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must be evacuated. The Germans retreated eastwards in good order, fighting a succession of delaying actions. Tank gunner Erich Dressler, appalled by the wreck of his own unit and the inferiority of the defenders’ resources, was baffled by Allied dilatoriness: ‘With more grit the tommies could have finished the whole lot of us … I thought, it is all over. But for some reason or other they suddenly stopped.’ On the night of 11 August, the Germans began to ferry their forces across the Straits of Messina, more than two miles wide, to the Italian mainland. Although Ultra flagged the enemy’s intention, neither the Allied air forces nor the Royal Navy intervened effectively to prevent the Axis from withdrawing 40,000 German and 62,000 Italian soldiers together with most of their tanks, vehicles and supplies. This was a shocking failure. A German naval officer, Baron Gustav von Liebenstein, masterminded an evacuation which some described as a miniature Dunkirk: arguably, indeed, it was more successful, because all three German divisions reached the mainland in full fighting order. The Americans entered the port of Messina late on 16 August, just ahead of the British. The German commander, Gen. Hans Hube, completed his withdrawal from the island the following morning.

The Sicilian campaign taught the Anglo-Americans painful lessons. Amphibious and related air operations were poorly planned and clumsily managed. Coordination between air and ground forces was lacking. If Italian troops had fought with the same determination as the Germans, the invaders would have been pushed back into the sea. The Americans were dismayed by Alexander’s lack of grip, contemptuous of Montgomery’s sluggishness, irked by their ally’s apparent desire to relegate them to a subordinate role. The British, in their turn, were exasperated by the reluctance of American commanders, especially Patton, to conform to agreed plans. Each partner criticised the combat performance of the other’s troops. Both found it hard to overcome defenders holding high ground dominating the island’s few roads. The Germans executed masterly ambushes and demolitions, a foretaste of their tactics up the length of Italy during the next two years. The invaders failed to exploit sea power to outflank resistance, and merely conducted a succession of slogging matches.

Fifty thousand Germans had held half a million Allied soldiers at bay for five weeks. The invaders made much of the perils posed by Tiger tanks, nebelwerfer mortars, ‘spandau’ machine-gun and artillery fire; the difficulties of attacking in steep terrain; the heat; malaria and combat-fatigue losses. But it was plain that, though overwhelming Allied superiority eventually prevailed, the Wehrmacht’s soldiers had fought more convincingly than their Anglo-American counterparts. Again and again Allied forces failed – as they would again fail in north-west Europe – to translate captures of ground into destruction of enemy forces. The Germans were so baffled by their own escape, and by Allied failure to launch an amphibious operation into Calabria to cut them off, that some cherished a fantastic theory that Alexander had acquiesced in their withdrawal for political reasons.

The Sicilian campaign represented the only significant summer 1943 land operation against the Germans by the United States and Britain, engaging eight Allied divisions and costing 6,000 dead. During the same season, four million men were locked in combat around Kursk and Oryol, where half a million Russians perished. Some German civilians, desperate for an end of the war, lamented the slowness of Western Allied progress. Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote on 14 August: ‘We hoped and hoped that things would move even faster.’ There are explanations for the modest Western Allied ground commitment in 1943, but it is easy to see why the Russians regarded it with such contempt. So too did some participants. Lt. Col. Lionel Wigram, one of the British Army’s most energetic and imaginative officers, submitted a report analysing failures he had observed at first hand.