The Americans were willing to risk landing a small army in France in 1943, or even in 1942. The British, who would have had to provide most of the men, were not. They judged, almost certainly rightly, that unless they deployed overwhelming strength they would suffer another disaster, as painful as those of the early war years. Even if a Continental campaign in 1943 had proved sustainable, it would have cost hundreds of thousands more casualties than the Anglo-American armies suffered in 1944–45, since they would have faced German forces much stronger than those deployed in Normandy on and after D-Day, following a further year of attrition on the Eastern Front.
The expanses of sea separating the Western Allies from occupied Europe posed a challenge for invasion forces which must cross them, but also quarantined the Anglo-Americans from German interference. Roosevelt and Churchill were able to exercise the luxury of choice, denied to the Red Army which continuously confronted Hitler’s armies. Captain Pavel Kovalenko was among many Russians embittered by the Western Allies’ supposed pusillanimity, which conveniently ignored the Soviet Union’s ignominious role between 1939 and June 1941. Kovalenko wrote from the front on 26 March 1943: ‘Winston Churchill made a speech on the radio, [saying]: “I can imagine that some time in the next year or possibly the one after, we shall be able to accomplish the defeat of Hitler.” What can one expect from these bastards of “allies”? Cheats, scoundrels. They want to join the fighting when the outcome is decided.’
Churchill, strongly aware of such sentiments, minuted his chiefs of staff in March 1943: ‘Everywhere the British and Americans are overloading their operational plans with so many factors of safety that they are ceasing to be capable of making any form of aggressive war. For six or eight months to come, Great Britain and the United States will be playing about with half a dozen German divisions [in North Africa and Sicily]. That is the position to which we are reduced, and which you should labour sedulously to correct.’ But the British and Americans found it impossible to launch a grand ground commitment in Europe in 1943; instead, they opted for limited operations against the Axis southern flank. At Casablanca Churchill’s delegation had secured American agreement to a landing in Sicily, which it was then hoped might take place in early summer. Much emphasis was also placed on Pointblank, the Combined Bomber Offensive designed to pave the way for the invasion of France. By the time of the subsequent Washington summit in May, the protracted endgame in North Africa had pushed back the Sicilian target date to July. The US chiefs of staff remained unhappy about diverting strength from the prospective French campaign, but in Washington they acknowledged that no landing in north-west Europe could take place that year. They believed that the British were exploiting the shipping shortage to escape a French invasion commitment which they disliked. British caution was real enough, but so was the transport issue. It would be intolerable for Allied armies to linger idle in England until the following summer; Italy was meanwhile their only credible objective.
The Allies knew how desperately many Italians yearned to escape from the war. Iris Origo, the American-born writer who occupied a castle in southern Tuscany, wrote in April: ‘A marked change has come over public opinion. The active resentment and dismay which followed upon the Allies’ landing in North Africa and the bombing of Italian cities has given place to a despairing apathy … everyone says quite openly: “It is Fascism that has brought us to this.”’ It was plain that Italy would soon quit. The British assumed that once this happened, most of the country would fall into Allied hands: Ultra indicated that the Germans did not intend to mount a major campaign in the lower peninsula, but merely to hold a mountain line in the north. Here was an example of the dangers posed by enjoying a privileged view of the enemy’s hand. The Allies thought they knew Hitler’s mind. But he frequently changed it, and redealt the cards.
Churchill and his generals were thus far right, that it was essential to attack the Italian mainland, the only battlefield where Anglo-American ground forces could engage the Germans in 1943. But they were inexplicably and culpably ill-informed about the geographical, tactical, political and economic problems they would meet there. They underestimated the difficulties of advancing through mountainous territory against a skilful and stubborn defence. They expected that Italy would provide a springboard for an early offensive against Germany’s southern flank. ‘The Mediterranean,’ the British chiefs of staff asserted in Washington, ‘offers us opportunities for action in the coming autumn which may be decisive … We shall have every chance of breaking the Axis and of bringing the war to a successful conclusion in May 1944.’
