Five US divisions take Rome a day before D-Day buries the story
What happened
On 3 June 1944, German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring declared Rome an open city rather than fight for it street by street. The next day, elements of five American infantry divisions, the 1st Armored Division, and the US-Canadian First Special Service Force advanced through Rome and took the city by dusk despite pockets of resistance. Brigadier General Robert Frederick, commanding the First Special Service Force, was wounded three times in the fighting. The US Fifth Army had shifted its main effort toward Rome on 25-26 May, when Mark Clark redirected VI Corps north rather than toward Valmontone as originally planned. The Rome operation cost the Fifth Army 21,024 total casualties, 3,667 killed, 16,153 wounded, and 1,204 missing, while German forces suffered an estimated 38,000 casualties plus 15,606 taken prisoner.
Why it matters
Rome was the first Axis capital to fall to the Allies, a genuine milestone, but it barely registered in the press. Two days later, the Normandy landings began, and the liberation of Rome was overshadowed almost immediately by news of D-Day. The Italian campaign kept absorbing German divisions for another year, but from this point on it became a secondary front in the public imagination and, increasingly, in Allied strategic priority as well.
How we know
The National WWII Museum's account of the liberation lays out the open-city declaration, the specific divisions involved, Frederick's wounding, Clark's late-May decision to redirect toward Rome, and the exact Fifth Army and German casualty and prisoner figures.
Sources
- The National WWII Museum. "Rome Taken!": The Liberation of Rome, 1944 · Reputable sourcenationalww2museum.org · The domain "nationalww2museum.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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