TOEHOLD IN EUROPE

THE ASSAULT ON ITALY

The defeat of the Axis in North Africa made possible the next stage of the strategy agreed at Casablanca, and reinforced by a meeting between Churchill, Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, Alexander and Ismay, Air Chief Marshal Tedder and Admiral Cunningham in Algeria in May 1943. At this meeting it was agreed that the first objective should be the securing of the Mediterranean sea lanes by the conquest of Sicily. If that went well, the next was to be the increase of pressure on Germany by an invasion of Italy, the elimination of Italy as a combatant, and the establishment of the first Allied permanent presence in mainland Europe since 1940.

Italy had suffered huge losses of men and equipment since her entry into Germany's war, and Mussolini had compounded those losses by his unnecessary and ill-conceived adventures in Albania, North Africa and, more recently, Russia. Of the 95 divisions that the Italians had had at, or had raised since, the start of the war, a third had been annihilated by death or capture, more than another third were distributed about the Axis Empire doing Hitler's bidding, and the remainder, nominally 30 divisions but in fact rather less, were available for the defence of the homeland. With a victorious, battle-hardened and ever better-equipped Allied army poised just across the Mediterranean, it was clear that that defence was about to be necessary.

The Italian Air Force and Navy were in no less difficulty. The Italian fleet had lost approaching half of its strength, and those vessels that remained, particularly the overworked destroyers and escort vessels, were becoming ill-maintained and unreliable. The air force lacked aircraft that were in any way a match for the latest Allied fighters and bombers, and was extremely vulnerable to losses in combat. To add to all these problems, all three services were desperately short of fuel, a situation which seemed likely only to become worse.

Recognising the inability of the Italian forces effectively to resist invasion, Mussolini appealed to Hitler for more assistance, particularly with aircraft and anti-aircraft defences. It was in some ways an unrealistic appeal, for already the Luftwaffe was in severe difficulties. Losses of aircraft and crews in Russia were mounting, the fuel shortage was every bit as desperate for the Germans as it was for the Italians, and the demands of Hitler's over-extended position in the Soviet Union were becoming greater every day. Nonetheless, Hitler and Kesselring had maintained considerable land forces in Italy, on the premise that they were better off defending Germany in Italy than defending Germany in Germany, and had allocated two German divisions - the 15th Panzergrenadier and the "Hermann Goering" Panzer Divisions - to the defence of Sicily, albeit with greatly reduced armament, and considerably under strength. They joined the Italian 6th Army under General Guzzoni, which had some 230,000 men and 1,500 guns, few motor vehicles, and quite impossibly large areas of Sicily to defend.

It was, however, by no means accepted in the Axis High Commands that Sicily would be the initial target. A substantial body of opinion that the first invasion would occur in Greece had been created by British Naval Intelligence, who had on 30th April 1943 planted in the sea to drift ashore in Spain the body of a man who had died of pneumonia (and therefore had fluid in his lungs not unlike that expected of someone who had drowned). Dressed in the uniform of a Royal Marines officer, the body, "Major Martin", carried letters from the Imperial General Staff to Generals Eisenhower and Alexander and to Admiral Cunningham, which referred to "the imminent landings in Greece". While treated with reserve, the ruse was taken seriously enough for immense efforts to be spent mining the waters around Greece, and for a Panzer Division to be diverted from France to Greece.

Nonetheless, both Hitler and Italy's Marshall Ambrosio were confident that the first landings would be in Sardinia, and were later certain that the Allies had failed to take full advantage of their position by invading Sicily. They believed that an invasion of Sardinia would have enabled the Allies to sever the Axis forces in the South from those in the North - and in fact feared just this eventuality as the Allied build-up to the landings continued.

For these and other reasons, Italy was not in a happy condition. Most of those who had formerly been close to Mussolini now believed not only that Italy had lost the war, but that Germany would never be able to win it. A powerful group led by Count Ciano and two other ministers, and by Marshals Badoglio and Caviglia, was pressing either for Mussolini to break with Hitler and sue for peace, or for the arrest of Mussolini so that others could end Italy's association with Germany.

