A German Tiger tank in Sicily, 1943.
Semovente da 90/53 in Sicily
Field Marshal Kesselring had long realized that Sicily would
be lost even as he insisted that his forces on the island could tie up a dozen
Allied divisions for some time. Berlin wondered who was tying up whom. Mindful
of Stalingrad and Tunis, the high command had insisted as early as July 15 that
“our valuable human material must be saved.” On July 26, Berlin ordered
preparations made for the island’s evacuation; the message was hand-carried to
Kesselring in Frascati to avoid alerting the Italians. With Mussolini deposed,
Hitler feared that the Badoglio regime would use the abandonment of Sicily as
an excuse to renounce the Pact of Steel.
The defense of the Strait of Messina fell to an unorthodox
colonel from Schleswig-Holstein named Ernst-Günther Baade. A devotee of
Aristotle and Seneca who printed small volumes of verse for his friends, Baade
favored a kilt rather than trousers, with a holstered Luger worn instead of a leather
sporran. By August 10, he had made Messina perhaps the most heavily defended
spot in Europe. Five hundred guns bristled on the Sicilian shore and on
mainland Calabria, two miles across the strait. Engineers prepared a dozen
camouflaged ferry sites on both sides of the water and assembled thirty-three
barges, seventy-six motorboats, and a dozen Siebel ferries, big rafts with twin
airplane engines mounted on pontoons and originally designed in 1940 for an
invasion of England. Baade even cached food, brandy, and cigarettes for the
rear guard.
Twelve thousand German supernumeraries and more than four
thousand vehicles quietly left Sicily in early August; Kesselring calculated
that five nights would be needed to evacuate the rest. With precise choreography,
combat units fell back on five successive defensive lines, a retreat aided by
the tapering shape of the Messina Peninsula. Vehicles that could not be
evacuated were sabotaged by bashing fuel pumps and distributors with hammers
and hatchets. “The hand grenade is especially effective,” one directive
advised. Enormous bonfires consumed surplus matériel, with German troops
“yelling as they hurled it into the flames: crates, chairs, tents, camp beds,
telephones, tools…all doused with petrol.”
Italian commanders quickly got wind of the evacuation scheme
and began their own measured withdrawals on August 3. Without informing Berlin
or awaiting Hitler’s approval, Kesselring authorized Operation
LEHRGANG—“Curriculum”—to begin at six P.M. on Wednesday, August 11, just as
Bernard’s battalion was fighting for survival at Brolo. The Hermann Göring
Division went first, under a flotilla commanded by the former skipper of the
airship Hindenburg; hundreds of shivering malaria patients also huddled on the
ferries for the thirty-minute ride across the strait at six knots. Oil lamps
flickered on the makeshift piers. Overhead screens shielded the glare from
Allied pilots, but every anxious Gefreiter stared upward and listened for the
sound of the B-17 bombers that would blow them to kingdom come.
The B-17s never came. Allied commanders had had no
coordinated plan for severing the Messina Strait when HUSKY began, nor did any
such plan emerge as the campaign reached its climax. Inattention, even
negligence, gave Kesselring something his legions never had in Tunisia: the
chance for a clean getaway.
British radio eavesdroppers had picked up many clues as
early as August 1, including ferry assignments for the four German divisions,
and messages about stockpiles of fuel and barrage balloons. But AFHQ
intelligence in Algiers on August 10 found “no adequate indications that the
enemy intends an immediate evacuation,” although General Alexander had noted
signs of withdrawal preparations a full week earlier, in a cable to Admiral
Cunningham and Air Marshal Tedder. “You have no doubt co-ordinated plans to
meet this contingency,” Alexander added. It was left to Montgomery to belabor
the obvious: “The truth of the matter is that there is no plan.” Not until ten
P.M. on August 14, four days into the evacuation, did Alexander signal Tedder,
“It now appears that [the] German evacuation has really started.” Only a few
hours earlier, AFHQ had again reported “no evidence of any large-scale
withdrawal.”
