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The armada sailed on, blacked-out and silent but for the softly swishing sea. Then the desperate night upon which so much depended changed its mind and blew up a sudden Mediterranean storm so severe (we learned later) that it convinced the enemy we could not invade next morning – but which surprisingly I do not remember at all. When you are braced for battle it does wipe away lesser worries – like being seasick, or drowning.
The storm blew itself out as abruptly as it had arrived, and I went back on deck to find we were surrounded by other shadowy craft with new and strange silhouettes which had assembled during the night. Ships had been converging from most ports in the Mediterranean, from Oran to Alex, to carry this Allied army to the enemy coast.
In the moonlight I tried to sleep on unsympathetic steel, fully dressed and sweating, lifebelt handy. Then around 4am the troops came cursing and coughing up out of the fug below decks into the grey dawn, buckling equipment and queuing for the rum ration.
Some took a last baffled glance at an unexpected Army pamphlet just distributed: ‘A Soldier’s Guide to Sicily’. Hard to keep a straight face. It was full of useful hints, like the opening hours of cathedrals, how to introduce yourself, and why you should not invade on early-closing day. It could have been a cut-price package cruise of the Med if the food had been more generous and we had not been preparing to break into Hitler’s fortress.
The Army Commander, General Montgomery, brought us back to reality. It is now easy to mock his resonant ‘good-hunting!’ calls to action, but they were penned more than sixty years ago, pre-television when reality had not begun to intrude upon Ealing Studios’ rhetoric.
Montgomery told us: ‘The Italian overseas Empire has been exterminated; we will now deal with the home country. The Eighth Army has been given the great honour of representing the British Empire in the Allied force which is now to carry out this task. Together we will set about the Italians in their own country in no uncertain way; they came into this war to suit themselves and they must now take the consequences; they asked for it, and they will now get it…’
He concluded: ‘The eyes of our families and in fact of the whole Empire will be on us once the battle starts. We will see they get good news and plenty of it. Good luck and good hunting in the home country of Italy.’
Wandering around the decks, I saw no one showing anxiety, no animosity, no heroics. There was too much to think about. Fear is born and grows in comfort and security, which were not available at that moment in the Med. Or perhaps we were all acting?
Action! was at first light on July 10 ’43 when British troops returned to Europe, wading ashore on to the sandy triangular rock that is Sicily. It was the first great invasion. Cut! came two years later, and was untidy.
The Eighth Army had 4½ divisions, the US Seventh Army 2½ Along the coast to our left the Americans and 1st Canadian Division were landing. The 231 Independent Brigade from Malta, the 50th and the 5th Divisions hit the beaches in an arc north towards Syracuse. Some 750 ships put 16,000 men ashore, followed by 600 tanks and 14,000 vehicles. We were covered, they assured us, by 4,000 aircraft. I saw very few – and most of those were Luftwaffe. I presumed, and hoped, that the RAF and the USAAF were busy attacking enemy installations and airfields elsewhere, to ease our way ashore.
While driving the enemy out of Africa the Eighth Army had settled the conflict in Tunisia by capturing the last quarter-of-a-million men of the Afrika Korps. Many could have escaped to Sicily had Hitler not ordered another fight to the death. At the end most were sensible, and surrendered – including General von Arnim with his 5th Panzer Army.
The triumphant conclusion of the North African campaign left the Allies with powerful armies poised for their next great offensive. President Roosevelt, unhappy on the sidelines, was determined to get his troops into action somewhere, and Italy provided the best targets available while building-up forces and experience for the Second Front. Despite their African victory the Allies were not yet dominant nor confident enough to invade France – certainly not the Americans, with little or no battle experience.
So at Churchill’s insistence we were to attack ‘the soft underbelly of Fortress Europe’. That’s what he called it. In the event, it was not as soft as advertised; indeed, it grew almost too hard to resist. After only just avoiding being pushed back into the sea a couple of times, we became resigned to Churchill’s brave optimism.
The strategic intention was to knock Italy out of the war and to tie down the 25 German occupying divisions – 55 in the whole Mediterranean area – which could otherwise have changed the balance of power on Russian battlefields or turned the coming Second Front in Normandy into a catastrophe.
