All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [280]
On the Allied right, Montgomery’s two corps took Syracuse as planned on the first day, but thereafter made slow progress, hampered by lack of transport. ‘This is not tank country,’ a British officer complained, while one of Montgomery’s soldiers grumbled that Sicily was ‘worse than the fuckin’ desert in every fuckin’ way’. A British officer, David Cole, described the experience of ‘plodding along mile after dusty mile in a temperature of 95 degrees in the shade’ until he looked down on the plain of Catania with his commanding officer.
The panorama before us was magnificent. Thirty miles to the north, dominating the horizon was the huge, misty, snow-capped conical mass, 10,000 feet high, of Mount Etna … Along the coast, the city of Catania was dimly visibly, shimmering in the heat. All this would have constituted a picture of great beauty and tranquillity, had it not been for the thud of shells, with their tell-tale puffs of black smoke, exploding near the river. The reality was that down in front of us, concealed in slit-trenches and ditches and sheltered behind buildings and whatever cover they could find, two armies were facing each other in mortal conflict.
A British airborne unit took the Primosole bridge intact, only to be forced back by counter-attacks when it ran out of ammunition. Luftwaffe paratroopers thereafter conducted a staunch defence of the bridge against assaults characterised by sluggishness, lack of imagination and failures of communication. A shortcoming of the British Army throughout the war was the poor quality of its wireless sets, manifest throughout the Primosole operations. The Germans had better radios than their enemies, a significant battlefield advantage. The differential was most marked on the Eastern Front, where in 1941–42 most Russian planes and tanks lacked wirelesses altogether; even in 1943 only company commanders’ tanks were fitted with them. Poor British communications contributed to disaster in the 1940 French and 1941 Cretan campaigns. As late as September 1944, the failure of radio links throughout First Airborne Division contributed significantly to its defeat at Arnhem, and represented a professional disgrace to the British Army. The RAF between 1942 and 1945 deployed some of the most advanced electronic technology in the world, but British military wirelesses remained unreliable, and this weakness sometimes significantly influenced the course of battles, as it did in Sicily.
At Primosole, two battalions of the Durham Light Infantry suffered five hundred casualties. Tank–infantry coordination was poor, and two German 88mm guns destroyed a succession of Shermans advancing across open ground. Some of the attackers afterwards described the fighting as among the bloodiest of their war. Yet the Germans held the ground with an improvised battlegroup, chiefly composed of engineers and signallers rather than infantrymen. It remains a mystery why Montgomery, confronted with strong resistance, did not outflank the defenders by sending troops by sea to Catania. The Primosole bridge was eventually overrun, but the advance had been seriously delayed.
Alexander tasked the Americans merely to protect the British flank. In consequence, they were denied an opportunity to push north across the island, with the possibility of trapping a panzer division which was withdrawing eastward. Patton, losing patience with his restricted role, sent a corps racing for