James Holland is a historian, writer and broadcaster. The author of a number of bestselling histories including Battle of Britain, Dam Busters and, most recently, Normandy ’44, he has also written nine works of historical fiction, including the Jack Tanner novels.

He is currently writing the final volume of an acclaimed new history of the Second World War, The War in the West. He has presented – and written – a large number of television programmes and series for the BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic, and the History and Discovery channels.

James is co-founder of the Chalke Valley History Festival and of WarGen.org, an online Second World War resource site, and presents the Chalke Valley History Hit podcast. He also presents We Have Ways of Making You Talk, a podcast with Al Murray in which they discuss the Second World War. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he can be found on Twitter and Instagram as @James1940.

A three-part documentary series based on his bestselling book Normandy ’44 can be found on Normandy44.info and Amazon Prime under the same title.

For my oldest friend and best man, Giles Bourne

All photographs have been kindly supplied by the author except those listed below. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders; those overlooked are invited to get in touch with the publishers.

1 Pantelleria under attack: © Imperial War Museum CNA 902.

2 All other images on page 1: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

3 Me109 partially hidden beneath olive trees: Büschgens/Bundesarchiv, bild: 101I-421-2070-21

4 One of JG77’s Me109s at Trapani: Büschgens/Bundesarchiv, bild 101I-421-2070-10

5 American P-38 Lightning: Courtesy US Air Force Historical Research Agency

6 Two destroyed Me109s: Supplied by author

7 Abandoned and captured Luftwaffe Messerschmitts and Regia Aeronautica Macchis: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

8 The allied commanders for HUSKY: © Imperial War Museum CNA 1075

9 Mussolini: AP/Shutterstock

10 Kesselring and von Senger: Supplied by author

11 RAF operations room in underground Lascaris bunker complex on Malta: Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna (The Malta Heritage Trust)

12 British troops loading LSTs for Operation HUSKY: National Army Museum

13 Rows of LSTs line up at Bizerte as US troops march aboard: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

14 The invasion fleet under sail: National Army Museum

15 British glider-borne troops load up in Tunisia: © Imperial War Museum CNA 1002

16 US paratroopers aboard a C-47: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

17 A Horsa glider en route to Sicily: Malta Aviation Museum

18 Very rough seas off Licata on D-Day: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

19 The British XIII Corps invasion, with the high escarpment looking down on the invasion beaches: National Army Museum

20 British Tommies coming ashore: Supplied by author

21 A near miss sends a fountain of water high into the air near Avola: National Army Museum

22 The 231st Malta Brigade coming ashore on D-Day: National Army Museum

23 LST 313 destroyed at Gela: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

24 Destruction of Liberty ship Robert Rowan: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

25 Jam-packed transport vessels: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

26 Light cruiser USS Brooklyn: Naval History Heritage Command

27 British troops move through Cassibile: National Army Museum

28 The destroyer HMS Tetcott firing on Augusta: National Army Museum

29 Canadian infantry push inland: © Imperial War Museum NA 4491

30 All other images on page 7: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

31 The landscape around Mount Etna: National Army Museum

32 All other images on page 8, with the exception of middle left (Don Calogero Vizzini): Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

33 Melilli after its bombardment from the sea: National Army Museum

34 The Italian strongpoint at Ponte Dirillo: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

35 One of the mighty Tigers of 2. Kompanie, 504. Heavy Panzer Bataillon: Esselborn/Bundesarchiv, bild 183-J14953

36 Well-positioned German machine-gunners: Dohm/Bundesarchiv, bild 183-J14874

37 US infantry moving forward: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

38 Monty addressing Canadian troops: National Army Museum

39 German Fallschirmjäger (paratroopers) moving forward: Novak/Bundesarchiv, bild: 101I-634-3899-02A

40 British paratroopers of the 2nd Parachute Brigade: Airborne Assault Museum

41 All other images on page 10: National Army Museum

42 Captured British paratroopers and Tommies: Funke/Bundesarchiv, bild: 101I-303-0558-22

43 An American half-track struggles through the narrow Sicilian streets: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

44 All other images on page 11: National Army Museum

45 German machine-gunners well camouflaged: Dohm/Bundesarchiv, bild: 101I-303-0559-27

46 A German Kubelwagon needs a change of wheel as a Sicilian boy watches: Grund/Horst/Bundesarchiv, bild: 101I-303-0559-27

47 The Allies captured tens of thousands of prisoners: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

48 Germans of the Herman Göring Division talk to their captor: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

49 A Spitfire comes into land: © Imperial War Museum CAN 1098

50 A British sapper clears one of the many mines the Germans left: National Army Museum

51 British tanks of the County of London Yeomanry cross the Plain of Catania: National Army Museum

52 All other images on page 13: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

53 A Fallschirmjäger anti-tank gun crew: Haas/Bundesarchiv, bild: 101I-567-1515-32

54 All other images on page 14: National Army Museum

55 Major-General Vyvyan Evelegh and Colonel George R. Smith meet on the road to Randazzo: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

56 The astonishing bridge-building effort by American 10th Engineer Battalion at Capo Calavà: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

57 US troops enter the wreckage of Messina: Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, USA

58 All other images on page 15: National Army Museum

59 The view from Assoro: © Mike Peters

60 Centuripe – the prostrate man: 4Corners images

61 All other images on page 16: Supplied by author

Integrated Pictures

62 Operations room in Malta: © Imperial War Museum NA 4094

63 SRS men with captured Italian gun: Paul Davis

64 Supplied by the author from various sources where known: Airborne Assault Museum, Angela Bruccoleri, Max Corvo, Paul Davis, Charles Dryden, Robin Dundas, Imperial War Museum, National Archives UK, National Archives and Records Administration USA, Roberto Piccione.

65 Part 3 opener: ‘The Race to Catania’: © Imperial War Museum NA 4666

© Naval History and Heritage Command

Writing a campaign history such as this is a complicated undertaking. Although dealing with American, British, Canadian, German and Italian units across the armed services, I’ve tried to keep the numbers of unit names as low as possible. To help distinguish one side from another, I have used a form of vernacular, styling German and Italian units more or less as they would be written in German and Italian – not to be pretentious in any way, but just to reduce the potential for confusion. Having said that, it seemed to me that to describe a Tiger tank company as the 2. Schwere Panzerkompanie was perhaps taking this too far, so I have called it more simply 2. Heavy Panzer Kompanie.

For those who are not familiar with the scale of wartime units and the numbers involved, the basic fighting formation on which the size of armies was judged during the Second World War was the division. German panzer divisions were an all-arms formation of motorized infantry, artillery and tanks; panzer-grenadier divisions had fewer panzers – tanks – and more motorized infantry: a grenadier was simply an infantryman who was provided with motor transport to get from A to B. Infantry divisions had much less motorization by 1943 as fuel and other shortages were increasingly keenly felt within the Reich.

As a rule of thumb, a division was around 15,000 men, although some divisions could have as many as 20,000. Two divisions or more made up a corps, usually denoted in Roman numerals to distinguish them. Two corps or more constituted an army, and two armies or more an army group. Going back down the scale, American, German and Italian divisions were divided into regiments, while British and Canadian divisions were divided into brigades. Confusingly, the British did have regiments too, but in the case of infantry these were parent organizations and never fielded as a whole. US and German regiments and British brigades were much the same, each consisting of three core components, which in the case of an infantry regiment/brigade were battalions, although the Americans termed these ‘regimental combat teams’ or RCTs. An infantry battalion was around 850 men, divided into companies of some 120 men, each of which in turn broke down into three platoons and finally to the smallest formation, the ten-man squad, Gruppe or section, depending on nationality. I hope this helps.

Sicily, Mediterranean and Allied Shipping Routes

Axis Dispositions, 9 July

HUSKY Final Landings Plan, 10 July

US Seventh Army Assault, 10 July

Withers’ Route to Ponte Grande, 9 July

SRS on Capo Murro di Porco, 10 July

Axis Counter-attack at Gela, 11 July

Allied Operations, 10–22 July

Primosole Bridge, 13–18 July

5th Division Attacks in the Plain of Catania, 18–21 July

US Seventh Army Drive West, 19–23 July

Axis Defensive Lines

Ridgeline Battles, 14 July–7 August

San Fratello, 8 August

The End in Sicily, 3–17 August

(See also the Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations on p. 501)

ALLIED UNITS AXIS UNITS

STANDARD MILITARY SYMBOLS

I = Company

II = Battalion

III = Regiment

X = Brigade

XX = Division

XXX = Corps

XXXX = Army

XXXXX = Army Group

OTHER ABBREVIATIONS

Air = Airborne

Arm = Armoured

bde = brigade

bn = battalion

Br = British

Can = Canadian

CB = Coastal Battalion (Italian)

CC = Combat Command

CD = Coastal Division (Italian)

Cdo = Commando

FA = Field Artillery

Fall = Fallschirmjäger

GM = Gruppo Mobile

gp = group

HG = Hermann Göring (Panzer Division)

Inf = Infantry

It = Italian

LCI = landing craft, infantry

LST = landing ship, tank

LZ = landing zone

ME = Middle East

MG = Mobile Group

MT = motor transport

ops = operations

Para = Parachute

PG = Panzer Grenadier

Pz = Panzer

SRS = Special Raiding Squadron

TF = Task Force

TG = Tactical Group

US = United States

Planning in Lascaris, MaltaPatton on the beach at GelaPrimosole Bridge from the air6th West Kents in Adrano

FRIDAY, 25 JUNE 1943. Morning, and another scorching day of soporific heat. Trapani on the western edge of Sicily was crowded with aircraft: two more fighter groups had arrived that morning. Major Johannes Steinhoff – ‘Macky’ to his friends – twenty-nine years old and in possession of a lean, gentle face, blue eyes and fair hair, had been up early, woken in the grey light of dawn and driven down to the airfield to join the rest of I. and II. Gruppen of Jagdgeschwader – Fighter Wing – 77. Already, mechanics were furiously working on their Messerschmitt 109 aircraft, desperately trying to get as many as possible fit to fly despite chronic shortages of parts – from simple bolts to electrical wiring to just about everything complex machines like these needed.

Trapani lay on a dusty, sun-bleached, small coastal plain, and by the time Steinhoff had planted himself in a chair in front of the wooden dispersal hut, the dawn light had been swept aside by the deep burning blue of the daytime sky. Beyond, past the edge of the airfield, lay the vast wine-dark sea. Crickets and cicadas chirruped. The heat grew palpably.

Steinhoff was exhausted. The previous day, General der Jagdflieger Adolf Galland had arrived, having taken over from the sacked and disgraced Generalmajor Theo Osterkamp, the former fighter commander – Jafü – on Sicily. Galland had been commander of fighters back home in Germany, defending the Reich, but had no experience of the Mediterranean and, while a notable fighter wing commander earlier in the war, had had no staff training and had been thrown in at the deep end to say the least. The previous evening, he had summoned Steinhoff to the Trapani fighter control base beneath the summit of Monte Erice, the mountain that dominated the plain below. The route up there was a winding dusty road, one hairpin after another until, beneath a sheer wall of craggy rock, it reached a small plateau that extended outwards. Several buildings had been constructed, while pneumatic drills continued work on a shelter dug directly into the cliffs. From there, the whole western tip of Sicily could be seen stretched out before them – the white houses of Trapani town and its small port and then, further to the south, the airfield, and beyond that Marsala. It was nothing if not a stunning view. After briefing him on recent operations, Galland had then told Steinhoff he wanted to talk to the Gruppen and Staffel commanders, and so they had headed back down the mountain road to the airfield.

Sitting on stools and in deckchairs outside the dispersal hut beneath gnarled old olive trees, Steinhoff’s commanders had listened in silence as Galland talked about the air defence of the Reich and the tactics that had been developed against the American four-engine heavy bombers. The key, he had told them, was to fly straight at them, opening fire at the nose of the bomber as close as possible then sweeping on over the top. The general also told them that against American heavy bombers, there was a 50 per cent chance of being shot down during a rear attack, and similarly poor odds for a side or flank attack too. It was hardly very cheering. On the other hand, a head-on attack greatly reduced the chance of being hit – but it did mean a pilot had only about two seconds of firing time, because it was only effective when really close, and with a closing speed of nearly 600 mph that didn’t leave much margin for error. Steinhoff had watched his officers start to glaze over. When Galland had finished, not one had asked any questions.

‘Very well then,’ Galland had said. ‘Until tomorrow.’ And then he had driven back to Monte Erice. Steinhoff had barely slept, the general’s words ringing in his ears: ‘Get in close.’ ‘Don’t fire too soon.’ ‘Lead them in head-on close formation.’ Steinhoff knew one had to have nerves of steel to pull off these frontal attacks. He was not feeling confident, and in any case, he had already been a front-line fighter pilot for three long years – over France, during the Battle of Britain, over the Eastern Front and then in those difficult final days in Tunisia when suddenly it had become clear that the Luftwaffe was in deep and chronic decline and the Allies, with their shiny Spitfires and Lightnings, their Marauders and Flying Fortresses, had dramatically and decisively begun to wield the upper hand.

Steinhoff was fed up with fighting, fed up with the war, fed up with not having enough of anything. And he was utterly exhausted. The intensity, the constant fear, and now, here on Sicily, the blistering, energy-sapping heat.

Early that day, his III. Gruppe had arrived from their base in Sardinia, and then so too had III. Gruppe Jagdgeschwader 53, the Pik As, or Ace of Spades. This was all part of Galland’s plan to show any Allied bomber formations that dared to fly over a heavy response by a mass of fighter aircraft; but with some eighty Messerschmitts now parked up around the airfield complex here at Trapani, Steinhoff was only thinking of the catastrophe that might unfold if they were heavily attacked by Allied bombers here.

The hours passed and the heat grew. Steinhoff wondered how many hours he had spent in a deckchair since the war had begun. ‘A day seems very long when it is spent in waiting,’ he noted, ‘with nothing to occupy one’s imagination except the war in the air.’1 He wondered whether he would be able to lead this huge formation of fighters into the bombers successfully; it was no easy matter manoeuvring en masse because the distances on the inside of a turn were shorter than those on the outside. Leading a Staffel of, say, nine, was reasonably straightforward, but eighty … Then those other thoughts kept creeping into his mind – thoughts impossible to keep out: the raking fire of the Flying Fortresses’ .50-calibre machine guns, the bailing out, the descent, the vainly hoping someone would spot the rubber dinghy on that vast dark Mediterranean Sea.

Then Oberst Günther ‘Franzl’ Lützow arrived, the new Inspector South for the Luftwaffe. An old friend of Steinhoff’s, he had been the Luftwaffe’s second pilot to amass a staggering one hundred aerial victories. Steinhoff hadn’t seen him since the Eastern Front the previous summer.

‘I want to be here for your first big defensive battle!’2 called Lützow as he clambered out of his car. Steinhoff led him over to dispersal and to the mass of pilots sitting waiting under the shade of the olive trees. All this talk of big aerial battles was making Steinhoff feel increasingly on edge.

‘Today’s your big chance,’ Lützow told the pilots.3 ‘You must keep close together when you attack and dismiss from your mind any thought of mixing it with the Spitfires. The Fortresses are like a fleet of battleships and you can only get in among them if you break through their defensive fire in a compact phalanx.’

‘For God’s sake, Franzl,’ Steinhoff snapped, ‘spare me that awful patter!4 For days now, advice and instructions have been raining down on our heads from on high. The General keeps dangling the gallant pilots of the Reich Air Defence as a shining example before our eyes.’ It was, continued Steinhoff, enough to make all his men start to feel inferior. The reality was that, for some time now, the older veterans had been gradually, one by one, falling by the wayside, while the new boys being sent to him were short of hours and had had almost no tactical training – and, such were the fuel shortages, there was little opportunity to lick them into shape. ‘You people don’t know this horrible theatre yet,’ he continued. ‘It’s mostly water and in the long run it gets us all. They’ll wear us down by keeping us grounded and destroying our parks and workshops.’ He was now in full flow. ‘You don’t, by any chance, do you, believe in the Teutonic superhero who, after a bombing raid, rises from his slit trench, shakes the dust from his feet and ascends on steely pinions into the icy heavens, there to wreak havoc among the Flying Fortresses?’

For a long moment, Lützow stared at him, as though suddenly he had accepted there was no longer any point keeping up the charade. Then he said: ‘Yes, but how’s it all going to end here?’5

That was the question Steinhoff had been asking himself. It was what all the old-timers had been wondering. They’d lost Tunisia. It wasn’t going well in the east. In western Germany, the Ruhr was being systematically bombed by the RAF each night and by the Americans each day. The Allies were getting stronger, while they were growing weaker. How was it going to end?

The discussion was suddenly silenced by anti-aircraft fire, followed by a deep rumble from the east, behind Monte Erice, getting louder with every moment. The pilots jumped up and ran for it. Steinhoff heard the whistle of bombs falling even as he fled towards the nearest slit-trench, then leaped for it, landing on the back of someone who had got there first. A carpet of bombs exploded in rapid succession, each one closer, the ground shaking, the noise immense. Steinhoff glanced across at Lützow, dust covering his head and at the back of his throat and in his lungs. Runnels of sweat pouring down his face marked lines through the dust on his skin. Steinhoff pressed his face to the ground as a bomb crashed horribly close, almost bursting eardrums, covering them in a swathe of grit and filling their lungs once more with choking smoke and dust.

And then the bombs stopped falling and the roar of aero-engines faded away. Slowly, unsteadily, they got to their feet and paused for a moment, legs dangling over the edge of the trench in case a second wave appeared. Ammunition from a burning plane was popping somewhere not far away. As they eventually got to their feet, Steinhoff saw splinters of glass; a little way away two ground crew, hands on hips, stood watching the burning wreckage of an Me109.

At the group hut, it turned out the phone line had been cut; soon afterwards a Kübelwagen appeared with a message from Galland asking Steinhoff to call immediately from one of the Staffel dispersal huts. Steinhoff hurried over to 1. Staffel, where the medical officer was tending a row of wounded ground crew. There, at least, the line was still working.

Galland apologized for the lack of warning. ‘We didn’t know the Marauders were on their way,’ he said. ‘They were so close to sea level that our direction finders didn’t pick them up.’ He told Steinhoff to be ready to scramble; radio traffic suggested bombers in Tunisia were starting to form up. It looked as though a big raid was on its way.

A little while later, and with the line from the group hut repaired, Galland rang again to say they were tracking an enemy raid that seemed to be heading for Naples. The fighters would be scrambled to catch them on the return leg. They most likely had an hour to wait.

But Galland was back on the line sooner than that. ‘Take off straight away, Steinhoff,’ he said. ‘The bombers have turned south and attacked the port of Messina. You must hurry if you’re going to catch them.’

Steinhoff put down the receiver and shouted ‘Scramble!’ at the operations clerk. Pilots ran to their machines, grabbing parachutes left on the wings, clambering up on to the wing root and hoisting themselves into the cockpit. A quick check, a signal to the ground crew, engine turning and bursting into life, then taxi out of the blast pen. Steinhoff checked his magnetos. The smell of oil, gasoline, metal and rubber, and a cockpit already hot as an oven. He glanced around, although the collar of his lifejacket restricted movement and his oxygen mask swung to and fro. Dust was being whipped up by the prop blast, making it hard to see, but with aircraft drawing up either side of him he opened the throttle and was off, rumbling forward, controlling the huge torque with opposite rudder. A routine performed hundreds of times; and then he was free of the ground and climbing high into the blue.

‘Odysseus One to Eagle,’ he said over the R/T – the radio – making contact with the ground controller below at Monte Erice.6

‘Pantechnicons withdrawing.’7 Galland’s voice now in his headset. ‘Grid reference Able two-two King. Steer zero-two-five.’

Steinhoff led his I. Gruppe, who closed in behind him as he circled Monte Erice. He had insisted on radio silence so all that could be heard was the background drone of the engine and the hiss of static in their headsets, interrupted only by the calm and precise instructions of General Galland from the fighter control room below.

‘Odysseus,’ Steinhoff heard him say, ‘turn on to three-zero-zero, Pantechnicons at 20,000 feet heading west.’8

As they climbed into the sky, the horizon and the sea below it slipped away. A high-pressure haze had settled around them, obscuring the land mass of Sicily and so blocking any fixed reference point that might aid navigation. More updates from Galland. The bombers – the ‘pantechnicons’ – were descending, now at 16,000 feet, but still being picked up by their Freya radar.

Then a further update. ‘Odysseus, steer two-eight-zero.9 Pantechnicons presumably now at low level since the Freya has lost contact.’

Steinhoff looked around him. Down below he could see nothing. Either side, his pilots were starting to waver, rising and falling, as uneasiness grew. The haze seemed to thicken. Glancing behind, he could only see I. Gruppe behind him – the rest had disappeared from sight in the murk. He broke radio silence to tell them to close up, conscious they only had another ten minutes or so before it would be time to turn back.

‘Pantechnicons right beneath us!’10 Steinhoff recognized Zöhler’s voice. ‘Right beneath us, lots of them, heading west!’

Steinhoff now saw them too, the desert yellow of their upper bodies standing out against the silvery grey of the sea, grouped in squadrons of nine or more aircraft. It was now around 1.30 p.m., and they were about 90 miles north-west of Trapani. The bombers had just pasted Messina, Sicily’s biggest port, a mere mile from the south-west toe of mainland Italy. In all, 123 B-17 Flying Fortresses, mostly from the 97th and 99th Bomb Groups, had dropped nearly 2,000 tons of bombs on the docks, warehouses and railway marshalling yards. They’d caused considerable damage and had also had the good fortune to hit a 5,000-ton Italian steamer, the Iris, which was fatally crippled.

On paper, they were a very juicy target and blissfully free of fighter cover; but they were also low, very low, below radar, almost, it seemed, touching the waves. And they were, unhelpfully, heading in exactly the opposite direction, which meant there was now no time for a carefully worked-out manoeuvre. Steinhoff realized he needed to peel over immediately and begin his dive right away in a big arc so that he could emerge level with and hurtling directly towards them, not behind them. Even with the advantage of height and the greater speed of the Me109, there was not a moment to lose. He had to hope the rest followed. Steinhoff dipped the wing and the Messerschmitt turned and dived, building up speed so that in no time the altimeter told him he was now at just 6,000 feet. Glancing around he saw Strafer, Bachman and Berhard following tightly. Five thousand, four, three. The lower he got, the faster the bombers appeared to be flying.

He knew he had to get on to the same level as the bombers, but as he neared the closing speed suddenly seemed immense. Lining up on one, he aimed at the cockpit and opened fire. ‘I pulled up my M-E to the same height as the bombers as though I had done it a hundred times before,’ he noted.11 ‘My task was to spray the gleaming cockpit with a hail of shot.’ Tracer from his guns arced towards the bomber, while the luminous cross-wires of his gunsight shook from the recoil of the cannon and machine guns. Pulling back the stick, he climbed, g-force pressing him down in his seat. His stomach lurched, his mouth tasted bitter. Glancing back once more, he saw he was on his own – his Geschwader headquarters flight had dispersed in the attack – but his bomber had crashed into the sea. Over the R/T, pilots chattered – a mixture of excited cries and orders, but also many urgently saying they were low on fuel and pulling out. Looking down at his own fuel gauge, Steinhoff knew he had about twenty minutes’ worth left, so turned and set off back for Trapani, a terrible sinking feeling growing in his stomach.

It had been a disaster, he was certain. It was not his fault they’d come across the bombers at the last moment before turning back, nor that among all the advice about how to attack a bomber over Germany at 18,000 feet no one had once suggested how to attack in haze over sea and at almost zero feet. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘absolutely nothing, had favoured our attack.’12

Looking around him, he saw the bombers had gone, vanished entirely, and that he was on his own, flying over the water, accompanied only by the growing anxiety that he might not have the fuel to get home. It was a familiar feeling – one he’d always hated, as almost all German fighter pilots hated it: a gnawing fear that had first gripped him while making repeated returns across the Channel during the Battle of Britain after dog-fights in southern England. The only difference now was that the Mediterranean was even bigger and their Messerschmitts, because of the dust and the shortage of parts, were less reliable. Over the radio, the chatter seemed to be getting ever more hysterical. With a rage born of frustration sweeping over him, he switched on to transmit and told everyone to keep their mouths shut.

