Читать книгу Sicily '43 - James Holland - Страница 21

‘FOLLOWING THE LOSS OF Tunisia,’ wrote General der Flieger Wolfram von Richthofen, C-in-C Fliegerkorps II, on 23 May, ‘the island chain comprising Sardinia–Sicily–Crete represents the advanced defence line of Southern Europe.1 Should the enemy succeed in gaining a foothold in one of these islands, he will have achieved a penetration into Fortress Europe which would signify a grave threat to the defence of the mainland. Every last man and weapon must be rallied to prevent this happening.’ Von Richthofen made the point that at the moment of assault the enemy would be at his weakest because he would be in landing craft and devoid of cover. Therefore all Luftwaffe personnel, unless servicing aircraft or directly employed in flying operations, would be issued with weapons and given training, and would be expected to help repel the enemy in the event of an invasion attempt.

It was all a bit desperate and smacked of panic. It would, of course, have been far better that Hitler, recognizing there was now no reasonable chance of winning the war, threw in the towel right away and saved a huge amount of carnage, but that was never going to happen. To start with, the Nazis already had too much blood on their hands; and secondly, Hitler had always been a black-and-white kind of person. There would be the Thousand Year Reich or there would be Armageddon, but no half measures. Tragically for Germany and for all those fighting the war, Armageddon now looked a dead cert. The only question was how long it would take.

Von Richthofen now had his air forces spread to the four winds in an attempt to counter every eventuality. One of the features of the glory days of the Blitzkrieg – and indeed of earlier German and, before that, Prussian, successes – was the concept of the Schwerpunkt: literally a ‘heavy point’, meaning a concentration of forces to deliver a maximum punch. These days, though, the Luftwaffe, like every other part of the Wehrmacht, were on the defensive and thinly spread. As a result, there were Luftwaffe units in Greece, in southern Italy and on Sardinia as well as Sicily, where there were now three Gruppen of JG 53, the Ace of Spades, each with three Staffel or squadrons; there was also one Gruppe, the second, of JG 27; and there were two Gruppen of Macky Steinhoff’s JG 77, with the third based on Sardinia.

The air defence was supposed to be a joint effort by Germany and Italy, but the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica were like an estranged couple reluctantly still cohabiting but barely speaking to one another. Certainly there was no shared doctrine or even common operational orders. The Luftwaffe had radar on the island and ground controllers, for example, but the Regia Aeronautica did not and the Germans were not about to share it – a bizarre state of affairs. They would pass on information if asked, but that was about it. As it happened, the Italians rarely did ask.

There were still a number of Italian bombers and torpedo bombers and seven gruppi of fighters on Sicily. Among the bombers were the Cant Z.1007s of the 27° Gruppo Bombardimenti at Gela–Ponte Olivo: three-engine bombers that could each carry a rather underwhelming 1,200kg of bombs. Reasonably quick and with good visibility for the crew, the Z.1007 none the less suffered from poor reliability and was woefully underarmed, with just four machine guns. Nor did it particularly help that the fuselage was mostly made of wood.

Among the aircrew at Ponte Olivo was 22-year-old Melino Barbagallo, part of an air force unit called Carro 1000, a radio service group named after the 1,000-watt radio they used on the ground to communicate with aircrew. Very often he would be sent up into the air as a spare radio operator and technician; since joining the Regia Aeronautica, he’d been up on a number of different bombers and missions. A native Sicilian, born and raised in Catania, from an early age he had dreamed of becoming a pilot but had left school at sixteen without either the right academic qualifications to be accepted for flying training or a wealthy enough father to pay for it. Even so, he still managed to join the air force rather than the army or navy, and was sent to Milan to train as a radio operator. From there he was posted back to Sicily, and to Gela–Ponte Olivo. He had been thrilled – at last he was able to see up close many of the various aircraft of the Regia Aeronautica. He was soon carrying out operations against Malta and against Allied shipping, including attacks on the Allied PEDESTAL convoy. ‘I was really passionate about the war,’ he said.2 ‘I wanted to defend my country and I really wanted to take part in the war until the end.’

The Italian air forces would soon be leaving the island, but the German fighter boys were staying put, for the time being at any rate. Macky Steinhoff felt weighed down by a constant feeling of impending doom he couldn’t shift, made worse by the knowledge that as commander of an entire fighter Geschwader he was responsible for the men under his charge. Most of the pilots were still boys – there were a few old-timers, Experten with more than twenty-five victories to their name and Knight’s Crosses dangling round their necks – but the majority were no older than twenty-one at most.

