The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Another battalion of the Durhams managed to ford the river later and take the Germans by surprise, but the bitter battle continued. The Durhams claimed that German snipers shot down their stretcher-bearers as they collected the wounded. As the battalion ran out of ammunition, Brengun carriers shuttled back and forth to replenish them. The smell of dead bodies in the heat prompted the carrier drivers to name the spot ‘stink alley’. But finally the German paratroopers were forced back when the 4th Armoured Brigade arrived.

  While the battle for the Primosole Bridge went on, the 51st Highland Division to the west attacked Francoforte, a typical Sicilian hilltop village above terraces of olive groves, reached only by a dirt road twisting up the steep slope in hairpin bends. To their left another part of the division managed to take Vizzini, after another short, fierce action. The Jocks of the Highland Division pushed on full of confidence. But they were soon to receive a nasty shock at Gerbini, where the Germans put up a strong defence at the adjoining airfield. The Hermann Göring and the Fall-schirmjäger Division deployed their 88mm anti-tank guns with devastating effect. The British XIII Corps on the coastal plain was blocked, while XXX Corps had to fight from ridge to ridge. British soldiers hated fighting in the rocky hills of Sicily and began to feel nostalgic for the North African desert.

  Montgomery decided to move his XXX Corps over into Patton’s zone, so that it could attack around the western side of Mount Etna. Alexander agreed to this without first consulting Patton, who was understandably riled. Major General Omar Bradley, the commander of II Corps, was even angrier and told Patton that he should not allow the British to do that to him. But Patton, after Eisenhower’s explosion over the airborne disaster and the lack of information he received from Seventh Army headquarters, did not want another battle with a superior officer. Bradley could hardly believe that Patton would be so docile.

  Although dubbed the ‘GI General’ for his outward lack of pretension and homespun appearance, Bradley was ruthless and ambitious. Patton did not appreciate how much Bradley resented him. But both Bradley and Patton also faced a potential scandal. In Bradley’s 45th Infantry Division, a National Guard formation which Patton had encouraged before the invasion to make itself known as ‘the killer division’, a sergeant and a captain massacred more than seventy unarmed prisoners. Patton’s initial reaction was that the murdered soldiers should be described as snipers or as prisoners shot while attempting to escape. The military authorities decided to hush up the whole affair on the grounds that the Germans might take reprisals against Allied prisoners.

  Patton managed to persuade Alexander that instead of just protecting Montgomery’s left flank he should also capture the port of Agrigento on the west coast to ease his supply situation. Alexander agreed, not guessing what his real intentions were. Patton took the opportunity offered to push north-west up the coast and north over the mountains towards Palermo. With their generous supply of vehicles and self-propelled artillery, the US Army could move much more rapidly than the British, whose commanders also seemed to find fighting in the hillside vineyards and sun-baked mountains a baffling experience. The British had failed to grasp Patton’s cardinal rule learned after the Kasserine debacle: always seize the highest point fast and first. Topography was everything.

  On 17 July, Patton heard that Alexander and Montgomery expected the US Seventh Army to act as flank guard. Patton was no longer prepared to accept a secondary role. He flew to see Alexander in Tunis, taking with him the notoriously anglophobic General Wedemeyer, who as General Marshall’s representative carried a great deal of weight. Alexander, embarrassed by the way he had pandered to Montgomery’s insistence, immediately permitted Patton to continue his advance. Patton’s earlier respect for Alexander had dwindled, but he now had his army group commander’s permission to turn his divisions loose.

  Like his soldiers, General Patton was appalled by the poverty, dirt, dung-heaps and disease they encountered in Sicilian towns and villages. ‘The people of this country’, he wrote in his diary, ‘are the most destitute and God-forgotten people I have ever seen.’ Many American troops thought living conditions in Sicily worse than in North Africa. Half-starved civilians begged for food from troops and there were occasional food riots in towns, dealt with by MPs firing Thompson sub-machine guns over the heads of protesters and even at them.