But he did make it back. The familiar marker of Monte Erice came into view and soon after, with other single fighters also homing back towards Trapani, he came back into land. Engine off, the dust settling, and a sudden stillness. And the sinking feeling of disaster.

Clambering out, he was met by Hauptmann Lutz Burckhardt and Oberleutnant Gerhard Strausen, both from his headquarters flight. Although Strausen was enthusiastic about the Fortress Steinhoff had shot down, neither had had any success themselves, nor had they seen any other bombers disappear beneath the waves. Major Siegfried Freytag, commander of II. Gruppe, and a man with both a growing cynicism and a talent for calling a spade a spade, greeted Steinhoff as he approached the hut.

‘That was a gorgeous balls-up, sir,’ he said.13

‘Didn’t your wing get any?’

‘Not a single one,’ he replied. He had lost sight of the headquarters flight in the haze, and then, when he did see the bombers, it was almost too late and they had had to attack from astern rather than head-on. ‘And we botched it, really botched it.’ It seemed the other two Gruppen hadn’t even seen the bombers.

So there it was – as he’d feared. In all, just four had been shot down – one by Steinhoff, one other, as it happened, by one of Freytag’s boys and two by the Ace of Spades. Not that Steinhoff knew it at the time. When, with a heavy heart, he phoned through to Galland on Monte Erice, he was able to report only his own single Fortress as confirmed shot down.

‘But I told you in good time that they’d gone down low,’ Galland replied.14 ‘It really isn’t possible – a hundred fighters and only one enemy shot down …’

An 88mm flak gun fired, shaking the walls of the wooden hut, and suddenly everyone was once again running to the slit-trenches, Steinhoff’s call left unfinished as the telephone fell from its perch on to the floor. As he ran out of the door, the engines of the approaching bombers could already be heard. By chance he found himself once again crouching next to Franzl Lützow, who had earlier been with Galland at fighter operations on Monte Erice. Once more bombs started to whistle down and explode as the anti-aircraft guns boomed their response. Eventually, the raiders passed, and once again they dusted themselves down and wearily clambered out. Galland, Lützow told him, was seething with rage. ‘Was there really nothing to be done?’15 he added.

Sensing a hint of reproach, Steinhoff turned on him. ‘I’ll be accountable to the general for everything,’ he snapped, ‘but what I do insist is that you finally get it into your heads that we’re trying to do the impossible here!’16

Lützow apologized – and assured his friend he was not reproaching him. ‘But, my God,’ he added, ‘how’s it all going to end?’17

IN THE LAST WEEK of June 1943, from Egypt across North Africa to Algeria and northern Tunisia, Allied troops were getting ready for what was to be the largest amphibious invasion the world had ever known. A pivotal moment in the war had been reached. On the Eastern Front, German forces were about to go on to the offensive once more, this time to try and straighten the Kursk salient following the retreat from Stalingrad back in February. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had been withdrawn after catastrophic losses, allowing Allied shipping finally to flow freely across that vast ocean for the first time since the start of the war. British and American bombers were attacking the Reich both day and night, while – after three long years of fighting – all of North Africa was now in Allied hands. And the future of Italy looked uncertain, to say the least, the Fascist state now reeling in the face of plummeting public morale, a string of military defeats and an economy in shreds.

There was a palpable sense that the noose was starting to tighten around Nazi Germany; and yet for the Allies to cross the sea and capture Sicily would be a mammoth undertaking. The challenges of such an operation, both logistically and in the levels of coordination needed between services and between coalition partners feeling their way in this war, were immense. Hovering over the Allies, too, was the knowledge that less than a year hence they would be attempting to cross the English Channel and invade German-occupied France; the last sizeable strike, at Dieppe in August 1942, had been an utter disaster. If Sicily went wrong, if it turned into catastrophe or even a long and bloody slog, then the ramifications would be enormous. The long road to victory would become even longer; the cross-Channel attack might have to be postponed. Reverses, at this critical stage in the war, simply could not be countenanced. They were unthinkable.

The stakes, then, could hardly have been higher. The invasion of Sicily had to be a success. Yet for the senior Allied commanders far away across the Mediterranean, in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt – from where the troops who would soon be attempting to land there were training – conquest of this ancient, even mystical, island seemed a very formidable undertaking indeed.

Most of the men now being put through their paces in North Africa were oblivious to such concerns. Training at Kabrit near the Suez Canal were the men of 69th Brigade, part of 50th ‘Tyne Tees’ Division, who would be part of the British landing force around Avola on the east coast of Sicily – not that Bill Cheall and the lads of the 6th Green Howards had any idea of that. ‘We realised that we were going to invade somewhere,’ noted Cheall, ‘but, of course, how could we know where at that time?’1 The war had already been going on a long time for Cheall, a former greengrocer from Middlesbrough in north-east England. Joining the Territorial Army in the spring of 1939, aged just twenty-one, he had been mobilized on the outbreak of war that September, and had served in France with the 6th Green Howards. Escaping from Dunkirk, he’d then begun the process of retraining before being laid low with chronic sinusitis and so had not gone overseas with the battalion when they’d first been posted to the Middle East. Instead, he’d spent some time with the 11th Battalion, before finally being shipped overseas and rejoining his old unit at the end of March 1943. He’d been shocked by how few were left from the battalion that had escaped from Dunkirk, but after the Battle of Wadi Akarit, when Eighth Army had crashed into the Italians in southern Tunisia back at the beginning of April, he had begun to realize why. Being in the infantry was a tough, bloody, attritional business. Sooner or later, one was bound to come a cropper. One just had to hope it wouldn’t be a fatal one.

They’d advanced to Enfidaville further north in Tunisia, then had been pulled out of the line. At the time, no one had the faintest idea why, but they were glad to be spared the final battles of the long North African campaign, which had not finally ended until mid-May. Back they went, some 2,000 miles, past previous battle sites, down into Libya, through Cyrenaica and then finally into Egypt once more. The carnage of war had been evident all the way: burnt-out tanks and vehicles, guns and the vast detritus of war. As they’d passed back through Wadi Akarit, Cheall had said a small prayer to himself. ‘I imagined the faces of the pals I had lost,’ he noted, ‘and could see them just as they were before they gave their lives.’2 Eventually, they’d stopped at Sidi Bishr near Alexandria before moving again to Kabrit. Training continued, including Exercise BROMYARD in the Gulf of Aqaba, where they relentlessly practised amphibious assaults. The heat was intense and the flies as much a nuisance as they had ever been, but Cheall reckoned that by the beginning of July none of them had ever been fitter.

Not far away at another camp at El Shatt was their sister battalion, the 1st Green Howards. Unlike the 6th Battalion, the 1st had yet to see action, having spent the war so far training in England, Northern Ireland and, more recently, Palestine. The 1st Battalion would be part of 5th ‘Yorkshire’ Division, which was appropriate enough since the Green Howards hailed from that county of northern England, and were originally named after the landowner who had been the regiment’s colonel back in the eighteenth century.

One of the officers, the commander of B Company, was quite a sporting celebrity. Major Hedley Verity was one of the finest spin bowlers ever to play cricket for Yorkshire and England, and in 1934 had taken fifteen wickets in England’s biggest ever victory over Australia. Verity had considered joining up in 1938 during the Munich crisis, but Arnold Shaw, the colonel of the Green Howards and an old friend, suggested he first read some military textbooks and advised him to get in touch again should war break out. That winter, Verity had read voraciously during the England tour of South Africa before returning home for the final season before the war. Yorkshire once again won the championship that summer with Verity cleaning up Sussex, taking six wickets for 15 runs on Friday 1 September, the day Germany invaded Poland. On the Saturday, he travelled back to Yorkshire with the rest of the team, on Sunday Britain declared war, and on Monday Verity got back in touch with Colonel Shaw and joined up.

Quiet, unassuming and always generous towards others, he quickly showed a natural aptitude for military tactics. The best spin bowlers have both sharp intelligence and a tactical mind, and Verity brought these skills to soldiering. Unsurprisingly, his men and his peers all adored him, while in between training sessions he never tired of playing morale-boosting games of cricket. Since his arrival in the Canal Zone there had even been a match in which Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey, commander of XIII Corps, had played. A keen cricketer since his schooldays, Dempsey had been as overawed as most others to have the celebrated England player among his men. The chance to face the bowling of this sporting star had been too good to pass over.

Not all British troops scheduled for Operation HUSKY, as the Sicily invasion was code-named, were in the Middle East. Some had been training in northern Tunisia, including much of Major-General Vyvyan Evelegh’s 78th ‘Battleaxe’ Division, which was not to be part of the first wave of invasion troops but was to be kept in reserve, most likely landing a week or two later. Major Peter Pettit was second-in-command of the 17th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, a lawyer from London who had joined the part-time ranks of the Honourable Artillery Company as a nineteen-year-old. During his twelve years of pre-war service with the HAC, he’d taken his soldiering seriously and had risen to acting major, and in March 1941 he had transferred out of the territorials and into the regular army by joining the 17th Field Artillery. A further eighteen months had been spent in England training until finally he and the regiment were posted overseas to Tunisia, where they’d been fighting with First Army in the north of the country since the previous November. The 17th had performed well in North Africa, but Pettit, now aged thirty-four, was not a man to sit on any laurels and took the business of being a gunner very seriously. Aware how vital the artillery had become in the British way of war, he thought deeply and carefully about how it could best support the infantry and armour, writing down his thoughts about the relative values of different types of barrages and fire support patterns, and ensuring there had been no let-up in training. ‘Training from 0600 to 1200,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 June, ‘and training from 1700 to 1900.’3 In his next entry, he jotted: ‘Gun drill for four hours, very hot.’4 Joint exercises were held with the Irish Brigade, one of three infantry brigades in the 78th. Combined all-arms training was vital because invariably infantry would be advancing with fire support from the gunners; and the more training there was, the more officers such as Major Pettit got to know their fellows in the infantry, all of which helped enormously when doing it for real.

While it was the infantry – and armour – who had to make the leap of faith and advance across ground if the enemy was to be overrun and beaten, both the British and the Americans put increasing weight on fire-power to bludgeon the enemy – and on the ground, at any rate, it was the artillery who could provide that support. Fire plans, barrages, counter-battery fire, the siting of forward observers – all required enormous skill and training, and since the 17th FA was the senior artillery regiment in 78th Division, Peter Pettit, for one, was determined his men should be up to the job. Very often, a skilfully executed fire plan could be the difference between living and dying for the infantry up ahead of them.

On 1 July, General Montgomery, commanding Eighth Army to which they were now attached, came to visit the officers of the division, assembled under a large canopy of old car hoods put together by the engineers, just a hundred yards from the sea. ‘He said he planned on three principles,’ wrote Pettit, ‘that he would not move until he was ready, that objectives would be limited, and that he would not ask formations to do something they could not do.’5 Having been part of First Army in Tunisia, they’d not fought under Monty before, so this was their first proper sighting of their commanding general. Earlier, Montgomery had driven up to the men in the regiment and asked them to gather round. This had prompted something of a stampede, but Pettit knew the men had loved it, seeing this famous general – now their general – right there, in front of them, happily answering questions. ‘He got right under their skins at once,’ Pettit later jotted in his diary.6

Meanwhile, at the coastal port of Oran in Algeria the US 1st Infantry Division had also been gearing up for this next phase of the war against Nazi Germany and its Italian ally. The men of the Big Red One – as the 1st Division was known – had been part of the initial TORCH landings at Oran and Arzew the previous November and had spent the most time in the line during the Tunisian campaign: 112 out of 132 days, which was a lot more than any other American troops. Second Lieutenant Franklyn A. Johnson had celebrated victory in North Africa with three days sleeping and loafing in Bizerte, but then the division had been transferred back to Algeria, and to a training camp at Mangin, 12 miles from the city of Oran. An officer in Cannon Company of the 18th Infantry Regiment, Johnson had survived the North African campaign with no further damage than a painful but not serious shrapnel wound to his hand, but he was tired after the long campaign and in need of some R&R. They all were; and, recognizing this, the divisional commander, Major-General Terry de la Mesa Allen, had announced a brief moratorium on training, plus unrestricted passes and trucks to take his boys into town.

Inevitably, after such a sudden release of steam, drunken mayhem had followed. The next morning, General Allen himself had gone down to the city’s jails and bailed out the many men who had been locked up for over-exuberance the previous evening. The episode had cost Allen a severe dressing-down from Lieutenant-General George S. Patton, the commander of Force 343 for the upcoming invasion – what would soon become the US Seventh Army. Patton disapproved of his soldiers going on drunken sprees, and even more strongly of commanders encouraging such behaviour.

Frank Johnson had been among those assembled for a pep-talk by Allen a day or so later, by which time the holiday period was over and training had resumed. No mention was made of the drunken revelry in Oran. Instead, Allen had praised them all for their work in Tunisia, highlighting the GIs – the rank and file – above any of the officers. ‘Do your job,’ he finished. ‘We don’t want heroes – dead heroes. We’re not out for glory – we’re here to do a dirty, stinking job.’ It went down well. ‘We love and respect Terry Allen even more after he talks frankly to us at Mangin,’ noted Johnson.7

Johnson was from New Jersey, the son of a professor of Military Science and Tactics at Hamilton College, New York. With poor eyesight, he’d known he would not get a regular army commission, but at Rutgers University had joined the ROTC – Reserve Officer Training Corps – graduating in May 1942 and heading off to join the army for the duration immediately after. He had shipped to England in September and been posted to Cannon Company of the 18th Infantry Regiment, arriving in Algeria in November, just behind the invasion. More training had followed, and then they’d been sent into Tunisia to help stem the flow at Kasserine in February 1943, when the US II Corps had suffered a severe setback at the hands of a briefly resurgent Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel and his Panzerarmee. Johnson and the rest of the 18th Infantry had been in the thick of it throughout the rest of the fighting.

The cannon company attached to each infantry regiment provided a mixture of fire support – a platoon of tracked 105mm howitzers on a Sherman tank chassis known as a Priest, 75mm guns mounted on half-tracks, and anti-tank guns. Johnson commanded an anti-tank platoon and was very relieved to be giving up the 37mm pea-shooters with which they’d fought through Tunisia and getting his hands instead on the new 57mm, a gun of greater velocity and far superior range that packed a considerably bigger punch – essentially a British 6-pounder in all but name. At last, Johnson and his men had realized, they would be able actually to disable a German tank. That was quite something.

They had been working hard that June, training for village infiltration, firing upon towed targets and conducting invasion exercises. At one such landing exercise, General Patton had turned up to watch. Many of the men in the Big Red One thought little of Patton; he was too spick and span, insisting on the wearing of ties at all times and on being clean-shaven. They also suspected he was a glory hunter – and that he wasn’t known as ‘Old Blood and Guts’ for nothing. Patton’s approach to the military – that it was his life’s mission and that appearances counted for everything – stood in sharp contrast to that of General Terry Allen and his Executive Officer, Brigadier-General Teddy Roosevelt, son and namesake of the former president, who were decidedly more laissez-faire over such matters. Allen’s and Roosevelt’s approach inevitably flowed downwards to the men. It also put Allen on a collision course with Patton, who had originally planned to leave the 1st Infantry Division out of the HUSKY order of battle. But the Big Red One was now comfortably his most experienced division in a force startlingly lacking in that most precious commodity. He needed them.

Johnson and his men had heard the sirens screaming before they’d seen Patton’s cavalcade arrive. Then suddenly there he was, stepping out and inspecting them as they were hastily brought to attention. Johnson couldn’t help but be impressed by the general’s appearance: shiny leather boots and spurs, pink breeches, silver buckled belt and shellacked and star-studded helmet. ‘After the aide signals that the inspection is over,’ noted Johnson, ‘we return to our work as someone mumbles.8 “Yeah, your guts and our blood.”’

The Tunisian campaign had ended on 13 May, when the German General Jürgen von Arnim had surrendered all German and Italian forces – two entire armies, amounting to more than 250,000 men – on the Cap Bon peninsula, the north-eastern tip of Tunisia. Later that day, the Allied ground forces commander, General Sir Harold Alexander, commander-in-chief of 18th Army Group, had signalled to the British prime minister. ‘Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over,’ he wrote.9 ‘All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.’

That North Africa was now teeming with American, British and Commonwealth troops seemed, on one level, rather bizarre; after all, it was a long way from Berlin, or France, or any other part of Nazi-occupied Europe. They were there, though, owing to a long and convoluted chain of events, whose origins could be charted back to June 1940. On the 10th of that month, when the French were staring down the barrel of defeat at the hands of the Germans and most of the British Expeditionary Force had already been evacuated back to Britain from Dunkirk, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, had declared war on both countries. It had been a massive gamble as his armed forces were underdeveloped, for the most part poorly equipped by modern standards and severely undertrained. Even the Italian navy, which was its most up-to-date component, lacked any aircraft carriers or any form of radar. Mussolini had gambled on both France and Britain being knocked out of the war, thereby giving him essentially a free hand in dramatically expanding his sphere of dominance in the Mediterranean and Africa. Libya and Abyssinia were already Italian colonies; next on the list were Malta, Egypt and Sudan – and the crucial Suez Canal, which would link them all neatly together. Also in his sights were Greece and the eastern Mediterranean.

Few of his senior commanders shared his enthusiasm, however – especially when it became clear that Britain had no intention of throwing in the towel. In early July, the Royal Navy sank much of the Vichy and Axis-backing French fleet at Mers el-Kebir in Algeria – hardly the action of a country soon to sue for peace. Then, in July, the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet had clashed with the Italian navy, the Regia Marina, at the Battle of Calabria and had given the Italians a brutal taste of superior British seamanship. Even the tiny Mediterranean outpost of Malta, an island lying just 60 miles south of Sicily, had resisted Italian bombing and had been hurriedly reinforced by the British. All this had not augured well for Mussolini’s ambitions.

By September 1940, with the RAF still successfully fending off all subjugation attempts by the Luftwaffe over southern England, men like Maresciallo Rodolfo Graziani, commander of the Italian Tenth Army in Libya, had begun to see the writing on the wall all too clearly. Land grabs in North Africa and the Mediterranean were one thing if the British were out of the war, but quite another if they were still fighting. It was reluctantly, and only under extreme pressure from Mussolini, that he advanced his men into Egypt on 13 September 1940; and then, having gone a few short miles, he stopped.

Already, Mussolini’s plans were starting to unravel. In Germany, he had a bullying dominant ally with a raft of victories already under its belt, while his own generals appeared to lack any fire at all; and all the while, the British, whom he had supposed to be dead and buried, were getting stronger, not weaker. Mussolini had wanted a parallel war where the Germans kept off his patch and where Italian victories would be ludicrously easy; one that would make him and Italy look militarily strong and the leading world player he believed it was Fascist Italy’s destiny to be.

By the end of that year such dreams had been completely dashed. The invasion of Greece at the end of October 1940 had quickly turned into a catastrophe as the Greeks unexpectedly resisted invasion and then fought back, while in December the British launched Operation COMPASS with its tiny Western Desert Force of 36,000 men. By February 1941, two Italian armies had been smashed, some 133,000 men taken prisoner and the remainder pushed back almost to Tripoli. Meanwhile, the British had also attacked through Sudan into Abyssinia and Eritrea, and by May had hammered the Italians there as well.

At this time, Britain’s priority was keeping open the Atlantic sea-lanes and defeating the U-boat threat. From one perspective, North Africa and the Mediterranean theatre held little strategic importance for Britain, given that the Mediterranean – and hence the Suez Canal – as a shipping channel and short cut to India and beyond was already closed because Axis forces controlled the northern shores. Nor was Middle East oil especially important to Britain, because the world’s leading oil producers at this time were America and Venezuela, and they were the sources of almost all Britain’s domestic oil; Middle East oil supplied British Middle East operations and nothing more.

Rather, Britain’s strategy in the Middle East and Mediterranean was largely opportunistic. This was a part of the world where Britain could easily concentrate the assets of the Dominions and the rest of the Empire – whether manpower or supplies – from India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It offered a chance to defeat Italy, make it a liability for Germany and expose the Reich’s southern flank, from which future operations might then open up. It was also the perfect testing ground for a British Army that needed to grow and develop rapidly following the fall of its ally, France, and the losses suffered on the continent. Britain also hoped to create an eastern Mediterranean bloc with Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia, from which British and Commonwealth troops could also push into Vichy French Syria and influence Franco’s Spain.

It was precisely for reasons of southern flank vulnerability that Hitler felt compelled to come to the rescue of his Italian ally. Generalmajor Erwin Rommel, one of the stars of the 1940 campaign in the West, was sent to Libya with two divisions, followed soon after by a third, while German troops swept into Yugoslavia, then mainland Greece, and then took Crete as well. This forced the British to siphon off troops from North Africa to support a failed cause in Greece and Crete, but in the long term the battles in the Balkans cost the Germans more, even though they won the day and sent the British scuttling back to the Middle East. This was because they took place immediately before the largest clash of arms the world had ever witnessed: Operation BARBAROSSA, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Germany had needed the dissipation of resources caused by being sucked into the Mediterranean like a bolt in the head. The diversion of even a handful of panzer divisions and the loss of vital transport aircraft and highly trained and motivated troops was keenly felt as, by late 1941, the German advance into Russia began to run out of steam. The aim of BARBAROSSA had been to annihilate the Soviet Red Army in a matter of three months at most, then feed off the booty gained. Instead, by the end of 1941, Germany had been sucked into an attritional and brutal campaign on the Eastern Front that was draining off ever more men and materiel, while at the same time pursuing a campaign in the Mediterranean that it could ill afford. Few in Germany had forgotten that fighting on two fronts for much of the First World War had done for them in that last major conflict.

Since there was absolutely no realistic chance of Britain invading Nazi-occupied Europe any time soon, and because they were now embroiled in North Africa and the Middle East, the British were compelled to keep fighting there until the bitter end. From June 1941 until the beginning of November 1942, the fighting raged across Libya, back and forth depending on the respective fortunes of the warring parties elsewhere. As a rough rule of thumb, when the Luftwaffe was on Sicily and pounding Malta, Axis fortunes in North Africa improved. When the Luftwaffe was needed elsewhere, however, as in the second half of 1941, then the British moved into the ascendancy, because Malta-based submarines, warships and aircraft were able to hammer Axis shipping convoys across the Mediterranean largely unchecked. When the Luftwaffe returned to Sicily en masse in the first half of 1942, Malta briefly became the most bombed place in the world. There had been discussions then about an Axis invasion of Malta, but it was eventually accepted that Rommel should push ahead with an offensive in Libya. Since that meant the Luftwaffe would be needed for support, most of Fliegerkorps II was transferred from Sicily to North Africa. At this point, Malta had been on its knees; but the easing of pressure and the arrival of more Spitfires allowed the island to get back on its feet. In North Africa, meanwhile, Rommel struck the British lines in late May 1942 and won a famous victory, with the garrison of Tobruk surrendering on 21 June and the British Eighth Army fleeing back to the Alamein Line, a mere 60 miles to the west of Alexandria in Egypt. For a brief moment, it looked as though Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika might actually conquer all Egypt and push on into the Middle East.

There were a number of reasons why he was unable to do so. On Malta, the RAF managed to win back air superiority in short order. Then, when the most heavily defended Allied convoy of the war inched into Malta in mid-August, it threw the starving island a lifeline and the chance to bounce back swiftly. By this time, Rommel’s men had hit a brick wall at the Alamein Line and couldn’t burst through to snatch the final furlong to Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal. To make matters worse, Axis supply lines were hideously long – the only decent-sized port available was Tripoli, over 1,000 miles away – which meant that half the available fuel was used up transporting it to the front, while British supply lines had shrunk dramatically and very advantageously. At the end of August, Malta-based aircraft sank six vital Axis tankers headed for North Africa, the Battle of Alam Halfa was lost, and the Panzerarmee Afrika was now on the back foot, while a reinvigorated Eighth Army was able to build up enough strength to ensure it never lost in North Africa again.

