History of the Second World War (75 page)

The complete capture of the eight divisions in Tunisia, including most of Rommel’s veterans and the pick of the Italian Army, left Italy and the Italian islands almost naked of defensive covering. These forces would have provided a very strong defence for the Italian gateways into Europe, and the Allies’ chances of successful invasion would have been dim. The Allies, however, were not ready to take immediate advantage of the opportunity — although they had decided in January that a landing in Sicily should be the next step, and Tunis had been captured close to the time expected. Fortunately, for them, the opportunity was prolonged by dissension and divergent views in the opposing headquarters.

Here we come to another point of evidence, provided in the first place by General Westphal, who was then Chief of Staff to Field-Marshal Kesselring, the Commander-in-Chief in southern Italy. As Italy had no mobile mechanised forces left, her military chiefs besought the Germans to provide a strong reinforcement of panzer type divisions. At that moment Hitler was moved to meet this urgent need, and sent Mussolini a personal message offering him five divisions. But Mussolini, without telling Kesselring, sent Hitler a reply that he wanted only three — and that meant only one fresh division beyond the two improvised from drafts which had been in transit to Africa. He even expressed the wish that no further German troops should be despatched.

Mussolini’s reluctance to accept this mid-May offer was due to a mixture of pride and fear. He could not bear to let the world, and his own people, see that he was dependent on German aid. As Westphal remarked: ‘He wanted Italy to be defended by Italians, and shut his eyes to the fact that the appalling state of his forces made such an idea quite impracticable.’ But his further reason was that he did not want to let the Germans acquire a dominating position in Italy. Anxious as he was to keep out the Allies, he was almost as anxious to keep out the Germans.

The new Chief of the Army Staff, General Roatta (previously commanding Sicily) eventually convinced Mussolini that larger German reinforcements were essential for any chance of a successful defence of Italy and its island outposts. So he agreed to further German divisions coming in — subject to the condition that they should be subordinated to the tactical control of Italian commanders.

The Italian garrison of Sicily consisted of only four field divisions and six static coast defence divisions that were poor in equipment and morale. The German drafts in transit to Africa when the collapse occurred were formed into a division and given the title of the ‘15th Panzergrenadier Division’, but it had only one tank unit. The similarly rebuilt ‘Hermann Goring’ panzer division was sent to Sicily near the end of June. But Mussolini would not allow these two divisions to be constituted as a corps under a German commander. They were placed directly under the Italian army commander, General Guzzoni, and distributed in five groups along the 150 mile diameter of the island as mobile reserves. The senior German liaison officer, Lieutenant-General von Senger und Etterlin, was provided with a small operations staff and a signals company so that he could exercise emergency control.

By the time that Mussolini was willing to accept more German help, Hitler was becoming more dubious about providing it, and also tending to a different view about the danger-point. On the one hand, he suspected that the Italians would throw over Mussolini and make peace — a suspicion that was soon borne out by events — and for that reason hesitated to push in more German divisions so deeply that they might be cut off if their allies collapsed or changed sides. On the other hand, he came to think that Mussolini, the Italian High Command, and Kesselring were mistaken in their view that the Allies’ next move from Africa would be a jump into Sicily. On that point he proved wrong.

Hitler’s greatest strategic disadvantage in meeting the Allies’ re-entry into Europe lay in the immense stretch of his own conquests — from the west coast of France, on the Atlantic Ocean, to the east coast of Greece, on the Aegean Sea. It was very difficult for him to gauge where the Allies would strike. Their greatest strategic advantage lay in the wide choice of alternative objectives and power of distraction which they enjoyed, through seapower. Hitler, while having always to guard against a cross-Channel stroke from England, had cause to fear that the Anglo-American armies in North Africa might land anywhere on his southern front between Spain and Greece.*

* For map, see p. 280.

