World Battlefronts: End of a Line

''You drove through heavy waves of sweet-smelling air where hundreds of dead Germans, pocketed in mountain hideouts, had been pulverized by the artillery barrage. Whole hillsides were reduced to rubble. The crests of the rocky knolls strung out along the entire breadth of the Gothic Line were sprayed with dead Germans wiped out by long-range artillery and bypassed by hard-pushing infantry."

Thus TIME Correspondent Tom Durrance described a drive through Futa Pass, following Fifth Army troops driving downhill to Bologna.

Two days before, after a month's battering, Canadians, British, Indians and Greeks of the...

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