The capture of Palermo

On the evening of 22 July 1943 American tanks rolled into Palermo, the capital and largest city of Sicily. Shortly after 7 p.m., in the Royal Palace, Brigadier General Giuseppe Molinero, commander of the port’s defences, surrendered the city to Major General Geoffrey Keyes, commander of the Provisional Corps of the American Seventh Army. Late in the evening the army commander, Lieutenant General George Patton, arrived in the city at the head of an armoured column. In a few days his troops had crossed the whole western part of the island, covering – according to American tallies – some 200 kilometres of mountainous terrain, and taken tens of thousands of prisoners, almost all of them Italians. It was the Americans’ most spectacular success of the Sicilian campaign – and at the same time one of its most controversial episodes.

The Americans in a supporting role

After the landing in Sicily on 10 July, the Seventh Army’s role was a modest one. The land forces commander, General Harold Alexander, had assigned it the task of covering the left flank of the British Eighth Army, which was to deliver the main blow along the east coast – through Catania to Messina. On 13 July, at the request of General Bernard Montgomery, Alexander also gave the British Highway 124 through Vizzini and Caltagirone, which until then had been allotted to General Omar Bradley’s American II Corps. The 45th Infantry Division had to turn back to the coast and move round behind the 1st Division. The American commanders took this as proof that the British did not treat them as equal partners, and Patton looked for a chance to show what his army could do.

An ordinary reconnaissance provided the pretext. On 15 July Patton formed a Provisional Corps under his deputy, Keyes: the 3rd Infantry Division of Major General Lucian Truscott, the 2nd Armored Division of Major General Hugh Gaffey and the 82nd Airborne Division of Major General Matthew Ridgway. Formally the corps was only to expand the beachhead and secure the left flank. Patton obtained Alexander’s consent to a “reconnaissance in force” towards Agrigento, which quickly turned into a full-scale attack: on 16 July Rangers and infantry of the 3rd Division, after fighting Italian Bersaglieri, took Agrigento, and soon afterwards the neighbouring port of Porto Empedocle.

On 17 July Patton flew to Alexander’s headquarters in North Africa and obtained permission to advance into the interior of the island and – as he presented it – to take Palermo as well. On 18 July he issued an order making Palermo the Seventh Army’s objective. When Alexander sent a signal the next day restricting this advance, Patton’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Hobart Gay, according to the American official history most probably prevented it from reaching his commander; other accounts speak of a message that was “lost in transmission” and turned up only after Palermo had fallen.

The drive on Palermo

After 18 July the advance gathered momentum. Truscott’s 3rd Division marched on foot through bare, sun-scorched mountains at a pace that the division called the “Truscott trot” – according to American accounts it covered some 160 kilometres in three days. On the left flank Ridgway’s 82nd Division, reinforced by a regiment of the 9th Infantry Division, advanced along the coast towards the Belice river. Behind them came the 2nd Armored Division, to which Keyes entrusted the final dash for the city.

Resistance was weak. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had already concluded on 12–13 July that western Sicily could not be held, and the 15th Panzergrenadier Division had moved east to defend the approaches to Etna together with the rest of the German forces. In the west there remained mainly Italian coastal divisions and tactical groups, demoralised and poorly armed. Some units, such as the Bersaglieri at Agrigento or General Ottorino Schreiber’s group, which covered the withdrawal on 21 July, put up resistance, but in many places the Italians surrendered without a fight. Several hundred soldiers were taken prisoner near Castelvetrano, and 800 at Alcamo. The Rangers and infantry rounded them up in their thousands.

On 22 July American columns approached Palermo from several directions. The first to reach the outskirts was the 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Division; a delegation of citizens came to its command post offering to surrender the city, but Keyes insisted that he would accept the surrender himself. The commander of the defences, General Marciani, was captured by the reconnaissance battalion of the 82nd Division, and the city was finally surrendered by Brigadier General Molinero, who drove into Palermo with Keyes and Gaffey; the formalities were completed in the Royal Palace. Patton entered Palermo during the night, and accounts speak of crowds of inhabitants welcoming the Americans – the city had endured months of Allied bombing, and weariness with the war and with the Fascist regime was widespread in Sicily.

The port of Palermo, the objective of the whole operation, had been badly damaged by earlier air raids and German demolitions. Engineers cleared the sunken vessels and rubble so quickly that the first supply ships from North Africa entered it on 28 July. On 23 July the 82nd Division took Trapani and Marsala at the western tip of the island, and the 45th Division of II Corps reached the north coast near Termini Imerese, cutting the coast road to the east. According to the American official history, the Provisional Corps lost 272 men in the entire operation (57 killed, 170 wounded and 45 missing), took some 53,000 Axis soldiers prisoner and killed or wounded another 2,900.

Success or detour?

The military value of the drive was disputed from the outset. Critics – among them Bradley, and later many historians – pointed out that the Americans had marched where there were no Germans left. The units capable of really defending Sicily were at that time falling back to the north-east, and the tens of thousands of prisoners were mostly Italian coastal troops who wanted to be done with the war anyway. Taking the western part of the island thus did nothing to bring the capture of Messina closer, and the forces committed to the march on Palermo could, the critics argued, have been put to use in the decisive direction. In the eyes of many observers it was above all a publicity operation, something of which Patton, with his love of the limelight, was well aware.

Patton’s defenders, for their part, pointed out that Palermo gave the Seventh Army a large port of its own, freeing it from dependence on supply over the beaches, and that reaching the north coast allowed it to strike at Messina along the coastal Highway 113. The drive also showed – to the Allies, to the enemy and to the Americans themselves – that an army the British had distrusted since the defeat at the Kasserine Pass was capable of fast mobile operations. The press in the United States hailed Patton as a hero.

Meanwhile the Eighth Army was stuck. Montgomery had failed to break through across the Catania plain: after bloody fighting for the Primosole bridge (14–16 July) and unsuccessful attacks on 17–21 July, he had to shift the weight of his operations to the western slopes of Etna and bring the reserve 78th Infantry Division over from Africa. The Germans, commanded from 16 July by General Hans-Valentin Hube, built successive lines of defence on the approaches to the volcano. As a result, instead of the original division of roles, the Allies began a race for Messina along two routes – the British along the east coast and the Americans along the north coast.

What came next

Three days after the fall of Palermo, on 25 July, Benito Mussolini was removed from power in Rome; the defeat in Sicily and helplessness in the face of air raids – including those on Rome – contributed greatly to his fall. On the island the fighting continued for more than three weeks. Bradley’s II Corps fought a hard battle for Troina (31 July – 6 August), and Patton tried to outflank the German positions on the north coast with small amphibious landings, among them at Sant’Agata and Brolo. On the morning of 17 August American patrols entered Messina, a few hours ahead of the British, but the Germans had already evacuated most of their troops and equipment to the mainland.

The success in the race was overshadowed by two incidents, on 3 and 10 August, in which Patton slapped soldiers being treated for battle fatigue in field hospitals. When the matter came to light, General Dwight Eisenhower ordered him to apologise, and Patton lost his combat command for many months – until Normandy, where in 1944 he led the Third Army. Palermo, for its part, became one of the most important Allied supply ports in the Mediterranean for the rest of the war.