Sicily '43

The First Assault on Fortress Europe

James Holland

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780802157201
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

A history of World War II's Operation Husky, the first Allied attack on European soil, by the acclaimed author of Normandy '44. On July 10, 1943, the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted took place, larger even than the Normandy invasion eleven months later: 160, 000 American, British, and Canadian troops came ashore or were parachuted onto Sicily, signaling the start of the campaign to defeat Nazi Germany on European soil. Operation Husky, as it was known, was enormously complex, involving dramatic battles on land, in the air, and at sea. Yet, despite its paramount importance to ultimate Allied victory, and its drama, very little has been written about the thirty-eight-day Battle for Sicily. Based on his own battlefield studies in Sicily and on much new research, James Holland's Sicily '43 offers a vital new perspective on a major turning point in World War II and a chronicle of a multi-pronged campaign in a uniquely diverse and contained geographical location. The characters involved—Generals George Patton and Bernard Montgomery among many—were as colorful as the air and naval battles and the fighting on the ground across the scorching plains and mountaintop of Sicily were brutal. But among Holland's great skills is incorporating the experience of on-the-ground participants on all sides—from American privates Tom and Dee Bowles and Tuskegee fighter pilot Charlie Dryden to British major Hedley Verity and Canadian lieutenant Farley Mowat (later a celebrated author), to German and Italian participants such as Wilhelm Schmalz, brigade commander in the Hermann Göring Division, or Luftwaffe fighter pilot major Johannes "Macky" Steinhoff and to Italian combatants, civilians and mafiosi alike—which gives readers an intimate sense of what occurred in July and August 1943. Emphasizing the significance of Allied air superiority, Holland overturns conventional narratives that have criticized the Sicily campaign for the vacillations over the plan, the slowness of the Allied advance and that so many German and Italian soldiers escaped to the mainland; rather, he shows that clearing the island in 38 days against geographical challenges and fierce resistance was an impressive achievement. A powerful and dramatic account by a master military historian, Sicily '43 fills a major gap in the narrative history of World War II. Praise for Sicily '43 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a Best History Book of the Year by the Wall Street Journal "Academic histories are all very well, but at times it is a pleasure to sit back and wallow in an old-school military tale of flinty-eyed men doing battle. That is what James Holland, a seasoned craftsman, offers in Sicily '43." — New York Times Book Review "Crisp, detailed, and entertaining. Holland refuses to let the legends overshadow the flesh-and-blood soldiers who fought, bled, and died. Sicily '43 is an outstanding look at a stepping-stone to victory." — Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 1

The Long Path to HUSKY

IN THE LAST WEEK of June 1943, from Egypt across North Africa to Algeria and northern Tunisia, Allied troops were getting ready for what was to be the largest amphibious invasion the world had ever known. A pivotal moment in the war had been reached. On the Eastern Front, German forces were about to go on to the offensive once more, this time to try and straighten the Kursk salient following the retreat from Stalingrad back in February. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had been withdrawn after catastrophic losses, allowing Allied shipping finally to flow freely across that vast ocean for the first time since the start of the war. British and American bombers were attacking the Reich both day and night, while – after three long years of fighting – all of North Africa was now in Allied hands. And the future of Italy looked uncertain, to say the least, the Fascist state now reeling in the face of plummeting public morale, a string of military defeats and an economy in shreds.

There was a palpable sense that the noose was starting to tighten around Nazi Germany; and yet for the Allies to cross the sea and capture Sicily would be a mammoth undertaking. The challenges of such an operation, both logistically and in the levels of coordination needed between services and between coalition partners feeling their way in this war, were immense. Hovering over the Allies, too, was the knowledge that less than a year hence they would be attempting to cross the English Channel and invade German-occupied France; the last sizeable strike, at Dieppe in August 1942, had been an utter disaster. If Sicily went wrong, if it turned into catastrophe or even a long and bloody slog, then the ramifications would be enormous. The long road to victory would become even longer; the cross-Channel attack might have to be postponed. Reverses, at this critical stage in the war, simply could not be countenanced. They were unthinkable.

The stakes, then, could hardly have been higher. The invasion of Sicily had to be a success. Yet for the senior Allied commanders far away across the Mediterranean, in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt – from where the troops who would soon be attempting to land there were training – conquest of this ancient, even mystical, island seemed a very formidable undertaking indeed.

