The OKH then tried to place the blame on the Eighth Army’s new chief of staff, Generalmajor Dr Hans Speidel, who was caricatured as that ‘intellectual, introspective, researching Württemberger, always fond of stressing the negative and missing much that is good’. Wöhler fired back a strong rejection, and Keitel promptly forbade any futher correspondence on the question. Keitel demanded that all officers should demonstrate unreserved confidence in the leadership. Anything else was tantamount to defeatism and any measure, however brutal, was justified in destroying those who tried to weaken the national will. This war would not end with a peace treaty. It was a matter of victory or annihilation. The unintelligent and pompous Keitel was for once right to be suspicious. Speidel was already becoming one of the key figures in the military resistance to Hitler and would play a major part in the July plot a year later.
32
From Sicily to Italy
MAY–SEPTEMBER 1943
On 11 May 1943, the day that American forces landed on the Aleutian Islands in the far northern Pacific, Winston Churchill and his chiefs of staff reached New York aboard the Queen Mary. General Sir Alan Brooke was dreading the Trident conference, due to begin in Washington, DC the next day. He suspected that the Americans were quietly going back on the ‘Germany first’ policy, by sending major reinforcements to the Far East. ‘Their hearts are really in the Pacific,’ he had written in his diary less than a month before. ‘We are trying to run two wars at once which is quite impossible with limited resources of shipping.’
Brooke was also having to restrain Churchill from charging off again on another pet project, the invasion of Sumatra to deprive the Japanese of oil. The prime minister had also not given up the idea of launching Operation Jupiter to take northern Norway. Trying to contain his incontinent enthusiasms, which bore no relation to Britain’s resources and above all shipping capacity and air cover, left Brooke exhausted.
In Washington, battle lines between the two allies were immediately apparent and perhaps deeper than before. Many senior American officers felt that they had been ‘led up the Mediterranean garden path’ by the British. General Marshall, who had been forced to concede on Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, was still determined that US forces should not linger in the Mediterranean. They should be brought back to Britain ready for the invasion of northern France in the late spring of 1944. If not, they should be sent to the Far East. This was probably more of a threat than a serious proposal, to force the British to commit themselves irrevocably. But it was exactly what Admiral King wanted.
Brooke argued back in his staccato style that the western Allies could not stand idly by for ten months while the Red Army faced the bulk of the Wehrmacht alone. He was thus playing the argument for Sledgehammer back at the Americans. Either Hitler would send powerful forces into Italy at the expense of the eastern front and the Channel defences, or he would abandon most of the country, and establish a line north of the River Po in the foothills of the Alps. Besides, he continued, an invasion of the mainland across the Straits of Messina, once Sicily was taken, would bring down Mussolini and knock Italy out of the war. To regain control of the Mediterranean would shorten the route to the Far East and help save the equivalent of a million tons of shipping a year.
Where the British were either disingenuous or over-optimistic was in their assurance that the campaign in Italy would require no more than nine divisions. Churchill’s idea of the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, which he had first tried on Stalin, had become a mantra. He had even started to suggest an invasion of the Balkans to hold back a Soviet occupation of central Europe, an idea which provoked the deepest distrust among Americans. They saw it as another example of British politicking for the post-war period.
On 19 May, at an off-the-record meeting with just the chiefs of staff on each side, a compromise was reached. Some twenty-nine divisions would prepare in Britain for an invasion of France in the spring of 1944, and the invasion of Italy would go ahead. Marshall insisted on one proviso. After the capture of Sicily, seven divisions had to be brought back from the Mediterranean to Britain for the cross-Channel attack.
After all his forebodings, Brooke was satisfied. His plan to disperse German strength before the cross-Channel invasion had been accepted. In any case, the build-up of American forces in Britain had been far too slow to permit an invasion of France in 1943, and the Allies certainly lacked both the landing craft and the air superiority to make it a success.