Allied pilots had reason to fear the “fire canopy” that
Baade’s guns could throw over the strait. But his antiaircraft guns, if
plentiful, lacked range. The entire initial production run of the new German
88mm Flak 81, which could reach the rarefied altitude of 25,000 feet and higher
where the B-17 Flying Fortresses flew, had been lost in Tunisia. Yet air
commanders were reluctant to divert the Allied strategic bomber force, which
included nearly a thousand planes, from deep targets in Naples, Bologna, and
elsewhere. To be sure, swarms of smaller Wellingtons and Mitchells, Bostons and
Baltimores, Warhawks and Kittyhawks raked the strait. Little sense of urgency
obtained, however: of ten thousand sorties flown by bombers and fighter-bombers
in the Mediterranean from late July to mid-August, only a quarter hit targets
around Messina. B-17s attacked the strait three times before LEHRGANG began;
yet, as the Axis evacuation intensified on August 13, the entire Flying
Fortress fleet was again bombing Rome’s rail yards.
Naval commanders had equal reason to shy from Baade’s
ferocious shore batteries and “the octopus-like arms of searchlights.” Admiral
Cunningham in Tunisia had famously decreed, “Sink, burn, and destroy. Let
nothing pass”; here, he issued no such commandment. “There was no effective way
of stopping them, either by sea or air,” Cunningham said, and Hewitt agreed.
Patrol boats and small craft staged nuisance attacks, but both British and
American admirals declined to risk their big ships. “The two greatest sea
powers in the world,” the strategist J.F.C. Fuller wrote, “had ceased to be
sea-minded.”
Not once did the senior Allied commanders confer on how to
thwart the escape. Increasingly preoccupied with the invasion of mainland Italy
in September, they never urged Eisenhower to divert his strategic bombers and
other resources for a supreme effort. Nor did he force the issue. On August 10,
alarmed at signs of exhaustion, the commander-in-chief’s doctors ordered him to
bed. There he remained for three days, “as much as his nervous temperament will
permit,” Butcher noted. Perhaps sensing the missed opportunity, Eisenhower on
Friday morning, August 13, “hopped in and out of bed, pranced around the room,
and lectured me vigorously on what history would call ‘his mistake,’” Butcher
added—the failure to land HUSKY forces “on both sides of the Messina Strait,
thus cutting off all Sicily.”
“It is astonishing that the enemy has not made stronger
attacks in the past days,” the commander of the Messina flotilla, Captain
Gustav von Liebenstein, told his war diary on August 15. The evacuation was so
unmolested that crossings soon took place by day, exploiting “Anglo-Saxon
habits” during the early morning, lunch hour, and tea time. The Italian port
commander departed Messina on August 16 after setting time bombs to blow up his
docks. Two hundred grenadiers held a crossroads four miles outside the city,
then fell back to board the last launches; German engineers cooled a wine
bottle by towing it in the sea, and drank a toast as they neared the Calabrian
shore. An eight-man Italian patrol inadvertently left behind was plucked from
the shore by a German rescue boat at 8:30 A.M. on Tuesday, August 17, just as
Allied troops converged on Messina.
They were among 40,000 Germans and 70,000 Italians to
escape. Another 13,500 casualties had been evacuated in the previous month.
German troops also carried off ten thousand vehicles—more than they had brought
to Sicily, thanks to unbridled pilferage—and forty-seven tanks. The Italian
evacuees included a dozen mules. “The Boche have carried out a very skillful
withdrawal, which has been largely according to their plan and not ours,” a
British major noted.
Kesselring declared the German units from Sicily “completely
fit for battle and ready for service.” That was hyperbole; since July 10, Axis
forces had been badly battered, by the Allies and by malaria. But those
escaping divisions—the 15th Panzer Grenadier, the 29th Panzer Grenadier, the
1st Parachute, and the Hermann Göring—would kill thousands of Allied soldiers
in the coming months. “We shall now employ our strength elsewhere,” Captain von
Liebenstein wrote as he reached the mainland, “fully trusting in the final
victory of the Fatherland.”
#
The thirty-eight-day campaign had ended, and another ten
thousand square miles of Axis-held territory shifted to the Allied ledger.
Patton deemed HUSKY “a damn near perfect example of how to wage war,” and
without doubt clear benefits obtained. Mussolini’s downfall had been hastened.
