The frontal attack bogged down after making only a shallow dent in the Axis line. A counterattack by 15th Panzer Division, with only 30 tanks and two infantry battalions, overran the forward British infantry, stopping the entire British effort.
On March 23 Montgomery shifted his forces to the inland flank. Since Montgomery’s frontal attack had failed, the Axis commanders had already shifted 15th Panzer Division to this flank two days before.
It might have been another defeat for Montgomery, except that Arnim, now commander of the whole front with the departure of Rommel, decided to withdraw Messe’s army back to the fourteen-mile-wide Wadi Akarit bottleneck, 43 miles to the rear. At Wadi Akarit Montgomery went through his laborious preparations all over again.
Meanwhile Patton renewed his efforts at El Guettar and Maknassy. By March 27 Montgomery had reached Gabès on the way to Wadi Akarit, and Alexander launched Patton’s tanks toward the coast without waiting for infantry to clear a path. However, a chain of antitank guns stopped the tanks. Patton called on his infantry to crack the barrier, but they failed as well.
However, Arnim had transferred 21st Panzer to help 10th Panzer, reducing strength at Akarit, and making it easier for Montgomery to crack the line, which his infantry did April 5. Once more Montgomery was slow to exploit success, and by morning the Axis troops were moving up the coast, heading for Enfidaville, only 50 miles south of Tunis. Here was a narrow coastal plain with a hill barrier on the west.
Alexander tried to intercept the enemy’s retreat, using a new corps (the 9th) under British General John Crocker to strike on the night of April 7–8 through Fondouk pass, with the aim of driving through Kairouan to Sousse, twenty-five miles south of Enfidaville. Crocker commanded the British 6th Armored Division, a brigade of the British 46th Division, and the U.S. 34th Infantry Division, which had 350 tanks. But the 34th troops were three hours late starting, soon stopped, and took cover. This permitted the enemy to shift fire northward to stop 46th Division. Crocker threw in his 6th Armored tanks to force a passage on April 9. But they took till afternoon to break through fifteen antitank guns and lost 34 tanks. By the time Crocker’s tanks got to Kairouan on April 10, Messe’s army had already passed through. It was a remarkable feat by a few Axis defenders and a sorry show by the Allies, especially 34th Division.
Messe’s army got to Enfidaville by April 11, and linked up with Arnim’s 5th Panzer Army in a hundred-mile arc around Tunis and Bizerte. Even so, the Axis position was hopeless, because German and Italian strength and supplies were declining, while Allied strength was rising.
Just as the Allies poised for a knockout blow, a great dispute threatened to tear the Allies apart. Since 8th Army was coming up the coast from the south, and the British 1st Army was already positioned opposite Tunis and Bizerte on the north, Alexander selected them to smash into the bridgehead and force the Axis surrender. The U.S. 2nd Corps, despite now having 95,000 men, had been neatly pinched off, with no role to play in the victory march. This didn’t sit well with Patton or Bradley, and they complained loudly to Eisenhower, who demanded that 2nd Corps be shifted to the north and strike out on its own for Bizerte.
The 2nd Corps, now under Bradley since Patton was planning for the invasion of Sicily, moved north, 2,400 vehicles a day, driving behind British lines.
The attack opened on April 19, with 8th Army striking northward through Enfidaville toward Tunis, while the British 1st Army made the main effort by attacking April 22 near Medjez el Bab against a 15-mile sector held by only two regiments of the German 334th Division. On the north, Bradley’s 2nd Corps struck on April 23 against Hasso von Manteuffel’s scratch division of 8,000 men.
Allied combat strength was now approaching 300,000 men and 1,400 tanks, while the nine German divisions, backbone of the defense, counted only 60,000 men, and had fewer than 100 tanks.
Thus the Allied attack should have been a walkover. But it wasn’t. Italians and Germans at Enfidaville stopped Montgomery cold. The advance by 1st Army made slow progress against tenacious defense by the two German regiments, then was pushed back by an improvised brigade comprising all the remaining tanks of Army Group Africa. In the north the U.S. 2nd Corps made slow progress through rough country, then found Manteuffel had slipped back to a new line a few miles in the rear. The Allied offensive came to a halt.