Most of the men now being put through their paces in North Africa were oblivious to such concerns. Training at Kabrit near the Suez Canal were the men of 69th Brigade, part of 50th ‘Tyne Tees’ Division, who would be part of the British landing force around Avola on the east coast of Sicily – not that Bill Cheall and the lads of the 6th Green Howards had any idea of that. ‘We realised that we were going to invade somewhere,’ noted Cheall, ‘but, of course, how could we know where at that time?’1 The war had already been going on a long time for Cheall, a former greengrocer from Middlesbrough in north-east England. Joining the Territorial Army in the spring of 1939, aged just twenty-one, he had been mobilized on the outbreak of war that September, and had served in France with the 6th Green Howards. Escaping from Dunkirk, he’d then begun the process of retraining before being laid low with chronic sinusitis and so had not gone overseas with the battalion when they’d first been posted to the Middle East. Instead, he’d spent some time with the 11th Battalion, before finally being shipped overseas and rejoining his old unit at the end of March 1943. He’d been shocked by how few were left from the battalion that had escaped from Dunkirk, but after the Battle of Wadi Akarit, when Eighth Army had crashed into the Italians in southern Tunisia back at the beginning of April, he had begun to realize why. Being in the infantry was a tough, bloody, attritional business. Sooner or later, one was bound to come a cropper. One just had to hope it wouldn’t be a fatal one.

They’d advanced to Enfidaville further north in Tunisia, then had been pulled out of the line. At the time, no one had the faintest idea why, but they were glad to be spared the final battles of the long North African campaign, which had not finally ended until mid-May. Back they went, some 2,000 miles, past previous battle sites, down into Libya, through Cyrenaica and then finally into Egypt once more. The carnage of war had been evident all the way: burnt-out tanks and vehicles, guns and the vast detritus of war. As they’d passed back through Wadi Akarit, Cheall had said a small prayer to himself. ‘I imagined the faces of the pals I had lost,’ he noted, ‘and could see them just as they were before they gave their lives.’2 Eventually, they’d stopped at Sidi Bishr near Alexandria before moving again to Kabrit. Training continued, including Exercise BROMYARD in the Gulf of Aqaba, where they relentlessly practised amphibious assaults. The heat was intense and the flies as much a nuisance as they had ever been, but Cheall reckoned that by the beginning of July none of them had ever been fitter.

Not far away at another camp at El Shatt was their sister battalion, the 1st Green Howards. Unlike the 6th Battalion, the 1st had yet to see action, having spent the war so far training in England, Northern Ireland and, more recently, Palestine. The 1st Battalion would be part of 5th ‘Yorkshire’ Division, which was appropriate enough since the Green Howards hailed from that county of northern England, and were originally named after the landowner who had been the regiment’s colonel back in the eighteenth century.

One of the officers, the commander of B Company, was quite a sporting celebrity. Major Hedley Verity was one of the finest spin bowlers ever to play cricket for Yorkshire and England, and in 1934 had taken fifteen wickets in England’s biggest ever victory over Australia. Verity had considered joining up in 1938 during the Munich crisis, but Arnold Shaw, the colonel of the Green Howards and an old friend, suggested he first read some military textbooks and advised him to get in touch again should war break out. That winter, Verity had read voraciously during the England tour of South Africa before returning home for the final season before the war. Yorkshire once again won the championship that summer with Verity cleaning up Sussex, taking six wickets for 15 runs on Friday 1 September, the day Germany invaded Poland. On the Saturday, he travelled back to Yorkshire with the rest of the team, on Sunday Britain declared war, and on Monday Verity got back in touch with Colonel Shaw and joined up.

Quiet, unassuming and always generous towards others, he quickly showed a natural aptitude for military tactics. The best spin bowlers have both sharp intelligence and a tactical mind, and Verity brought these skills to soldiering. Unsurprisingly, his men and his peers all adored him, while in between training sessions he never tired of playing morale-boosting games of cricket. Since his arrival in the Canal Zone there had even been a match in which Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey, commander of XIII Corps, had played. A keen cricketer since his schooldays, Dempsey had been as overawed as most others to have the celebrated England player among his men. The chance to face the bowling of this sporting star had been too good to pass over.