The Germans were now compelled to withdraw units from their armies around Europe to reinforce the Italian front: the Hermann Goering Division from France, the 20th Luftwaffe Field Division from Denmark, the 42nd Jäger and 162nd Turkoman Divisions from the Balkans, the 10th Luftwaffe Field Division from Belgium … were the first to leave their positions and head for Italy. By drawing some of the Wehrmacht’s finest units into battle, we supported Germany’s hard-pressed enemies everywhere.
Mussolini’s Fascist regime had already been demoralised by the loss of its African empire and army, and if we could now drive Italy out of the war our frontier would be the Alps, and the Mediterranean route to the Middle and Far East secure. To defend Sicily with its 600 miles of coastline, the Italian General Alfredo Guzzoni had twelve divisions – ten Italian and only two German: 350,000 men, including 75,000 Germans. With Kesselring’s instant reaction, by the end of August seven fully equipped German divisions were attacking us in Sicily.
To clear our sea route to this battlefield and obtain a useful airfield, the Allies had first attacked Pantelleria, a tiny volcanic island 60 miles south of Sicily. It surrendered without a shot being fired on June 11 after severe bombing, and was found to have a garrison of 11,000 troops – a ready-made prisoner-of-war camp and an indication that Mussolini’s strategic planning could be haphazard. The only British casualty during this invasion was one soldier bitten by a mule.
Though the Allies dropped 6,570 tons of bombs on that Mediterranean rock the garrison suffered few casualties and only two of its 54 gun batteries were knocked out. Such pathetic results did not lead Allied High Command to question the efficacy of future saturation bombing.
Our landing in Sicily was also preceded by the first Allied airborne operation of any size. A parachute regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division and a British Glider Brigade were flown from Kairouan, Tunisia, in some 400 transport aircraft and 137 gliders. This daring night operation was the first ever attempted. It was not a success.
Poorly-trained pilots had to face dangerously high winds, so only twelve gliders landed near their objective, and 47 crashed into the sea; they had been cast off too early by their American towing aircraft. The fact that our aerial armada was fired-on by Allied naval vessels did not help. The 75 Dakotas also dropped the US paratroops far from their target of Gela, scattering them across Sicily.
The survivors of the Glider Force saved their part of the operation from complete disaster by causing some chaos among the defences around the Ponte Grande across the River Anapo. These elite troops removed all demolition charges from the bridge, enabling the 5th Division to drive straight across, head for Syracuse and occupy it that night with port installations little damaged.
So Sicily was a curtain-raiser for Europe’s major airborne landing at Arnhem in September ’44 – which was equally unwise and unsuccessful.
Otherwise the first great invasion was going well. Only four of our great fleet of some 3,000 ships in convoy had been torpedoed. Kesselring did not seem to have noticed our arrival. We learned later there was frenzy at the Field Marshal’s HQ – but this did not show.
At Pachino our LST came to anchor offshore. A few enemy miss-and-run spotter aircraft roared over, too high for pictures. When it grew light we needed to get closer in, so with Sgt Radford, I thumbed a lift on a smaller Landing Craft Infantry. We slipped from that into the Med, struggling armpit-deep through the gentle breakers and holding our cameras high. The LCI Captain, a young Australian Lieutenant with whom during the tense dawn I had been considering life, the future and everything, this Ozzie very decently jumped into the sea and waded behind me, holding my back-pack full of unexposed film up out of the Med.
On the continent of Europe I took my first sodden steps on the long march towards the Alps. So far, so surprisingly good.
At that stage of the war nobody knew much about assault landings, about storming ashore and facing mines on the beaches and machine guns in pillboxes backed by mortars and artillery and bombers. Despite hesitant or invisible opposition, there was a new naked sensation. Standing tense on that soft warm beach and gazing around I was ready to burrow into the sand for protection. I felt exposed and enormous – a perfect target. I could sense a million angry eyes were watching me over hidden gun barrels, trigger-fingers tightening. Who would fire first?
We had been prepared for everything – except an invisible enemy, and silence.
