The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
“Some confusion and lack of control,” the 50th Division acknowledged off Avola. “Many craft were temporarily lost and circled their parent ship more than once…. It was exceedingly dark. Most naval officers were uncertain as to their whereabouts.” Transports unwittingly anchored twelve miles off the coast rather than the expected seven, confounding runs to the beach and putting shore parties beyond radio range. Some landings “were in no way carried out to plan,” a British intelligence report noted. “Army officers had to take a hand in navigation, and had they not done so, many craft would have beached still further from the correct places.” A Canadian captain was more direct. “Get on, you silly bastards!” he roared at his men. “Get on with it!”
Landing craft ground ashore in the early light. Voices sang out: “Down door!” Then: “Sicily, everybody out!” Fire from shore batteries proved modest, except of course for those it actually struck. “The water had become a sea of blood and limbs, remains of once grand fighting men who would never be identified,” wrote Able Seaman K. G. Oakley, who saw a landing craft shattered in the 50th Division sector. From the surf Oakley pulled “a man whose arm was hanging on by a few bits of cloth and flesh. He cried, ‘My arm! Look, it’s hit me.’” Like tens of thousands of others on that Saturday morning, Oakley reflected, “So this is war.”
Ashore they swarmed, scrambling through the dunes and across the coastal highway. A Scots regiment entered Cassibile skirling, in defiance of orders that bagpipes remain on the ships. A pungent smell briefly triggered gas alarms and fumbling for masks, until more sophisticated noses realized that the odor came from wild thyme churned by bombs. While some troops built makeshift jetties with stones salvaged from a beachfront vineyard, others darted between doorways, shouting the Eighth Army challenge—“Desert Rats!”—and listening for the proper parole: “Kill Italians.” A Sicilian peasant charged from his house and fired an ancient shotgun at approaching Commandos, who killed him with return fire. “Sorry we had to shoot that farmer,” a British soldier remarked. “He had the right spirit.”
Eighth Army had prepared for up to ten thousand casualties during the first week of combat on Sicily; in the event, they would sustain only 1,517. But even those who escaped without so much as a sunburn shared a Royal Engineer corporal’s view:
We had learned our first lesson, mainly that fate, not the Germans or Italians, was our undiscriminating enemy. With the same callousness as Army orders, without fairness or judgement, “You and you—dead. The rest of you, on the truck.”
More than a third of Eighth Army’s casualties were sustained in one misadventure, code-named LADBROOKE, which was intended to complement Colonel Gavin’s jump but which bore the signature traits of so many airborne operations in the Second World War: poor judgment, dauntless valor, and a nonchalant disregard for men’s lives. LADBROOKE had a coherent purpose: 1,700 soldiers were to capture the Ponte Grande, a graceful highway bridge that arched above the river Anapo just south of Syracuse. After preventing demolition of the span, troops would push into the city, capture the docks, and give Eighth Army a vital port. Under General Montgomery’s plan, the assault was to be made late Friday night by 144 gliders.
There was the rub: the only pilots available to fly the tow planes had little experience at night navigation and even less at towing a seven-ton glider full of infantrymen on the end of a 350-foot nylon rope. Skilled glider crews were also in short supply, as were the gliders themselves. So rudimentary was the art of combat gliding that jeeps had been tried—unsuccessfully—to tow gliders into the air that spring. Not least, the landing zones near the Ponte Grande appeared to be seamed with stone walls and stippled with rocks. Protests by subordinate officers proved unavailing. Once made, the daring plan could not be unmade; naysayers risked the appearance of timidity and the threat of removal from command. Again, senior officers with little airborne experience and unrealistic expectations held sway.