Hitler thought that the Allies were more likely to land in Sardinia than in Sicily. Sardinia would provide an easy stepping stone into Corsica, and a well-placed springboard for a jump onto either the French or Italian mainland. At the same time an Allied landing in Greece was expected, and Hitler wished to have reserves kept back so that they could be rushed in that direction.

These ideas were fostered by receiving from Nazi agents in Spain copies of documents found on a ‘British officer’ whose body had been washed ashore on the Spanish coast. Besides identity papers and personal correspondence, the documents included a private letter — of which the dead man had been the bearer — written by Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Nye, the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to General Alexander. This letter referred to recent official telegrams about forthcoming operations, and its supplementary comments indicated that the Allies were intending to land in Sardinia and Greece while aiming by their ‘cover plan’ to convince the enemy that Sicily was their objective.

The corpse and the letter were part of an ingenious deception devised by a section of the British Intelligence service. This was so well worked out that the heads of the German Intelligence service were convinced of its genuineness. Although it did not alter the view of the Italian chiefs and Kesselring that Sicily would be the Allies’ next objective, it appears to have made a strong impression on Hitler.

On Hitler’s orders the 1st Panzer Division was sent from France to Greece — to support the three German infantry divisions and the Italian 11th Army there — while the newly formed 90th Panzergrenadier Division reinforced the four Italian divisions in Sardinia. Further reinforcement of that island was hindered by the difficulty of supply, since most of the piers in the few harbours had been destroyed by bombing, but as an additional insurance Hitler moved General Student’s 11th Air Corps (of two parachute divisions) down to the south of France, ready to deliver an airborne counterattack against an Allied landing in Sardinia.

Meanwhile, Allied planning proceeded at a slower gait. The decision to land in Sicily had been born of a compromise, and unaccompanied by any conclusion as to further aims. When the American and British Chiefs of Staff met at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, their initial divergence of views was in contrast to their common title, the ‘Combined Chiefs of Staff’. The Americans (Admiral King, General Marshall, and General Arnold) wanted to wind up what was regarded as the Mediterranean diversion, once North Africa was cleared, and get back on the direct line of action against Germany. The British (General Brooke, Admiral Pound, Air Chief Marshal Portal) considered that conditions were not yet ripe for a direct cross-Channel invasion, and that such an attempt in 1943 would end in disaster or futility — an estimate that will hardly be questioned in historical retrospect. But all agreed that some further action must be initiated in order to maintain pressure and draw away German forces from the Russian front. On the British side the Joint Planning Staff advocated a landing in Sardinia, but both the British and the American Chiefs of Staff were inclined to prefer Sicily — which was also Churchill’s preference — so that agreement on this line was quickly reached. The most potent argument was that the capture of Sicily would effectively clear the sea passage through the Mediterranean, and thus save a lot of shipping — for, since 1940, most of the troop and supply convoys to Egypt and India had been forced to go the long way round by South Africa.

In coming to the decision, on January 19, to move against Sicily, the Combined Chiefs defined the object as ‘(i) Making the Mediterranean line of communications more secure; (ii) diverting German pressure from the Russian front; (iii) intensifying the pressure on Italy.’ The question of how it should be exploited was left open. An attempt to decide on the next objective would have revived divergencies of view — but in such matters tactful deferment is apt to result in strategic unreadiness.

Nor was there an emphatic sense of urgency in the planning of the Sicilian stroke. Although it was assumed that the conquest of Tunisia might be completed by the end of April, the Combined Chiefs set the moon period of July as the target date for the landing in Sicily. The British produced an outline plan on January 20 for this ‘Operation Husky’ — a converging sea approach and invasion by forces coming from the eastern and western Mediterranean respectively. It was agreed that Eisenhower should be the Supreme Commander, while Alexander became his Deputy. (That was a significant acceptance of the United States as the senior partner in the alliance, for the British Commander-in-Chief was the senior in rank and experience, and in this campaign the British would still provide the larger part of the forces.) A special planning staff was formed early in February, with headquarters in Algiers, but its branches were widely separated, and in the case of the air force the separation was not only in space but also in thought — the outcome being that air action during the Sicilian campaign was not closely or well related to the needs of the land and sea forces. Much time passed while the draft plan was being carried to and fro. Eisenhower, Alexander, and the two chosen army commanders, Montgomery and Patton, were too occupied with the last lap of the North African campaign to give adequate attention to the next move. Montgomery did not find time to study the draft plan until late in April, and then called for numerous changes in it. The plan was recast on May 3, and final approval of it, by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, was received on May 13 — a week after the collapse of the German-Italian front at Tunis, and the day that the last enemy fragments surrendered.