Not all British troops scheduled for Operation HUSKY, as the Sicily invasion was code-named, were in the Middle East. Some had been training in northern Tunisia, including much of Major-General Vyvyan Evelegh’s 78th ‘Battleaxe’ Division, which was not to be part of the first wave of invasion troops but was to be kept in reserve, most likely landing a week or two later. Major Peter Pettit was second-in-command of the 17th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, a lawyer from London who had joined the part-time ranks of the Honourable Artillery Company as a nineteen-year-old. During his twelve years of pre-war service with the HAC, he’d taken his soldiering seriously and had risen to acting major, and in March 1941 he had transferred out of the territorials and into the regular army by joining the 17th Field Artillery. A further eighteen months had been spent in England training until finally he and the regiment were posted overseas to Tunisia, where they’d been fighting with First Army in the north of the country since the previous November. The 17th had performed well in North Africa, but Pettit, now aged thirty-four, was not a man to sit on any laurels and took the business of being a gunner very seriously. Aware how vital the artillery had become in the British way of war, he thought deeply and carefully about how it could best support the infantry and armour, writing down his thoughts about the relative values of different types of barrages and fire support patterns, and ensuring there had been no let-up in training. ‘Training from 0600 to 1200,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 June, ‘and training from 1700 to 1900.’3 In his next entry, he jotted: ‘Gun drill for four hours, very hot.’4 Joint exercises were held with the Irish Brigade, one of three infantry brigades in the 78th. Combined all-arms training was vital because invariably infantry would be advancing with fire support from the gunners; and the more training there was, the more officers such as Major Pettit got to know their fellows in the infantry, all of which helped enormously when doing it for real.

While it was the infantry – and armour – who had to make the leap of faith and advance across ground if the enemy was to be overrun and beaten, both the British and the Americans put increasing weight on fire-power to bludgeon the enemy – and on the ground, at any rate, it was the artillery who could provide that support. Fire plans, barrages, counter-battery fire, the siting of forward observers – all required enormous skill and training, and since the 17th FA was the senior artillery regiment in 78th Division, Peter Pettit, for one, was determined his men should be up to the job. Very often, a skilfully executed fire plan could be the difference between living and dying for the infantry up ahead of them.

On 1 July, General Montgomery, commanding Eighth Army to which they were now attached, came to visit the officers of the division, assembled under a large canopy of old car hoods put together by the engineers, just a hundred yards from the sea. ‘He said he planned on three principles,’ wrote Pettit, ‘that he would not move until he was ready, that objectives would be limited, and that he would not ask formations to do something they could not do.’5 Having been part of First Army in Tunisia, they’d not fought under Monty before, so this was their first proper sighting of their commanding general. Earlier, Montgomery had driven up to the men in the regiment and asked them to gather round. This had prompted something of a stampede, but Pettit knew the men had loved it, seeing this famous general – now their general – right there, in front of them, happily answering questions. ‘He got right under their skins at once,’ Pettit later jotted in his diary.6

Meanwhile, at the coastal port of Oran in Algeria the US 1st Infantry Division had also been gearing up for this next phase of the war against Nazi Germany and its Italian ally. The men of the Big Red One – as the 1st Division was known – had been part of the initial TORCH landings at Oran and Arzew the previous November and had spent the most time in the line during the Tunisian campaign: 112 out of 132 days, which was a lot more than any other American troops. Second Lieutenant Franklyn A. Johnson had celebrated victory in North Africa with three days sleeping and loafing in Bizerte, but then the division had been transferred back to Algeria, and to a training camp at Mangin, 12 miles from the city of Oran. An officer in Cannon Company of the 18th Infantry Regiment, Johnson had survived the North African campaign with no further damage than a painful but not serious shrapnel wound to his hand, but he was tired after the long campaign and in need of some R&R. They all were; and, recognizing this, the divisional commander, Major-General Terry de la Mesa Allen, had announced a brief moratorium on training, plus unrestricted passes and trucks to take his boys into town.

Inevitably, after such a sudden release of steam, drunken mayhem had followed. The next morning, General Allen himself had gone down to the city’s jails and bailed out the many men who had been locked up for over-exuberance the previous evening. The episode had cost Allen a severe dressing-down from Lieutenant-General George S. Patton, the commander of Force 343 for the upcoming invasion – what would soon become the US Seventh Army. Patton disapproved of his soldiers going on drunken sprees, and even more strongly of commanders encouraging such behaviour.

