The Axis evacuation of Sicily

On the evening of 11 August 1943 the first ferries carrying units of the German XIV Panzer Corps pushed off from the beaches north of Messina for the far shore of the Strait of Messina. Operation Lehrgang – the main evacuation of German forces from Sicily – had begun. The Italians had been shipping their units to the mainland since the beginning of August. Over the next six nights, under an umbrella of dense anti-aircraft artillery, the Germans moved to Calabria almost all of their soldiers still on the island, together with most of their equipment. Counting the Italians, more than 100,000 men left Sicily.

The Allies, who had been fighting for the island for a month, were unable to stop it. The Sicilian evacuation, sometimes compared with Dunkirk, is regarded as one of the best-executed Axis withdrawals of the entire war and as one of the most severely criticised failures of Allied command in the Mediterranean.

The decision to abandon the island

After the landing in Sicily on 10 July and the rapid advance of the Americans, who took Palermo on 22 July, the Axis forces were holding out only in the north-eastern corner of the island, on a line anchored on the Etna massif. On 25 July Mussolini was overthrown, and the German command ceased to trust the new Italian government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The commander of German forces in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and the commander of XIV Panzer Corps in Sicily, General der Panzertruppe Hans-Valentin Hube, concluded at the end of July that the island could not be held. They did not want a repeat of the disaster of May, when nearly a quarter of a million Axis soldiers had surrendered in Tunisia. An orderly retreat was better than a defence to the last man.

On 29 July Kesselring reported to Hitler that the evacuation could be carried out in a few nights. Written plans were drawn up at the beginning of August; according to German documents Kesselring approved them on 2 August, and on 8 August he authorised Hube to begin the operation whenever he saw fit. Hube set the start for 11 August. Even before that, between 1 and 10 August, the Germans had quietly shipped off the island more than 12,000 soldiers not needed at the front – wounded men and rear-echelon units – together with some 4,500 vehicles and 5,000 tonnes of equipment.

Relations with their ally were strained. Formally all forces on the island were commanded by an Italian, General Alfredo Guzzoni, commander of the Sixth Army. When at the beginning of August Hube proposed moving some men and equipment to the mainland, Guzzoni refused without the consent of the Supreme Command in Rome. The Germans went ahead regardless, and the Italians learned of their intentions only belatedly. On 10 August Guzzoni handed Hube responsibility for the defence of north-eastern Sicily and moved to Calabria with the Sixth Army staff. The evacuation of the remnants of the Italian Livorno and Assietta divisions and other units was organised by Admirals Pietro Barone, naval commander in Sicily, and Pietro Parenti.

An umbrella over the strait

The German plan was careful and clear. The Commandant of the Strait of Messina, with the powers of a fortress commandant, was Colonel Ernst-Günther Baade. Under him came all units in the crossing area – infantry, artillery, anti-aircraft defence, engineers, transport and services – as well as the German sea transport command. The crossing itself was directed by Commander (Fregattenkapitän) Gustav von Liebenstein, who had at his disposal Siebel ferries, Kriegsmarine landing barges, landing craft and motor boats. On the mainland the units were received by General Richard Heidrich, commander of the 1st Parachute Division, while Hube directed the fighting on the island to the end.

The key to success was anti-aircraft defence. According to the British official history, the strait, about three kilometres wide at its narrowest point, was defended by 120 heavy and 112 light anti-aircraft guns, roughly half of them Italian; other studies give even higher figures. Fire from the two shores overlapped, and Allied airmen said that it was worse over the strait than over the Ruhr. In addition there were coastal batteries, including guns of up to 24 cm calibre, which kept warships away from the narrow strait with its strong currents.

Six nights

On the first night, 11–12 August, the crossing suffered disruptions, but over the following days it settled into a rhythm. Each night Hube pulled the front back by 8–24 kilometres, covering the retreat with mines, demolished bridges and blocked roads. On the narrow Messina peninsula the front line grew steadily shorter, which allowed one unit after another to be released and sent to the crossings. The ferries ran day and night from several points north of Messina to Villa San Giovanni and its surroundings. When air raids halted traffic, the backlog was made up as soon as they stopped.

