by Mark Zuehlke
Plans kept diverging, even about which divisions would compose the invasion force. Divisions assigned to Force 545 were particularly in flux. Initially, five British divisions—the 5th, 56th, and 78th deployed in North Africa and the 1st and 4th in Britain—were placed on the order of battle. But the 78th was fighting in Tunisia, and soon the 56th was also committed. Then the 1st and 4th divisions were transferred to North Africa and joined the fray. Not until the end of April, when 1st Canadian Division was swapped for the 3rd British Division, was the order of battle declared firm. There remained just seventy days to “complete a vast amount of detailed work.” The invasion plan remained undecided and was the source of rancorous debate.24
On March 13, Dempsey and his naval counterpart at Force 545, Admiral Bertram Ramsay, had dropped in on Montgomery at his field headquarters in Tripoli while en route to a meeting with Gairdner in Algiers. Although Montgomery was focussed on the endgame in North Africa, he gave the Husky plan a cursory study before they arrived. Montgomery handed Dempsey a letter for Alexander that provided more detailed analysis, but after the two officers departed, he fired off a terse cable headlining his concerns. “In my opinion the operation planned in LONDON breaks every common sense rule of practical battle fighting and is completely theoretical. It has no hope of success and should be completely recast.”25
When able to put their minds to Husky, Alexander, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, and Admiral Andrew Cunningham continued to see one problem after another. As March gave way to April, Alexander tinkered with the plan, taking a division from here and adding it there, but the two-pronged approach remained intact. He was increasingly anxious that this dispersal of strength presented great dangers. What if the enemy defending the island proved stronger and of higher quality than intelligence reports indicated? The invading forces, divided by design, could be destroyed one by one.26
Montgomery agreed and didn’t mince words. “There is some pretty wooly thinking going on—tactically and administratively,” he signalled Alexander on April 3. “I do not know who the best planner is, but I do suggest he comes to see me very soon, and before the thing gets too far. I have no intention of doing some of the things they suggest. We must get the initial stage-management right before we go into details.”27
Aware that time was critical, Montgomery diverted his attention from the ongoing fighting to suggest that he and Alexander meet Eisenhower in Algiers to discuss Operation Husky. They met on April 19 and the Eighth Army commander presented a précis complete with suggestions for bringing order to a chaotic situation. “Detailed planning is being carried out by Staff Officers who are not in touch with battle requirements,” he stated. “There is no responsible senior commander thoroughly versed in what happens in battle who is devoting his sole attention to the Husky operation. If we go on in this way much longer we may have a disaster. The preparations for the operation must be gripped firmly, and be handled in a sensible way.” He recommended that Freddie de Guingand go to Cairo to represent Eighth Army in Force 545 planning. Eisenhower and Alexander consented.28
Four days later, Montgomery flew to Cairo to finally study the plan in detail. “They want me to operate in little [brigade groups] all over the place. I refuse,” he declared in a signal to General Sir Alan Brooke. “They say there will only be slight resistance. I say that here in Tunisia the Italian is fighting desperately; he has never done so before; but he is doing so now. To operate dispersed, means disaster. We cannot go on in this way. Unless we have a good and firm plan at once; on which we can all work there will be no Husky in July. I hope that this is realized your end.”29
IF BROOKE WAS not yet ready to concede the point, Alexander was. The fifty-one-year-old general was ready to let Montgomery recast Husky to his own design. In many ways Alexander was Montgomery’s polar opposite. New York Times columnist Frank L. Kluchohn described him as having an “athlete’s figure and Grecian profile.” His moustache was close cropped and in “his favourite field uniform of breeches, high boots, jacket with red facings and cap with red band, this Irishman reminds one of a deadly poised rapier. His outstanding feature, cold blue eyes, capable of freezing under stress, point to the steel in his character.
“He has a fine smile, but when those eyes turn really cold his subordinates feel the inherent authority he possesses, then it becomes clipped and brittle. A champion athlete who has always kept in tip-top shape, he moves with a light rhythm and balance that point to another facet of his character. Alexander never allows himself to be upset.