He had taken over command of JG 77 in Tunisia in the latter half of March, having been given some leave following a long tour in the Caucasus and Crimea, on the southern Eastern Front. It had been good to spend some time with his wife, Ursula; but then had come a call from General der Jagdflieger Adolf Galland offering him a choice of commands: either France or North Africa. He chose the latter. ‘I had never been there,’ he admitted, ‘and I think the adventure appealed to me.’3

Steinhoff’s predecessor at the head of JG 77 had been Joachim Müncheberg, one of the legends of the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm and a commander much loved by his men. In 1941, from Sicily, Müncheberg had led a fighter group against Malta that in two months had shot down forty-three Hurricanes for not one loss of their own; Müncheberg had claimed twenty of them. By the time he died on 23 March 1943 in a mid-air collision with an American Spitfire, he had 135 aerial victories to his name. His loss seemed to symbolize a terrible realization that the Luftwaffe’s glory years lay behind them. ‘I knew him,’ said Steinhoff, ‘and he was a great pilot, good man, great sense of humour and a fine gentleman.’4 Müncheberg’s shoes were hard to fill, but Steinhoff had a pretty impressive record himself, having shot down some 152 Soviet aircraft over the Eastern Front. As he had quickly discovered, however, Allied fighter pilots were of a different calibre from those of the Red Army: on one of his first missions in Tunisia he had had his radiator shot out by a Spitfire, forcing him to crash-land in the desert. Despite this, he’d soon won the trust and respect of his airmen – and also that of the ground crew, whom he arranged to fly out to Sicily without his superiors’ knowledge.

JG 77 had escaped to Sicily by the skin of their teeth, landing at Trapani on 8 May. Their Messerschmitts had been covered in bullet holes and hadn’t been serviced for days, but in the fuselage of each one had crouched a mechanic with whatever tools he could carry. It had been dangerous, but the gamble had paid off. None the less, to a man, from Steinhoff down to the most junior pilot, they knew they’d been whipped. Everyone was physically and mentally exhausted, and they all realized there was little chance of their fortunes improving any time soon. General von Richthofen might have issued memos about Luftwaffe personnel readying themselves to fight on the beaches and instigating training programmes, but Steinhoff wasn’t playing ball. Nor did he stand on ceremony. His men, unshaven, wore a range of odd uniforms and non-regulation clothing, with sandals on their feet and a variety of scarves, headscarves and hats on their heads. ‘Let me just say,’ Steinhoff commented, ‘we had developed the beach mentality.’5

The day after their arrival, Kesselring drove over to see them, appearing just after Allied bombers had been over and given Trapani a pasting. The field marshal was less shocked by the ambulances screaming past hither and thither than he was by the state of the pilots.

‘Steinhoff,’ he exclaimed, ‘do your men know that there is a war on?’6

‘Yes, Herr Feldmarschall,’ Steinhoff replied, ‘we have been fighting it for about four years now.’ Kesselring, ever the optimist, liked to appear cheerful and was known as ‘Smiling Albert’ but he was certainly not smiling now.

‘Tell your men to at least pretend that they are German soldiers. This is a disgrace. What if the Reichsmarschall had come here and seen this?’

‘I do not think we have a chair that would support his weight, Herr Feldmarschall,’ replied Steinhoff with all the insolence of a man at his wits’ end. Around him the men started to snigger. Kesselring ordered them to stand to attention, then asked Steinhoff a number of questions. How were things going? Rotten, Steinhoff replied; he had just forty aircraft and right now, not one of them was serviceable. So no, they were not combat ready. And no, they did not have enough aircraft or ammunition. He implored Kesselring to allow his men a brief rest.

‘Sir,’ Steinhoff pleaded, ‘the group is no longer a battle-worthy unit.7 Its combat value is precisely nil. Do, please, believe me when I say that after coming through the murderous defensive battles in North Africa and Tunisia my pilots are absolutely all in. The heavy casualties have utterly demoralized them. May I therefore request that they have a few weeks off operations?’

