The capture of Pantelleria

On the morning of 11 June 1943 Allied landing craft emerged from the dust that hung over the sea after wave upon wave of air raids. On board waited a brigade of Major General Walter Clutterbuck’s British 1st Infantry Division, while Royal Navy cruisers and destroyers circled nearby; from the cruiser HMS Aurora General Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral Andrew Cunningham watched the operation unfold. Since dawn bombers had again been circling over Pantelleria. Around midday the British went ashore in the ruined harbour, and the island’s commander, Admiral Gino Pavesi, surrendered the garrison. Some 11,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner – some tallies give more than 11,600 Italians and a few dozen Germans – while the attackers’ own losses were almost nil.

The statement found in chronologies that the British 1st Division “captured” the island nevertheless needs adding to. There was practically no fighting for Pantelleria on land: by then the garrison had already been broken by an air offensive under way since May and by a naval blockade, and Pavesi had asked Rome for permission to surrender before the first soldiers set foot on the island. The operation, which the Allies called Corkscrew, went down in history as a rare case in which air power almost single-handedly forced a fortified island to surrender. In the days that followed, the remaining small Italian islands in the Strait of Sicily passed into Allied hands, and the bombers shifted the weight of their attacks to Sicily itself and southern Italy.

An island on the road from Tunisia to Sicily

Pantelleria is a rocky volcanic island of about 84 km², lying at the narrowest point of the Strait of Sicily, about 70 km from the Tunisian coast and about 100 km south-west of Sicily. From 1937 Benito Mussolini had it fortified, in the hope that it would become Italy’s answer to British Malta. Underground hangars for fighters were cut into the rock beside the local airfield, and radars, including German ones, detected aircraft taking off from Africa and Malta. In 1940–1942 the island was a thorn in the side of the British convoys supplying Malta; it was in its vicinity that the battle for the Harpoon convoy was fought in June 1942.

The war, however, interrupted the building of the fortifications. According to Italian figures, the garrison – the Pantelleria Mixed Brigade – numbered about 11,400 men. A dozen or so batteries of 152, 120 and 90 mm coastal guns and 14 anti-aircraft batteries had been planned, but by 1943 many positions still lacked concrete protection and casemates. More than 10,000 civilians lived on the island. In March the Italian navy proposed evacuating them, but the Ministry of the Interior refused, out of concern for the mood in Sicily. The weakest point was water: the island has no rivers, and the wells with their electric pumps depended on an unfinished power station, so water was shipped in from Sicily by tanker.

After the Axis surrender in Africa on 13 May 1943, Pantelleria lay on the line of the coming advance. The Trident Conference in Washington confirmed that the Allies’ next objective would be Sicily (Operation Husky). The airfield on Pantelleria could take Allied fighters, for which there was no room on overcrowded Malta, while Italian radars and aircraft could detect and attack the invasion fleet early. Eisenhower therefore decided to take the island and at the same time to test whether this could be done by destroying its defences from the air before the infantry landed.

A month under the bombs

The first raids, carried out between 8 and 10 May, were intended chiefly to prevent the island from being used in the evacuation of Axis troops from Tunisia. From 18 May the North African Air Forces of General Carl Spaatz, part of Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder’s Mediterranean Air Command, were waging a systematic air offensive, and the Royal Navy sealed the island off with a blockade. The May raids on the island went hand in hand with attacks on Sicily and Sardinia. Cruisers and destroyers shelled the harbour and batteries several times, and from the end of May bombers dropped flares at night, which prevented the defenders from repairing damage under cover of darkness. In the first days of June the American 99th Fighter Squadron, made up of Black airmen trained at Tuskegee, saw combat for the first time over the island.

From 6 June the raids grew sharply in intensity. According to American tallies, some 5,000 tons of bombs fell on the island in the first ten days of June, and about 1,400 tons on 10 June alone – the third anniversary of Italy’s entry into the war. In all, from mid-May to 11 June the Allies flew more than 5,200 sorties over Pantelleria and dropped between 6,200 and 6,400 tons of bombs (depending on the source), mostly on an area of some 20 km² around the harbour and airfield. The town of Pantelleria was reduced to ruins. Women and children crowded into underground ammunition stores and other military shelters, in stifling air and without enough water or food. Thanks to the caves and tunnels, however, casualties were surprisingly low: Italian sources speak of about 40 soldiers killed and fewer than 150 wounded, plus a few civilians killed; the British official history gives 39 killed.