Churchill and Brooke flew on to Algiers accompanied by General Marshall, in order to brief Eisenhower on the decisions made in Washington. Marshall was still opposed to the invasion of Italy and insisted that no final decision could be taken until the outcome of the Sicilian campaign was clear. Every time that Churchill tried to nobble him on strategic questions during the flight over, Marshall would head him off by innocently asking a question about a subject on which Churchill could not resist expounding at great length. But even if Marshall remained non-committal about the next stage after Sicily, Churchill and Brooke convinced Eisenhower of the advantages of an invasion of Italy, assuming Axis resistance collapsed.
Stalin, then awaiting the German onslaught on the Kursk Salient, was far more dissatisfied with the Italian project, as he made clear in a joint signal to Roosevelt and Churchill. Churchill sent back a sharp reply, yet the prime minister was entirely at fault for having told Stalin in February that they were aiming to launch the cross-Channel invasion in August, an operation which Brooke knew to be impossible. It had been a totally unnecessary deception which was bound to confirm Stalin’s worst suspicions about Britain’s broken promises.
The planning for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, had been complicated and almost acrimonious at times. In April, Eisenhower had considered calling it off when he heard that two German divisions had been deployed on the island. Churchill had been contemptuous. ‘He would have to meet a good deal more than two German divisions’ when they invaded France, he pointed out. ‘I trust the chiefs of staff will not accept these pusillanimous and defeatist doctrines, from whomever they come,’ he minuted.
Montgomery, who had been heavily involved in the final battles for Tunis, then felt that the planners for Husky had been working at cross purposes, and thinking back to front. The problems of resupply had encouraged the idea that it would be better to make numerous landings. He rejected this approach and argued for the Eighth Army to be landed in the south-east of the island in a greater concentration, with Patton’s Seventh Army to its left for mutual support. Patton suspected that Montgomery wanted to achieve the victory himself and use the Americans as little more than a flank guard.
This created a certain amount of inter-Allied friction. Patton even felt that ‘Allies must fight in separate theaters or they hate each other more than the enemy.’ Eisenhower’s British chief of staff, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, shared Patton’s scepticism about Montgomery. ‘He is a little fellow of average ability,’ he apparently said to Patton, ‘who has had such a build-up that he thinks of himself as Napoleon–he is not.’ Patton also thought that Alexander was afraid of Montgomery, which is why he was not firm enough with him.
Intrigues even more intense than those within Allied Force Headquarters seethed within the French colonial quarter of Algiers. Ever since the shotgun marriage of General Henri Giraud and General Charles de Gaulle, enforced by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in January, the Gaullists had been awaiting their moment. On 10 May, the third anniversary of the German invasion of France, the Conseil National de la Résistance in occupied France acknowledged de Gaulle’s leadership. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had any idea how significant this would prove to be.
On 30 May, General de Gaulle finally arrived in Algiers at Maison Blanche airfield, having been long delayed by the American military authorities at Roosevelt’s instigation. In the blinding sunlight a band played the ‘Marseillaise’, while British and American officers tried to stay in the background. They had good reason to try
to keep out of things. The day before, Giraud had decorated Eisenhower with the medal of Grand Commander of the Legion of Honour, but de Gaulle, as Brooke found, was ‘indignant that Giraud should have done this without consulting him!’
The key to power was control of the Armée d’Afrique, which was starting to be rearmed with American equipment and weapons. Inevitably, deep suspicions lingered between the traditional officers, or moustachis, of the former Vichy army which had been loyal to Pétain, and the hadjis, so-called because they had made the pilgrimage to London to join de Gaulle. The imbalance in numbers was considerable. The moustachis commanded 230,000 troops, while the Free French from the Middle East and Koenig’s force which had so distinguished itself at Bir Hakeim had only 15,000 men. The Gaullists began poaching troops for their own formations, which caused Giraudist outrage. But de Gaulle’s moral authority and superior political skills would bring him out on top.
On 10 July Husky began with pre-dawn airdrops, then 2,600 ships landed with eight divisions, as many as in Normandy eleven months later. By nightfall the Allies had 80,000 men, 3,000 vehicles, 300 tanks and 900 guns ashore.
