Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  In the South Pacific, MacArthur and his combined Australian and American forces had by now taken most of New Guinea, while Nimitz continued his island-hopping advance along the Solomons. In February 1943, the Russell Islands, the next stepping stone up from Guadalcanal, fell, and in June New Georgia was taken. This was followed by Vella Navella in August and by October American troops were poised to land on Bougainville, the most northerly island in the Solomons of any consequence. Both MacArthur and Nimitz followed similar strategies. An island or a base would be taken, and immediately converted into an airstrip from which land-based fighters and bombers could cover the move to the next base or island. Japanese land-based air support grew less and less as the nimble Oscar and once much feared Zero were now being bettered by more modern Allied fighters, and increasingly Japanese carriers risked destruction if they ventured out of range of land-based air cover. From September 1943 the Japanese were on the defensive and Imperial Headquarters decided that defence should be based on a smaller perimeter than that conquered in 1941 and 1942. The line from the Bonin Islands through the Marianas to the Carolines across the most westerly tip of New Guinea and via the Dutch East Indies to Burma would mark the new perimeter of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, while the Gilbert, Marshall and Solomon Islands and all but the west of New Guinea would be abandoned. Yet these outlying garrisons would be expected to fight, even if they were going to be abandoned, and fight they did, with no thought of surrender. The death toll was enormous but the Allies’ ability to replace ships sunk and aircraft downed at a far faster rate than the Japanese could ever match ensured that by the spring of 1944 the Japanese tide was going out. It would not come in again.

  14

  THE EUROPEAN WAR

  MAY 1943–AUGUST 1944

  By the summer of 1943 the war situation for the Allies was very different from that of a year before. The Axis had been completely cleared from North Africa; the balance was beginning to tip against the U-boats in the Atlantic; the Russians had decisively defeated the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front at Kursk; the bombing of Germany by the RAF and the USAAF was intensifying; and in the Far East the Americans were fighting their way up the Solomons and the Australians were holding the Japanese on Papua New Guinea. None the less, once it had become apparent in the spring of that year that the Axis surrender in North Africa could not be long in coming, Allied differences as what to do next had resurfaced. The Americans were very reluctant to do anything that might detract from landings in North-West Europe, while the British were still in favour of the ‘soft under-belly’ approach as advocated by Churchill. Two Allied conferences, one in the United States and one in Casablanca, had agreed that a cross-Channel invasion would be the priority and, after much debate, that the next move would be to take Sicily. The British saw this as a prelude to an invasion of Italy, while the Americans preferred to reserve their position in this regard, and an agreement to invade Italy after Sicily had been taken was not arrived at until the Trident Conference in May. Even then, it was hedged around with all sorts of caveats that would contribute greatly to the muddle and confusion of the subsequent campaign.

  What the Allies could not allow was a stalemate: Churchill was quite clear that, now that Panzer Army Africa was dealt with, North Africa must be ‘a springboard, not a sofa’; Stalin was unhappy that there was to be no second front in 1943 and even more unhappy that Lend-Lease convoys had been suspended during Operation Torch and had only just been resumed. So, with the surrender of 250,000 German and Italian troops in Tunisia in May 1943, planning for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, went into high gear. The strategic aim agreed by both Americans and British was to knock Italy out of the war and tie down the maximum number of German divisions to divert them from the Eastern Front: that the British, or at least their prime minister, had a subsidiary hope of opening a Balkan Front was regarded with great suspicion by the Americans, who saw it as nothing more than a furtherance of British imperial ambitions to control the Mediterranean.

  The overall plan for Husky was to reduce Sicily’s defences by air bombardment supported by naval gunfire and then to mount a seaborne assault. Fighter cover would be essential and, as Malta, no longer under siege, could not of itself provide all the airfields needed, Eisenhower decided to take the Italian islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa, both of which had hardened aircraft shelters and good airstrips, and could interfere with shipping from Tunisia to Sicily if left unoccupied by the Allies. On 9 May 1943, five days before the Axis surrender in Tunisia, air raids were mounted on Pantelleria, thirty miles east of Tunisia and seventy-five miles from Sicily, and on Lampedusa, 100 miles to the south-south-east of Tunisia and 125 miles from Sicily. On 13 May the air raids were augmented by naval bombardment, and, when a British brigade landed on Pantelleria on 11 June, 11,000 Italians surrendered. The following day, the 4,600-strong Italian garrison of Lampedusa surrendered, initially to the pilot of an antiquated Fleet Air Arm Swordfish that had crash-landed on the airfield.

