Читать книгу Sicily '43 - James Holland - Страница 19

GERMAN COMMANDERS IN THIS war were not widely known for their eccentricities, but the senior army officer on Sicily that May certainly stood apart from his peers. Partial to wearing a tartan kilt and a claymore sword slung by his side, Oberst Ernst-Günther Baade had been something of a legendary figure in Rommel’s Afrika Korps, known for his fearlessness, immense charm, wonderful sense of humour and penchant for tapping into British telephone conversations and having a chat in his flawless English with whoever was on the other end of the line. Another favourite trick was calling in to misdirect artillery fire.

Born to wealth in Brandenburg in 1897, Baade had grown up an avid horseman, roaming widely on his family estates. Clever, and intellectually curious, he was immensely well read and spoke not only excellent English but fluent French as well. With a thirst for adventure, he enlisted in the cavalry the moment Germany went to war in 1914, even though he was still just seventeen. Somehow, he survived four years on the Western Front before being gassed very near the end in August 1918, albeit not too severely. He had been making a good recovery by the time the Armistice was signed that November.

It had been Baade’s intention to remain in the army, but with the great cuts in size after the war there was no place for him and so instead, still aged only twenty-two, he had settled on one of the family estates in Holstein in northern Germany, where he became a notable horse-breeder. His ambitions for an army life had not been blunted, however, and just a few years later, in 1924, he was accepted back – into the 14. Cavalry Regiment. Between army duties, he and his wife continued to breed horses and became quite celebrated as international show-jumpers.

Remaining in the cavalry, he served in Poland, then France, and when the Wehrmacht’s last cavalry division was disbanded in 1941, he took over command of the 4. Maschinengewehr Bataillon on the Eastern Front. In April 1942, he was sent to North Africa and soon after took command of the 115. Gewehr Regiment, just in time to join Rommel’s offensive against the British at Gazala at the end of May and personally leading the assault that ended Free French resistance at Bir Hakeim – wielding his claymore as he did so. On one occasion, Baade found himself caught in a British minefield, but persuaded a captured English sapper to lead him through the gap. Once safe, Baade shook the man’s hand, wished him luck and let him go. In the desert he won a Knight’s Cross and a reputation as a superb commander who led from the front; in that, he was cut from the same cloth as Rommel. His men were devoted to him and although higher up the chain his eccentricities – not to say wackiness – and his insistence on old-fashioned military chivalry ruffled feathers, his performances and the esteem in which he was held by Rommel and others ensured he was safe enough. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baade was no great fan of Hitler and the Nazis.

Severely wounded at the Battle of Alamein, he returned to duty in December 1942, but was not deemed fit for combat and so was posted to a staff position at the Italian Comando Supremo, the Italian high command, and then, in April, to Sicily to try to salvage and organize some German units from those returning from Tunisia or those who had been sent south as replacements but had been held back as defeat in North Africa loomed. Division Kommando Baade was the starting point, although by the time of the Axis surrender in North Africa on 13 May, he had formed just one four-battalion panzer-grenadier regiment. Had the Allies been able to hustle their way across the Mediterranean and land right away, the door would have been wide open. Instead, Baade was able to continue building up German forces on the island; by 14 May he had about 30,000 troops, now redesignated Division Kommando Sizilien, and more were heading his way.

Among those moving south were a number of supply and support troops and also flak units, including several batteries drawn from Flak Regiment 7, with a mixture of 88mm anti-aircraft and four-barrelled quick-firing Flakvierling 38s, 20mm cannons. These flak units were veterans of the Eastern Front and had already seen considerable action during the war. One of them included 22-year-old Kanonier Hanns Cibulka from Jägerndorf in Upper Silesia – when he was born, part of the new Czechoslovakia, but now within the German Reich once more.

Cibulka was something of an intellectual and a poet, but in the German army he was a wire man, responsible, within a small team of three, for ensuring the batteries were all connected to battalion headquarters with field telephone wires. Travelling with their wiring equipment in a truck rather than on foot or by horse-drawn cart, the column wound slowly down through Italy. On 14 May they had been south of Rome, but it wasn’t until two days later that they finally reached the Straits of Messina. It was 3 a.m., still dark, and both sides and the water in between seemed to be still, quiet and devoid of life. A ferry was waiting ready; first to load were the headquarters company, including the wire team and their truck. An hour later they pushed off.