But the Axis, because their supply lines had been virtually choked off, were down to only enough fuel to run their vehicles for twenty-five kilometers, while ammunition was sufficient for only three days, and food was getting desperately short.
On April 21, Montgomery suspended his attacks at Enfidaville because of losses, permitting Arnim to shift his armor northward to stop the British from breaking through east of Medjez el Bab.
Meanwhile Bradley’s 2nd Corps resumed its attacks on April 26, but was held up by obstinate resistance. Manteuffel’s men were virtually out of ammunition, however, and withdrew to a new line east of Mateur, only fifteen miles from Bizerte. There was now little maneuver room in the Axis position, and any breakthrough would be fatal. The Germans had also lost their air cover, because the Allies had seized the main fields, and aircraft had been withdrawn to Sicily.
The Allied breakthrough on May 6 came on a narrow front, less than two miles wide, in the Medjez el Bab sector, by four British divisions, two infantry, two armored, with 470 tanks. Although the lead tanks poured through the gap, the commander halted after six miles—although there was nothing between him and Tunis, since the Germans were immobilized by lack of fuel. His aim was to keep all his brigades together.
The advance resumed early on May 7, but the British, again showing excessive caution, only reached Tunis in the afternoon, though there was no resistance.
Meanwhile, 2nd Corps discovered the road ahead empty on May 7, and drove into Bizerte in the afternoon.
Mass surrenders began. Hitler had called for resistance to the death, but the Axis soldiers gave up everywhere. The bulk of the battle-tested German and Italian troops in the Mediterranean, about 160,000 men, were marched off to prisoner-of-war cages. If they had been evacuated to Sicily and Italy, an attack on either would have been an expensive, possibly prohibitive exercise. Rommel had been right. The army would die if it remained in Africa.
18 THE INVASION OF SICILY
ALLIED OPERATIONS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AFTER THE CAPTURE OF TUNISIA presented a case study of how Germany might have achieved a deadlock if Hitler had moved over to defensive warfare. Hitler’s senior generals had been pleading with him to follow this strategy ever since the failure to capture Moscow in December 1941.
The disaster of Stalingrad should have convinced Hitler that there was no hope for a decision in the east. At the same time, western Allied commanders were proving to be so cautious that they were offering him a chance to reverse by defense many of the strategic errors he had committed by offense.
Victory, of course, no longer was possible. But Germany might have achieved a standstill in the west if Hitler had transferred much of his army and air force to challenge landings by the western Allies. By husbanding his forces in the east, and above all by avoiding an offensive that might consume his little remaining striking power, he also might have held back the Soviet Union until everyone was weary of war.
But such a reversal would have required Hitler to see that he had made mistakes—and this Hitler could not do. On the contrary, he began in the spring of 1943 to concentrate every man, gun, and tank possible for a final confrontation with the Red Army in the Kursk salient northwest of Kharkov. This campaign, Operation Citadel, was to be a make-or-break effort to regain the initiative. In this continued quest to destroy Russia and Communism, he neglected the Mediterranean and the northern coast of France. It was his ultimate failure as a field commander.
German generals in the Mediterranean were seeing that the principal Allied commanders were hesitant, slow-moving, and insistent upon overwhelming superiority before they undertook operations. Allied obsession with security played
directly into the strengths of the German army. Compared to Allied commanders, German generals were, on balance, bolder, more flexible, more inventive, more willing to take chances, and more confident of their ability to overmaster opponents.
A couple of decisions illustrate the attitude of Eisenhower, Alexander, Montgomery, and other senior commanders. First, though no one expected much opposition, they earmarked ten divisions for the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky), more than they were later able to get on the beaches of Normandy. Second, they insisted on attacking the Italian boot at Salerno because it was within the 200-mile range of Spitfires operating from northeast Sicily. Since the Germans knew about the Allied fixation on air cover, they spotted Salerno as the target and prepared a gruesome reception there.