The Americans agreed the Italian commitment, subject to an understanding that come autumn, several divisions would be withdrawn, for redeployment to Britain to prepare for D-Day. As late as 27 July 1943, the British Joint Intelligence Committee correctly forecast an imminent Italian surrender, but mistakenly assumed that Hitler’s forces would thereafter withdraw to the Maritime Alps and positions covering Venice and the Tyrol. Churchill’s chiefs of staff were more cautious, anticipating some German reinforcement of Italy. But Allied operations against Mussolini’s country were launched amid British assurances of easy pickings, which prompted enduring American bitterness when confounded by events.
On 10 July an armada of 2,590 warships and transports began to disembark 180,000 troops on the coast of Sicily, under the command of Gen. Sir Harold Alexander. The British landed in the east, the Americans in the south-west. Strong winds wreaked havoc with the airborne plan, causing many gliders to fall into the sea – sixty-nine out of 147 which took off from Tunisia were thus lost, drowning 252 British paratroopers, and just twelve landed safely on their assigned zones. Reckless anti-aircraft fire from the Allied fleet cost more casualties among the transport planes. Four Italian divisions offered little resistance on the beaches, which was fortunate, since many invaders were put ashore in the wrong places. Even some Germans showed little fight: an American paratrooper who landed helpless and alone amid one of their units was amazed when three enemy soldiers approached him. Their leader said in perfect English, ‘We surrender. For three years and eight months we’ve been fighting all over Europe, Russia and North Africa. That’s long enough in any army. We’re sick of it all.’
The defence was hampered by the fact that, while Gen. Albert Kesselring commanded in Italy, Mussolini had insisted that an Italian, Gen. Alfredo Guzzoni, should control Axis forces in Sicily, a responsibility he was woefully unfit to fulfil. But most men of the two German formations on the island, soon reinforced by elements of a third, threw themselves into the battle with their usual determination. Luftwaffe paratrooper Martin Poppel wrote on 14 July, after his unit took their first prisoners, British airborne soldiers: ‘In my opinion their spirit is none too good. They tend to surrender as soon as they face the slightest resistance, in a way that none of our men would have done.’ He added after an action a week later: ‘The Tommies obviously thought that their artillery fire yesterday had made us withdraw, and arrived early this morning with three lorries packed full of infantrymen. Hitched up behind 3.7cm and 5.7cm anti-tank guns. Clearly they didn’t understand our paratroopers and had learned nothing from their experiences yesterday. Everything was quiet. My boys let the motorcycle escort past and only let them have it when the lorries were right next to them. Within a matter of seconds the first truck was in flames, with Tommies jumping off as best they could. At the end of it we counted fifteen dead and brought back eleven prisoners. In the evening we fetch the anti-tank guns back – they’ll strengthen our positions considerably.’ Poppel spoke well only of British artillery, which commanded German respect throughout the war: ‘You have to hand it to Tommy, he gets his Forward Observation Officer in position bloody quickly and his artillery fires itself in very fast.’
The Germans suffered not only from Allied guns, but also from air attacks. They discovered that their enormous sixty-ton Tiger tanks, while formidable weapons, were quite unsuited to the rough terrain of Sicily: Axis counter-attacks,
notably against the American beachheads, were easily repulsed. Martin Poppel’s braggadocio about his own unit’s performance should not mask the fact that another Luftwaffe division, the Hermann Goering, proved the most inept German formation on the island. Its commander Gen. Paul Conrath wrote furiously on 12 July: ‘I had the bitter experience of watching scenes during these last few days which are unworthy of a German soldier … Personnel came running to the rear, crying hysterically, because they had heard a single shot fired somewhere in the landscape … “Tank panic” and the spreading of rumours are to be punished by the most severe measures. Withdrawal without orders and cowardice are to be dealt with on the spot, if necessary by shootings.’ Germans were infuriated by widespread reports of Italian officers abandoning their men.