‘The overall situation demands that your group remain operational,’ Kesselring replied icily. Then he got into his car and left to go and see the troops arriving at the tiny port of Marsala. The next day, however, while conferring at a house near the harbour where he had stayed overnight, it was hit by a bomb during an air raid. Lucky to survive, he managed to escape by sliding down a rope to the street below, burning his hands in the process. At least he was alive, which was more than could be said for his ADC. Later, he appeared back at Trapani and, before flying out, told Steinhoff his Geschwader could move to Bari in southern Italy for a few weeks. ‘But be quick about it,’ he added.8 ‘I shall want the group back in Sicily soon, fit for action.’

Steinhoff’s men were not the only ones having a bit of downtime. So too were the Allied Tactical Air Force. Air Marshal Mary Coningham was determined to enjoy the recent victory, having spotted a luxury villa overlooking the sea at Hammamet which he had decided would make a splendid new HQ. As he pointed out to Tommy Elmhirst, they had roughed it ever since arriving in North Africa and most likely would be roughing it again soon. Elmhirst had been packed off to get Alexander to sign a piece of paper confirming the Villa Sebastian was allocated to C-in-C Tactical Air Force. Alex had looked at him ‘a bit sideways’ as he knew one of the divisional commanders was already occupying it; on the other hand, the army were about to move, so he signed it. Coningham had his villa.

Many visitors would call in at the Villa Sebastian over the coming weeks, from Alex to the prime minister to the King, who even rather gamely joined in for a skinny-dip in the sea as no one had trunks. Not all the visitors were VIPs, however. One was Hugh ‘Cocky’ Dundas, who at just twenty-two was the youngest wing commander in the RAF. A veteran of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain who had already commanded a wing of Typhoons, he had been sent to North Africa to take command of 324 Wing only to learn that the existing Wingco, George ‘Sheep’ Gilroy – nicknamed for his former life as a Scottish shepherd – had recovered from a minor wound in the arm and was carrying on. So Dundas joined as supernumerary wing commander. After the end in Tunisia, Gilroy had been promoted to group captain and so Dundas had expected to take over 324 Wing after all. He was as pleased as anyone about the recent victory and, like many others, had driven out to see the POWs in one of the many temporary camps. He’d been shocked to see tens of thousands of them, dirty, disarmed and dejected. ‘Well, fuck ’em all, I thought,’ he noted.9 ‘They were the defeated ones, but they were safe. That was more than could be said for me and my friends. We had won; so we had to go on and start all over again.’

Dundas was impressed by Coningham’s villa – he honestly believed he had never seen a more beautiful place – and was treated to fresh coffee and brandy followed by a delicious lunch. They chatted widely, Dundas wondering why he’d been summoned, but eventually Mary got to the point. Air Vice-Marshal Harry Broadhurst, the current commander of the Desert Air Force, didn’t want him as commander of 324 Wing. It was no reflection on Dundas’ capabilities or leadership, Coningham emphasized. ‘You know Broadie,’ he said.10 ‘He likes to choose his key men. And I have always let him do so.’

Although this meant he could very possibly take a safe desk job for a while, Dundas couldn’t help feeling both deeply disappointed and ashamed. Coningham explained: apparently, Dundas had once clashed with Broadhurst over a matter of tactics; the superior officer had sided with Dundas, and Broadhurst had taken a dim view of being trumped by a junior officer. Coningham tried to placate the young pilot; he would find him a good post outside the Desert Air Force, and more immediately, he wanted him to fly one of two Typhoons that had arrived for trials from Casablanca to Cairo; but for Dundas, it was by far the most shattering experience of his short but celebrated career to date.

While the tactical air forces were training and refitting, the strategic air forces were as busy as ever. After the Tunisian victory Tedder and Spaatz had immediately sat down to work out a clear and comprehensive plan of action for the Allied air forces to support HUSKY. They envisaged four major stages: they were to neutralize the enemy air forces as far as possible before the invasion, so that whatever airfields they could not immediately capture on the ground would be unable to offer much resistance; they were to destroy enemy communications; they were to isolate the expected battlefield by making it as difficult as possible for enemy ground forces to rapidly deploy troops towards the Allied bridgehead; then, once the invasion had taken place, they were to offer close air support to the ground forces. In addition, Allied air forces were to support naval operations, provide convoy cover, deliver airborne troops, protect base areas and offer ample air–sea rescue. In other words, the demands were both many and varied.

