The Germans leave Sardinia and Corsica

In mid-September 1943 the last ferries, barges and small craft carrying German soldiers were leaving the ports of Santa Teresa Gallura and La Maddalena at the northern tip of Sardinia. They ferried the troops across the strait, little more than ten kilometres wide, to Corsica – to Bonifacio and Porto-Vecchio. By 18–19 September the entire German garrison of Sardinia – some 25,000 men according to figures cited in the literature, with tanks, guns and several thousand vehicles – was on the neighbouring island. Sardinia, which as recently as the spring the Allies had considered one of the possible targets of an invasion, passed into the hands of Italians loyal to the king without a single battle. On Corsica, by contrast, fighting had been going on for ten days, with the Germans facing their former allies – Italian divisions – as well as the Corsican Resistance and French troops shipped over from Algiers.

The date of 19 September in fact marks the end of the evacuation, not its beginning: the Germans began leaving Sardinia as early as the night of 8–9 September, and according to Italian and German figures the last units crossed to Corsica on 18 September. The evacuation of Sardinia was, moreover, only the first stage of the withdrawal; the second was the abandonment of Corsica, completed at the beginning of October.

Two islands in the shadow of Sicily

In 1943 Sardinia was heavily garrisoned. The commander of the island’s armed forces, General Antonio Basso, had under him two corps, several infantry and coastal defence divisions and the Nembo Parachute Division – some 130,000 men in all, according to Italian figures, though poorly equipped and not very mobile. After the defeat in Tunisia the Germans had re-formed on the island, from the former Sardinien Division and replacements, the 90th Panzergrenadier Division (PL) under General Carl-Hans Lungershausen; alongside it were Luftwaffe and anti-aircraft units. After Operation Mincemeat Adolf Hitler regarded Sardinia as a likely target for an Allied landing, and the island’s airfields had been the target of heavy air raids since the spring. The Allies, meanwhile, had decided to take Sardinia and Corsica only once Italy had surrendered.

The Italians had occupied Corsica since November 1942, from Operation Anton onwards. Stationed there was General Giovanni Magli’s VII Corps, with the Friuli and Cremona divisions and two coastal divisions. There were few Germans: the SS assault brigade Reichsführer-SS, fortress units and artillery. On 7 September General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin arrived on the island, appointed to command the German forces on both islands. On Corsica an increasingly numerous Resistance was active, united in the National Front, which was dominated by the Communists and supplied by sea and air from Algiers. The submarine Casabianca under Commander Jean L’Herminier contributed to its growth, bringing emissaries, radio sets and weapons to the island from December 1942.

The agreement on Sardinia

On the evening of 8 September, after the announcement of Italy’s surrender, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring ordered Senger to withdraw his troops from Sardinia to Corsica and, if necessary, from there to the mainland. Under Operation Achse the Germans were disarming the Italians wherever they had the upper hand; on Sardinia they did not. General Basso therefore came to an arrangement with Lungershausen: the Germans would withdraw without a fight to the north of the island and cross to Corsica, and the Italians would not hinder them. Basso’s supporters later stressed that he had thus spared the island and its inhabitants fighting in which his poorly armed divisions might have been crushed by an armoured division. His critics accused him of failing to carry out the orders of the Comando Supremo, which required German actions to be met with force, and of letting a full-strength division slip out of a trap, a division that would soon be fighting the Allies in Italy.

The withdrawal went smoothly. The Germans fell back by road to the north, destroying seven airfields and depots behind them, and at the ports of Santa Teresa and La Maddalena they loaded the troops onto Siebel ferries, barges and small craft, some of them the same vessels that in August had evacuated the Axis forces from Sicily. On 9 September they seized the naval base at La Maddalena; that is why the Italian fleet from La Spezia, which was to have put in there, was ordered to sail for Africa and on the way lost the battleship Roma – one of the most tragic episodes of the surrender of the Italian fleet. Italian units set off after the Germans only on 12 September and were unable – and did not try very hard – to stop them. There were only isolated skirmishes, among other places in the Oristano area.

The most dramatic episode took place in the Nembo Division. The XII Parachute Battalion under Major Mario Rizzatti decided to stay with the Germans. When on 10 September the division’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Alberto Bechi Luserna, tried to turn back the departing paratroopers, they shot him dead. The battalion crossed to Corsica with the Germans and later fought on the side of Mussolini’s Social Republic. Meanwhile, from 10 September, Italian aircraft were landing at those Sardinian airfields the Germans had not had time to destroy, and some flew on to Allied airfields in Sicily and Tunisia. On 16 September Italian bombers attacked German shipping in the Strait of Bonifacio, and the Luftwaffe responded with raids on the Sardinian airfields.

