In January 1944, 36,000 Allied troops landed at Anzio and Nettuno behind the German Gustav Line and met almost no resistance. A jeep patrol drove to the outskirts of Rome untouched. Then Major General John P. Lucas ordered his army to stop and dig in. This episode examines how Winston Churchill's end-run gamble, conceived while recovering from pneumonia in Marrakesh, turned into one of the muddiest and deadliest sieges of the war on the reclaimed Pontine Marshes, a flat basin ringed by mountains that one general had already labeled a death trap.

We follow Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's rapid redeployment of over 40,000 troops into the hills, the sabotage of Mussolini's pumping stations that flooded the fields with brackish saltwater, the Ranger disaster at Cisterna where only six of 767 men returned, and the death of Eric Waters, whose s ...