Between now and the invasion, however, it was the bombers who would be expected to do the heavy lifting, albeit supported by fighters operating from Cap Bon and Malta. Already, as early as 7 May, just a few days after the final HUSKY plan was agreed, Spaatz had sent General Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the US Strategic Air Forces, orders to pummel the western part of Sicily. Palermo, Marsala and Trapani were all to be hit ‘as critical points in the enemy’s lines of communications.’11 The aim was to deny the enemy the use of the ports and any other facilities that might be of use to the Axis – railway lines, warehouses, vehicles or roads. ‘A high degree of destruction is therefore indicated,’ added Spaatz.12 ‘It is desired that you critically analyse the size and distribution of your effort and the types of bombs and fuses to be used, in order to insure the complete demolition of areas attacked.’

Now the Allied air forces had their foot on the Axis throat there was to be no release of pressure; this was emphatically underlined by Spaatz’s tough, severe and uncompromising orders. And Doolittle was swift to respond, with Palermo and Trapani hit heavily on both 9 and 10 May – which was when Kesselring was visiting Macky Steinhoff and the men of JG 77. Among those flying over Palermo on 9 May was Lieutenant Jimmy Bruno, co-pilot on a B-17 Flying Fortress of the 99th Bomb Group. Bruno had not been alone in groaning inwardly during the briefing that morning after photo reconnaissance revealed that Palermo was now bristling with anti-aircraft guns. Their task was not to hit the harbour on this occasion but to fly over it and try to knock out as many anti-aircraft positions as possible. This, they all knew, would make it easier for them to return in future; but it only took one well-aimed shot to bring down a bomber and its crew. In any case, they could hardly expect to destroy all those flak positions in one raid.

Bruno had been brought up near Waukesha, Wisconsin, and had decided he had to become a pilot after seeing the pioneering aviator Charles Lindberg fly over the family farm back in August 1927, when he had been eight years old. ‘Aviation is in its infancy,’ he had later written in his high school yearbook; ‘the opportunities are unlimited.’13 Just over a decade later, in 1939, he’d taken his first flying lesson, in a Piper Cub, and a short while after that he and a friend bought an OX-5 Curtiss Pheasant biplane for $175 – a small fortune for the two young men, but as far as they were concerned a bargain for the dream it enabled them to fulfil. Another couple of years on, in September 1941, having brushed up his academic qualifications, Bruno applied to join the US Army Air Forces and was accepted, beginning his flying training the following February. So rapidly was the new force expanding that entire bombardment and fighter groups were being formed as one, and Bruno’s entire Class 42-1 were all posted to 99th Bombardment Group, newly formed on 23 January 1943. Two months later they’d flown to North Africa, where they were sent to the newly completed air base at Navarin, near Oran in Algeria, arriving at their tented home on 27 March. Four days after that they flew their first mission, to bomb Villacidro airfield in southern Sardinia. Since then, Bruno and the rest of Lieutenant Blaine Bankhead’s crew had completed seven missions.

On this eighth mission, they reached Palermo without a hitch and flew low over the city, their bomb-bay doors already open. Flak was bursting all around them but they dropped their bombs and managed to get clear away without damage, although Bruno saw one Fortress come down. ‘This particular mission was extremely discomforting to me,’ Bruno admitted, ‘and I sensed the other men on my plane were equally uneasy about it.’14 They made it back to Navarin safely, only to head back the following morning to hammer Trapani.

Once the Tunisian battle was finally over, Tedder and Spaatz agreed a timetable for HUSKY. From 16 May to 6 June, bombers would range widely over the Mediterranean area without focusing especially on Sicily. Between 6 and 13 June, the key islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa would be the focus, before normal strategic bombing ops would resume. Finally, from 3 to 9 July, heavy and systematic attacks upon Axis air bases on and close to Sicily would be the priority.

The swift smashing of Pantelleria was to be another early test of the Allies’ new-found dominance of the skies. Lying almost halfway between Sicily and Tunisia, some 63 miles to the south-west of the former and 53 miles from the latter, it had been an Italian military zone since 1926; and it contained a key airfield, one that would be very useful for the Allies to capture before HUSKY as a base for Allied fighters, which would then be within range to support the Americans when they landed at Licata and Gela on the southern Sicilian coast.

