The landing on Elba

On the night of 16/17 June 1944 a fleet of some 270 vessels, which had sailed from Corsica that evening, approached Elba – the largest of the Tuscan Islands, lying just 10 kilometres off the Italian coast near Piombino. Shortly after midnight French commandos went down into rubber boats off Cape Enfola in the north of the island, and before dawn the first waves of infantry began landing on the beaches of the south coast, in the Gulf of Campo. So began Operation Brassard – the capture of Elba by French troops, carried and supported by British and American warships and by Allied aircraft.

Popular chronologies record under 17 June that the “Free French” landed on Elba, and under 18 June that the island was declared liberated. Both dates are close to the truth but need to be made more precise. The island was attacked by General Joseph Magnan’s 9th Colonial Infantry Division from General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s Army B – part of the new French army rebuilt in North Africa and subordinate to the Provisional Government of the French Republic, rather than the old Free French forces of 1940–1943. As for the second date: on 18 June the French entered Portoferraio, the island’s main town, but according to concurring French, British and Italian accounts resistance ceased and Elba was wholly in Allied hands only on 19 June; the last German soldiers left for the mainland in the course of 20 June.

An island between Corsica and Tuscany

Elba is about 30 kilometres long and only 4 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. It is mountainous – in the west rises Monte Capanne (1,019 m) – and its coasts are steep cliffs cut by deep bays. In 1939 it had some 30,000 inhabitants, about 12,000 of them in Portoferraio, the main port on the north shore. The island was best known as the place of Napoleon Bonaparte’s first exile in 1814–1815, and for its iron-ore mines, which since antiquity had fed the furnaces at Piombino.

Elba’s strategic importance stemmed from its position. Lying between Corsica and the mainland, it closes off the northern part of the Tyrrhenian Sea and commands the Piombino Channel. Whoever held its coastal batteries controlled shipping along the Tuscan coast.

When the Italian armistice was announced on 8 September 1943, about 8,300 Italian soldiers and sailors were stationed on the island under Brigadier General Achille Gilardi. The island then became a refuge for Italian warships fleeing the Tyrrhenian ports, and for several days its batteries beat off German attempts to land. The Germans, however, needed Elba because it covered the evacuation of their troops from Sardinia and Corsica. On 16 September German bombers attacked Portoferraio; according to findings cited in the literature some hundred soldiers and civilians were killed. The next day, in Operation Goldfasan, about 600 paratroopers were dropped over the bay opposite the town, and a battalion of panzergrenadiers arrived by sea from Livorno. The Italian garrison surrendered without a fight. Gilardi and several hundred officers who refused to go on serving alongside the Germans were arrested in October and deported to prisoner-of-war camps in occupied Poland.

The war also struck the shipping between the island and the mainland. On 22 September 1943 the British submarine HMS Uproar torpedoed the Italian steamer Andrea Sgarallino, which plied between Piombino and Portoferraio; about 200 passengers were killed, almost all of them civilians.

The German garrison

From December 1943 the island’s defence was commanded by Generalmajor Franz Gall, an elderly reserve officer. His forces were a motley collection. Their core consisted of two fortress battalions, the 902nd and 908th, of about 520 men each, formed in 1943 from soldiers withdrawn from the Eastern Front, many of them recovering from frostbite. According to surviving reports roughly one in ten was an ethnic German, mainly from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and most of their weapons were Italian. Alongside them stood Italian soldiers who had remained on the German side – a coastal defence battalion of 18- to 21-year-olds, some of whom, as the Germans themselves reported, had been threatened with the imprisonment of their parents if they did not “volunteer”. Several former Italian coastal batteries were manned by sailors of a Kriegsmarine coastal artillery battalion, and the only modern weapons were two batteries of 88 mm anti-aircraft guns on the hills opposite Portoferraio.

In June 1944, according to German figures, the garrison numbered about 2,600 men, some 800 of them Italians, and had roughly sixty medium and heavy guns. The bays suitable for landing were mined and blocked with wire. After the collapse of the front near Rome, Adolf Hitler attached great importance to the island: on 12 June Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was ordered to defend Elba “to the last man and the last round”. On 14 June reinforcements began arriving from the neighbouring island of Pianosa. The Allies did not know this – they took the movement of vessels between Elba and the mainland for the start of an evacuation.

The plan for Operation Brassard

Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers began preparing a landing on Elba in April 1944. It was originally to take place on 25 May, at the same time as the great offensive against the Gustav Line and the breakout from the Anzio beachhead, but it was postponed for lack of supporting aircraft and to give more training time to the French units, which had no experience of amphibious landings. When the Allies entered Rome on 4 June and the Germans were falling back northward, taking the island would allow the Allies to cut their coastal shipping through the Piombino Channel and open the way along the Tuscan coast. The starting base was Corsica, liberated in the autumn of 1943.

The ground forces, designated Force 255 and commanded by General Magnan, numbered according to French figures 11,667 men with 86 guns, 481 vehicles and 250 mules; a second echelon was to bring a further 4,000 men. Their core was two Senegalese Tirailleur regiments from the 9th Colonial Division – Colonel Jean Chrétien’s 13th Regiment and Colonel Lucien Cariou’s 4th Regiment – and Colonel Pierre Boyer de Latour’s 2nd Group of Moroccan Tabors. The coastal batteries were to be silenced by two assault units: Colonel Fernand Gambiez’s Bataillon de choc and Lieutenant Colonel Georges-Régis Bouvet’s Commandos d’Afrique. The operation as a whole was directed by General de Lattre de Tassigny.

The landing force was carried by the British Rear Admiral Thomas Troubridge’s Force N: four tank landing ships, several dozen infantry and tank landing craft, the gunboats HMS Aphis, Scarab and Cockchafer, rocket and gun landing craft and several dozen British and American motor torpedo boats. Air support was provided by American tactical aircraft under Colonel Thomas C. Darcy. At the briefing Troubridge predicted that the batteries would be destroyed from the air and by the commandos, and that the garrison – in his view at most 800 men, many of them not German – would put up no serious resistance. Both forecasts proved wrong.

The night of 17 June

To preserve surprise the Allies dispensed with preliminary air raids; only on the night of 16/17 June did 26 Wellington bombers attack Portoferraio and Porto Longone (today Porto Azzurro). German reconnaissance aircraft did spot two groups of ships on 16 June, but they were taken for ordinary convoys on the Naples–Bastia route. On the other hand, according to the later testimony of captured Germans, movements on Corsica had given away the Allies’ intentions and the defenders had been expecting an attack a day earlier.

Shortly after midnight on 17 June motor launches put 87 men of the Bataillon de choc into rubber boats a few hundred metres off Cape Enfola and then began laying a smokescreen. Other boats staged a feint landing at Portoferraio: they fired rockets into the bay and threw dummies overboard so that the defenders would think troops were wading ashore. The real blow, however, fell on the south coast, around Marina di Campo.

At 3.38 a.m. a signal flare went up from the shore and the German artillery opened fire on the approaching landing craft. The task of capturing the German flak ship Köln, moored at Marina di Campo and dominating both landing beaches, was given to British Royal Navy commandos. Under heavy fire they seized the ship and the mole, but then had to wait for hours for the French. During this time demolition charges laid on the mole went off, probably set off by a shell. The explosion killed almost all the commandos and their prisoners, and fire engulfed the Köln and her ammunition.

The Senegalese tirailleurs who landed on the beaches codenamed Kodak Amber and Kodak Green ran into a mined and fortified shore. Machine-gun, mortar and 88 mm fire from the surrounding hills pinned down the first waves. At about 7 a.m. the boats at Amber beach had to withdraw under cover of smoke, and the following echelons were diverted to Green beach, where the beachhead quickly became congested. Some landing craft could unload men and equipment only at around 2 p.m. The situation was turned by the commandos, who within a few hours of landing had fought their way up the ridge of Monte Tambone above the beaches and begun knocking out the batteries from the rear. Gall then shifted his main forces from the west of the island to its centre to defend the approaches to Portoferraio.

Portoferraio and the end of the fighting

On 18 June the first French units entered Portoferraio. Fighting in the hills went on, fierce and at close quarters – the Senegalese tirailleurs drove out the dug-in Germans with flamethrowers. By 19 June the island was effectively taken, and General Gall received permission to evacuate the remnants of his forces. By the afternoon of 20 June about 400 Germans had escaped by boat to the mainland. A report by the Italian Carabinieri of September 1944 states that the island was “completely liberated” on 19 June – the same date given by French and British accounts. The record that Elba was declared liberated on 18 June thus corresponds to the day its capital was taken rather than to the end of the fighting.

Losses

Figures for losses vary from source to source. In 1952 General de Lattre de Tassigny stated that the Germans had lost 500 killed and 1,995 prisoners, and the French 252 killed and missing and 635 wounded; the British were said to have lost 38 killed and 9 wounded. A more recent study by Jean Paul Pallud (2016) gives French losses as 201 killed, 51 missing and 635 wounded, and British losses – in addition to the commandos – as 65 Royal Navy sailors killed and 100 wounded. Pallud estimates the defenders’ losses at 672 killed and missing (507 Germans and 165 Italians), with 1,383 Germans and 612 Italians taken prisoner. The French also reported capturing 48 guns and howitzers and about a hundred machine guns.

Wrongs done to the inhabitants

For some of Elba’s inhabitants the liberation took a bitter course. A report by the Italian Carabinieri, drawn up in Rome on 21 September 1944 by their commander, General Taddeo Orlando, describes the violence committed after the fighting by soldiers of the colonial units – Senegalese and Moroccan – under French officers. According to the report, the local Carabinieri established 191 cases of rape of women, girls and children and more than 30 attempted rapes, as well as killings of men who tried to defend their relatives or homes – among other places in Capoliveri, Porto Longone, Marina di Campo and Portoferraio. Studies based on this document speak of eleven civilians killed, as well as the looting of houses, livestock and wine. The report accuses the officers of inaction and quotes their replies that “this is war” and that it was “nothing compared with what the Italians did in Corsica”.

The inhabitants, who, as the Carabinieri wrote, had been longing for liberation after months of German occupation, fled into the mountains. Calm returned only when the units of the 9th Colonial Division and the Moroccan tabors were replaced by a battalion of Algerian tirailleurs. In Italy these events are counted among the so-called marocchinate – the violence committed against civilians in central Italy in May and June 1944 by soldiers of the French Expeditionary Corps and the goumiers.

Place in the war

Contemporaries were already asking whether the operation had been necessary. The US Fifth Army, pursuing the Germans north of Rome, was approaching Grosseto, and as it advanced holding Elba was becoming impossible for the Germans in any case. Historians therefore judge the point of the landing cautiously: it cost the lives of several hundred soldiers on both sides, and its aim would probably have been achieved a few weeks later without a fight.

For the new French army, however, Elba was a test. It was one of the first operations in which French units on their own took a shore defended by the Germans, and their commanders – de Lattre de Tassigny, Magnan, Gambiez – gained experience of working with Allied naval and air forces. This came at a moment when Charles de Gaulle was fighting for recognition of his government and for a French share in the liberation of France. The same units – the 9th Colonial Division, the Moroccan tabors, the Bataillon de choc and the Commandos d’Afrique – landed two months later, on 15 August 1944, in Provence in Operation Dragoon, and de Lattre’s Army B became the French First Army, which went on to reach the Rhine and the Danube.

The capture of Elba closed the Piombino Channel to the Germans and allowed Allied artillery to control shipping along the Tuscan coast. Kesselring, whose troops were then falling back to the Trasimene Line, lost his last forward defensive outpost in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Yet in the memory of the island’s inhabitants June 1944 remained not only the date of liberation but also a time of violence that for decades was spoken of mainly within families and in local historiography.