  Although there were places of great beauty in the hot, rocky landscape, with olive and citrus groves, the primitive existence of the population, relying on donkeys and carts for transport, seemed almost medieval. Patton remarked in a letter to his wife that ‘one could buy any woman on the island for a can of beans, but there are not many purchasers’. He was clearly wrong, since the rate of venereal disease soared in both armies. One British field hospital admitted 186 cases in a single day.

  On 19 July, Hitler and Mussolini met at Feltre in northern Italy. The Duce’s bombast and supreme self-confidence had evaporated. Hitler now frightened him and Mussolini said nothing during a two-hour lecture on Italy’s deficiencies. The Führer, perhaps fuelled by the amphetamines he was taking at the time, seemed to be vibrant with energy. The Duce, on the other hand, was a shrunken man, physically as well as psychologically. For somebody who had prided himself on his fitness and had used to love showing off his torso–a habit which Hitler considered undignified–he was now sick with stomach pains and prone to melancholia, listlessness and indecision. As Hitler was to feel later about Germans, Mussolini had decided that his countrymen were worthless and did not deserve his leadership. Yet, like Hitler, he had never visited either the front or the victims of bombing.

  Mussolini’s inability to confide in anybody around him had left him out of touch with reality. He pretended to be the all-knowing, all-seeing dictator, yet none of his entourage dared to tell him that he was loathed by the majority of Italians, and that they wanted to have nothing more to do with his war. The Duce’s compulsion to issues streams of instructions on every subject under the sun also meant that he was, in the words of one Fascist Party secretary, ‘the most disobeyed man in history’. The government was adrift and his son-in-law, Count Ciano, although not daring to oppose him openly, began to plot his downfall in the hope of taking over himself and negotiating a peace with the western Allies.

  During the meeting at Feltre, news arrived that the Americans had bombed marshalling yards on the edge of Rome for the first time. Mussolini was shaken, even more so when he discovered that this had set off a panic in the city. Hitler, who feared that Mussolini’s regime might be on the edge of collapse, had not only prepared a large contingent of the German army to occupy the country, he had sent tanks to the Italian Blackshirt militia to enable them to put down any attempt at an anti-Fascist coup.

  On 22 July Major General Lucian K. Truscott’s 3rd Division swept into the dilapidated capital of Palermo and Bradley’s II Corps reached the north coast at Termini Imerese. An exultant Patton settled himself in the grandeur of the Royal Palace of Palermo, where he ate K-Rations off crested porcelain plates in the state dining room and drank champagne. The British, meanwhile, were still slogging away on both sides of Mount Etna. A regiment from the Canadian 1st Division managed to seize the town of Assoro by scaling a cliff, like General Wolfe’s capture of Quebec almost two centuries before.

  On 24 July, the Fascist Grand Council met in Rome. Criticism was guarded to begin with, and Mussolini failed to appreciate what was happening. In great pain, he appeared to be apathetic, almost paralysed. The meeting carried on through the night. After ten hours Count Dino Grandi, the pre-war ambassador to London, introduced a motion for a return to a constitutional monarchy and a democratic parliament. Mussolini’s failure to react convinced some that he was simply looking for a way out. Grandi’s motion was carried by nineteen votes to seven.

  Next day Mussolini, having forgotten to shave, went to see King Vittorio Emanuele III at the Villa Savoia. He acted as if nothing untoward had happened. But when he began to speak, the diminutive King stopped him and tol
d him that Marshal Pietro Badoglio would take over as prime minister. As the stupefied Mussolini left the royal presence, he was arrested by Carabinieri officers and taken in an ambulance to their heavily guarded barracks. A radio announcement that night brought people on to the streets cheering ‘Benito e finito’. Italian Fascism collapsed in a matter of hours, disappearing like a stage-set to make way for a new production. Even the Blackshirt militia armed with German tanks did not attempt to prevent his fall. In Milan, workers stormed the prisons to release anti-Fascists.

  On hearing of the coup in Rome, Hitler had wanted to drop a division of paratroopers on the city to seize both the new government and the royal family. He suspected that freemasons and the Vatican were somehow behind Mussolini’s downfall. Rommel, Jodl and Kesselring finally persuaded him against launching an attack on Rome. Hitler certainly did not trust Marshal Badoglio’s promise that Italy’s war would continue. German troops seized the Brenner Pass and key installations in north Italy with eight divisions. An operation codenamed Alarich had been prepared for the occupation of the whole country in the event of an Italian surrender. Hitler told his intelligence services to find out where Mussolini was being held, using any means including bribery and clairvoyants.

