Allied invasion of Sicily

• 1. Introduction

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  The Allied invasion of Sicily, known formally as Operation Husky, began on the night of the 9th and the 10th of July 1943 with one of the largest amphibious operations in the history of World War II. More than 26 beaches stretched along 105 miles of coastline received invading forces in the pre-dawn darkness. Before a single soldier had waded ashore, a British corpse had already done its part. A carefully staged deception had sent German armoured divisions racing to Greece, Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel among them, all chasing a phantom threat.

  The questions worth asking are these: How did a campaign built around one of the war's most audacious intelligence hoaxes actually unfold when its moving parts came apart in mid-air, literally and figuratively? What did it cost, on all sides? And what changed in Europe because of six weeks of fighting on an Italian island in the summer of 1943?

• 2. The Deception That Moved Armies

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  Operation Mincemeat was conceived by Naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu and RAF Squadron Leader Charles Cholmondeley. Their plan was to allow a corpse, dressed as a British Royal Marines officer, to drift ashore on the Spanish coast carrying a briefcase stuffed with fake secret documents. Those documents named a coming Allied operation as an invasion of Greece rather than Sicily.

  German intelligence accepted the forgeries without apparent hesitation. Three panzer divisions were transferred to Greece, one from France and two from the Eastern Front, directly reducing combat strength at the Kursk salient. Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel himself was dispatched to assume command there. German minesweepers and minelayers were pulled from Sicilian waters and sent to lay three additional minefields off the Greek coast.

  The deception held until the Allied seizure of Pantelleria on the 11th of June 1943, which finally drew German and Italian attention back toward the western Mediterranean. Even then, the damage had been done. Axis forces in Sicily faced the invasion with far less armoured support than they might otherwise have had.

• 3. Command on Both Sides

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  American General Dwight D. Eisenhower held overall command of all Allied forces as Commander-in-Chief. British General Sir Harold Alexander served as his deputy and commanded the 15th Army Group, the formation that would actually direct the two invading armies. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham led all Allied naval forces.

  British General Sir Bernard Montgomery commanded the Eastern Task Force, built around the British Eighth Army and including the 1st Canadian Infantry Division. Lieutenant General George S. Patton commanded the Western Task Force, the American Seventh Army. The Canadian division's inclusion was not militarily determined; it came at the insistence of Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King and the Canadian Military Headquarters in the United Kingdom. The change displaced the veteran British 3rd Infantry Division and was not finalized until the 27th of April 1943.

  On the Axis side, General Alfredo Guzzoni commanded the Italian 6th Army defending the island. In early July the total Axis garrison stood at roughly 200,000 Italian troops, 32,000 German troops, and 30,000 Luftwaffe ground staff. The main German formations were the Panzer Division Hermann Göring and the 15th Panzergrenadier Division. German commanders in Sicily were openly contemptuous of their Italian allies and German units took their operational orders from Generalleutnant Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, the German liaison officer attached to the 6th Army headquarters, who was in turn subordinate to Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring.

• 4. Chaos from the Air

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  Strong winds reaching 45 miles per hour blew the troop-carrying aircraft carrying American paratroopers far off course. The American force was scattered across a wide stretch of south-east Sicily between Gela and Syracuse. By the 14th of July, only about two-thirds of Colonel James M. Gavin's 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment had managed to concentrate at all.

  The British airborne fared no better. Only 12 of 147 gliders landed on target, and 69 crashed into the sea, drowning more than 200 men. Major General George F. Hopkinson, commander of the British 1st Airborne Division, ended up in the water himself, eventually rescued by the landing ship HMS Keren after spending several hours clinging to wreckage.

  A platoon of the 2nd Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment, under Lieutenant Louis Withers, managed to land on target, seized the Ponte Grande bridge over the River Anape, and repulsed counterattacks. By 08:30 that morning, 89 men were holding it. By 11:30, a battalion of the Italian 75th Infantry Regiment arrived with artillery. The British force held out until about 15:30, when, low on ammunition and reduced to 18 men, they were forced to surrender, just 45 minutes before the leading elements of the British 5th Division arrived from the south.

  A second airborne disaster came on the 11th of July when the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment dropped as reinforcement, arriving over the beachhead at the same moment as an Axis air raid. An Allied naval vessel opened fire on the transports, and every other naval vessel and shore position joined in. The 52nd Troop Carrier Wing lost 23 of its 144 C-47 transports to friendly fire, with 318 casualties, 83 of them dead. Among them was Brigadier General Charles L. Keerans, Jr., the 82nd Airborne's assistant division commander, who had come along as an unofficial observer. Ridgway canceled the follow-on glider operation.

• 5. The Fight on the Beaches

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  Landings began at 2:45 in the morning of the 10th of July along 26 beaches. More troops hit the shore on the first day than in any previous amphibious operation of the entire war in terms of divisions landed and geographic spread. The strong winds that had scattered the paratroopers also surprised the defenders, who had assumed no one would attempt a landing in such poor conditions.

  The Italian coastal plan was not designed for a pitched battle at the water's edge; the coastal formations were meant to screen an invasion and buy time for the field divisions further back to respond. Several Italian units fought hard despite this. The 429th Coastal Battalion, defending Gela, lost 45 percent of its men. The 246th Coastal Battalion defeated British attempts to capture Augusta on the night of the 11th and the 12th of July.

