Chapter 36: Jul 1943 Allies Land in Sicily

“Odd, don’t you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one woman writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.

You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That’s the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.

I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it.”

― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

It might seem odd to some people that the Allies took the slower path of clearing the southern flank of all Axis troops before entering into Old Europe proper with the Channel invasion into Normandy almost a full year later.

Still, it made a lot of sense militarily to clean up the scattered Wehrmacht units in southern Europe before undertaking a final push into the Fatherland from the beaches at the Normandy coastline. With the surrender of the remnants of the Afrika Korps in North Africa, the bulk of this southern fighting force escaped the debacle of the final fall of the Third Reich which lasted only a short decade rather than a thousand years.

Things on the ground in Europe were accelerating at a rapid pace now what with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the entrance of the United States into the Second World War on two fronts, and the flip flop of Italy from the ranks of the Axis into the hands of the Allies.

Of course, the Nazis were quick to make every effort to totally disarm the Italian military and were highly successful in this regard. The Italian soldiers were never really comfortable at being a pawn for Hitler in the war and were eager to return to their farms and homes as quickly as possible. The Fuhrer was in the grip of a sense of it all falling apart at this point and he moved quickly to occupy all of France banishing the Vichy government to some dead end office space inside of Germany and allowing the Gestapo to implement harsh measures of collecting the remaining Jews in French territory and transporting them all to the concentration camps that existed only as the “end of the line” for their existence on earth. The French government and the police and French militia were complicit in this order and followed orders like automatons in fear for their own lives and the lives of their families. That part of French history was carefully erased from the French history books as too shameful to be repeated in front of little children. Yet another example of how history books can shape new generations into an entirely false sense of what had actually happened in the past.

It is difficult to understand why the German Wehrmacht was so well entrenched in the Sicilian countryside but it was unfortunately the case and they had to be uprooted and destroyed to secure the Allies southern flank as they continued to dismantle the Nazi hold over the occupied territory of Europe.

As I write this chapter, I think back to a film I saw as a young child called “A Walk in the Sun” which came out just after World War II describing a day in the life of a platoon of American soldiers as they walk across the Italian countryside with danger at every turn in the road. The well written book by Harry Brown was put into words for the screen by screenwriter Robert Rossen with stunning visual effects. It was the epitome of the “Boots on the Ground” controversy that dominates today’s discussions of actually putting ground forces in harm’s way fighting against stiff opposition. Strangely, there is more truth in films such as this one, or like “Sahara” with Humphrey Bogart as the hard-bitten tank commander searching for water in the desert in North Africa than one would find in some cut and dry account of some forgotten battle so very long ago.

There were many reasons for the invasion of the island of Sicily by the Allies. The primary one was to press their successes in North Africa against the Axis into the homeland of the Mussolini-led Italians and to drive them from their alliance with Hitler. That was aided by the fact that most Italians considered their pact with the Fuhrer as a “deal with the Devil” and they were ready to surrender at almost any excuse.

It was an ambitious plan that involved large numbers of troops and equipment along with both airborne assaults and amphibious assaults of coordinated attacks at the same time. The surprised German troops were fighting like rats in a trap with nowhere to go. Their enjoyment with what they had previously considered a plush assignment in the Italian countryside turned to desperation as they fought to escape the brunt of the Allied attacks that showed no signs of easing up as they were steadily pushed back into a small corner of the island. The civilian populace was enthusiastically endorsing the Allies despite being recently a member of the Axis powers. The German opposition was highly suspicious of the motivations of the Italian troops fighting alongside them. Most of the Italian troops were not from Sicily but were from Italy proper and they only wanted to go home and get away from fighting a war not very much to their liking.

The Allied plan was relatively simple.

General Eisenhower who was in overall command approved a plan that involved Allied forces landing in the southeastern corner of the island. General Patton’s Seventh Army would land in the vicinity of the Gulf of Gela while General Montgomery’s forces would land further east in the vicinity of Cape Passero. They would separately move north to Santo Stefano with the intent to split the island in two parts.