formats and are often useful. 76.67.63.230 (talk) 04:51, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Microsoft's reaction on OpenDoc
Microsoft's alleged attitude against OpenDoc is illustrated in an email, made public int the Comes-Microsoft case.

From: Greg Whitten [gregw] Sent: Monday, November 22, 1993 10:51 AM To: Bob Atkinson; Bob Muglia; Jim Allchin Cc: Mike Maples; Paul Maritz; Tony Williams Subject: RE: WP, OpenDoc

We have to take the hard line. We can't give OpenDoc even an inch as easy runtime interface to OLE 2.0.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.101.91.31 (talk) 11:50, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

IronDoc
Former developer of OpenDoc (David McCusker) was working on IronDoc after OpenDoc was closed.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021015172926/http://mccusker.best.vwh.net/fe/fe.htm

Aekton (talk) 00:58, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

 * , as I understand it (which is fairly well), IronDoc was a new version of the Bento document format, not a new OpenDoc per se. Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:13, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Collaborating Companies
I just happened to read this article today and was surprised that IBM is barely mentioned and that Novell is not mentioned at all. Yes, Apple was the inventor and leading designer of OpenDoc, but Novell and IBM also were key implementers. The IBM team in Boca Raton Florida focused on the OS/2 implementation. Apple worked on the Mac version. I believe Novell worked on Netware. I believe the Windows implementation started with WordPerfect, which was acquired by Novell. IBM might have as well in support of OS/2's Windows layer. I recall some Unix activity but I forget who was involved with that. Jasonnet (talk) 14:20, 22 October 2018 (UTC)  Edit: Jasonnet (talk) 19:19, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

BTW... I agree with the comment above the AJAX has no relationship with OpenDoc. The concepts are totally different. Jasonnet (talk) 14:20, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

title: Talk:OpenDoc


text:
Italian campaign (World War II)

The Italian campaign of World War II, also called the Liberation of Italy following the German occupation in September 1943, consisted of Allied and Axis operations in and around Italy, from 1943 to 1945. The joint Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) was operationally responsible for all Allied land forces in the Mediterranean theatre and it planned and led the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, followed in September by the invasion of the Italian mainland and the campaign in Italy until the surrender of the Axis forces in Italy in May 1945.

The invasion of Sicily in July 1943 led to the collapse of the Fascist Italian regime and the fall of Mussolini, who was deposed and arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III on 25 July. The new government signed an armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943. However, German forces soon invaded northern and central Italy, commiting several atrocities against Italian civilians and army units who opposed the German occupation and started the Italian resistance movement. Mussolini, who was rescued by German paratroopers, established a collaborationist puppet state, the Italian Social Republic (RSI), to administer the German-occupied territory. The events of 8 September 1943 turned the Kingdom of Italy into a co-belligerent of the Allies in the conflict against Nazi Germany, a state of war formally declared on 13 October 1943. Therefore, the Italian Co-Belligerent Army and the Italian partisans fought alongside the Allies against German troops and the collaborationist National Republican Army; an aspect of this period is the Italian civil war. In the summer of 1944, after the German defeats at Cassino and Anzio, central Italy, including Rome, was liberated. Northern Italy was liberated following the final spring offensive and the general insurrection of Italian partisans on 25 April 1945. Mussolini was captured by the Italian resistance and summarily executed by firing squad. The campaign ended when Army Group C surrendered unconditionally to the Allies on 2 May 1945, one week before the formal German Instrument of Surrender. Both sides committed war crimes during the conflict, and the independent states of San Marino and Vatican City surrounded by Italian territory also suffered damage.

It is estimated that between September 1943 and April 1945, 60,000–70,000 Allied and 38,805–50,660 German soldiers died in Italy. The number of Allied casualties was about 330,000 and the German figure (excluding those involved in the final surrender) was over 330,000. Fascist Italy, prior to its collapse, suffered about 200,000 casualties, mostly prisoners-of-war taken in the invasion of Sicily, including more than 40,000 killed or missing. Over 150,000 Italian civilians died, as did 35,828 anti-Nazi and anti-fascist partisans and some 35,000 troops of the Italian Social Republic. On the Western Front of World War II, Italy was the most costly campaign in terms of casualties suffered by infantry forces of both sides, during bitter small-scale fighting around strongpoints at the Winter Line, the Anzio beachhead and the Gothic Line. Casualties among infantry in Italy were proportionally higher than they were on the Western Front of WWI.

Strategic background
The British, especially the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, advocated their traditional naval-based peripheral strategy. Even with a large army, but greater naval power, the traditional British answer against a continental enemy was to fight as part of a coalition, blockading with their navy and mount small peripheral operations designed to gradually weaken the enemy. The United States, with the larger U.S. Army, favoured a more direct method of fighting the main force of the German Army in northwestern Europe. The ability to launch such a campaign depended on first winning the Battle of the Atlantic.

