Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (39 page)

The small Dieppe Raid and the large North African invasions each had the same array of practical and overlapping issues: the length of the landing zones and how far apart from one another should they be; the timing and length of the naval bombardment; the management of the actual touchdown on the beaches; preparations for topographic and enemy-made obstacles. The questions were endless. When did naval control cease and army commanders take over? How did one manage stage two, when one might be pushing further forces ashore while pulling casualties and empty fuel trucks back to the ships? How did one neutralize aerial counterattacks? Yet every question was serious and had to be addressed.

The experiences from these two operations were also the only recent ones Allied military strategists and other officials could draw upon from the European/Mediterranean theater when Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca and demanded amphibious results in the year ahead. A thoughtful planner might have put it to the two great men, and to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, this way: “Sirs, we have some evidence of the problems ahead simply from a small-scale raid on the coast of France that was bashed apart by the German defenses. And we
have additional evidence from our much larger and successful invasion of North Africa of the challenges of putting major armies onshore, despite distance, the tides, the storms, and the many logistical and communications problems. We do not know what will happen when we combine those two things: (1) we land a lot of troops on a hostile shore, whatever the weather, and (2) that shore is occupied, and easily reinforced, by a large number of extraordinarily tough German divisions. Not Italians, not Vichy French, but Germans who are exceptionally able defensive fighters. We have no way of calculating what will happen then.”

There is no record that anything like that was said aloud. If it had been, it would not have stopped the political leadership from issuing the Casablanca directives. It certainly would not have halted Roosevelt, so enigmatic and aloof about all specific policies and methods, yet so confident in the capacity of the United States to win any foreseeable conflict; to him, one guesses, all the problems were about time and place, about waiting for massive resources to come out of America’s factories, but never about the final victory. And although Churchill occupied a more beleaguered strategic position, scared about weaknesses that Roosevelt didn’t seem to appreciate (the U-boats) and worried about his beloved empire, the Briton could also be confident at Casablanca in calling for future landings in the defeat of the Axis. This was the moment he had waited for and had a multitude of ideas about: the turning of the tide.

The unfolding of the Allied offensive during the next sixteen months tended to confirm that imaginary strategist’s sober predictions. After Dieppe, no significant military activity occurred along the shores of France or in the rest of western Europe. What would be the point? Until one had won command of the sea and then command of the air, and until the U.S. Army had enough trained divisions and sufficient landing craft, the Western Allies simply could not open the second front, much though Stalin and Roosevelt pressed for it. Thus, unless the Americans in sheer frustration shifted the bulk of their manpower and weapons to the Pacific (Admiral King’s preference), the pressure upon the Axis had to be placed in the Mediterranean, as Churchill and the British Chiefs had argued all along. And by this time they had very considerable land, naval, and aerial forces in North Africa that surely
should not lie idle for a year. It is important to note that Eisenhower also argued for further operations, perhaps against Sardinia, perhaps Italy. There is no place here to argue about the wisdom or folly of the overall Mediterranean strategy, or to get bogged down in debating Churchill’s deeper motives for being so aggressively inclined in this theater of war.
²²
The fact is that this major offensive drive took place, and it took place in three amphibious hops—from North Africa to Sicily (July 1943), then the crossing of the Straits of Messina together with the double landings at Salerno and Taranto (September 1943), and then the final effort to hasten the advance upon Rome by the amphibious strike at Anzio (January 1944).

How did these three very large-scale amphibious invasions in the six months between July 1943 and January 1944 better prepare the Western Allies for that greatest assault of all, Operation Overlord? Everyone, even the more cautious Churchill and Alanbrooke, knew that a gigantic attack upon German-held Europe had to come by early 1944 at the latest. But could their staffs and their armed forces get it right at the operational and tactical levels, so as to produce a strategic breakthrough and not a humiliating retreat to the sea? Herein lay the significance of the Mediterranean operations, because for the first time the Allies would be seeking to invade and capture German-held coastlands.

