by Mark Zuehlke
Outside of physical activity, few other recreational pursuits were on offer. All towns were strictly off limits, and patrols were in place to round up anybody who decided to disobey the prohibition. So the men drank bootlegged wine, gambled, wrote and read letters, fought with mates, fantasized about sex, and grew bored. Despite strenuous efforts to keep the men away from Sicilian women, Vokes was alarmed that the number of men contracting venereal diseases was on the rise. He proposed an unorthodox solution—setting up brigade brothels where the prostitutes would be vetted. The planning process for this was well along when a group of padres got wind of the plan and nixed it.31
Vokes was a man of strong opinion. He made good on his decision to relieve PPCLI commander Lieutenant Colonel Bob Lindsay. Cameron Ware, who had managed to talk his way to Sicily just in time to see the campaign’s end, took command—realizing a boyhood dream.
Lindsay was not the only Canadian officer to be punished for perceived failures during the campaign. The Carleton and York Regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel Dodd Tweedie was relieved by 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Brigadier Howard Penhale, who told Major General Guy Simonds that he had “lost all confidence in this officer.” John Pangman, the brother of 3 CIB’s Brigade Major G.F.C. Pangman, took over the Carletons.32
Penhale, too, was for the chop. The division’s senior brigadier, he would normally have been in line to succeed Simonds. But Simonds believed Penhale’s “over caution and hesitation in making operations decisions in face of apparent risks may well result in creating even greater risks.” Given sufficient time to make decisions, the brigadier reached the right conclusions, but he was not able to think quickly enough for the pace of modern combat. Penhale was shuffled off to a staff position at Canadian Military Headquarters in London.33
More career reputations were made, however, than broken by the campaign. Simonds told Vokes he was in line to succeed him, and Lieutenant Colonel Bert Hoffmeister would be first choice for 2 CIB’s command in that eventuality. Lieutenant Colonels George Kitching, Geoff Walsh, Paul Bernatchez, and Pat Bogert all performed well in their respective duties and were tipped for future brigade command. Each would rise to such commands during the division’s forthcoming campaign.
That campaign would open on September 3 with Eighth Army’s amphibious crossing of the Straits of Messina and the beginning of the invasion of Italy. The final decision to use Sicily as a springboard into Italy had been reached on August 16. This was the same day that the Germans concluded their stunningly successful evacuation from the island. Over the course of the previous fifteen days, 39,569 German troops, 9,605 vehicles, 47 tanks, 94 guns, and 17,000 tons of vital supplies had been ferried out of Sicily. Allied naval and air force attempts to disrupt the transfers were dismal. How this escape was achieved quickly became the subject of an intense debate that continues still, with fingers pointing at numerous Allied senior officers or arms of service. It also gave the Germans fodder for claiming the Sicily campaign more a victory than a defeat.
This was hardly the case. German forces in Sicily lost 6,663 soldiers captured and about 5,000 killed. They also lost 78 tanks, 287 guns, and 3,500 vehicles, as well as vast amounts of matériel. German high-command claims that the divisions evacuated from Sicily arrived on the mainland “ready for immediate service” were far from truthful. The Hermann Göring Division reported its mobility levels at about 50 per cent, and the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division stated its fighting power also at only 50 per cent of normal.
Operation Husky basically knocked Italy out of the war. Although 59,000 Italian soldiers and 3,000 sailors were evacuated, 137,000 remained as prisoners. Another 2,000 had been killed and about 5,000 wounded. Mussolini was deposed, and the Italian government engaged in secret talks with the Allies to secure a peace accord. On July 30, Hitler ordered German formations lurking on the northern border of the mainland to occupy the nation and put to an end the sham that Italy was still a trusted Axis partner.
As Churchill and his Chief of Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, had predicted at the outset, Sicily forced the Germans to divert strength away from the Russian front and, because they could not know for certain where in the Mediterranean the Allies would strike next, to strengthen garrisons in southern France and the Balkans. Sardinia and Corsica were rendered untenable, and German troops evacuated these islands in September.