Against this background, Eisenhower and Alexander planned "Operation Husky", with broadly the same command structure as had so recently been successful in Tunisia. The American 7th Army under General Patton was made up of II Corps, commanded by General Omar Bradley, and the autonomous 3rd Division under the command of the immensely tough General Truscott. Their role was to establish a beach-head in the Gulf of Gela, between Licata and Scoglitti, west of Sicily's southernmost tip, and then penetrate inland to the North. The British 8th Army under General Montgomery, consisting of XIII Corps under Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey and XXX Corps commanded by Lieutenant-General Oliver Leese had the task of taking the coastline to the East of that Southernmost point, between Pachino and Avola.

As an essential first step, the Allies began on June 1st a major bombing offensive against Italian targets, starting with a round the clock bombardment from the air of the island of Pantelleria, midway between Tunisia and Sicily. This tremendous air attack on the island, which brought down some 6,500 tons of bombs on the 12,000 defenders (and the 10,000 civilians they were supposed to be defending), culminated in a landing on June 11th, and surrender by the Italian commander Admiral Pavesi on June 12th. On the same day, a hapless Sergeant pilot in the Royal Air Force, Sergeant Cohen, earned his place in history by capturing an enemy garrison single-handed. He made a forced landing on Lampedusa, a small island off Sicily, and the Italian defenders, seeing the arrival of the dreaded Allies of whom they had heard so much, surrendered without enquiring the reason for his visit.

All through June, Allied aircraft attacked Italian airfields, Italian ships at anchor and military installations both in Sicily and throughout mainland Italy. By Dawn on 10th July, when the Allied invasion of Sicily began, the Axis air defences in the area had been virtually destroyed. Tedder's 4,000 aircraft found they had only 200 Italian and 320 German aircraft with which to contend. The invasion itself, planned by Admiral Ramsay, who had masterminded the evacuation of Dunkirk, went extremely well. For the first time, new LST (Landing Ship, Tank) and LCT (Landing Craft, Tank) vessels were used to put armour ashore with the first wave of infantry, and the invaders were rapidly established, capturing the coastline and driving inland. Eight divisions landed from a thousand ships along a front some 100 miles long. By evening on the 11th July, 80,000 troops and 8,000 vehicles were ashore, Montgomery's 8th Army had occupied the ports of Syracuse and Augusta without a shot being fired, the garrisons having taken themselves elsewhere, and the Hermann Goering Panzer division had been badly mauled by US Navy fire from the cruisers Boise and Savannah when they attempted to take the US 1st Division to task on the coast near Niscemi. This was probably the first occasion when sea power decided a tank battle.

Both the American and the British Armies were heading for Messina at the northern tip of Sicily, and nurtured hopes that they might get there before the German army, so preventing an evacuation of Axis troops to the mainland. Field Marshal Kesselring, one of whose considerable talents was a mastery of organisation, was too clever to allow that to happen. By a minor miracle of improvisation, Kesselring transported on to the island from mainland Italy two paratroop regiments and the 29th Panzergrenadier Division, and put General Hube of XIV Panzer Corps in command of all German fighting troops in Sicily. From that point onward, the standard of Axis resistance to the Allied advance on both sides of Mount Etna became very much tougher. Nonetheless, General Patton made the rapid progress that was soon to become his trademark. The 7th Army established contact with the British 8th Army on July 14th, and then, despite appallingly rough terrain in the West of Sicily, launched one division upon the major task of taking Palermo, in the North-West of the island, and two others under General Bradley on the problem of fighting directly northwards to the North coast. Incredibly, Patton arrived in Palermo, to the cheers of a mightily relieved populace, only a week later, on the 22nd July, having overcome the Italian "Assietta" Division on the way. From Palermo Eastward to Messina was not so easy.

Montgomery, meanwhile, had been having a difficult time on the Eastern plains of Sicily. Having captured Syracuse and Augusta by default, the 8th Army faced the problem of attacking across an open coastal plain towards the larger port of Catania, and of taking the town, before the entirely different problem of the assault through the foothills of Etna to Messina could be overcome. Montgomery encountered fierce resistance all the way to Catania, and was not able to take the town until August 5th. Before that, however, he had detached the 1st Canadian Division to attack to the West of Mount Etna (which displeased the US Army), and had hemmed in General Hube's forces ever closer to the North-East of the island.

Substantial Allied reinforcements were arriving via Palermo and Syracuse in the shape of the US 9th Division in the North-West, and the British 78th Division in the South-East, and the US and British forces now had an enormous numerical advantage over Hube's German defence force. A massive German withdrawal to the mainland began, and on 17th August, shortly after Hube had left on the final assault craft for Calabria, Patton arrived in Messina, a few hours ahead of the furious Montgomery, who had in his own view reserved the right to take the key northern city.