Capturing Pantelleria, though, was potentially a very tricky proposition. It was well defended, with over three hundred concrete gun emplacements and a plethora of pillboxes built into the cliffs; an amphibious assault had just one small beach to land, and had also to cope with vicious offshore currents and an unusually high surf for the Mediterranean. There were also some twelve thousand Italian troops crammed into this 10-mile-long bean-shaped island. For Operation CORKSCREW, Eisenhower asked Admiral Cunningham to provide a powerful naval striking force and also earmarked the British 1st Division for a landing. First, though, Allied bombers would blitz Pantelleria and reduce its defences as much as possible. ‘I want to make the capture of Pantelleria a sort of laboratory to determine the effect of concentrated heavy bombing on a defended coastline,’ Eisenhower wrote to Marshall.15 ‘When the time comes we are going to concentrate everything we have to see whether damage to materiel, personnel and morale cannot be made so serious as to make a landing a rather simple affair.’

Conscious this was to be an important test for Allied air power not just in the Mediterranean but more generally, Spaatz recruited a British medical doctor and research anatomist to help him. Professor Solly Zuckerman had been brought into Combined Operations, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s commando and raiding organization, and had been introduced to Spaatz that March when the air chief had briefly been back in England. The two had hit it off immediately. ‘They were men who were learning,’ wrote Zuckerman of Spaatz and his staff, ‘as I was learning, and unlike some professional military people whom I had met, there was no assumption of superior knowledge and no assurance that they knew how Germany was going to be defeated.’16 In May, Zuckerman was asked to come to North Africa, and since he was between jobs he readily accepted, arriving on the 22nd. After being briefed by Tedder he was sent straight to Spaatz’s headquarters with the challenge of applying his scientific and analytical techniques to the feasibility of an assault on Pantelleria. After two days of studying intelligence data on Italian morale on the island and also the island’s defences, Zuckerman concluded it was certainly possible. Spaatz, who was always looking for new ways to advance air power and very happy to think outside the box, brought Zuckerman into his staff and asked him to prepare a detailed bombing plan.

This was delivered to Spaatz on 2 June, using not only intelligence on Pantelleria’s defences but also data previously gathered about the effectiveness of various bombs. No one had ever applied this level of number-crunching data analysis to the bombing of a specific target before. Neutralizing strongly prepared defensive positions by air power alone, Zuckerman admitted, had previously been considered next to impossible. ‘In so far as the task has never before been attempted on any large scale,’ he wrote, ‘Operation CORKSCREW thus becomes a test of the tactical possibilities of this form of air attack, and an exercise in the most economical disposal of the available air strength.’17 It was no wonder the Allied commanders were going to follow CORKSCREW with a mixture of excitement and nervous apprehension. It felt, understandably, like a big moment in the Allies’ journey with air power.

It was also an operation that required not only strategic bomber forces but also the Coastal Air Force and the medium twin-engine bombers of Coningham’s Tactical Air Force, as well as his fighters for escort duty. The organization and administration of such an operation fell squarely within Air Commodore Tommy Elmhirst’s remit; Coningham had never been one for paperwork, which was why Elmhirst had always been such an invaluable sidekick. Elmhirst, however, had been in Algiers helping to prepare detailed plans for HUSKY. Arriving back at the villa after three weeks away, he was told they were on forty-eight hours’ notice for CORKSCREW. Hurriedly phoning round the bomber wing commanders, he asked whether they had enough bombs and fuel. To a man, they replied that they did not. After managing to secure a loan of a hundred army trucks, he arranged for them to set off at dawn the next morning for their ammunition dumps 50 miles behind the old front line. ‘My situation was saved!’18 recalled Elmhirst. ‘But my staff for once got the rough edge of my tongue.’ Coningham’s and the Tactical Air Force’s blushes had been spared.

With a naval blockade of the island already in place, bombers had already begun to strike before Zuckerman had delivered his detailed plan to Spaatz. Heavy bombers flew over the island on 1 June. Also flying that day were the 99th Fighter Squadron, the first all-black air unit to see action in the war. Racial segregation was still a feature of the US armed forces, although a growing number of more enlightened senior commanders, not least Tooey Spaatz, were working to use African-American troops at the front line. Spaatz had inspected the 99th FS at Oujda in Morocco on 19 May, meeting the men and talking with their commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the son of the first black US general. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Davis impressed me most favourably,’ he noted in his diary, ‘both in appearance and intelligence.’19 Colonel Davis was remarkable for having graduated from West Point despite suffering four years of racism and silent treatment, largely shunned by his contemporaries. Indeed, all the men in the 99th Fighter Squadron were impressive because all had had to overcome so much to be there.