Operations Husky (Sicily), Avalanche (Salerno), and Shingle (Anzio) were all successful, but none of them was perfect, far from it—at a certain critical stage, it looked as if the Salerno and Anzio forces would be forced to pull out, so serious was the opposition. All of them gave the Allied staffs fresh opportunities for learning, for rethinking, for reorganizing, for technical and tactical modifications, and for turning to newer, better weapons. It has been claimed frequently that the Overlord landings were the greatest and best-organized military-naval operation in modern history. If that was so, it must also be said that never had a venture as grand been so much rehearsed by the operations preceding it.

The Anglo-American-Canadian invasion and takeover of Sicily (July and August 1943) was also the Allies’ first entry into Europe, more than three turbulent years since Dunkirk, more than two years after the British Empire forces had been swept out of Greece and Crete, more than two years after Hitler attacked the USSR. It was a major
blow to the Axis; it led to Mussolini’s overthrow and to Italy’s surrender. It was an important testing ground for newer Allied divisions, especially the American ones, and a significant further exercise in the goal of perfecting a very large, combined-service, amphibious operation.
²³

Yet even when the last German and Italian troops retreated across the Straits of Messina into mainland Italy on August 17, 1943, it could not be said that the Sicilian campaign had been a stunning or decisive success. Allied planning and preparations for this invasion had been held back by the amazingly determined Axis defense of Tunisia until almost mid-May. The Sicilian garrison was small—of course: eight German divisions had been captured in North Africa, and many others were deployed on Hitler’s orders to forestall a possible western invasion of Greece, Sardinia, or even southern France. Ultra decrypts confirmed that the Axis had only two scratch (i.e., rebuilt) German divisions and four Italian divisions on Sicily, plus ill-equipped coastal defense units. By contrast, the Allies planned an enormous simultaneous landing force of eight divisions—considerably larger than later invasions of Normandy or the Marianas, larger too than the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa operations.
^c
Some 150,000 troops were landed on the first day alone, and a total of 478,000 overall, along a pair of 40-mile stretches of coast. On the beaches themselves, the invaders were mostly unopposed, although the first American units faced some Italian fire. The 4,000-plus Allied planes should have had virtually complete command of the air, yet the Luftwaffe managed to get in some blows. Vast fleets of landing craft and warships lay off the beaches, occasionally interrupted by enemy fire or planes; naval support was massive.

This was therefore not a real test. Probably only two lessons for the future could be drawn from the Sicily operation. The first, a negative one, was that when the two Wehrmacht divisions entered the fray, reinforced by paratroops and then more ground forces, both the British and American land advances slowed down, even when calling in additional units from Tunisia. Moreover, while the German troops gave way to Patton in the west of the island, they found it easy to hold their eastern
mountain line even when they were fighting merely to delay the Allies until they had gotten most of their own trucks, tanks, guns, and supplies across the Straits of Messina—which they did almost uninterrupted. Field Marshal Harold Alexander’s report to Churchill that on August 17, 1943, “the last German soldier was flung out of Sicily” may well have given Allied planners in London a false impression.
²⁴
The second lesson, much more encouraging in nature, was that despite strong offshore seas and winds that blew the American and British airborne troops all over the southern parts of the island, the two amphibious commands had another excellent opportunity to iron out many of the stage-by-stage problems of overcoming coastal obstacles, pushing troops and supplies quickly off the beaches, coordinating with aerial and naval support forces, and communicating with the all-important HQ ships and the admirals in charge. The latter, moreover, were the two best amphibious naval admirals that would emerge in the European theater: Sir Bertram Ramsay of the Royal Navy and H. Kent Hewitt of the U.S. Navy. Ramsay had enormous experience, but Hewitt learned very fast, and he easily understood that separate though parallel landings made for the greatest clarity.