Allied casualties were substantial, but far below what Operation Husky planners had feared. The U.S. Seventh Army suffered 7,402 casualties and Eighth Army, 11,843. About a quarter of the latter were Canadians—2,310. Including those men who died at sea, 40 officers and 522 other ranks were killed, 124 officers and 1,540 other ranks were wounded, and 8 officers and 76 men were taken prisoner. Among the wounded were 12 nursing sisters injured when an anti-aircraft shell struck No. 5 Canadian General Hospital in Catania on September 2.34
The soldiers of 1st Canadian Infantry Division had marched 120 miles through Sicily’s difficult heartland mountains “in continuous and extreme heat, and in contact for most of the way with a stubborn foe.” They marched farther than any other Eighth Army Division and, due to the problems with transport, covered most of that distance with their boots. Originally, Eighth Army had ascribed the division only a minor role in Operation Husky. Blocked from advancing on the Catania plain, however, Montgomery was forced in the last two weeks of the invasion to call upon the Canadians to bear “the brunt of the fighting...No other division in the Allied force made a larger contribution to the victory,” concluded one Canadian army historical report on the campaign.35
While in Happy Valley, Captain Strome Galloway put on the major’s crowns that he had carried in anticipation throughout the course of the fighting. Having led a British company in North Africa and seen hard fighting there, he thought the Canadians got off lightly in Sicily in terms of casualties. “It was, however, a hard campaign from the standpoint of discomfort, long gruelling marches, the stench of burning grass, and unburied dead, including soldiers, civilians and mules, and the incredible heat, with thirst, hunger and painful sunburn our constant scourges. Lack of sleep, caused by the continuous movement, and bowel trouble caused by contaminated fruit and water helped to wear down some troops. Fortunately, the training in Britain had turned us into the right material from which to make hardy campaigners. Besides, we were young.”36
Padre Durnford would have argued against Galloway’s dismissal of Canadian casualties as light. “As I look back over this great episode, I am filled with admiration for my fellow officers, my [commanding officer], and the men of my battalion. They proved to be men of sterling worth in the face of great odds. I look back, too, and see in my mind’s eye many dead faces—unforgettably imprinted on my mind. They were the faces of brave men who were ready to pour out their lives to the last full measure of devotion.”37 Although he spoke of the Seaforths, his words could have applied to any and all of the Canadians in Sicily.
[EPILOGUE]
Operation Husky in Memory
I STAND IN THE Agira Canadian War Cemetery next to the headstone of Lieutenant Earl John Christie. A group of Canadians are gathered before me. Behind them is the entrance to the cemetery and then the Sicilian countryside—a mix of grain fields, olive orchards, and vineyards—spreads across the narrow valley and up the steep slopes of surrounding mountains. To the east, Agira is perched atop its mountaintop.
It is late afternoon, the sun a hard brightness to the west. Although it is September rather than July or August, the heat is withering. Our clothes are damp with sweat. When I was in this place some years earlier it had been late fall, and rosemary dotted with purplish blue flowers had twined around the cool white marble headstones that stretch out in precisely straight lines from one side of the cemetery to the other. But this is a summer of drought, and there are few flowers, what rosemary there is lies shrivelled, and the grass is coarse and brown underfoot.
The people with me are participants in a battlefield tour. For the past few da
ys, we have been driving in vans along the route that 1st Canadian Infantry Division followed from Pachino to Adrano. This day has seen visits to Leonforte, Assoro, and Agira, before ending at the cemetery. For some, this stop at Agira cemetery is their first experience of a Commonwealth war cemetery, while others are old hands at such visits. No matter, all are moved. Basil Libby is one of two World War II veterans present. He was navy, not army—an Able Bodied Seaman whose last war-time posting was aboard the HMCS Antigonish. With his son, Ross, he has made a couple of rubbings on paper of the headstones of men buried here who came from the South Porcupine- Timmins area of Ontario. The rubbings will be displayed, along with others they have gathered from earlier visits to Commonwealth cemeteries in Europe, in Libby’s local Royal Canadian Legion.
