Inferno - Max Hastings [282]
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 U.S. 45th Division murdered large groups of Italians in cold blood. One, Sgt. Horace West, who killed thirty-seven with a Thompson submachine gun, was convicted by a court-martial, but later granted clemency. The other, Capt. John Compton, assembled a firing squad which massacred thirty-six Italian prisoners. Compton was court-martialled but acquitted, and was later killed in action. Patton, whose military ethic mirrored that of many Nazi commanders, wrote that “in my opinion these killings have been thoroughly justified.” He agreed to the courts-martial only under pressure. Disclosure of both incidents was suppressed, because Eisenhower feared enemy reprisals against Allied prisoners. If Germans had been responsible, they would have been indicted for war crimes in 1945, and probably executed.
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 counterattacks 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 the 1st 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