Several dozen Horsa gliders arrived in Tunisia in late June after a harrowing 1,400-mile tow from England. The wood-frame craft had “huge flaps, like barn doors.” To supplement the Horsas, the Americans donated a fleet of smaller, metal-framed Wacos; each arrived in North Africa in five crates and required 250 man-hours to assemble. British airmen believed that every pilot needed at least 100 hours of flight training on the Waco for proficiency; in the event, they averaged less than 5 hours in the cockpit, including a single hour of night flying. Many had barely qualified for solo flights. Of 150 gliders used in training, more than half were destroyed, even though novices flew almost exclusively in daylight and a dead calm. Most of the tugs would be U.S. C-47 Dakotas, but not until mid-May were the tug pilots released from their duties flying freight in order to train with the gliders.
Pilots and passengers were doomed, of course. From six Tunisian airfields on that windswept Friday night, the gliders soared into the air, towed by 109 American Dakotas and 35 British Albemarles. Confronting “conditions for which we were completely unprepared,” as the glider force commander conceded, they headed for Malta at five hundred feet, fighting the gale, as well as lingering turbulence from the day’s thermal currents and the tow rope’s nauseating tendency to act as a pendulum. Many inexperienced navigators quickly grew confused; some had the wrong charts or none at all. Strain on the tow ropes snapped the communication wires between many tugs and gliders. A Horsa’s tow line parted north of Malta, and thirty men plummeted to their deaths; when a Waco’s line also broke, fifteen more followed. One glider cast off from its tug and landed smartly, only to have a soldier pull up in a jeep and announce, “We are sorry to inform you that you are not in Sicily, but on the main airstrip at Malta.” Another glider team, surprised to find Sicily so sandy, discovered that they had landed near Mareth, in southern Tunisia. Investigators later concluded: “Navigation generally was bad.”
Ninety percent of the aircraft made the Sicilian landfall at Cape Passero, to be greeted moments later along the Gulf of Noto by flak, flares, searchlights, and dust clouds, which rattled the pilots and obscured their vision. “I guess that’s Sicily,” said one squinting captain. Formations disintegrated, and soon tugs and gliders were “milling in a blind swarm.” Some tug pilots, shying from antiaircraft fire that seemed closer than it actually was, released their gliders too early. Plans called for all gliders to be cut free within two miles off the coast, but an optical illusion, magnified by the pilots’ inexperience, made the shoreline appear to be directly below when the planes were thousands of yards out to sea. From altitudes of 2,000 to 4,000 feet, the scattered Horsas and Wacos cast off along a thirty-mile front and immediately found that gliding west into a thirty-knot wind was “unsound,” as one account concluded.
“As we lost height it seemed as if a great wall of blackness was rising up to meet us,” an officer wrote. For many, that blackness was the Mediterranean. A cry went up: “Prepare for ditching!” Dozens of gliders careered across the water like skipping stones. Some splintered and sank quickly; others would float for hours. Frantic passengers kicked at the fabric walls or hacked away with hatchets. “We went under almost instantly,” Flight Officer Ruby H. Dees recalled. “When I reached the surface the rest of the fellows were hanging on the wreckage.” An officer clinging to another fractured wing murmured to a British major, “All is not well, Bill.” At least sixty gliders crashed into the sea, and ten more vanished—somewhere—with all hands lost. Men flailed and struggled and then struggled no more. In some instances Italian machine-gun fire raked survivors clinging to the flotsam.
Fifty-four gliders made land, often with equally fatal results. “Heavy tracer, left wing hit, flew over landing zone and landed sixteen miles southwest of Syracuse, hitting a six-foot wall,” a survivor reported. “Left wing burning, also seventy-seven grenades ignited inside glider. Two pilots and twelve other ranks killed, seven wounded.” Horsa number 132—among the dozen gliders that found the Ponte Grande—crashed into a canal bank four hundred yards from the bridge, killing all aboard but
Rather than five hundred or more British soldiers holding Ponte Grande, a mere platoon seized the bridge, ripping out demolition charges from the abutments. By Saturday dawn the force had grown to eighty-seven, with only two Bren machine guns among them, and little ammunition. Italian mortar fire and infantry counterattacks whittled the little band, killing troops on the span and in the muddy river below. By midafternoon the bridgehead was held by just fifteen unwounded Tommies, and Italian machine-gunners had closed to forty yards. At four P.M. the survivors surrendered. They were marched away toward Syracuse by “a pompous little man with a coil of hangman’s rope around his shoulders,” only to be promptly freed by a Northamptonshire patrol that had landed with the 5th Division. At the same time, Royal Scots Fusiliers bulled through from the south and easily recaptured the bridge.