Corsica: a fight instead of a march

On Corsica a peaceful march proved impossible. On the night of 8–9 September German naval units seized the port of Bastia, damaged the Italian torpedo boat Ardito lying there and – according to Italian sources – killed some seventy of her sailors. In the morning the Italians counter-attacked and retook the port, and the torpedo boat Aliseo under Lieutenant Commander Carlo Fecia di Cossato caught a German force leaving Bastia and sank two submarine chasers and several armed barges. That same day members of the Resistance rose against the Vichy authorities and the occupiers in Ajaccio, which the French regard as the first liberated town of metropolitan France. General Magli, who only a few days earlier had assured Senger that he would not interfere with the Germans, sided with the Allies and the partisans after the clashes in Bastia and the receipt of orders from home.

General Henri Giraud, co-president of the French Committee of National Liberation and commander-in-chief of the French army in North Africa, also wanted to join the fight. Fearing that the Germans would crush the Corsican fighters, he obtained the consent of General Dwight Eisenhower for an intervention, on condition that the French used their own ships and troops and took nothing away from the operation at Salerno. The operation was codenamed Vésuve. Giraud’s troops are often called Free French; strictly speaking, however, this was the French army of North Africa, under the Committee of Liberation, not General de Gaulle’s former Free French Forces. On the night of 12–13 September Casabianca landed 109 men of an assault battalion at Ajaccio, and from 13 September the destroyers Le Fantasque and Le Terrible, and later the cruisers Jeanne d’Arc and Montcalm, brought in further units: Moroccan tirailleurs, goumiers and artillery. An American commando detachment was also delivered to the island – aboard Italian destroyers. Command of the French forces was taken by General Henry Martin, who on 17 September agreed joint operations with Magli at Corte.

Meanwhile, on 12 September, Hitler ordered Corsica to be abandoned as well. The sea evacuation was to be directed by Fregattenkapitän Gustav von Liebenstein, who in August had organised the crossing of the Strait of Messina. The Germans concentrated on the east coast, along the road from Bonifacio to Bastia, and sailed from there to Elba and to Livorno and Piombino; at the same time Luftwaffe transport aircraft flew troops out from the airfields at Ghisonaccia and Bastia. The 90th Division, which had crossed from Sardinia, covered the withdrawal.

To Bastia

When on 19 September the last Germans from Sardinia were already on Corsica, the fighting on the island was only just getting into its stride. On 21 September Giraud himself arrived in Ajaccio. On 22 September the French and the partisans entered Sartène, and Porto-Vecchio the next day. At the end of the month the Italian Friuli Division and Moroccan goumiers took the San Stefano pass, and on 3 October the Teghime pass above Bastia. They were unable, however, to cut off the retreat: on the night of 3–4 October the last German units sailed from Bastia, and on the morning of 4 October goumiers and Italians entered the ruined town. According to figures cited in the literature, the Germans evacuated from Corsica by sea more than 6,000 men, some 1,200 prisoners and more than 3,000 vehicles, and by air more than 21,000 men; Allied aircraft and submarines sank ships totalling some 17,000 tons in the process. Losses in the fighting for the island are given approximately: the Germans lost about a thousand killed and several hundred prisoners, the Italians more than 600 killed, the Corsican partisans about 170, and the French regular troops about 75.

Place in the war

Corsica became the first liberated department of metropolitan France – eight months before the Normandy landings. The island, and Sardinia with it, became a great Allied air base from which aircraft attacked German communications in Italy and southern France and, in August 1944, supported the landings in Provence. Sardinia came under the authority of Badoglio’s royal government, and its garrison became part of the Italian army fighting alongside the Allies.

For the Germans the evacuation was an operational success: from two islands surrounded by an enemy who commanded the air and the sea, they brought out almost all their forces, with their weapons and equipment. As early as November and December 1943 the 90th Panzergrenadier Division was fighting the Canadians on the Moro River and at Ortona, and Senger und Etterlin later commanded the defence at Monte Cassino. General Basso was arrested in October 1944 for his decisions of September 1943 and put on trial; after almost two years he was acquitted.

The liberation of Corsica also had political consequences. Giraud had carried out the operation on his own initiative, relying on partisans among whom the Communists predominated; General Charles de Gaulle, who learned of it only at the last moment, regarded this as a breach of the principles of joint leadership of the Committee. The dispute hastened Giraud’s removal: at the beginning of November 1943 he ceased to sit on the Committee, and de Gaulle became the sole leader of Fighting France. For the Italians, the fighting on Corsica, waged shoulder to shoulder with the French, with whom they had only recently been at war, became one of the first examples of Italian soldiers taking part in the liberation of Europe from German rule.