After Tunisia, the Americans had committed themselves only to an invasion of Sicily. In mid-May 1943 Winston Churchill made his third visit to Washington, hoping to get an agreement to assault the boot of Italy. This, he argued, would lead to a quick Italian surrender. Churchill avoided mention of his real purpose: to turn the Americans away from a cross-Channel invasion.
But General Marshall insisted that Operation Bolero, the buildup in Britain for a cross-Channel attack (Operation Roundup), take precedence over anything else. This did not rule out an invasion of Italy, but Marshall hoped to prevent any shift toward the Mediterranean.
He was partly successful. The conference, code-named Trident, established early March 1944 as the date for the invasion of France, an operation that soon received the new code name Overlord. Nothing was said about Italy.
Churchill didn’t accept the silence at Washington as final and called a meeting at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers for May 29, 1943, to push for an Italian invasion, and, by inference, abandonment of Overlord. General Marshall attended, but Churchill stacked the deck with Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial staff, and all British commanders in the Mediterranean.
Eisenhower was interested in gaining the airfields around Foggia in southern Italy to attack the Ploesti oil fields and targets in southern Germany, but he was not enthusiastic about a campaign up the rugged mountainous boot of Italy, especially since rain, mud, and immobility would be coming with winter.
Churchill was cagey enough not to propose more than seizure of southern Italy, but Brooke confessed privately to Eisenhower that he wanted to avoid any wider land front than the Allies could sustain in Italy, and preferred applying Allied air and naval power to blockade Germany and destroy its industry.
Eisenhower knew Marshall would never accept abandonment of Overlord, but he found himself agreeing to seize Naples and the Foggia airfields. Churchill and Brooke were satisfied. An Allied army was unlikely to stop with Naples and Foggia. Once the camel’s nose got under the tent, the whole animal was likely to follow. Churchill might still get his Mediterranean strategy.
The key to Sicily was the narrow Strait of Messina (in Greek mythology guarded by Scylla and Charybdis), less than three miles wide, which divides the northeastern tip of the island from the toe of Italy (Calabria). Any supplies to and evacuation from Sicily had to pass this bottleneck.
Since the Allies held command of the sea, the way to assure the capitulation of the enemy on Sicily without firing a shot was to invade the toe of Italy. There were virtually no Axis troops in Calabria. Its occupation would have separated Sicily from the mainland and prevented the evacuation of troops from the island—except those few who might have been flown out.
This idea never received serious consideration. Part of the reason was the hesitation by the Americans to commit to an invasion of mainland Italy. But the principal reason was Eisenhower’s unwillingness to undertake any operation that was not conservative, sure, and direct. The American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote: “The entire Husky plan was wrong…. We should have attacked the Messina bottleneck first.”
General Heinrich-Gottfried Vietinghoff-Scheel, who commanded the German 10th Army in Italy, wrote that the Allies could have seized the Strait of Messina “without any special difficulty.” If this had happened, Albert Kesselring, German commander in chief south, said it “would have turned the landing in Sicily into an overwhelming victory.”
Instead, Eisenhower approved a completely frontal attack. General Montgomery’s 8th Army was to land at the southeastern corner of Sicily, while George Patton’s U.S. 7th Army was to come ashore immediately to the west.
This was where the Italians and Germans expected the invasion, and where the Axis commander, Italian General Alfredo Guzzoni, had posted his 275,000 men in eight coastal divisions (static forces made up mostly of Sicilian conscripts), and four mobile Italian divisions, with two German divisions (the 15th Panzergrenadier and the Hermann Göring Panzer) divided into five mobile reserve groups.
Hitler had not sent more troops to Sicily because he suspected Mussolini might be overthrown and the Italians sue for peace. He also was not sure the Allies would land in Sicily. To him Sardinia was a more logical target. Possession of this island would provide an easy jump to Corsica just to the north, and from Corsica the Allies could strike at southern France or northern Italy. He also thought the Allies might land in Greece and push northward through the Balkans.