The sea was dead calm, but a cold breeze blew gently over them, dawn breaking in the east. As they pushed further out, the water began to swell, splashing on to the wooden deck. Then the sun rose, glistening, dispersing the fog – and suddenly there was Sicily, at first a narrow blue strip and then, as they drew closer and the morning mist cleared, so Messina seemed to rise up and, behind the city, the grey hills. ‘In the coastal waters, colourful sails,’ wrote Cibulka in his diary, ‘at the pier a few men are sitting and fishing, on the beach promenade trees stand in joyful green.1 The air that blows over from the land is warmed by the sun, but on the tongue, I don’t know where from, a salty, bitter taste.’

An air raid siren rang out and moments later, they saw them: four-engine bombers, thundering over ponderously in close formation, their shapes clear against the steel-blue sky. Cibulka and his comrades stood on the pier watching, waiting apprehensively for the bombs to start falling, but the Flying Fortresses moved on in the direction of the mainland. The anti-aircraft gunners along the heavily defended straits opened fire, the sky suddenly full of clouds of bursting shells. The noise was immense – the guns, the explosions, the roar of engines. Suddenly there was a bright flash, an explosion. Cibulka and his friend Arno stood by the truck, their heads craned skywards, watching as a wing plunged down into the sea in a slow, sloping arc. ‘So this is what death by air looks like,’ he thought to himself.2 ‘What is left of the ten-man crew is a single parachute that descends slowly and pendulously over the waterway.’ And then, in what seemed like no time at all, the Straits of Messina were empty again. So, this was Sicily. Cibulka remembered a line from Goethe’s Italian Journey. ‘Italy without Sicily makes no picture in the soul: here is the key to everything.’3

Cibulka and his comrades had no idea where they were headed, although news from North Africa had reached them by now. German plans at this moment were still very uncertain, the German high command disconcerted, to say the very least, by the disaster that had just occurred in Tunisia, following hot on the heels of the catastrophe at Stalingrad. Urgent plans needed to be made to try to repel the next enemy onslaught – wherever that might be – while also working out what to do about Italy, an ally that was clearly on the ropes.

A striking feature of Nazi Germany was the truly appalling way in which it treated its allies, with the possible exception of the Japanese, whom they largely ignored apart from a bit of intelligence sharing. All Germany’s other allies, whether Romania, Hungary, the Balkan states, Bulgaria or even Finland, were browbeaten and bullied and treated with little more than contempt. Only the Axis alliance with Italy, first signed in 1936 and then militarized with the Pact of Steel in May 1939, had begun on reasonable terms, not least because initially Hitler had been rather inspired by the Italian dictator Mussolini, and the two had struck up something akin to a real friendship.

That, however, soon turned sour when Germany began planning for the invasion of Poland without any prior consultation with Italy whatsoever. The cynical Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union of August 1939, also made without Italy’s knowledge, which paved the way for the outbreak of war that September, chilled the mood further. Indeed, although Germany was prepared to help Italy materially, it was on the basis of a clear quid pro quo. Germany would fight to expand its borders and pursue its own aggressive foreign policy without the need for Italian military assistance. Italy, for its part, would expand its own empire and sphere of influence in the Mediterranean without the involvement of German troops. This suited Hitler because he had always been paranoid about fighting on multiple fronts – that Germany had done so in the previous war had been one of the major factors in its defeat in 1918. The last thing Hitler wanted to be worrying about was his southern flank – the soft underbelly of Europe. Italy’s role in Hitler’s master plan was to ensure the south was kept safe and secure from enemy influence.

But that simple plan had gone terribly awry from the moment the Italians first tried to assert themselves over the British in the Mediterranean. The brief glimpses of triumph – especially after the fall of Tobruk in June 1942 – had proved an illusion; yet such had been Hitler’s obsession with his southern front that he’d poured not just men but huge amounts of materiel into Tunisia, so that what had begun with a couple of divisions in February 1941 had ended up swelling to two German–Italian armies. By the time the Axis forces surrendered on 13 May 1943, some 250,000 men were in captivity in North Africa. In the final battles, more than 300 tanks had been lost, while the three battle-hardened divisions of Rommel’s old Afrika Korps, the 21. and 15. Panzer Divisions and 90. Light Division, had been wiped out: every man killed, wounded or put in the bag, along with all their equipment and invaluable combat experience. For the Luftwaffe, the picture was every bit as grim: from November 1942 until the end of the campaign, a staggering 2,422 German aircraft alone – not including those of the Italian air force, the Regia Aeronautica – had been lost in the Mediterranean theatre. These were crippling numbers.

