33

Sicily—and Kursk

AT THE WHITE HOUSE on the evening of July 9, President Roosevelt was giving a state dinner for General Giraud. He was also waiting patiently for word from General Eisenhower as to how the invasion of Sicily, timed to start soon after midnight in the Mediterranean, was going. Had Allied deception measures worked? Were the Germans waiting for the Allied armies to come ashore in the south? How would Italian forces fight on their home soil?

Finally Admiral Brown, his naval aide, brought him the news.

Taking General Giraud upstairs to his study, Roosevelt met Daisy Suckley, who was staying in the Blue Room, on the landing. The President had told her the dinner would go on until a quarter to eleven, so Daisy was happily sewing a seam on her new nightgown when “the elevator door suddenly opened—I heard the P’s voice—I grabbed my diary, my pen, my workbox, & my nightgown—started to flee! The President stopped me, laughing, halfway down the hall already, & followed by the General. My thimble flew to the right, my spool to the left. The General laughed & we shook hands—the P. spoke over his shoulder as he was wheeled into his study: ‘The General & I are going to have a heart to heart talk—We have landed in Sicily! The word has just come!”¹

For his part, Admiral Leahy noted in his own diary: “During the dinner the president announced that British-American-Canadian troops were in process of invading Sicily. Our best information indicates that the enemy force now on the island consists of 4 or 5 Italian divisions and two German divisions, which we should be able to defeat in time if the landing is successful.”²

The President was pleased, but like Leahy, he was determined not to give way to overexpectations. Failure would delay but by no means wreck the agreed timetable for a cross-Channel assault the next year; victory, however, would give the Allied forces—including French troops fighting under Eisenhower’s command—further confidence that they could mount a major amphibious invasion and defeat the Wehrmacht in combat: the prerequisite for a successful Overlord.

And with that quiet confidence the President set off the next day to spend the weekend in Shangri-la with his de facto domestic deputy president, former Justice James Byrnes—his head of the Office of War Mobilization—and Byrnes’s wife, as well as Harry Hopkins and his wife, and Daisy Suckley. After watching a movie in the mess hall, “We sat around,” Daisy Suckley, “to get news about the invasion of Sicily—During dinner, we had tried also, but static is very bad and reception not good up on this hill, even when the weather is clear . . .”³

 

The President had every reason to be hopeful.

Operation Husky was the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted in war: three thousand Allied vessels, troop planes, and hundreds of gliders setting 160,000 soldiers ashore in Sicily in a single day from across the Mediterranean, departing from ports and airfields in Algeria, Tunisia, Malta, Libya, and Egypt in appalling weather (which caused almost half the gliders from Tunisia to land in the sea) to their rendezvous at dawn on July 10.

General Eisenhower had overruled his own planners and had accepted General Montgomery’s preference for a concentrated invasion of the southeastern corner of Sicily, stretching from Gela to the Gulf of Noto and Cassibile. This was just as well, since the German commander in chief, General Kesselring, sent the first of his two panzer divisions (with 160 tanks and 140 field guns) to the west of Sicily—leaving only a single panzer division in the east. However hard they fought, the men of the remaining Hermann Göring Panzer Division were unable to prevail against Allied troops debauching across twenty-six beaches there. Italian defenders, ill armed and ill motivated, for the most part crumpled under the weight and power of the Allied bombardment.

Despite the poor weather—with gale force 7 winds—the invasion thus proved brilliantly successful.

 

At the Pentagon in Washington there was an air of near jubilation, especially when the casualty rolls turned out to be less than a seventh of what had been estimated. Once again it was the President, in his capacity as U.S. commander in chief, who had made victory happen. Over the objections of his top generals and secretary of war in January, he’d insisted upon success in the Mediterranean in 1943, rather than sure defeat in France. How wise he’d been proven, all now agreed; only two German divisions in Sicily, instead of more than two dozen in France.

Many things went wrong in the landings, not simply owing to the high wind but also because of friendly fire: trigger-happy naval gunners shooting down dozens of Allied aircraft. Patton’s Seventh Army landing at Gela was initially touch-and-go, requiring naval artillery to beat off determined Axis counterattacks—Kesselring having instructed the Hermann Göring tanks and troops to move “at once and with all forces attack and destroy whatever opposes the division. The Führer has ordered all forces to be brought into operation immediately in order to prevent the enemy from establishing itself.”⁴

For the Germans, it proved a losing battle, as it had for Vichy defenders in Torch. For the Allies, however, the military lessons provided by Husky would not only be legion but gold—not least in terms of intelligence, deception measures, command experience, army air and naval cooperation, and cohesion. Launched in such overwhelming, concentrated Allied force, there was little the Germans could do to halt it. A U.S. general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the Allied supremo, with one American and one British army field commander serving under him. George Patton, who had commanded the invasion forces at Casablanca, now led the U.S. Seventh Army, with excellent U.S. corps and divisional commanders such as Omar Bradley, Geoffrey Keyes, Manton Eddy, and Terry Allen coming to the fore. Montgomery again commanded the British Eighth Army—this time with both veteran and untried troops, including a full Canadian corps determined to obliterate the “fiasco” of Dieppe. Inter-Allied coalition command was rehearsed in real time, as well as interservice cooperation—improving exponentially as the battle for Sicily progressed.

With the Allies achieving complete naval and air superiority over Axis forces in the Mediterranean, moreover, and Patton and Montgomery’s ground forces threatening to strike out from the beaches of Sicily, there arose a real prospect that the Italians—who for the most part were refusing to fight to defend their homeland—might overthrow Mussolini and submit to unconditional surrender without the Allies needing to invade Italy.

Hitler’s hand was forced, therefore. He would have to call off his latest offensive on the Eastern Front and deal with the Western Allies before they dealt with him.