  From the German perspective, the days of lightning war and sweeping advances were over. German strategy now was aimed at holding the enemy as far away from Germany proper as possible, and relied on the hope that some sort of compromise peace could be made when the Allies fell out amongst themselves or became exhausted. Sicily and, of course, Italy were nominally Italian theatres, under the direction of the Commando Supremo in Rome, but already the Germans were suspicious of Italian intentions – with good reason, for there were those in the Italian government and armed forces who had come to the conclusion that Germany was going to lose the war and had made unofficial approaches to the Allies to see what might be salvaged for Italy. The German Commander-in-Chief South was still Field Marshal Kesselring, who deferred to Mussolini and then proceeded to do what he thought to be best, and who had correctly predicted that an Allied landing directed at Italy was a certainty after the collapse of North Africa. He had stationed one German division in Sardinia, a brigade in Corsica, a division in Calabria (the toe of Italy) and two divisions in Sicily, and by June he was moving a further four German divisions into the south of Italy. Sicily itself was held by the Italian Sixth Army, commanded by the sixty-six-year-old General Alfredo Guzzoni, recently recalled from compulsory retirement after accusations of incompetence in Albania in 1941. Sixth Army disposed of four field divisions, or about 60,000 men in all, and six coastal divisions, or around 40,000 men, made up of soldiers of lower medical category and lacking much basic equipment. Theoretically under Guzzoni as his German liaison officer and commander of German troops in Sicily but in fact reporting direct to Kesselring was Lieutenant-General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in his youth and son of the German First World War general who had given the British so much trouble in East Africa. Under von Senger were 15 Panzer Grenadier Division and, at two infantry and two tank battalions, the seriously under-strength Hermann Göring Luftwaffe Field Division. These German units were held as a mobile reserve which could reinforce where needed.

  Although the British had mounted a disinformation operation – one involving the well-known Man Who Never Was* – to conceal the actual objective, by June Kesselring was reasonably certain that it would be Sicily and instructed the German commander that an Allied landing should be countered on the beaches, but that, as movement by day would be impossible because of Allied air superiority, the counter-attack units should move into position by night. Although the number of defenders was impressive, there were problems. The estimated daily tonnage of supplies needed by the troops and the civilian population was 8,000 tons, whereas only 2,000 were actually coming across the Straits of Messina from the mainland; communications were poor, with the Germans – probably wisely – refusing to give their codes to the Italians and the only contact von Senger had with Kesselring was via a Luftwaffe undersea telephone cable, and the procedures of the Luftwaffe and the Italian air force were not compatible, meaning that separate systems of air traffic contro
l and target allocation had to be maintained.

  The Allies intended to invade Sicily with two armies: the British Eighth commanded by General Sir Bernard Montgomery with seven divisions (one of them Canadian) and the American Seventh with six divisions commanded by Lieutenant-General George S. Patton. In support would be an Allied fleet including six British battleships, two British aircraft carriers, ten British and five American cruisers, seventy-one British and forty-eight American destroyers, and twenty-three British submarines, and the aircraft of the North African Tactical Air Force consisting of the RAF’s Desert Air Force and Middle East Tactical Bomber Force and the USAAF XII Air Support Command. Under Eisenhower, the naval elements would be commanded by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham RN, the land forces by General Sir Harold Alexander and the air forces by Air Vice-Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham.

  Planning was marked by acrimony and inter-service and inter-Allied sniping, and, as Alexander tried to keep the peace between the two prima donnas, Montgomery and Patton, he had frequently to call upon Eisenhower to mediate. At last a plan of attack was agreed: after an air and naval bombardment, the two armies would land side by side, the British on the south-east coast and the Americans on the south-west. D-Day was to be 10 July and on the previous night three American parachute battalions and a British glider-borne air-landing brigade would take out key installations, gun positions and the bridge over the River Anapo delta, the Ponte Grande, which had to be in Allied hands to allow an advance up the east coast. It was to be a massive amphibious landing, putting 115,000 British and Empire and 66,000 American troops ashore to face an island-wide garrison of 315,000 Italians and, ultimately, 50,000 Germans.

  The airborne phase of the operation was a disaster. The air-landing brigade of 1,200 men were to be delivered in 144 gliders, a mix of American Wacos, which could take fourteen men and their equipment, and British Horsas, which could carry thirty. The towing aircraft were 109 USAAF C-47 Dakotas and thirty-five Albermarles of the RAF. The RAF pilots of the towing aircraft all had considerable experience of training with gliders, and the British Glider Pilot Regiment crews (two to a glider) had practised the operation over and over again in the UK. Unfortunately for their passengers, many of the Waco pilots had not completed their training, while the C-47 pilots had little or no experience of glider operations and some had done little night flying. During the night the weather worsened and the wind got up to 40 mph. The defenders were fully alert and, as the airborne armada approached, their anti-aircraft guns opened up.