For the OKW – the men trying to plan and shape Germany’s war while also acting as Hitler’s mouthpiece – the loss of Tunisia had far-reaching and decidedly grave consequences. No longer was the war in the south restricted to the arm’s-reach safety of the North African coastline; it now encompassed the entire sweep of the Mediterranean.

Deputy Chief of the OKW Operations Staff was Generalleutnant Walter Warlimont, a 48-year-old career soldier and former artilleryman who had served on the operational planning staff since before the war. This had given him almost daily access to Hitler and the largely unenviable task of trying to put the Führer’s wishes into some kind of action. It also meant that right now, with North Africa lost, some serious plans needed to be made and in quick order. Warlimont’s staff soon produced figures to suggest that by reopening the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal the Allies had freed up around 2 million tons of shipping for the movement of troops and supplies, which was certainly not good news.

Worse, though, was the realization that the Allies now had vast armed forces in the Mediterranean and were almost certain to send them across the sea for an assault on a major Axis stronghold in the southern theatre. It was Warlimont’s job to try to work out where that might be and to prepare for such an eventuality. And it was also the task of his team to consider what the Germans might do about their Italian ally, an appreciation they set to work on immediately. The ‘Survey of the Situation Should Italy Withdraw from the War’ was prepared on Hitler’s direct instructions and was an extraordinary admission of just how low relations between the two allies had sunk.

Hitler’s view was that the most likely target for further Allied action in the southern theatre was the Balkans. His lack of geopolitical understanding repeatedly hindered German strategy; he was utterly incapable of looking at any situation except through the prism of his own world-view. The Balkans were the part of the southern flank he feared losing most; so that was where the Allies would strike. Whenever he tried to put himself into the Allies’ shoes, he merely transposed his own thoughts on to their situation. The reason for this obsession with the Balkans was because this route into Europe led directly to the Romanian oilfields, some of Nazi Germany’s most prized assets, as well as to critical supplies of bauxite, copper and chrome that came from the area. With much of the Balkans, from Greece to Yugoslavia, now in revolt against their German occupiers, the region seemed ripe for the Allied plucking – along with the fact that long stretches of its coastlines were poorly and thinly defended by Italian troops who had not been given any updated equipment since 1941. That there might not be anything like enough beaches or ports, or half-decent internal infrastructure, or that it was way beyond Allied fighter cover – an absolute non-negotiable prerequisite for any major amphibious landing – does not appear to have swayed him from his conviction that the Balkans were now the Allies’ major goal. The Balkans, he announced on 19 May, were ‘almost more dangerous than the problem of Italy, which, if the worst comes to the worst, we can always seal off somewhere.’4

Warlimont, though, was aware, as were others, that the Allies would need a stepping stone in crossing the Mediterranean, and that Sicily, Sardinia or even Corsica were the most likely targets. Clearly, it was essential to keep the Allies as far away from the southern Reich as possible, and this meant sending reinforcements into Italy and also the Balkans. These would have to come from the Eastern Front but could also be drawn from France, since it now seemed unlikely the Allies would attempt a Channel crossing any time soon.

Hitler broadly accepted Warlimont’s appreciation, although he seems to have become convinced that the first stepping stone would be Sardinia, not Sicily. This was in large part due to Operation MINCEMEAT, a rather ghoulish intelligence wheeze by the British Secret Intelligence Service and their XX ‘Double Cross’ Committee, who had had the idea to take the corpse of a Welsh down-and-out who had killed himself with rat poison, dress him up as an officer and dump him from a submarine just off the southern Spanish coast. No longer would the dead man be Glyndwr Michael; he was now (Acting) Major William Martin of the Royal Marines. No small detail was overlooked: about his person were letters between ‘Martin’ and his fictitious girlfriend, receipts, and various other seemingly innocuous details that lent verisimilitude to the whole elaborate scam. Most importantly, though, he was carrying documents relating to Allied plans to make landings in southern Greece at Cape Araxos and Kalamata. There was also a reference to ‘sardines’, which was supposed to be perceived as a possible coded clue to an operation against Sardinia. The body was prepared to look as though the man had died in a plane crash, and was dropped close enough to the Spanish coast to ensure that it would be washed up on the beach and picked up by the Spanish authorities, who would pass all the information on to the Germans. ‘Major Martin’ was put into the sea in the early hours of 30 April and everything went exactly according to plan, so that by 14 May British cryptanalysts had decoded German ciphers warning that an Allied invasion was expected in the Balkans.

