Allied Campaign in Sicily by Carlo D'Este

[After the victory in North Africa Allied Commanders met in Casablanca to iron out a strategy. The  British  ‘grand’ strategy prevailed- Sicily would be invaded with Italy on the block after that - but coordination and planning remained deeply flawed.]

Another decision taken at Casablanca was to have enormous effects that are still being felt today. This was the announcement that the Allies would only accept an unconditional surrender from Germany, a declaration that has been judged one of the most tragic and disastrous mistakes of  the entire Second World War .’Only time will to determine its wisdom’ George Marshall told Eisenhower at the time.[ Unlike various operational plans connected to the invasion of Sicily, this decision was never seriously reconsidered.]

[ The author points out three major tactical errors in the campaign. First, the Allies timidly avoided an amphibious assault directly at Messina and the coast of Calabria. They had the overwhelming naval, air and troop superiority needed to do it. All the German and Italian forces on Sicily would have been trapped. As it was, they escaped, lived to fight another day. Second, they canceled the planned amphibious assault at Catania, which was lightly defended, or at least completely smashed by aerial bombardment. As a result, Montgomery’s 8^th Army’s drive up the coast to Messina stalled. Third, if Patton had driven  his army from the Gela sector northeast instead of northwest to Palermo, the German defensive perimeter would have been breached and the fighting concluded more quickly and with fewer casualties.]

All the words of praise and self-congratulations that followed the conquest of Sicily never masked the hollowness of the Allied  victory. One historian has described Sicily as ‘an Allied physical victory, a German moral victory,’ and undoubtedly this is how the campaign ought to be remembered. Behind the rhetoric there was little joy, and dissatisfaction existed at the highest level where even the War Office after-action report called the campaign ‘a strategic and tactical failure’ and a chaotic and a deplorable example of everything planning should not be.’

From the outset the Allies had taken the safe, conservative path. The invasion plan was Montgomery’s version that opted for safety in numbers and was in no small part the result of the misjudgment of the Allied planners who overestimated the resistance the Italians would offer. The original plan for multiple landings, while bold in conception, was flawed – and Montgomery’s compromise plan tried to use only the Eighth Army to seize Messina, while relegating Patton’s Seventh Army to a minor role. Nevertheless, as the campaign unfolded there were opportunities to have won a decisive victory which were squandered. For the Allied ground forces were left to fight a needless, frontal battle of attrition. The result was that a German Army corps which never exceeded 60,000 men and which was void of air and naval support managed to thwart and then delay the might of two Allied armies whose combined strength exceeded 450,000- troops. What ought to have been a brief, decisive victory lasted thirty-eight days at no small cost. German losses are believed to have totaled nearly 29,000: 4,325 killed, 6,663 captured and an estimated 17,944 wounded, while Allied Armies lost 11,843 British and 8,782 American skilled, wounded, missing or captured.

The experience gained in Sicily provided valuable lessons, both positive and negative, not only for the combined operation planners but for the commanders of all servicers who participated in the long-awaited cross-Channel operation. Sicily ought to have served as a clear warning to the Allied leadership that faint heartedness and the absence of clearly defined strategic goals were a recipe for future setbacks. Instead, the lessons learned (though later applied to OVERLORD) were ignored in the Italian campaign where the same blunders were repeated time and again. To have needlessly permitted the surviving German force in Sicily to evade destruction was bad enough, but within less than a month the Allies began demonstrating just how little had been learned when the Italian campaign opened with the invasion of Salerno and Taranto. Led by Alexander, who continued to exhibit the dame lack of imagination and strategic vision he had shown in Sicily, the campaign in Italy was doomed to become the longest, dreariest and most expensive Allied endeavor of the entire war.

The defeat of the Luftwaffe fulfilled the Allied goal of removing Axis airpower as a factor in the defense of Sicily with stunning success. No such clam could be made for air operations in support of the conquest of the island by the ground forces. Tactical air support left much to be desired, particularly Coningham’s attempt to isolate the battlefield by crippling the enemy lines of communication leading into it. These targets including not only ports and rail centers but also road communication centers inland. The towns were pounded into rubble. Regalbuto, was hit by 215 American, British and South African fighter-bombers on 26 July alone. Between 10 July and 7 August Adrano was pounded by 694 aircraft, ‘leaving it untenable’ During the first week in August Randazzo received the same treatment from 745 fighter-bombers. But the Germans rarely ever established their defensive positions inside a town and the result of these bombings was most often the death of innocent civilians and the reduction of the place to ruins.

Daily Telegraph correspondent Christopher Buckley witnessed many of these bombardments and later wrote that Regalbuto and Randazzo were among those ‘blotted out by bombing from the air on a scale unprecedented in the history of war.’ The bombing failed on two counts: it rarely killed Germans and it created more problems than it solved. As Buckley observed:

. . .our objective, which was to block the roads with rubble and render retreat of the German wheeled vehicles impractical, was largely frustrated because it was not necessary for the Germans to retreat through villages. Instead, we found that when our troops entered these places they had to spend hours clearing away the rubble in order to continue the advance. Our own bombing was piling up obstacles in the way of the advance of our ground forces. Nor was the occupation of these villages eased by the necessity for coping with the scores of homeless and wounded inhabitants and the hundreds of dead and wounded civilians.

In his study of the Second World War, British historian J. F. C. Fuller called these tactics ‘asinine’. Singling out Coningham for his tactics of destroying cities and towns, Fuller scornfully asserted that ‘surely it should have occurred to him that low-flying attack with cannon and machine-gun fire would have caused the Germans incomparably more damage than this insensate bombing of villages.’

The key to a successful campaign, however, was not in the air but on the see. HUSKY was an enormous improvement over TORCH  and provided valuable lessons in the development of amphibious warfare that would be used in preparations for OVERLORD. The newly developed LST, DUKW and the LCT/LCI/LCVP proved exceptionally successful  as a means of landing men and equipment on a hostile shore. The Navy fully merited Alexander’s praise for the ‘magnificent ‘ support provided his ground forces. But to have defeated the Axis evacuation of Sicily required an integrated, joint air-naval effort which was never forthcoming, thus realizing the worst fears of the British Chiefs of Staff. Sea power was the greatest weapons the Allied possessed and it was never pressed anywhere near its full capacity. If an epitaph is to applied to the Sicily:

The fact remains that the most economical solution was sea-borne attack,, because  in coastal operations he who commands the sea can nearly always find an open flank leading to the enemies rear- the decisive point in every battle. This was the lesson of the Sicilian campaign, and it was not learned.

 Brute force bereft of wisdom falls to ruin by its own weight- Horace.