The Second World War (55 page)

A remarkable Allied deception plan involving the planting of a corpse bearing fabricated top-secret papers had further helped to convince Hitler that any enemy invasion fleet detected in the Mediterranean would be heading for Greece, Corsica or Sardinia, not Italy. Even when an earthquake bombardment of Sicily’s offshore island, Pantelleria, forced its commander to capitulate to the Allies on 11 June, he still refused to consider the possibility of an invasion of Italy. Hitler, moreover, was distracted by events elsewhere – by the intensification of the combined bomber offensive against the Reich, by the worsening of the German situation in the Battle of the Atlantic and by last-minute decisions over the launching of the Kursk offensive (Operation Citadel) in Russia. He had also just changed headquarters again. Since March, after a prolonged sojourn at his Werwolf headquarters in the Ukraine, he had been at his holiday house, the Berghof in Berchtesgaden. He left there only at the end of June for his gloomy forest retreat, Wolfschanze at Rastenburg in East Prussia, and was re-established there a bare four days before Citadel began on 5 July. Since it was on the outcome of Citadel, designed to destroy the Red Army’s offensive potential, that the course of the war on the Eastern Front in 1943 depended, it was understandable that his attention should have been divided at the moment when Patton’s and Montgomery’s divisions began their descent west and east of Cape Passero on 9 July.

The Allies had brought eight seaborne and two airborne divisions to the assault – an armada which greatly exceeded not only OKW’s forecast of their amphibious capability but also the Axis force deployed on the island. Alfredo Guzzoni, the Italian general in overall command, disposed of twelve divisions, but of these six were static Italian divisions of negligible worth; four other Italian divisions, though capable of manoeuvre, were no match for the Allies; only the 15th Panzergrenadier and the newly raised Hermann Goering Panzer Division (the elite of the Luftwaffe’s ground troops) were first class. Despite the disparity in strength and the surprise the invaders achieved, however, Operation Husky, as the Sicily landing was codenamed, went less smoothly than planned. The Allied airborne forces, drawn from the US 82nd and British 1st Airborne Divisions, suffered enormous casualties when inexperienced pilots dropped them into the sea and nervous anti-aircraft gunners shot down their aircraft. A key operation by British paratroopers to seize the Primosole bridge south of Mount Etna on the fourth day of the invasion proved particularly costly when the German 1st Parachute Division counter-attacked.

However, the seaborne landings mounted against Italian ‘coast’ units were uniformly successful, and some of the ‘defenders’ even helped unload the invaders’ landing craft. On 15 July Major-General Sir Harold Alexander, Patton’s and Montgomery’s superior, was able to issue a directive for the final elimination of Axis forces on the island. While Patton occupied the western half, Montgomery was to advance each side of Mount Etna and secure Messina at the north-eastern tip, thus cutting off the Axis garrison’s line of retreat into the toe of Italy. In the event, Patton made rapid progress against light resistance, but Montgomery, opposed by the Hermann Goering Division, found it impossible to pass east of Mount Etna on the short route to Messina and was forced to redeploy his divisions to pass to the west. On 20 July Alexander accordingly ordered Patton to delay his assault on Palermo and Trapani and instead turn eastward to drive along the coast road to Messina. Hitler, who had sent a German liaison officer, Frido von Senger und Etterlin, to oversee Guzzoni’s conduct of the battle, and five German divisions as reinforcements to the Italian army, now ordered two of them, the 1st Parachute and the 29th Panzergrenadier, into Sicily to stiffen the defence.

Confronted by these forces, the Allied advance slowed. It was not until 2 August that Patton and Montgomery had formed a line running south-east and north-west between Mount Etna and the north coast of the island. Even then they moved forward only by using seaborne forces in a series of amphibious hooks (8, 11, 15 and 16 August) to unseat the enemy from his strong defensive positions. Nevertheless, Guzzoni had accepted as early as 3 August that his situation was ultimately indefensible and had begun to evacuate his Italian units across the Straits of Messina. The Germans began to evacuate on 11 August; sailing at night, they largely evaded Allied air attack and were even able to save a large portion of their equipment (9800 vehicles). The Allies made a triumphal entry into Messina on 17 August; but the enemy had escaped.