The indirect effects were far more serious. The bombs cut telephone lines and roads – orders were carried by runners, and many cut-off batteries no longer received ammunition, food or water. The pumps and the power station were destroyed. At the end of May the Germans evacuated their roughly one thousand men from the island along with their radars, which further shattered Italian morale. Night-time deliveries by transport aircraft from Sicily and by small vessels that slipped through the blockade could not meet the island’s needs. As early as 2 June Pavesi reported to the naval command in Rome (Supermarina) that there was no hope and that surrender was a matter of time. Two Allied calls to surrender, dropped on the island in June, went unanswered.

The surrender of 11 June

On the evening of 10 June Pavesi reported that the garrison’s ability to resist was almost exhausted: reportedly only two anti-aircraft batteries inland were still serviceable, and water would last only a few days. The Comando Supremo authorised him to negotiate. Meanwhile convoys carrying the brigade of the 1st Infantry Division had sailed from Sousse and Sfax, covered by Rear Admiral Rhoderick McGrigor’s warships. After dawn on 11 June the raids intensified still further. At around 9 a.m. Pavesi reported to Supermarina that he would ask for terms; his signal crossed with an order from Mussolini instructing him to surrender “owing to lack of water”.

A white flag was hoisted over the radio station, but in the clouds of dust after the bombing no one saw it. The last serviceable guns fired a few rounds towards the landing craft, which were waiting out of range for the raid to end. Pavesi sent a signal asking to surrender and forbade the blowing up of stores and hangars, to avoid further casualties. At around 11.30 a.m. the first British troops went ashore. For several hours cut-off Italian units that had not received word of the surrender kept firing, and it took until the afternoon to call off the air raids. The airfield with its underground hangars fell into Allied hands intact and soon took Allied fighters.

British losses were negligible. Winston Churchill wrote in his memoirs that the only casualty of the island’s capture was a soldier bitten by a mule; the anecdote is still repeated today, although some authors state that it was actually a more serious accident involving an animal. Churchill also recalled a bet with Eisenhower: convinced that there were at most 3,000 Italians on the island, he had promised him a sou for every prisoner above that number – and lost. In the air alone, according to some authors, the Allies lost a dozen or so aircraft over the island during the whole campaign.

Pavesi was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Britain, from which he returned home in November 1944. In Italy he faced a wave of accusations that he had not put up sufficient resistance, and in May 1944 a court of the Fascist Italian Social Republic sentenced him to death in absentia. Many historians, however, consider that further resistance would merely have led to a massacre of the garrison and the population without delaying the Allied plans by more than a few days; what drew criticism was rather that he had not destroyed the military installations before surrendering the island.

Lampedusa, Linosa and Lampione

The next objective was the Pelagie Islands, lying between Malta and Tunisia. The largest of them, Lampedusa, had a garrison of about 4,300 men according to popular accounts, and a landing ground for aircraft. It had been bombed for several days, and on the night of 11–12 June it was shelled by the cruisers Aurora, Orion, Penelope and Newfoundland and six destroyers. On 12 June white flags appeared over the harbour. When Lieutenant Corbett of the destroyer HMS Lookout approached the shore in a motor boat, he was told that the garrison wished to surrender – Mussolini, as with Pantelleria, had permitted capitulation for lack of water. The formal surrender of the island was accepted in the evening, in an underground command post, by a joint army and navy delegation, and a company of the 2nd Battalion, Coldstream Guards took charge of the prisoners.

A famous story is attached to the same day, but it must be told with a caveat. According to press reports of the time, Sergeant Pilot Sydney Cohen of the RAF, flying a three-seat Fairey Swordfish, landed on Lampedusa because of a compass failure and a dwindling fuel supply, expecting to be taken prisoner. Instead, the Italians are said to have handed him a note offering surrender, which he flew to Malta. The British press dubbed him the “King of Lampedusa”, and his story later inspired a popular Yiddish play of that title. How much of the tale is fact and how much embellishment is hard to establish today; officially the island surrendered to the ships and troops that arrived after him.

After Lampedusa came the turn of the smaller islands. Linosa surrendered without a fight to the crew of the destroyer HMS Nubian on 13 June, and on 14 June – according to British tallies – the uninhabited rock of Lampione was occupied. Within four days the whole Strait of Sicily was in Allied hands, and with it the airfields and observation posts that could have warned Sicily’s defenders of the approaching fleet.