“He does not have that extraordinary power to inspire troops possessed by Montgomery and Patton, but he knows men, how to pick and handle them. He knows what they are capable of doing. This is the mark of all successful commanders. Once he has picked a man for the job, he backs him to the limit.”30
Montgomery had none of Alexander’s physical presence. Five-foot-seven, weighing barely 147 pounds, and possessed of a sharp nose and pointed ears that seemed oversized for his head, Montgomery was casual in dress. Chukka boots, corduroy trousers or sagging khaki shorts (the latter worn with knee-length tan socks), khaki shirt with sleeves rolled, and the trademark armoured corps black beret that concealed his thinning hair. Montgomery’s voice was high-pitched, meaning it carried well during open-air speeches to his troops. A teetotaller, this fifty-five-year-old general had a monkish air about him that his seemingly humourless nature reinforced. His eyes were striking blue-grey and piercing, icily intelligent, hinting at ruthlessness. Montgomery was charismatic. And he was a winner—the Hero of Alamein. In the bitter fall of 1942, Montgomery had led Eighth Army into an attack, advancing on October 23 behind a four-hour artillery barrage that dwarfed anything the British had fired in this war. Two weeks of blistering combat broke Rommel’s Afrika Korps and sent it reeling. About fifty thousand men were left behind, nearly thirty thousand of them taken prisoner. British casualties numbered 13,560. Montgomery had won more than a victory—it was the turning point for the Western Allied war with Germany. Thereafter the Germans were on the defensive, giving ground rather than gaining it. The British press never forgot, and Montgomery, a deft self-promoter, played to the growing myth that he and his Eighth Army were invincible. Churchill, seldom one to be accused of false modesty, declared that Montgomery was “indomitable in retreat, invincible in advance, insufferable in victory!”31
Montgomery and Alexander had one great thing in common. Both had fought as young lieutenants in the Great War. They had gone over the top at the head of troops and saw what each believed had been needless slaughter brought about by poor leadership and dated tactics. Montgomery had been shot in the chest by a sniper at First Ypres, won the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), and survived the Somme. The “so-called ‘good fighting generals’ of the war appeared to me to be those who had a complete disregard for human life,” Montgomery later wrote.32 Equally appalled, Alexander guiltily confessed to finding in war “something terribly fascinating.”33 Despite being twice wounded, he considered it a “terrific adventure.” Alexander was said to have gone over the top thirty times, a feat considered so remarkable that Irish Guardsmen under his command tried to follow precisely in his footsteps to stay safe during that long rush across No Man’s Land.34 He ended the war a lieutenant colonel. At Dunkirk, as commander of I Corps, Alexander was reportedly the last British soldier to step off the sand onto a rescue boat. By 1943, he and Montgomery had seen more than their share of war and each recognized that it was the “poor bloody infantry” that always had to win the ground. Now, separately and sometimes together, these two men looked at the Husky plan and their maps of Sicily and feared it would end in tragedy.
Alexander decided to bring all the senior parties together for a conference in Algiers on April 29, where Montgomery’s suggested revisions would be discussed. Bedridden by illness, Montgomery sent de Guingand in his stead. En route, de Guingand’s plane crashed. Although nobody was seriously hurt, de Guingand suffered a concussion. The British xxx Corps commander
, Lieutenant General Oliver Leese, then rushed to Algiers. When nobody met him at the airport, Leese hitchhiked to Force 141 headquarters. He burst into the room to find all the senior officers “very well and correctly dressed” while he wore his “usual shirt and shorts and no medal ribbons.” Gamely, Leese attempted to explain the plan, only to be rebuffed. Alexander’s attempts to referee the meeting failed miserably, and it collapsed into a series of recriminations and backbiting.35
Montgomery’s revisions made Eighth Army’s landings on the southeastern coast the major push but retained a weakened second prong aimed at Palermo by Patton’s Seventh Army. Tedder complained this left too many airfields in enemy hands. Axis airfields in Sicily were clustered on the island’s three small areas of relatively level terrain: the Catania-Gerbini area on the east coast’s Catania plain, inland from Gela on the south coast, and between Trapani and Palermo in the northwestern corner. The assault, Tedder argued, would fall too far south of the most important Catania-Gerbini cluster to bring these into Allied hands quickly enough. Cunningham, meanwhile, argued that gathering most of the invasion fleet off Siracusa invited disaster, because amphibious landings were best mounted across broad beach fronts as the original plan had envisioned. Patton, who until now had shown little more than passing interest in the invasion planning, allowed that “while I might get ashore, I won’t live long.”36
For three hours, one officer after another pitched in and several arguments broke out among the British army representatives. Exasperated, Cunningham sniffed, “Well, if the Army can’t agree, let them do the show alone. I wish they would.” The meeting was deadlocked. “It was one hell of a performance,” Patton wrote in his diary. “War by committee.” He blamed the impasse on Alexander, who “cut a sorry figure at times. He is a fence walker.”37