The strategic disagreement was fierce, with the U.S. service chiefs arguing for an invasion of France as early as possible, while their British counterparts advocated a policy centred on operations in the Mediterranean. There was even pressure from some Latin American countries to stage an invasion of Spain, which, under Francisco Franco, was friendly to the Axis nations, although not a participant in the war. The American staff believed that a full-scale invasion of France at the earliest possible time was required to end the war in Europe, and that no operations should be undertaken that might delay that effort.

Eventually the U.S. and British political leadership reached a compromise in which both would commit most of their forces to an invasion of France in early 1944, but also launch a relatively small-scale Italian campaign. A contributing factor was Franklin D. Roosevelt's desire to keep U.S. troops active in the European theatre during 1943 and his attraction to the idea of eliminating Italy from the war. It was hoped that an invasion might knock Italy out of the conflict, or at least increase the pressure on it and weaken it. The elimination of Italy would enable Allied naval forces, principally the Royal Navy, to dominate the Mediterranean Sea, securing the lines of communications with Egypt and thus Asia. Italian divisions on occupation and coastal defence duties in the Balkans and France would be withdrawn to defend Italy, while the Germans would have to transfer troops from the Eastern Front to defend Italy and the entire southern coast of France, thus aiding the Soviet Union.

Invasion of Sicily
The initial plan was for landings in the south-east, south and north-west areas of the island which would lead to the rapid capture of key Axis airfields and except for Messina, all the main ports on the island. This would allow a rapid Allied build-up, as well as denying their use to the Axis. This was altered into a reduced number of landings but with more concentration of force.

The Allied invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky, began on 9 July 1943 with both amphibious and airborne landings at the Gulf of Gela. The land forces involved were the U.S. Seventh Army, under Lieutenant General George S. Patton, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division and the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade under the command of Major-General Guy Simonds and the British Eighth Army, under General Bernard Montgomery.

The original plan required a strong advance by the British northwards along the east coast to Messina. The Canadians took the central position, with the British on their right and the Americans on the left. The Canadian War Cemetery in Agira is testament to the sacrifice made driving the Germans from the rugged terrain. The Americans had the important role of pushing Axis forces out of mainland Sicily on left flank. When the Eighth Army were held up by stubborn defences in the rugged hills south of Mount Etna, Patton amplified the American role with a wide advance northwest toward Palermo and then directly north to cut the northern coastal road. This was followed by an eastward advance north of Etna towards Messina, supported by a series of amphibious landings on the northern coast that propelled Patton's troops into Messina shortly before the first units of the Eighth Army. The defending German and Italian forces were unable to prevent the Allied capture of the island, but they succeeded in evacuating most of their troops to the mainland, with the last leaving on 17 August 1943. The Allied forces gained experience in opposed amphibious operations, coalition warfare, and large airborne drops.

Invasion of mainland Italy
Forces of the British Eighth Army, still under Montgomery, landed in the 'toe' of Italy on 3 September 1943 in Operation Baytown, the day the Italian government agreed to an armistice with the Allies. The armistice was publicly announced on 8 September by two broadcasts, first by General Eisenhower and then by a proclamation by Marshal Badoglio. Although the German forces prepared to defend without Italian assistance, only two of their divisions opposite the Eighth Army and one at Salerno were not tied up disarming the Royal Italian Army.

On 9 September, forces of the U.S. Fifth Army, under Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, expecting little resistance, landed against heavy German resistance at Salerno in Operation Avalanche; in addition, British forces landed at Taranto in Operation Slapstick, which was almost unopposed. There had been a hope that, with the surrender of the Italian government, the Germans would withdraw to the north, since at the time Adolf Hitler had been persuaded that Southern Italy was strategically unimportant. However, this was not to be; although, for a while, the Eighth Army was able to make relatively easy progress up the eastern coast, capturing the port of Bari and the important airfields around Foggia. Despite none of the northern reserves having been made available to the German 10th Army, it nevertheless came close to repelling the Salerno landing. The main Allied effort in the west initially centred on the port of Naples: that city was selected because it was the northernmost port that could receive air cover by fighter planes flying from Sicily. In the city itself, anti-Fascist Forces began an uprising, later known as the Four days of Naples, holding out despite continuous German reprisals until the arrival of Allied forces.

As the Allies advanced, they encountered increasingly difficult terrain: the Apennine Mountains form a spine along the Italian peninsula offset somewhat to the east. In the most mountainous areas of Abruzzo, more than half the width of the peninsula comprises crests and peaks over 3000 ft that are relatively easy to defend; and the spurs and re-entrants to the spine confronted the Allies with a succession of ridges and rivers across their line of advance. The rivers were subject to sudden and unexpected flooding, which had the potential to thwart the Allied commanders' plans.