Mediterranean sea-lanes were further secured, along with southern supply lines
to the Soviet Union and southern Asia via the Suez Canal. Allied air bases
sprouted on Sicily as quickly as engineers could build them. German pressure
had eased on the Russian front, where Hitler in July canceled a major offensive
at Kursk after only a week, in part to divert forces to Italy and the Balkans.
American confidence, so badly battered at Kasserine Pass,
was fully restored; four more Army divisions had become combat veterans,
joining the four annealed in Tunisia. Cooperation between naval and ground
forces had improved, and the many lessons learned, in mountain warfare and
sniping tactics, in the arts of camouflage and combat loading, would be useful
in Italy and beyond. The experience of launching a vast amphibious invasion
against a hostile shore would be invaluable for the invasions yet to come,
notably at Normandy. “We know we can do it again,” said Brigadier General Ray
McLain, artillery commander of the 45th Division, “because we have succeeded.”
The butcher’s bill was dear for both sides. American battle
casualties totaled 8,800, including 2,237 killed in action, plus another 13,000
hospitalized for illness. The British battle tally of 12,800 included 2,721
killed. Axis dead and wounded approached 29,000—an Italian count found 4,300
German and 4,700 Italian graves on Sicily. But it was the 140,000 Axis soldiers
captured, nearly all of them Italian, who severely tilted the final casualty
totals.
For the Allies the campaign had been “a great success, but
it was not complete,” as a German admiral put it. Barely fifty thousand Germans
had overcome Allied air and sea supremacy, and the virtual collapse of their
Italian confederates, to hold off an onslaught by nearly half a million
Anglo-Americans for five weeks. Kesselring considered much of the American
effort misspent on seizing “uninteresting territory” in western Sicily; he
detected an aversion to risk in Allied commanders, and now believed that he had
a clear sense of his foes for future battles. HUSKY also exposed lingering
combat shortcomings and revealed a few new ones. Rugged terrain could annul the
advantage of a highly mechanized but roadbound army. “Vertical envelopment,”
whether by parachute or glider, had yet to prove its value; in 666 troop
carrier sorties flown over Sicily, the Allies lost 42 planes and had another
118 badly damaged, many from friendly fire. The meshing of infantry, armor,
artillery, air, and other combat arms into an integrated battle force—the
essence of modern combat—remained ragged; at times it was unclear whether
Allied air and ground forces were even fighting the same campaign. Eisenhower
claimed that the “international and interservice spirit” was now “so firmly
established…that it was scarcely necessary any longer to treat it as a
problem.” This was sheer fantasy. Relations between flyboys and ground-pounders
were almost as badly strained as those between Brits and Yanks. As the
historian Douglas Porch later wrote, “Sicily demonstrated the many limitations
of interservice and inter-Allied cooperation, ones that foreshadowed problems
that the Allies would encounter in Italy.”
If hundreds of combat leaders at all ranks proved their
mettle under fire, others failed to measure up. The sorting out of the capable
from the incapable continued, and Truscott’s critique in relieving a regimental
commander in August showed how ruthless that sifting could be: “You lack clear,
calm judgment and mental stability under stress of battle, and you are unduly
influenced by rumors and exaggerated reports.”
But it was at higher echelons that leaders had yet to prove
themselves entirely worthy of the led. Montgomery showed signs of being “a
superb leader but a mediocre manager of armies in battle,” as the historian
Geoffrey Perret put it, “unable to tell a sufficiency from a superfluity.”
Patton had retired to the royal palace with his demons. Alexander had been
conservative, unimaginative, and easily bamboozled by subordinates; his
generalship in Sicily was “feeble from beginning to end,” the British
biographer Nigel Hamilton concluded. As for Eisenhower, notwithstanding his
growth since TORCH ten months before, all too often he still failed to grip the
reins of his command, day by day and hour by hour. He had yet to become a great
commander because he had yet to demonstrate the preeminent quality of a great
captain: the ability to impose his will on the battlefield.
Still, they owned the island. Rome was closer; Berlin was
closer. An enemy who a year earlier had been ascendant was now in retreat,
everywhere. Half a million German soldiers lay dead, with as many more captured
or missing. After Sicily, a Luftwaffe commander wrote, few could doubt “that a
turning point had come and that we were on the road to final defeat.”