These delays in the planning were the more regrettable since only one of the ten divisions to lead the invasion of Sicily was engaged in the final stage of the North African campaign, and seven of them were fresh entries. A landing in Sicily soon after the Axis collapse in Africa would have found the island almost naked of defence. The long interval that the enemy was allowed for reinforcing the defence of Sicily might have been longer still but for Churchill who, at the Casablanca Conference and subsequently, urged that the landing should be made in June. He gained the backing of the Combined Chiefs of Staff but the commanders in the Mediterranean were not ready to launch the invasion earlier than July 10.

The main change that had been made in the plan was that Patton’s army (the Western Task Force), instead of landing at the western end of Sicily near Palermo, would land in the south-east close to Montgomery’s army, whose landing points would now be more concentrated. In view of the time that had elapsed for the enemy’s possible reinforcement, this tighter massing of the invading forces was a sound precaution against the danger of a heavy counterstroke — though in the event it proved an unnecessary precaution. But it forfeited the chance of capturing the port of Palermo at the outset — a forfeit that would have been of serious effect but for the way that the new DUKW amphibious vehicles in conjunction with the LSTs (‘Landing Ships, Tank’) proved capable of solving the problem of maintaining supply over the beaches. The revised plan also forfeited much of the distracting effect sought in the original one, and thereby helped the enemy to concentrate his dispersed reserves after the landing had taken place, and block the Allies’ advance across the mountainous centre of the island. If Patton had landed near Palermo on the north-west coast, he would have been well on the way to the Straits of Messina, the enemy’s line of reinforcement or retreat — whereby all the enemy forces in Sicily could have been trapped. In the event, the escape of the German divisions had far-reaching ill effects on the Allies’ further moves.

To err on the side of security was, however, a very natural preference in this first bound back into Europe by the Allies — and first big seaborne assault on a coast held by the enemy. Here it is worth note that the assault landing, by eight divisions simultaneously, was larger in scale even than in Normandy eleven months later. Some 150,000 troops were landed on the first day and the next two days, and the ultimate total was about 478,000–250,000 British, 228,000 American. The British landings were made along a forty mile stretch of coast at the south-east corner of the island, and the American along a forty mile stretch of the south coast, with a twenty mile interval between the British left and the American right wing.

The naval side of the operation was planned and conducted under the direction of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. It involved a complex pattern of moves leading up to a landing by night, yet went through from start to finish with a wonderful smoothness that did great credit to the planners and the executants. As an amphibious operation it worked much better than ‘Operation Torch’, the landings in French North Africa, the previous November, from which much had been learned.

The Eastern Naval Task Force (British), under Vice-Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, comprised 795 vessels, while a further 715 landing craft were carried with it for the beaching stage. The 5th and 50th Divisions (and 231st Infantry Brigade) came from the east end of the Mediterranean — from Suez, Alexandria, and Haifa — in ships; they were to land along the southerly stretch of Sicily’s east coast between Syracuse and Cape Passero. The 51st Division came from Tunisia, in craft, part of it staging at Malta; it was to land on the south-east corner of Sicily. The 1st Canadian Division, to land just west of the corner, came from Britain in two convoys — the second and faster one, carrying the bulk of the troops, sailed from the Clyde on D -12 (June 28). It passed through the mine-protected channel near Bizerta immediately ahead of the American convoys.