The Allies now found that they had captured 132,000 prisoners, 260 tanks and 520 guns. Approximately 8,600 German and Italian troops have known graves on Sicily, and almost 8,400 Allied soldiers were killed or posted missing, with nearly 14,500 wounded.

Italy's Turning Point While these events had been taking place in Sicily, the politics of the Axis had been reaching crisis point in Italy. The King, under pressure to remove Mussolini, in fact sought to remove the entire Fascist party from power. The Fascists, at a meeting in Feltre with Hitler and Keitel, had sought far greater military support from the Germans, which, to some extent, Hitler said he was prepared to give, on condition that Mussolini mobilised Italy's manhood to greater effort and restored flagging Italian morale. Mussolini, urged by Ambrosio and his colleagues to break with Hitler and broadcast to the Allies for terms of surrender, could not bring himself to accept defeat, and to believe that Hitler's boasts of new reprisal weapons capable of destroying London by the Autumn were exaggerated. The meeting broke up inconclusively, with Mussolini still relying upon his faith in Hitler, and the Fascist ministers and High Command fuming.

A Fascist Grand Council on July 24th, called by Mussolini to discuss the situation, became the scene of a plot to oust the Duce. A motion put by Count Grandi, by which the Council required Mussolini to hand over authority over the Italian armed forces to the King, was carried by a large majority. The motion also authorised the monarch to remove Mussolini from power. At 5pm on the 25th, the King informed Mussolini that he was accepting his (unsubmitted) resignation, and that Marshal Badoglio was to be appointed Head of the Government in his place. Mussolini was driven ignominiously in an ambulance to a military police barracks, and the Fascist conspirators were denied all complicity in the new government. Count Ciano left for Germany lured by an invitation to a non-existent meeting, a trap which was ultimately to cost him his life.

Badoglio issued as his first act a proclamation that "the war goes on". But Hitler was not enthusiastic about the intentions of the new Italian government, and decided to take action to ensure that Italy was not snatched from the Germans' grasp by a defection to the Allies. Field Marshal Rommel was given command of "Operation Alarich", and instructions to move Army Group B to Bologna by mid-August. By the time the Allies' conquest of Sicily was complete, eight divisions of crack German troops including the 24th Panzer Division and the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Waffen SS 1st Panzer Division were in position North of the Appenines. Kesselring, still the supreme commander in the field in the Mediterranean theatre, was reinforced with the 2nd Parachute Division.

On August 15th, General Jodl and Field Marshal Rommel met General Roatta, the Italian Army Chief of Staff in Bologna, and attempted to assure themselves that the Italian Government was not in the process of seeking an armistice with the Allies. Three days previously, Generals Castellano and Montenari had secretly met Eisenhower's Chief of Staff in Lisbon and had discussed the text of an armistice, but the Italians succeeded in lying their way out of their meetings with the Germans. On August 27th, the Generals returned to Rome with secret radio equipment capable of contacting the Allies, and with the text of the surrender. After extensive and intensive negotiations by which the Italians sought to gain the maximum protection from German reprisals against the Italian population and cities, the armistice was signed at 5.15pm on September 3rd. On the 8th, the Armistice was announced by Badoglio to the Italian people.

The German reaction was immediate, devastating and brutal. Whole divisions of Italian troops serving alongside those of Germany in Italy were taken prisoner and given scant comfort as prisoners of war. In the small hours of September 9th, the morning after the announcement of the armistice, a convoy of Italian warships heading for Malta to surrender was bombed by the Germans, and the battleship Roma was sunk with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. Away from the Mediterranean theatre, the Italian troops fared no better. In the Balkans, 29 divisions were attacked and surprised by the German army and disarmed. Two divisions (the "Acqui" and the "Bergamo") that put up a fight were besieged into surrender - and then thousands of soldiers were murdered after they had capitulated. Those that escaped joined the partisans and fought Germany from the hills.

Mussolini was sent to a remote residence in the Gran Sasso , high in the mountains. Hitler, determined to hold the brotherhood of fascist dictatorship high, sent a daring commando unit under Otto Skorzeny to rescue him from his captors. They succeeded brilliantly, landing in the mountains with several light aircraft, and bearing him back to a Hitler who felt that honour had thus been satisfied. Under pressure from the Fuehrer, Mussolini proclaimed on September 18th the "Italian Social Republic", but it was an empty gesture recognised only by the puppet Axis governments and Japan.