Others in the group have collected similar rubbings of specific headstones or photographed them for use in various acts of remembrance. In front of some headstones, one or the other of us has pushed a little paper maple leaf flag into the hard soil as a personal tribute to the man lying in the earth below.
Now we are gathered about Lieutenant John Earl Christie’s headstone, and I tell the story of how a young man from Medicine Hat, Alberta, came to die on August 5 while leading his platoon of Loyal Eddies up Hill 736 into deadly fire. Beyond the facts of his death, there is another story I relate here—told me by John Dougan, the other officer on that hillside, who, though badly wounded, walked away at the end of that bloody day. It is a story that Dougan told once while we sat on the patio of his home outside Victoria, sipping iced tea on a warm summer day. The volcanic cone of Mount Baker had been visible across Haro Strait, just as Etna had been within his view on August 5, 1943.
I had interviewed Dougan on several occasions and considered him a friend now, rather than just an interview subject. He always chose words carefully, which was fitting, for after the war he had been a Rhodes Scholar in 1946 and then had a distinguished career with the Department of External Affairs, where he represented Canada in various overseas postings. This day, our conversation had turned to the matter of Christie’s death. Johnnie reminded me that he and Christie had been two of four young officers all from the same year at the University of Alberta and posted together to the Loyal Edmonton Regiment. Christie had died in his first action, while the others survived the war. Who lived and who died seemed mere chance in Dougan’s estimation. But some deaths were more tragic than others. Christie had been studying medicine before he enlisted. Dougan and his friends all agreed that before him waited a brilliant medical career. Christie would make some great discovery or become a leading surgeon. Instead he bled out his life on Hill 736. All that potential lost to the whims of war. The four had known the odds were that one or all might die. But it had seemed particularly cruel fate that it should be Christie—who the others had agreed was the best and brightest of them.
Christie was but one of 562 Canadians who perished in Operation Husky. Some were lost at sea, but most died in the bare, sun-baked landscape of Sicily. Almost four hundred of them lie in Agira Canadian Cemetery. While some Commonwealth cemeteries annually draw thousands of visitors engaged in remembrance tours, the visitor book at Agira has many days that are blank between visits by small groups or even a single person. Isolated, difficult to get to without a vehicle, this Canadian cemetery is seldom a place of active remembrance.
Perhaps this should not be surprising, for Canada’s participation in the Sicily invasion is not well remembered. Even those who are aware that Canadians fought in Italy are often oblivious to the Sicilian part of the story. Twenty-eight grinding days of combat have been easily forgotten. But consider the historical record. This book is the first Canadian work dedicated solely to Canada’s role in the campaign. Outside Canada, most histories of Operation Husky give our participation less attention than seems warranted by 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s exploits.
Canada could, of course, have stayed out of Operation Husky. But we sent men there, and they fought well in the nation’s first test of sustained combat on a divisional scale. For the Canadian officers and soldiers involved, Sicily was a proving ground and a place where many lessons were learned that would serve the army well over the course of the rest of the war.
This was true for the Allies as a whole. Initially, the Americans had not wanted an invasion in the Mediterranean. They had wanted to get on immediately with the cross-channel invasion of France. In grudgingly conceding to the Sicily invasion, they unwittingly avoided likely disaster. The amphibious invasion of Sicily was complex, and the planning that went into it tried to meet every contingency. Yet so many things went wrong—landings on wrong beaches, friendly fire slaughtering airborne troops, problems in maintaining the follow-up flow of supplies and reinforcements, to cite just a few calamities. Had the beaches been guarded by veteran German troops rather than ill-trained and war-weary Italians, the invaders may not have got ashore at all. When Allied planners began work on the invasion of Normandy, which would be launched on June 6, 1944, they drew well on the lessons learned in Operation Husky. Thousands of lives, and quite likely the success of the invasion itself, were saved because of this prior experience.