The Germans were taken by surprise. Operation Mincemeat, dropping the body supposedly of a Royal Marine officer with fake plans off the Spanish coast, together with other deception plans had misled Hitler into believing that the invasion was aimed at Sardinia and Greece. Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring still believed that Sicily or southern Italy were more likely objectives, but he was overruled. Mussolini had reinforced Sardinia, convinced that the Allies would land there after their bombing attacks on the island. There had also been strikes and unrest in Turin and Milan, which increased the Fascist regime’s nervousness.
The sea had been calm when the invasion fleets set sail, but soon strong winds churned it up and the ships wallowed, provoking seasickness among the troops packed aboard. Those on a flat-bottomed LST, or Landing Ship Tank, suffered the worst, rolling and lurching in every direction. Fortunately the winds eased as they approached the coast. Montgomery’s Eighth Army headed in to the south-eastern tip of the Sicilian triangle. His forces would then strike north up the coast towards Messina to cut off the Axis divisions before they could cross back to the mainland. Patton’s US Seventh Army was landing to the west at three points on the southern coast, also guided in by Royal Navy submarines acting as beacons, flashing blue lights out to sea. Once ashore, no clear objectives had been set for the Seventh Army, a vagueness in planning which Patton had every intention of exploiting.
Shortly before 02.00 hours on 10 July, the order was given–‘Lower away!’–and the landing craft were winched down from davits into the water. The sea was still rough, and soon soldiers were sliding about on the vomit of the sufferers. Eventually, the assault craft were launched, and a correspondent watched the ‘hordes of tiny craft, like water bugs, scooting towards the shore’. The landing was far from easy in heavy surf, and with minefields on the beaches. Often troops came ashore at the wrong place, and the confusion was at times almost as bad as during Operation Torch. Within a few hours the amphibious DUKWs went into action, bringing in supplies, fuel and even batteries of artillery.
Inland, the airborne landings in the high winds had been chaotic, with paratroopers from both the British 1st Airborne Division and the US 82nd Airborne scattered all over the place. Many suffered leg injuries. The British glider force, whose objective was a key bridge just south of Syracuse called the Ponte Grande, suffered the most. The tug pilots had little experience, and their navigation was dreadful. One glider landed in Malta and another near Mareth in southern Tunisia. Sixty gliders released too early crashed in the sea. But the thirty men who made it to the target still managed to seize the bridge, and remove the demolition charges. They were joined by another fifty men during the morning and held it against heavy attacks for most of the afternoon, until only fifteen were left unwounded. Although they were forced to surrender, the bridge was swiftly retaken by the Royal Scots Fusiliers arriving from the beach. The whole operation had cost 600 casualties, of whom almost half had drowned.
Whatever the confusion on the Allied side, the 300,000-strong Axis forces were in greater disarray. The storm at sea had convinced them that there could be no invasion that night. General Alfredo Guzzoni’s Sixth Army may have been 300,000 strong in theory, but it contained just two German divisions, the 15th Panzergrenadiers and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division. The former had been deployed in the west of the island and was too far away to counter-attack, so Kesselring ordered the Hermann Göring to advance immediately on Gela, which had been captured by Rangers in Patton’s central landing on the first day. The 1st Infantry Division, ‘the Big Red One’, had then moved inland to occupy the high ground and take the local airfield.
The attack of the Hermann Göring on the morning of 11 July caught the leading infantry battalions without tank support. The Shermans had not yet been landed. To the west, the Italian Livorno Division also advanced on Gela, but was soon halted by mortars firing white phosphorus, directed in person by General Patton, and naval gunfire from two offshore cruisers and four destroyers. The Hermann Göring to the north and north-east of the town almost reached the beaches. Their commander even informed General Guzzoni that the Americans were re-embarking. Just in time, a platoon of Shermans and some artillery were landed. The 155mm ‘Long Toms’ went straight into action, firing over open sights.