Italian soldiers streamed into the Allied lines to surrender ‘in a mood of fiesta’, as an American put it, ‘their personal possessions slung about them, filling the air with laughter and song’. A lieutenant wrote home: ‘A queer race these Italians. You’d think we were their deliverers instead of their captors.’ Some Americans responded brutally to such docility: in two separate incidents on 14 July, an officer and an NCO of the US 45th Division murdered large groups of Italians in cold blood. One, Sergeant Horace West, who killed thirty-seven with a Thompson sub-machine gun, was convicted by a court-martial, but later granted clemency. The other, Captain John Compton, assembled a firing squad which massacred thirty-six Italian prisoners. Compton was court-martialled but acquitted, and was later killed in action. Patton, whose military ethic mirrored that of many Nazi commanders, wrote that ‘in my opinion these killings have been thoroughly justified’. He agreed to the courts-martial only under pressure. Disclosure of both incidents was suppressed, because Eisenhower feared enemy reprisals against Allied prisoners. If Germans had been responsible, they would have been indicted for war crimes in 1945, and probably executed.
On the Allied right, Montgomery’s two corps took Syracuse as planned on the first day, but thereafter made slow progress, hampered by lack of transport. ‘This is not tank country,’ a British officer complained, while one of Montgomery’s soldiers grumbled that Sicily was ‘worse than the fuckin’ desert in every fuckin’ way’. A British officer, David Cole, described the experience of ‘plodding along mile after dusty mile in a temperature of 95 degrees in the shade’ until he looked down on the plain of Catania with his commanding officer.
The panorama before us was magnificent. Thirty miles to the north, dominating the horizon was the huge, misty, snow-capped conical mass, 10,000 feet high, of Mount Etna … Along the coast, the city of Catania was dimly visibly, shimmering in the heat. All this would have constituted a picture of great beauty and tranquillity, had it not been for the thud of shells, with their tell-tale puffs of black smoke, exploding near the river. The reality was that down in front of us, concealed in slit-trenches and ditches and sheltered behind buildings and whatever cover they could find, two armies were facing each other in mortal conflict.
A British airborne unit took the Primosole bridge intact, only to be forced back by counter-attacks when it ran out of ammunition. Luftwaffe paratroopers thereafter conducted a staunch defence of the bridge against assaults characterised by sluggishness, lack of imagination and failures of communication. A shortcoming of the British Army throughout the war was the poor quality of its wireless sets, manifest throughout the Primosole operations. The Germans had better radios than their enemies, a significant battlefield advantage. The differential was most marked on the Eastern Front, where in 1941–42 most Russian planes and tanks lacked wirelesses altogether; even in 1943 only company commanders’ tanks were fitted with them. Poor British communications contributed to disaster in the 1940 French and 1941 Cretan campaigns. As late as September 1944, the failure of radio links throughout First Airborne Division contributed significantly to its defeat at Arnhem, and represented a professional disgrace to the British Army. The RAF between 1942 and 1945 deployed some of the most advanced electronic technology in the world, but British military wirelesses remained unreliable, and this weakness sometimes significantly influenced the course of battles, as it did in Sicily.
At Primosole, two battalions of the Durham Light Infantry suffered five hundred casualties. Tank–infantry coordination was poor, and two German 88mm guns destroyed a succession of Shermans advancing across open ground. Some of the attackers afterwards described the fighting as among the bloodiest of their war. Yet the Germans held the ground with an improvised battlegroup, chiefly composed of engineers and signallers rather than infantrymen. It remains a mystery why Montgomery, confronted with strong resistance, did not outflank the defenders by sending troops by sea to Catania. The Primosole bridge was eventually overrun, but the advance had been seriously delayed.
Alexander tasked the Americans merely to protect the British flank. In consequence, they were denied an opportunity to push north across the island, with the possibility of trapping a panzer division which was withdrawing eastward. Patton, losing patience with his restricted role, sent a corps racing for Palermo in the north-west. He reached the city on 22 July, taking many Italian prisoners, but his thrust baffled Kesselring, because it was strategically futile. Alexander’s acquiescence in this American dash in the opposite direction from the German main forces reflected his usual lack of grip. It was obvious to every thoughtful officer that the campaign would be decided in eastern, not western Sicily. But as Allied soldiers picked their wandering paths across the island, only their opponents displayed clarity of purpose.