Among them was Lieutenant Charlie Dryden from New York. Dryden had wanted to fly for as long as he could remember – ‘aeroplane’, or a childish version of it, had been almost the first word he’d spoken – and although he had worked hard at school and had managed to secure a place on one of the Civilian Pilot Training Programs, his dream of flying for his country in the US Army had so nearly been thwarted time and time again. The son of British Jamaicans, he had feared he wouldn’t get accepted in the first place because neither of his parents had ever got around to applying for US citizenship. Once as a boy he’d been arrested for trying to get on the New York subway using a fake dime, and when asked whether he’d ever fallen foul of the law at his air force interview had wrestled with himself over what to say. He’d decided to tell the truth – and it turned out they’d known all along; they had wanted to test his honesty. And although he’d already got his civilian pilot’s licence, he quickly discovered once he’d arrived at Tuskegee Campus in Alabama to begin his military training that whatever flying hours he already had in his logbook counted for next to nothing.

Of the eleven men who had joined Dryden in Class 42-D, only three had gained their coveted wings. Dryden himself had been warned numerous times he was within a whisker of being washed out. The moment the silver wings had been pinned on his chest, Dryden had scarcely been able to believe the moment had actually come. ‘My heart was racing so fast I feared I might pass out from excitement,’ he recalled; ‘for now, at last it was over.20 All the hurdles that could have killed my dream were now, themselves, washed out.’ At the time, he and two of his classmates had been three of only eight black officers in the United States Army Air Forces. To get to that point they had had to be better than their white colleagues at every stage of the training programme. Most new pilots heading to England or North Africa had around 350 flying hours in their logbooks, but by the time Dryden was posted overseas on 2 April 1943, some twenty-six months after the formation of an all-coloured air force unit had been first authorized, he had accrued some 538 hours, including 207 on the P-40 Kittyhawk and not including the 90 hours from his civilian pilot training programme.

In fact, that the 99th FS was going to war at all was something of a miracle as Jim Crow had attempted to throw a spanner in the works at every opportunity. General Hap Arnold had thought it would take too long to train both aircrew and ground crew to be of any value in the war, and had recommended the 99th FS be posted to a backwater in the Caribbean. It was Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the president, who had done much to overcome such barriers. Visiting a polio clinic in Tuskegee and seeing aircraft flying overhead, she was told they were flown by coloured pilots and introduced to some of the key personnel; she had even been given a flight. Back in Washington, she had urged the president to intervene; and the squadron, with just twenty-eight pilots, had finally been posted overseas.

The 99th had left Oujda on 30 May in two flights of fourteen, headed for Tunis. Dryden was in the second flight but soon after they’d taken off his wingman, Willie Ashley, began having problems with overheating and so they decided to turn back, Dryden accompanying him to make sure he made it all right. This set them back a good while, and when they finally reached the staging post of Blida the following day, the second flight had already taken off again for Fardjouna airfield near Tunis. And by that time the first flight, led by Colonel Davis, had already taken the 99th FS into action over Pantelleria.

Dryden finally flew his first combat sortie on 4 June, as the air bombardment of Pantelleria continued. With a 500-pound bomb slung underneath his Kittyhawk, he dived down, following his flight leader, red tracers streaking past his cockpit. He was concentrating so hard he didn’t have time to feel scared; only as he pulled up from the bomb run did it cross his mind the enemy below had been trying to shoot him. ‘Only then,’ he admitted, ‘did I tweak a bit.’21

He was back over Pantelleria again on 9 June, which was when he ran into the Luftwaffe for the first time. This time, he’d been leading a flight of six when a number of Me109s had been spotted flying above them. The German pilots had tried to manoeuvre with the sun behind them, but Dryden and his flight were able to perform a tight 180-degree turn towards the enemy. The Messerschmitts swiftly scattered. Although none had been shot down, Dryden felt elated and relieved. ‘When I saw the swastikas on those Me109s and felt the urge to go get ’em,’ he wrote, ‘I knew that I had conquered my fear of possibly turning yellow and turning tail at the first sign of enemy.’22

