Operation Husky

The Canadian Invasion of Sicily, July 10—August 7, 1943

Mark Zuehlke

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781553655398
• eBook ISBN:
  9781926685779
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

On July 10, 1943, two great Allied armadas of over 2, 000 ships readied to invade Sicily. This was Operation Husky, the first step toward winning a toehold in fascist-occupied Europe. Among the invaders were 20, 000 Canadian troops serving in the First Canadian Infantry Division and First Canadian Tank Brigade — in their first combat experience. Over the next 28 days, the Allied troops carved a path through the rugged land, despite fierce German opposition. Drawing on firsthand accounts of veterans and official military records, Operation Husky offers a gripping, meticulous account of this seminal operation and the young men who fought, died, and survived it.

PART ONE
TOWARDS AN INVASION

[ 1 ]
If the army Can’t Agree

ON APRIL 23, less than twenty-four hours after federal government approval was given, Eighth Army commander General Bernard Law Montgomery signalled Lieutenant General Andrew McNaughton: “Am delighted Canadian Division will come under me for Husky.”1 Classic Monty hyperbole, still there might have been some kernel of truth contained therein. For Montgomery knew something of 1st Canadian Infantry Division. In 1941, as commander of Britain’s South Eastern Command, he had taken a personal interest in transforming the amateurish Canadians into professional soldiers. Deeming their senior officers too old and inept, Montgomery had imposed rigorous training schedules and schemes. He disdained McNaughton, advising chief of imperial general staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, that the Canadian was unfit for army field command. One training exercise had followed another through 1941 and into early 1942. Fox, Dog, Waterloo, Bumper, Beaver II, Beaver III, and Tiger hammered the troops into shape and instilled skills required to survive and even perhaps win battles. When Montgomery departed Britain for the deserts of Africa in the summer of 1942, he had pronounced the Canadians professional enough.2

The immediate problem was that the Canadians had to hit the ground running to meet the rapidly closing invasion deadline. As Brooke had acknowledged in his signal to Mediterranean theatre commanders, this was a last-minute change. Most under the gun was 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s commander, Major General Harry Salmon, and his General Staff officers. They had to quickly acquaint themselves with an invasion plan still in flux, identify potential problems, and seek solutions while also preparing the division for operations in a completely new theatre.

The forty-eight-year-old Salmon had won a Military Cross during the Great War and was considered one of Canada’s best generals—particularly with regard to training. General staff officer (I) Lieutenant Colonel George Kitching, who acted as Salmon’s chief of staff, found him an unceasing “stickler for detail.” Tall, with “a good physique and a clipped moustache on a square and rugged face,” Salmon exuded confidence. But he was also enigmatic. Kitching later judged him as “one of the most unusual men I . . . ever served under and I do not think many people, even his close friends, really knew the inner workings of his mind.”3

Fortunately, Salmon and Kitching had the benefit of planning already undertaken by 3rd British Division headquarters staff. Within hours of McNaughton’s notification, Salmon moved his people to Norfolk House on St. James’s Square in London, which the British used as a top-secret headquarters for combined operations planning. Here, the British officers briefed them in detail. As soon as their counterparts departed, the Canadians got to work. They numbered just fifty senior officers—drawn from 1st Division’s headquarters, its three infantry brigades, and the 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade—which would provide the armoured contingent. Excepting McNaughton and a couple of his staff, nobody in First Canadian Army was yet privy to operational details. Norfolk House was locked down; heavy security ensured that nobody entered without a pass or removed any secret papers. Almost every document was labelled “Most Secret.”

Salmon and his team checked into the Mayfair Hotel, about a mile from their new headquarters, but with discussion of the invasion forbidden beyond the walls of Norfolk House, the men spent most waking hours there. Kitching considered the discussion prohibition a blessing in disguise. Unexpectedly, Salmon, a workaholic who normally maintained a demeanour of stony reserve even over dinner and drinks, now “became cheerful and lively [at dinner] and thoroughly enjoyed his meals in restaurants when we had time to get them. He would stay up at night and have a drink with us even though we might have been working for 14 hours that day. He was a different man and I thoroughly enjoyed his company.”4