Before any hostility arrived, we scrambled off the beach, moving between white tapes the Royal Engineers were already putting down to show where mines had been cleared. Then we set about filming the landings.
On our beach, landing troops tried to dry out in the early sun; then formed up and pressed inland through the fields, interrupted occasionally by Italians who wanted to surrender to somebody – please!
Beachmasters were already in control. Tank Landing Craft disgorged enormous self-propelled guns, armoured bulldozers and Sherman tanks. RAF liaison officers talked to their radios. The Navy flagged craft into landing positions. One LST was on a sandbank, another churning the sea and trying to tow it off. Three-ton amphibious DUKWS – great topless trucks that swim – purred purposefully between ships and shore. The first prisoners arrived back on the beach, and wounded were carried into regimental aid posts. Royal Engineers were clearing mines and Pioneers laying wire netting road strips. Military police came ashore and began to control landing traffic. Bofors crews took up defensive positions and dug in. Fresh drinking water was pumped from LST tanks into canvas reservoirs. Petrol, ammunition and food dumps were started. A de-waterproofing area for trucks was marked out. Pioneers started to build and improve tracks and work on Pachino airstrip, which had been well ploughed by the Italians; by midday it was ready for use. All that was what the months of planning had been about.
We filmed the Eighth Army getting set to go places – and so far, to our relief and amazement, few shots had been fired in anger. XIII Corps took a thousand prisoners, that first day. I saw some of our invading troops with tough NCOs actually marching smartly up the enemy-held beach in columns of three – not a scene you expect to see on the first day of the re-conquest of Europe. What – no bearskins?
We had been braced to face the fury of the Wehrmacht. In fact, all we faced were a few peasants and goats, and the usual hit-and-run Luftwaffe dive-bombers. It was quite a relaxed way to start an invasion. So far we had on our side most of the military strength and all the surprise, and as the troops came ashore some of our hesitant Italian enemies – local farm workers – waved and smiled. It’s always comforting to have the audience on your side.
Towards the evening of D-Day I rounded up a few sergeant-cameramen who had landed nearby with other units and we settled in a field for our first European brew-up. On went the tea in its regulation sooty billycan and the bacon sizzled, supported by our first trophy of war: fat Sicilian tomatoes. A few Messerschmidts came over and did what they could, bombing ships and strafing beaches, but I don’t think my new Scottish friends of the 51st Division suffered many casualties. Our surprise had been total.
At dusk, finding our blankets were still somewhere at sea, we settled down on the damp rocky soil of the tomato grove and in an unnatural silence, slept uneasily.
Such lack of enemy opposition was unexpected – and so of course was the hidden fact that, after this first easy day, it was going to take another 665 days to fight our way up the length of Italy, from Pachino to the Swiss frontier by way of Catania, Messina, Salerno, Naples, Anzio, Rome, Florence, through the Gothic Line and out into the Po Valley, to Milan and Venice … and victory?
I did not know that I faced 22 months of battle that was going to provide some of the worst experiences of my life – and a few of the best.
THEY ENLISTED THE GODFATHER… (#ulink_715a1436-7e62-52dd-9670-d380aa72218d)
The stunning thud of bombs shook us awake. The lurid nightscape was bright as day. We jumped up in alarm, our shadows stretching out before us. The Germans had finally reacted.
Their night bombers were dropping flares and hunting targets. They had plenty. We covered the coastline and were impossible to miss. Attempting to hold them off, thousands of glowing Bofors shells climbed up slowly in lazy arcs through the night sky and into the darkness above the flares. They were pretty enough and encouraged us, but did not seem to worry the Luftwaffe. The invasion fleet and the beaches were bombed all night.
There may be no justice in life, but in battle the percentages go even more out of synch. For instance, my batman-driver Fred Talbot was a regulation cheery Cockney sparrer and peacetime bus driver. We saw a lot of war together, without a cross word.
During the planning for the invasion he had been much relieved to learn that, while I was directing our team and carrying my camera along with the first wave of infantry ashore, when I could reasonably expect to get my head knocked-off … there would be no room for him. He would have to stay behind with our loaded jeep and sail across in the relative comfort of a larger, safer transport ship. This would land with some dignity a day or two later, when hopefully the shot ‘n’ shell would have moved on. It was just his good luck, and he was duly thankful.
However on invasion day my first wave went in, as I said, to mystifying silence. The worst we got was wet. Meanwhile, Driver Talbot’s ship, preparing to follow the fleet to Sicily and proceeding through the night at a leisurely pace from Sousse towards Sfax and well behind the armada … hit a mine and sank immediately.
Talbot spent some hours in the dark sea before being picked up, and another ten hours in a lifeboat. He was one of the few survivors.
When he caught up with us some days later he was rather rueful about the injustice of it all. I passed a few unnecessary remarks about life sometimes being safer at the sharp end, but understandably Talbot was not amused.
My relief at his return was clouded by the knowledge that our jeep, loaded with everything we possessed, was at the bottom of the Med. Down there in the deep lay the Service Dress and gleaming Sam Browne I had worked so hard to achieve and only worn a few times. Now I had nothing resplendent and should have to attend what I anticipated would be the vibrant social scenes in Rome and Florence in my invasion rig – a bit basic and underdressed for any hospitable Contessa’s welcoming party … War can be cruel.
Then there was my religiously-kept wartime diary. Had those notes brimming with excitement, dates, facts and figures not become an early casualty of war … had that mine not destroyed my tenuous literary patience at a time when life was becoming too busy to sit and think and remember and write … had that ship not sunk – you could have suffered a version of this book half-a-century ago!
Strangely, having lost everything but my life, I felt curiously light-hearted – free and fast-moving. I would recommend travelling light to any Liberator. You sometimes approach this silly carefree mood when an airline has lost your luggage in some unfamiliar city and suddenly you have nothing to carry, or wear, or worry about.
Talbot and I met only once after the war, late one night going home on the District Line, Inner Circle. He was in good shape and told me he was working in Norwich as a ladies’ hairdresser.
Next day, still curiously carefree, I watched General Montgomery and Lord Mountbatten land from their Command ship – the Brass setting foot upon Europe. Our piece of their global war was getting under way and, apart from the bombing, we’d met little opposition – certainly not from the crack Parachute and Panzer Grenadier Divisions we were expecting to attack. We moved inland cautiously.
The Italian defences in our sector seemed admirably sited. Their pillboxes commanded excellent fields of fire, were strongly constructed and most had underground chambers full of ammunition. In main positions were six-inch guns, some made in 1907. All sites were deserted; their crews had melted away.
A handful of small Italian tanks did attempt a few brave sorties but their 37mm guns had no chance against Shermans with 75s and heavy armour.
Fifteen miles from the landing beaches, our first capture on the road north to Syracuse and Catania was Noto, once capital of the region and Sicily’s finest baroque town. Thankfully it was absolutely untouched by war, and bisected by one tree-lined avenue which climbed from the plain up towards the town square and down the other side. We did not know whether this approach had been cleared of enemy and mines, so advanced carefully.
The population emerged equally cautiously, and lined the road. Then they started, hesitantly, to clap – a ripple of applause that followed us into their town.
You clap if you’re approving, without being enthusiastic. Nobody cheered – the welcome was restrained. We were not kissed once – nothing so abandoned. It seemed they didn’t quite know how to handle being conquered.
Like almost every other village and town we were to reach, Noto’s old walls were covered with Fascist slogans. Credere! Obbedire! Combattere! – Believe! Obey! Fight! – was popular, though few of the locals seemed to have got its message. Another which never ceased to irritate me was Il Duce ha sempre ragione – The Leader is always right! Shades of Big Brother to come. Hard to think of a less-accurate statement; we were in Sicily to point out the error in that argument.
Another even less-imaginative piece of propaganda graffiti was just ‘DUCE’, painted on all visible surfaces. As a hill town came in to focus every wall facing the road would be covered with Duces. Such scattergun publicity was a propaganda tribute to Mussolini, the Dictator who by then had already become the victim of his own impotent fantasies. To me he always appeared more a clown than a threat. To his prisoners he was no joke.
In Noto the baroque Town Hall and Cathedral faced each other, giving us a taste of what war-in-Italy was to become: it would be like fighting through a museum.
We filmed one small unexpected ceremony with a carabinieri officer who had discovered a copy of a 1940 speech to the Italians by Churchill. From the steps of the Casa del Fascio he read it out with many a verbal flourish; an intent audience nodded thoughtfully. Churchill had been promoted from ogre to statesman overnight.
Then three British officers arrived and marched up to the town’s War Memorial, where after a respectful silence they gave a formal salute to the commemorated townsfolk who had fallen as our Allies in the Great War. That sensitive and sensible gesture went down very well, and for the first time the applause was real. You could see the Sicilians thinking, ‘Maybe they’re going to be all right, after all!’
Observing both sides in action, I had by now seen enough of the war and the military to appreciate that if you had to be in the army, a film unit was the place to be. It offered as much excitement as you could handle – in some cases, rather more – but also a degree of independence, and even an unmilitary acknowledgement which cut through rank.
We’re all susceptible to cameras, though we may pretend to be disinterested and impatient. (Surely you don’t want to take my picture?) In truth, everyone from General Montgomery down was delighted to be photographed. I spent some time with him during the war and always, as soon as he saw me, he’d start pointing at nothing in particular, but in a most commanding manner. It was his way and it seemed to work; half-a-century ago he had television-style fame, before television.
People do straighten up and pull-in their stomachs when a camera appears. It’s an instant reflex – like beauty queens, for instance. As soon as they see a camera, they smile and wave.
Senior army officers were certainly not given to waving but, not quite understanding what we were doing, tended to approach us with impatient exasperation or amused confusion. Usually when they saw we were quite professional they would submit to direction or just leave us alone – which for a junior officer, was ideal.
We drove north and found the 7th Green Howards had captured a large Italian coastal defence position of 12-inch gun-howitzers which could throw a 6101b shell 20 miles. They were pointing towards our carefree arrival route and positioned to do terrible damage to any invader, but were only as good as their crews – who fortunately were not working that day.
We noticed with some bitterness towards international Arms Kings that they had been manufactured by British Vickers-Armstrong. Our 74th Field Regiment got them firing on German positions outside Catania, the biggest guns the Eighth Army had ever operated – so I suppose it worked out all right in the end.
Another capture worked out equally well, and Sergeant S.A. Gladstone got some expressive pictures of happy troops liberating cellars containing 7,000 gallons of good red wine. As trophies go, this was vintage and generally accepted as even better booty than tomatoes.
After our carefree advance from the beach, resistance had toughened in front of the Eighth Army. German paratroops had been flown in from France and the Hermann Goering Division replaced the timid and apathetic Italians. After tough fighting on the beaches, the Americans enjoyed an easier run through east and central Sicily, then followed the Germans around the giant sentinel of Mount Etna as they pulled back and prepared to retreat to the mainland.
As for our enemies, we soon discovered that the Italians in their rickety little tanks were anxious to become our prisoners, and the Germans in their enormous 57-ton Tiger tanks were anxious to kill us – so at least we knew where we were …
Sergeant Radford and I set off across the island to be in at the capture of Palermo by General Patton’s army. That pugnacious American General had just been in deep trouble after visiting a hospital where he slapped and abused two privates he believed were malingering. The soldiers were said to be suffering, like the rest of us, from ‘battle fatigue’. They had no wounds though one was found to have mild dysentery, yet they seriously affected the war. Patton’s exasperation was demonstrated in front of an accompanying War Correspondent, and the resultant Stateside publicity put the General’s career on hold for a year – and in due course provided a tragic death-knell for Churchill’s Anzio campaign, which needed Patton’s drive and leadership.
As we drove through remote and untouched mountain villages, we were the first Allied soldiers they had seen. Wine was pressed upon us and haircuts (including a friction) cost a couple of cigarettes. Even the almost unsmokable ‘V’ cigarettes made for the Eighth Army in India were eagerly bartered.
In Palermo householders peeped timidly around their curtains, wondering whether our dust-covered khaki was field-grey? The city was peaceful – blue trams were running and the police with swords and tricornes drifted about, as well dressed as Napoleonic officers.
After an RAF visit, the harbour was full of half-sunken gunboats, each surrounded by shoals of large fish. We caught a few by hitting them with stones. Izaac Walton must have been spinning.
Posters showed a monstrous John Bull, the world his rounded stomach as he swallowed more lands. Another was of a grinning skeleton in a British steel helmet. I took pictures of them while passers-by hurried on, fearful lest I turn and blame them.
We returned across Sicily to the Eighth Army HQ on the malarial Lentini plain – indeed a large number of our casualties were from mosquitoes. During the night we felt huge shuddering explosions outside Catania and watched sheets of flame light the sky. The Germans were blowing-up their ammunition dumps – so they were about to start their escape to the mainland.
A new officer had arrived to join us: Lieutenant A.Q. McLaren who, captured in the desert by Rommel’s Afrika Korps while using two cameras, had refused to hand one over because it was personal property and demanded a receipt for the War Office Ikonta. He later escaped, still carrying the receipt.
As we were meeting, an operational message came in saying that Catania was about to fall. We scrambled off to get the pictures. McLaren was driving ahead of me, standing up in the cab of his truck watching for enemy aircraft, as we all had to. This gave a few seconds’ warning if the Luftwaffe swooped down to strafe the road.
We drove in column around the diversion at reeking Dead Horse Corner. In the dust ahead lay a German mine. McLaren’s warning scream came too late. It was his first day in Sicily.
The patient infantry plodding past us moved on silently towards the city. They had seen another violent death and perhaps they too would soon stop a bullet or a shellburst. In an hour or so some of them would also be dead, and they knew it.
The whole direction of their lives now was to reach some unknown place and, if possible, kill any unknown Germans they found there. In battle, death is always present and usually unemotional, and when it approaches, inches can mean the march goes on – or you are still and resting, for ever.
However its proximity does wipe away life’s other problems. Those plodding figures passing Dead Horse Corner and McLaren’s body were not worrying about unpaid bills or promotion or nagging wives or even sergeant majors. Getting through the day alive was achievement enough.
It took the population of Catania some time to realise that the Germans had gone. Then they came out into the streets to cheer and show their relief, carrying flowers, fruit, wine … It was hard to see them as enemies. Our pictures showed Italian nurses tending the wounded of the Durham Light Infantry.
At this point Sergeants Herbert and Travis arrived and unintentionally captured Catania’s entire police force. This was not in the shot-list. They had left their jeep behind a blown bridge on the road into town and were filming on foot when a civilian car came out of the city towards them. Surprised by such an apparition in a war zone, they commandeered it and ordered the driver to turn round and take them into Catania.
Speeding ahead of the Army, he whizzed excitedly along back streets and finally through two huge gates into a palace courtyard full of armed carabinieri. As the gates slammed behind them and they looked around at massed uniforms … suspicion dawned that now they might be the prisoners.
Then the Commandant in an elegant uniform arrived, saluted, and asked for their orders. That was better. They ventured that they were just a couple of photographers who did not really want a police force, not just then. However, they did want transport.
They were instantly ushered into a large garage crammed with every type of vehicle, their choice was filled with petrol and the ignition key presented with a flourish. Amid salutes, the conquering sergeants drove out through the massive gates, at speed. Honour had been satisfied on all sides.
The object of much planning-ahead during the final fighting through Sicily was not the capture of Messina, straddling the enemy’s escape route and well-protected by Kesselring’s massed anti-aircraft guns, but of Taormina, an hour’s drive to its south. This charming honeymoon-village of the Twenties climbs the rocky coast in the shadow of Mount Etna’s 11,000 feet. Like Capri, its flowers, pretty villas and bright social life gave it a sort of Noël Coward appeal. It was untouched by war, of course, as all armies protect places they might wish to use as headquarters, or billets.
It was a placid scene, as we arrived. Out in the bay a British gunboat lay peacefully at anchor, while a number of anxious Italian soldiers were standing on the beach trying to surrender to it. They would probably have been almost as satisfied if anyone else had paused to capture them – even a passing Film Unit – but by this time we had all become rather blasé about Italian prisoners. They had lost their scarcity value.
