Third Reich Victorious (35 page)

While the Allies argued and the Sicilian defenders dug in, events were coming to a head in Italy itself. The fall of Syracuse and Augusta triggered the anti-Mussolini plotters into making their move. But Roberto Farinacci informed the Germans that the head of the Fascist Grand Council, Dino Grandi, was planning to oust Mussolini at a council meeting on July 24. Kesselring met with the Italian leader to warn him of the plot, but Mussolini dismissed the idea, stating that Grandi was fully on his side. Stymied from that direction, the Germans took direct action—Gestapo agents grabbed Grandi at his home and spirited him away. Bereft of its leader, the coup subsided.

On July 22, while the Germans were finishing their withdrawal from the Orel salient and the armored clashes around Kharkov were dying down, the 8th Army attacked. The XIII Corps tried to breach the line of defenses on the Lentini River and failed after three days of hard fighting. The Highlanders struck again at Palazzola, but were battled to a standstill by 15th Panzer. However, after several days the Germans withdrew from the battered town voluntarily to avoid being cut off. Farther west, the Canadians attacked Vizzini along the main highway and had a difficult time against the dug-in Italians, who were supported by a Kampfgruppe from the 15th Panzer. After nine days of fighting, the Canadians finally dislodged the Axis with help from the Highland Division.

While the British were slogging ahead, the Americans were regrouping and reinforcing their beachhead, The battered 36th Division was pulled out and replaced by the 9th Infantry Division. The Texas division’s baptism of fire had been a hard one; apart from the troop casualties, five senior staff officers were relieved along with six battalion commanders. With two battalion commanders captured during the fighting, the 36th Division would enter its next fight with new leaders.

Patton refused to sit quietly, regardless of his orders from the 15th Army Group. As soon as the 2nd Armored and the 45th “Thunderbird” Division were built up, he sent them on a “reconnaissance in force” against the town of Caltagirone. Capture of this town would begin to open the way across the island. After several days the Thunderbirds fought their way into the town, only to be pushed out again by the Hermann Göring troops. A battalion of the 2nd Armored arrived to stop the German pursuit and begin the push back toward the town.

At the end of July, with his attacks across the Lentini stymied and Vizzini in his hands, Leese demanded that Patton pull away from Caltagirone and give the 8th Army possession of the vital highway for his drive across the island. Patton, whose troops were battling back into the city, refused.

Leese immediately went to Alexander, demanding that Patton be relieved for insubordination and disobeying direct orders not to “become engaged.” Alexander flew to Sicily to meet with Patton personally. The American made an impassioned argument that the British were not in a position to take the town and he was. To pull back, Patton stated, would be a gift to the Germans.

Alexander was noncommittal to the 7th Army commander, but flew directly from his meeting to Eisenhower’s headquarters, where he dumped the problem on his superior’s lap. Eisenhower, exasperated by the internecine arguments and the slow process of the campaign, compromised. He ordered Patton to take the town, then turn it over to the British. In a closed-door session, he also told Alexander to take control of the 15th Army Group or be relieved himself.

On August 2, 1943, Caltagirone fell to the 45th Division, when the Hermann Göring Panzers and Panzergrenadiers fell back. The II Corps commander, Bradley, still livid about the orders from above, grudgingly ordered his troops to pull out. Moving the XXX Corps and its support into the town delayed any British action for several days, as Leese’s command was woefully short of transport. While the XXX Corps was moving into position for its next push, Leese also brought the the 78th Division into Syracuse to bolster the battered XIII Corps along the coast.

While the transfer was being made, Patton ordered Bradley to shift his attack toward Caltanissetta, farther west, then unleashed a surprise. He amphibiously leapfrogged a regiment of the 3rd Infantry around the Axis western defences to land at Porto Empedocle, where the attack quickly captured the small port and the larger undefended town of Agrigento. The move unhinged the Axis defenses and the Italians pulled back into the hills, opening up the coast road to the west.

Von Senger ordered all German troops on the western half of the island to move into a large arc around volcanic Mount Etna. Guzzoni, shocked and angry at the German withdrawal, ordered his troops to resist. Over the next several days it became clear, however, that the Italians were no match alone for the fast-moving Americans.

By August 7, with the British drive just getting under way and the Americans closing in on Palermo, Patton sent a strongly worded suggestion that the British consider leapfrogging units around Axis strongpoints. He even suggested landing the U.S. 1st Infantry Division at Marina di Catanzara on the Italian mainland to isolate the island and break open the front.

Three days later, however, two Ultra intercept bombshells took the Allied focus away from Sicily and onto the ominously quiet Eastern Front.

The first bombshell was an order to Rommel to send the 1st Panzer Division south to join the 26th Panzer and 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions under the XIV Panzer Corps headquarters en route from the east. He was also told to expect the II SS Panzer Corps, then activate himself as commander, Army Group Italy, under Kesselring. Knowing that substantial reinforcements were heading for Italy was bad enough, but the second Ultra intercept was worse. The orders went to all German army group, army, and corps commanders, telling them to prepare for a series of defensive shifts in connection with the expected armistice with the Soviet Union.

Stalin, after his concentrated combat strength was shattered at Orel and Kharkov, had indeed entered into armistice negotiations with Germany. He was angry and disappointed at the results of his massive offensives—the losses left him little capability to attack and thus robbed him of the initiative. He grew increasingly bitter that the Western Allies seemed unable to break through two German divisions while he fought off a hundred times as many. This left him feeling that the West was forcing him to destroy himself along with the Germans. Ultimately he knew that any armistice with Germany would be violated at some point, but he was determined that this time it would be to his advantage. Until then, he thought, let the capitalists and the fascists bleed each other for a while. He ordered his Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, to open secret negotiations with his hated enemy.

