The Fight for Sicily and Italy
In January 1943 President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met in Casablanca to discuss future strategy. By this time, American success on Guadalcanal was assured, and it was agreed that enough resources would be allocated to the Pacific to retain the initiative in that theater. In Europe, the Americans favored an early attack across the English Channel, but Churchill and his staff felt that the Allies were not yet ready. After a lengthy debate, it was decided that Sicily and Italy presented the best opportunity for continuing the offensive in 1943.
Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, began soon after midnight on July 10, 1943. The American 82nd and British 1st airborne divisions dropped into landing zones inland to block enemy movements toward the invasion beaches. Meanwhile a naval armada of more than two thousand ships and craft staging out of North African bases converged on Sicily from the south and east. Under cover of darkness the assault waves of Patton’s 7th Army landed on the southern coast to seize the small ports of Gela, Licata, and Scoglitti. The British 8th Army under Montgomery landed on the Pachino Peninsula and Gulf of Noto to the east to seize the port at Syracuse. In all, more than four hundred seventy thousand troops went ashore across a beachhead extending nearly one hundred miles.
The overriding Allied objective on Sicily was to converge all forces on Messina in a large pincer movement, to trap the Axis defenders before they could evacuate the island. Characteristically, Patton drove his troops forward with all possible speed, capturing Palermo on July 22. He then turned eastward along the north coast, leapfrogging enemy defenses in a rapid series of amphibious landings. Montgomery decided to bypass the stiff coastal defenses in his sector and moved his forces inland over the rugged terrain around Mount Etna. Falling back along interior lines, the German and Italian forces were able to buy enough time to evacuate more than one hundred thousand troops and their equipment to the mainland, to oppose the next advance.
The next Allied move came with the September 1943 invasion of Italy. Montgomery’s 8th Army crossed the Straits of Messina on September 3 with no opposition. On September 9 the main attack came at Salerno by the newly formed 5th Army under General Mark Clark. There, the Germans waited in strength behind well-prepared defensive positions. Bitter fighting to gain and hold the beachhead reached a climax on September 1314 when a massive German counterattack with six hundred tanks and mobile guns was beaten back. On October 1 Allied forces entered Naples, as the Germans fell back to a new defensive line along the Volturno River.
From this point the Italian campaign became a slugfest as the American and British forces tried to surmount a series of bitterly contested German defensive positions. By year-end, fighting was stalled on the Gustav Line, seventy miles south of Rome. Anchored on the mountaintop abbey of Monte Casino, this German position proved to be almost impregnable. In an effort to break the stalemate, the Allies launched a major amphibious attack on January 22, 1944, at Anzio, thirty miles from Rome. This effort also stalled against determined and effective German resistance. It was not until May that the Monte Casino position fell to Allied assaults, precipitating a German retreat to new positions in the northern part of Italy. On June 4, 1944, Mark Clark’s 5th Army entered Rome unopposed, two days before the focus of the war would shift to the beaches of Normandy.