My CO Geoffrey Keating and our War Artist friend Edward Ardizzone had reached Taormina ahead of the army patrols. I was surprised poor old Ted could climb the mountainside because he seemed to be overweight and getting on a bit – he was at least 40. However he struggled up the 800 feet from the seashore – not as elegantly as Noël arriving at the beginning of Act 2 but in time for them to requisition, breathlessly, the Casa Cuseni. This splendid little villa built of golden stone was owned before the war by an expatriate British artist. Its garden was heady with the exotic scent of orange blossom, its library equally heady with pornography.
Despite those distractions, the defeat of the Germans in Sicily meant that we at last had time to be happy, even as we prepared for the coming invasion of the mainland. Every evening we relaxed with a Sicilian white in the hush of the garden terrace as the sun set behind Mount Etna. This was war at its best…
The 10,000 square miles of Sicily had been captured in 38 days, during which the Allies suffered 31,158 casualties. The Wehrmacht had lost 37,000 men, the Italians 130,000 – most of them, of course, prisoners getting out of the war alive.
In its successful strategic withdrawal, the German army corps had little air and no naval support, yet its 60,000 men stood up to two Allied armies of 450,000 men – and finally some 55,000 of them escaped across the Straits of Messina to Italy to fight another day. They took with them 10,000 vehicles and 50 tanks. Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring – the troops called him ‘Laughing Albert’ – had enough to laugh about at this Dunkirk victory.
Our last pictures of the Sicilian campaign showed Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery staring symbolically through field glasses out across the Straits of Messina towards the toe of Italy, and the enemy. That was to be our next step towards the end of the war. Behind them in Sicily, an Allied military government was being established, though in fact control of the island was falling back through the years into the hands of the island’s secret army – the Mafia.
Our victory was darkened by the fact that behind the scenes – and with the very best of intentions, you understand – the Americans were handing Sicily back to its former masters. In a misguided military decision, they enlisted the Godfather!
From his prison cell in New York State, Lucky Luciano, then Capo di tutti Capi, arranged Mafia support and guidance for the Allies in Sicily – in return of course for various business concessions. So it was that Lucky was released from prison and flown-back to his homeland to ‘facilitate the invasion’ – and on the side, to set-up the Mafia’s new narcotics empire. Vito Genovese, well-known New York hoodlum wanted for murder and various crimes in America, turned up in uniform in Sicily as a liaison officer attached to the US Army. Through threats and graft and skill, their contingent soon out-manoeuvred our unworldly do-gooding AMGOT, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory. We had our card marked by gangsters.
Thus the victors helped destroy Mussolini’s rare achievement; he had held the Mafia down and all-but destroyed its power. Now in their rush to pacify an island already peaceful, the Americans resuscitated another convicted Mafiosi, Don Calò Vizzini, and put him in control of the island’s civil Administration with military vehicles and supplies at his disposal. The Mafia was born again, fully grown.
Since then even Italian Prime Ministers have been found to enjoy such connections and support. For example, the 113-mile Palermo to Messina autostrada was finally inaugurated after 35 years by Silvio Berlusconi in December 2004. It cost £500 million and was partly funded by Brussels and the European Investment Bank. Work had begun in 1969 and, following the regular siphoning-off of materials and funds by the Mafia, proceeded at a rate of three miles a year.
Fortunately for our lively sense of mission, we simple soldiers in our shining armour knew nothing of the Mafia’s rebirth, nor could we foresee it. We had no time to occupy ourselves with the future crime and corruption that was to inherit our victory. We were busy fighting a war and preparing for an attack on Italy’s mainland.
So the Allies left five million Sicilians to a future often controlled by the Mafia, and a resigned tourist industry which in the peacetime-to-come would advertise: ‘Invade Sicily – everyone else has …’
At the end of August, the only Germans left in Sicily were the 7,000 ruminating behind barbed wire. General Montgomery’s headquarters in the San Domenico, former convent and now the grandest hotel in Taormina, prepared for the first visit of the Allied Commander of the Mediterranean Theatre, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then almost unknown outside the US – and little-known within it.
An American Supreme Commander with all those stars was something quite new to us, so he was accorded the full military razzle-dazzle and then some, as only the British Army knows how to lay on.
