OPERATION HUSKY AT 70, Part 6
At great cost, Sicily falls and Operation Husky is a success for the Allies 0
The grave of Pte. Charles Lloyd of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment at the Canadian War Cemetery at Agira, where most of the 562 Canadians who died in the Allied conquest of Sicily are buried.
For six weeks in the summer of 1943 the outcome of the Second World War balanced on the Mediterranean island of Sicily, and the Allied operation to seize it was codenamed Husky. More than 26,000 Canadian soldiers, sailors, and airmen took part. Part 6, the Allies victorious.
On Aug. 14, 1943, the commander of the Axis forces that had fought in Sicily, the German Gen. Hans Hube, wrote a dispatch to his boss, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Hube’s letter was on the topic of the Axis evacuation of the island through the port of Messina, which was then just finishing.
The dispatch contained suggestions for how the military should try to portray the Sicilian campaign to the German people. The main idea, Hube said, was to describe the battles in Sicily as a big success, in order to “raise morale and confidence at home.” He used the example of how the British had presented their evacuation of Dunkirk as a success to the British public, and suggested the propaganda ministry try to show that the Sicilian campaign had actually been a great victory.
But like most German propaganda, it was a lie, and both men knew it. Sicily was no German success. Like the British at Dunkirk, at best the Germans salvaged something from a catastrophic situation.
The German defence of the island of Sicily was doomed after the battles of Agira and Centuripe at the end of July and the beginning of August 1943. Their main defensive line had collapsed after successive Allied victories in and around the Canadian front. The Canadians broke the Germans at Agira and Catenanuova, the British 78th Division captured Centuripe, and just to the north the American 1st Division was fighting hard outside a town called Troina in the highest-intensity battle involving American troops since the First World War.
For the Axis, these defeats signalled the end. Their only chance of salvaging anything was to save the troops they had committed to the defence of Sicily, retreating back to the port of Messina and then ferrying them across to the Italian mainland.
The 1st Canadian Infantry Division continued to fight into the first week of August. Located at the pivotal centre of the front, the Canadians reunited their division, previously split for the near-simultaneous advances on Agira and Catenanuova. They outfought German panzer division soldiers in the town of Regalbuto, and then set their sights on Adrano, a settlement on the slopes of the volcanic Mount Etna that was the last possible line of retreat for the Germans.
There followed days of vicious fighting along the line of the Salso River against the Germans’ elite paratroopers, who had been rushed to the Canadians’ front to prevent a breakthrough. The 2nd Canadian Brigade fought and won “Hill 736” and positions along the river, with supporting tanks from the 1st Canadian Independent Armoured Brigade being used to the fullest on the plain. The paratroopers suffered heavy losses, the Canadians very few.
Patrols entered Adrano on Aug. 5, but found it abandoned. The Axis forces were in full flight. They lost Catania to the British and Troina to the Americans on Aug. 6, the same day that the Canadians, after almost a full month of active operations, were taken out of the line for a rest.
There would be another 10 days of fighting as the British Eighth Army and the U.S. Seventh Army chased the fleeing Germans and Italians into the island’s northeast corner toward Messina. But the north side of Mount Etna is not ground that allows pursuit. Despite some amphibious landings, the Allies were unable to cut off their retreating enemies or disrupt the evacuation process.
Most historians have claimed that the Allies should have done more to stop the Axis flight across the Straits of Messina, and because they didn’t Sicily was at best a “bitter victory” for the Allies, or even a German triumph.
But the Allied objective was fulfilled: they had met the enemy in battle and destroyed it. The Canadians in particular had done an astonishing job. They had travelled further than any other Eighth Army unit, and without their motor transport this meant walking much of the way; they had stormed some of the most formidable parts of the German defensive line; they had fought and defeated elements of every German division on Sicily and many Italian ones; they had inflicted far more casualties upon the enemy than they sustained.
Attrition is an ugly concept, and a morbid way of assessing a military campaign. But attrition shows the scope of what the Allies had been trying to accomplish. According to new research by Dr. Lee Windsor at the University of New Brunswick, the Germans lost 5,000 men killed and another 6,663 captured by the Allies in Sicily. They managed to evacuate an estimated 53,000 soldiers from the island in August, of whom some 19,261 were severely wounded.
But according to Dr. Windsor, the dead and wounded came overwhelmingly from among the ranks of the fighting soldiers, which even in the lean German Army made up only about half of their total troops in any division. The other half of the roughly 65,000 German soldiers on the island served support roles: headquarters, administration, supply, transport, ordnance, and medical.
So after six weeks of hard fighting, hardly any German combat troops could walk away from Sicily. Those who weren’t dead were carried out on stretchers, or were piled into the backs of trucks.
Added to this “balance” were 2,000 Italian soldiers killed, 5,000 wounded, and 137,000 captured by the Allies. Another 62,000 Italian troops were evacuated to the mainland, which the Germans quickly regretted doing. Italy was about to descend into civil war, and most of the Italians evacuated from Sicily would be interned by the Germans as enemy combatants within a month, herded into forced labour gangs or shot by their former allies.
The German divisions that escaped Sicily were stripped of any ability to fight. The Allies would meet these formations again in Italy, but not before they had been completely rebuilt. And the confidence that the Canadians gained, having fought and eviscerated some of the Germans’ best units, would carry them forward.
The impact of the Allied conquest of Sicily rippled through the Second World War like a rock flung into still water. On July 25, precipitated by events in Sicily, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was ejected from power and arrested. The Germans and Italians remained wary allies throughout August, but on Sept. 3, 1943 a secret armistice was signed between Italy and the Allies, which brought Italy into the war against Germany.
The Germans pulled dozens of divisions, almost a million men, away from the Russian Front and from northern France to forcibly occupy and defend Italy, the Balkans, and southern France from further Allied incursions. They had not wanted this outcome. Hitler and his commanders had hoped to forestall it by holding the Allies in Sicily as long as possible. But they had failed, and after only six weeks the German war effort was weakened all across Europe. The Allies’ campaign of liberation had begun.
But victory came at a steep cost. More than 5,000 Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen lay dead, another 13,000 wounded. The Canadians paid a dear price: 1,664 were wounded, 84 captured, and around 1,200 fell sick with malaria after the fighting had ended.
Five hundred and sixty-two, including Private Charles Lloyd of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment and Lieutenant George Atkinson of the 4th Field Company RCE, were killed. Most are buried on that hillside near Agira where this column began its story, six weeks ago.
Robert Engen is a historian and teacher at Queen’s University. This is the final column in his six-part review of the Allied invasion of Sicily.