MINCEMEAT was certainly ingenious, but one of the reasons it worked was because it reinforced a conclusion upon which Hitler had already decided. What’s more, it wasn’t the only piece of intelligence chicanery employed by the British. The Axis were also led to believe a Twelfth Army had been established in the Middle East, ready to invade Greece, even though in reality it was every bit as fictitious as Major Martin and simply a cover name for Eighth Army. In Greece itself, Operation ANIMALS was carried out by a British Special Operations Executive (SOE) mission led by Brigadier Eddie Myers, a quiet and methodical engineer turned sabotage maestro. In just over three weeks between 29 May and 23 June, Myers and his team carried out some forty-four acts of sabotage in Greece, cutting telephone wires, blocking roads, blowing railway lines, destroying the Asopos viaduct and blocking the Métsovo pass, all of which was supposed to make the Axis believe the Allies would be landing in Greece, and possibly Sardinia, but certainly not Sicily.

Clever as all these elaborate deception plans were, however, they couldn’t obscure the fact that Sicily was just such an obvious choice, despite Hitler’s view to the contrary. It was the only target that afforded realistic fighter cover, and it was very obviously the target that promised the most bang for the Allied buck. Certainly, Feldmarschall Kesselring remained convinced Sicily would be the Allies’ target – and so too did Mussolini, for what it was worth. At any rate, neither MINCEMEAT nor any of the other deception plans were responsible for changing the entire course of the Second World War, as has often been claimed by film-makers’ and publishers’ hyperbole. What does seem clear is that Hitler had already decided on the Balkans and possibly Sardinia as the targets, intelligence scams or no, while those who were convinced, rightly, it was going to be Sicily were not dissuaded by any washed-up corpse or blown-up viaduct.

Far more corrosive for Axis fortunes in the Mediterranean was the growing toxicity of the alliance, for wherever the Allies struck it was absolutely clear by now that neither the Germans nor the Italians trusted the other one inch. Germany was actively planning for life without its Italian ally, while most senior Italian commanders were wondering how they could extricate themselves from the war with the minimum amount of German retribution, which, for obvious reasons, was feared might be terrible indeed.

With the loss of North Africa, Hitler accepted the writing was on the wall for Italy but – perhaps because of a lingering affection for Mussolini – he did not want to accept that Il Duce might now stab him in the back and take Italy out of the war. Instead, the Führer had become convinced that Mussolini was in poor health and now, at sixty, too old to hold on to the reins of power with his former iron grip. After all, Il Duce was not the absolute leader that Hitler was; Italy was still a monarchy, and because of that there were checks on his power.

‘Do you think’, Hitler asked Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz on 14 May after the latter’s return from a seven-day visit to Rome, ‘that the Duce is determined to go all the way with Germany right to the end?’5 Without Mussolini, Hitler knew, Germany’s partnership with Italy would be over; it had always been the two leaders’ personal relationship that had glued their nations together. Despite the catalogue of catastrophic errors Mussolini had made, Hitler had remained curiously loyal to his old Fascist friend. He had even offered to send five German divisions to Italy, but in early May Mussolini had declined the offer; perhaps he had thought it would make too much of a dent in his prestige, or that it was too dangerous to have too many German troops in Italy should the tide turn against him at home.

At any rate, less than a week later, on 20 May 1943 at the Wolfschanze, Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia, a conference was held to discuss the deteriorating situation with Italy. Those present included Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the OKW and Hitler’s number one lackey, as well as Warlimont and also Rommel, who had recently been appointed commander of Army Group B, formed to defend northern Italy should the worst come to the worst. Also attending was Sonderführer Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath of the SS, the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, who had just returned from a diplomatic mission to Rome. While there, von Neurath had had a number of conversations with Generale Mario Roatta, who had been commander of the Italian Second Army in Yugoslavia before taking over on Sicily. He had recently returned to Rome as he was due to take over from Generale Vittorio Ambrosio as chief of staff of the Italian armed forces.

