Posted on 07/10/2013 12:48:20 PM PDT by Kaslin
Seventy years ago this week, U.S. and British Commonwealth troops began Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Foreshadowing D-Day 1944, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower served as overall Allied commander. Like D-Day, Allied airborne soldiers led the Husky assault by parachuting (on the night of July 9, 1943) into olive groves and rock-strewn fields along the island's southeastern shores.
On July 10, seven divisions -- three U.S., three British and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division -- launched an amphibious attack on a 100-mile long front. Despite several successful Axis air attacks on ships and a brazen Italian tank attack on U.S. positions near Gela, by midnight July 10 all seven divisions were ashore.
Putting seven divisions ashore so swiftly was an extraordinary coup. Oh, grievous errors occurred as the buildup proceeded, the most notorious being the July 11 downing of 23 U.S. transports by Allied anti-aircraft fire. The planes were ferrying paratroop reinforcements. Yet in its initial phases Husky demonstrated that the Anglo-American team had learned a great deal since the Operation Torch landings in November 1942. Planning and coordination had improved. North African combat had honed the skills of American forces.
Then came the hard slog, over Sicily's godforsaken rocks.
For the next six weeks, the Germans and a diminishing number of Italians fought brutal delaying actions. German infantry stalled the Commonwealth's east coast advances, south of the city of Messina. The Axis frustrated an American thrust in central Sicily.
The conflicting egos of the two Allied army commanders, Britain's Bernard Montgomery and America's George Patton, sorely tested Allied cooperation. Cool-headed Ike and his combined staff finessed both powerful personalities. The stubborn Montgomery continued to slam his troops against Axis positions near Mount Etna. His was the shortest route to Messina, and Messina, Sicily's route to Italy, was the prize. Messina sits on the western side of the Strait of Messina, known in classical times as Scylla and Charybdis. Capture Messina, and Sicily became an Axis POW cage.
The Germans wanted a bloody slugfest. Patton didn't. He sent mobile units toward the weakly defended northwest sector. On July 22 his troops seized the port of Palermo, as the U.S. 45th Infantry Division cut the long highway connecting Palermo and Messina. The U.S. bagged 20,000 prisoners.
Now U.S. troops pushed east toward Messina. The British kept pounding from the south. The hard slog did not end until Aug. 17. The Allies suffered 25,000 casualties (killed and wounded). The Germans lost 4,700 dead, 14,000 wounded and 5,500 captured. Italians suffered 4,300 dead, 32,000 wounded and 100,000 captured (possibly more).
The Sicily campaign placed Allied troops less than 10 miles (the strait's width) from mainland Italy.
The oh-so-close proximity of large Allied forces to Italy was enticing. And that enticement leads to the biggest historical question tagging Operation Husky: Was taking Sicily the best strategic choice, since it made an invasion of Italy inevitable? From south of Naples to the Po Valley, Italy's rugged and rocky terrain is a defender's delight and attacker's sorrow.
Winston Churchill had sold Sicily as the next logical step. Sicily was the classical route to Rome from North Africa, and knocking fascist Italy out of the war would deal Adolf Hitler's Axis a heavy political loss.
Sicily geographically dominates the central Mediterranean. Husky's advocates noted that for three millennia the island served as the stepping stone of to-and-fro commerce and war between North Africa and Europe.
American military leaders were not convinced. The decisive route to Berlin goes through France -- make the all-out effort there. Churchill also claimed Europe had a "soft underbelly." Italian and Balkan terrain is not soft. Several senior U.S. planners thought Churchill was really trying to defend British imperial interests.
Axis-controlled Sicily had served as a big aircraft carrier for attacking Allied shipping. Under Allied control, those bases would extend air cover to northern Italy and Sardinia. U.S. planners agreed that Husky made operational sense if the goal was securing air bases. But can we stop there, at the strait? Sicily's hard slog was costly. A strategic thrust up Italy's mountainous spine will be as just slow and deadly.
And indeed it was.
The battles between Rome and Pyrrhus were in mainland Italy. Pyrrhus did go to Sicily but he fought the Carthaginians there. Rome forced Carthage to give up Sicily entirely in the peace treaty at the end of the First Punic War. After the battle of Cannae in the Second Punic War, Syracuse revolted from Rome and had to be reduced by siege—the Carthaginians did what they could to aid the Syracusans. Other than that the Romans and Carthaginians did not fight in Sicily in the Second Punic War.