Although Operation Husky failed to inflict much damage on the enemy’s troops, it had indeed secured the Allied line of communications through the Mediterranean to the Middle East; but, since the wars there and in North Africa were now over, that was a hollow achievement. It had not by any visible sign brought Turkey nearer to joining the Allies; it had not diverted German divisions from Russia, since all those sent (after 24 July) to Italy, the 16th and 26th Panzer, 3rd and 29th Panzergrenadier and 1st Parachute Divisions, had come from the west. It remained to be seen whether it would exert sufficient pressure on the anti-fascist forces in Italy to bring about a reversal of alliances.

The Americans, as represented by General George Marshall, the chief of staff, in any case doubted the value of a reversal of alliances. As always they held to the view that direct assault into north-west Europe was the only quick and certain means of toppling Hitler. They had been deflected from this position by practicalities in 1942 but had never been converted to it by argument. They suspected (in retrospect, rightly so) the logic of Churchill’s commitment to a ‘peripheral’ strategy against what he called the ‘soft underbelly’ of Hitler’s Europe, better seen as its dewlap. Hitler valued Italy because its loss would be a blow to his prestige and because it offered flank protection to the Balkans, where he had genuinely vital economic and strategic interests. However, if he had been able to eavesdrop on General Marshall’s assessment of Italy as a secondary front where operations would ‘create a vacuum into which it is essential to pour more and more means’, he would have wholeheartedly agreed.

A reversal of alliances was nevertheless at hand. The arrival of the Allies in Sicily and the incontrovertible evidence of how limply the Italian forces in the island had opposed them now persuaded Italy’s ruling class that it must change sides. Churchill, in conference with Roosevelt at Quebec (Quadrant, 14-23 August), remarked when he heard the first news of approaches from Mussolini’s enemies: ‘Badoglio [the senior Italian general] admits he is going to double-cross someone . . . it is . . . likely that Hitler will be the one to be tricked.’ Hitler himself had formed the same impression on 19 July. While the battles of Sicily and Kursk were both in progress, he had made the long flight to Italy to see his fellow dictator and assure him of his support, in a form of words intended to disguise his intention of neutralising the Italian army and seizing the defensible portion of the peninsula with his own troops at the first sign of treachery. On 25 July a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council requested Mussolini’s resignation as Prime Minister. When he meekly obeyed a summons to the royal palace by the king, he was arrested and imprisoned. King Victor Emmanuel assumed direct command of the armed forces and Marshal Pietro Badoglio became Prime Minister.

The new government publicly announced that it would remain in the war on Hitler’s side but secretly entered immediately into direct negotiations with the Allies. The first meeting took place in Sicily on 5 August, the day before Raffaele Guariglia, the new Italian Foreign Minister, gave the German ambassador his word of honour that Italy was not negotiating with the Allies. Eisenhower was soon afterwards empowered by Roosevelt and Churchill to conclude an armistice, but on terms much harsher than Badoglio expected. While the Italians quibbled, preparation for a landing on the mainland went forward. The Italians hoped that the Allies would land north of Rome and seize the capital by parachute landing, thus forestalling the moves they guessed Hitler had in train to occupy the peninsula himself. Eventually, on 31 August, they were presented with an ultimatum: either to accept the terms, which were in effect unconditional – as Churchill on 28 July had told the House of Commons they would be – or to suffer the consequences, which meant German occupation. On 3 September the Italians signed, believing that they were being given time to prepare themselves against the German intervention they knew must follow as soon as news of the armistice became public. Only five days later, however, on 8 September, Eisenhower made the announcement, just a few hours before his troops began landing south of Naples at Salerno.

The Salerno landing (Operation Avalanche) was not the first by the Allies on the Italian mainland. On 3 September Montgomery’s Eighth Army had crossed the Straits of Messina to take Reggio Calabria as a preliminary to the occupation of the toe of Italy. Hitler had nevertheless decided to discount this move as unimportant, a view shared by Montgomery, who was disgruntled at being shunted into a secondary role. The Salerno landing, by contrast, stirred Hitler to order Operation Alarich to begin. Although he failed to prevent the sailing of the Italian fleet to Malta as required by the armistice terms, the Luftwaffe did succeed in sinking the battleship
Roma
en route by release of one of its new weapons, a guided glider bomb. In almost every other respect, Operation Alarich (now codenamed Achse) worked with smoothness.

