The end of the fighting in Sicily

On the morning of 17 August 1943 General George Patton drove at the head of a column of vehicles into ruined Messina, the last town in Sicily still beyond the Allies’ reach. Shells from German guns firing from the far side of the strait, in Calabria, passed overhead. A few hours earlier the last boats carrying Axis soldiers had pushed off from the Sicilian shore. After 38 days of fighting that had begun with the landing on the night of 9–10 July, the whole island was in Allied hands. It was the first piece of Axis home territory in Europe that the Allies had captured in this war. Yet the victory had a bitter taste: most of the German forces and a large part of the Italian ones that had defended Sicily for five weeks had managed to slip away to the mainland.

The race for Messina

From the beginning of August the Sicilian campaign was essentially a pursuit. After fierce fighting for Troina in the first week of August and the British capture of Catania on 5 August, the Axis defence on the Etna line collapsed. General Hans-Valentin Hube’s German XIV Panzer Corps fell back into the north-eastern tip of the island, which narrowed towards Messina like a funnel. Every night the Germans withdrew a few kilometres or a dozen or so, leaving behind mined roads, blown bridges and small but effective rearguards. Every night thousands more soldiers crossed the Strait of Messina to the mainland. The main Axis evacuation, Operation Lehrgang, had been under way since the night of 11–12 August.

On the Allied side two armies were heading for Messina, and their commanders treated the advance as a contest. General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army was pushing along the east coast and the slopes of Etna, Patton’s American Seventh Army along the north coast. Patton, who in July had ostentatiously swung west and taken Palermo, now wanted at all costs to reach Messina before the British and prove that American troops were in no way inferior to them. To speed up the advance he three times put small landing forces ashore behind the German lines: on 8 August near Sant’Agata di Militello, on 11 August near Brolo and on 16 August near Spadafora. The last of these, carried out by the reinforced 157th Infantry Regiment, came ashore just after midnight, but troops advancing overland had already reached the spot. Montgomery also tried a landing: in the last days of the campaign British commandos and tank crews came ashore on the east coast near Scaletta, likewise too late to cut anyone off.

The race was run in the shadow of a scandal of which few as yet knew. On 3 and 10 August, in field hospitals, Patton had struck two soldiers being treated for combat exhaustion, and the report of these incidents was already on the desk of General Dwight Eisenhower. On 17 August, the day of the triumph in Messina, Eisenhower wrote Patton a letter containing a severe reprimand and an order to apologise.

The night of 16–17 August

On the evening of 16 August a reinforced platoon from L Company, 7th Infantry Regiment, of the American 3rd Infantry Division, led by Lieutenant Ralph Yates, entered the outskirts of Messina. The city, bombed repeatedly since the spring, lay in ruins. During the night and early morning further patrols of the 7th Regiment and a platoon of the 157th Infantry Regiment entered Messina. They met only scattered shots; organised resistance was over. At dawn on 17 August, at about 6.35 a.m., General Hube reported that Operation Lehrgang had been completed. The commander of XIV Corps had himself crossed to Calabria the previous morning. The last boat, about an hour after Hube’s report, carried away a handful of Italian soldiers.

At seven in the morning the commander of the 3rd Division, General Lucian Truscott, received representatives of Messina’s civil authorities on the hills above the city, and at about eight an Italian officer, Colonel Michele Tomasello, offered the formal surrender of the garrison. Truscott held off accepting it until the army commander arrived. Patton turned up at about ten, reportedly asked the assembled officers what in hell they were all standing around for, and led the column into the centre, accepting the city’s surrender. Shortly after him a British spearhead of the 4th Armoured Brigade and commandos arrived, having come up the coast from the south. Its commander is said to have shaken Patton’s hand and said: “It was a jolly good race. I congratulate you.”

News of the end of the campaign quickly went round the world. General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army Group, reported to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had just arrived in Quebec for talks with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that by ten o’clock on the morning of 17 August the last German soldier had been flung out of Sicily and the whole island was in Allied hands. The report was only half true: the German soldiers did not need to be flung out, for they had withdrawn of their own accord, in good order and with their equipment.