It was Sicily that had been of particular interest to von Neurath, and Roatta had told him he had little faith in the Italians’ ability to hold the island, should it ever be attacked. Already the Allied air forces were shooting up railways and other lines of communication. There was, he reported, just one ferry operating across the Straits of Messina. The others were being saved for ‘more important purposes’.6 What were these? Hitler asked.

‘Well, my Führer,’ von Neurath replied, ‘at one moment the Italians say, “When the war is over” – that’s a very frequent expression – at another moment they say, “You never know what’s going to happen.”7 ’ German troops von Neurath spoke to told him the ferries over the straits were there and in working order but that the Italians were holding them back. German troops already in Sicily were deeply unpopular. ‘Once the English arrive, that’s the end of the war,’ von Neurath continued. ‘That’s the general opinion in Southern Italy – that once the English come the thing will be over quicker than if the Germans are still there making life unpleasant.’

As the discussion continued, Hitler and the rest of those attending increasingly began to work themselves into a lather about Italian treachery. The Allies were flattening Palermo but not Cagliari in Sardinia, another sign they were intending to land on the latter and use its port facilities. Generale Roatta was known to have a number of pro-English staff officers under him; some were even married to English wives! ‘Personally, in so far as I know him,’ added von Neurath about Roatta, ‘I wouldn’t trust him further than I could kick him.’8 He had always been rather a fox. Hitler agreed; Roatta was a spy! A completely spineless spy! That Roatta had come to be known as the ‘Black Beast of Yugoslavia’ for the brutality with which he dealt with Communists and partisans, a ruthless approach earlier much admired by the Germans, was forgotten. That was then; now the filthy weasel was clearly up to something and planning to stab them in the back. The Italian leadership, too, was feckless, spoiled and corrupt – they were always bleating to the Germans they never had enough supplies, and yet continued to party hard in Rome like overindulged playboys.

‘I am quite clear in my mind,’ Hitler then announced. ‘A certain section in that country has consistently sabotaged this war from the beginning. From the beginning!’ Back in 1939, if Italy had declared war on Poland at the same time as Germany had, then France and Britain would never have entered the conflict. ‘Every memorandum I sent to the Duce’, he continued, ‘was immediately transmitted to England.’ Treachery was clearly lurking at every turn. They now wondered whether they shouldn’t get the Hermann Göring Panzer Division out of southern Italy. Rommel suggested perhaps they should demand the Italians send more troops to Sicily instead. The last thing anyone wanted was for their own troops to be isolated, surrounded and betrayed. Rommel had so little faith in the Italians he even questioned whether they should be sending any German troops into Italy at all.

‘The great question for me is what’s the Duce’s state of health?’ Hitler said, returning to a now familiar theme. ‘That’s the decisive factor with a man who has to take such important decisions. What does he reckon the odds are, if for instance, the Fascist revolution goes under?’

The truth was, Mussolini would not have been able to give Hitler an answer to his question even if he had been standing before him. Mussolini had got himself into power back in 1922 as the world’s first fascist dictator through energy, drive and force of character. To a war-weary, poverty-stricken nation where democracy seemed to do little for the ordinary citizen, Mussolini had offered something brash and bold and exciting. He had restored some much-needed pride and yes, the trains had improved – as had employment, and as had Italy’s wider reach, with Libya, and then Abyssinia, drawn into a burgeoning empire. Many Italians, especially the young, had loved the marches, the militarism, the snappy uniforms. Vast crowds had cheered when Mussolini had stood on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome on 10 June 1940 and announced that Italy had declared war on Britain and France. ‘Vinceremo!’ he had promised, his jaw set, chin jutting upwards with resolute bombast. ‘We will win!’

Not quite three years later, his dreams of a new Rome with himself as its Caesar had long been punctured. Even the might of Nazi Germany and Hitler’s panzers and Messerschmitts had not been able to stave off disaster. And Hitler had been right about one thing: Mussolini was feeling ill. The previous July he’d gone to Libya expecting to lead the triumph into Cairo. He had returned with the Axis armies stuck at Alamein and with a stomach problem he couldn’t shift. Whether it was psychosomatic or not, it was eating away at his resolve. At the Council meeting in Rome the previous November, his appearance had shocked his ministers; he’d looked like a dying man about to collapse at any moment. ‘From October 1942,’ he wrote, which was when Montgomery had launched the Battle of Alamein, ‘I had a constant and growing presentiment of the crisis which was to overwhelm me.9 My illness greatly affected this.’ Or perhaps it was the other way around.

