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By Root 1195 0

at key points throughout the Italian Peninsula as well. Field Marshal Kesselring, “Smiling Albert” as the Allied troops called him, was the German commander for the Mediterranean. Fortunately for German-Italian relations, Kesselring was something of an Italophile, which was rather rare in German military circles, and he and the Italian Comando Supremo managed to get along in what otherwise might have been a very awkward situation. As the possibility of an Allied invasion neared, Hitler ordered Erwin Rommel, back from Africa and sick leave, to command a shadow army group in the Alps, to be activated in the event of a landing. Unlike Kesselring, Hitler was aware of the possibility of Italian defection. He did not think that in such an event the Germans could hold the entire peninsula, but he issued orders that the German forces were to fall back and hold the shoulder of the northern Apennines, keeping the Allies out of the Po Valley.

Musing on his allies, Hitler once remarked disgustedly, “The Italians never lose a war; no matter what happens, they always end up on the winning side.” By 1943 the Italians, or many of them in high places, recognized that they were on the losing side and that it was time to get off it. To do so, they had to achieve two things: they had to get rid of Mussolini and they had to get Allied help to protect them from the German reaction. The spur that forced them to deal with the first of these was the invasion of Sicily.

On July 10 the greatest armada of the war, more than 3,000 ships, dropped anchor off the beaches of southern Sicily. Nearly half a million Allied soldiers made up the invasion force, larger than would be put into the early stages of the Normandy landings. Overall command went to General Eisenhower, as the Mediterranean theater chief. Under him General Sir Harold Alexander led 15th Army Group made up of two armies, the British 8th commanded by the desert victor, Montgomery, and the American 7th, under General George S. Patton, who had commanded the Casablanca landings and had then moved into still greater prominence during the Tunisian campaign.

Sicily was garrisoned by about 350,000 Axis soldiers, under General Alfred Guzzoni; many of these were local coastal reserve forces, who did not care for their German allies. The main strength of the defense was six mobile divisions, two of them German. As always, for an Axis faced with the superior enemy mobility conferred by sea power, the problem was whether they should try to hold all the possible landing sites, which was beyond their strength, or whether they should concentrate in some central position, then react when the Allied moves were revealed. In that case they would be hindered by Allied air superiority. The dilemma was essentially insoluble, and in Sicily, in Italy, and in Normandy the Germans were bothered by it.

In Sicily they concentrated inland, hoping to move and seal off the beaches as rapidly as possible. The landings therefore went relatively smoothly, encountering light opposition from the Italian coastal defenders. The weather was bad, with heavy seas running, and the invasion took the Axis by surprise. The most difficult part of the operation was a series of airborne drops. On the night of the initial landing, American paratroopers and British glider-borne infantry were scattered all over southern Sicily by high winds and the inexperience of their pilots. On subsequent nights, the 11th and the 13th, large numbers of Allied airborne troops were shot down by the Allied ships, as the transport planes flew over the invasion fleet to their drop zones. The Italians and Germans had been mounting fairly heavy but ineffectual hit-and-run bombing attacks against the shipping, and the gunners shot at anything that flew.

In spite of these setbacks the airborne troops secured some major bottlenecks on the approach roads to the beaches, and their very dispersion over the countryside helped to dislocate the enemy response. The crisis of the landing came on the 11th when the Germans mounted heavy armored counterattacks in