The first five days passed in a hectic whirl. On April 27, barely forty-eight hours after being advised of their new assignment, Salmon presented his staff with a ten-page appreciation that assessed intelligence estimates of enemy dispositions and strengths relative to their own, topographical details of the identified beaches and defences, and allotment of ships; in the document Salmon also drew conclusions about whether the division could win a toehold. He warned that the planned heavy preliminary bombing of Sicily, well before the invasion convoy formed up off Malta, made gaining “strategical surprise impossible.” But he was heartened by how thoroughly unsuited the designated beaches were for amphibious landings. There were two, lying on either side of the small fishing village of Scoglitti on Sicily’s southern coast. Steep banks rose behind each, so that getting tanks and other vehicles off the beach would be extremely difficult. “I may achieve a certain measure of tactical surprise owing to unsuitability of beaches,” Salmon explained. But the enemy, expected to be “at a high state of readiness,” would undoubtedly block the division’s push inland. Right now, however, enemy forces were reportedly weak enough that, even “if tactical surprise is lost, this should not preclude a successful landing unless enemy defences are considerably strengthened prior to D Day.”5

Nothing was simple. Wherever the officers turned, more complications were revealed. When everyone was unexpectedly summoned to the War Office, they were surprised to find Montgomery waiting for them in a room adorned with large wall maps of Sicily. He had flown from North Africa to deliver a detailed briefing. Now the Canadians learned the full scope of the enterprise. They would be under Montgomery’s command and folded into the Eighth Army, which was carrying off the British side of the invasion. Landing simultaneously would be another army, the American Seventh, under General George S. Patton. Delivering two armies in a single day onto Sicilian beaches meant the invasion was the largest in history. There were not enough men in Northern Africa, so the Canadians would be sailing from Britain, while a large contingent of American troops came direct from the United States. “It can be appreciated,” noted 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade commander Brigadier Howard Graham, “that the sailor boys had a tough task on their hands to co-ordinate the movement of convoys from North America, Great Britain, North Africa, and Malta so that all would arrive at their proper places at the proper time.”6

A major headache was that Eighth Army’s supply stores were so strained that nothing would be available from North Africa for the Canadians. They must bring their own supplies, sufficient to last forty-two days. This meant there would be ninety-two ships, excluding escorts, carrying the division. Instead of everyone sailing together, they would move in three convoys, the two main ones designated the Slow Assault Convoy and the other the Fast Assault Convoy. The slow one would assemble in Liverpool and sail on June 25, while the fast convoy would depart harbours in the River Clyde three days later. Aboard the slow convoy would be packed vehicles, equipment, and supplies not required to immediately support the assaulting troops during the first days of the invasion. The fast convoy would carry the assault troops and their weaponry. Movement of these convoys was to be so precise that they would marry up at a “release point” seven miles off Sicily on the night before the invasion. Following a few days behind these two convoys, a third carrying reinforcements, field hospitals, replacement equipment, and supplies would proceed to a staging area in North Africa, from which matériel and men would be transferred to Sicily as needed.7

Montgomery departed, leaving instructions that Salmon and some key staff officers should fly to Cairo in a few days for a meeting with the corps commander under whom the Canadians would serve, Lieutenant General Oliver Leese. The most worrisome aspect of the plans so far presented was that they were not finalized and were subject to minor or major change at a moment’s notice. As had been the case since the decision to invade Sicily was agreed on at the Casablanca Conference, Montgomery, his superiors, and the staff at the various headquarters were still arguing many key aspects fundamental to Husky.

EARLIER THAT YEAR, in January, the combined chiefs of staff had met Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in French Morocco, at Anfa Camp on the outskirts of Casablanca. Their purpose was to hammer out basic strategy for the year. With North Africa all but won, the pressing issue was how next to employ Commonwealth and American forces against Germany and her European allies. It was a heady time. German and Italian forces were cornered in Tunisia, the last Axis stronghold in North Africa. In Russia, the Germans had been forced onto the defensive in the aftermath of Sixth Army’s destruction at Stalingrad. The Japanese tide had been stemmed in New Guinea and on Guadalcanal. Churchill cautiously mused that in the dawn of 1943 they were seeing, “perhaps, the end of the beginning.”8

The Americans, particularly the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General George C. Marshall, preferred an immediate invasion of Western Europe from Britain or, alternatively, landings in southern France. But the three-pronged invasion on November 8, 1942, of Morocco and Algiers and subsequent operations in North Africa—with heavy demands on shipping and supplies—had forced them to recognize that a cross-channel assault would be impossible until 1944. The British countered that Allied landings in southern France would preclude any chance of a cross-channel invasion. There was no way to limit the scope of such an operation. Any landings there would require such a vast commitment of manpower, shipping, and supplies that this would become the invasion of continental Europe, which the Allies were not yet ready to carry out. On the other hand, Churchill warned, the Allies “would be a laughing stock if in the spring and early summer no British or American soldiers were firing at any German or Italian soldiers.”9 So where to shoot?

