All Hell Let Loose (73 page)

At Primosole, two battalions of the Durham Light Infantry suffered five hundred casualties. Tank–infantry coordination was poor, and two German 88mm guns destroyed a succession of Shermans advancing across open ground. Some of the attackers afterwards described the fighting as among the bloodiest of their war. Yet the Germans held the ground with an improvised battlegroup, chiefly composed of engineers and signallers rather than infantrymen. It remains a mystery why Montgomery, confronted with strong resistance, did not outflank the defenders by sending troops by sea to Catania. The Primosole bridge was eventually overrun, but the advance had been seriously delayed.

Alexander tasked the Americans merely to protect the British flank. In consequence, they were denied an opportunity to push north across the island, with the possibility of trapping a panzer division which was withdrawing eastward. Patton, losing patience with his restricted role, sent a corps racing for Palermo in the north-west. He reached the city on 22 July, taking many Italian prisoners, but his thrust baffled Kesselring, because it was strategically futile. Alexander’s acquiescence in this American dash in the opposite direction from the German main forces reflected his usual lack of grip. It was obvious to every thoughtful officer that the campaign would be decided in eastern, not western Sicily. But as Allied soldiers picked their wandering paths across the island, only their opponents displayed clarity of purpose.

The Germans were hampered, however, by shortages of ammunition and supplies, and by the abject performance of their allies. Gen. Conrath wrote bitterly: ‘The Italians virtually never gave battle and presumably will not fight on the mainland either. Many units in Sicily, either led by their officers or on their own, marched off without firing a single shot … 90 per cent of the Italian army are cowards and do not want to fight.’ The readiness of Italian soldiers to abandon the struggle availed their nation little: in Sicily its long agony began. As town after town became a battlefield, battered by bombs and shells, Mussolini’s war-weary subjects suffered terribly. Troina, west of Mount Etna, became the focus of days of fierce fighting. A correspondent described the scene in the town after its eventual capture by the Americans: ‘A ghostly old woman lying amid crumbling plaster and shattered timber … stretched out her hands to us, stared out of sightless eyes, and moaned like the wind whining through pine trees. We went on to the church. Light was shining through a hole in the roof. Below it an unexploded 500lb bomb lay on the floor. Some American soldier breathed heavily in my ear: “God, that was a miracle” … In the mayor’s office we found a few of the living wounded that our soldiers had pulled out of the wreckage. On a wooden bench lay the thin form of a girl about ten years old. Her black hair was streaked with gray powder plaster. One of her legs was completely wrapped in bandages … In her two hands she clutched a cracker which a soldier had given her. She didn’t move but only stared at the ceiling.’

On 25 July in Rome, King Victor Emmanuel and Marshal Pietro Badoglio contrived the arrest of Mussolini. Europe’s first fascist leader scarcely protested at his own downfall. His spirit was broken, he was resigned to defeat and seemed chiefly concerned to save his skin. The ex-Duce spent the ensuing weeks of captivity, first on offshore islands then at a ski resort in the Apennines, eating prodigious quantities of grapes, reading a life of Christ and attending mass for the first time since childhood. It is doubtful that he much relished ‘rescue’ by Otto Skorzeny’s Nazi commandos on 12 September. Though restored to puppet power in northern Italy, he knew that his game was played out. So did Hitler, who for months had been casting about for an alternative leader of Italy’s fascists; he restored Mussolini only because he could identify no substitute.

The Duce’s fall precipitated a moment of exhilaration among the Allies and their sympathisers around the world. Many people found wartime life endurable only because they were sustained by spasmodic injections of hope. Amid local victories or reports of regime change, they experienced pathetic surges of excitement or relief. Victor Klemperer, the Dresden Jewish diarist who clung to a precarious liberty, noted many landmark occasions when he supposed Germany’s defeat imminent. On 27 July 1943, he exulted at Mussolini’s fate: ‘The end is now in sight – perhaps another six to eight weeks! We put our money on a military dictatorship [in Germany].’ A fellow Jew shared his euphoria, saying of his workplace, ‘We don’t really need to turn up in the morning now,’ and speculating about whether Hitler would survive another month. Such moments of fevered and misplaced optimism sufficed to carry people on both sides of the conflict just a little further through their sorrows and privations, staving off despair.