The next step was the invasion of Italy itself. Even taking this further advance had been a matter of dispute between the American and British chiefs, though American worries about new delays to Overlord were weakened by the Italian government’s clear eagerness to surrender and be brought under the Allied umbrella. This important top-level debate did result in an agreement to invade southern Italy, but that action was delayed until September 3, when Montgomery’s Eighth Army crossed the Straits of Messina, followed on the ninth by a flanking British attack on Taranto and a far larger Anglo-American assault upon the Salerno beaches, farther north, under Mark Clark’s command. The landings were unopposed, there were no mines or barbed wire, and the 3,000 Italian troops who surrendered were in fact willing to help unload the British ships—anything to be distant from the Germans. (One staff report states that the only resistance was put up by a puma that had escaped from the Reggio zoo.) Cautiously the British and Canadian forces pushed inland, slowed only by German demolitions. This caution was even more in evidence during the “assault” on Taranto, a
hastily assembled job carried out, again unopposed, by troops of the British 1st Airborne Division, temporarily without their air transport but also without any land vehicles when they got ashore. Within the next two weeks, the ports of Brindisi and Bari were taken in a similar uncontested fashion. Then the British 5th Corps simply sat and waited for further orders. By an appropriate coincidence, Allied planners had previously code-named the Taranto campaign Operation Slapstick.

The landings around Salerno were a different story. The attack was apparently known beforehand to every barber in Malta and Tripoli, and certainly to the Germans, who put their troops on alert hours before the landings (despite which Clark, to Hewitt’s dismay, forbade naval covering fire, at least for the American divisions under his command). While not as large as the Sicilian campaign, Operation Avalanche was certainly a grand affair, involving four divisions, plus additional commando and Ranger units—55,000 troops initially, with another 115,000 to come—carried in and supported by around 700 landing craft and warships. Given its size, and the tactic of dispatching the landing craft to the beaches, about 8 miles away, around three o’clock in the morning (of September 9), it is not surprising that there were confusions and congestions. Nor is it surprising that the American landings near Paestum took a battering from German artillery until destroyers were at last released to go inshore and silence that fire.

What
was
remarkable was the capacity of the lonely 16th Panzer Division, about half the size of an Allied division and with only 80 tanks (Clark in his memoirs claims there were probably around 600), to contain the British advance, then switch units across the Sele River to keep the American troops in check, and after that go back to work along the British lines. On the second day the fresh American 45th Division got almost 10 miles inland and then was hustled back by a counterattack from a single motor infantry battalion and eight German tanks. Nor could the carrier-borne aircraft prevent frequent Luftwaffe attacks upon the crowded beachheads. By the end of the third day, when they had hoped to be in Naples, the Allies were still in two narrow and separate lodgements—and the Wehrmacht’s reinforcements were arriving.

Even now, it remains hard to judge how close the Allies came to a
Gallipoli-sized disaster on the fourth and fifth days of this invasion, when the Germans simultaneously sealed the mountain passes, put a powerful force (the 29th Panzer-Grenadier Division) between the two beachheads, and drove the British out of Battipaglia and the Americans out of Persano, sending the latter reeling back to the sea. At one point the Germans were within half a mile of the beaches, and late on September 13 Clark was making plans to reembark his Fifth Army HQ and to evacuate the 6th Corps, possibly to the British beachhead.

The chaos that such a move would have caused appalled Clark’s own naval and military officers, and Eisenhower and Alexander in turn firmly dismissed the possibility. But the shock of retreat prompted them not only to dismiss divisional commanders from their posts but also to call in all and any Allied forces in the entire theater. Large numbers of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers were deployed to pummel the German positions—with spotter aircraft, the
Warspite
’s 15-inch shells were crashing into targets 10 miles inland. All Allied aircraft in the Mediterranean, whether strategic or tactical, were made available: a convoy of tank landing ships headed for India was diverted to Salerno, Matthew Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne Division was rushed across from Tunisia with only light equipment and dropped into the American sector, while the 7th Armoured Division (the Desert Rats) reinforced the northern beachhead. Rather more slowly, units of Montgomery’s Eighth Army were coming in from the south, distracting German attention if not contributing to the fighting.
²⁵