If the Sicily invasion is not much remembered in Canada, that is not the case on the island itself. On the same day we visited Agira Cemetery, our group paused in a pullout below the towering heights of Assoro. As we got out and I started speaking about the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment’s heroic scaling of the back slope on the night of July 22, a farmer strode towards us from where he had been working in his driveway. He looked angry, ready to send us packing. “Il canadese, il guerra,” I said—as if that might explain why these strangers were milling about on the edge of his property. His Sicilian dialect was rapid as a machine-gun burst, but suddenly he was smiling and gesturing towards the farmhouse. When everyone crowded inside, wine was broken out, glasses handed around. A cell-phone was chattered into and soon a little black car roared into the yard and a young man who spoke a little English arrived. Assoro loomed over us. The farmer spoke of a time when he had been young, the war had come to this place, and there had been Canadian soldiers. Beyond this it was hard to comprehend much because the young man’s English was barely more serviceable than my crude Italian, but gratitude was mentioned repeatedly.
He reminded us of the monument recently erected on the summit by the Canadian Battlefields Foundation. It is the first of what is promised to be several set up to mark key events in the course of the 120-mile march across Sicily. In the future, these will serve as way-points for tours.
There is another monument in Sicily of import to Canadians. It sits on the side of a road between Bark West beach and Ispica and was largely funded by one Canadian, Syd Frost. A lieutentant in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, Frost had landed in the unlikely role of temporary mayor of Ispica. His experiences during what was only about two weeks left an indelible impression and forged a longstanding relationship between him and the people of this Sicilian town. The monument was unveiled on July 10, 1991, to commemorate the 48th Anniversary of the landings and 1st Canadian Infantry Division.
But Frost and the people of Ispica were not done. In 2000—in a joint effort—additional panels were unveiled that honoured the Italian troops and civilians of Ispica who had fallen during the invasion. Due to health problems, Frost was unable to attend that ceremony and could only send a heartfelt letter to be read to the crowd. The three-panel monument, as it stands today, formally honours the bond between Canada and Sicily that is the result of mutual sacrifice and loss during Operation Husky. It symbolizes a desire by the Sicilian people never to forget the experiences of war nor their dead or the dead of their Canadian liberators.
APPENDIX A:
PRINCIPAL UNITS AND COMMANDERS IN OPERATION HUSKY
BRITISH
Chief of Imperial General Staff—Gen. Sir Alexander Brooke
Deputy Supreme Commander Mediterranean—Gen. Harold Alexander
Eighth Army—Gen
. Bernard Law Montgomery
XIII Corps—Lt. Gen. Miles Dempsey
xxx Corps—Lt. Gen. Oliver Leese
Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder
Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham
78th Division—Maj. Gen. Vyvyan Evelegh
231st Malta Brigade—Brig. Robert Urquhart
AMERICAN
Chief of Staff, United States Army—Gen. George Marshall
Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean—Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
U.S. Seventh Army—Gen. George S. Patton
II Corps—Gen. Omar Bradley
1st Infantry Division—Maj. Gen. Terry Allen
CANADIAN
First Canadian Army—Lt. Gen. Andrew McNaughton
1st Canadian Infantry Division—Maj. Gen. Harry Salmon,
then Maj. Gen. Guy Simonds
1st Canadian Infantry Brigade (1 CIB)—Brig. Howard Graham
Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR)—Lt. Col. Ralph Crowe, then Maj. Tom Powers
Hastings and Prince Edward (Hasty Ps)—Lt. Col. Bruce Sutcliffe; then Maj. John Buchan, 2nd Baron Tweedsmuir; then Maj. Bert Kennedy
48th Highlanders of Canada—Lt. Col. Ian Johnston
2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade (2 CIB)—Brig. Chris Vokes
Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI)—Lt. Col. Bob Lindsay
Seaforth Highlanders of Canada (Seaforths)—Lt. Col. Bert Hoffmeister