MEDENINE, TUNISIA
MARCH 6, 1943
8:30 P.M.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is on the run.
The long day of combat has been devastating. As night falls, desert winds carry the smell of death and burning German tanks. Rommel is fifty-one, a career soldier whose face is sunburned from years of desert warfare. His lips are chapped from the heat and his eyes lined from goggles that keep out the dust. The Desert Fox, as British journalists have nicknamed the Allied army’s most wily adversary, is also Nazi Germany’s top field general.1
Rommel has known defeat before, but not like today. His army, known as the Afrika Korps, has not just been defeated—it has been decimated. So, rather than watch the total annihilation, Rommel now makes a calculation that could alter the course of World War II. His new plan is centered around a military reality.
Today was supposed to be a huge victory—with Rommel boldly striking at Allied troops under British general Bernard Law Montgomery.
That did not happen.
Unbeknownst to the Desert Fox, British code breakers intercepted his battle plans. At 5:36 a.m., just twenty-four minutes before Rommel’s troops were to launch their first bombardment, British forces were alerted to his strategy. Thus, the surprise became a debacle. Through fourteen hours of fighting, the British were always one step ahead. More than thirty thousand shells rained down on German positions. Rommel began the day with 140 tanks—he now has just 52. His veteran Panzer crews lie dead and burned on the sands of North Africa. In addition, more than three hundred German infantry have been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner by the British.
Montgomery’s forces did not lose a single tank.
Now, as night falls over the desert, a weary Rommel orders retreat. He knows that the time to flee has come. German Panzer tanks and infantry-carrying trucks turn north, fleeing to the coastal Mediterranean city of Gabès.
“The battle was lost,” Rommel will later write. “A great gloom settled over us.”
For two years, Erwin Rommel has controlled the war in North Africa. The Desert Fox utilized an aggressive style of tank warfare to win territory ranging from Tunisia in the west to Egypt in the east—a distance as wide as all of Western Europe. But then, just shy of taking the Egyptian capital of Cairo in July 1942, Rommel’s Afrika Korps was first defeated by Montgomery and the British at El Alamein. Two more defeats at the hands of the British soon followed. To save the lives of his men, Rommel ordered a retreat. The Afrika Korps pulled back hundreds of miles to Tunisia, hoping to make another stand against the British.
That stand was today.
All this time, the British and their Commonwealth Allies have been Rommel’s only opponent. But now the Americans have arrived. Rommel easily overwhelmed and defeated a U.S. force two weeks ago at the Kasserine Pass, but he knows that their best general was not in command for that battle. That will not happen again. General George S. Patton, a brilliant tactician and America’s most aggressive combat general, has just arrived in Africa to take charge of U.S. forces. It is said that his relentless style of warfare borrows heavily from Rommel.2
It is just a matter of time until Germany loses control of North Africa. The Desert Fox is sure of that. “For the Panzerarmee to remain in Africa was plain suicide,” he will recall in the aftermath of the Medenine defeat.
At 7:50 a.m. on March 9, fewer than forty-eight hours after ordering his tanks to pull back, General Erwin Rommel flies to Eastern Europe to meet with German leader Adolf Hitler. American commander Dwight Eisenhower will later write of this transitory moment, accusing Rommel of “foreseeing the inevitable and desiring to save his own skin.” But to Rommel, this departure is not permanent. He is the führer’s favorite general. No other man can deliver the hard news that the war in North Africa is irretrievably lost. He plans to return to Africa, but not until his message is delivered in person.
Hitler and Rommel meet at the Werwolf, Hitler’s command post in the Ukraine where the Russian front is the scene of bitter and unrelenting fighting. The führer’s forest compound is built of thick reinforced concrete. Snow still covers the ground. Coming directly from the dry heat of Africa, Rommel’s sunburn looks dramatically out of place. He shivers despite his greatcoat. Before the strategic discussion can begin, Hitler presents Rommel with a diamond-studded Knight’s Cross, making the general only the sixth man in the history of the Third Reich to receive such an honor.