Allied advance on Rome

In early October 1943, Hitler was persuaded by his Army Group Commander in Southern Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, that the defence of Italy should be conducted as far away from Germany as possible. This would make the most of the natural defensive geography of Central Italy, whilst denying the Allies the easy capture of a succession of airfields, each one being ever closer to Germany. Hitler was also convinced that yielding southern Italy would provide the Allies with a springboard for an invasion of the Balkans, with its vital resources of oil, bauxite, and copper.

Kesselring was given command of the whole of Italy and immediately ordered the preparation of a series of defensive lines across Italy, south of Rome. Two lines, the Volturno and the Barbara, were used to delay the Allied advance so as to buy time to prepare the most formidable defensive positions, which formed the Winter Line – the collective name for the Gustav Line and two associated defensive lines on the west of the Apennine Mountains, the Bernhardt and Hitler lines (the latter had been renamed the Senger Line by 23 May 1944).

The Winter Line proved a major obstacle to the Allies at the end of 1943, halting the Fifth Army's advance on the western side of Italy. Although the Gustav Line was penetrated on the Eighth Army's Adriatic front, and Ortona was liberated with heavy casualties to Canadian troops, the blizzards, drifting snow and zero visibility at the end of December caused the advance to grind to a halt. The Allies' focus then turned to the western front, where an attack through the Liri valley was considered to have the best chance of a breakthrough towards the Italian capital. Landings behind the line at Anzio during Operation Shingle, advocated by Churchill, were intended to destabilise the German Gustav line defences, but the early thrust inland to cut off the German defences did not occur because of disagreements that the American commander, Major General John P. Lucas, had with the battle plan, and his insistence that his forces were not large enough to accomplish their mission. Lucas entrenched his forces, during which time Kesselring assembled sufficient forces to form a ring around the beachhead. After a month of hard fighting, Lucas was replaced by Major General Lucian Truscott, who eventually broke out in May.

It took four major offensives between January and May 1944 before the line was eventually broken by a combined assault of the Fifth and Eighth Armies (including British, American, French, Polish, and Canadian corps) concentrated along a 20 mi front between Monte Cassino and the western seaboard. In a concurrent action, Clark was ordered to break out of the stagnant position at Anzio and cash in on the opportunity to cut off and destroy a large part of the German 10th Army retreating from the Gustav Line between them and the Canadians. But this opportunity was lost on the brink of success, when Clark disobeyed his orders and sent his U.S. forces to enter the vacant Rome instead. Rome had been declared an open city by the German Army so no resistance was encountered.

The American forces took possession of Rome on 4 June 1944. The German 10th Army was allowed to get away and, in the next few weeks, may have been responsible for doubling the Allied casualties in the next few months.

Allied advance into Northern Italy

After the capture of Rome, and the Allied invasion of Normandy in June, the U.S. VI Corps and the French Expeditionary Corps (CEF), which together amounted to seven divisions, were pulled out of Italy during the summer of 1944 to participate in Operation Dragoon, codename for the Allied invasion of Southern France. The sudden removal of these experienced units from the Italian front was only partially compensated for by the gradual arrival of three divisions, the Brazilian 1st Infantry Division, the U.S. 92nd Infantry Division, both in the second half of 1944, and the U.S. 10th Mountain Division in January 1945.

In the period from June to August 1944, the Allies advanced beyond Rome, taking Florence and closing up on the Gothic Line. This last major defensive line ran from the coast some 30 mi north of Pisa, along the jagged Apennine Mountains chain between Florence and Bologna to the Adriatic coast, just south of Rimini. In order to shorten the Allied lines of communication for the advance into Northern Italy, the Polish II Corps advanced towards the port of Ancona and, after a month-long battle, succeeded in capturing it on 18 July.

During Operation Olive, which commenced on 25 August, the Gothic Line defences were penetrated on both the Fifth and Eighth Army fronts; but, there was no decisive breakthrough. Churchill, the British Prime Minister, had hoped that a major advance in late 1944 would open the way for the Allied armies to advance northeast through the "Ljubljana Gap" (the area between Venice and Vienna, which is today's Slovenia) to Vienna and Hungary to forestall the Red Army from advancing into Eastern Europe. Churchill's proposal had been strongly opposed by the U.S. Chiefs of Staff, despite its importance to British postwar interests in the region, as they did not believe that it aligned with overall Allied war priorities.

