The Invasion of Sicily 1943

Jon Diamond

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781473896093
• eBook ISBN: 9781473896116
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The decisive WWII campaign that brought Italy to its knees is vividly captured in this in-depth photographic history.
With victory in North Africa complete, the Allies had a choice. The Americans wanted an early cross-channel attack from Britain on Northwest Europe. Churchill favored invading the soft underbelly of Italy to weaken the Axis forces and gain Italian surrender. With Eisenhower's army and battle-hardened Eighth Army in North Africa, Churchill prevailed.
The ambitious Operation HUSKY required meticulous planning. While the outcome was never in doubt, the mountainous terrain acted in the defender's favor. While Montgomery's Eighth Army and Patton's Seventh landed successfully, the air landing proved costly. The German presence was higher than expected and the vast bulk of the enemy were Italian.
The strategic plan was successful: the Italian capitulated, Hitler had to reinforce his Southern flank—relieving pressure on the Soviets—and valuable lessons were learned by Allied for D-Day.

Chapter One

Strategic Prelude to the Invasion of Sicily

The first official summit held between neutral America’s President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill occurred during the Atlantic Conference in Placentia Bay, Canada on 8–9 August 1941. It would be another five months before the entry of the United States into the war, which followed Imperial Japan’s aerial attack on Pearl Harbor and invasion of the Philippine Archipelago. At that meeting in Newfoundland, Canada, nascent plans to better co-ordinate allocation of American war matériel and foodstuffs, through Lend-Lease, were reinforced. Both Britain and the Soviet Union, the latter invaded by Germany on 22 June 1941, were desperately attempting to contain the ceaseless expansion of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini’s Axis forces in North Africa and across Russia in order to protect the many strategic locales, such as the Suez Canal, the Caucasus and Middle Eastern oilfields, and Moscow. Also, at this Placentia Bay Conference in Canada, the Atlantic Charter was crafted that outlined the goals of the Allies for after defeating the Axis belligerents.

After the entry of the United States into the global conflict, the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), a body comprising both American and British service chiefs and their principal aides, was formalised at the Arcadia Conference in Washington from 22 December to 14 January 1941. At this initial Washington Conference, the Allies decided that their major effort was to be directed towards Europe to ultimately bring about the defeat of Germany. Also, the Allied nations would not make any separate peace with the enemy. Even before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Churchill considered the Nazi regime as a more dangerous threat to their countries and survival, and they had adopted a strategy to vanquish the Axis partners of Germany and Italy first. In Asia and the Pacific, primarily defensive or limited actions were to be conducted against the Japanese until European victory was secure. The ill-fated and short-lived American-British-Dutch-Australian (ABDA) command for the Far East, under British General Archibald Wavell, was also established at the Arcadia Conference. However, it was dissolved by mid-February 1942, following the ignoble defeats suffered by Allied forces at Singapore and throughout the Dutch East Indies at the hands of Imperial Japan.

The Japanese juggernaut of 1941–1942 over the Allies in the Far East and the Pacific established hegemony over a new Tokyo-controlled Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This enormous geographical area included a vast swathe of China along with total domination of Burma, Malaya and Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippine and Bismarck Archipelagos, and almost all of the Solomon Islands. Advanced Japanese bases along Papua New Guinea’s northern coast at Buna and Gona, as well as at Lae in North-east New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula, were established for Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Navy (IJN) offensive action against Port Moresby, which lay across the Arafura Sea from Australia’s Northern Territory. Australia’s northernmost principal port, Darwin, had been bombed by the Japanese from February 1942. A planned Japanese south-eastern thrust into the New Hebrides, Fiji and Tonga island groups, if accomplished, would have created havoc by severing American sea lanes to the Antipodes, thereby denying the Allies a strategically-important geographic springboard for future offensive operations.

The interval from October 1942 to January 1943 has been referred to as a ‘turning of the tide’ in the epic struggle of the Second World War. During this three-month time-frame five major land campaigns were conducted leading to staggering losses for the Axis partners of Germany and Italy as well as for Imperial Japan, at the expense of a very attenuated Allied war production machine to meet the global confrontation requirements. These included the protracted battles by American and Australian formations for Papua, New Guinea; Guadalcanal, in the southern Solomon Islands of the South Pacific area; the defence of Stalingrad, resulting in the surrender of large numbers of Axis coalition troops, comprising mostly the Wehrmacht Sixth Army; the ‘see-saw’ British and Dominion forces’ operations, first confronting the eastwardlyadvancing Italian Tenth Army; and then against General Erwin Rommel’s Deutsches Afrika Korps, combined with the remnants of Mussolini’s North African expeditionary force, across the Western Desert encompassing Egypt and the Cyrenaican portion of Libya. These chaotic internecine engagements, employing both large mechanised forces as well as defensive lines, would initially culminate in the First and Second Battles of El Alamein in July and October 1942, respectively, and then the Anglo-American invasion of Vichy French-controlled Morocco and Algeria in north-west Africa on 8 November 1942, Operation Torch. A gruelling six-month campaign for control of Tunisia would ensue until May 1943.