Despite the lavish award, Rommel does not forget why he has made this journey to a cold, remote Ukrainian woods. As the two men sit down to tea, the Desert Fox outlines the hopeless situation in Africa. The tactically brilliant Rommel argues that rather than lose valuable veteran troops to death or imprisonment, they should be moved from Africa to Fortress Europe. Sicily is their most logical destination. That island off the south coast of Italy is the closest portion of Europe to the African mainland. It is just a few hundred miles from Tunis to the Sicilian capital of Palermo. Logistically, such an evacuation is daunting but vital to the future success of the German Army. Rommel plans to begin immediate troop transport, leaving tanks and other vehicles behind.
Adolf Hitler will not hear of it.
“He was not receptive to any of my arguments about Tunisia and seemed to dismiss them by saying I had become a pessimist,” Rommel will write to his wife, Lucia. “He simply could not see what was happening in Tunisia.”
Rommel never returns to Africa but his predictions soon turn all too true. Just two weeks after his meeting with Hitler, U.S. forces under General George S. Patton rout German tank units at the Battle of El Guettar. This marks the first time American forces defeat the Afrika Korps, but for Patton this is not enough. He longs to defeat the famous Desert Fox and is severely disappointed to learn that Rommel is not present on the field of battle.3
As Rommel has predicted, El Guettar is the death knell for German forces in Africa. They surrender to the Allies on May 13, 1943. The Third Reich has lost thousands of men forever.
As operations in North Africa come to an end, Allied war planners shift their focus to the next step in the Allied fight to end the Nazi stranglehold in Europe: Sicily. The invasion is code-named Operation Husky.
Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, occupied over the centuries by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and Vandals. Sicilian locals have survived this history of intrusion and subjugation by forming an extremely tight-knit society. Outsiders are not welcome. The warm climate and simple agricultural lifestyle of the island hides the fact that little about daily life in Sicily is known to anyone but those who actually live there.
Thus, Allied war planners don’t have a grasp of the situation in Sicily, which is just ten miles off Italy’s southern coast. They do know that Sicily has been occupied by the Italian fascist military regime for almost twenty years. A handful of units from the German Afrika Korps have successfully managed to escape from Tunisia, meaning that more than two hundred thousand German and Italian troops now await an Allied attack. They are entrenched in mountainous volcanic terrain that favors a defensive strategy.
For Operation Husky to succeed, British and American troops must have help on the ground. They require individuals with insider knowledge, capable of sharing not only possible invasion routes but also the most efficient local roads, size of enemy troop strength, and location of gun emplacements.
They need the Mafia.
But the feared Italian gangsters have largely moved to New York City.
The exodus began shortly after May 1924, spurred on by Italy’s fascist prime minister, Benito Mussolini. Il Duce (the leader) is a small, rotund, balding man with a penchant for histrionics. Mussolini is determined to control Italy by using totalitarian methods and brutally stamps out all opposition. On the island of Sicily, this means getting rid of the Mafia.4
The etymology of Mafia is unknown, with some believing the term has its roots in an 1863 play known as I Mafiusi della Vicaria, about a group of prisoners demanding respect. Others believe it to be an acronym for Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela (“Death to the French is Italy’s Cry”) after the French invasion of Sicily in 1282. Still others believe it stems from the Sicilian adjective Mafiusu, a term for bold behavior.
“Mafiosi,” in Italian, means someone who asks for favors. But through the centuries those favors often evolved into criminal acts. On the island of Sicily, gangs coerced poor people in a variety of ways. For example, the simple act of seeing a doctor might involve a small payment to the local Mafia chieftain. If a Sicilian wanted a job, wanted his daughter to be married, or wanted a new mule for the fields, the Mafia often got a “taste.”
Sicilian businesses were forced to pay pizzo, or protection money, to ensure that customers could visit their shops. Those who do not pay are beaten, sometimes killed. But a strict rule of silence known as omertà means the people of Sicily do not speak out against this predatory behavior. Anyone who defied omertà was in grave danger, subject to immediate execution.