The pounding of Pantelleria continued remorselessly, in conjunction with heavy naval bombardments. On the evening of 8 June, a naval force of four cruisers and six destroyers departed Malta to join the assault on the Italian island early the following morning. ‘It was a perfect dawn we saw breaking this morning,’ jotted Midshipman Peter Hay, ‘but the whole atmosphere was rather tense.’23 Hay was just nineteen and had become a midshipman the previous year, joining the battleship Nelson and taking part in Operation PEDESTAL, the convoy that had relieved Malta in August. He had sat his midshipman’s exams in March and passed with a second – as had most of his fellows – and had then been posted to HMS Tartar, one of the Tribal class that were designed to be fast and agile, with a greater emphasis on fire-power than torpedoes. Tartar, for example, could not only travel at 36 knots – around 41 mph – but was armed with eight quick-firing 4.7-inch guns, one four-barrelled light anti-aircraft gun and two quadruple quick-firing 5-inch guns, which for a ship of 125 yards in length was quite a lot of fire-power and quite a lot of speed.

Their force of warships was joined by HMS Whaddon, which, Hay learned, had General Spaatz aboard as an observer. Having closed up at action stations, they saw the bombers fly over. ‘There were literally hundreds of them,’ noted Hay, ‘and we saw Fortresses, Baltimores and Mitchells, to say nothing of the Lightnings, Spitfires and Kittyhawks.’24 The naval forces split up at around 11 a.m.; a quarter of an hour later, ‘Battle Ensigns were broken at the yard’ and the cruiser Euralyus opened fire on the coastal defences from 15,000 yards. Tartar sped back and forth while the bombers started to do their work, then closed in at 30 knots. Peter Hay watched the bombs falling, first into the sea then creeping up on to the beach and inland. Meanwhile, Tartar opened fire with her guns, along with the rest of the force. ‘At first our shots could be seen falling,’ jotted Hay, ‘but very soon the smoke and dust from the bombs obscured the target.25 During all this time I had seen no firing from Pantelleria except a little at the bombers.’ They closed further to around 3,500 yards then sped parallel to the coast, firing continuously. The enemy did reply, but at first their shots were far too high; then a shell landed just ahead of Tartar, producing a huge spume of water through which the ship ran. Everyone out on the fo’c’sle, Hay included, was soaked. A second fell close again, drenching them once more – but that was it: suddenly the enemy guns fell silent. The whole action, Hay reckoned, lasted around forty-five minutes, by the end of which Pantelleria had largely disappeared behind a pall of smoke.

Tartar returned with the rest of the force to Malta, but was back again on 11 June, the day of the planned invasion by the British 1st Division. Also attacking this time were a number of small, fast motor gun boats – MGBs – that sped towards the harbour, raking it with fire. There were some sixteen Italian shore batteries that might have fired back at the MGBs, but only three did so and not with much heart. The will of the defenders, after such a sustained pounding, was beginning to break. Of the town of Porto di Pantelleria not much remained, and especially not after the night-bombing of 10–11 June, which had been heavy and sustained.

By morning on the 11th, the Italian garrison commander, Contrammiraglio Gino Pavesi, had lost the will to continue; many of his men had already deserted. The Allies, he signalled to Rome, had plunged the island into ‘a hurricane of fire and smoke’.26 The situation was so desperate there was no further means of resisting. At 9 a.m. on the 11th, D-Day for 1st Division’s amphibious invasion, Pavesi issued the order to surrender, just as waves of B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming over. Tartar was a mere 3,000 yards off shore. ‘We could distinctly see them coming down,’ wrote Hay, ‘and a few seconds later saw great clouds of black smoke and rubble – mixed a moment later with brown dust.’27

They and the rest of the naval forces soon joined the bombardment, unaware that the surrender had already been signalled – a message that had not reached the assault commander either, so that the British came ashore as planned at around 11.55 a.m. Less than half an hour later, what remained of the town was secured and by the end of the day over eleven thousand Italian troops had been taken prisoner, along with some eighty-four enemy aircraft. Despite the force of the assault, casualties had been surprisingly low, with fewer than two hundred Italians killed and the same again wounded. But the shattering mental effect of having some 6,200 tons of bombs dropped on to their positions had very effectively broken the will of the Italian defenders.

Spaatz was elated; so were all the Allied commanders. ‘Pantelleria’, noted Tedder, ‘was the first defended place to be reduced to surrender in the Second World War as a result of air and naval bombardment alone.’28 That was true enough; but more than that, for HUSKY it meant another airfield under Allied control closer to Sicily. It also suggested the Italians might not fight as hard in the coming battle as some had feared. No one was feeling complacent. But the Allies could now look towards the invasion with a little more confidence than they had before. CORKSCREW had been a resounding success.