As this Mediterranean see-saw rocked back and forth, the United States had formally entered the war on 7 December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, America had tied its colours to the Allied mast far earlier, with senior men sent to London back in 1940 to observe the Battle of Britain and on 27 March the following year agreeing, in principle, that should the United States become embroiled in the war at some future point, defeating Germany would be the priority. This was reaffirmed at the Atlantic Meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August that year and swiftly confirmed during the ARCADIA conference in Washington between the American and British chiefs of staff – the first formal Allied conference, following swiftly on the heels of Pearl Harbor.

America had also been involved in the war materially long before the Japanese attack. Following the defeat of France, Roosevelt, who had won presidential terms in 1932 and 1936 on an isolationist ticket, had decided not only that he would stand for a historic third term in November 1940, but also that the Atlantic was no longer the barrier it had once been. His conundrum was how to successfully rearm on a massive scale while public opinion remained strongly against any involvement in European matters. Somehow, he had to pull off not only one of the biggest ever political voltes-face, but also win a third term – something no previous president had ever attempted.

In the event, he did both – by a combination of guile and political cunning, superb public relations and, perhaps most importantly, his superlative geopolitical understanding and clear vision of what needed to be done. Drawing around him a number of highly skilled technocrats and big businessmen as ‘advisors’, he began the process of kick-starting rearmament, using the argument that the best way to keep American boys out of the war was to help America’s friends to use their young men to keep the wolves from the door themselves. By rearming, they could not only achieve this but help pull their economy out of the continuing effects of the Great Depression at the same time. Even better, a decent chunk of the cash to fund this initial push to rearm was coming from British coffers.

It is sometimes hard to grasp just how much the United States armed forces had been allowed to languish in the twenties and thirties. By 1935, the army had fallen to just under 119,000 men and even by September 1939 it stood at merely 188,000, which made it the nineteenth largest in the world, sandwiched between those of Portugal and Uruguay. Most units were operating at half-strength, and much of its equipment was obsolescent. Even by May 1940, there were just 160 fighter planes and 52 heavy bombers in the entire US Army Air Corps; only the navy had been kept up to date and given much investment. Back in 1918, the States had been the leading supplier in the world of TNT; by 1940 there were barely any manufacturers of explosives left in the country. So by the time Roosevelt pressed the ‘go’ button on rearming, the army and what would become the US Army Air Forces effectively had to start again from scratch. As a result, on 16 May 1940, Roosevelt asked for a defence budget increase not to $24 million, as had been originally mooted, but rather to $1.2 billion. The aim was to produce 50,000 aircraft a year and to have an army of 4 million by 1 April 1942.

This was rearming on an exponential scale and involved harnessing much of the United States’ already advanced consumer industry – and, not least, making the most of its extensive automobile industry, cheap labour and isolated position, which meant there would be no threat of air raids or need for night-time curfews. Once America began producing armaments, it would be able, in theory, to keep on producing them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even so, as Roosevelt was warned, this huge transformation could not happen overnight; it would take some six months or so to create the new machine tools needed for this huge manufacturing programme, then another six months to train up the workers and get the show on the road, and a further six months before the production lines would start to churn out materiel in meaningful numbers. That was eighteen months, which conveniently took America to the end of 1941 – precisely the time when the States formally entered the war. It is often assumed that by Pearl Harbor the United States had seamlessly emerged, fully formed, as the ‘arsenal of democracy’; in fact, it was a fraught and dramatic process, and even though few in the summer of 1940 would have doubted America’s armaments manufacturing potential, there had been a big difference between what might be possible and what was actually achievable.

None the less, the miracle was happening. Ships, tanks, guns, bombers and fighter aircraft were all starting to roll off the production lines, while the rapidly growing US Army, the result of the country’s first peacetime draft, was emerging from camps all around the country and being put through vital training exercises – not just for the men but for the entire modus operandi of the army – at a series of large-scale manoeuvres in Louisiana in the late summer of 1941. Meanwhile, the US Atlantic Fleet had begun to play its part, helping escort British convoys across the ocean from early September 1941, and with orders to destroy any Axis vessel found in American waters or threatening its personnel or cargo. As it happened, the first US–German clash of arms happened the other way around, when a U-boat in the Atlantic sank an American destroyer, the Reuben James, in October 1941.

Although this caused public outrage in the States, Roosevelt continued to hold off entering the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and even then it was Germany that declared war on America, not the other way around. Once in the fight, however, Roosevelt and his military chiefs had been quick to express their desire to get into battle as soon as possible. Britain, lying off the European continent, was the obvious place to build up American forces with a view to launching a cross-Channel invasion later that year, 1942. The British, mustard keen to get the Americans ensnared in the fight against Nazi Germany right away, readily agreed, even though they knew perfectly well there was not the slightest chance either they or the United States would be ready for such an undertaking so soon. The following year, 1943, seemed a more reasonable bet.

Matters came swiftly to a head in the early summer of 1942 when Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, visited first London and then Washington in an effort to secure greater materiel support from the western Allies and also secure a pledge from them to launch a new front against Germany. It was clear the Germans were planning a renewed offensive on the Eastern Front, and Molotov stressed the Soviet Union urgently needed the Allies to draw off German troops as soon as possible. In London, Churchill told him that opening a second front in Europe simply would not be possible that year.

With this bombshell, Molotov travelled on to Washington. In the meantime, Churchill had reported the substance of his conversations to Roosevelt and reminded him of a suggestion he’d made the previous October: a joint Anglo-US invasion of Vichy French north-west Africa. This, he argued, would kill two birds, if not three, with one stone. It would speed up the conquest of North Africa and clear the southern Mediterranean; it might well hustle Italy out of the war; and it would give British and US forces a chance to operate together in an enterprise where victory was likely. As such, it could be a very useful test run for the cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe to which they had both pledged their commitment. In Washington, meanwhile, Molotov repeated the requests he’d made to the British – and this time, Roosevelt and General George Marshall, the US chief of staff, both confirmed that, yes, they would start a second front against Germany that year, 1942.

By this time, US men and materiel had begun arriving in Britain – the first troops, from the 34th ‘Red Bull’ Division, had reached the UK on 24 January 1942. To begin with, their training and organization were somewhat lackadaisical, to say the least, and Major-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a protégé of General Marshall, was packed off to England to see US build-up preparations for himself. Returning with a fairly damning report, he unwittingly wrote himself into a job and was sent back to Britain as Commanding General, European Theater of Operations, with Major-General Mark W. Clark, another up-and-coming star, as his deputy.

In the summer of 1942, Eisenhower was still only a two-star general, but he had already shown plenty of signs of his remarkable talents. His upbringing could scarcely have been more humble. Born in Texas, he had been raised from an early age in the tiny rail halt town of Abilene, Kansas, in America’s Midwest. Both studious and athletic, he had worked hard, won a place at West Point, the US Army Military Academy, and slowly but surely risen up the ranks by dint of hard work, a meticulous eye for detail, a highly organized brain and no small amount of charm and graciousness. Unlike contemporaries such as Patton or Mark Clark, he had not made it to the Western Front in the last war and had, by 1942, yet to command troops in battle, but had instead shown early promise as a highly competent staff officer.

After a stint serving with General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, he had returned to Washington and caught the eye of General George Marshall, who in September 1939 had become the Chief of Staff, the United States’ most senior serviceman. Eisenhower had won further good notices for his part in organizing the Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941, the largest exercises of their kind up to that point, so that once America was in the war, he was an obvious candidate for higher command.

Eisenhower and Clark had reached London still believing their brief was to mount Operation SLEDGEHAMMER. This was to be a cross-Channel invasion of France, to capture a key port, establish a bridgehead and then use it to break out with a bigger operation – ROUNDUP – in 1943. Yet it soon became clear to them that, despite promises to Molotov from Roosevelt and Marshall, the British had no intention of attempting such an undertaking. That there were still two entirely different strategic agendas as late as July 1942 underlined the gulf between the British and the Americans, who – though widely referred to as ‘the Allies’ – were at this point still only coalition partners rather than bound by a formal alliance. Both Britain’s and America’s war leaders had to feel their way into this new relationship. And, for all the Americans’ gung-ho enthusiasm to strike swiftly at the heart of the Reich, there was no doubt the British had a point. There was a lack of shipping, they argued, and also a shortage of landing craft – new vessels were being built but there were not yet enough. What’s more, no American troops had ever fought against a German panzer division, and many US infantrymen had not even seen a tank yet, let alone trained with one. Failure would have a disastrous knock-on effect for ROUNDUP the following year.

By mid-July, SLEDGEHAMMER had been scrapped; but the promise made to Molotov hung over the Americans, and so Churchill once again raised the prospect of a joint Anglo-US invasion of French north-west Africa. On 24 July, with Roosevelt’s approval, this was agreed in principle: it meant the Americans could keep their promise to the Soviets, the operation would not need as many landing craft or warships as a cross-Channel invasion, and it could, as Churchill had earlier suggested, give the new coalition partners a fairly safe opportunity to test the water of joint operations. An overall Allied commander would be needed for the entire operation, and General Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, suggested it should be an American. The Brits also proposed that the landing operations in Algiers and French Morocco should be led by US troops, partly as an additional sop to the Americans and partly because Vichy French antipathy to Britain was still very strong after the sinking of the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir back in July 1940. This was all agreed, and so the new operation, codenamed TORCH, was now on. Eisenhower became the natural choice for overall commander, and was duly appointed with a promotion to lieutenant-general. Planning was carried out from Eisenhower’s headquarters in London and with a joint Anglo-US planning team getting down to the nitty-gritty.

As a first foray into mounting such operations, TORCH certainly ticked the boxes outlined by Churchill when he first suggested it, and it was agreed it would take place on 8 November 1942, as a second punch following Eighth Army’s main attack on the Panzerarmee Afrika at Alamein on 23 October. By this time, General Bernard Montgomery, who had taken over command of Eighth Army in early August, had built up overwhelming strength, although the battle still turned out to be a bloody and attritional affair. None the less, by 3 November it was all over, Rommel’s forces fleeing back across the desert with the British in pursuit, and this time for good.

Superb planning, led by General Mark Clark, ensured that TORCH was a success. Clark himself had made a clandestine visit to North Africa for pre-invasion talks with the Vichy French, which had gone some way to ensuring the opposition to the landings was extremely light. Even so, it was no small feat to land three separate invasion forces, two from Britain and one directly from the United States, pretty much on time and pretty much where they were supposed to after just two months’ planning. Having subdued the Vichy French, who sued for terms within four days of the invasion, the plan was to make straight for Tunisia: the British First Army, which included the US II Corps, would drive in from Algeria in the west, while Eighth Army, from the east, sped as quickly as possible across Libya to trap Rommel’s forces in a pincer movement.

After the success of the TORCH landings and the victory at Alamein, however, the Allies had not found the going in North Africa quite as good as they’d hoped. Northern Tunisia was, in places, further north than Sicily, it was not the flat open desert of Libya, and by late November 1942 winter had arrived and bad weather began to slow down the advance of the British First Army.

The second spanner in the works was Hitler’s decision to send massive reinforcements to Tunisia. As soon as the Führer heard about the Allied invasion, he ordered the total occupation of France – much of the south had remained unoccupied since the armistice back in June 1940 – and told the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German general staff, that a bridgehead was to be created around Tunis. There were those who suggested to Hitler that this wasn’t the best idea, but he was having none of it. He had always been obsessed with the Mediterranean, because of the threat from the Allies striking the soft underbelly of his southern flank, which was why he’d insisted on earlier interventions in North Africa, the Balkans, Greece and Crete.

Of all the places on the long North African coastline, Tunisia was the closest to Sicily – and Europe – and so the easiest for German troops to reinforce. Hitler hoped to avoid any Italian collapse, and saw the build-up of men and supplies there as the means of keeping the southern flank secure. It was to be held at all costs. The Luftwaffe was sent south once more, as too were panzer divisions, some even equipped with the new giant Panzer Mk VI, better known as the Tiger.

This build-up of troops had enabled the Axis forces to check the advance of the British and Americans racing to Tunis, while it had taken time for Eighth Army and the RAF to shift themselves 1,200 miles west. In January 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had met at Casablanca for a strategy conference. By this time, Rommel had around 80,000 men in his Panzerarmee Afrika, while General Jürgen von Arnim’s 5. Panzerarmee now amounted to some 65,000 – and growing – in northern Tunisia. Eisenhower actually offered to resign over this setback, but Marshall, Brooke and the chiefs of staff recognized that he was now carrying too much responsibility. Instead, he was made Supreme Allied Commander, which allowed him to concentrate on political and wider operational issues, and a new deputy and overall field commander was brought in under him. This was General Sir Harold Alexander.

On 21 January, Eighth Army took Tripoli, and while Montgomery waited for the rest of his forces to catch up, Rommel took the opportunity to sweep into southern Tunisia, where he attacked with his old dash and flair on St Valentine’s Day 1943, his panzers smashing into the unprepared and still green US II Corps in what became the ten-day Battle of the Kasserine Pass. The US 1st Armored Division, with losses of some 1,400, was hardest hit, but overall the Allied casualties at Kasserine had been serious rather than disastrous, and the American defeat was not really the catastrophe that is so often depicted – more a short-term tactical gain for the Axis forces than a victory of much strategic value. It had shocked the Americans, none the less; but for troops new to battle, sometimes there is more to be learned from defeat than victory, and that was certainly the case in this instance.

In any case, the reverse at Kasserine was checked in fairly quick order, leaving Rommel’s Panzerarmee in the south once again overextended and needing urgently to turn back to face Eighth Army’s advance from Libya. In March, the Allies fought back. Eighth Army pushed the Panzerarmee Afrika back at Medenine in southern Tunisia, after which Rommel, now sick and exhausted, left Africa for good, handing over command of his forces, now increasingly made up from Italian units, to Generale Giovanni Messe. Eighth Army then attacked the strong defensive Mareth Line between the coast and the Matmata Hills, while the New Zealand Corps outflanked the position by making a 200-mile trek around the back of the mountains. By the beginning of April, Eighth Army had turned north; while they were briefly halted by the Italians at Wadi Akarit, II Corps and the rest of First Army advanced from the north and west against von Arnim’s 5. Panzerarmee. The Allies were closing in, the Axis bridgehead becoming ever smaller. The final offensive, in the Medjerda valley west of Tunis, was possibly the best-executed battle the Allies had yet launched, smashing the last resistance and ensuring that by 13 May victory had, at last, been secured in North Africa.

While all this had been going on, the Allies were busy planning their next move: the invasion of Sicily and the first assault on Fortress Europe, an operation of mind-boggling complexity and one that presented what had first appeared to be insuperable challenges.

BY LATE JUNE 1943 the Allies were almost ready, and in Algeria the US 9th Division was among the American units training for the forthcoming invasion. Since the end of the Tunisian campaign, they had been based in the middle of the rocky desert 30 miles south of Sidi bel Abbès, an ancient walled oasis town south of Oran. The 9th Division, like all those American ground units that had fought in Tunisia, had learned the hard way and learned fast; well aware by now there was no room for any kind of complacency, they had, since arriving back in Algeria, been training hard.

Within the division, the 39th Infantry Regiment had been adopting a number of British tricks of the trade, thanks to 24-year-old Lieutenant Charlie Scheffel, who had spent time attached to a British brigade in England and then more recently, during the Tunisian campaign, at the battle schools set up under British instructors in Algeria. Since victory in Tunisia back in May, Scheffel had been promoted from platoon commander to first lieutenant, and was now 1st Battalion S-3 staff officer – plans and operations. After imparting the benefits of his fast-growing experience to the whole of the battalion, Scheffel had been asked to do the same for the other two battalions in the division. In the 39th, as elsewhere, there was a hunger to learn and get better; after all, it didn’t take a genius to realize that the better the soldier, the better the chances of survival. Combine that with dramatically increased amounts of supplies and there was every reason to think the US Seventh Army would soon be a formidable outfit. No one, though, could expect this to happen overnight. Apart from the fifty US Army Rangers who had taken part in the ill-fated Dieppe Raid the previous August, it was only since November that American troops had been in combat on the ground in the western theatre and, for the vast majority, only since the turn of the New Year that they’d been fighting the Germans and Italians. That wasn’t very long, yet very soon the Americans would be providing an entire army to help re-enter Europe and capture Sicily. It was a big ask, to put it mildly, in this still early phase of their part in the war against Germany and Italy.

Raised in the small town of Enid in Oklahoma, Charlie Scheffel was the son of a German and a Swedish immigrant. His parents had reached America with little but had done well; after briefly serving in the US Army, his father had had first the insight to set up a filling station and then the entrepreneurial flair to start prospecting for oil. By the summer of 1929 he had a number of highly successful wells, plenty of money and a brand new Studebaker, in which the family drove to California for an unforgettable and wonderful holiday. Then, in October, everything had come tumbling down around them with the financial crash. First the oil business collapsed, and then Scheffel’s father, always so strong and vital, contracted pneumonia; three months after the Wall Street Crash he was dead, aged just fifty. ‘All of a sudden,’ noted Scheffel, ‘we were alone in a world that seemed increasingly uncertain.1 I was scared.’

The Great Depression that hit the United States after the crash brought untold hardship to millions. It is extraordinary to think how many of the young men like Charlie Scheffel, now fighting in the war, had grown up deprived of one, if not both, parents. Undoubtedly it made them tougher and, generally speaking, better able to cope with the challenges and adversity flung at them now America was at war. The Scheffel family, cruelly shorn of a husband and father as well as their livelihood, had somehow to pull themselves together and play with the cards they had been dealt – a prospect made even tougher by the dwarfism suffered by Scheffel’s younger brother, Stanley, in an era when physical differences were a considerable handicap.

Charlie himself grew up physically strong and athletic and won a sports scholarship to Oklahoma A&M University, where he played tennis, basketball and, especially, baseball. He also joined the college ROTC, which provided him with a useful few extra dollars. In the summer he played semi-pro baseball for a dollar a day; and back home in Enid he had a girlfriend, Ruth, with whom he was smitten, so life had been looking up. In the fall of 1940, the draft was introduced and the college ROTC began recruiting for the advanced course; signing up for this meant he would not be conscripted before completing his college degree, and also that later he could join the army directly as a second lieutenant.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 changed everything. With the United States now irrevocably at war, Scheffel had returned to college expecting to be sent off to the army full time right away, but was given a reprieve to complete his degree the next May. With the future suddenly so uncertain, Scheffel asked Ruth to marry him; after their wedding at the end of March 1942, they spent their honeymoon in a dollar-a-night room above a garage. ‘We had no time to go anywhere else,’ Scheffel recalled.2 After graduating, he was offered a place in the Finance Corps, but spurned the chance of an easy war and instead joined the infantry. ‘A surge of patriotism made me want to get to the SOBs who had attacked us,’ he wrote.3 ‘I was also young and needed to prove myself as a man.’

Sent to Britain as part of a replacement unit, he bade farewell to his mother, brother and new wife, and set sail across the Atlantic. He and the rest of his provisional company were initially attached to a British brigade, most of whom had already fought in France back in 1940. This was an early experiment to see whether British and American troops could operate and fight literally side-by-side, and although Scheffel soon realized there were a lot of cultural differences, he learned much from his new comrades. British officers, for example, had batmen – soldier-servants. This was not for the maintenance of some antiquated class division but rather because an officer needed a personal assistant, not least to dig a foxhole when first in the line. ‘If you’re an officer in command,’ he was told, ‘you’re going to be so damn busy figuring out how to get out of the mess you’re in, you’ll never have time to dig your own slit.’4 Scheffel also learned it was far better to dig a foxhole for two men than for one, as he’d been taught back home. Two men could support each other, watch backs, one staying awake while the other slept. They could provide more warmth, and emotional as well as physical support.

He learned much more besides, and even went off to war on an all-British ship as part of Operation TORCH. Soon afterwards, though, the novelty of being with the more experienced British began to wear off. He and his fellow Americans, still part of a provisional company, seemed to be given all the worst tasks – endless night patrols and night duties – and Scheffel, for one, wanted to be back with his own kind. ‘I think we got the shit details because we were rookies,’ he noted, ‘and the Brits didn’t trust us much.’5 After a few days, he asked the brigadier if he and his men could rejoin the US Army – and the very same day, they were on their way: half, Scheffel among them, sent to join the 39th Infantry Regiment in the 9th Division, and the other half to join the Big Red One, the 1st Infantry Division.

While the Big Red One had fought alongside the British in northern Tunisia, the rest of the US II Corps had suffered its bloody nose at Kasserine Pass. The perceived humiliation of being so badly overrun by Rommel’s Panzerarmee cut deep, but was none the less an important stepping stone in the development of the US Army. The British had suffered their fair share of setbacks too, having also begun the conflict with a tiny standing army. It was inevitable. Training was, of course, vital, but required battle experience to be truly valuable; route marches, map reading and rifle firing only took the raw recruit so far. The Americans were growing their army exponentially, mobilizing more men at greater speed than even the British, and for much of the time so far had had insufficient equipment with which to train and few instructors with any experience whatsoever. The lessons of modern combat had to be learned, absorbed and applied.

Scheffel had seen plenty of action in Tunisia, and like many Americans who survived the early fighting in that campaign, he had emerged a considerably better soldier – and officer. After Kasserine, a number of the American units had been rotated through the battle schools that had been set up in Algeria on the model of those originally established by the British following the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. These were the brainchild of General Sir Harold Alexander, who had the idea of training conscripts in simple battle drills to which they would react automatically in times of stress – orders, such as ‘Down, crawl, observe, fire!’ Alexander had also recognized that some kind of battle inoculation was needed before green troops were subjected to the terrors of dive-bombing, shelling, mortaring and machine-gunning. This could only be done using live ammunition. Finally, he also realized that it was essential that all troops were battle fit. For the time, such training was quite innovative, and battle school soon became a key part of a young conscript’s training.

Despite his earlier time with the British, Scheffel was one of those packed off to battle school. He reckoned he had been pretty lucky to have made some mistakes and yet lived to tell the tale, so had paid keen attention to all he had been taught. While there, he spent an evening with a group of junior British officers in a mess tent drinking local wine and shooting the breeze. Most didn’t think they had much chance of surviving. ‘We sat there giving coarse opinions on the war,’ recalled Scheffel.6 ‘We gave everybody hell – Patton, Eisenhower, Churchill, Montgomery, Alexander – we didn’t miss anybody except ourselves. We were the only good guys in the war, serving at the mercy of fools.’

They’d been grousing a while when the tent flap opened and in stepped a trim British officer whom all recognized immediately, the American included. Hastily they got to their feet and saluted. The visitor addressed Scheffel.

‘You’re an American?’7,

‘Yes, sir,’ Scheffel replied. ‘Oklahoma.’

‘I’ve been to Fort Sill,’ he said, then motioned to the group – ‘Sit down, gentlemen’ – before joining them. He confessed he’d heard some of what they’d been saying, but swiftly allayed their fears. He, too, had been a young officer once. He understood their concerns, and reassured them a corner had been turned. Eventually, ready to leave, he stood. ‘I want you to remember this,’ he said.8 ‘Gentlemen, the Boche are beginning to lose this war. If you think it’s bad on our side, just be glad you’re not on theirs.’

Their visitor had been none other than General Alexander himself, at the time newly arrived in Tunisia to take command of 18th Army Group.

Alexander – or ‘Alex’, as he was always known – was really a rather remarkable character, although not one ever to blow his own trumpet. In the world of high command, where ego and personal ambition often went hand-in-hand, Alex was notable for having very little of the former and almost none of the latter. Certainly, there were few people more prone to self-deprecation. Such unassuming modesty had been drummed into him during a childhood in which he had been brought up to respect notions of honour, duty and impeccable manners in all things and at all times.