  Patton, with his blood up, was determined to take Messina before Montgomery. He urged his men on relentlessly, even though many were succumbing to the intense heat and dehydration. Malaria, dysentery and dengue and sand-fly fevers had accounted for a high proportion of the non-combat casualties. Malaria alone would strike down 22,000 men in the two Allied armies on Sicily.

  On 25 July Patton flew to Syracuse at Montgomery’s request, to discuss the advance on Messina. The lack of direction from Allied headquarters made this essential. Montgomery tacitly admitted that he was blocked south of Catania, and without waiting for Alexander they began to discuss the situation over a map spread on the front of Montgomery’s Humber staff car. To Patton’s surprise, Montgomery agreed to American forces crossing army boundaries if that would help them get to Messina quickly. Alexander finally arrived accompanied by Bedell Smith, having been delayed by news of the momentous events in Rome. The army group commander was clearly irritated to find that his two generals had come to an agreement without him. But even though Montgomery at Syracuse had half conceded the race to the Seventh Army, Patton had every intention of winning it outright.

  His men, sweat-stained and coated in dust, advanced from rocky hill to rocky hill. Like the British, they had to bring up ammunition and other supplies packed on mules. The two panzergrenadier divisions made them fight all the way, blowing bridges and planting mines and booby-traps at every opportunity. American troops were enraged by the way they booby-trapped the dead, so they sometimes took their revenge on prisoners. The countryside stank of decomposing corpses and so did the towns, smashed by Allied artillery and bombing at the cost of huge civilian casualties. Bodies were piled high amid the rubble and burned with gasoline to prevent disease.

  During the first week of August, the battle for the mountain town of Troina cost the US 1st Infantry Division 500 casualties. Patton had already decided that its commander Terry Allen was exhausted, and as soon as the fighting at Troina was over he relieved both him and his second-in-command, Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt Jr. Bradley, who loathed Allen because of his open disrespect, was deeply satisfied.

  On 3 August Patton visited the 15th Evacuation Hospital. He was visibly moved surveying the wounded, but had no patience with psychological breakdown. Patton asked a soldier from the 1st Division, a young carpet-layer from Indiana suffering from battle-shock, what his problem was. ‘I guess I can’t take it,’ the soldier replied helplessly. Patton flew into a blind rage, slapped him with his gloves and dragged him out of the tent. He booted him in the rear, shouting: ‘You hear me, you gutless bastard. You’re going back to the front!’ A week later, Patton had another explosion when visiting the 93rd Evacuation Hospital. He even drew his pistol on the victim, threatening to shoot him for cowardice. A British reporter, who happened to be present, heard him say immediately afterwards: ‘There’s no such thing as shellshock. It’s an invention of the Jews!’

  To increase the speed of advance along the north coast, Patton persuaded the US Navy to provide enough landing craft to insert a battalion fifteen kilometres behind German lines. Both Bradley and Truscott were strongly opposed to the plan, and, as they had feared, the battalion was virtually wiped out after seizing a key hill called Monte Cipolla. Patton felt that the costly gamble was entirely justified. He had no idea that the Germans had already begun to pull their forces back across the Straits of Messina in a well-organized operation. The German retreat went into top gear on 11 August. Allied Force Headquarters had failed to put any measures into effect to block it. Tedder was instead using the B-17 Fortresses to bomb the railyards round Rome, and both the Royal Navy and the US Navy were reluctant to use large ships with all the Axis artillery positioned on the Italian coastline. Eisenhower later regretted his failure to land forces on the far side of the straits, but in the event 110,000 Axis troops were evacuated, almost without loss. To a large extent, this oversight was due to General Marshall’s reluctance to commit to an all-out invasion of the mainland.