A lesson for the air forces

Advocates of strategic air power greeted the capture of Pantelleria with enthusiasm. Tedder reported that the island’s defences had been destroyed and that “most of the artillery” had been “crippled or wiped out”. It looked like proof that strategic bombing could take territory on its own. Pantelleria was often presented later as the only case in the war in which a garrison surrendered solely under air attack – but such formulations should be treated as a simplification, since the naval blockade, the shelling from warships and the sight of the landing fleet also contributed to the surrender.

A more precise picture emerged from a study made on the spot by Professor Solly Zuckerman, scientific adviser to the air forces, who had also advised on planning the raids on the island. He established that although the weather had been ideal for bombers, only about 3.3 per cent of the bombs dropped by the four-engined heavy bombers had fallen within 100 yards of their target, and the fighter-bombers had been even less accurate. Of the 112 guns selected for the study, only two had received direct hits; most had to be dug out of the rubble but were then usable. Later analyses estimated that the effectiveness of the batteries had fallen by roughly half. The surrender was thus decided less by destruction than by exhaustion, lack of water and sleep, and the collapse of the defenders’ morale.

For the air forces themselves the conclusions were ambiguous. Tedder feared that the army would henceforth demand that the RAF and the American bombers routinely “soften up” every fortified position, which would reduce air power to the role of artillery for the ground forces. Zuckerman, for his part, drew from Pantelleria the conclusion that bombers should rather destroy the communications hubs without which a defender cannot be supplied – an idea he later developed in the plans for attacking the railways of Italy and France.

Bombs on Sicily and southern Italy

The capture of the islands in the strait allowed the Allies to turn the full weight of their air power against Sicily and southern Italy. War chronologies record this under 17 June as massive bombing of Sicily and the Italian peninsula amid growing signs of an impending invasion. In reality it was not a single raid but a campaign that lasted throughout June. On 12 June B-17 and B-26 bombers attacked airfields in the west of the island – Castelvetrano, Milo near Trapani and Boccadifalco near Palermo – and on 13 June American and British heavy bombers struck the airfields around Catania and Gerbini, where most of the Axis fighters were based. On 15 June the raids were repeated against the airfields of western Sicily and the radio stations near Marsala.

Messina, through which ran the ferries and the railway connecting Sicily with the mainland, was hit particularly hard. On 18 June 76 Flying Fortresses attacked the ferry terminal and the railway station, and on 25 June some 130 B-17s dropped more than 300 tons of bombs on the port, tracks and warehouses – the heaviest single Allied raid of the month. According to the American official history, Messina was attacked eleven times before the invasion, with more than 800 tons of bombs dropped on it in all. On the other side of the Strait of Messina, American Liberators of the Ninth Air Force bombed the ferry terminal at Villa San Giovanni and the port of Reggio di Calabria. At night British Wellingtons attacked ports and railway junctions, while other formations struck Sardinia and the ports of Italy’s west coast.

Spreading the raids over many targets was deliberate. Bombs fell on Sicily, Sardinia and southern Italy, and – from bases in the Middle East – on Greece too, so that the Germans and Italians could not read from them where the landing would come. Deception completed the picture: documents planted in Operation Mincemeat led Hitler to reinforce Sardinia and Greece. At the same time, though, the fall of Pantelleria and Lampedusa was an all too legible signal that the target would be Sicily; the Italian command and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring understood this and strengthened the island’s defences in June. For the inhabitants of Sicilian cities it meant ever heavier raids – civilians died in Messina, Palermo and Catania, and people fled to the countryside in large numbers.

Place in the war

The capture of Pantelleria and the Pelagie Islands was the first time the Allies had taken part of Italy’s national territory, as opposed to colonies or areas occupied by the Axis. It removed the last obstacle on the road from Tunisia to Sicily and provided an airfield from which fighters could cover the invasion.

The air offensive intensified at the turn of June and July, when the bombers concentrated on the Sicilian airfields. According to Allied figures, from mid-May to the invasion some 430 German and Italian aircraft were destroyed for the loss of about 250 Allied ones, and by 10 July only two airfields in Sicily were still fully operational. On the night of 9–10 July 1943 American and British troops landed on the island, and two weeks later, on 25 July, the Grand Council of Fascism and King Victor Emmanuel III removed Mussolini from power. The fall of Pantelleria, which the dictator had for years cast as Italy’s Malta, was one of the defeats that undermined his position. The experience of Pantelleria also fed into the arguments over the role of air power – the overrated “proof” of the effectiveness of bombing and Zuckerman’s sober analysis shaped Allied thinking right up to the preparations for the invasion of France in 1944.