His had been an aristocratic upbringing: a large estate in Northern Ireland, school at Harrow, then a commission in the Irish Guards. Charming, well connected and with no small amount of dash, he effortlessly excelled at all sports, was a highly talented artist and even took up motor racing at Brooklands. The four long years of the First World War developed him as a soldier. He quite openly enjoyed it, despite – or rather, because of – spending almost the entire war with fighting troops. At the First Battle of Ypres in November 1914 he was seriously wounded in the thigh and hand and invalided home. Recovering well and determined to get back to the front as soon as possible, he walked 64 miles in one day to prove to a cautious doctor that he was fit enough. Sure enough, by February 1915 he was back, and later that summer led his company at the Battle of Loos. His reputation had grown rapidly, notably for exceptional personal courage, but also for extraordinary imperturbability and the gift of quick decision. Always leading from the front and with no regard to his own personal safety, he soon had the complete devotion and respect of all those who served under him.

Though wounded twice more, Alex survived the carnage of the Somme, Cambrai and Passchendaele, and in 1917, aged just twenty-five, became acting lieutenant-colonel commanding the 2nd Battalion. By the Armistice, he had earned a DSO and bar, an MC and the French Légion d’Honneur, and had been mentioned in dispatches five times. Nor did his combat record stop with the end of war. In 1919 he was sent to command the Baltic Landwehr, part of the Latvian Army, in the war against Russia. Since most of the men in this force were of German origin, he was unique among the current Allied commanders in having led German troops in battle. Staff college and staff appointments were followed by stints of further action along the North-West Frontier between India and Afghanistan, where he was one of very few guardsmen to command a brigade. By the outbreak of war in 1939, this gilded officer was one of the army’s youngest major-generals and commanding 1st Division. He went with them to France, and after the British retreat in May 1940 was left behind to supervise the final withdrawal of British troops. Alex, in fact, was the final British soldier to be evacuated – the last man out of Dunkirk.

Remaining in England for the next two years of war, Alex realized that the vast majority of infantry troops under his command were simply not ready for battle, and it was at this point that he instigated the battle schools. It was also during this time that he particularly came to Churchill’s notice. The prime minister was certainly influenced by Alex’s easy charm and illustrious background, but also by his calm control and a military record that was second to none. Even when sent to oversee the retreat from Burma in May 1942, Alex had impressed with his unflappable ability to make the best of a bad situation. And he looked the part, too: although by early 1943 a rather shabby military chic had developed with Eighth Army, Alex always looked immaculate. There was a bit of sartorial flair to his style. ‘As calm and serene as a lecturer in a college,’ noted the American war correspondent John Gunther.9 ‘Everyone calls Montgomery “Monty” but Alex is General Alex.’

By early 1943, there was no British commander with a greater reputation, not even Montgomery. Now a full general, Alex was also unique in having commanded men in battle at every single officer rank. He never swore and never really lost his temper – not publicly, at any rate – and also somehow managed to speak German, French, Italian, Russian and even Urdu fluently. He had also developed a very sound sense of judgement and, perhaps even more importantly, an understanding of the men under his command, including the recognition that confidence and good morale were absolutely vital ingredients for success – especially with largely conscript armies. And this in turn meant that the approach to battle – the preparation and the removal of potential stumbling blocks – was the key to victory.

This stood him in good stead as Eighth Army began to claw their way back across North Africa in the summer and autumn of 1942. Although Alamein is seen as Montgomery’s victory, Alex – appointed C-in-C Middle East at the beginning of August 1942, and so Monty’s boss – deserves every bit as much credit for that crucial turning point in British fortunes. It had been Alex who had first made clear there would be no more retreats. It had also been Alex, arriving at Alamein in the middle of the battle with matters not going entirely according to plan, who subtly suggested a different approach to his army commander.

When Alex had been appointed commander of the newly formed 18th Army Group after the Casablanca Conference, his brief had been to finish the battle in Tunisia as quickly as possible. Reaching Tunisia immediately following the setback at Kasserine, he had hurtled up and down the front to see the situation with his own eyes, and spent the first week swiftly reorganizing his forces into greater concentrations, plugging gaps and then counter-attacking. Within ten days of his arrival at the front, the Kasserine defeat had been reversed, allowing Alex breathing space to lick his forces into shape and to develop a new plan to complete the Allied victory in North Africa. Raw and undertrained units were whisked off to the battle schools in Algeria, while Alex himself spent as much time as possible at his tactical headquarters camp near the front and visiting as many troops as he could – including Charlie Scheffel, on whom he had certainly made an impression. ‘I had great respect for Alexander,’ he noted.10 ‘Maybe my meeting him had something to do with that opinion … but General Alexander inspired me and I know I was a better officer for having met him.’

In this still new situation of coalition warfare, a deft touch was needed to ensure the Anglo-US partnership worked on the battlefield. Alexander was ideally placed to provide this steer and soon won over his new American subordinate commanders, including Major-General Omar Bradley, who at the end of March 1943 was soon to take over command of US II Corps. Initially put out that his corps were not to be used in the final drive on Tunis, Bradley had braced himself for a confrontation, only to be swiftly disarmed. Alex had listened and assured him II Corps would be part of his plans. ‘We were impressed with Alexander,’ noted Bradley’s aide, Captain Chester B. Hansen.11 ‘He was a striking and possessed individual who simply exuded an air of confidence.’ Later in the campaign, once II Corps had been sent to northern Tunisia and Bradley had taken over, Alexander had visited his headquarters. Bradley had shown him the current map and his dispositions and planned movements, of which Alex did not entirely approve. ‘By a brilliant piece of diplomacy,’ noted Harold Macmillan, then the British political advisor to General Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander in North Africa, ‘he suggested to his subordinate commander some moves which he might well make.12 He did not issue an order. He sold the American general the idea, and made him think that he had thought of it all himself.’ It was a command style particularly suited to coalition operations.

Alex was far too polite ever to have looked down upon his new peers and comrades in arms; and moreover, a sense of unity of purpose, of working together, side-by-side, hand-in-hand, was stressed over and over by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was personally championed with religious zeal by Eisenhower. It was a firm policy that stood in stark contrast against the naked contempt with which Nazi Germany regarded its allies.

Certainly, it would have been a crime had the chiefs of staff allowed Eisenhower to resign back in January 1943. While not all had run smoothly on the battlefield, there was no doubt he had handled the extremely difficult political situation, with the Vichy French leadership coming in from the cold, as well as the myriad different personalities under his command, with admirable deftness and diplomacy.

Eisenhower – or Ike, as he was widely known – understood that given the cultural differences, and given that Britain had been fighting the war for far longer than the Americans and had a more entrenched military tradition, it would be all too easy for their new British colleagues to appear superior and to look down their noses at their new Johnny-come-lately comrades in arms. Equally, it was every bit as important the Americans did not develop unhealthy chips on their shoulders about British snootiness or perceived standoffishness. National pride and competitiveness – tribal instinct – were one thing; Anglophobia and Americaphobia, quite another. ‘I do not allow, ever,’ Eisenhower made clear, ‘an expression to be used in this Headquarters in my presence that even insinuates a British versus American problem exists.13 So far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t.’

‘In his current efforts to improve British and American relationships,’ noted Eisenhower’s good friend and naval aide, Harry C. Butcher, in March 1943, ‘I see in Ike something akin to a fireman atop an observation tower watching a forest for smoke or flame.14 He has to put out some fires by logical argument that to win the war the Allies must stick together.’

Eisenhower warned all his US senior commanders that any American preaching anti-British sentiment would be sent home. Alexander was similarly impressed upon to do the same with British commanders, as were the other British top brass. Publicly, Alex certainly made sure the Americans got their due deserts following victory in North Africa. The 34th ‘Red Bull’ Division were a case in point. They had arrived in North Africa having never even seen a tank, let alone trained with one, and their first engagement at Fondouk in Tunisia in February had been a disaster. Sent to battle school, they had then returned and in April had captured from the Germans and held a vital high point, Hill 609, despite repeated enemy counter-attacks. In recognition of this, Alex had insisted the Red Bulls lead the subsequent victory parade in Tunis.

And while a host of varied factors had contributed to that huge Allied success, there was no question that Alex, as the overall Allied battlefield commander, had gripped the situation swiftly, acted with tact, charm and sound judgement, and played a key role in making sure the fighting in Tunisia was brought to a rapid and successful conclusion. Equally, it was Eisenhower who had led from the front in terms of forging the coalition. There were disagreements, naturally, but there were many new – and lasting – friendships being developed too, and these relationships were ensuring that the Allies were indeed working together towards one united goal: the eventual unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, as had been agreed at the Casablanca Conference back in January; and with it, victory.

Sicily, however, would be very different from Tunisia, for both men. For Eisenhower, the challenges of preparing for Operation HUSKY were gargantuan, especially since planning had been taking place concurrently with the campaign in Tunisia. The responsibility, too, for overseeing the Allied re-entry into Axis-controlled Europe was on an entirely different level from the campaign in North Africa, carrying a hugely increased weight of importance. Alexander, for his part, also found himself in uncharted territory. Up to this point, he had repeatedly been brought in to salvage a situation that had gone badly awry. Now, for the first time, he was commanding a multinational force that was in the ascendancy, and at this stage in the war it was essential that Allied fortunes remained that way. Under him were two army-sized forces: the brand new and comparatively inexperienced US Force 343, which would become Seventh Army, and the battle-hardened and experienced British Eighth Army, still code-named Force 545, both with commanders whose experiences mirrored those of the men they commanded. Yet those two men – Patton and Montgomery – were also strong-willed and highly divisive characters and would need careful handling. In fact, the entire operation would need careful handling, to put it mildly, for the pressures now were even greater. Failure was not to be countenanced. It was simply unthinkable, and yet the risks remained huge. No one could say for sure how the enemy would react. Would the Italians fight as they had in Tunisia? Would the Germans throw more men and materiel into the island as Hitler had so dramatically reinforced Tunisia? No amphibious operation on this scale had ever before been attempted. There was, unquestionably, much that could still go wrong.

PLANNING FOR HUSKY WAS an extremely daunting challenge for the Allies, for a whole host of reasons. Winning in North Africa, where the Axis forces had had very difficult lines of communication, was one thing. Breaking into Festung Europa was quite another. Operation TORCH the previous November had been an astonishingly successful undertaking, but it had been an amphibious landing against poorly trained and equipped Vichy French troops – and in any case, political machinations beforehand had paved the way and ensured the ‘enemy’ forces opposing them came to heel in quick order and barely put up a fight.

Operation HUSKY, by contrast, was an altogether much bigger undertaking, and the Allies’ first attempt at re-entering Europe since the withdrawal of 1940. The last time the Allies had undertaken a major European amphibious assault had been at Gallipoli in the First World War, and no one needed reminding how badly that had gone. Alexander, who had studied the campaign at staff college and had walked the ground back in 1922, was all too aware that only by very close cooperation between the Allies, and between their collective air, land and naval forces, could the risks of such a massive undertaking be kept to reasonable proportions. What’s more, now that they had a great victory behind them, it was absolutely inconceivable that HUSKY should fail. Militating against failure trumped all other considerations. All.

The decision to invade Sicily had been made during the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. It had been back in December 1942, at a time when they had been expecting a swift end to the campaign in Tunisia, that Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to meet with their chiefs of staff to plan future strategy; but then bad weather and unexpected heavy reinforcements by the Germans had put paid to any such rapid outcome, so that long weeks – months even – of fighting were still to come before the Allies would finally win the North African battle for good.

None the less, the meeting had been planned and organized for January, the Allies still needed to thrash out the next moves, and there were fundamental differences of opinion between the American and British chiefs of staff as to what those moves should be. The British approach was largely opportunistic. They would continue to build up strength, see how matters turned out, and respond to what opportunities presented themselves. The Americans, by contrast, preferred to look at Berlin and draw the straightest possible line to the closest launch point, which was Britain. The invasion of north-west Africa had been reluctantly accepted by the American military because of Roosevelt’s support for the plan, but now the US chiefs of staff, headed by General Marshall, had arrived in Casablanca wanting to pin down, first and foremost, how and when they were going to cross the English Channel and get into France. The British, for their part, better prepared for the conference and still, at this stage, the dominant partner when it came to land warfare, argued that by continuing operations in the Mediterranean they would be hastening Italy’s exit from the war and possibly even prompting Turkey to join the war on the Allied side.

In the sunshine of Casablanca, the Joint Chiefs, with Roosevelt and Churchill as the great overseers, thrashed out a way forward. In the end, the Americans agreed on a joint assault on Sicily in part because a great Allied force had already been amassed in North Africa and in part because of the shipping issue. As the American chiefs accepted, shipping was the biggest obstacle to their favoured strategy of a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The drain on supplies caused by the fighting in North Africa had been startling. Both Britain’s and America’s war effort had suddenly and massively increased, which meant shipping was in considerably greater demand. After all, it wasn’t just the growing scale of operations in the Mediterranean, nor even the ongoing build-up in Britain, that had to be supported; there was also the war in the Pacific and in the Far East being prosecuted in parallel.

As things stood, the eastern Mediterranean remained closed, which meant shipping to the Far East was still heading all the way around South Africa, a long route which in turn caused a further drain on this precious resource. Capturing Sicily would open up the Mediterranean, enabling Allied shipping to use the Suez Canal and so save considerable time and effort. In other words, the British argued, by invading and taking Sicily, the Allies would be moving closer to making the cross-Channel invasion possible. In any case, argued General Sir Alan Brooke, the British CIGS, it was doubtful Germany could be sufficiently weakened to allow a successful cross-Channel invasion that year. The Dieppe Raid of August 1942, in which half the attacking force had been lost, had been a disaster and a salutary lesson. Yet the Soviet Union still needed diversionary support. Reluctantly, the American chiefs accepted that a cross-Channel operation in 1943 was not practicable; yet the political and military pressure to continue ground operations that year following the end of the North African campaign, not least to relieve pressure on the Soviet Union, was immense. Taking Sicily would help in forcing the Germans to spread their weakening resources still further, especially if, as hoped, the Italians were knocked out of the war. General Marshall and the US chiefs conceded there should be ongoing operations in the Mediterranean – but only on the non-negotiable condition that the British back a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied France in 1944.

And so it was settled, on 23 January 1943, with a directive issued to Eisenhower. Although Sardinia had been discussed, Sicily was the only realistic target. It was a far greater political and military prize, but also considerably more manageable now that Malta had been transformed from the most bombed place on Earth into what was in effect a stationary aircraft carrier just 60 miles south of Sicily. Everybody accepted there could be no invasion without fighter cover, which ruled out southern Greece and, realistically, Sardinia too.

Agreeing that Sicily should be the next focus was, however, the easy part. Eisenhower had announced his three service chiefs on 11 February – Alexander as land commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder as air commander and Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham as naval commander. In terms of experience and seniority it made perfect sense for them to all be British – but just three days later had come Rommel’s strike against the Americans at Sidi Bou Zid that opened the way for the defeat at Kasserine. Suddenly Alexander was being diverted to take charge of the crisis in Tunisia, and clearly this was his first priority, demanding that he devote much of his time, and his mental and physical energy, to touring the front and making the necessary dispositions.

None the less, by this stage Alexander had already concluded that the secret to the Allied way of war was to draw together more closely than ever before the three elements in which it was conducted: land, air and water. ‘Army, Air Force and Navy must become a brotherhood,’ he said.1 This mantra held especially true for HUSKY and was the starting point for planning for the invasion. From the outset, it was agreed that two invasion forces would be needed for HUSKY, one British and one American, and these, for the time being, were allotted code numbers. Force 545 was to be British, commanded by General Montgomery, and would sail for Sicily from Egypt. For planning purposes, Force 545 was based in Cairo, 1,400 miles away, even though Montgomery was still commanding Eighth Army in Tunisia. The American Force 343 was to be commanded by General Patton, known as a firebrand and an armour expert, and currently based in Algeria. Its headquarters was at Rabat in Morocco, over 1,000 miles from Tunis – but soon Patton, too, was pulled into the Tunisian battle to take command of II Corps after the sacking of the hopeless General Lloyd Fredendall. The air commanders also had their hands full with the Tunisian battle, leaving only the Allied navies with any kind of time to plan, although even they were caught up in anti-shipping operations against Axis convoys. Absentee landlordism was to be a major feature of the planning of HUSKY, but part of the reason for agreeing to Sicily was that most of the forces – including their commanders – were already in the Mediterranean theatre. Bringing in a new and untested team would rather defeat the point of the object. Even so, and to make matters more complicated, there was a planning team in London and also ostensibly another under Alexander in Bouzarea, near Algiers: Force 141, so named for security reasons but also after the main room used in the St George Hotel in which the team were housed.

There were at least certain prerequisites on which everyone was agreed. Air superiority was essential, so too was naval superiority, and so too was a sufficient speed with which ground forces could be landed and reinforced compared with the likely rate of Axis reinforcement. Naval superiority was more or less a given, since the Italian fleet had not been to sea since the middle of the previous year, but air superiority was not yet assured and there was a huge question mark over how effectively the Allies could build up their strength once ashore.

The geography of Sicily hardly helped. Messina was the ultimate goal, as the city closest to the toe of the Italian mainland and the access point through which enemy supplies would principally flow. It was also comfortably the largest port on the island, with a daily handling capacity of some 4,500 tons. However, it was in the north-eastern corner of the island, which was dominated by the mighty volcanic mass of Mount Etna. ‘It was strongly defended,’ noted Alexander, ‘difficult of access and well out of range of air cover.’2 As an invasion point, it was a non-starter. Away to the west along the northern coast was the second largest port, Palermo, with a daily capacity of 2,500 tons; but near to Palermo was the Trapani–Castelvetrano complex of airfields. Along the central eastern coast, some 150 miles from Trapani, was Catania, the third largest port, and south of that, Augusta and Syracuse. Catania had an airfield, and a little further inland was the Gerbini airfield complex, while on the southern coast there were further airfields at Gela and Comiso. When planning began, there were nineteen airfields on Sicily – no small number – but by the end of June there were thirty.

Planners reckoned they needed to be unloading some 3,000 tons of supplies a day initially, rising rapidly to 6,000 as the invasion strength grew. Operation TORCH, although a major amphibious landing, wasn’t a huge amount of help in terms of lesson learning because the Vichy French had had no air forces, the enemy strength had been known and the ports had been swiftly captured. For HUSKY, hastily developed landing craft could deliver a certain amount of supplies directly on to beaches, but this was considered a temporary measure at best. The swift capture of ports was recognized to be essential.

Yet in this respect the island was poorly served, despite its long history as a maritime base. Shipping had grown massively in recent decades and so had armies, yet Sicily, still centuries behind the times in many ways, had not caught up. Without Messina, it was estimated the east coast ports could manage around 3,400 tons a day, while western harbours – Palermo plus Trapani and a couple of other smaller ones – could collectively cope with around 4,700 tons. The tiny southern coast ports together could handle possibly as much as 1,400 tons each day. And that was assuming the ports had not been wrecked first and would be open for business almost immediately.

A horrible planning conundrum was very quickly rearing its ugly head. Key to success was air power, and yet a mass of enemy airfields were stretched along both sides of this awkward triangular and really quite large Mediterranean island. Fighter aircraft from Malta could cover the eastern side of Sicily, but not the west. From Cap Bon in Tunisia, Palermo was at the outer reach of effective fighter cover. The much-needed ports were in both the west and the east, which implied the need for landings at the geographical and logistical extremes in both directions. That was all very well, but risked the two invasion forces being effectively independent of one another and therefore not mutually supporting, and so being exposed to defeat in isolation. Since planning was taking place from February – and starting at the very moment of a reversal in fortunes in Tunisia – it was impossible to know what enemy strength they might face when they finally landed in Sicily. It was anyone’s guess in February 1943, and even more so by the beginning of May when a plan was finally agreed. It made the entire operation the most terrible risk.

Historians have not been kind to the Allied planners for HUSKY. Everyone, it seems, has had it in the neck from those sitting in the comfort of their armchairs many decades after the events took place. Eisenhower has been accused of being too weak, Alexander for not gripping the process, everyone else for being at one another’s throats, and Montgomery, especially, for being brash, arrogant and selfish. Really, it’s been extraordinary how deep the criticism has run; yet because most of the key decision-makers already had their hands full fighting a bitter battle in Tunisia, it’s hard to think of a more challenging set of circumstances in which to prepare such an enormous undertaking.

A different point of view on the planning of HUSKY is that it was always going to be a mind-bogglingly difficult operation to prepare, and that an evolving plan was entirely normal and understandable for such an enterprise in such challenging circumstances. Furthermore, what is remarkable about the HUSKY planning is not the levels of discord involved, but rather, how well the new coalition partners were operating and rubbing along together.

It is all too easy to be seduced by a choice one-liner in a diary taken in isolation. The journals and letters of these senior commanders need to be read and understood within the context in which they were written: by men with overwhelming amounts of responsibility and as a means of letting off steam as much as to set down a record for posterity. Most people, at some point in their lives, have argued vociferously for something they care about, whether with colleagues, friends or family. So it was with the Allied commanders, but for them the consequences of making the wrong decision were potentially catastrophic – including the loss of many young men’s lives – so of course, at times, matters grew heated. It was to be expected. But this really does not mean the coalition was crumbling at the seams. Far from it; that the senior commanders could debate such matters so openly was both healthy and a demonstration of how much they cared about the mission they had been given.

In this new partnership, Eisenhower was the chief executive answerable to a board of Joint Chiefs, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Alexander, Tedder and Cunningham were the CEOs of subsidiary arms. The difference was that their results would be judged not in terms of share price, but in success in battle and numbers of casualties.

Alexander wrote to General Brooke on 5 April from his tactical headquarters near the Tunisian Front. Despite having to give much of his attention to current operations, he had, he told the CIGS, been giving time to the study of HUSKY. ‘I think we are on a good wicket,’ he wrote, ‘provided certain obvious conditions are fulfilled – such as air and naval superiority and not too many good German formations in the way.3 The latter we cannot prevent, but the former we can influence and I want to put it quite plainly. The margin between success and failure is small. If the Navy and the air forces, especially the latter, will go all out 100% in their backing the Army, we should pull off a great victory.’ He was keen to use the airborne forces being assembled in helping to secure the beachheads. Alex was also aware of the shortfall in shipping caused by the continued and growing battle in Tunisia. ‘LSTs are short – other shipping is short,’ he acknowledged. ‘But it must be found, even if people at home go short. Half measures or half-hearted measures will spell defeat for certain – we must go all out 100% for a win. RN, RAF and Army.’

What he meant was, HUSKY was not the operation on which to take any avoidable risks. Stalingrad, Tunisgrad – as it was now being called – the start of the all-out strategic air offensive against Germany by Bomber Command, and the battle against the U-boats in the Atlantic which was about to reach a peak in favour of the Allies: all pointed to a dramatic reversal of fortunes for the Axis. It was on its knees and there was, realistically, no way back now for Nazi Germany. What was uncertain was how much longer the war would continue and how many more lives would be lost in the process. For the Allies to attack Sicily and be thrown back into the sea would not mean losing the war but it would be a terrible setback. It would also unquestionably push back OVERLORD, the cross-Channel invasion that had been agreed for 1944. Far better to cover all bases, cut out as much risk as possible and make sure HUSKY was a success. Alexander’s assessment was spot-on.

The date for HUSKY had been set for early July when the moon was favourable, and although both Churchill and Marshall repeatedly urged Eisenhower and Alexander to bring it forward a month if at all possible, as time marched on, and the Tunisian campaign continued, it became increasingly clear they would have to stick with the July date. This was because even once victory had been won in North Africa on 13 May, time was needed to properly train the assault battalions and also the airborne forces who were seen as a key component of the invasion. So Eisenhower stuck to his guns. The day of invasion, D-Day – the day – would be Saturday, 10 July.

