The German army floods the Pontine Marches, on the coast of Italy southeast of Rome, by stopping pumps and opening dikes, in order to disrupt Allied forces who had established a beachhead at Anzio, Italy. Allied forces are surrounded by German artillery and pinned down for months by heavy shelling. The purpose of the flooding is to bring mosquitoes and malaria, “deliberately introduced as an act of biological warfare.” This has a limited military impact, but devastates the local population, which the Third Reich had wished to punish for disloyalty.