In October, Lieutenant General Sir Richard McCreery succeeded Lieutenant General Sir Oliver Leese as the commander of the Eighth Army. In December, Lieutenant General Mark Clark, the Fifth Army commander, was appointed to command the 15th Army Group, thereby succeeding the British General Sir Harold Alexander as commander of all Allied ground troops in Italy; Alexander succeeded Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson as the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean Theatre. Clark was succeeded in command of the Fifth Army by now-Lieutenant General Truscott. In the winter and spring of 1944–45, extensive partisan activity in Northern Italy took place. As there were two Italian governments during this period, (one on each side of the war), the struggle took on some characteristics of a civil war.

The poor winter weather, which made armoured manoeuvre and the exploitation of overwhelming air superiority impossible, coupled with the massive losses suffered to its ranks during the autumn fighting, the need to transfer some British troops to Greece (as well as the need to withdraw the British 5th Infantry Division and I Canadian Corps to northwestern Europe) made it impractical for the Allies to continue their offensive in early 1945. Instead, the Allies adopted a strategy of "offensive defence" while preparing for a final attack when better weather and ground conditions arrived in the spring.

In late February-early March 1945, Operation Encore saw elements of the U.S. IV Corps (1st Brazilian Division and the newly arrived U.S. 10th Mountain Division) battling forward across minefields in the Apennines to align their front with that of the U.S. II Corps on their right. They pushed the German defenders from the commanding high point of Monte Castello and the adjacent Monte Belvedere and Castelnuovo, depriving them of artillery positions that had been commanding the approaches to Bologna since the narrowly failed Allied attempt to take the city in the autumn. Meanwhile, damage to other transport infrastructure forced Axis forces to use sea, canal and river routes for re-supply, leading to Operation Bowler against shipping in Venice harbour on 21 March 1945.

The Allies' final offensive commenced with massive aerial and artillery bombardments on 9 April 1945. The Allies had 1,500,000 men and women deployed in Italy in April 1945. The Axis on 7 April had 599,404 troops of which 439,224 were Germans and 160,180 were Italians. By 18 April, Eighth Army forces in the east had broken through the Argenta Gap and sent armour racing forward in an encircling move to meet the U.S. IV Corps advancing from the Apennines in Central Italy and to trap the remaining defenders of Bologna. On 21 April, Bologna was entered by the 3rd Carpathian Division, the Italian Friuli Group (both from the Eighth Army) and the U.S. 34th Infantry Division (from the Fifth Army). The U.S. 10th Mountain Division, which had bypassed Bologna, reached the River Po on 22 April; the 8th Indian Infantry Division, on the Eighth Army front, reached the river on 23 April.

By 25 April, the Italian Partisans' Committee of Liberation declared a general uprising, and on the same day, having crossed the Po on the right flank, forces of the Eighth Army advanced north-northeast towards Venice and Trieste. On the front of the U.S. Fifth Army, divisions drove north toward Austria and northwest to Milan. On the Fifth Army's left flank, the U.S. 92nd Infantry Division (the "Buffalo Soldiers Division") went along the coast to Genoa. A rapid advance towards Turin by the Brazilian division on their right took the German–Italian Army of Liguria by surprise, causing its collapse.

Between 26 April and 1 May there were the Battles of Collecchio-Fornovo di Taro, which resulted in the surrender of the 148th German Infantry Division to Brazilian soldiers of the FEB; the Brazilian soldiers captured about 15,000 Italian and Nazi soldiers, the end of these battles marked the end of the conflicts in Italy and the end of the Italian fascist army.

As April 1945 came to an end, the German Army Group C, retreating on all fronts and having lost most of its fighting strength, was left with little option but surrender. General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who had taken command of Army Group C after Albert Kesselring had been transferred to become Commander-in-Chief of the Western Front (OB West) in March 1945, signed the instrument of surrender on behalf of the German armies in Italy on 29 April, formally bringing hostilities to an end on 2 May 1945.

Axis crimes
Research in 2016 funded by the German government found the number of victims of Nazi war crimes in Italy to be 22,000. The victims were primarily Italian civilians, sometimes in retaliation for partisan attacks, and Italian Jews.

Approximately 14,000 Italian non-Jewish civilians, often women, children and elderly, have been documented to have died in over 5,300 individual instances of war crimes committed by Nazi Germany. The largest of those was the Marzabotto massacre, where in excess of 770 civilians were murdered. The Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre saw 560 civilians killed while the Ardeatine massacre saw 335 randomly selected people executed, among them 75 Italian Jews. In the Padule di Fucecchio massacre up to 184 civilians were executed.

Allied crimes
Allied war crimes during the conflict were reported, including killing of civilians (such as the Canicattì massacre), execution of prisoners (such as two massacres at Biscari airfield on 14 July 1943), and rape (most notably the marocchinate).

title: Italian campaign (World War II)