For Hitler, the armistice was a compromise as well. Although his forces had stopped the Soviet attacks and inflicted massive casualties, his own armies had been hurt too. Short on men and equipment, and exhausted from the intense combat of the last few weeks, they were in no condition to follow up their defensive victory with an offensive of their own. Stalemate could only lead to more battles and, with the West knocking at Europe’s side door in Sicily, he would end up confronting the same no-win options he faced in early 1943. Armistice was acceptable for now.

Churchill and Roosevelt were stunned by Ultra’s implied turn of events. Churchill likened it to the same gut wrench he felt when the 1939 pact between the Soviet Union and Germany was announced.
⁸
Both men immediately sent their ambassadors to meet with Stalin. The Soviet leader had little to say other than to confirm his decision to settle with the Germans. When pushed for an explanation, he exploded, stating that his nation had lost a million sons in the past month and demanding to know what sacrifices the West was making. With that he dismissed his visitors.

In mid-August, while the German-Soviet talks were nearing completion, the Allied political and military leaders met again in Casablanca. As the first order of business, they reviewed their military situation. On Sicily, there was slow progress against the stiff enemy line that curved around Mount Etna. U.S. forces were clearing out the western half of the island, while the British probed for a weak spot. Quality Axis troops were starting to appear in the lines against them, despite Allied air interdiction. The straits between Messina and Reggio had become ringed with dense antiaircraft defenses that both protected the troops crossing and allowed more supplies to flow. Allied movement forward was becoming even more difficult than it had been before. In addition to the worsening military situation, Mussolini’s political fortunes were stable for the time being. Italian troops from the Balkans were being brought home, replaced by a slow trickle of German divisions from the east. With Grandi’s disappearance, the Italian leader’s opposition had been subdued. The possibility of Italy falling out of the war now seemed unlikely without a solid Allied victory in Sicily.

The differing U.S. and British strategic viewpoints again emerged in the talks. Churchill wanted to continue the Mediterranean campaign, threatening German Europe along a wide front. The United States was caught in a quandary. Its air campaign against the Reich was just beginning to pay dividends, but without an Eastern Front, the bombers would face heavily reinforced Luftwaffe interceptor squadrons. As much as the U.S. wanted a cross-Channel attack, Roosevelt had to admit that the American and British armies were not ready to take on the Germans alone. With little progress in Europe and few strategic options, public opinion in America would demand that he turn his full attention toward the Japanese.

Reluctantly, both men concluded that a Germany unhampered by a Soviet enemy would be able to augment its forces in the Mediterranean and make an Allied position on Sicily untenable, especially from a logistics point of view. Orders went out to the 15th Army Group to withdraw the 7th and 8th Armies from Sicily. Although the two leaders left each other with renewed vocal assurances of continued support against Hitler, they both knew that, to all intents and purposes, the war in Europe was over.

In reality, Hitler did little reassessing in early 1943. His decision to defend Tunisia failed, trapping 250,000 Germans and Italians. In the East, despite his own misgivings—and those of his leading generals—he chose to initiate Operation Zitadelle in July, throwing his Panzer reserves into the attack. It failed and the weakened German forces were unable to counter the subsequent Soviet attacks. As historians note, the Soviet offensives did not end until Berlin fell. The messages about the cancellation of Zitadelle were in fact received by Stalin, but he waited several days, and German troop movements showed him the operation was still on. In the West, the deception Operation Mincemeat was not turned down by Eisenhower and succeeded in spreading the scarce German resources into Greece, Sardinia, and the Balkans. And despite the muddled planning and mistakes, the Allies succeeded in capturing Sicily—after Montgomery just missed being wounded by a strafing aircraft on D-Day. The campaign there sealed the end of Mussolini’s regime, and Italy capitulated less than a month after the island fell.

Deakin, F. W.,
The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism
(Harper & Row, New York, 1962).

D’Este, Carlo,
Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily 1943
(HarperCollins, New York, 1988).

Erickson, John,
The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany
(Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1999).

Glantz, David M.,
Soviet Military Intelligence in War
(Frank Cass, Portland, OR, 1990).

Glantz, David M., and House, Jonathan M.,
The Battle of Kursk
(University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 1999).

Mitcham, Samuel W., and von Staffenberg, Friedrich,
The Battle of Sicily
, (Orion Books, New York, 1991).

Sadkovich, James,
The Italian Navy in World War II
(Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1994).

1
. The Italians were not the only German ally to lose armies on the Eastern Front. The Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies were destroyed in the fighting around Stalingrad as well.

2
. Unlike Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria, Finland was not Germany’s “ally.” The small country was a “co-belligerent” and had joined the war to redress the results of the Winter War of 1939 with the Soviet Union. Finland called its participation the “War of Continuation.”

3
. The 1943 Soviet tank army was an organization consisting of two tank corps and one mechanized corps, plus supporting units. It totaled 37,000 to 45,000 men and 600 to 700 tanks. It was the equivalent of a German Panzer corps and capable of sustained independent deep operations.

4
. The Italians lost 319,000 tons of shipping from February through May 1943. Over 60 percent of the losses occurred in port from Allied air attacks. Ultra intercepts also tracked and targeted tankers, making sure that the mobility of the Axis forces was limited. See Sadkovich,
The Italian Navy in World War II.