In a vineyard below Biazza Ridge to the east, part of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment under Colonel James M. Gavin came up against Tiger tanks attached to the Hermann Göring Division. Gavin had no doubts about the aggressiveness of his men who, before leaving Algeria, had practised their marksmanship on ‘some menacing looking Arabs’. But against the Tigers they had only bazookas and a couple of 75mm pack guns.
Fortunately for the paratroopers, a naval ensign with a radio volunteered to called down naval gunfire. Gavin was understandably nervous, wondering how accurate it might be. He asked for a single ranging shot first. It was right on target. He called for a concentration. The Germans began to pull back, and then the first Sherman tanks arrived from the beach, to the cheers of the paratroopers. Together they attacked the ridge and managed to kill a Tiger crew unwisely standing outside their tank, which they captured. They looked at the bazooka strikes on the front of the Tiger, and saw that they barely dented its massive frontal armour. The Hermann Göring panzers had to withdraw rapidly right along the front, fired at all the time by the US Navy. Patton, who had been cheering and cursing on his troops around Gela, was well satisfied. ‘God certainly watched over me today,’ he wrote in his diary.
During the night, Patton’s mood changed again. The 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment was due to fly in from Tunisia in the early hours and drop behind Seventh Army lines as an instant reinforcement. He wanted to cancel the operation, but found that it was too late. He suspected that his order to anti-aircraft gunners ashore and on land to hold their fire had not been disseminated properly. The guncrews could not distinguish between friend and foe, especially in the dark, and were jumpy after all the Luftwaffe attacks that day. Landing force commanders complained about the lack of Allied air cover over the beaches, but their air force colleagues remained reluctant to risk their fighters when Allied anti-aircraft gunners fired at anything that flew.
Patton’s worst fears were realized. A single machine gun began firing when the C-47s appeared, and then everyone joined in, even tank gunners with their turret-mounted .50s. His men simply could not stop themselves. They continued firing at the paratroopers coming down and even after they hit the ground or the water. It was one of the worst examples of ‘friendly fire’ on the Allied side in the war, with twenty-three planes destroyed, thirty-seven badly damaged and over 400 casualties. Eisenhower, when he eventually found out, was furious and blamed Patton.
Patton’s position, however, was eased when General Guzzoni ordered the Hermann Göring to move east to block the Eighth Army on the road north to Messina. The Briti
sh had taken Syracuse against the lightest resistance. But over the next few days, as they advanced up the coast road towards Catania, the fighting became far harder. The Germans were in the process of reinforcing the island with the 29th Panzergrenadiers and the 1st Fallschirmjäger Division of paratroopers. General Hube’s XIV Panzer Corps headquarters had been flown in to direct Wehrmacht troops. But Hube’s principal objective, agreed with Guzzoni, was to fight a holding action to protect Messina and the straits, so that their forces could be withdrawn to the mainland to avoid another surrender like the one at Tunis.
On 13 July the British attempted another parachute drop, this time to capture the Primosole Bridge near Catania. Once again the aircraft were fired on by the invasion fleet as well as by Axis anti-aircraft guns, causing chaos. Out of the 1,856 men of the 1st Parachute Brigade, fewer than 300 reached the rendezvous point near the bridge. They secured it by the following morning and removed the demolition charges. Counter-attacks by the recently arrived 4th Fallschirmjäger Regiment almost drove them off, but despite losing a third of their strength, the British paratroopers just managed to hold on.
The 151st Brigade, with three battalions of the Durham Light Infantry, was coming to their relief on a forty-kilometre forced march in full kit in temperatures of 35 degrees Centigrade. On the way they were strafed by German fighters and bombed by American aircraft. The 9th Battalion of the Durhams went straight into the attack, suffering heavy losses from well-camouflaged German paratroopers firing low with their MG 42s, which the British called Spandaus. ‘From the high ground where we watched the 9th Battalion make their frontal assault,’ wrote a Durham, ‘the sight was shocking. The River Simeto did, literally, run red with the blood of the 9th Battalion. It was all over by 09.30 hours. They had succeeded in preventing the Germans from blowing up the bridge.’
The Second World War Page 68