  Patton was far more interested in the fact that his troops had reached Messina before Montgomery’s, and he made a triumphal entry into the ruined city on the morning of 17 August. But his triumph was soon spoiled. The storm over the two hospital incidents was about to break, for Eisenhower had heard of them that same morning in Algiers from American war correspondents. Nothing was known back in the United States. President Roosevelt had even sent the volcanic Patton a message of congratulation, saying that Harry Hopkins had suggested that ‘after the war I should make you Marquis of Mount Etna’.

  For an officer to strike a subordinate was an offence to be tried by court martial, but Eisenhower, while furious with Patton, did not want to lose him. He managed to persuade both American and British journalists to kill the story. After agonizing over the dilemma for several days and nights, Eisenhower ordered Patton to apologize to the two soldiers as well as to the medical staff who had witnessed the incidents and publicly to the troops. Some cheered him, but the 1st Infantry Division, still resentful after the sacking of Allen and Teddy Roosevelt, heard him in silence.

  The Sicilian campaign, although it permitted so many Axis troops to escape, had certainly proved its worth. Casualties were high–12,800 from the Eighth Army and 8,800 from Patton’s Seventh–but morale had been greatly bolstered and many skills sharpened, both on amphibious operations and in the fighting afterwards. The Allies now had virtual control of the Mediterranean and numerous airfields from which to attack Italy and beyond. The invasion had also prompted Mussolini’s downfall and contributed to Hitler’s rage, panic and depression at the Wolfsschanze. The destruction of Hamburg by the RAF had shaken Hitler more than he dared to admit, and the Red Army’s offensives on the eastern front, following the Battle of Kursk, underlined how short of troops he was.

  In August, Churchill, Roosevelt and their chiefs of staff assembled again, this time in Quebec for the Quadrant conference organized by the Canadian premier William Mackenzie King. A few days before, Churchill had raised the question of the atomic-bomb project with Roosevelt. The Americans had been trying to exclude the British from sharing in this research, known as ‘Tube Alloys’, but Churchill persuaded Roosevelt that it should continue as a joint venture.

  At Quebec, the conference discussed the imminent surrender of Italy, following secret overtures via Madrid and Lisbon from Badoglio’s emissary General Giuseppe Castellano. It was an encouraging prospect. Italian airfields could be used for bombing Germany and the Ploesti oilfields, as General ‘Hap’ Arnold, the chief of the US air force, emphasized. But British enthusiasm for an all-out Italian campaign to advance north to the line of the River Po was not shared by the Americans, even though Brooke argued forcefully that it would draw German divisions away from the Normandy f
ront.

  Roosevelt and Marshall did not want the advance to continue beyond Rome, even if that meant leaving their forces in Italy idle. They suspected, with some justification, that the British would use the Italian campaign as a means to delay the invasion of France and divert efforts towards the north-east, into the Balkans and central Europe. Unfortunately, Churchill’s gadfly approach to strategy–he now wanted to invade Rhodes and the islands of the Dodecanese to bring Turkey into the war–only seemed to confirm their misgivings. Marshall remained adamant that the seven divisions allocated for the invasion of Normandy should be withdrawn from Italy by 1 November, as had already been agreed at the Trident conference.

  The invasion of Normandy, now called Operation Overlord, was nevertheless fixed for May 1944. Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, the chief of staff to the (as yet unnamed) supreme Allied commander, was already working on the initial plans. Supported by General Arnold, he underlined the urgent need to weaken the Luftwaffe first. Churchill had rather rashly promised General Brooke the supreme command on three occasions. He now faced the fact that Roosevelt would insist that an Ameri can general should have the job, as the US would provide the majority of the troops. The Americans also believed, mistakenly, that Brooke was against the invasion of France.

  Brooke was deeply disappointed when Churchill told him that he would not command Overlord after all, and never really got over the blow. He was even more put out when he discovered that Churchill had privately settled in return for Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten to head SEAC, the new South-East Asia Command. The obvious candidate for Overlord appeared to be General Marshall, even though he avoided putting himself forward.

  On 3 September, Churchill travelled by train from Quebec to Washington. He arrived in time for a momentous day. The dapper General Castellano, Badoglio’s chief of staff, and Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Bedell Smith, had secretly signed the Italian armistice after difficult negotiations. The Germans had built up their forces in Italy to sixteen divisions, and the Italians were understandably terrified of German reprisals.