But Alexander was fed up. Clearly, Tedder and Cunningham would not willingly consent to implementing Montgomery’s plan. Yet the original plan could not be bent to satisfy either his or Montgomery’s concerns. When a May 2 meeting, which Alexander missed, resolved nothing, he decided to implement most of what Montgomery had proposed. Rather than take the “operational” risk of dispersing his forces, Alexander opted for what he considered an “administrative” gamble. Gone was the objective of seizing major ports. Instead, Seventh Army would strike the southern corner of the island, while Eighth Army came ashore on the eastern flank. The only ports to be taken quickly would be the small one at Siracusa and the naval anchorage at Augusta, with Catania, it was hoped, falling soon thereafter. Patton’s Seventh Army would supply itself from the beaches until D plus 14, when Alexander believed supplies could begin flowing from Siracusa to the Americans.
Alexander thought he possessed a trump card that made beach supply practicable. A few days earlier he had seen a demonstration of a remarkable vehicle, the DUKW. An American-made two-and-a-half-ton amphibious truck with six wheels that was capable of six knots in water, the DUKW struck him as “ingenious” and sure to revolutionize beach maintenance practices. With the July weather predicted to be mild and the seas calm, Alexander imagined hundreds of DUKWS shunting back and forth from freighters to the beach and the Americans being as fully supplied as if they had a port.
He fretted about one aspect of the new plan—the Americans carried all the risk of a supply breakdown if delivery over the beaches failed. There would be no glorious race for Messina by Patton and his troops. Instead, they would cover Montgomery’s left flank by liberating unknown little towns such as Gela, Licata, and Scoglitti, while Montgomery’s men captured Siracusa, Catania, and likely the final objective of Messina. While the plan struck Alexander as the only sound one, he feared Patton’s resentment at having to dance to a new tune played by a superior and British officer. But when Alexander cautiously presented the revised plan to Patton, the American accepted it without any show of emotion.38 In a letter to his wife, Patton wrote, “The new set up is better in many ways than the old.” Partly, Patton cared less about where he was to fight than how he was to fight. Once the target was clear, he was ready to go at it with all the skill and strength he could muster. “Execution is the thing, that and leadership,” he believed.39
Finally, after several months of letting others move the invasion planning along, Alexander had stepped to the plate in a manner that Patton approved. On May 13, Alexander presented the plan to the Combined Chiefs of Staff and received their formal blessing. The same day, the last remnants of German and Italian resistance in Tunisia ended in a full surrender. Operation Husky could now receive everyone’s undivided attention. But the clock was ticking. Just fifty-eight days until the landing craft launched.
[2]
Finally, the Final Plan
WHILE THE DEBATE over Operation Husky’s general strategy had raged between the three headquarters in North Africa, Canadian planners in London strove to shape their role in the invasion. Until mid-May, when General Alexander finalized where the British Eighth Army and U.S. Seventh Army would go ashore, they had understood that 1st Canadian Infantry Division would land at Scoglitti in the Gela Gulf, with a British parachute battalion dropping ten miles inland on the nearby airfield at Comiso. Intelligence reported a battalion of Italian infantry garrisoned at Comiso, and Major General Harry Salmon hoped that by capturing the “airfield at the same time as I assault the beaches I should succeed in making [it] look both ways.” If he could also quickly cut the road running east from Comiso to larger Ragusa it would be difficult, given the rugged countryside, for the stronger Italian force there to counterattack either airfield or beaches.1
Intelligence assessments of beach conditions and known defences at Scoglitti enabled Salmon and his staff to develop a detailed invasion plan by April 28. He expected stiff resistance from the pillboxes and machine-gun posts shown on aerial photos, but believed these defences too weak to prevent assault troops from securing the beach. Thereafter, Salmon planned to have 13,890 men ashore within twelve hours and 1,310 vehicles landed within eighteen hours. An elaborate schedule, based on beach capacity, was prepared for transferring troops and vehicles ashore.2
Salmon convened a long session that afternoon with his general staff officer (GSO), Lieutenant Colonel George Kitching; divisional artillery commander, Brigadier Bruce Matthews; division chief engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Geoff Walsh; the division’s three brigade commanders, and other senior staff members. He confessed to being worried that Eighth Army had yet to indicate that the operational plan was finalized. With the deadline for completion of loading ships assigned to the slow convoy set for mid-June—just six weeks away—Salmon considered sealing matters of the greatest urgency. He would, the general said, emphasize this point during his forthcoming meeting with Lieutenant General Oliver Leese in Cairo.
