Leonardi hoped to seize the opportunity afforded by the foe’s disappearance from the battlefield in an immediate assault against Gela, using the momentum of 3rd Battalion’s advance to storm the town and push the Yanks back into the sea. His troops had just reached the Gela roadblock and were digging in for the attack, when Allied naval gunfire rained down 21cm and 39cm shells on them. Their numerical strength had been reduced to just 400 men, not enough to take the town, so reinforcements were urgently requested from the 34th Regiment. Leonardi was disappointed when relief came only in the form of a mortar company.

By the time it arrived, however, the enemy battleship barrage had been replaced by salvos of heavy artillery directed from troops of the U.S. 26th Infantry Regiment regrouped in and around Gela, where they anticipated a siege. Return fire rained down from 81mm mortars set up by the Italians on Colle Frumento, a hillock overlooking the town, and American casualties began to mount. After this softening-up bombardment, Leonardi planned to storm the town, from which the foe could be expelled from at least this part of Sicily. But his hopes were frustrated when he was informed that the 34th Regiment had itself suffered too many losses in men and equipment to spare him any reinforcements.

While the main body of his troops withdrew under cover of darkness, the Americans left Gela to reclaim unopposed the vacated ground they lost during the day, and outflanked the Battalion’s 9th Company. Its members escaped, however, joining armed motorcyclists of the substantially reduced 155th Bersaglieri atop Mount Castelluccio. There, several hundred men from both groups improvised a defensive position around the Battalion headquarters.

Just before sunrise on 12 July, they were shelled by a brief but massive barrage hurled at them from the combined ordinance of field artillery and naval guns, followed by waves of U.S. infantry advancing in a frontal attack. The hopelessly outnumbered defenders, still shaken from their drubbing meted out in the pre-dawn bombardment, continued to fight with desperate fanaticism, so much so, it took the G.I.s two hours of fierce combat before finally overwhelming Mount Castelluccio. But only a handful of Bersaglieri and their 9th Company comrades were captured. By then, 70% of the 3rd Battalion’s men were killed, wounded or missing.

A glum Mussolini told Admiral Franco Maugeri, one of his captors after the Badoglio coup, “If the Goering Division had resisted more strongly, the Americans would have been thrown back into the sea at Gela, and that might have changed a lot of things.”²¹

The waters around Sicily were no less hotly contested, although prodigious numerical superiority possessed by the Allies at sea and in the air made Italian sorties of any kind perilous in the extreme. They nonetheless took place. The Supermarina dispatched its dozen submarines available for the campaign to attack the Anglo-American armada off the southeastern coast of Sicily, where four were sunk within the first three days of the invasion.

Typical was the Piero Micca, among the Regia Marina’s most successful veterans in continuous service from the day Italy declared war. According to Jackson, “she was a good, maneuverable seaboat”, which, under Commander Meneghini, laid a barrage of forty mines outside the Royal Navy base at Alexandria. She alternated her mine-laying duties with transporting fuel and supplies to Tobruk, Leros and Cyrenaica, eluding the enemy until 29 July 1943, when another submarine, HMS Trooper, torpedoed her in the Straits of Otranto.²²

Such losses were compounded by the destruction of Italy’s latest undersea craft, large vessels built to serve as both attack boats and transports, with cargo capacities of 200 tons. Built for long-range missions, they featured numerous improvements over earlier designs, better living conditions for crew members, and foreshadowed today’s huge, world-cruising submersibles found in the Russian and U.S. Navies. Among the first of these, the Remo was making a high-speed, after-dark surface-run from the Ionian to Tyrhennian Seas. As she approached the straits, she was torpedoed and sunk by another submarine, a British boat, on 15 July. American bombers sank her sister ship, the Romolo, while she was on patrol in the same area, just three days later.

The Remo’s fate was somewhat offset two nights later by the Scipione, christened after Mussolini’s favorite Roman commander. The dangerously unescorted light cruiser steamed at high speed through the Strait of Messina, where she was beset by four British torpedo-boats. As they pressed their attack, the accuracy of her gunnery was such that the two leading torpedo-boats were sunk almost at once, and a third set ablaze and adrift. With that, the fourth MTB turned away at full throttle. The Scipione would survive the Sicilian Campaign to keep the Allies guessing when she would strike again.

Regia Marina motor torpedo-boats, even smaller in number than its submarines, fared better, when MAS 31 and 73 encountered two enemy destroyers off Cape Spartivento, just before dawn on 15 August. Defying intense deck-gun fire from the British vessels, the Italians closed for the kill. MAS 31 scored a hit on one of the warships, knocking it out of action, and the two motor torpedo-boats retired unscathed. With the Allied capture of airstrips on Sicily, however, further Italian naval operations opposing the invasion had to be terminated. Enemy air supremacy over the battlefield was complete, allowing USAAF and RAF bombers to range at will, attacking all enemy ships with impunity. But the Italian Navy’s part in the Sicilian Campaign was by no means over. In fact, it played the key role in Mussolini’s broader strategy.

On 3 August, stiff resistance on the Catania plain, where the island’s last defenses had been gathered, could no longer be expected to hold out against the combined weight of the American 5th and British 8th Armies about to trap Axis forces at Messina. In what General Eisenhower assumed would be hardly more than a formality, he was surprised to find all attempts at closing the gap there firmly rebuffed.

While German and Italian units held the Allies at bay, a veritable fleet of small, auxiliary vessels that had been kept in reserve for the present contingency steamed at high speed from Calabria on the Italian mainland toward Sicily’s northwest coast. They comprised motley flotillas of mine-sweepers, tugs, motorized barges, fishing boats, yachts, schooners, excursion vessels, ferries, and almost anything that could float. These disparate units were covered by the last specimens of Reggiane Ariete and Macchi Veltro fighters, which gave Mustang and Spitfire pilots a run for their money, despite Allied numerical supremacy.

Word spread that the redoubtable Littorio and Roma battleships, accompanied by the Scipione, together with every other surviving Italian warship, were on their way to clear the Messina Channel in a suicide run. Although untrue, U.S. naval authorities and British Admiralty commanders, unprepared for such an imaginary confrontation, quickly withdrew most of their surface units from around northern Sicily, allowing the masses of auxiliary vessels to pass largely unmolested, at least at sea. Most destruction came from the sky, but Italy’s odd assortment of ships and boats continued to evacuate troops and supplies amid a torrent of falling bombs.

The rescue operation continued non-stop for nearly two weeks, despite all opposition by Anglo-American forces. They were gradually taking ground, although at the highest attrition rate of the entire campaign. On 16 August, the last ferry carrying men and materiel away from Sicily steamed out of Messina, just as British troops entered the other end of the city. Its port facilities were being blown to bits under the falling bombs of an American air-raid, while Italian demolition experts sabotaged permanent installations. Despite losses among the odd assortment of vessels participating in the evacuation, they saved more than 70,000 German and Italian soldiers, including 10,000 tanks, armored cars, trucks and various military vehicles. In excess of 17,000 tons of ammunition arrived safely in Calabria.

From Mussolini’s point of view, the Sicilian Campaign concluded in Italy’s favor. “It was a success,” he stressed, “not a victory. That will come later, because the men and resources that can make it happen escaped to fight another day, on our terms, not the enemy’s.” Ironically, this optimism was voiced while he was under arrest after the fall of his Fascist regime. “The British escaped annihilation at Dunkirk,” he told his sympathetic captors, “and look where they are now! If they could do it, so can we. We did it at Sicily, and we shall triumph in the end!”²³