The British chiefs of staff in London had already developed a speculative plan, which they passed on to Alexander’s Force 141 in Bouzarea. With Alex off at the Tunisian front, it was left to Major-General Charles Gairdner, his new chief of staff, to oversee the multinational planning team and try to make some sense of the complex issues that faced them. One particularly ominous line in the London plan warned: ‘We are doubtful of the chances of success against a garrison which includes German formations.’4 Alexander felt this was massively overstating the threat but made clear to Gairdner, in the brief moment he was able to give it his attention, that the first plan was a starting point only. None the less, at this early stage of the planning, it seemed a good idea to try and find a way to make landings in both the east and the west, possibly staggered, so as to both knock out key concentrations of airfields and also swiftly capture Palermo as well as Catania, Augusta and Syracuse, and so solve the issue of how to build up strength rapidly.

‘The month of February and the early days of March were the most critical periods in Tunisia,’ noted Alexander, ‘and it was impossible for me to give the plans for Sicily any detailed attention.’5 That was more than understandable, albeit far from ideal; but even so, he was able to make some suggestions and modifications to the plan. His biggest concern with the early drafts was the distance between the divisions and brigades that were landing – they were clearly too far apart, not mutually supporting and in danger of being picked off in isolation. Nor were the burgeoning airborne forces of paratroopers and glider troops being concentrated enough. In fact, the early drafts lacked any kind of concentration of force, a military tenet to which Alexander was rightly wedded.

Alex even considered sending both task forces to the south-east of Sicily, but this plan hit a wall of opposition elsewhere because it was still felt the quick capture of Palermo was essential. At this time it was estimated – or guessed – that there would be at least eight enemy divisions in Sicily. Alex had ten divisions earmarked for the invasion in total.

In between periods of commanding at the front, Alex and the other key commanders met for planning conferences whenever they could, although the constraints on their time and the distances they had to travel to be in the same place meant that Eisenhower, Alexander, Tedder and Cunningham were very rarely all together. It really was far from ideal. Geography dictated where the British and American landings would be focused. Because most of the British forces would be sailing from Egypt and the Middle East, they would be landing in the eastern part of Sicily. Similarly, because the Americans would be setting off from Tunisia, logic suggested they should be in the west. Furthermore, because the eastern parts of the island were closest to Messina, it seemed likely this side would be the more heavily defended. Moreover, the Gerbini airfield complex, close to Catania, clearly held the key to the defence of the island, and both the port and the surrounding airfields had to be the overriding number one initial target priority. On this, Eisenhower and Alexander were united. Montgomery demanded an extra division for his landings around Avola, just to the south of Syracuse, and one was eventually found. As Easter approached, it seemed that a plan of sorts was emerging upon which everyone was agreed.

Then, on 24 April, a brusque and damning signal arrived from Monty, in which he called the proposed HUSKY plan a ‘dog’s breakfast’ that had no chance of success.6 ‘Unless someone will face up to this problem,’ he told General Brooke in London, ‘there will be a first-class disaster.’ Needless to say, this caused consternation elsewhere. Both Tedder and Cunningham were seething at Montgomery’s proposed front-loading of the Eastern Task Force to focus on the Avola area because it meant moving the planned British force that had been due to land around Gela and Licata on the central southern coast. Their task had been to overrun the airfields at Comiso and especially Gela–Ponte Olivo, which had recently grown in size and sophistication. Tedder felt they posed far too great a risk to be left in enemy hands, and so too did Cunningham. ‘I’m afraid Montgomery is a bit of a nuisance,’ wrote Cunningham to Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord.7 ‘He seems to think that all he has to do is to say what is to be done and everyone will dance to the tune of his piping. Alexander appears quite unable to keep him in order.’

The real gripe for Tedder and Cunningham, though, was less that Montgomery was unhappy with the plan as it existed, more the way in which he demanded changes. It was, after all, only right that individual commanders should air concerns if they had them. Perhaps Alexander could have given Montgomery a lesson in manners, but Monty had always been forthright and outspoken; and he had Brooke’s unwavering support. In any case, he was the primary assault commander and it was essential he was carrying out a plan that had his backing. Montgomery had repeatedly proved himself a highly competent operational commander and was, by some margin, the most famous and lauded British general of the war to date. He instinctively understood what could and could not be achieved by largely conscript armies whose personnel would no longer be shot at dawn should they decide they didn’t want to go into battle after all. His big failing was his total inability to show any kind of sensitivity to others. He cared not a jot about rubbing people up the wrong way, and seemed to have no awareness of his appalling rudeness.

Much has been made over the years of tensions between the British and the Americans, but the spats that did occur rarely ran on national lines; they were nearly always over matters of differing tactical approaches or doctrine, or basic clashes of personality that had nothing to do with nationality. Almost all the senior commanders loathed Montgomery; that didn’t make him a bad commander, but it did complicate matters, especially when there was quite enough pressure and tension to deal with as it was. Even in a time of coalition warfare and diplomatic singing from the same hymn sheet, Monty steadfastly proved incapable of abiding by the rules.

His scathing critique of the current favoured plan was, on the face of it, all the more remarkable because he had earlier appeared reasonably happy. What had changed his view had been the fighting in Tunisia. After the Battle of Wadi Akarit at the beginning of April, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had swept up the coastal plain confident of bursting through the next obvious defensive position around Enfidaville, which was held by what had once been Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika but was now a mostly Italian force commanded by the Italian Generale Messe. Instead of a swift victory, Eighth Army had hit a brick wall. Takrouna, a particularly well-defended strongpoint, proved an especially stubborn and hard-fought battle. It made Montgomery realize, with stark clarity, that on the home soil of Sicily the Italians might well not prove the push-over being predicted. ‘Planning so far’, Monty wrote to Alex, ‘has been based on the assumption that the opposition will be slight and that Sicily will be captured relatively easily.8 Never was there a greater error. The Germans and also the Italians are fighting desperately now in Tunisia and will do so in Sicily.’ Montgomery might have been overstating matters, but HUSKY was not the time to throw caution to the wind and gamble. It went back to the most vital of all considerations: HUSKY could not be allowed to fail.

Expressions of caution over the likely strength of enemy defence had prompted caustic signals from Churchill, who seemed to be forgetting Gallipoli back in 1915, when the Allies had landed against what had been assumed to be comparatively weak Turkish troops. In any case, Monty’s bombshell chimed with nagging doubts as to the current plan shared by both Eisenhower and Alexander. By the end of April, however, it was clear the Tunisian campaign was nearly over and so there was now time to give HUSKY more detailed consideration. The picture was beginning to clarify. ‘It must be remembered when considering the frame of mind in which we set out on this expedition,’ noted Alex, ‘that this was the first large-scale amphibious operation in the war against a defended coastline and opponents equipped with modern weapons … No care was too great to ensure our first landing in Europe should be successful beyond doubt.’9

While Alexander and Eisenhower now accepted Montgomery’s demand for greater strength around Avola, that did not mean they had completely accepted his plans; after all, there was the question of what to do about the airfield complexes at Gela–Ponte Olivo and Comiso. Failing to neutralize thirteen enemy airfields that could threaten shipping and landings was every bit as unacceptable as attacking under strength at Avola.

Montgomery’s planning team went back to the drawing board and on 1 May he flew in person to Algiers, where he met with Major-General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, and suggested abandoning the western assault altogether and instead directing Patton’s Western Task Force to the southern coast at Gela and Licata. Bedell Smith was sold on this idea but initially Eisenhower refused to discuss it further without Alexander being present. Bad weather prevented Alex from reaching Algiers the following day, although a conference was held then after all. By the time Alexander finally reached Allied Forces HQ on 3 May, Ike had come round to Montgomery’s proposals.

By now Alexander had needed little persuading. He’d already proposed such a plan early on, and only the accepted need for Palermo’s port had persuaded him otherwise. Both Tedder and Cunningham seemed content, although Tedder decidedly grudgingly so; he had long since grown weary of Montgomery – and could hardly be blamed for that. Only two concerns troubled both Ike and Alex. One was unloading directly on to the very extensive beaches around Gela; but this, it seemed, was being solved in part by the arrival of DUKWs. Pronounced ‘ducks’, these were ingenious amphibious vehicles developed by the Americans that could swim from larger vessels and then drive straight on to the beach. Large orders had been placed on 22 March with an understanding they would be available for HUSKY.

The second concern was the perception that the Western Task Force, or more simply US Seventh Army as it was about to be renamed, should somehow be playing second fiddle. Its commander, General Patton, was as forthright as Montgomery and not known to mince his words or hide his displeasure if slighted. But when this new and final plan was presented to him, Patton was as good as gold. ‘It is an impressive example of the spirit of complete loyalty and inter-Allied co-operation’, wrote Alexander, ‘which inspired all operations with which I was associated in the Mediterranean theatre.’10

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.

ON THURSDAY, 22 APRIL 1943, two Spitfires from Takali airfield on the tiny island of Malta took off at first light and, banking, turned and headed north in the direction of Sicily. A year earlier, the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica had done their level best to crush the island and pummel it into the sea. Lying 60 miles to the south of Sicily, Malta lay directly in the path of any Axis shipping heading to North Africa. From this island, torpedo bombers, fighter aircraft, submarines and warships could all operate against the Axis supply line. The most successful Allied submarine of the war, HMS Upholder, had operated from Malta. So too had Force K, two cruisers and two destroyers that had played havoc with Axis shipping, so much so that in November 1941, 77 per cent of all Rommel’s supplies crossing the Mediterranean had been sent to the bottom. A few weeks later, his forces were driven back across Libya. Feldmarschall Kesselring, newly appointed C-in-C South, realized that Malta needed to be neutralized: its port facilities wrecked, its RAF contingent destroyed, its airfield made unusable, its harbours inaccessible for both warships and submarines. Luftflotte II, an entire air army, had been sent to Sicily for the purpose.

In April 1942, 6,728 tons of bombs had been dropped on the island, sixteen times the amount that had destroyed the English city of Coventry back in November 1940. Some 841 tons had been dropped on Takali airfield alone, and a similar amount on neighbouring Luqa. On five separate days that month there had been just one serviceable fighter left for the RAF to fly, and on one day, 14 April, there had not been a single one. Malta had been a brutal place to be back in April 1942.

Kesselring had not been able to finish the job, however. Malta had been on its knees, but his Luftwaffe were needed across the sea in North Africa to support Rommel’s planned offensive at the end of May 1942. More Spitfires had reached the island and the fightback had begun in the air, and very successfully too, but by June the island – and the fighter pilots – were beginning to starve. By July the situation was desperate. And by August, the shortages were so dire it had seemed that Malta might have to surrender after all. One last effort was made to save the island with the mounting of the most heavily defended Allied convoy of the entire war: Operation PEDESTAL. The Allies were determined the convoy should get through, the Axis were equally set on ensuring it failed. A mighty battle raged the length of the western Mediterranean as bombers, U-boats and fast torpedo boats were all flung at the convoy. Of the fourteen vessels that set sail, just five made it, including the one tanker, the Ohio, which despite being hit ten times and even having a crashed Stuka dive-bomber land on its decks, managed to limp in, woefully low in the water and with two destroyers lashed either side because its engines had stopped. It reached Grand Harbour on 15 August 1942, the Feast Day of Santa Maria, the most important festa in Malta’s calendar. A miracle had occurred. Malta had been saved.

In October the same year Kesselring had made one more effort to extract this thorn in the Axis side, but by then the island was bristling with fighter planes and his air forces were shot down in droves. Now, a year on from the height of the Malta Blitz, the island was still looking bashed and beaten, rubble still lay in the streets and life was tough for the Maltese, many of whom had been made homeless, but it was also awash with Allied fighter aircraft. How the tide had turned.

The two Spitfires taking off that early morning were from 249 Squadron, a Battle of Britain veteran fighter unit that had been operating from the island for more than two years, since the spring of 1941. Pilots had been rotated in and out, however, and the two now heading north had both been on Malta a few months only. One was the newly promoted Squadron Leader John J. Lynch Jr from Alhambra, California, just twenty-four years old; the other was even younger, twenty-year-old Flying Officer Irving ‘Hap’ Kennedy, from Cumberland, Ontario.

Since the outbreak of war, the RAF had attracted – and welcomed – pilots and aircrew from all around the world, and certainly the fighter pilots on Malta had always been a fairly polyglot bunch. Johnny Lynch really should have been flying with an American outfit, but having joined the US Army Air Corps – as it had then been – before the war, he had become impatient for some action and so had taken himself north to Canada and signed on the dotted line for the RAF instead. Although he’d wound up in one of the all-American Eagle Squadrons in England, he had then accepted an overseas posting to Malta in September 1942. Seven months on, he was not only still on the island but had taken command of the squadron and was in no especial hurry to join his fellow Americans now serving in the USAAF. Lynch liked 249 Squadron just fine.

Hap Kennedy had arrived on Malta just a month after Lynch; at the height of the siege, three months was considered ample time for a tour on the island, but throughout the Mediterranean theatre aircrew were carrying out longer tours now, as it was recognized that the more experienced the pilots were, the better the Allied air forces would be. Malta remained a physically tough posting and was still short of many of the creature comforts of home, but it had been transformed in recent weeks.

Both men were carrying auxiliary fuel tanks that could be discarded once the fuel they carried had been used. The idea for this flight had been Lynch’s; he’d spent a fair amount of time at Lascaris, the operations and fighter control rooms dug into the rock underneath the island’s capital Valletta, studying patterns of behaviour by the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica, and realized they would often fly transport planes bringing in supplies early in the day. He hoped to catch some this morning.

Flying low over the sea, they were soon past Capo Passero on the south-east tip of Sicily and continuing on their way, Avola and then Syracuse off to their left. Just north of Catania, near the coastal town of Riposto, Kennedy spotted an aircraft heading south towards them and inland, presumably to land at either Catania or Gerbini. He wondered whether he should break radio silence, because it was clear Lynch hadn’t seen it. He decided he would – after all, it might be the only aircraft they saw.

‘Tiger Green One,’ he called over the R/T.1, 2 ‘Aircraft eleven o’clock ahead, same level, proceeding south. Over.’

Lynch still couldn’t see it.

‘Green One. Aircraft is now at nine o’clock,’ Kennedy said. ‘Might be a Junkers 52.’

After a pause, Lynch replied that he still couldn’t see it, so Kennedy told him he was going after it before they lost the aircraft entirely. Opening the throttle and banking away to the left, he soon caught it, creeping up directly behind as close as he could. Aiming at the port engine, he gave it a quick burst of cannon fire and saw the engine burst into flames and the aircraft immediately plunge down into the sea, before turning again and quickly catching up with Lynch once more.

On they flew, Mount Etna on their left, up through the Straits of Messina swiftly before anyone could fire at them and then turning to port along the north Sicilian coast. The sun was now up and behind them, which was ideal, and up ahead Kennedy soon saw three small specks of light, which at first he thought might be birds but then realized had to be aircraft. Once again he warned Lynch, who, still struggling to see, asked him to take the lead. Kennedy gave the Merlin engine extra boost and felt the Spitfire surge forward. Much to his delight, he saw the three aircraft were not fighters, as he’d first thought, but bigger.

‘Green One,’ he called. ‘The three aircraft dead ahead are twin-engined. I’m opening up a little more. We must catch up more quickly. Over.’

Lynch followed, and together they soon caught their quarry at barely 200 feet above the surface of the sea. In fact, they were three-engined Ju52s – transports, just as Lynch had hoped. Kennedy drew in close towards the nearest and, seeing the machine gun of the mid-upper gunner pointing upwards, realized the man was snoozing in the morning sun. It had been the perfect stalk – with the sun directly behind the two Spitfires, the German crews could not see them at all. Kennedy opened fire and, once again, the plane flipped over and dived into the sea. ‘I reckon that woke him up,’ he thought. Only now was Lynch catching up. Kennedy hammered the second of the three, and once again saw smoke billow from the port engine. Lynch now drew right up behind the third and blasted it into the sea, before turning to the second and finishing it off.

‘Green Two,’ said Lynch, ‘Green One here.3 Let’s go home.’

They climbed as they flew over Sicily then dived down low over Comiso in the south, at zero feet, watching men on the ground scattering in all directions. ‘We were rubbing it in,’ noted Kennedy.4

Back at Takali, they landed safely. Lynch was a serious, quiet fellow, and the ground crews called him ‘Smilin’ Jack’ because he rarely did. But he was smiling now.

‘What are you going to claim?’ he asked Kennedy.

Kennedy thought a moment. He wanted the CO to take him on another trip like that. He’d begun the day with three confirmed kills to his name, so the two he’d shot down alone gave him five and that made him an ace. It seemed a little churlish to demand he share the Junkers they both hit.

‘What about sharing even, two each?’5 he suggested.

‘Sounds reasonable,’ Lynch replied. Six days later, Lynch shot down another Junkers 52 on a similar early-morning sweep, although that time he hadn’t taken Kennedy. It was the 1,000th enemy aircraft destroyed by Malta-based units since the start of the war. That was a lot of enemy aircraft. Malta had been revitalized, and so had its pilots, now flush with experience, confidence and plenty of aircraft. The tables could not have been more blatantly turned.

In his letter to Brooke back in early April, General Alexander had stressed that HUSKY required the all-out commitment of the Allied naval and air forces – especially the latter – to support the army. He had not been disappointed. At the end of May both Brooke and the prime minister had visited Algiers to see for themselves how preparations were coming along, to provide a bit of a morale boost for the men and, of course, to confer with the senior commanders. On Monday, 31 May, Churchill and Brooke sat down with Eisenhower and the three service chiefs for HUSKY; and Tedder, as overall Allied air commander, was able to report that his men had been blasting Axis communications for weeks and were already exerting considerable pressure on the enemy’s windpipe. A few days later, at Eisenhower’s villa, Tedder reported to Churchill that they were attacking relentlessly, bombing communications centres, airfields and the enemy’s main bases. A Daimler-Benz factory near Naples, producing engines not just for the Messerschmitt 109 but also the Italian Macchi 202, had been hit on 30 May; airfields at Bari in southern Italy had already been hammered and so they had now turned on Foggia further up the leg of the peninsula. Intelligence showed the Italians had moved some units further north still from Foggia all the way up to Piacenza. ‘Our bombing of ports and railways,’ Tedder told him, ‘was interfering effectively with shipping and supply lines.’6

There were now almost 3,500 Allied aircraft in the Mediterranean, a huge fleet and well over double the size of the Axis air forces in the theatre. Air power had always been at the heart of British and then American strategy, a central part of the ‘steel not flesh’ principle designed to keep the numbers of young men fighting at the coal-face of war as small as possible. Unlike the Axis, the Allies were truly fighting on air, on the sea and on land, and coordinating their operations very effectively, despite ongoing grumbles in certain quarters – gripes that were generally made through ignorance and a lack of understanding rather than reflecting real deficiencies.

Really, the development of Allied air power was quite remarkable. Although Britain had developed the world’s first fully coordinated air defence system before the outbreak of war and had used it superbly during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, the RAF’s performance in France beforehand had shown up just how little thought had been given to tactical air power – supporting the army in their operations on the ground. Bombing capability had also been far short of what had been confidently hoped. The United States, on the other hand, had merely had the US Army Air Corps rather than a fully fledged air force. By May 1940, at a time when Messerschmitts were marauding at will over northern France, the Americans had just 160 fighter aircraft and fifty-two heavy bombers. Since then, not only had production of aircraft in both the United States and Britain risen urgently and dramatically, the means of operating them had been transformed too, and it had been in North Africa, over the desert sands, that Allied tactical air power had been born.

Air Chief Marshal Tedder had certainly played his part. Lean, thin-faced, with dark, keen eyes and a pipe never far from his mouth, he was sharply intelligent, forward-thinking and driven by belief in the huge possibilities air power might yield. So too had Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham. An Australian by birth who had been brought up in New Zealand, he had arrived in Egypt in the middle of 1941 and taken over command of what became the RAF’s Desert Air Force. Known to all as ‘Mary’, derived from ‘Maori’ – a nickname that, curiously, he rather liked – he was a tough and charismatic figure, bristling with ideas and energy; he devoutly believed air power was vital not just for strategic bombing and defence but also for achieving victory on the ground.

Tedder had understood that improving technical maintenance in the field had been a first step, but had also overseen the development of new methods – or doctrine – as Army and RAF together strove for a clearer understanding of the role of close air support in a land battle. Army commanders wanted to have the air forces at their beck and call, but Tedder – and Coningham – rightly resisted this. Air commanders, they argued, were best placed to judge when and where air power should be used. An army commander would always want permanent air cover almost directly above his troops, but while an air commander would certainly help take out specific targets, he would also direct his aircraft to destroy enemy air forces or supply columns before they reached the front. Fortunately, Tedder and Coningham had Churchill’s support and a new directive, based on the concepts of air support that had been outlined by Tedder, had been issued back in September 1941.

By the early summer of 1942, Coningham had honed his tactics further, thanks to his collaboration with his number two, right-hand man and administrative chief, Air Commodore Tommy Elmhirst, a diminutive and altogether quieter fellow as well as the owner of incredibly bushy eyebrows. Coningham might have been the visionary but Elmhirst was the enabler, implementing greatly improved management of supplies and maintenance, as well as better ground control and a system of leap-frogging. Landing grounds were established all along the coast from the main airfields around Cairo to the front. Stores and supplies were built up at each, which meant forward units could keep as close to the fighting front as possible. If they needed to retreat suddenly, the aircraft could take off and the ground crew shuttle back to the next landing ground. The aircraft would then join them on their return from operations over the front. This enabled Coningham’s fighters and bombers to harry the enemy almost constantly, and after the fall of Tobruk on 21 June 1942 and with Eighth Army in full and desperate retreat, it was the Desert Air Force that very probably saved it from annihilation, hammering the pursuing Axis forces without let-up.

The pause that followed between Rommel’s defeat at Alam Halfa at the very beginning of September that year and the Battle of Alamein in the third week of October had allowed Coningham and Elmhirst to develop their forces yet further. Piecemeal units were kicked into touch and replaced by groups of fighters, divided into three wings, each with its own administrative staff. This centralization of administration allowed wing and squadron commanders to get on with the job of leading their men and fighting the enemy rather than worrying about paperwork and logistics. It also meant the pilots could train harder and better. Gunnery techniques were improved and the hours in logbooks increased. Coningham didn’t want his pilots thinking about flying; that was to be automatic. He wanted them thinking about how best to shoot down the enemy or destroy targets on the ground.

Like Tedder, Coningham also firmly believed the aim of a tactical air force should be to win air superiority over the battle area. Once that was achieved, more direct support could be provided for the troops on the ground. In other words, while the Desert Air Force could offer close air support to Eighth Army, it could do much more than that; but although it was obviously vital to form close working relations with the army command, it was also essential that the air commander be left to command his force how he, as an airman, thought fit. Sometimes, for example, he could best help troops down below not by responding to a specific target request, but by neutralizing a threat further back behind the enemy.

Coningham had also learned from the enemy, and while he had been impressed with how effective dive-bombing could be, he had also realized how vulnerable the Junkers 87 Stuka was as it emerged from its dive to any Allied fighter waiting to pounce, and that generally it was simply too slow in all forms of flight. Instead, he increasingly used fighters, especially the rugged US-built P-40 Kittyhawks, as fighter-bombers, not least because they could out-dive the latest Messerschmitt 109s and Macchi 202s. The ‘Kittybombers’ soon became an incredibly effective weapon, and increasingly so as the pilots gained in experience. Able to hurtle towards a target at speed, which made them harder to shoot down, they could drop their load and speed on out of the fray. The results were quickly felt. Not only did the RAF save Eighth Army’s bacon, it contributed to the victory at Alamein every bit as much as the troops on the ground – as Montgomery, to be fair to him, freely acknowledged. And Monty also accepted and understood the importance of working hand-in-hand with the air forces, gladly agreeing to joint tactical HQs as Coningham had proposed.

Coningham’s developments, backed up by Tedder and combined with the authority to act independently from the army commanders conferred by Churchill, transformed close air support in North Africa and laid down the basis of future doctrine not just for the RAF but for the USAAF as well – which was significant, because with the TORCH landings had arrived burgeoning US air forces, including a bevy of bright, dynamic and hugely competent airmen only too happy to learn, improve and develop the very exciting and ever-growing potential of air power.