Discussion turned to who should accompany Salmon on the morning’s flight. Initially he wanted Kitching, but then decided on the GSO’s counterpart in the British 3rd Division, who had been involved in the initial planning. That left Kitching free to advance the plan in Salmon’s absence. Walsh was dropped when it was learned the plane would be a modified Hudson bomber, which had limited load-carrying capacity. Every passenger pound eliminated could be replaced by fuel to ensure sufficient range to fly from Britain to Gibraltar for a refuelling stop and then on to Cairo.
After the meeting, Kitching went to Salmon’s room and continued discussions while the general packed his bags and organized the personal papers he would take. At 1900 hours, Salmon said he was ready. Kitching thought Salmon was “in great form and in a happier mood than I had ever seen him before.” He was pleasantly surprised when the general suggested dinner, for usually Salmon ate alone. “I had never seen him let his hair down in the way he did that night,” Kitching recalled. “He was full of fun . . . He was assured and positive and I was delighted to experience the change in the man.” The two lingered over drinks and did not return to the hotel until 0200. Salmon turned at his hotel door and told Kitching “he hadn’t enjoyed himself so much for a long time.”
Kitching readily agreed.
Shortly after 0700, Kitching rode with Salmon and Walsh in a staff car to Hendon Airport outside London. Accompanying Salmon on the flight were Rear Admiral P.J. Mack—the naval officer assigned to command the Canadian support ships, 3rd Division’s GSO, Lieutenant Colonel G.G.H. Wilson, the newly appointed 1st Division assistant adjutant and quartermaster general, Lieutenant Colonel C.J. “Chuck” Finlay, and Mack’s naval assistant, Captain T.L. Beevor. The five men boarded the plane, while the other officers “saluted and waved, wishing them luck and God’s speed.” After watching the converted two-engine bomber lumber off the runway at about 0900, Kitching and Walsh returned to the Mayfair Hotel for a late breakfast.3
A couple of hours later, Kitching arrived at Norfolk House and was immediately called over by Brigadier Howard Graham, who was manning the army’s top-secret phone line. Kitching noted that Graham was “pale and drawn.”
“George,” Graham said, “I’m sorry to tell you that Harry Salmon and all his party were killed when their Hudson crashed somewhere in Devon.” Kitching felt the colour drain from his face. “Now what do we do?”
Quickly recovering, the two men sent signals alerting everyone to the tragedy. Kitching also ordered his chief staff officer (II), Major Dick Danby, to proceed immediately to the crash site and secure any documents. Danby found the plane so badly burned that none of the bodies were recognizable. But he found Salmon’s briefcase. Amid the charred papers inside were the remnants of a personnel folder that read: “Recommended for promotion to Brigadiers: Lt.-Cols. Kitching and Walsh.” With their sponsor dead, the recommendations were now meaningless, but Salmon’s confidence “meant a great deal” to Kitching.4
The lieutenant colonel told General Andrew McNaughton of the crash via a scrambled phone call. The army commander wasted not a second filling the gaps created by Salmon’s death. First, he reorganized a second flight due to depart on April 30 for Cairo, so that Kitching and 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade commander Brigadier Chris Vokes—who had been pinch-hitting as the division’s deputy commander—were added to the manifest. The two officers would begin discussions with Leese. McNaughton next called Major General Guy Simonds at 2nd Canadian Infantry Division headquarters. Simonds was instructed to take over 1st Division and “put himself in the picture in regard to the forthcoming operations as quickly as possible.”5