On 12th September, as confusion continued to reign in the former Axis, the Free French embarked on the liberation of Corsica, and by October 4th the Allies had gained an additional valuable base by Italy's side door. Despite tremendous efforts by the French and Moroccan troops of the invasion force, the Germans kept their escape route open, and were able to evacuate 28,000 valuable battle-trained troops to the mainland.

Salerno - the Allied Success that Almost Wasn't

Having taken Sicily and achieved a considerable victory, and then secured the capitulation of the Italian state, the Allied High Command planned hastily - perhaps too hastily - to capitalise on the advantage thus created by establishing a presence on the Italian mainland.

The plan for the Salerno invasion was a two-part exercise. A Corps of the British 8th Army was first to launch an attack across the Straits of Messina with the objective of drawing the German army into battle. This, it was hoped, would divert attention away from the major landing - the second phase, which was to bring the US 5th Army commanded by General Mark Clark ashore in the Gulf of Salerno. When the British force - XIII Corps under General Dempsey - made its landing on September 3rd, the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of Hitler's war, it met very little resistance. Kesselring, expecting a diversionary attack before a main landing (which he thought would be further North, near Rome), had instructed the German 76th Panzer Corps not to become involved in battle unless it was unavoidable. Dempsey was able to advance some miles inland and await developments, a situation for which the Allied plan of attack did not provide. Ready withdrawal to strong defensive positions in the MacArthur mould was not expected of the German army.

"Operation Avalanche" began in earnest on September 9th, when the US VI Corps and the British X Corps landed in the Gulf of Salerno between Paestum and Maiori along a front of 25 miles. Initially, the invasion went well, and by the end of the first day the US 36th Division had made five miles progress inland, and the British X Corps, although held up in and around Salerno, was established, and seemed likely not to be thrown back into the sea. But Kesselring had a surprise in store. For a start, Hitler had long regarded Salerno as potentially important, and had allocated the crack 16th Panzer Division to its defence. Secondly, having captured Rome following the Italian government's armistice with the Allies. Kesselring was able to divert from the area around the capital the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division, and by September 12th General von Vietinghoff's 10th Army was able to field four and a half divisions against the Allies' three. Over the next three days, the situation was touch and go. The Germans almost succeeded in surrounding the American 45th Division, which had advanced farther than the British 56th that should have been alongside it, and only desperate measures by the stubborn and determined General Mark Clark saved the day at the Battle of Ponte Bruciato. The story has it that Clark armed as infantry two artillery battalions, the regimental band, all the HQ orderlies and the cooks. In any event, the effort succeeded in stopping the German advance some five miles from the beach-head, where the tactic of using naval gunfire in support of the land army, so effective in Sicily, was used again with considerable success.

Now General Alexander called Montgomery's 8th Army in to attack the German forces from the side. Montgomery's 5th Division reached Agropoli on September 16th, just as the US 5th Army, at terrible expense of life, was beating back the attack. Later that day, faced with the additional strength of Montgomery's troops in a battle that was already lost, Kesselring pulled back the 10th Army, and admitted that the Allies had won the Battle of Salerno. Speedily, the British army occupied the important Italian ports of Brindisi and Taranto.

It is arguable that the Germans would not have lost the battle for Salerno had Rommel and Kesselring not been in violent disagreement on the strategy for the defence of Italy. Rommel thought Germany should abandon Rome and pull back to the North. Kesselring, in theory the senior commander, resolved to defend the German Southern positions, but could not, because of Hitler's ambiguous orders and duplicated command structure, pull enough weight to force Rommel to release his best Panzer troops for the battle in the South.

Now began the arduous and extremely wet advance up the southern part of Italy to Rome, during which the heavy armour of the British and American troops, unable to leave the roads because of the sea of mud on either side, became vulnerable and slow. At Termoli in early October, at Sangro at the end of November, at Monte Cassino - again and again General von Vietinghoff turned the bad weather and the confusion it caused to the maximum advantage, turning and making a determined, even heroic stand at every opportunity. It was clear that neither Kesselring nor his commanders had any intention of giving up Italy lightly - and that Hitler was firmly behind this policy was made clear by the recall of Rommel on November 21st. Kesselring was now in total charge in Italy.

How Kesselring tackled the subsequent stages of the Battle for Italy will be discussed in a later chapter. At this point this narrative must return to the war at sea.