The Allies tried to cut off the retreating enemy with landings behind his lines. Americans of the 3rd Infantry Division landed near Sant’Agata di Militello on 8 August, and on 11 August a battalion of the 30th Infantry Regiment landed near Brolo, where it beat off counter-attacks all day and suffered heavy losses. On the night of 15–16 August both armies carried out further brigade-sized landings: the Americans on the north coast, the British on the east coast south of Messina. The Germans, however, were withdrawing so fast that both blows struck thin air.

The last German formation, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, crossed on the night of 16–17 August. Early on the morning of 17 August the last boats carrying the rearguard pushed off from the shore. A few hours later patrols of the American 3rd Infantry Division entered Messina. The Italians scuttled the train ferry Cariddi in the harbour so that it would not fall into Allied hands.

The balance of the crossing

Figures for the scale of the evacuation vary according to the source and whether they include crossings before 11 August. According to German returns, during Operation Lehrgang itself, from 11 to 17 August, 39,569 German soldiers crossed, including 4,444 wounded, together with – according to the American official history – 9,605 vehicles, 47 tanks, 94 guns and more than 17,000 tonnes of ammunition, fuel and supplies. Adding the transports of the first days of August, some authors give about 52,000 Germans and more than 14,000 vehicles. The Italians, according to studies based on their navy’s figures, carried about 62,000 men, 41 guns and 227 vehicles between 3 and 17 August; OKW reports of 18 August spoke of as many as about 75,000 Italians. Axis losses during the crossing were negligible – the Italians lost one motor raft and the ferry Cariddi, and German losses in men and vessels were slight.

Why the Allies did not intervene

The Allied command expected an evacuation – according to historians, indications of it also came from decrypted German radio traffic (Ultra) – but it prepared no joint plan to stop it. General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army Group, drew the attention of the air and naval commanders to the possibility of a withdrawal across the strait at the beginning of August, but no coordinated action followed. Tactical aircraft attacked the crossings, but daylight raids on such a heavily defended strait proved costly and ineffective, while night raids – carried out mainly by Wellington bombers – only temporarily halted traffic. For most of those days the four-engined heavy bombers were attacking other targets in Italy, among them railway junctions on the mainland. Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s navy did not risk sending larger warships into the narrow strait under the fire of the coastal batteries, fearing also an attack by the Italian fleet; only motor torpedo boats operated there at night, without much result.

Historians, among them Carlo D’Este and the authors of the American official history, attribute the failure above all to a lack of coordination between the land, air and naval commanders, each of whom regarded the matter as someone else’s task. General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army also advanced too slowly on the east coast, held up before Catania and at the foot of Etna, while General George Patton’s Americans on the north coast were forcing their way along wrecked roads. The race between the two armies to Messina was a matter of prestige, but in practice it pushed the enemy towards the crossings instead of cutting him off.

Significance

The evacuation allowed the Germans to save the core of three experienced divisions – the Hermann Göring, the 15th and the 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions – as well as the headquarters of XIV Panzer Corps. The same units fought the Allied landing at Salerno a few weeks later, and then for many months on successive defensive lines in southern and central Italy. The successful retreat also strengthened the position of Kesselring, who in the autumn persuaded Hitler that Italy could be defended far to the south of the Alps.

For the Italians the evacuation meant the loss of Sicily and hastened the Badoglio government’s efforts to leave the war, conducted in secret at a time when the Germans were moving into Italy with ever more divisions. On 17 August the fighting on the island ended, and on 3 September, the day of the British landing in Calabria, an armistice between Italy and the Allies was signed at Cassibile in Sicily. For the Allies, the Sicilian lesson – that winning ground does not mean destroying the enemy – was to return more than once, among other places in 1944 on the Seine and in the Falaise pocket.