  A military glider has the aerodynamic properties of a brick: once it is released from its towing aircraft, the only way is down, although turns to right and left, and even complete circles, are perfectly possible. What is critical is that the towing pilot releases his glider at the correct distance from the target, and this depends on the height at which release takes place. Also critical is the ability of all gliders to ‘stream’, that is to arrive at the landing ground from the same direction, which is achieved by the towing aircraft flying in formation to the release point. It was not easy to tow a fully laden glider at night while being shot at and to many of the inexperienced USAAF pilots it was just too much. Sixty-nine gliders were released too soon and crashed into the sea; fifty-six were released in the wrong place and did make landfall, but scattered all along the coast. Only twelve, all towed by RAF pilots, landed where they should have done, and, when the main assault came in across the beaches, eight officers and sixty-five soldiers of Second Battalion the South Staffordshire Regiment and a mix of glider pilots, Royal Engineers and members of the brigade headquarters defence platoon held the Ponte Grande and the rest of the gallant band had taken a nearby coastal battery. The 2,700 American paratroopers fared equally badly: forced to take a complicated approach route to avoid the shipping lanes, many of the pilots got lost, others could not see the dropping zones that had been obscured by fires started by the preliminary bombardments, and the men were dropped all over Sicily or in the sea. Some consolation came from the fact that the Italian defenders were unable to work out exactly where the main point of the attack was supposed to be.

  H-Hour for the main force was 0245 on 10 July and, despite the increased swell and sea sickness amongst the troops, the landings did take place, with Italian gun batteries that started to shell the beaches being knocked out by naval gunfire. To the west, the Americans were exposed to the full force of the wind; there were delays in launching the landing craft, and some units were not able to land until after First Light (0415 hours, British double summer time or GMT + 2) but despite the difficulties all were ashore by 0630 and by 1000 tanks and vehicles were being landed and both armies had secured their lodgement areas and were beginning to push inland and, in the case of the British, along the coast to the Ponte Grande. The intention now was for Patton’s Seventh Army to cover Montgomery’s left flank, while Eighth Army sent XIII Corps up the coast to Catania, to seize the port and then press on to the Straits of Messina and cut off the Axis line of retreat to Italy, while XXX Corps made for Leonforte and Enna, the centre of the island and location of the German main force headquarters, with the aim of cutting the island in half.

  The British moved cautiously – those who had fought in North Africa knew that they could not beat the Germans in a battle of manoeuvre and thus relied heavily on artillery and air bombardment before moving forward – and failed to prevent 15 Panzer Grenadier Division from withdrawing towards the east of the island. An attempt to capture bridges over the River Simeto at Primasole on 13 July by a British parachute brigade emplaned in North Africa ran into trouble when Allied warships mistook their aircraft for the Luftwaffe, failed to see recognition signals and opened fire on them. This forced them off course over the no-flying zone above ships unloading at the beachheads and these also opened fire, provoking more diversions that brought many of the planes over German-held territory and into more flak. Of the 126 aircraft containing paratroopers, nineteen returned to their base without dropping their troops, fourteen were shot down, twenty-seven got hopelessly lost and dropped their loads over the sea or on the slopes of Mount Etna, many miles from their objective. Only thirty-nine aircraft managed to drop their sticks within a mile of the bridge, which was at last captured by one officer and fifty men.

  In the opinion of both Guzzoni and von Senger, once the Allies were ashore Sicily was lost: to add to the garrison was pointless and the island should be abandoned with the main battle fought in Italy. Hitler did not agree, however, and from 12 July reinforcements began to arrive in the form of the one-armed Colonel-General Hans Hube, late of the Russian front, whose XIV Panzer Corps took over the existing two German divisions and brought with them 29 Panzer Division and 1 Parachute Division. Hube knew that he had to delay the Allies as long as he could and established three lines of defence running from Catania on the east coast north-west to San Stefano on the north coast.

  By 16 July, Patton was unhappy about what he saw as a subsidiary role to Montgomery and protested to Alexander, who agreed to let him off the leash. In a lightning dash Patton got to Palermo on the north coast on 22 July. It looked good and captured a lot of Italians but in fact did little to shorten the campaign and was the scene of Patton’s career hiccough when on two separate incidents he accused soldiers in hospital with psychiatric problems of being cowards, slapped them across the face and ordered that the european war they be sent back to the front. Those journalists who saw or heard of the incidents agreed to cover them up but one, Drew Pearson, then a radio reporter and later infamous as a muckraker (when admittedly there was much muck to rake), reported them and Patton was ordered by Eisenhower to apologize in public to the units of the men involved.

  Eventually, on 23 July, Eighth Army captured Leonforte and Bradley’s corps of Seventh Army cut the island in two, too late for it to have any effect. One of the principles of amphibious operations was the need to capture a port or ports as early as possible, as it was not considered possible to supply an army over open beaches for longe
r than a few days. Catania held out, and would not be taken until 5 August, but the Allies were fortunate in that there is almost no tide in the Mediterranean, the weather had improved and the arrival of a quantity of DUKWs, amphibious trucks, allowed supplies to be offloaded out to sea and delivered inland.