The British high command would proclaim LADBROOKE a success because the Ponte Grande had been spared. But rarely has a victory been more pyrrhic. Casualties exceeded six hundred, of whom more than half drowned. Bodies would wash ashore on various Mediterranean beaches for weeks. If the courage of those flying to Sicily that night is unquestionable, the same cannot be said for the judgment of their superiors in concocting and approving such a witless plan. Anger and sorrow seeped through the ranks; British fury at American tow pilots grew so toxic that surviving Tommies who arrived back in Tunisia were confined to camp to forestall a fraternal bloodletting. A memo to George Marshall concluded, “The combat efficiency for night glider operations was practically zero.” But the most trenchant summary of LADBROOKE appeared in a British Army assessment: “Alarm, confusion and dismay.”
The Loss of Irrecoverable Hours
IF much had gone wrong for the Allies during HUSKY’s first twelve hours, almost nothing had gone right for the Axis defenders. Miscalculation and mischance, those handmaidens of military misfortune, dominated the initial response to the invasion and “irrecoverable hours were thus lost,” as a German commander later acknowledged. The Anglo-Americans had a toehold, which soon became a foothold, and dislodging them from the island became more difficult with the arrival of every DUKW and LST. Among the alarums sounded that Saturday, in fact, was a report by an incredulous Italian officer of “amphibious contrivances” capable of beaching and then advancing inland “under their own power.”
For weeks, Axis reconnaissance had deflected hints of invasion, including the presence of half a dozen hospital ships at Gibraltar on July 1—Italian pilots eventually counted sixteen in the Mediterranean—and the massing of landing craft and gliders in Tunisia. Yet Allied deception efforts for months had kept Axis intelligence off balance and befuddled. The British, for example, had created a fictional “Twelfth Army,” supposedly based in Cairo, with the notional mission of invading the Balkans through Greece in the early summer of 1943. Particularly successful was Operation MINCEMEAT, which featured a corpse later celebrated as “the man who never was.” A British submarine had dumped the body, dressed as a major of the Royal Marines, off the southern coast of Spain in late April. Manacled to the dead man’s wrist was a briefcase containing forged documents; these, it was hoped, the Spanish authorities would share with the Germans. The Spanish duly obliged. Subsequent Ultra intercepts revealed that German intelligence, convinced that the “major” had drowned in a plane crash, considered the documents further evidence that the main Allied blow would fall on Sardinia and Greece rather than Sicily.
Six immobile and badly armed Italian coastal divisions now guarded the Sicilian shore, backed by four Italian infantry divisions positioned inland with two capable German units: the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division in western Sicily, and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division in the east. The first unequivocal alert had been issued on Sicily at 6:40 on Friday evening, July 9. Allied bombs had shattered the rudimentary Sicilian telephone system, so some units got the word but others did not. A few Italian commanders, presuming that no fool would attack in such foul weather, went to bed. Exhortations at one A.M. Saturday to defend “this most precious piece of Italian soil” fell on deaf or sleeping ears. British Spitfires, using signals intelligence to pinpoint the German Luftwaffe headquarters, shot up the San Domenico Palace—a grand hotel in Taormina, once favored by D. H. Lawrence—and unhinged the Axis air defenses just as invaders approached the island.
Little was expected from the Sicilian coastal divisions, and that expectation was fully met. Training had recently been reduced because of footwear shortages, and Italian coastal artillery was limited to the pea-shooter range of nine thousand yards, further impaired by morning glare that blinded defenders facing south and east. The Syracuse garrison commander was killed in the invasion’s first minutes, and his skittish counterpart in Augusta spiked his guns without a fight. Italian foot soldiers surrendered by the thousands, or peeled off their uniforms and melted into the refugee hordes streaming inland.
