Inferno - Max Hastings [281]
The Americans agreed to the Italian commitment, subject to an understanding that come autumn, several divisions would be withdrawn, for redeployment to Britain to prepare for D-Day. As late as 27 July 1943, the British Joint Intelligence Committee correctly forecast an imminent Italian surrender, but mistakenly assumed that Hitler’s forces would thereafter withdraw to the Maritime Alps and positions covering Venice and the Tyrol. Churchill’s chiefs of staff were more cautious, anticipating some German reinforcement of Italy. But Allied operations against Mussolini’s country were launched amid British assurances of easy pickings, which prompted enduring American bitterness when confounded by events.
On 10 July an armada of 2,590 warships and transports began to disembark 180,000 troops on the coast of Sicily, under the command of Gen. Sir Harold Alexander. The British landed in the east, the Americans in the southwest. Strong winds wreaked havoc with the airborne plan, causing many gliders to fall into the sea—69 out of 147 which took off from Tunisia were thus lost, drowning 252 British paratroopers, and just 12 landed safely on their assigned zones. Reckless antiaircraft fire from the Allied fleet cost more casualties among the transport planes. Four Italian divisions offered little resistance on the beaches, which was fortunate, since many invaders were put ashore in the wrong places. Even some Germans showed little fight: an American paratrooper who landed helpless and alone amid one of their units was amazed when three enemy soldiers approached him. Their leader said in perfect English, “We surrender. For three years and eight months we’ve been fighting all over Europe, Russia and North Africa. That’s long enough in any army. We’re sick of it all.”
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. The 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 counterattacks, 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 Göring, proved the most inept German formation on the island. Its commander, Gen. Paul Conrath, wrote furiously