The dictator Mussolini vows to stop the Mafia oppression. But Sicily defies him, and Mussolini backs off. That does not sit well with some fascist leaders. “If we want to save Sicily we must destroy the Mafia,” one top fascist militant writes to Il Duce in April 1923.
The following year, Mussolini demonstrates a show of force to remind the Mafia that he is in charge. He travels to Sicily aboard the battleship Dante Alighieri. In the skies above, Italian fighter aircraft circle. Submarines prowl the dark blue Mediterranean waters all around the Alighieri. Benito Mussolini steps ashore guarded by an intimidating phalanx of bodyguards. He visits the small town of Piana del Greci, where its mayor, Don Francesco Cuccia, actually sneers at Il Duce’s men. In addition to running the town, Cuccia is a member of the Mafia. He says to Mussolini: “You are with me. You are under my protection. What do you need those guys for?”
The dictator is taken aback but says nothing. However, he will never forget the incident and begins referring to Cuccia as “that unspeakable mayor.”
Don Cuccia is certainly disrespectful. Using his power to great advantage, the Mafioso chief ensures that the village square is all but empty when Mussolini finally stands to speak. The only citizens of Piana del Greci in attendance are twenty derelicts and fools, all handpicked by Cuccia to express disdain for Mussolini.
A few days later, as the dictator continues his tour of Sicily, he is once again reminded of the lack of respect when the Mafia conspires to steal his hat.5
So it is that Benito Mussolini declares war on the Sicilian Mafia. Upon his return to Rome, the furious and humiliated prime minister grants sweeping powers to a special police force led by Cesare Mori, a thickset Northern Italian known for his active disdain for organized crime. Working with his own team of special agents, Mori rounds up Mafia by the hundreds. His tactics are simple: surround a village, block off all roads, and then his police move in to arrest the gangsters. Should the suspects flee, Mori’s men begin shooting Mafia-owned cattle, one by one. Threatened with this loss of income, many Mafioso eventually come out and surrender. Once in Mori’s custody, suspects are tortured in a most medieval fashion, their bodies shocked by electrical wires, burned with flames, flayed with cattle whips, and their bones pulled from the socket while being stretched on the rack—all in an effort for the prosecutor to obtain names and information to further his manhunt.
The collapse of the Sicilian Mafia is almost immediate. Mayor Cuccia and more than twelve hundred men are arrested. The city of Palermo, the scene of 224 murders in 1923, is pacified. Within five years murders drop to just thirty-five.
Quickly, many Mafia chieftains sail to America seeking asylum. They declare themselves refugees from fascism. This plea allows Mafiosi to circumvent the Immigration Act of 1924, which caps the number of foreign nationals into America at 150,000 per year. As the immigrants are refugees, U.S. officials do not inquire about the backgrounds of the Sicilians or their intended line of work.
America has seventy ports of entry in the 1920s, but the Sicilians are not interested in places like Galveston or New Orleans. Instead, they alight in New York City. There, after processing on Ellis Island, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, they are free to enter the city without restriction.
New York City’s population of almost seven million people is nearly twice that of the entire island of Sicily, and it offers an exponential increase in ways of making money illegally. To extortion, protection, and other forms of racketeering, the Sicilian Mafia now adds bootlegging, prostitution, and control of the waterfront unions.
And always, there is omertà, that code of silence meaning certain death for anyone speaking out against the Mafia, thus ensuring its ability to grow and corrupt their environment.
As Allied war strategists, including General George Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, prepare to invade Europe, contact is made with the few criminals left on the island of Sicily. They will be helpful in defeating the fascist Italian Army and their German allies. They will carry messages. They will destroy installations. And they will even kill on behalf of the Allies. For the Mafia, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler are far worse than the Americans or the British. And for their help, the gangsters of Sicily will soon reap a huge reward.