The German response in those first irrecoverable hours, if less timid, was hardly impressive. Sicilian communications were so crude that the commander of the Hermann Göring Division first learned that he was under attack in a radio alert from Frascati, the German headquarters near Rome. Orders to subordinate commanders proved tardy or contradictory. The repositioning of one regiment was delayed when a courier carrying the movement orders died in a car wreck. Efforts to fling seventeen big Tiger tanks into the fight near Gela on Saturday were beset by mechanical breakdowns, poor leadership, naval gunfire, and the difficulty of picking a path through the olive groves. Fantasy prevailed over hard fact: Comando Supremo, the Italian high command in Rome, announced at noon on July 10 that the Gela and Licata landings were “almost cleaned up”; some Anglo-American troops were even said to have reembarked in their amphibious contrivances. A subsequent dispatch from Rome asserted that “the enemy is still actively landing but he is constantly in crisis.”
Such fairy tales did not deceive the man who would ultimately direct the defense of Sicily. For now he remained at his Frascati headquarters, sifting through the fragmentary reports, rumors, and mendacities arriving from the island. But his tactical influence could already be felt on the young campaign, as well as his unquenchable optimism and a gift for battlefield improvisation. The Allies knew Field Marshal Albert Kesselring all too well. As the senior German commander in the Mediterranean—in effect, Eisenhower’s counterpart—Kesselring had thwarted a quick Allied victory in Tunisia, fought the Anglo-Americans to a bloody draw for months, then dodged both capture and recrimination when Hitler’s no-retreat decree consigned Axis forces in Africa to destruction. Ostensibly, he served under Italian authority, as a sop to the Pact of Steel signed in 1939, and to Mussolini’s proprietary claim on the Mediterranean; in reality, he answered to Berlin and had few equals in any army. Kesselring was loyal to Hitler as “Germany’s savior from chaos,” and he had long found it “possible to ignore the less pleasing things” in the Nazi regime. Hitler repaid the loyalty with a field marshal’s baton, which an aide carried in a zippered leather case.
Now fifty-seven, he had a face full of flashing teeth, which expressed both his Bavarian bonhomie and the nickname—“Smiling Albert”—coined by his soldiers. “Kesselring is a colossal optimist,” Hitler had said on May 20, “and we must take care that this optimism does not blind him.” An artilleryman who in midcareer had learned to fly and transferred to the Luftwaffe, he had a knack for the narrow escape, demonstrated most recently during an Allied bombing raid on Marsala in May that killed two staff officers; Kesselring fled the upper floor of a shattered building by rappeling down a rope to the street, badly skinning his palms.
For six months he had pondered how to defend southern Europe, and for six weeks he had believed that the next Allied blow would likely fall on Sicily. Kesselring’s overarching strategic concept involved keeping the war as far from the Fatherland as possible for as long as possible; as an airman, he had a vivid understanding of
Kesselring in late spring had dismissed Sicilian defenses as “pretty sugar pastry,” but reports on July 10 that entire Italian divisions were evaporating disheartened even the “colossal optimist.” If Allied forces also landed in Calabria, on the toe of the Italian boot, Sicily could become a “mousetrap,” with the result that another Axis army would be annihilated. To forestall this calamity, Kesselring realized, German forces on the island must strike before Allied troops consolidated their beachheads. The 15th Panzer Grenadier Division was too far west to attack quickly, because the field marshal, against Italian advice, had just shifted the grenadiers across 155 miles of bad roads to meet landings in western Sicily that now seemed unlikely. That left the Hermann Göring panzers to take the fight to the enemy. Badly mauled in Tunisia, the division had been hurriedly rebuilt and now mustered nine thousand combat troops with ninety Mk III and Mk IV tanks, in addition to the seventeen Mk VI Tigers.
From Frascati, Kesselring dictated an order to the division commander, General Paul Conrath: counterattack Gela at first light on Sunday, July 11, and drive the invaders into the sea. “Herr Feldmarschall,” Conrath had told Kesselring, “immediate advance on the enemy is my strength!”