Prominent among them was Lieutenant-General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, who had first reached North Africa soon after the TORCH landings as USAAF Theater Commander. Spaatz was fifty-one, with a resolute jaw, trim silver moustache, intelligent eyes and a natural air of charisma and authority. An experienced airman with combat experience from the First World War, he had risen up the ranks of the Air Corps during the 1930s to become Chief of Plans. A close friend and colleague of General Henry Harley ‘Hap’ Arnold, C-in-C of the USAAF, Spaatz had been at the forefront of modernizing America’s air forces. Energetic, open-minded and forward-thinking, he oozed competence and good sense from every pore. Sent to Britain in 1940 as an observer, he had swiftly – and correctly – concluded the Luftwaffe had little chance of winning the Battle of Britain. A bomber man first and foremost, he recognized that weight of numbers, both of aircraft and of bombs, counted, and that the Luftwaffe simply didn’t have enough of either. But he’d also been impressed by RAF organization, and had returned to Britain earlier in 1942 to take command of the fledgling US Eighth Air Force.

US involvement in North Africa meant that no sooner had he begun to lay foundations for the Eighth than he was needed in the Mediterranean instead. He had arrived in Algiers in November with a number of misgivings, not least the depletion of Eighth Air Force, which lost some fourteen units of fighters, bombers and transports to the Mediterranean.

There had been a further concern, however, and that was doctrinal. The Eighth was a strategic air force designed to operate on its own, and they had worked out and agreed their doctrine for daylight operations in coordination with, but separate from, RAF Bomber Command. The duties of Twelfth Air Force in North Africa, however, were very different: part strategic, part coastal and part tactical in support of ground operations. For this he had good numbers of aircraft, but inexperienced crews, an untested logistical organization and no doctrine at all for close air support. What’s more, unlike the RAF, which was an independent armed service, the US air forces were part of the army. Eighth Air Force could operate without interference from the army ground forces, and were already doing so; but North Africa was already proving a different kettle of fish.

As if to complicate matters further, there had been no unified command. The Americans were doing their thing in Twelfth Air Force, and the RAF were doing theirs – and were also split up between Eastern Air Command in Algeria and Tunisia, and the Desert Air Force and other units of RAF Middle East. The set-up had been designed in this way to support the landings and on the assumption that Tunisia would be swiftly captured; but by the end of 1942 it was clear that this had been wishful thinking. Spaatz, quite rightly, had felt that the dispersal of command and total lack of any coordinated close air support doctrine had been threatening to undermine the material strength being thrown into the theatre.

But everything the Allies had been doing in Tunisia in terms of air power had been new. Even in Libya, where Mary Coningham had been developing his Desert Air Force into a finely tuned tactical force offering close air support, he and his men had still been feeling their way and working out methods on the hoof. What’s more, they only had Eighth Army to support, whereas in north-west Africa there were the American, French and British ground forces to support, all new to fighting and each with different structures and attitudes to air power. Joined-up thinking on air power was decidedly lacking. Yet if they were feeling their way, it was hardly surprising. After all, just three years earlier the United States had only had an air corps amounting to a handful of fighter planes; it had already come an incredibly long way in really no time at all.

Clearly, unifying the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean had been essential; and it had been done, as part of the shake-up in February 1943 in which Eisenhower had been made Supreme Allied Commander and Alexander put in charge of 18th Army Group. Tedder had become C-in-C Mediterranean Air Command and so the overall Allied air commander. Under him fell RAF Malta, RAF Middle East and also the new North African Air Force, which was by far the largest single command now in the Mediterranean. This was given to Spaatz, and directly under him was now the Northwest Africa Strategic Air Command headed by another American hot-shot, Major-General Jimmy Doolittle, a celebrated aviation pioneer and a household name back in the States. In the same reorganization, all Allied tactical air forces were handed over to Coningham, first as Air Support Tunisia but then renamed North African Tactical Air Force, which also fell within Spaatz’s command. Coningham’s new deputy was Brigadier-General Larry Kuter, who had helped write the USAAF’s strategic air doctrine; he too was supremely competent and forward-thinking, and was eager to hone this exciting and rapidly developing weapon every bit as much as Tedder, Spaatz, Coningham et al. Nor was that all. Also under Spaatz’s umbrella were coastal air operations against Axis shipping and the all-important training command.

It was notable how well these commanders, different people all, and suddenly thrown together, seemed to get on. A pioneering spirit welded them together. For sure, ruffles occurred along the way – including a fairly major spat between Coningham and Patton in March during the latter’s command of US II Corps. Patton, with no understanding at all of the new doctrine being developed for close air support, had angrily demanded a permanent umbrella of fighter cover for his operations in southern Tunisia. Coningham and Kuter had told him this was not possible, prompting ire from Patton and an increasingly heated exchange that ended with Coningham accusing the American of crying wolf. Tedder had been furious with Coningham for threatening Anglo-US relations, while Alexander had thought Patton had rather deserved it. On Tedder’s insistence, however, Coningham was forced to apologize and visited Patton in person. They shook hands and lunched together, and, as Patton noted, ‘We parted friends.’7

At the start of the Tunisian campaign, Allied soldiers on the ground had grumbled that the Luftwaffe appeared to roam at will above them; by the end, there were no such complaints. Day by day, week by week, the Allied air forces began increasingly to dominate the skies. The American and British contribution in terms of numbers, logistics and effort was simply immense. By the last days in Tunisia, some three thousand Allied aircraft were dominating barely three hundred of the Axis. This level of commitment produced more than a hundred new airfields in the theatre, and all-weather ones at that, which required labourers, concrete, graders, bulldozers and other plant – almost all of which had to be shipped from the United States or Britain. After Kasserine, five new airfields were built around the nearby town of Sbeitla – all within seventy-two hours.

Meanwhile, in the skies, increasingly confident and more experienced airmen were winning the day. On Palm Sunday, 18 April, intelligence reached Coningham’s air forces that around a hundred Ju52 transport planes were approaching Tunis. It was late afternoon and in all, four squadrons of Kittyhawks and eighteen Spitfires climbed into the air to try to intercept the fleet of enemy transports. In what became known as the ‘Palm Sunday Turkey Shoot’ no fewer than seventy-four Luftwaffe aircraft were shot down.

No matter that on the ground, US troops were still a little green and learning the ropes, or that British forces were still working out an effective way of war; in the air, in a matter of months, the Allies had transformed their offensive capabilities.

‘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.

THE PRE-WAR BAEDEKER GUIDE to southern Italy and Sicily warned that under no circumstances should the traveller attempt to visit Sicily during the months of July and August because of the appalling heat and prevalence of disease. The Allied planners were not taking any heed of that, but they were preparing a booklet for the Allied soldiers about to take part in HUSKY, which was to be issued to every single serviceman and included a brief history of the island and an outline of what they might expect when they got there, from climate to the living conditions of ordinary Sicilians, along with a handful of useful words and phrases. ‘The Island,’ the Soldier’s Guide to Sicily stated matter-of-factly on page 1, ‘has a long and unhappy history that has left it primitive and undeveloped, with many relics and ruins of a highly civilized past.’1 Sicily in 1943 was an island that had been rather left behind; the Allies might have been about to re-enter Europe, but this wasn’t a Europe many of them would recognize: parts of Italy – Sicily in particular – were very different from the modern, industrialized and increasingly urban worlds of Britain, the United States and Canada.

Shaped not unlike a stone-age flint arrowhead, with the point facing west, Sicily was, in many ways, trapped in a world that had barely changed in a thousand years: it was a place where agriculture dominated the economy and class dominated society, and where the peasants, which meant most of the population, were as poor, downtrodden and oppressed as they had ever been. In winter there could be vicious soaking downpours, which often did more harm than good as there were no dams or reservoirs to make the most of the rainfall, causing mudslides that could block roads to and from the hilltop towns for weeks. In the spring and early summer, Sicily would be briefly bathed in soft green and a multitude of wild flowers; but then came the long, volcanically hot summer, baking the hilly and mountainous interior into a brutal, bleached landscape that became more desert than farmland. In high summer, the air would be as still as the inside of an oven one day but the next whipped by dust storms brought on the North African scirocco.

Nor was this tough landscape improved by the dominating presence of Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, looming high over the north-east corner of the island and on clear days visible from even distant parts. It was like an all-seeing god, standing sentinel, occasionally with volcanic steam hanging over the top like a white cap. Sometimes, of course, it would erupt. Back in 396 BC, an eruption had stopped the Carthaginians in their tracks; another in 122 BC had destroyed much of Catania, lying just to the south-east of the mountain. Catania was nearly overrun again in 1669, while almost all of the town of Mascali, lying on the coast to the east of Etna, was swamped by lava barely more than a decade before the war in 1928.

Volcanic eruptions were one threat to the livelihoods – and lives – of Sicilians; earthquakes were another. At 5.20 a.m. on 28 December 1908 a massive quake hit Messina, swiftly followed by a 40-foot-high tsunami along the coastline. More than 90 per cent of Messina was destroyed and tens of thousands killed – possibly as many as a hundred thousand.

Along with natural disasters and a savage climate, Sicilians over the centuries had also had to deal with marauders and invaders. It was an island with an astonishingly rich history. Those modern, twentieth-century troops who had been taught Latin and Greek during their schooldays would have remembered that Sicily was the place where Daedalus, the first aeronaut, landed – according to the myth – and where, in Homer’s tale, Odysseus tricked and blinded the Cyclops.

Sicily had always been a bridge, or stepping stone, from one world to another – first to the ancient Greeks, then to the Romans and Carthaginians. Over time it was occupied by Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, before becoming a vassal to the Bourbons of the Holy Roman Empire, then to Napoleon, then back to the Bourbons once more. Over and over, successive powers arrived in Sicily, imposed themselves and ruled with an iron rod until usurped by someone else. The one constant was the appalling treatment of the native Sicilians. At the same time, the island was subjected to regular raids by pirates from Arabia, from Africa – from all over. This turbulent history gave rise to one of Sicily’s characteristic features: the lack of villages or isolated settlements. It was never safe to live in small communities, and so most Sicilians lived in towns, more often than not perched high on a hill for safety. Daily, the menfolk would leave the town and head down into the fields to eke out a pitiful living, then, the backbreaking day done, trudge back up to their homes.

Even by 1943, Sicilians for the most part were still living lives of appalling poverty. There was an electricity grid, but by no means all homes were connected, certainly not in the more remote towns of the mountainous interior. Only around two-fifths of the population had access to running water and those were mostly in the cities – the majority of the island’s towns, perched atop hills and mountains, were dependent on wells and rooftop water tanks, just as they had always been. This also meant modern sanitation was the preserve of the elites only. Most people simply threw effluent into the street.

Mario Turco lived in the coastal town of Gela. Thirteen years old, he was from a working-class family but they were better off than many. His father and uncle ran a construction business – in fact, one of their jobs had been to put up some wooden buildings for the Regia Aeronautica at the nearby Ponte Olivo airfield. Mario was one of five children, which was not at all unusual. There was no luxury and very little spare cash; life was simple. Turco was happy enough, however. ‘I had a good childhood,’ he said.2 ‘My father made sure we had everything. We all went to school.’ Food was simple, too: milk for breakfast, pasta for lunch, vegetables and fish for supper, meat once a week. ‘During the war,’ he said, ‘meat was scarce and expensive or it wasn’t available at all.’3 Not only was there severe rationing in Italy, often it was impossible to get even what little was supposed to be available – increasingly so on Sicily as the war progressed, primarily because the transport system was on the point of collapse due to the loss of shipping and, more recently, Allied air attacks on the railways.

There were hardly any vehicles in Gela – just a few cars for the most senior town officials, but no trucks, although that had been the case before the war too. ‘People used to move on farm wagons,’ said Turco, ‘on donkey-drawn carts.’4 There was a cinema in town, and a public radio in the town club – a kind of community centre – where people could hear the news. Otherwise, contact with the outside world was minimal; for Mario Turco, Gela was his entire world.

In contrast, sixteen-year-old Vincenza La Bruna, who lived in the town of Regalbuto in the eastern centre of the island, not far from the foot of Etna, lived a life of grinding hardship. There were nine crammed into their family home – her parents, her grandmother and six children. Vincenza went to school for just three years, and much of the rest of her time was spent working. ‘At home,’ she said, ‘but there was also work to do in the fields.5 At home there was a donkey and mule to look after too, and some chickens and a pig to feed. There was no lack of work.’ The family even had to make their own shoes – simple wooden clogs – although much of the time they wore nothing. ‘We were barefoot,’ said Vincenza, ‘like slaves.’6 Despite the animals and chickens, food was short, increasingly so as the war progressed. Boiled wheat berries became the staple.

Mario Turco was healthy enough as a boy, helped no doubt by swimming almost daily in the sea, but disease was rife on Sicily. In the plains in the west near Trapani, on the southern coastal strip and in the larger, low-lying Catania plain, malaria was an ever-present threat – but it could be caught in the mountains too. Vincenza La Bruna had had it as a child, which interrupted her time at school; by the time she’d recovered, her mother insisted she stay at home and help look after her younger brothers. And malaria was only one threat to health. Throughout the island sandfly fever, dysentery, typhus and typhoid were all prevalent. ‘The insanitary condition of the island,’ noted the Soldier’s Guide dryly, ‘is one of its best defences against an invader.’7 While it was true that Sicilians had built up a level of immunity to many of these diseases, life expectancy was still way below the national norm.

Public services and facilities were rudimentary or absent. Some 40 per cent of the islanders remained illiterate, and what public education there was remained basic in the extreme. Although the state roads, the strade stato – the ones that crossed the island and ran along the northern and southern coasts – were asphalted, the vast majority of the island’s thoroughfares were strade bianche – made of dirt and stone. Outside the cities there were few vehicles; Sicilians depended on donkeys, mules and their own two feet to get around, much as they had always done.

More than half the adult male population was involved in agriculture. Cereals, vegetables, olives, citrus fruits and also almonds as well as wine were all produced on the island, although with tools that had barely changed over the centuries and with the majority wedded to a system that went back to medieval times and beyond. Millennia ago, in the time of the Phoenicians, the land had been divided up into latifundia – effectively, large estates – which were then leased to local notables, who in turn forced locals into slavery, or even brought in slaves from elsewhere, to work the land. It was a system that continued right through the period of Arab rule; then, when the Normans arrived and swept out the Arabs in the tenth century they brought with them their feudal system, which was not so very different from the system of latifundia, except that instead of explicitly being slaves, Sicilian peasants now worked like slaves but at least got to take home some of what they produced, while the barons kept the rest. This baronial class stayed in place even after the Bourbons arrived to rule Sicily. The old latifundia were now known as feudi – large tracts of land of at least 5,000 acres each, of which several might be owned by a single baron. Increasingly, though, the last thing any self-respecting baron wanted to do was spend his time in some godforsaken spot getting baked alive when he could live off the proceeds more comfortably in a large town house in Palermo or Naples – or even Rome or Florence. This meant overseers were needed to keep an eye on things and make sure the share-croppers tending the soil – the contadini – were keeping their side of the bargain. Violence and systematic exploitation were part and parcel of the system.

The feudal system officially ended in 1812, although, as with the switch from latifundia to feudalism, the actual differences were – for the hapless contadini at any rate – rather slight. Instead of answering to armed guards, share-croppers now had to deal with a gabellotto – a kind of steward, who rented the entire feudo and paid the absentee landlord a guaranteed income, while continuing with his henchmen to grind the peasant class into the dust, screwing them for everything they possibly could. Armed revolutions in Sicily in 1820 and in 1848 loosened the power of the old aristocratic baronial class yet further, as did the Risorgimento of 1860, in which the Bourbon dynasty was finally overthrown and Italy became an independent and – notionally, at least – unified state. Yet even though Sicily had been at the centre of Garibaldi’s battle for freedom, the Sicilians, typically, suffered badly from its success, because the island did not fit into a one-nation brand of political rule. Italy may have been the most Catholic country in Europe, but it had more regional dialects and patois than any other, and even after unification remained more of a geographical concept than a nation-state. Not that the central government in Rome accepted this. New taxation laws were introduced along with across-the-board conscription, which prompted outrage among the Sicilians. Theirs was both an agricultural and a highly patriarchal society; men worked on the land, women stayed indoors and tended the home. Conscription meant fields would not be tended and people would starve and die. To avoid it, young men fled to the hills, recruiting officers were lynched and rural Sicily – especially the western half – became ever more lawless as these outlaws evolved into bands of brigands roaming the countryside. Now, Sicilian peasants no longer feared pirates from across the sea, but they did fear being rustled or robbed. Within a couple of decades of the Risorgimento, the murder rate on the island was ten times higher than it was in northern Italy.

It was into this melting pot of poverty, misery and growing violence that the Onorata Società – the Honoured Society – began to emerge as a dominating factor in Sicilian life. At the most basic level, it was a protection racket; but it also had a complex set of codes that revolved around respect, outward devotion to family life and, above all, loyalty. These ‘men of honour’ were also known more simply as the Mafia.

It’s hard to pin down the origins of the word conclusively, although it may well have come from an Arabic word of similar sound that means ‘place of refuge’, as safety, or protection – of a kind – is what the Mafia were offering. On the other hand, in the Palermo patois, mafioso was another word for ‘beautiful’ and ‘self-confident’. So a person described as mafioso came to mean someone attractive and self-assured.

The men of honour were none other than the gabellotti, who, after a period of years looking after the feudi and making money, were starting to acquire enough wealth themselves to invest in land of their own, putting them in a position to turn against the absentee landlord by refusing to pay up, threatening him – or worse, if he did appear on the doorstep – and eventually coercing him into selling up. By this time, the gabellotto had developed into a man of immense local power. He now had land he needed to protect on his own account, and a workforce and subsidiary interests that also needed safeguarding. Protection of the workforce was offered with guarantees and at a price. Those who refused to pay up would be ‘warned’. They might find their olive grove felled or livestock rustled – this was what they could expect if they didn’t have protection. If they still didn’t play ball, then blood would be spilled, often fatally. Bandits would either be paid off or warned off. If a life had to be taken, so be it. The rule of central government counted for nothing in these backwaters of Sicily because everyone, from the police to the politicians to the local parish priest, was in the pocket of the local man of honour.

Gradually, these men of honour began to respect different fiefdoms – there was, after all, some safety in numbers – and so a code began to develop: a code of honour that transcended any normal human loyalties, including those of blood relationship. There were strict lines that no man could cross with impunity. The rules were understood and they were accepted; if they were broken, blood would be shed and dishonour brought down on the perpetrator and sometimes those around him too.

Between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War, in a great exodus fuelled by the Messina earthquake of 1908, some 1.1 million Sicilians – a huge number, amounting to roughly a quarter of the entire population – had emigrated in search of a way out of the grinding oppression and poverty of life on the island. Some went to Britain, France or even South America, but most – around 800,000 – headed to the United States. Yet more left in the 1920s, and among them were many mafiosi, fleeing Fascist clamp-downs. The very notion of having much of central and western Sicily run by a secret organization that was uncontrollable by central government was anathema to Mussolini. He was Il Duce, the dictator, and he was in charge, not some so-called ‘man of honour’.

Determined to stamp out the Mafia once and for all, Mussolini dispatched a hard man, Cesare Mori, to sort it out. Mori, a tough and uncompromising policeman from Pavia in northern Italy, had first been posted to Sicily before the First World War and had made a name for himself for catching the notorious bandit Paolo Grisalfi; he had also used strong-arm tactics against banditry again immediately after the war when still serving on the island. Although he had since retired to Florence, Mussolini now persuaded him to return to duty and posted him back to Sicily as the prefect of Trapani with the sole task of destroying the Sicilian Mafia. ‘Your Excellency has carte blanche,’ Mussolini told him; ‘the authority of the State must be absolutely, I repeat absolutely, re-established in Sicily.8 Should the laws currently in effect hinder you, that will be no problem. We shall make new laws.’ Mori set about his task with an iron fist, smashing bandit gangs, imprisoning mafiosi without trial, and humiliating men of honour publicly with parades and show trials to try to dispel their mystique. Not for nothing was he known as the ‘Iron Prefect’. By the time he was brought back to mainland Italy by Mussolini in June 1929, he had arrested more than 11,000 mafiosi, most of whom continued to languish in prison without having ever had a trial. Very publicly, it was announced the Mafia had been destroyed.

That had been something of an overstatement. Still, rampant banditry, cattle rustling and small-time mafiosi had definitely been crushed. Mori’s successors in the 1930s turned away from show trials, preferring to send many mafiosi into internal exile on Sicily with the threat of further strong-arm tactics if they erred. What remained were a handful of Mafia groups, now operating more quietly and subtly. Perhaps a better way of describing matters would be to say the Mafia were lying dormant in Sicily; but there was definitely a sense that by the outbreak of war in 1939, their era of dominance was over.

In fact, the Mafia had rebooted itself into the United States, profiteering first from dominating the lemon trade and then from prohibition and a host of other protection rackets, and while there were plenty of Italian-American gangsters who did not hail from Sicily – Al Capone and Vito Genovese, to name but two – a large number of Sicilian mafiosi not only moved to and began operating in the United States, they also maintained firm links with the old country. Mafiosi always thought of themselves as a breed apart, and as men of honour that meant living and operating outside the normal rule of law. And yet the normal rule of law did exist; and having a foot in two different countries could be extremely useful.

In the central west of Sicily, lying on the edge of the province of Caltanissetta between Palermo to the north and Agrigento to the south, stood the small town of Villalba, home to around three thousand people. This was particularly harsh countryside, surrounded by low mountains, connected to the outside world by remote winding tracks, its thin, stony soil baked the colour of sandstone in the long summer. The town itself was built on a slope, looking northwards towards the Madonie Mountains, and laid out on a grid of thirteen streets by six around a town square, the Piazza Madrice, dominated by the Chiesa Madre – the Mother Church. Away from the church, the handsome stone houses around the piazza and along the central streets very quickly gave way to hovels and squalid one-room dwellings, or bassi, with compacted mud floors, effluent in the gutters and no running water.

This small, unremarkable and impoverished town was home to Calogero Vizzini, a 65-year-old man whose only sign of wealth was his paunch, a conspicuously rare feature on an island where very few fat people existed. With his spectacles, moustache and greying, receding hair, he looked otherwise nondescript; there were certainly no bespoke clothes, his usual outfit being a short-sleeved shirt and trousers with braces.

Born in the town back in July 1877, Vizzini had been the first son of a labourer and contadino, although his mother was slightly higher in the social hierarchy with the additional prestige that came from having a member of her family in the priesthood. While Vizzini’s two younger brothers took to their studies and later went into the Church, he had remained illiterate, deciding instead to make his way in the world in a different manner by trading in the cancia, the barter of wheat for milling into flour, which enabled him to take a cut at both ends as well as demand a transport fee. The men in this trade effectively acted as intermediaries between the peasants who needed their wheat milled and the mills that produced the flour – and the mill, in the case of Villalba, was 50 miles away along tracks that were impossibly dangerous and controlled by bandits.

Vizzini got around the travel risk by coming to an arrangement with the biggest bandit in the region, Paolo Varsalona. Together they ran the cancia very much to their own profit. Along the way, Vizzini was accused of robbery and murder and twice arrested, but acquitted on both occasions for lack of evidence, protected by the barrier of omertà – the Mafia’s sacred code of silence. Through a combination of guile, intelligence, ruthlessness and daring, by the outbreak of the First World War Vizzini had won respect and authority and had become a gabellotto. Unsurprisingly, he managed to duck war service and instead made a packet through the black market, supplying horses and other animals for the army through a combination of theft, bribery and threats. When he was eventually investigated, all those who had originally testified against him suddenly retracted. Nine of them were then accused of perjury and imprisoned; all nine took their sentences without so much as a further squeak. The episode only served to enhance Vizzini’s prestige as a man of honour.