At any rate, he was certainly aware the vultures were starting to circle. Most within the Italian establishment – those very same Roman elites that had prompted so much contempt from Hitler and von Neurath – had been wondering how Italy might extricate itself from the war ever since the disastrous defeat at Alamein. The loss of North Africa had merely brought the question into sharper focus. Perhaps, some wondered, Mussolini might ask for Hitler’s consent to conclude peace with the Allies? This was, of course, a vain hope, but conversations were had and meetings held, although nothing much seemed to come of them – not least because it was obvious that if Italy did somehow make peace with the Allies, the country would most likely be invaded by Germany. The payback, inevitably, would be appalling. Italy found itself between a rock and a hard place.

Mussolini knew it too. He wrote a long letter to Hitler pleading with him to sue for terms with Stalin and turn his attention closer to home, in the south. The Führer simply ignored it; obsessed though he was with his southern flank, Hitler’s ideology and that of National Socialism was wedded to the struggle against Bolshevism and racial battle in the east. None the less, in Rome the plots continued to thicken, and although none of them seemed to get much beyond the conversational stage, conspiracy, as von Neurath had discerned so palpably, was in the air.

In February, Mussolini had had a clear-out, sacking those he thought most likely to be plotting and the most outspokenly pessimistic. One of those to go was his son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, one of the playboys Hitler had scorned, but a clever man, who had far greater geopolitical awareness than his master and who had seen the writing on the wall a long time earlier. Ciano, a serial philanderer, was made Ambassador to the Vatican. ‘The ways which Providence chooses’, he wrote in one of his last diary entries, ‘are indeed sometimes mysterious.’10

The change of team at the top made little difference. Mussolini had become isolated; he was sick and alone. He held no reciprocal affection for Hitler, who seemed to rant at him whenever they met. When more German troops were proposed to help shore up Italy and Sicily in May, Mussolini turned down the offer, fearing further humiliation and ulterior German motives. Hitler felt betrayed by Italy; Mussolini felt betrayed by Hitler, also dating back to 1939, for embroiling Italy in a war for which it had clearly not been ready. Neither man was prepared to consider his own culpability for the disasters that now faced their respective countries.

Wracked with stomach pains, surrounded by men he could no longer trust, Il Duce began to go a little mad on occasion. In early June, Carlo Pareschi, the minister for agriculture, admitted during a meeting that the harvest so far had not brought the yields hoped for. Mussolini suddenly cut in. ‘A few days ago,’ he said, ‘I was in the countryside and I saw what the birds get up to.11 They land on the stem, and their weight bends the ear of the wheat so that they remain hidden. Then they eat the grain.’ His solution was to kill the birds. ‘Kill them all!’ he exclaimed.

In many ways, the immediate fate of Mussolini was in the hands of King Vittorio Emanuele. Tiny of stature and pretty tiny of mind too, the King had sanctioned Fascism and had sanctioned a catastrophic war; now he seemed less concerned about the fate of his people, and more about the fate of the monarchy and whether it would survive any peace with the Allies. He also worried whether it would survive an invasion by the Germans. Whatever course it took, the future looked far from rosy, and if the King was considering removing Mussolini he did nothing about it. For the time being, Mussolini would remain Il Duce.

Meanwhile, across Italy, civil strife grew worse. The country was being bombed – not, perhaps, with the same city-flattening treatment that was starting to be meted out on Germany, but by the end of 1942 some 25,000 homes had been destroyed in Turin, while more than half a million people had been evacuated from Milan. Food shortages were really beginning to bite, especially in the cities – most people were living off less than 1,000 calories a day, which was not enough – and other commodities were in short supply too. There was little petrol. Corruption and black marketeering were rampant, making life even more miserable for the masses. Hundreds of thousands of young men were now locked up in Allied or Russian prison camps.

And nowhere was the misery of war felt more keenly than in the south – and especially in Sicily, the island off the toe of the mainland that was part of Italy but also not part of it. On Sicily, for centuries home to a mass of impoverished, beaten-down peasants, life was especially tough. It was soon to become a lot tougher.