Frank Johnson had been among those assembled for a pep-talk by Allen a day or so later, by which time the holiday period was over and training had resumed. No mention was made of the drunken revelry in Oran. Instead, Allen had praised them all for their work in Tunisia, highlighting the GIs – the rank and file – above any of the officers. ‘Do your job,’ he finished. ‘We don’t want heroes – dead heroes. We’re not out for glory – we’re here to do a dirty, stinking job.’ It went down well. ‘We love and respect Terry Allen even more after he talks frankly to us at Mangin,’ noted Johnson.7

Johnson was from New Jersey, the son of a professor of Military Science and Tactics at Hamilton College, New York. With poor eyesight, he’d known he would not get a regular army commission, but at Rutgers University had joined the ROTC – Reserve Officer Training Corps – graduating in May 1942 and heading off to join the army for the duration immediately after. He had shipped to England in September and been posted to Cannon Company of the 18th Infantry Regiment, arriving in Algeria in November, just behind the invasion. More training had followed, and then they’d been sent into Tunisia to help stem the flow at Kasserine in February 1943, when the US II Corps had suffered a severe setback at the hands of a briefly resurgent Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel and his Panzerarmee. Johnson and the rest of the 18th Infantry had been in the thick of it throughout the rest of the fighting.

The cannon company attached to each infantry regiment provided a mixture of fire support – a platoon of tracked 105mm howitzers on a Sherman tank chassis known as a Priest, 75mm guns mounted on half-tracks, and anti-tank guns. Johnson commanded an anti-tank platoon and was very relieved to be giving up the 37mm pea-shooters with which they’d fought through Tunisia and getting his hands instead on the new 57mm, a gun of greater velocity and far superior range that packed a considerably bigger punch – essentially a British 6-pounder in all but name. At last, Johnson and his men had realized, they would be able actually to disable a German tank. That was quite something.

They had been working hard that June, training for village infiltration, firing upon towed targets and conducting invasion exercises. At one such landing exercise, General Patton had turned up to watch. Many of the men in the Big Red One thought little of Patton; he was too spick and span, insisting on the wearing of ties at all times and on being clean-shaven. They also suspected he was a glory hunter – and that he wasn’t known as ‘Old Blood and Guts’ for nothing. Patton’s approach to the military – that it was his life’s mission and that appearances counted for everything – stood in sharp contrast to that of General Terry Allen and his Executive Officer, Brigadier-General Teddy Roosevelt, son and namesake of the former president, who were decidedly more laissez-faire over such matters. Allen’s and Roosevelt’s approach inevitably flowed downwards to the men. It also put Allen on a collision course with Patton, who had originally planned to leave the 1st Infantry Division out of the HUSKY order of battle. But the Big Red One was now comfortably his most experienced division in a force startlingly lacking in that most precious commodity. He needed them.

Johnson and his men had heard the sirens screaming before they’d seen Patton’s cavalcade arrive. Then suddenly there he was, stepping out and inspecting them as they were hastily brought to attention. Johnson couldn’t help but be impressed by the general’s appearance: shiny leather boots and spurs, pink breeches, silver buckled belt and shellacked and star-studded helmet. ‘After the aide signals that the inspection is over,’ noted Johnson, ‘we return to our work as someone mumbles.8 “Yeah, your guts and our blood.”’

The Tunisian campaign had ended on 13 May, when the German General Jürgen von Arnim had surrendered all German and Italian forces – two entire armies, amounting to more than 250,000 men – on the Cap Bon peninsula, the north-eastern tip of Tunisia. Later that day, the Allied ground forces commander, General Sir Harold Alexander, commander-in-chief of 18th Army Group, had signalled to the British prime minister. ‘Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over,’ he wrot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Dedication
• Picture Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• List of Maps
• Map Key
• Maps
• Principal Personalities
• Prologue: The Burning Blue
• Part I: Command of the Skies
• Part II: Invasion
• Part III: The Race to Catania
• Part IV: The Conquest of Sicily
• Postscript
• Images
• Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
• Appendix 1: Allied and Axis Forces
• Appendix 2: Number of Times Sicilian Towns and Cities Hit by Allied Bombers
• Timeline
• Notes
• Selected Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright