Operation Baytown

Before dawn on 3 September 1943, the fourth anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, hundreds of guns ranged along the Sicilian shore opened fire across the Strait of Messina. Under cover of this bombardment landing craft carried two divisions of General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army over to Calabria. The operation, code-named Baytown, was the first step of the Allied invasion of the Italian peninsula. The soldiers, who had expected a second Sicily, came ashore almost without loss: the Italians did not want to fight, and the Germans had no intention of defending the toe of the Italian “boot”.

Some chronologies speak of a landing by “the British XXIII Corps”. This is a mistake: the force that crossed the strait was XIII Corps under Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey, made up of the British 5th Infantry Division and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division. The British XXIII Corps never fought in Italy at all.

After Sicily

When the Americans entered Messina on the night of 16–17 August, it was already clear that the Allies’ next objective would be mainland Italy. The Germans had managed to ferry across the strait most of their men, equipment and vehicles, and since the end of July, after the fall of Mussolini, they had been moving more divisions into Italy. The new government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, meanwhile, was secretly seeking an agreement with the Allies.

The invasion plan was approved in August, at the Quebec Conference. The main blow was to be a landing by General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army in the Gulf of Salerno (Operation Avalanche), set for 9 September, with Naples as its immediate objective. The Eighth Army’s crossing of the strait was to precede it by a few days, secure a bridgehead on the “toes” of the Italian boot, open the strait to the Allies and – it was assumed – tie down part of the German forces in the south, far from Salerno.

Montgomery considered the plan ill-conceived from the outset. In his view a landing in Calabria, several hundred kilometres from Salerno, could decide nothing: the Germans would simply withdraw northwards, and instead of fighting them his army would be chasing them along mountain roads. He would have preferred the whole effort to be concentrated on Avalanche. He also complained that he had not been given a clear objective, and when some of the landing craft and ships were transferred to the Salerno operation, he protested again. He nonetheless carried out his orders, and made his preparations with his customary meticulousness – and, as his critics said, his customary caution.

Who stood on the other side

In theory southern Italy was defended by two armies. The Italian coastal divisions, among them the 211th Coastal Division around Reggio, were poorly armed, made up of older age groups and demoralised by weeks of bombing and political uncertainty. The real strength was the German LXXVI Panzer Corps under General Traugott Herr, part of General Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s newly formed Tenth Army. In Calabria stood the 29th Panzergrenadier Division and part of the 26th Panzer Division (PL).

What the Germans would do in Calabria had been decided back in August. On 17 August Vietinghoff, who was to take command of the Tenth Army, was told by Hitler that the “centre of gravity” of the defence lay in the Naples–Salerno area. Calabria was to be given up, though “only under enemy pressure”, with mobile units fighting delaying actions against superior forces. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, for his part, did not believe that a landing in Calabria would be the Allies’ main blow – he expected it at Salerno, north of Naples or even near Rome. At the very tip of the peninsula he therefore left only one German regiment to support the Italians, and ordered the rest to withdraw, destroying bridges, culverts and roads behind them.

The crossing

During the last days of August and the first days of September Allied aircraft bombed Calabria, and Royal Navy ships shelled the coastal batteries. On the night of 2–3 September the massed artillery of the Eighth Army stood waiting on the Sicilian shore around Messina. According to the Canadian official history, 655 guns opened fire as the landing craft set off across the strait; the bombardment was supported by warships, and tactical aircraft from Sicilian airfields flew over the strait.

Major General Guy Simonds’s 1st Canadian Infantry Division landed on the right, with the task of taking Reggio di Calabria and the nearby airfield. The first wave consisted of battalions of the 3rd Brigade – the Carleton and York Regiment and the West Nova Scotia Regiment. Major General Gerard Bucknall’s British 5th Infantry Division crossed on the left, opposite Messina, in the area of Villa San Giovanni. In the darkness and smoke many groups of landing craft missed their assigned beaches, but this time it did not matter.

Resistance was negligible, slighter even than on the beaches of Sicily in July. The men of the Italian coastal units, stunned by the bombardment and aware that their government was looking for a way out of the war, surrendered in whole groups or simply went home. The Germans had pulled out beforehand. The Canadians took Reggio and its surroundings without difficulty, and before evening units of the 1st Brigade were moving up into the mountains. The British on the left fared just as well. The Canadian official historian summed up the day by saying that the troops of the Western Allies “once again had a foothold on the continent of Europe” – for the first time since the withdrawal from Greece in the spring of 1941, short raids such as Dieppe aside.

The one exception was the Italian 185th Infantry Regiment “Nembo”, a parachute unit assigned to coastal defence. Its men put up stiffer resistance in the Aspromonte massif and gave in only on 8 September – the day Italy’s surrender was announced.

That same 3 September, more than a hundred kilometres away at Cassibile in Sicily, General Giuseppe Castellano signed a secret armistice with the Allies on behalf of Badoglio’s government. Montgomery’s soldiers knew nothing of it, and the armistice, kept secret until 8 September, had no effect on the course of the operation.

The slow march through Calabria

The following days bore out Montgomery’s fears. The Germans would not give battle, so the Eighth Army was tying no one down – instead of fighting, it had to repair roads. Calabria is a land of steep mountains and narrow valleys, and the mountainous Aspromonte massif rises to almost 2,000 metres. German engineers blew up bridges, viaducts and hillsides above the roads, and left mines and small rearguards that held up the columns for a few hours and then vanished. The Canadians, who a few weeks earlier had been fighting in the Sicilian heat, now marched through the September rains and froze at night on the wooded ridges.

After a few days the Canadians were switched to a better road along the east coast. On 10 September their patrols reached Catanzaro, some 120 kilometres in a straight line from Reggio, and on 11 September the Canadian division’s reconnaissance entered the port of Crotone. The 5th Division advanced along the west coast. By then, however, XIII Corps had outrun its supplies, and Montgomery had to halt his main force at the Catanzaro isthmus so that the ammunition and fuel columns could catch up. Only light units pushed on.

The halt came at the worst possible moment. On 9 September the Americans and British landed at Salerno, and the Germans, who had not committed themselves in Calabria, threw their reserves in there and for several days threatened to drive the bridgehead into the sea. The commander of the 15th Army Group, General Harold Alexander, and Clark pressed Montgomery to hurry. The advance resumed on 14 September, and only on 16 September did patrols of the 5th Division make contact with the right flank of the Fifth Army – by which time the worst at Salerno was over. Montgomery’s critics accused him of advancing too cautiously; his defenders pointed to the wrecked roads and the supply shortages, which stemmed largely from the fact that transport had been given to Operation Avalanche.

Significance

Operation Baytown was militarily easy and strategically modest. It did not tie the Germans down in Calabria – Kesselring withdrew his troops from there as planned and used them against the landing at Salerno. It did, however, open the Strait of Messina and a supply route from Sicily to the Allies, and the Eighth Army, advancing north and east, linked up with the forces that landed at Taranto on 9 September and went on to take the Adriatic ports.

Above all, it was the beginning of the Italian campaign – the longest campaign of the Western Allies in Europe. The British and Canadians who came ashore at Reggio on 3 September were to fight their way through Calabria, Apulia and the Abruzzi, only to be held up in the winter of 1943–1944 before the German defences on the line of the Sangro and Moro rivers, and then at Monte Cassino. The campaign, which began almost without a shot being fired, cost both sides hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded and lasted until the surrender of the German forces in Italy at the beginning of May 1945.