Vizzini had become a gabellotto more powerful than the landowner, and so was able to buy his own feudo at auction at a ludicrously low price because there were no other bidders. Such was his rising influence and power. On another occasion, a young mafioso from Villalba named Lottò committed a very badly planned murder, so blatantly that his arrest and conviction seemed to be foregone conclusions. Not so. Certainly, men of honour did not simply murder people – there was a process to be gone through, and authority had to be given; and Lottò had breached the rules. And yet, for men of honour it was unthinkable that punishment should be left to the state. To have allowed this to happen would have caused Vizzini a loss of respect, and so he took matters into his own hands. First, Lottò was transferred to an insane asylum where, soon after, he ‘died’. His ‘corpse’ was then removed in a specially ventilated coffin and ‘buried’. Meanwhile, the very much alive Lottò was given false documents and some money and smuggled to the United States. Arriving in New York, he was met by ‘friends’, and identified himself by producing a yellow silk handkerchief on which was embroidered a single ‘C’ – C for Calò.

Vizzini continued to accumulate wealth and expand his interests, entering into a partnership with some Fascists to develop sulphur mines in the Caltanissetta region. Although he was strongly anti-Fascist, it suited him to keep in with the Church and the Fascist Party, and he skilfully managed to do so without the slightest loss of prestige as a man of honour – which was one of the reasons he escaped the fate of many other mafiosi during the regime of Cesare Mori. This didn’t stop him from repeatedly being charged with criminal conspiracy, but every time, without fail, he was acquitted due to lack of evidence, either because key witnesses clammed up or because vital papers mysteriously disappeared. In 1935 he declared himself bankrupt and from then on the authorities left him in peace; but by June 1943 he was as rich, powerful and unscrupulous as he had ever been, and while the Mafia might have been lying low, Don Calò, as he had become, was the most senior mafioso in all of Sicily, with contacts not just across the island but in the United States as well.

Don Calò had every interest in making sure Mussolini and the Fascist regime came to an end, because the Fascists had waged war against the Honourable Society and that needed to be avenged. Moreover, whenever there was political chaos there was opportunity, and that needed to be exploited too. Another Sicilian who was every bit as eager to see the back of Mussolini and Fascism, but for somewhat different reasons, was Lieutenant Max Corvo, now a citizen of the United States of America, who until the age of nine had lived in Melilli, a town perched in the hills overlooking Augusta and Syracuse in the east of the island. His father, Cesare, an outspoken critic of Fascism, had been forced to emigrate to the States ahead of the rest of his family, a separation that affected Max deeply. A keenly intelligent and determined young man, Max Corvo grew up fired by the same strong liberal political views as his father and, with the onset of war, was determined to play his part both for his adopted country and for the island of his birth.

While still in training as a conscript, Corvo wrote a paper he called his ‘Plan to Overthrow the State in Sicily’, outlining the kind of work US intelligence might carry out to undermine the Fascist regime. Managing to get it into the hands of the right people, Corvo eventually caught the attention of Earl Brennan, then head of the Italian Section of Secret Intelligence, a department of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, which had been established in June 1942 to train and deploy secret agents to gather intelligence and operate behind enemy lines, and to work alongside army and navy intelligence as well as the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). Corvo’s theory was that the dissatisfaction many Sicilians felt with the war and with their lot in general could be exploited and that, as someone who could speak the local dialect and had an intimate knowledge of the island’s customs and cultural quirks, he was well placed to help with this.

Brennan was impressed, and employed him to draw up a detailed plan and to start recruiting agents and operatives among the large network of Sicilians now in the United States and their connections back in Sicily. Corvo soon managed to gather around him and Brennan a team of men, ranging from eminent anti-Fascist exiles to young liberal firebrands, who, it was planned, would infiltrate into Sicily as soon as possible. Once Sicily itself became a target for the Allies, the intention was to send these agents in with the invasion troops so that they could rapidly begin the process of undermining Sicilian resistance to the Allies. However, Corvo and Brennan agreed at an early stage that no attempt should be made to establish contact with the Mafia or any other form of organized crime, even though several attempts were made by other OSS sources to arrange a meeting between Corvo and Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian gangster in prison in New York for running a prostitution racket. Despite being locked up, Luciano had continued running his businesses via another Italian-American, Vito Genovese, and had maintained links with associates not only in the States but also back in Italy – including Sicily. Corvo had resisted these approaches. ‘I explained to Brennan that we could gain nothing from such a tie,’ he noted, ‘and that the relationship might prove embarrassing in the future.’9 In any case, as far as he was concerned, the Mafia had been practically stamped out. They were nothing.

Corvo had set off for Algiers on 20 May 1943, flying via Cuba, Guiana, Brazil and then across to West Africa. Even with a week’s delay en route while his plane was repaired, that gave him and the agents of the Italian Secret Intelligence section of the OSS around six weeks to finalize plans for their infiltration and to put the ‘Corvo Plan’ into action.

Corvo had been right in his view that the majority of Sicilians had been instinctively against Fascism, although plenty had cheered Mussolini when he’d first declared war. Images of Mussolini were everywhere – black-painted stencils of his helmeted head and the Fascist slogan Credere, ubbedire, combattere – ‘believe, obey, fight’. Giacomo Garra remembered when Italy entered the war in 1940. At the time he was the youngest of six children in a large and comparatively well-to-do family in Caltagirone, towards the south-east of the island, and his older brothers were all in the army. His family had embraced Mussolini and so had he, albeit through the naïve prism of a young boy. They had all been utterly confident of victory. ‘How could we not win the war?’10 he’d thought. The British were viewed as utterly despicable and inept, even though they would repeatedly crush the Italians in the opening years of the conflict.

Nearby in Gela, Mario Turco had been at the town club at the time war was declared, and Mussolini’s speech had been broadcast on state radio. ‘There was only one radio in Gela,’ he said, ‘and it was at the Nobles’ Club right in the centre of town.’11 He had been excited by the prospect of war. ‘We believed’, he added, ‘that we were the strongest nation in the world.’ It was hardly surprising; as a young boy in Fascist Italy he had joined the Fascist Youth, starting with the Figlio della Lupa – She-Wolf’s Child – at the age of just six, then at eight moving up to the next stage, the Balilla, and on to the Balilla Moschettieri at eleven. Like so many others, he had been indoctrinated. ‘I used to believe all the things they taught us.’ He enjoyed it well enough, because his mates also did it and there were lots of sports. One time, he missed a weekly Saturday muster and was threatened with having his junior membership taken from him. ‘And do you know what it meant not having the membership card any more?12 It was like the end of the world,’ he said. ‘At my age, it meant being isolated, no more friends, and not even being allowed to go to school.’

Another who had cheered the declaration of war on 10 June 1940 was Livio Messina, who back then, aged eighteen, had applauded excitedly alongside crowds of others in the Piazza Plebiscito in Naples, where he’d been brought up, though born in Sicily. He’d then looked around him and had noticed an elderly lady beside him with tears running down her cheek. Catching his eye, she raised a hand and touched his face. ‘My son,’ she said, ‘you don’t realise what is going to become of us.’13

At the time, Messina had thought little of it. He had wanted war because he was fiercely patriotic and wanted Italy to be a great nation; he believed it was only right that Italy should expand and create a new Roman Empire. Patriotism – nationalism – had been drummed into him in the Balilla and Fascist youth organizations. At university he’d then taken a course in Colonial Studies and had never had much cause to question what he’d been taught. Now, three years on, he was back on the island of his birth and a tenente – a lieutenant – in the signals platoon of the 4° Divisione ‘Livorno’, and still young enough and naïve enough to be taking in his stride everything that life threw at him. An uncle had been killed during the fighting in Albania, which had shaken him, and the reverses of fortune in the war had dented his confidence a little, but when he’d been called up at the age of nineteen he’d set off for officer training with no small amount of pride. His father had been to see him off at the station and had given him a razor, brush and soap as a parting gift – even though, fair-haired and baby-faced as he was, he’d barely needed them, which he’d felt as something of an affront to his manhood. So far, though, the war had treated Messina fairly well. He’d been passed from pillar to post but, now aged twenty-one, was yet to go into action. Even after arriving in Sicily with the division the previous November, that prospect still seemed to him a remote one.

Not all were as naïve as Tenente Livio Messina, however. Tenente-Colonnello Dante Ugo Leonardi was commander of the III° Battaglione of 34° Reggimento in the same Divisione Livorno, and although he was doing his best to prepare his men for the invasion he felt certain was to come on Sicily, he was doing so with a heavy heart. Leonardi did not share either Messina’s more laissez-faire approach to soldiering or his youthful enthusiasm for war. Rather, he was convinced that most Italians had entered the war with little conviction and that, despite Fascism, as a nation they had simply never had the aggressive spirit or hatred of their enemies to justify taking the terrible step to armed conflict. In fact, he reckoned they had never really thought through the consequences of going to war at all.

There was a lot in this view. It resonated with Graziani’s reluctance in invading Egypt in September 1940, when it had become clear Britain had no intention of giving up the fight. Suddenly, Italy had found itself woefully ill-prepared. The country had even fewer natural resources than Germany. Compared with the leading powers, it was backward, too. Italy’s military was not modern enough, not well equipped enough, not organized enough and – as Colonnello Leonardi knew – not committed enough to win the war. Now, in June 1943, Italy seemed finished – most certainly so if what he’d discovered on the island was anything to go by. ‘The conditions on Sicily,’ he noted, ‘were abject.’14

When he had first arrived in November 1942, Leonardi had toured the entire island and had been horrified by the lack of any kind of centralized defensive organization. Rather, the various units had been left to pursue their different approaches and differing ideas of how best to organize themselves. Some coastal units were even speaking entirely different dialects, which, of course, was hardly ideal for any kind of coordinated defence. The coastal divisions were made up of poorly armed and poorly trained men, most of whom had been hurriedly conscripted and showed not the slightest interest in fighting. They were also horribly stretched in certain parts of the coastline, with battalions of some six hundred men each defending stretches of up to 30 miles. ‘For example,’ he noted, ‘the Battaglione 435 had thirteen men per kilometre.15 The best case scenario was the Battaglione 388 with sixty men per kilometre spread over ten kilometres.’ Nor was there any naval artillery outside the main ports. ‘None!!’

Matters had improved significantly with the arrival in February 1943 of Generale Roatta to command Sixth Army on Sicily. Contrary to what Hitler and von Neurath believed, Roatta was not a spy, spineless or otherwise. Having made a name for himself in the Balkans as an utterly ruthless hard man, willing to wage war against Yugoslavian insurrectionists with the utmost brutality, he had come to Sicily determined that Italy should fight and do its very best to repel the invasion which, like Kesselring, Mussolini and others, he felt certain would be directed at the island. In expressing his views to von Neurath, whom he had known for some time, he had been merely speaking frankly; such, though, had been von Neurath’s – and Hitler’s – paranoia, they had not taken Roatta’s warning in the spirit in which it had been made.

Roatta had been as appalled as Leonardi by what he had discovered on Sicily. At the time, Sixth Army had only partial control over Italian anti-aircraft defences, and none at all over the militia units or navy or Regia Aeronautica. Leonardi was right – there was no joined-up approach to the defence of the island at all. Clearly, this could not be allowed to go on; and, since Roatta was a wily operator, he managed to secure a decree from the Italian general staff, the Comando Supremo, that made him overall Armed Forces Commander, Sicily, a post that gave him control of some seven military and nine civilian defence agencies on the island. The only parts of Sicily’s defence that eluded him were the three naval fortress areas of Messina–Reggio in the north-east, Trapani in the west and Augusta–Syracuse in the east.

With the vastly increased power and authority that came with his new title, Roatta had set about licking Sicily’s defences into shape. Both troops and locals were drafted in to build bunkers, lay mines and wire, and create anti-invasion obstacles along the island’s beaches. Frustratingly for Roatta, however, many of the resources earmarked for Sicily ended up being sent to Tunisia, where they were lost for ever, either sunk en route or taken by the Allies. The general had demanded and had been promised some 160,000 tons of cement a month. Only around 7,000 tons had ever reached him.

On 13 May, the very day North Africa was lost, Ammiraglio Arturo Riccardi, the head of the Regia Marina, the Italian navy, held a conference in Rome. The report on Sicily made for grim listening. Allied bombing was causing mayhem and had cut off almost all coastal traffic, which was principally how Sicily was supplied. By May 1943, almost all of Italy’s merchant fleet was at the bottom of the Mediterranean; in fact, between November and the middle of May, Allied aircraft had sunk over 170 Axis ships and damaged a further 120, while Allied naval forces had sunk several hundred thousand tons of shipping too. Unlike the Allies, whose shipyards in the United States and Britain were building new vessels at an unprecedented rate, neither the Italians nor the Germans had any means of either building or bringing into the Mediterranean any more freighters. They were simply running out of shipping, which was why there were just forty small vessels left for maritime supply of Sicily. This meant that the population, already underfed at the best of times, was suffering even more severely from food shortages – and this went for the military as well as the civilians. It also meant there was little chance of Roatta getting the cement he needed – or much else besides, including boots, the shortage of which had repeatedly and bizarrely plagued the Italian army ever since it had gone to war. Many of the men in the coastal divisions were now wearing sandals or going barefoot – and so disabled by this that training had been affected. As it happened, there were warehouses full of boots; but they were all far too big and so had remained where they were.

The failure of Roatta’s attempt to provide Sicily with adequate defences also explained why, at Gela, some bunkers were now being made of cardboard instead of concrete. Tenente Giuseppe Bruccoleri was an engineer whose particular task of setting up barrage balloons around Italy had exempted him from overseas service; then his mother, who had a connection to Mussolini, wrote to Il Duce explaining that she had already lost her husband to war in 1917, and needed her son back home in Gela. Incredibly, Mussolini personally agreed to post Bruccoleri to Sicily, where he was to oversee the elevation of barrage balloons at Augusta but then could return to Gela – although he was to take his balloon company with him and set up a telephone switchboard in his house, and help with the preparation of local defences. This he did; and, since there was not enough cement, he and his men made fake bunkers out of cardboard. The idea was to fool the Allies into thinking Gela had stronger defences than it did. Bruccoleri’s story reveals one of two things: either Mussolini really was going a little mad, or the Italian army had by now become so institutionally broken that an officer could be sent home because his mother had the influence to demand it and end up overseeing the construction of cardboard pillboxes. Whichever was the case, it was certainly no way to fight a war.

Generale Roatta did his best, but even for a mover and shaker like him, the current shortages and endless difficulties now facing the Italians were insurmountable. In the middle of May, he made a speech which was thought to be just a little bit too disparaging about the Sicilians and questioning their patriotism. The Comando Supremo, nervous that the gulf between Sicily and the rest of Italy was already dangerously wide, recalled him, appointing him to the top job in place of Ambrosio – which was why he was in Rome talking to von Neurath, reflecting on the invidious situation in which they now found themselves.

The decision to push Roatta upstairs also revealed the stark limits to Fascism’s power; no German general would have been removed for fear of worrying the locals, after all. In his place arrived Generale Alfredo Guzzoni, sixty-six years old and retired since May 1941 after a long career that had begun in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911. Small, heavy-set and with little obvious enthusiasm for the posting, he had never once before set foot on Sicily. Nor had his new chief of staff, Colonnello Emilio Faldella, who was much younger and more obviously energetic. In fact, Faldella and Guzzoni had never met one another before either, so their appointments were curious ones. It was now June, and as the Axis were all very well aware, an Allied invasion, wherever it fell, could not be long in coming.

On 22 June, Generalleutnant Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin was summoned to see Hitler at the Berghof, the Führer’s home in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Recently returned from commanding 17. Panzer Division on the Eastern Front, von Senger had been enjoying a very rare stint of leave; now, on joining Hitler, Keitel and Warlimont at their daily situation conference, he was told he was being sent to Sicily as German liaison officer to the Italian Sixth Army. His brief was somewhat loose. Hitler talked at length about the possibilities of defending Sicily, should it come to that, but was still undecided about how many German units he should commit. Baade’s newly constituted Division Kommando Sizilien was already there and a second division, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, was also on its way. Others were potentially waiting in the wings. Generalleutnant Hans-Valentin Hube, one of Hitler’s favourites, was also now in southern Italy. Due to the machinations of the Italian royal court and general staff, he reported, it was likely the Italians would soon defect and be out of the war – although it was felt the Allies had already missed the boat by not invading Sicily immediately after their landings in north-west Africa.

Afterwards, von Senger lunched with Warlimont, who believed that in the event of a major Allied attack on Sicily, it would be best to transfer the mass of Axis troops to the mainland. ‘This appreciation and definition of my task,’ noted von Senger, ‘were not in line with those of Hitler.’16

Von Senger was precisely the kind of military aristocrat Hitler loathed. The feeling was mutual. ‘I detested him,’ wrote the general, ‘for all the misfortune he had brought upon my country.’17 Born near the Swiss border in 1891, Frido von Senger had been educated in part at Eton College in England and then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, which had helped give him a slightly broader world-view than many of his peers. A fine military career had followed, initially in the First World War, then between the wars and now in this current conflict, where he had proved outstanding, both a deep student of warfare and also a compassionate and highly regarded general. A fine, indeed world-class, equestrian like Baade, he was also a devout Catholic, a cultured intellectual and, along with Kesselring, less prone than many senior Germans to regarding all Italians as feckless Latin types deserving only of deep contempt. This made him an ideal choice to play the go-between with German and Italian forces, regardless of what Hitler thought of him personally.

Three days later, von Senger was in Rome meeting with Kesselring, who talked far more optimistically about the chances of preventing an invasion of Sicily. The Allied assault on Dieppe back in August 1942 had been easily repulsed, he pointed out. Von Senger was not so sure; he felt the Allied victory in North Africa marked an entirely new phase of the war that did not augur well. On the other hand, he agreed that German forces could not fight two opponents – both the Allies and the Italians, should they defect. Von Senger would need to tread sensitively and carefully, Kesselring warned him; Sicily was a tinderbox, and the Germans would disregard the primacy of Guzzoni on the island at their peril. While Kesselring and von Senger were singing from the same hymn sheet with regard to relations with their Italian comrades in arms, the same could not be said of General von Richthofen, who told von Senger, in no uncertain terms, that the Luftwaffe was going its own way. Unlike Kesselring, Guzzoni or Mussolini, he was convinced Sardinia was the most likely target for the Allies and so had already begun moving his air forces there. ‘All this revealed’, commented von Senger, ‘a regrettable divergence of views.’18 It also put Allied planning disagreements into perspective.

Once actually in Sicily, the first stop for von Senger was Enna, an ancient town perched on a flat mountaintop right in the geographical centre of the island. Viewed from the west, Enna was silhouetted against the sky like a fairytale medieval bastion, Etna looming beyond; it was here that Guzzoni had his headquarters. Accompanied at this first meeting by Kesselring, von Senger found Guzzoni realistic and candid. The coastal divisions were next to useless and could not be relied upon; the four regular divisions were better equipped but still not up to standard, although the Livorno was in the best shape with some motorization and half-decent officers and commanders. It became clear, however, that there was a divergence of views as to how best to repel the enemy if he did come. Guzzoni was for keeping the coastal batteries intact and out of range of large naval guns, but the German view was that it was far better to have as much fire-power forward as possible. The time to repel an invasion was right away, while the attackers were exposed, under strength and devoid of effective cover. Let the Allies secure a bridgehead and it would be all over. This difference of views was not resolved, while Kesselring’s continued optimism also contrasted markedly with Guzzoni’s more sceptical view. At least the meeting remained cordial. None the less, there was still much to iron out – not least exactly where the German divisions should be located.

Time, though, was running out. Unbeknown to the Axis officers as they sat in Guzzoni’s palazzo up in Enna that day in late June, the Allies would be assaulting the island in just two weeks’ time. The countdown was on.

ON FRIDAY, 11 JUNE 1943, at around 4 p.m., an American C-47 transport touched down at Luqa airfield on Malta. On board were two colonels of the 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, as well as two battalion commanders of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the regiment’s commander, Colonel James M. Gavin. It had already been quite an eye-opening journey. The party had travelled from the 82nd Airborne Division’s training base at Oujda in French Morocco, first to Tunis, where wrecks of German aircraft were still scattered all around the city’s edge; from there they headed out low over Cap Bon, the site of the final Axis surrender on 13 May, and down the east coast to Monastir. There they met with their British counterparts, who seemed to possess an insouciance Gavin found both impressive and unnerving. ‘We are sweating, tense, trying hard at everything we attempt,’ he jotted in his diary.1 ‘They are relaxed, appearing indifferent at times, no pressure, and everything seems to be getting done in tip-top shape.’ Sleeping on their C-47 that night, they were up early the following morning to fly on to Tripoli, en route crossing over the Mareth Line, the scene of more fighting back in March. Briefings received and clearance given, they then headed on to Malta, via Pantelleria, which had fallen to the Allies that very same day.

On Malta they switched planes, boarding several Mosquitoes – the ‘wooden wonders’ of the RAF, multi-function aircraft capable of flying at over 400 mph. Since there was only room for two in a Mosquito, including the pilot, Gavin had to take on the role of navigator. Once dusk had fallen, off they went, hurtling over the sea towards Sicily, following the route his troops would take on 9 July, in four weeks’ time, and simulating the same night-time conditions by flying at just 600 feet off the deck. As temporary navigator, Gavin found the drop zones – DZs – easily enough; then they flew inland towards Niscemi, a town perched on a ridge looking down over the Gela Plain towards the sea, before turning back and speeding by Ponte Olivo airfield, one of the key Allied targets for D-Day on Sicily. Flying separately in different Mosquitoes, his two battalion commanders, Lieutenant-Colonels Krause and Keens, sped directly over Ponte Olivo and were both shot at by flak. ‘No one hit,’ noted Gavin.2 ‘We are all pleased with the results of our reconnaissance.’

Gavin and his men were to be the first American troops on Sicily, and had been given the mission of parachuting in ahead of the seaborne landings to capture and secure the Piano Lupo – the Plain of the Wolf – an upland area to the east of Gela – and both prevent the enemy from using it and also use it to their own advantage; it was always good to control the high ground. They were also to disrupt enemy lines of communication and then, on D-Day itself, help the attacking 1st Infantry Division in taking first Gela and then the Ponte Olivo airfield. The men, he knew, were well trained and physically fit and ready; but none of them had ever been in action before, and Gavin, outwardly confident, calm and collected, none the less worried privately. No person really knew how they would respond to being under fire until they faced this challenge for the first time. Doubts were inevitable. So too was fear. On 5 July, Gavin would find a man from the 2nd Battalion with a rifle across his knees and a bible in his hand, contemplating suicide. ‘Said he was going to be killed anyway,’ noted Gavin.3 ‘So it goes.’

Jim Gavin was thirty-six years old but looked younger. He had formed the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment from scratch, using training programmes he had devised, and applying tactics and operational techniques he had developed himself. Ambitious, extremely driven and a deep thinker about all aspects of modern warfare, he was a progressive officer hugely respected by his superiors, his peers and the men under his command. That he was a regimental commander at all was all the more remarkable because of his extremely humble beginnings. An orphan, he had been adopted at the age of two and brought up in the coal-mining town of Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania. It had not taken him long to realize a career as a miner was not for him, even though he had left school at just twelve years old and needed to get a job to help with the family coffers. At seventeen he had run away to New York, where he managed to blag his way into the army, even though he was under age. Posted to Panama, he read prodigiously and caught the eye of a senior NCO, who took the young man under his wing and encouraged him to apply to a local army school – an opportunity for Gavin to better himself, because from there the brightest and best students were encouraged to try for West Point. Catching up on his lost schooling in quick time, Gavin duly won a place at the army school in Corozal in the Canal Zone, and from there a place at West Point. In the land of opportunity, this orphan was grabbing it firmly with both hands.

In June 1929 he graduated as a second lieutenant in the US Army, continuing his studies as his fledgling career got under way. Stints in the infantry at home and then out in the Philippines were followed by a posting back to West Point and specifically to the Tactics faculty. He was still there when war broke out in Europe and, studying German operations in great detail, quickly became an advocate of airborne warfare. When the US Army decided to form its own parachute school at Fort Benning in June 1940, Gavin was among the early volunteers, eventually released from West Point in February the following year and soon making a name for himself. He was asked to write the airborne field manual, FM 31-30: Tactics and Techniques of Air-Borne Troops, which not only gathered together lessons from his studies of German – and also Soviet – airborne forces, but also drew on his own tactical studies and included information about how such troops should be structured and organized, and how and when they should be deployed. Far from a carbon copy of German doctrine, Gavin’s vision was very much his own.