Churchill and his chief of imperial general staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, knew the precise spot. The British arrived in Casablanca with a strategy to win agreement to an invasion of Sicily by patiently wearing down American resistance “like the dripping of water on a stone.” Yet Churchill knew that any Mediterranean invasion point he put forward would be initially resisted by the Americans, who saw in every British strategical suggestion a veiled attempt to regain or expand their empire. This “atmosphere of veiled antipathy and mistrust” had clouded every conference since the war’s outbreak.10

Casablanca proved no exception. This time, however, Churchill and Brooke were able to build a compelling case for invading Sicily. Benito Mussolini’s Italy was on the verge of collapse, and Sicily would provide a perfect springboard onto the peninsula. An invasion there would force Italian surrender. With Italy broken, the British held, the Germans would not move to defend it. The Allies could gain a solid footing on the European mainland at little cost in blood—penetrating Hitler’s Fortress Europe through its soft underbelly, as Churchill was fond of putting it. The British went on to predict that Turkey would join the Allied side and the Germans be forced to divert divisions that would otherwise have been deployed to Russia in order to shore up defences in southern Europe.11

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Expeditionary Force in North Africa, thought that invading Sicily made sense only if the motivation was to remove the island and her seaports as a threat to Allied shipping in the Mediterranean. The other Americans concurred, refusing to discuss further what might follow Sicily’s capture out of a fear that British ambitions in the Mediterranean could indefinitely forestall a cross-channel invasion for lack of men and ships. Striking a conciliatory posture, Churchill and Brooke chose not to press the point. They could afford to leave in abeyance the idea of continuing on to mainland Italy. Instead, they forecast that Sicily’s loss might suffice to bring about an Italian surrender and avoided speculating further as to whether the Germans would occupy and tenaciously defend the country.12

Neither delegation left Casablanca triumphant. But the British had succeeded on a number of levels that gave cause for satisfaction. Sicily would be invaded, and Italy might well follow. Another coup that left Brooke almost giddy with pleasure was that the Americans had been neatly outfoxed, leaving operational control of the invasion in British hands. In a communiqué issued on January 23, Eisenhower was declared the “supreme commander.” This technically gave him overall authority for Husky’s planning and conduct, but the document went on to appoint General Harold Alexander his deputy commander-in-chief, charging him personally with “the detailed planning and preparation and for the execution of the actual operation when launched.” Further, Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham would be the naval commander and Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, the air commander. All three men were British.13

“Eisenhower,” Brooke declared, “had neither the tactical [nor] strategical experience required for such a task.” Making him senior “could not help flattering and pleasing the Americans in so far as we were placing our senior and most experienced commander to function under their commander who had no war experience.” Eisenhower was effectively pushed “up into the stratosphere and rarefied atmosphere of a Supreme Commander, where he would be free to devote his time to the political and interallied problems.”14 Eisenhower was little fooled by this ruse, but there was nothing he could do about it. “I ceased to concern myself directly with the details of the Sicilian operations,” he wrote.15 Churchill emphasized in follow-up correspondence with Roosevelt “that the British should at least be equal partners with our Allies. The proportions of the armies available [for] July were: British, eight divisions; United States, six. Air: the United States, 55 per cent; British, 45 per cent. Naval, 80 per cent British . . . It did not seem too much in these circumstances that we should have at least an equal share of the High Command.” Rather unctuously he would later claim “this was willingly conceded by our loyal comrades. We were moreover given the direct conduct of the fighting.”16

THE MAN RESPONSIBLE for planning the invasion, however, was unable to turn his mind to the task. General Harold Alexander was already commander-in-chief for Tunisia, where battles still raged that required his daily attention. All he could do was hastily examine the tentative plan submitted to the Casablanca Conference by the Joint Planning Staff in London and agree it provided the framework for th...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction The Supreme Tragedy
• Part One Towards an in Vasion
• Part Two First Blooding
• Part Three Battle for the Sicilian Hills
• Part Four: The Eastward Advance
• Epilogue Operation Husky in Memory
• Appendix A Principal Units and Commanders in Operation Husky
• Appendix B The Canadian Army in Operation Husky (Combat Units Only)
• Appendix C Canadian Infantry Battalion (Typical Organization)
• Appendix D Canadian Military Order of Rank
• Appendix E Axis Military Order of Rank
• Appendix F The Decorations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Formations, Units, and Corps
• About the Author