British intelligence officers abetted Hitler’s misconceptions. They planted papers on the body of a “British officer” washed ashore on the Spanish coast. In addition to identity papers and personal letters, the documents included a private letter written by Sir Archibald Nye, vice chief of the Imperial General Staff, to General Alexander saying the Allies intended to land in Sardinia and Greece while aiming to convince the Axis that Sicily was the target.
Nazi agents in Spain were convinced the letter was authentic. Though it didn’t sway Kesselring or the Italian chiefs, it made a strong impression on Hitler. He sent 1st Panzer Division from France to Greece, the 90th Panzergrenadier Division to Sardinia, and Kurt Student’s 11th Air Corps of two parachute divisions to the south of France to intervene when the Allies invaded Sardinia.
It took Eisenhower and his senior generals until May 13 to finish their plans. Yet, since only one of the divisions intended for Husky was being used in the last stages of the Tunisian campaign, the invasion could have followed directly on the heels of the Axis surrender. If this had happened, the attackers would have found the island virtually bereft of defenders and could have seized it almost without casualties.
Because of extreme caution, therefore, the Allied invasion of Sicily was delayed to July 10, 1943. The only surprise was that a storm unexpectedly blew up, and the members of the Italian coastal divisions, who were not much interested in fighting anyway, went to sleep thinking the Allies would wait for good weather.
Four British divisions landed on a forty-mile stretch on the southeastern corner of Sicily around Syracuse and Cape Passero, while four American divisions landed to the west on a forty-mile front across the beaches around Scoglitti, Gela, and Licata. A total of 150,000 troops came ashore on the first three days; ultimately there were 478,000: 250,000 British, 228,000 American.
The American landing was made possible by use of new LST (Landing Ships Tank) and DUKW amphibious trucks.
Italian naval response was weak. Only four ships and two LSTs were lost—to submarine attack. Meanwhile Allied aerial superiority was so great (4,000 aircraft against 1,500 German and Italian) that enemy bombers had withdrawn to central Italy.
The worst Allied losses were in airborne troops. Parts of the British 1st and the American 82nd Airborne Divisions were to land inland and seize key points. But high winds scattered the Americans over a fifty-mile radius and caused 47 of 134 British gliders to fall into the sea.
On none of the landing sites did the Italians offer any resistance. General Sir Harold Alexander, in command of land forces, wrote: “The Italian coastal divisions, whose value had never been rated very high, disintegrated almost without firing a shot, and the field divisions, when they were met, were also driven like chaff before the wind. Mass surre
nders were frequent.”
From the first day of the invasion, the whole burden of the defense fell on the Germans. Only one major counterattack occurred. The Hermann Göring Division had a force of 56-ton Tiger tanks around Caltagirone, twenty miles inland from the Gela plain. On the morning of July 11, the Tigers overran outposts of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division and those of the 45th Infantry Division, reaching the sand dunes bordering the beaches. It was scary, but well-directed naval gunfire broke up the attacks.
With Italian forces surrendering to any Allied troops that appeared, the Germans withdrew to the northeast corner of Sicily to cover the routes to Messina. They formed a powerful defensive line around the Mount Etna massif with the help of two additional divisions, all under a new headquarters (14th Panzer Corps) commanded by Valentin Hube.
As Montgomery attacked northward up the east coast, Patton’s 7th Army swung around to the west and central portions of the island, captured Palermo, all with little or no opposition, and drove along the north coast toward Messina.
As Sicily was being overrun, the Italians ousted Mussolini on July 25 and turned the government over to the king, Victor Emanuel, and Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The new leaders arrested Mussolini, but to deceive their German allies attested their determination to continue the war, all the while establishing secret contacts in Lisbon with the Allies.
President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were holding their Quebec conference (code-named Quadrant, August 14–24, 1943), and they superintended the negotiations. Churchill was hoping Mussolini’s ouster would turn the Americans away from Overlord and lead to a move through northern Italy into southern France or toward Vienna. He also sought to wrest Greece and the Balkans from the Germans. He especially wanted landing craft to attack the Italian-ruled island of Rhodes in the Dodecanese Islands in the eastern Mediterranean. On this, Churchill ran up against adamant opposition from General Marshall.
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 22