  At Gela, Tiger tanks of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division participated in a division-sized counterattack against the U.S. 1st Infantry Division. Gunfire from a destroyer and a light cruiser destroyed several tanks and dispersed an attacking infantry battalion. The 3rd Battalion of the 34th Regiment, Livorno Division, launched a daylight attack two days later with infantry and armor but was repulsed.

  The port of Licata was captured by the morning of the 10th of July at a cost of nearly 100 killed and wounded in the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division. By evening, seven Allied assault divisions, three American, three British, and one Canadian, were established ashore. The port of Syracuse had been taken and feared Axis air attacks had not materialised. By the 10th of July, Allied bombing had already reduced Sicilian airfields to the point where only two remained fully operational and more than half the Axis aircraft had left the island.

• 6. Weeks of Hard Ground

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  Alexander's plan after securing the beachheads was to thrust north through the center of Sicily and cut the island's east-west road network. On the 13th of July, he assigned this task to Montgomery's Eighth Army while directing Patton's Seventh Army to a holding role on the left flank. On the 12th of July, Kesselring had visited Sicily and concluded German units were fighting effectively alone. He ordered the abandonment of western Sicily to shorten the front line.

  The British 1st Parachute Brigade dropped in Operation Fustian on the 12th of July in an attempt to seize Primosole Bridge over the river Simeto on the southern edge of the Catania plain. The paratroopers seized the bridge against fierce counterattacks, but it was not until the 17th of July that a shallow bridgehead north of the river was consolidated.

  At Troina, the 1st Division reached the town on the 31st of July. The Battle of Troina lasted six days, with the defenders launching 24 counterattacks. On the 7th of August, the U.S. 18th Infantry Regiment of the 9th Division captured Mount Pellegrino, which overlooked the Troina defenses and allowed accurate artillery direction.

  Patton reorganised his forces and, by the 22nd of July, the Provisional Corps entered Palermo. On the northern coast, the advance was slowed by heavy demolition of roads. By the night of the 16th of August, leading elements of the 3rd Division entered Messina, bringing the six-week land campaign to a close.

• 7. The Evacuation

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  By the 27th of July, Axis commanders had concluded the campaign would end in evacuation from Messina. Kesselring reported to Hitler on the 29th of July that the operation could be accomplished in three days. The full-scale withdrawal, codenamed Operation Lehrgang, began on the 11th of August.

  The narrow Strait of Messina was defended by 120 heavy and 112 light anti-aircraft guns, roughly half Italian-built. Allied pilots described the overlapping gunfire from both sides of the strait as worse than the defenses over the Ruhr. Daylight air attacks were largely ineffective. The strait varied from 2 to 6 miles wide and was covered by artillery up to 24 centimeters in caliber, while a 6-knot current made naval interdiction extremely hazardous.

  General Hube ordered successive withdrawals each night of between 5 and 15 miles, keeping Allied units at arm's length with mines, demolitions, and other obstacles. The Allies launched brigade-sized amphibious assaults on the 15th of August, one each from the Seventh and Eighth Armies, but the speed of the Axis withdrawal was such that both operations hit empty ground.

  The Germans evacuated some 52,000 troops, including 4,444 wounded, along with 14,105 vehicles, 47 tanks, 94 guns, and roughly 20,700 tons of stores. Italian forces recovered approximately 62,182 men, losing only one motor raft and the train ferry Cariddi, which was scuttled when Allied troops entered Messina.

• 8. Cost and Consequence

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  The U.S. Seventh Army lost 8,781 men: 2,237 killed or missing, 5,946 wounded, and 598 captured. The British Eighth Army suffered 11,843 casualties. Canadian forces sustained 2,310 casualties, including 562 killed. German losses, according to figures compiled in 2007 by Samuel W. Mitcham and Friederich von Stauffenberg, were approximately 20,000 killed, wounded, or captured. Italian military losses, according to the Historical Branch of the Italian Army, were 4,678 killed, 36,072 missing, 32,500 wounded, and 116,681 captured. A large portion of the missing were presumed buried on the battlefield or in unknown locations.

  The campaign carried a darker record as well. On the 14th of July, Sergeant Horace T. West of the 180th Infantry Regiment marched 48 Axis prisoners for approximately a mile before summarily executing 37 of them. The same day, Captain John T. Compton ordered 35 Italian prisoners executed by firing squad. West was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, then released to active service as a private in November 1944. Compton was acquitted, transferred to another regiment, and died in November 1943 during the Italian campaign.

  The consequences reached well beyond Sicily. The loss of the island directly led to the ousting of Benito Mussolini and the fall of his regime, which was replaced by the First Badoglio government. Italy's subsequent collapse required Germany to replace Italian forces throughout Italy and parts of the Balkans. One-fifth of the German army was diverted from the Eastern Front as a result, a proportion that would remain in place until near the end of the war. The Mediterranean was also reopened to Allied merchant shipping for the first time since 1941, a logistical shift whose value Eisenhower's headquarters had cited at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 as one of the primary justifications for striking at Sicily rather than Western Europe.