A stint at the US Army Command and General Staff College marked Gavin out for higher command and sure enough, in August 1942, he was made the first commander of the newly activated 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR). By April 1943, he reckoned he had licked his men into pretty good shape: they were physically and mentally tough, able to think on their feet, experienced at jumping out of aircraft and at a more advanced state of training than any other regiment – which was why they were sent to North Africa to join Major-General Matthew Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne Division. Ridgway had it in mind that Gavin’s 505th would spearhead the US airborne operations for HUSKY.

Gavin and his men had landed at Casablanca on 10 May and from there been posted to Oujda for further training. It had been accepted from an early stage of the HUSKY planning that airborne troops would play a key role in the invasion as a whole, not just the American sector. Both paratroopers and glider-borne troops were, however, new elements in Allied planning. It’s fair to say that both American and British war leaders had been somewhat dazzled by the cut, dash and sheer chutzpah of German airborne operations. Germany’s glider troops had captured a seemingly impregnable Belgium fort, Eben Emael, back in May 1940, while their paratroopers had taken key bridges; later, German paratroopers had helped to capture Crete in May 1941. These airborne formations were regarded within the Wehrmacht and by their opponents with a certain amount of awe as highly trained special forces – an elite of shock troops that offered tactical flexibility in attack.

While the Allies quickly latched on to the successes of the German airborne forces, less analysis was given to their shortcomings. On 10 May 1940, at the start of the attack on France and the Low Countries, the Luftwaffe had lost a staggering 353 aircraft, most of which were delivering the airborne spearhead; this was the worst single day of losses for the Luftwaffe in the entire war to date, but was never much considered by Allied planners. Nor was the fact that a battalion of paratroopers was destroyed at Dombas in Norway in April 1940 by the Norwegian army, who were not widely recognized as being especially well equipped or well trained at the time. Nor was much attention paid to the fact that, for the most part, German airborne operations had been against low-quality troops, or that half the force of paratroopers sent to the assault on Crete had been lost over the island, despite the Germans’ subsequent victory there.

The British, with Churchill as one of the loudest advocates, had quickly put plans together to create an airborne brigade of five thousand men; that had soon swollen to double the size. In October 1941, the 1st Airborne Division had been created and more recently, in April 1943, a second division, the 6th, was also formed. In the United States, the first airborne formation had been the 501st Parachute Infantry Unit; in March 1942 the 82nd Airborne Division had been formed, followed in August the same year by the 101st, and in May 1943 by two more airborne divisions. Both the British and American armies were also developing glider-borne and parachute units concurrently. A huge amount of time, effort, money and training had gone into creating forces that so far had not really been tested in battle. Airborne troops had been dropped as part of the Allied invasion of north-west Africa, but that had been a total fiasco, while a British paratrooper operation to capture an enemy airfield in Tunisia had also achieved absolutely nothing except the loss of a few good men and a very long and risky walk back to friendly lines. In terms of glider operations, there had been just one, by the British, into Norway in November 1942. All the men aboard had been killed, or captured and subsequently executed.

Much discussion had taken place over exactly how these rapidly growing airborne forces should be used for HUSKY. In the early plans, the British and Americans were to land one after the other, which had meant all transport aircraft would be available to lift airborne troops for both. That all changed once the final plan had been accepted, at which point a certain amount of frantic jockeying for position had taken place. General Ridgway, concerned his airborne forces might have to play second fiddle to the British because of a shortage of transport aircraft, went straight to Patton, who, as he had hoped, demanded and was given a paratroop jump ahead of the seaborne assault.

Ridgway’s concerns had been understandable. The British, who had taken the top spots in command of all three services for HUSKY, had also, from early May, secured the senior airborne command too. This was given to Major-General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, dapper, dashing, and married to the best-selling novelist Daphne du Maurier. Browning had been commander of the British 1st Airborne Division, but had since been bumped up to become Airborne Advisor to Allied Forces Headquarters; for all Alexander’s incredible experience, airborne operations were entirely new to him and almost as new to Eisenhower too. Clearly, airborne forces were a growing element in Allied plans, and there was also an implicit understanding they would be used to spearhead the cross-Channel invasion the following year too, so Browning’s role was an important one.

The trouble was, no one had much idea about how airborne operations should best be used. Young, ambitious commanders were inevitably drawn to the new airborne forces precisely because they were new, at the cutting edge of war. There had also been an understanding from the outset that airborne troops were special – an elite force. All these men were volunteers, not conscripts thrown together. They trained harder, were physically fitter and, crucially, were highly motivated, which meant they were far more likely to be able to use their initiative, an essential attribute that particularly marked out the better troops from the rank and file. Unlike the vast majority of soldiers fighting in the Allied armies, who simply longed to keep their heads down and get through, airborne soldiers wanted to be fine soldiers. They wanted to be the best, and generally speaking thought of themselves in such terms. Their commanders understood this attitude, and the prestige and accolades that would potentially follow from it. Ambition was not a fault; but it did mean there was a level of competitiveness among the airborne forces that was, perhaps, more prominent than in other parts of the armed services, pitting one regiment against another, paratroopers against glider-borne troops, British versus American. Ridgway’s concern had been that with Browning, a Brit, as the new senior airborne advisor, it would be the British 1st Airborne, rather than the US 82nd Airborne, who would get first dibs at the precious C-47 fleet.

As it happened, however, he need not have worried, because Boy Browning’s replacement at 1st Airborne was the newly promoted Major-General George ‘Hoppy’ Hopkinson, a man of enormous charm and voracious ambition, but less for paratroopers than for glider-borne operations. Before taking command of 1st Airborne, Hopkinson had been commander of the 1st Airlanding Brigade, and to say he was messianic about glider operations would be an understatement. Hopkinson had always been a man in a hurry. Twice he had resigned from the army because of a lack of opportunity and because the rate of peacetime advancement had been too slow. He liked being in charge and leading new units – such as the specialist GHQ unit, codenamed ‘Phantom’, that was supposed to be the British Expeditionary Force commander Lord Gort’s eyes and ears on the ground back in 1940. After Dunkirk, Hopkinson lobbied hard to be allowed to develop Phantom into a permanent unit; he got his way and it became the GHQ Liaison Regiment, although after the invasion scare had evaporated, Hopkinson himself lost command. Then came another opportunity with the development of airborne forces and in particular, for him, of gliders. Relentless ambition and a gift of the gab unquestionably helped him move swiftly into the top job at 1st Airborne in early May 1943, and with this promotion he was determined to become the champion of glider-borne forces. The trouble was, so tunnel-visioned had he become in his enthusiasm that he had failed to realize his force was not remotely ready for deployment.

By this point, Britain had been at war long enough to have sorted much of the wheat from the chaff when it came to generalship. The Americans, too, after North Africa, were starting to work out who was good and who needed sending home. The airborne forces were still so new, however, and those making the decisions on fresh appointments had their eyes on so many other matters besides, that it was not hard for an individual like Hopkinson, who talked a fantastic game, to get a divisional command in an untested arm. The same factors explained why he was able to convince those who might have known better – had they really thought about it rationally – that it was a good idea to send very badly trained glider pilots across a huge expanse of sea, at night, in gliders they were not used to operating, to land very close to the sea on ground that was both rocky and contained a lot of stone walls.

It’s clear that from the moment Hopkinson was appointed commander of 1st Airborne he did all he could to avoid being in a room with Browning, because the latter, when still commanding the division, had strongly advocated using paratroopers on the night of the invasion to capture a key bridge south of Syracuse, the Ponte Grande, and then storm the city itself. Instead, rather as Ridgway had done with Patton, Hopkinson managed to secure a face-to-face audience with Montgomery and persuade him instead to use glider-borne troops both for this key objective and then to attack a second bridge further north, at Augusta, the following night. Paratroopers, he cautioned, would not be able to drop with the concentrated accuracy needed; what’s more, only with gliders could the invaders achieve the kind of tactical surprise needed to capture a bridge intact before the enemy realized what was happening and blew it up first. Paratroopers would be better used for a later objective, the Primosole Bridge, which led into the Plain of Catania – by which time the cat, of course, would be already out of the bag.

He might have had a point had there been plenty of the right gliders available, along with lots of highly skilled and trained pilots, and had he himself any experience of mounting such an operation. But not a single one of those criteria had been met. As it happened, the Glider Pilot Regiment had a new commander in Lieutenant-Colonel George Chatterton – the previous CO having been lost in the ill-fated Norway venture the previous November. Competent, intelligent and, above all, a realist, Chatterton had been tearing his hair out in frustration since being warned earlier in the year to get his men ready for overseas deployment. The unit was still new; and although the British had developed the Horsa glider, there had yet to be enough of them for his small force to train adequately. It was all well and good being sent overseas, but what about training? And what about the gliders that would be needed? His questions were met with obfuscation or, worse, silence.

On 3 April, Chatterton had finally been told the regiment were to be posted to North Africa. Still no one could tell him how many gliders might be available, and he boarded their ship with his men none the wiser. Most of his pilots had between six and twelve hours’ flying time logged over the previous six months; it was as though the British had returned to the bad old days of the last war when they’d sent young pilots up in their Sopwith Camels with just a handful of hours in their logbooks. They reached Oran in Algeria on 22 April after two weeks at sea. ‘I was full of foreboding,’ said Chatterton.4 ‘There was indeed a great gulf between those in authority and myself as to our proper role in battle.’ That was something of an understatement.

In Algeria, Chatterton discovered to his horror that there were still no gliders, which meant his 240 pilots had now not flown for at least three months. It was a ludicrous situation, and makes Hopkinson’s manic lobbying of Montgomery all the more bizarre, because by 7 May, when he had his audience with the Eighth Army commander, he would have been well aware of how deplorable the state of glider pilot training was and also of the total lack of any gliders with which to hurriedly lick themselves into shape. Neither factor was mentioned to Monty. As far as Montgomery was concerned, airborne forces were to be used, and here, in front of him, was the commander of the 1st Airborne Division advising him on how best they should be deployed. It did not occur to him that Hopkinson could be so woefully reckless as to promote something for which his men were ill-prepared and unequipped.

Within a day of his meeting with Montgomery, Hopkinson had briefed Chatterton and shown him photographs of the planned landing zones, with their rocks, walls and almost total lack of any kind of flat and open ground.

‘You know, sir,’ Chatterton interjected, ‘that the pilots have had no flying practice for at least three months and little or no experience of night flying at all?’

Hopkinson brushed aside his concerns. The Americans were going to provide both tugs and gliders.

‘American gliders?’ Chatterton asked.5

‘Yes, what difference will that make?’ Hopkinson replied.

‘Difference, sir?’ Chatterton answered, scarcely believing what he was hearing. ‘Why, they hardly know our own gliders, let alone American!’

Hopkinson then warned Chatterton that if he didn’t start playing ball, he would be sacked and sent home. After a short consideration, Chatterton decided, with a heavy heart, that it would be better to stand by the men, even though he thought Hopkinson’s plan insane.

When the American Waco gliders did eventually turn up, they were in crates spread over a number of different ports, and when they were unpacked, it was discovered many had suffered damage during the crossing. Key assembly tools were also lacking – as was any sense of urgency. At Blida, for example, assembling the gliders was sixth priority, and the task of putting together the twenty-five crated gliders delivered there was given to one officer and twenty GIs, none of whom had any previous glider assembly experience. By 25 May, a little over six weeks before HUSKY D-Day, only thirty gliders had been assembled. Eventually, as it was at last realized a crisis was looming, glider assembly was given greater priority, so that by 13 June some 346 gliders had been put together and delivered to the airfield at La Sénia. Many were then damaged by strong winds and so grounded for repairs, causing further training delays. By 30 June, most of the gliders had developed weaknesses in the tail wiring, and so all were grounded yet again for a further three days.

In addition, thirty-six Horsa gliders, which were quite different and with which the British pilots were familiar, were being flown out from England twelve at a time by A Flight, 295 Squadron, using ageing Halifax bombers. From the outset, the operation was beset with problems. First, 295 Squadron did not fly Halifaxes and so the pilots and crews had to convert in quick order. Three pilots didn’t cut the mustard in time and a fourth crashed in bad weather. Towing the Horsas all the way from England to North Africa took around seventy-seven hours for each Halifax and crew, an amount of flying time that meant the Halifaxes required a huge amount of servicing; but the stores for this, although sent ahead, had not arrived in North Africa when the Halifaxes turned up with their Horsas. Then there was the added problem of extreme turbulence while flying over the Atlas mountains, which did nothing to improve the state of either the Halifaxes or the gliders they were towing.

In all, one Halifax and Horsa were shot down en route, another pairing disappeared entirely, one Halifax crashed, one Horsa became detached and fell into the sea, another was brought back and another had to be written off on arrival. One pilot suffered six engine failures during the six weeks of ferrying flights, others experienced several – and almost all were due to oil leaks. As one of the ferrying pilots, Flight Lieutenant Tommy Grant, noted, ‘An oil leak may easily force the Halifax to jettison his glider, and two oil leaks on a long sea journey may cause complete loss of the Halifax.’6 One of the Horsa pilots – Chatterton’s adjutant, Captain Alistair Cooper – had been attacked over the Bay of Biscay by Focke-Wulf Condors, released himself from the tug and ditched in the Atlantic, been picked up, sailed back to England, collected another Horsa and ferried it out to North Africa. By the time he walked into Chatterton’s Nissen hut, it was almost time to fly to Sicily. Although an extremely competent pilot, he had zero hours’ night-flying experience.

The net result was that by the beginning of July only nineteen out of the thirty-six Horsas had been delivered, and there was almost no time at all for training in flying them loaded even by day, let alone by night. Nor had there been much training on the Wacos. Chatterton had first flown one on 14 May, and on the basis of this a rough training syllabus was prepared. His men flew as much as they could, but that was not saying very much. By 9 July, Chatterton’s glider pilots each had an average of 1.2 hours of night flying and just four and a half hours of flying time in Wacos. It was nowhere near enough. But the die had been cast.

A further operation was being planned for the early hours of 10 July, and that was to take out an Italian coastal defence battery on Capo Murro di Porco – the Cape of the Snout of the Pig – which lay on a peninsula that stretched out into the sea directly south of Syracuse. This battery, which contained four guns of what appeared from aerial photographs to be at least 150mm calibre, posed a serious threat both to the invasion beaches immediately to the south and to an assault on Syracuse. It was essential they were destroyed, and in quick order, before the landings occurred.

The men given this task were some of what had been 1 SAS – the Special Air Service – who had caused havoc against the enemy the previous year in Libya. Operating independently and deep behind enemy lines, they had made a series of daring raids on enemy landing grounds, supply columns and other targets. However, since their maverick commander, Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling, had been captured in January in Tunisia, an environment not so well suited to such hit-and-run tactics, the men of the SAS had been at something of a loose end, sent back to their training camp at Kabrit in Egypt, their future uncertain.

Among those wondering whether he would ever see any action was 21-year-old Lieutenant Peter Davis. He had been posted to the Middle East straight from officer training back in England the previous autumn, and after being sent to the vast Infantry Base Depot next to the Suez Canal at Geneifa had volunteered to join C Squadron, 1st Special Service Regiment, which despite its name had in fact been at the time the only squadron in this still embryonic unit. Set up the previous summer, initially to help develop guerrilla warfare on the Syrian border with Turkey in case Rommel’s forces should reach the Suez Canal, it too had been at a loose end and so had eventually been merged into 1 SAS. By March 1943, however, rumours were flying around that the SAS would be broken up entirely. Stirling was a prisoner of war, while his right-hand man, Major Paddy Mayne, had gone on a drunken spree in Cairo, had had one too many fights and bust up one too many bars, and had ended up in a cell.

Davis had first met Mayne soon after he’d been released and had returned to Kabrit. Already, Mayne was something of a legend – a former rugby international for both Ireland and the British Lions, he was known for his utter fearlessness, stamina, and imperturbability in the face of extreme danger. Davis had been struck first by Mayne’s sheer size. ‘His form seemed to fill the whole tent,’ he noted.7 ‘Standing well over six feet, every part of his body was built on a proportionately generous scale: his wrists were twice the size of those of a normal man, while his fists seemed to be as large as a polo ball.’ At the time, he had been wearing a reddish beard and had looked at Davis with keen, piercing blue eyes – but then had spoken in a soft voice, with a hint of an Irish brogue, that was totally at odds with his immense physicality. Davis thought he seemed rather shy, albeit perfectly courteous and charming.

As it happened, Davis was about to see a lot more of him because 1 SAS was then split into two, 250 of them – including himself – joining the newly created Special Raiding Squadron under Mayne’s command, and the remaining 150 making up the new Special Boat Squadron under Major George Jellicoe, another desert stalwart and son of the First World War admiral. Both units were to take part in HUSKY: the SBS to launch diversionary raids on Sardinia, the SRS to attack the battery at Capo Murro di Porco – not that any of them knew that then. The idea was for the SRS to parachute into battle, and the SBS to get there by sea.

The SRS was, from the outset, Mayne’s unit, although on paper they were answerable to a colonel commanding HQ Raiding Forces, who arrived at Kabrit and gave a speech that impressed no one very much. ‘It hardly mattered,’ noted Davis, ‘as we hardly saw anything of him.8 To all intents and purposes Paddy was the boss and took no orders from anyone.’ Mayne’s mission was to shape this new unit and train it as he saw fit, so long as the training involved stifling heat, endurance, scaling cliffs, close-quarters fighting and firing mortars. He decided to divide his men into three troops of three sections each, which were divided down again into half-sections and then three-man teams. Davis was put in No. 2 Troop under Captain Harry Poat, whom he liked and respected immediately. In fact, he liked all his new fellows.

On 20 March, Mayne had briefed his men in a soft, faltering voice that could barely be heard. They were, he told them, in for a very intense period of training – for what, no one knew, not even he; but it was going to be important. Within a week, after one last drunken party, they set off for Palestine, where they began training with a 45-mile march in oven-like heat. Over the next two months, there was no let-up; at the beginning of June, by now physically honed, they boarded the converted Irish Sea ferry HMS Ulster Monarch to begin a month of intensive training in seaborne assault, involving getting ashore in LCAs – landing craft, assault – climbing cliffs and carrying out night-time research assaults; plans for a parachute assault had been quietly dropped. That this was the kind of operation for which Jellicoe’s SBS had been established was never mentioned. At the end of June came further endurance marches and experiments with Benzedrine, an amphetamine – ‘speed’ – that was trialled on No. 3 Troop. Mayne had been quite impressed with its effect: the men had been dragging their heels, but after taking the drug perked up enormously, picking up their feet, swinging their arms and singing merrily. Finally came their last training exercise: a mock assault on a British anti-aircraft battery 2 miles or so from where the Ulster Monarch was docked. ‘The attack’, noted Peter Davis, ‘was an outstanding success in every way.9 I do not think it any exaggeration to say that those gunners were completely at a loss.’

By early June, then, the Allies had a decent number of supremely well-trained and highly motivated troops. There were also British Commandos, created and designed for raiding operations. Really, these men were among the very best soldiers anywhere in the world at this time. It was in the delivery of these troops where differences emerged, for while the SRS and Commandos were in pretty safe hands with the navy, the same could not be said for Allied paratroopers, whether those under Gavin’s command or the British training for later operations on the Primosole Bridge; for while the state of glider training was absolutely deplorable, training for the troop carrier commands was hardly sufficient either. In part this was because delivering paratroopers into combat was just one of their many roles; transports were constantly busy, especially given that the Allies were preparing for HUSKY from bases stretched as far apart as Palestine, Malta and French Morocco.

It meant, though, that troop carrier aircrew simply had not had the same levels of combined training as had those being delivered into battle by the navy. This amounted to a grave flaw in the development of the airborne arm: that while so much thought had been given to training the elite troops themselves, the same concentration had not been applied to those charged with delivering them to the battle zone. The British had not developed a troop transport, and while the Americans had successfully developed the DC-3 into the C-47 – called the Dakota by the British – some important adaptations had not been made, such as providing the military aircraft with self-sealing fuel tanks, which helped prevent the fatal spread of fire should one of them get hit. Furthermore, the cream of the crop among pilots and navigators tended to fly fighters or bombers, not transport aircraft. This led to the paradoxical situation where some of the very best troops were being delivered into combat by among the least trained and least skilled pilots. There were, of course, exceptions; but 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, who would be delivering the 505th Parachute Combat Team into Sicily, had conducted only two night-time parachute drop exercises. Of these, one had become badly dispersed while the second went rather better; it was hard to know what could be gleaned from these results, but even an optimist could only conclude they now had a fifty–fifty chance of getting it right on the night. A better option would be to have the troops dropped in daylight, but that simply wasn’t possible. The invasion fleet needed to approach the coast under cover of darkness because of the threat of enemy aircraft and coastal batteries, which meant the invasion had to be launched at very first light. The whole point of the airborne operations was to take out strongpoints and secure ground before the landings. And that meant dropping in darkness.

Colonel Jim Gavin had wavered continually during this training and waiting period. Jump exercises on to the hard, stony desert near their training base in Morocco had led to one too many injuries, which was frustrating. His men were in fine fettle; but despite this, one moment he felt confident, the next dark doubts crept into his mind. ‘I feel quite certain that I will also get an opportunity for advancement if I survive,’ he confided to his diary.10 ‘I may not. I am going to keep the parachute tradition in mind. Chances will be taken, risks run, and everything ventured. If I survive, well and good. If I am killed at least I have been true to myself, my convictions … At the moment, I haven’t the slightest fear.’

He worried, too, about his subordinate commanders. One in particular, Major Gray of the 2nd Battalion, troubled him. Gavin just didn’t feel he was cutting it. Despite these concerns, he’d not thought to relieve him before the assault; but then Gray had gone AWOL for a few days. As it happened, he had been on a legitimate fact-finding operation – but for Gavin it was enough to wield the axe. ‘More bad judgement than AWOL,’ Gavin had conceded.11 ‘I should have replaced him in the States.’ Gray had been one of just three battalion commanders in the 505th, and Gavin had to feel totally confident in all of them. Major Mark Alexander, the highly competent battalion XO – deputy – took over the command on 21 June. Despite Gavin’s doubts, Gray had been popular with the men, making Alexander’s task, just a couple of weeks before the jump into action, an invidious one. ‘It really put pressure on me,’ said Alexander, ‘as I had a lot to do to get on top of things.12 There were a lot of good men in the battalion, but some of them were still Gray’s men and I had to fight that issue because they didn’t understand why he was being relieved.’

None the less, Alexander, at thirty-one, was older than most, tall and athletic, and had a natural aura of authority; he was also, like Gavin, the kind of man who would never dream of asking any of his men to do something he would not do himself. Gavin gave him a very able West Pointer, Captain Jack Norton, as his new XO, and together the two men swiftly got the battalion back on an even keel. Even so, Alexander had not been too happy with how the night exercises had gone, and so had spoken to the commander of the troop carrier group that would be taking them to Sicily. No matter where they were dropped, Alexander emphasized, he wanted to make sure the battalion was dropped together. That way, they would at least have the opportunity to organize themselves and fight as a battalion. It was hardly a resounding vote of confidence in the Troop Carrier Wing.

Then there was the time it took to move everyone and all their equipment up to Tunisia. The move from Oujda in western Algeria had begun on 16 June, by which time Gavin had once again been racked by doubts. It was too late for any more practice jumps, however, as the move was not expected to be completed until 3 July. By that time they were bivouacked about 20 miles north of the ancient city of Kairouan and 10 miles south of Enfidaville, where just a couple of months earlier there had been fierce fighting. Battle debris was still strewn all over the place. ‘The loneliest sight in the world,’ Gavin jotted in his diary, ‘is to come across a lone grave in the desert marked only with a simple wooden cross and a rusty helmet.’13 He was keenly aware that one day very soon, that could easily be him.

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