All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [279]
The defence was hampered by the fact that, while Gen. Albert Kesselring commanded in Italy, Mussolini had insisted that an Italian, Gen. Alfredo Guzzoni, should control Axis forces in Sicily, a responsibility he was woefully unfit to fulfil. But most men of the two German formations on the island, soon reinforced by elements of a third, threw themselves into the battle with their usual determination. Luftwaffe paratrooper Martin Poppel wrote on 14 July, after his unit took their first prisoners, British airborne soldiers: ‘In my opinion their spirit is none too good. They tend to surrender as soon as they face the slightest resistance, in a way that none of our men would have done.’ He added after an action a week later: ‘The Tommies obviously thought that their artillery fire yesterday had made us withdraw, and arrived early this morning with three lorries packed full of infantrymen. Hitched up behind 3.7cm and 5.7cm anti-tank guns. Clearly they didn’t understand our paratroopers and had learned nothing from their experiences yesterday. Everything was quiet. My boys let the motorcycle escort past and only let them have it when the lorries were right next to them. Within a matter of seconds the first truck was in flames, with Tommies jumping off as best they could. At the end of it we counted fifteen dead and brought back eleven prisoners. In the evening we fetch the anti-tank guns back – they’ll strengthen our positions considerably.’ Poppel spoke well only of British artillery, which commanded German respect throughout the war: ‘You have to hand it to Tommy, he gets his Forward Observation Officer in position bloody quickly and his artillery fires itself in very fast.’
The Germans suffered not only from Allied guns, but also from air attacks. They discovered that their enormous sixty-ton Tiger tanks, while formidable weapons, were quite unsuited to the rough terrain of Sicily: Axis counter-attacks, notably against the American beachheads, were easily repulsed. Martin Poppel’s braggadocio about his own unit’s performance should not mask the fact that another Luftwaffe division, the Hermann Goering, proved the most inept German formation on the island. Its commander Gen. Paul Conrath wrote furiously on 12 July: ‘I had the bitter experience of watching scenes during these last few days which are unworthy of a German soldier … Personnel came running to the rear, crying hysterically, because they had heard a single shot fired somewhere in the landscape … “Tank panic” and the spreading of rumours are to be punished by the most severe measures. Withdrawal without orders and cowardice are to be dealt with on the spot, if necessary by shootings.’ Germans were infuriated by widespread reports of Italian officers abandoning their men.
Italian soldiers streamed into the Allied lines to surrender ‘in a mood of fiesta’, as an American put it, ‘their personal possessions slung about them, filling the air with laughter and song’. A lieutenant wrote home: ‘A queer race these Italians. You’d think we were their deliverers instead of their captors.’ Some Americans responded brutally to such docility: in two separate incidents on 14 July, an officer and an NCO of the US 45th Division murdered large groups of Italians in cold blood. One, Sergeant Horace West, who killed thirty-seven with a Thompson sub-machine gun, was convicted