The balance of the campaign

The campaign lasted 38 days. Casualty figures vary with the source and the method of counting. According to Allied returns, the American Seventh Army lost 8,781 men, including about 2,200 killed and missing, and the British Eighth Army 11,843 men, including about 2,100 killed and missing. Fighting as part of the Eighth Army was the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, which lost 2,310 men, 562 of them killed. To this must be added the losses of the navies and air forces. In total the Allies lost what is usually estimated at 20,000–25,000 men.

Axis losses were considerably higher, above all because of the mass surrenders of Italians. According to the German official history, German forces lost about 28,000 men, including 4,325 killed, about 4,600 missing and 5,500 taken prisoner. Other authors give about 20,000. According to the Historical Office of the Italian Army General Staff, the Italians lost 4,678 killed, more than 36,000 missing, about 32,500 wounded and nearly 117,000 taken prisoner. Many of the “missing” were probably dead, while some were Sicilians who simply discarded their uniforms and went home. The civilian population of the bombed towns also suffered, above all in Messina, Palermo and Catania.

The Allies’ most painful disappointment was the enemy’s escape. According to German and Italian figures, more than 100,000 soldiers in all crossed the strait: depending on the calculation, 40,000–52,000 Germans (including the wounded) and about 62,000 Italians, and the Germans also took with them between about 10,000 and more than 14,000 vehicles, several dozen tanks and nearly a hundred guns. Allied aircraft could not break through the dense anti-aircraft defences of the strait, and the navy did not risk coming within range of the coastal batteries. Nor did any of the commands prepare a joint plan to cut the line of retreat. The four German divisions that had fought in Sicily, including the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the 15th Panzergrenadier Division, faced the Allies on the mainland a few weeks later.

Lessons

For the Allies Sicily was a great training ground. It was the largest amphibious operation of the war up to that time, and the experience of its first days – with DUKW amphibious trucks, LST landing ships and the supply of troops across open beaches – was put to use in later landings, all the way to Normandy. Costly failures were lessons too. The scattering of paratroopers and gliders over the island on the first night, and the tragic shooting down of friendly transport aircraft by warships and anti-aircraft guns on 11 July, led Washington to consider seriously giving up large airborne formations. In the end the procedures were changed and the divisions kept. The campaign also exposed poor cooperation between the air forces and the ground troops and the lack of unified command in the final phase, of which the enemy’s successful withdrawal was the clearest proof.

For the American army Sicily was proof of maturity. After the defeat at the Kasserine Pass in February, the Americans showed that they could wage fast mobile warfare and fight doggedly in the mountains. The race for Messina, for all its vanity, strengthened their position within the alliance. For Patton himself, however, the victory proved the beginning of a crisis. When at the end of the year the affair of the slapped soldiers reached the American press, Patton lost his combat command for many months, and command of the American forces in the invasion of France went to his former subordinate, General Omar Bradley.

Place in the war

The capture of Sicily opened the Mediterranean shipping lanes to the Allies and gave them airfields from which they could reach deep into Italy. The campaign also contributed to Mussolini’s fall on 25 July. The new government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, during the days when the island’s fate hung in the balance, was looking for a way out of the war, while the Germans, expecting betrayal, had been moving more and more divisions into Italy since late July. Sicily, cut off from the mainland, came under Allied military government. It was the first piece of Axis territory in Europe to be ruled by Allied occupation authorities.

In the same days when victory was being celebrated in Messina, the Italian emissary General Giuseppe Castellano was travelling to Lisbon to discuss surrender with Eisenhower’s envoys. At the Quebec Conference Roosevelt and Churchill approved the plan for further operations on the peninsula. On 3 September the British Eighth Army crossed the Strait of Messina to Calabria in Operation Baytown; the same day the armistice with Italy was signed at Cassibile, to be announced on 8 September, and on 9 September the American Fifth Army landed at Salerno in Operation Avalanche. The divisions that had slipped out of Sicily were waiting for them on the mainland. The Italian campaign, for which Sicily was the prelude, lasted until May 1945 and proved one of the bloodiest and slowest campaigns of the war in the West.