Washington was reluctant to commit forces to Italy because it was determined the Alliance should launch an invasion of north-west Europe without avoidable delay. Accordingly, it was very much to Hitler’s advantage that Eisenhower’s lack of landing craft and divisions had obliged him to go ashore so far to the south. In consequence Hitler was able to use the divisions which had escaped from Sicily to concentrate against the Avalanche forces, while he deployed those brought from France and elsewhere (the 1st SS Panzer Division was temporarily transferred from Russia for the mission) to occupy Rome and subdue the Italian army in the centre and north of the peninsula. Before the invasion he had received contradictory advice: Rommel, one of his favourites, had warned against trying to hold the south; Kesselring, the general on the spot and an acute strategic analyst, had assured him that a line could safely be established below Rome. He now employed both men’s talents. While Rommel took charge of the divisions which had been rushed through the Alps to put down military and civilian resistance in Milan and Turin (and to recapture the tens of thousands of Allied prisoners liberated from captivity on Italy’s defection), Kesselring organised the Tenth Army in the south to check and contain the Salerno landing.

German troops elsewhere moved rapidly to disarm and imprison Italian troops or extinguish their resistance when it was offered. The areas of Yugoslavia under Italian occupation were brought under German control or that of their Croat (Ustashi) puppets. Italian-occupied France was taken over by German troops (with tragic consequences for the Jews who had found refuge there). Sardinia and Corsica, regarded as indefensible, were both skilfully evacuated, the former on 9 September, the latter by 1 October after a Free French invading force had come to the rescue of the local insurgents, who had risen in revolt on news of the armistice. In the Italian-occupied sectors of Greece the Germans actually scored a remarkable success against the run of strategic events. Encouraged by an outbreak of fighting between the Germans and the Italian garrison of the Ionian islands on 9 September (brutally put down by the Germans, who shot all the Italian officers they captured), the British, in the teeth of strong and wise American discouragement, invaded the Italian-occupied Dodecanese islands on 12 September and, with Italian acquiescence, took Kos, Samos and Leros. Sensing an easy success, offered by their local command of the air – as the Americans had perceived but the British refused to acknowledge – the Germans assembled a superior triphibious force, retook Kos on 4 October, forced the evacuation of Samos and seized back Leros by 16 November. The Dodecanese operation, painfully humiliating to the British, was then extended into the Cyclades. By the end of November the Germans directly controlled the whole of the Aegean, had taken over 40,000 Italian and several thousand British prisoners, and had actually set back the likelihood of Turkey’s entering the war on the Allied side – Churchill’s justification for mounting his second Greek adventure in the first place.

These were not the only chestnuts plucked by Hitler from the fire raised by Italy’s defection. On 16 September an airborne task force, led by an SS officer, Otto Skorzeny, rescued Mussolini from the mountain resort in the Gran Sasso where he was currently confined. Mussolini at once proclaimed the existence of an ‘Italian Social Republic’ in the north of the country; after 9 October it was to have its own army, formed from soldiers still loyal to him and led by Marshal Rudolfo Graziani, once governor of Libya and Wavell’s opponent in Egypt. The creation of Mussolini’s successor state to fascist Italy ensured that the growing resistance to German occupation of the north would swell into a civil war, with brutal and tragic consequences. To those consequences Hitler was entirely indifferent. Italy’s change of alliance relieved him of the obligation to supply a large part of the country with the coal on which it depended for energy; it added a captive labour force to the body of Italian volunteer workers in German industry; and it brought him nearly a million military prisoners who could also be set to work for the Reich.

Meanwhile the strategic effort to minimise the effect of the Allied invasion of the mainland was developing to his satisfaction. Rommel’s deprecation of the chances of defending Italy south of Rome had proved ill founded. Kesselring, by affiliation an officer of the Luftwaffe but by training and background a product of the general staff elite, had correctly argued that the Italian terrain lent itself admirably to defence. The peninsula’s central mountain spine, rising in places to nearly 10,000 feet, throws numerous spurs east and west towards the Adriatic and Mediterranean. Between the spurs, rivers flow rapidly in deep valleys to the sea. Rivers, spurs and mountain spine together offer a succession of defensible lines at close intervals, made all the more difficult to breach because the spine pushes the north-south highways into the coastal strip, where the bridges that carry them are dominated by natural strongpoints on the spurs above.