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Palermo in the north-west. He reached the city on 22 July, taking many Italian prisoners, but his thrust baffled Kesselring, because it was strategically futile. Alexander’s acquiescence in this American dash in the opposite direction from the German main forces reflected his usual lack of grip. It was obvious to every thoughtful officer that the campaign would be decided in eastern, not western Sicily. But as Allied soldiers picked their wandering paths across the island, only their opponents displayed clarity of purpose.

The Germans were hampered, however, by shortages of ammunition and supplies, and by the abject performance of their allies. Gen. Conrath wrote bitterly: ‘The Italians virtually never gave battle and presumably will not fight on the mainland either. Many units in Sicily, either led by their officers or on their own, marched off without firing a single shot … 90 per cent of the Italian army are cowards and do not want to fight.’ The readiness of Italian soldiers to abandon the struggle availed their nation little: in Sicily its long agony began. As town after town became a battlefield, battered by bombs and shells, Mussolini’s war-weary subjects suffered terribly. Troina, west of Mount Etna, became the focus of days of fierce fighting. A correspondent described the scene in the town after its eventual capture by the Americans: ‘A ghostly old woman lying amid crumbling plaster and shattered timber … stretched out her hands to us, stared out of sightless eyes, and moaned like the wind whining through pine trees. We went on to the church. Light was shining through a hole in the roof. Below it an unexploded 500lb bomb lay on the floor. Some American soldier breathed heavily in my ear: “God, that was a miracle” … In the mayor’s office we found a few of the living wounded that our soldiers had pulled out of the wreckage. On a wooden bench lay the thin form of a girl about ten years old. Her black hair was streaked with gray powder plaster. One of her legs was completely wrapped in bandages … In her two hands she clutched a cracker which a soldier had given her. She didn’t move but only stared at the ceiling.’

On 25 July in Rome, King Victor Emmanuel and Marshal Pietro Badoglio contrived the arrest of Mussolini. Europe’s first fascist leader scarcely protested at his own downfall. His spirit was broken, he was resigned to defeat and seemed chiefly concerned to save his skin. The ex-Duce spent the ensuing weeks of captivity, first on offshore islands then at a ski resort in the Apennines, eating prodigious quantities of grapes, reading a life of Christ and attending mass for the first time since childhood. It is doubtful that he much relished ‘rescue’ by Otto Skorzeny’s Nazi commandos on 12 September. Though restored to puppet power in northern Italy, he knew that his game was played out. So did Hitler, who for months had been casting about for an alternative leader of Italy’s fascists; he restored Mussolini only because he could identify no substitute.

The Duce’s fall precipitated a moment of exhilaration among the Allies and their sympathisers around the world. Many people found wartime life endurable only because they were sustained by spasmodic injections of hope. Amid local victories or reports of regime change, they experienced pathetic surges of excitement or relief. Victor Klemperer, the Dresden Jewish diarist who clung to a precarious liberty, noted many landmark occasions when he supposed Germany’s defeat imminent. On 27 July 1943, he exulted at Mussolini’s fate: ‘The end is now in sight – perhaps another six to eight weeks! We put our money on a military dictatorship [in Germany].’ A fellow Jew shared his euphoria, saying of his workplace, ‘We don’t really need to turn up in the morning now,’ and speculating about whether Hitler would survive another month. Such moments of fevered and misplaced optimism sufficed to carry people on both sides of the conflict just a little further through their sorrows and privations, staving off despair.

The political upheaval in Rome persuaded Hitler that Sicily