At Guadalcanal in the Southern Solomon Islands, throughout a hellacious jungle and gruesome naval surface campaign from 7 August 1942 to 9 February 1943, the heroic defence by, initially, the 1st Marine Division (Reinforced) followed by regimental elements of the US Army’s Americal Division enabled the Americans to maintain possession of Henderson Field as an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’. Coupled with the gallant sacrifices of Allied seamen and American pilots, IJN Combined Fleet Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto and IJA Lieutenant-General Harukichi Hyakutake’s naval bombardment and island counter-attacks, respectively, failed to re-capture Guadalcanal, thereby deterring the potentially nightmarish maritime scenario of Japanese naval expansion into the South-eastern Pacific Ocean with potential severance of the sea lanes connecting the United States and Australia and New Zealand.

Coincident with the struggle for Guadalcanal, Australian Militia battalions, reinforced later by Australian Imperial Defence Force (AIF) veterans returning from the Middle East, stopped a Japanese amphibious invasion at Milne Bay at Papua’s eastern tip from 25 August to 6 September 1942. Also, an enemy over-land attack across the Owen Stanley Mountains via the Kokoda Trail stalled in mid-September 1942, a mere 27 air miles from the Australian-American main staging area at Port Moresby. After those Japanese setbacks, both American and Australian forces, going onto the offensive, would be severely bloodied in their attempts to re-capture the northern Papuan Japanese entrenched garrisons at Buna and Gona from October 1942 to January 1943. These actions were to herald the fanatical defence that the Japanese were to mount throughout the Pacific War.

Ultimately, the costly Allied victories along Papua’s northern coast and on Guadalcanal would usher in the counter-offensives against the recently acquired Japanese bastions by General Douglas A. MacArthur’s South-west Pacific Area (SWPA) forces westward across New Guinea and Vice Admiral William F. Halsey’s South Pacific Force up the Solomon Island chain. Both campaigns conducted simultaneously would keep the IJA and IJN strategically off balance. Acquisition of existing and construction of new airfields in both zones would enable the aerial neutralisation of Rabaul on New Britain Island in the Bismarck Archipelago during Operation Cartwheel, making an amphibious bloodbath there unnecessary.

By October 1942, two Nazi armies had driven forward deep into the Soviet interior’s Caucasus Mountains but had become bogged some way from the Baku oil fields that Hitler desperately sought to fuel his war effort. Just to the north of the Caucasus Mountains was the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River. At that eponymous locale, Soviet forces conducted an epic defence within that city’s ruins against Wehrmacht General Friedrich Paulus and his vaunted Sixth Army, some of Hitler’s finest troops. On 2 October, Paulus unleashed his last offensive against the Russians in Stalingrad, namely a 2,000-yard deep pocket, which included the gutted remains of buildings and factories. It was to become the farthest point that the German Sixth and Fourth Panzer Armies would advance to. The German gains were measured in yards and Paulus admitted to his peers, ‘Things are going very slowly, but every day we make a little progress. The whole thing is a question of time and manpower.’ The Wehrmacht could not do anything to delay winter’s onset nor could they tap into any ready reinforcements for Paulus’ dwindling Sixth Army ranks. The German High Command knew that if Stalingrad were not captured within a month, the whole Nazi position in southern Russia would be a precarious one since their flanks to the north west were held by Rumanian troops. As would happen, the flanks were overrun by a Russian winter counter-offensive and, despite General von Manstein’s attempt to open a corridor to Paulus’ troops, the Sixth Army was encircled and forced to surrender. The loss of the Sixth Army’s twenty divisions doomed the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Allied planning for Operation Torch, the first Anglo-American amphibious assault, would have been for naught had the Germans won their epic clash with the Soviets on the Volga at Stalingrad.

The prelude for both Operation Torch and the Sicilian Campaign of July 1943 began with the combat events that transpired in Egypt’s Western Desert and Libya’s Cyrenaican province, from 9 December 1940 through 8 November 1942, the latter date roughly corresponding to the British Eighth Army victory at El Alamein and the Anglo-American Operation Torch landings in Morocco and Algeria. An ensuing bitter, contentious six-month camp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: Strategic Prelude to the Invasion of Sicily
• Chapter Two: Terrain, Fortifications and Installations
• Chapter Three: Commanders and Combatants
• Chapter Four: The Landings and Axis Counter-attacks
• Chapter Five: Allied Advances and Sicilian Objectives Captured
• Epilogue
• Bibliography