The Germans were hampered, however, by shortages of ammunition and supplies, and by the abject performance of their allies. Gen. Conrath wrote bitterly: ‘The Italians virtually never gave battle and presumably will not fight on the mainland either. Many units in Sicily, either led by their officers or on their own, marched off without firing a single shot … 90 per cent of the Italian army are cowards and do not want to fight.’ The readiness of Italian soldiers to abandon the struggle availed their nation little: in Sicily its long agony began. As town after town became a battlefield, battered by bombs and shells, Mussolini’s war-weary subjects suffered terribly. Troina, west of Mount Etna, became the focus of days of fierce fighting. A correspondent described the scene in the town after its eventual capture by the Americans: ‘A ghostly old woman lying amid crumbling plaster and shattered timber … stretched out her hands to us, stared out of sightless eyes, and moaned like the wind whining through pine trees. We went on to the church. Light was shining through a hole in the roof. Below it an unexploded 500lb bomb lay on the floor. Some American soldier breathed heavily in my ear: “God, that was a miracle” … In the mayor’s office we found a few of the living wounded that our soldiers had pulled out of the wreckage. On a wooden bench lay the thin form of a girl about ten years old. Her black hair was streaked with gray powder plaster. One of her legs was completely wrapped in bandages … In her two hands she clutched a cracker which a soldier had given her. She didn’t move but only stared at the ceiling.’
On 25 July in Rome, King Victor Emmanuel and Marshal Pietro Badoglio contrived the arrest of Mussolini. Europe’s first fascist leader scarcely protested at his own downfall. His spirit was broken, he was resigned to defeat and seemed chiefly concerned to save his skin. The ex-Duce spent the ensuing weeks of captivity, first on offshore islands then at a ski resort in the Apennines, eating prodigious quantities of grapes, reading a life of Christ and attending mass for the first time since childhood. It is doubtful that he much relished ‘rescue’ by Otto Skorzeny’s Nazi commandos on 12 September. Though restored to puppet power in northern Italy, he knew that his game was played out. So did Hitler, who for months had been casting about for an alternative leader of Italy’s fascists; he restored Mussolini only because he could identify no substitute.
The Duce’s fall precipitated a moment of exhilaration among the Allies and their sympathisers around the world. Many people found wartime life endurable only because they were sustai
ned by spasmodic injections of hope. Amid local victories or reports of regime change, they experienced pathetic surges of excitement or relief. Victor Klemperer, the Dresden Jewish diarist who clung to a precarious liberty, noted many landmark occasions when he supposed Germany’s defeat imminent. On 27 July 1943, he exulted at Mussolini’s fate: ‘The end is now in sight – perhaps another six to eight weeks! We put our money on a military dictatorship [in Germany].’ A fellow Jew shared his euphoria, saying of his workplace, ‘We don’t really need to turn up in the morning now,’ and speculating about whether Hitler would survive another month. Such moments of fevered and misplaced optimism sufficed to carry people on both sides of the conflict just a little further through their sorrows and privations, staving off despair.
The political upheaval in Rome persuaded Hitler that Sicily must be evacuated. The Germans retreated eastwards in good order, fighting a succession of delaying actions. Tank gunner Erich Dressler, appalled by the wreck of his own unit and the inferiority of the defenders’ resources, was baffled by Allied dilatoriness: ‘With more grit the tommies could have finished the whole lot of us … I thought, it is all over. But for some reason or other they suddenly stopped.’ On the night of 11 August, the Germans began to ferry their forces across the Straits of Messina, more than two miles wide, to the Italian mainland. Although Ultra flagged the enemy’s intention, neither the Allied air forces nor the Royal Navy intervened effectively to prevent the Axis from withdrawing 40,000 German and 62,000 Italian soldiers together with most of their tanks, vehicles and supplies. This was a shocking failure. A German naval officer, Baron Gustav von Liebenstein, masterminded an evacuation which some described as a miniature Dunkirk: arguably, indeed, it was more successful, because all three German divisions reached the mainland in full fighting order. The Americans entered the port of Messina late on 16 August, just ahead of the British. The German commander, Gen. Hans Hube, completed his withdrawal from the island the following morning.
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