Inferno - Max Hastings [285]
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, 4 million men were locked in combat around Kursk and Orel, where half a million Russians perished. Some German civilians, desperate for an end of the war, lamented the sluggishness 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. He criticised set-piece frontal attacks, overdependence on artillery and refusal to exploit infiltration to work behind defenders in close country. He urged that every battalion should be relieved of some twenty-odd of its soldiers who invariably ran away in action. He concluded: “The Germans have undoubtedly in one way scored a decided success in SICILY. They have been able to evacuate their forces almost intact having suffered very few casualties … They have inflicted heavy casualties on us. We all feel rather irritated as a result.” This recklessly frank assessment reached Montgomery’s ears: his vanity pricked, he sacked Wigram from command of his battalion. No heed was taken of the colonel’s just strictures.
Apologists for the British and American armies assert that respect for the German defence of Sicily, like many other Axis battlefield achievements, cannot mask its ultimate failure. Kesselring’s forces were evicted from the island. They lost. This is true, and important. It is among the themes of this book that the Wehrmacht fought many battles brilliantly well, but that Germany made war very badly. Nonetheless, repeated Anglo-American failures to destroy Hitler’s armies, despite successes in displacing them from occupied territory, meant that the Red Army remained until 1945, as it had been since 1941, the main engine of Nazism’s destruction.
2. The Road to Rome
THE ALLIED ASSAULT on the Italian mainland began on 3 September, when Canadians of the Eighth Army landed in Calabria without meeting resistance; Kesselring, commanding the German defence, had decided to fight his first battle farther north. Five days later, on 8 September, as Allied leaders assembled for a summit in Quebec, Marshal Badoglio’s government in Rome announced Italy’s surrender, prompting renewed optimism about a swift advance up the peninsula. On the ninth, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed at Salerno. This proved one of the critical actions of the western war, but not in the fashion the invaders anticipated. Col. Bill Darby’s U.S. Rangers achieved initial success on the extreme left of the Allied line, clearing the Amalfi coast resort villages and securing the Chiunzi Pass, with its distant view of Naples. But elsewhere the Germans deployed rapidly to meet the invaders and launched a series of smashing counterattacks. Clark’s one American and one British corps found themselves penned in four small beachheads under intense fire.
On 13 September, Kesselring’s forces drove a wedge between U.S. and British elements which brought his panzers within a mile of the sea. The amphibious armada offshore suffered heavy attacks by the Luftwaffe, employing new radio-controlled glider bombs. Clark panicked and proposed reembarking the army. Though Eisenhower and Alexander overruled him, for hours chaos dominated the beachhead, especially after darkness fell. “In the belief that our position had been infiltrated by German infantry, [American