The political upheaval in Rome persuaded Hitler that Sicily must be evacuated. The Germans retreated eastwards in good order, fighting a succession of delaying actions. Tank gunner Erich Dressler, appalled by the wreck of his own unit and the inferiority of the defenders’ resources, was baffled by Allied dilatoriness: ‘With more grit the tommies could have finished the whole lot of us … I thought, it is all over. But for some reason or other they suddenly stopped.’ On the night of 11 August, the Germans began to ferry their forces across the Straits of Messina, more than two miles wide, to the Italian mainland. Although Ultra flagged the enemy’s intention, neither the Allied air forces nor the Royal Navy intervened effectively to prevent the Axis from withdrawing 40,000 German and 62,000 Italian soldiers together with most of their tanks, vehicles and supplies. This was a shocking failure. A German naval officer, Baron Gustav von Liebenstein, masterminded an evacuation which some described as a miniature Dunkirk: arguably, indeed, it was more successful, because all three German divisions reached the mainland in full fighting order. The Americans entered the port of Messina late on 16 August, just ahead of the British. The German commander, Gen. Hans Hube, completed his withdrawal from the island the following morning.

The Sicilian campaign taught the Anglo-Americans painful lessons. Amphibious and related air operations were poorly planned and clumsily managed. Coordination between air and ground forces was lacking. If Italian troops had fought with the same determination as the Germans, the invaders would have been pushed back into the sea. The Americans were dismayed by Alexander’s lack of grip, contemptuous of Montgomery’s sluggishness, irked by their ally’s apparent desire to relegate them to a subordinate role. The British, in their turn, were exasperated by the reluctance of American commanders, especially Patton, to conform to agreed plans. Each partner criticised the combat performance of the other’s troops. Both found it hard to overcome defenders holding high ground dominating the island’s few roads. The Germans executed masterly ambushes and demolitions, a foretaste of their tactics up the length of Italy during the next two years. The invaders failed to exploit sea power to outflank resistance, and merely conducted a succession of slogging matches.

Fifty thousand Germans had held half a million Allied soldiers at bay for five weeks. The invaders made much of the perils posed by Tiger tanks, nebelwerfer mortars, ‘spandau’ machine-gun and artillery fire; the difficulties of attacking in steep terrain; the heat; malaria and combat-fatigue losses. But it was plain that, though overwhelming Allied superiority eventually prevailed, the Wehrmacht’s soldiers had fought more convincingly than their Anglo-American counterparts. Again and again Allied forces failed – as they would again fail in north-west Europe – to translate captures of ground into destruction of enemy forces. The Germans were so baffled by their own escape, and by Allied failure to launch an amphibious operation into Calabria to cut them off, that some cherished a fantastic theory that Alexander had acquiesced in their withdrawal for political reasons.

The Sicilian campaign represented the only significant summer 1943 land operation against the Germans by the United States and Britain, engaging eight Allied divisions and costing 6,000 dead. During the same season, four million men were locked in combat around Kursk and Oryol, where half a million Russians perished. Some German civilians, desperate for an end of the war, lamented the slowness of Western Allied progress. Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote on 14 August: ‘We hoped and hoped that things would move even faster.’ There are explanations for the modest Western Allied ground commitment in 1943, but it is easy to see why the Russians regarded it with such contempt. So too did some participants. Lt. Col. Lionel Wigram, one of the British Army’s most energetic and imaginative officers, submitted a report analysing failures he had observed at first hand. He criticised set-piece frontal attacks, overdependence on artillery, refusal to exploit infiltration to work behind defenders in close country. He urged that every battalion should be relieved of some twenty-odd of its soldiers who invariably ran away in action. He concluded: ‘The Germans have undoubtedly in one way scored a decided success in SICILY. They have been able to evacuate their forces almost intact having suffered very few casualties … They have inflicted heavy casualties on us. We all feel rather irritated as a result.’ This recklessly frank assessment reached Montgomery’s ears: his vanity pricked, he sacked Wigram from command of his battalion. No heed was taken of the colonel’s just strictures.