Precisely - that's what I meant by "death of empires" - as usual, I wasn't clear enough.
It was also his last western campaign IIRC. The guy really was a lot better than a lot of historians give him credit for.
Also note that there were commissars at all levels, adjacent to the commanders. Soviet Archives have command reports filed through command channels, and commissar reports, filed through commissar channels.
Commissars didn’t die in large numbers in wartime like commanders did. They did tend to have higher casualty rates in peacetime: They tended to be true believers, and thought that party doctrine was selected because it was scientifically correct.
“Guns Against the Reich” is a memoir of a soviet artillery officer. In his first action he was to identify a reverse slope at night, mark it, and bring up the guns to occupy it. In the dark on his way back he couldn’t find it, so before dawn, he decided to occupy a different site and camouflage the battery before dawn. As daylight broke he was horrified to realize that he was on the forward slope. The commissar made open threats that he must be a traitor to so locate the guns.
His battery was ordered to fire in support of the infantry, and complied, knowing that counter battery fire would soon be on the way.
The counter battery fire concentration landed on the carefully reconnoitered reverse slope position. Germans knew that competent battery commanders would locate their guns on the reverse slope. The soldiers were estatic, knowing that their commander had somehow arranged for them to dodge a number of very painful bullets. The commissar was silent, waiting for another chance.
The high level politicians who started the war were not the ones who died by the millions in the trenches.
The various peoples of the USSR paid a high price for the decisions of their politicians, both before the war, and during the war.
I’m not sure I understand the gist of what you are saying. Of course, Churchill’s correspondence, of course, backs up his point of view. But there is still 2500 years of military history going against that.
Weasely Wesley Clark.
I would counter with Hood, the Confederate General who Burned Atlanta.
Guadualcanal was rather like Iwo Jima: Attacks that didn’t do much toward winning the war but may have been necessary for politics.
Standard response.
It wasn’t high level politicians who were machine-gunning Cossacks, jews, Poles, etc. by the millions. Those machine gun carrying russians could have dispensed with the “high level politicians” many, many times. But they didn’t.
The problem with positing a British imperial motive for the Italy invasion is simply that it is entirely inconsistent with Churchill's approach to the rest of the war, especially what he allowed to happen at Yalta. I don't blame Roosevelt quite so much for the latter as he was a dying man at that point, but Churchill essentially ceded the Balkans to Stalin. And Britain, quite honestly, had no imperial ambitions in Italy.
RE Lee put sharpshooter companies behind his attacking infantry brigades, to kill men who would not attack hard enough.
Stalin improved that with machine gun detachments, in “blocking battalions” for the same purpose.
There is another reason for the invasion of Italy.
Churchill & FDR had promised the USSR they would launch a second front in Western Europe. The Russians were facing the brunt of the Nazi forces & needed some relief. The Italian invasion fulfilled that promise as the invasion of France (Overlord) was not yet ready.
Germany was forced to defend Italy with troops & equipment badly needed in the fight with the Russians & needed in France to prepare for the Allied invasion. In effect, the Italian defense was a THIRD front for Germany.
The Lorenz Cipher and how Bletchley Park broke it
documentary on it.
But what was giving away at Yalta was not in Britain’s sweat spot, i.e. keep the seas free for British trade. So, Churchill was giving up things he was perfectly content to give up.
So there were whole machine gun battalions that could have gotten to these guys. But those guys determined that their leaders were not wrong. The responsibility does not only land on the upper echelon leaders, it extends down to the rank & file in Russia, as well as Germany.
Yes, a pretty good general, but not very good at dodging roof tiles.
There is a lesson to be learned from Pyrrhus' death--don't invade a city with narrow streets with a bunch of elephants. It's a mistake that even the worst Civil War generals avoided.
No doubt MacArthur experienced some spectacular debacles, such as his failure to prepare for the Japanese air raid on the Philippines on December 8, 1941, several hours after Pearl Harbor was bombed, but his "Island hopping" strategy was brilliant, as was his landing at Inchon in 1950.
And I can think of some far worse generals, such as Horatio Gates, who was routed at Camden in 1780, or William H. Winder, who lost the Battle of Bladensburg in 1814, after which the British occupied Washington, DC.
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