Apologists for the British and American armies assert that respect for the German defence of Sicily, like many other Axis battlefield achievements, cannot mask its ultimate failure. Kesselring’s forces were evicted from the island. They lost. This is true, and important. It is among the themes of this book that the Wehrmacht fought many battles brilliantly well, but that Germany made war very badly. Nonetheless, repeated Anglo-American failures to destroy Hitler’s armies, despite successes in displacing them from occupied territory, meant that the Red Army remained until 1945, as it had been since 1941, the main engine of Nazism’s destruction.

2
THE ROAD TO ROME

The Allied assault on the Italian mainland began on 3 September, when Canadians of Eighth Army landed in Calabria without meeting resistance; Kesselring, commanding the German defence, had decided to fight his first battle further north. Five days later, on 8 September, as Allied leaders assembled for a summit in Quebec, Marshal Badoglio’s government in Rome announced Italy’s surrender, prompting renewed optimism about a swift advance up the peninsula. On the 9th, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed at Salerno. This proved one of the critical actions of the western war, but not in the fashion the invaders anticipated. Col. Bill Darby’s US Rangers achieved initial success on the extreme left of the Allied line, clearing the Amalfi coast resort villages and securing the Chiunzi pass, with its distant view of Naples. But elsewhere the Germans deployed rapidly to meet the invaders, and launched a series of smashing counter-attacks. Clark’s one American and one British corps found themselves penned in four small beachheads, under intense fire.

On the 13th, Kesselring’s forces drove a wedge between US and British elements which brought his panzers within a mile of the sea. The amphibious armada offshore suffered heavy attacks by the Luftwaffe, employing new radio-controlled glider bombs. Clark panicked and proposed re-embarking the army. Though Eisenhower and Alexander overruled him, for hours chaos dominated the beachhead, especially after darkness fell. ‘In the belief that our position had been infiltrated by German infantry, [American troops] began to shoot each other,’ wrote a British eyewitness, ‘and there were blood-chilling screams from men hit by the bullets. We crouched in our slit trench under the pink, fluttering leaves of the olives, and watched the fires come closer, and the night slowly passed … Official history will in due course set to work to dress up this part of the action at Salerno with what dignity it can. What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos.’

Lt. Michael Howard of the Coldstream Guards wrote: ‘Shells whined swiftly over us like lost souls. Moan, moan, moan they wept.’ Some British as well as American units behaved deplorably: the Scots Guards official history acknowledged ‘a general feeling in the air of another Dunkirk’. Only an intense naval bombardment, pounding the German front, averted disaster. ‘For God’s sake, Mike,’ said Eisenhower to US VI Corps commander Maj. Gen. Mike Dawley a few hours before Dawley was relieved and sent home as a colonel, ‘how did you manage to get your troops so fucked up?’ Lt. Peter Moore of the Leicestershire Regiment wrote:

After days of heavy fighting, Kesselring’s counterattack was beaten off. ‘In the first grey hints of light, we buried the German dead,’ wrote Michael Howard. ‘These were the first corpses I had handled: shrunken pathetic dolls lying stiff and twisted, with glazed blue eyes. Not one could have been over 20, and some were little more than children. With horrible carelessness we shovelled them into their own trenches and piled on the earth. The scene remains etched in my mind: the hunched, urgent diggers, the sprawling corpses with their dead eyes in a cold dawn light that drained all colour from the scene, leaving only mournful blacks and greys. When we had finished, we stuck their rifles and bayonets above the graves and scuttled quickly back under cover. It was a scene worthy of Goya.’