Out of the Night Sky: The Airborne Story

A U.S. paratrooper describes his drop onto Sicily to Coast Guardsmen aboard a transport, July 1943. U.S. Coast Guard photograph, National Archives.

Operation Husky · Chapter 3 of 9

Out of the Night Sky: The Airborne Story

Gliders in the sea, paratroopers scattered across sixty miles, and a convoy that shot down its own reinforcements: Sicily wrote the airborne rulebook in blood.

9–16 July 1943Ponte Grande · Piano Lupo · Biazzo Ridge · Gela–Farello · Primosole~27 min read

At 1842 on 9 July 1943, the first tug aircraft lumbered off the dusty strips around Sousse and Kairouan in Tunisia, each towing a glider packed with British infantry. Two hours later the first of 222 American C-47s followed with the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division. Over the next week, four Allied airborne operations would be flown into Sicily. Together they formed the largest airborne effort the Allies had yet attempted, and by most measures they went badly wrong.

Gliders were released too far out and fell into the sea. Paratroopers were dropped across a stretch of southeastern Sicily some sixty miles wide. On the night of 11 July, Allied gunners shot down 23 of their own transports. Yet scattered men, fighting in knots of a dozen or a hundred, seized bridges, blocked roads and threw the Axis counterattack off balance at the moment it mattered. This chapter tells both halves of that story and follows the lessons that came out of it to Normandy.

A new arm, untested at scale

In the summer of 1943, airborne warfare was still largely a theory for the Western Allies. The Germans had shown what parachute and glider troops could do in Belgium in 1940 and on Crete in 1941, though Crete’s cost had persuaded Hitler never to mount another big airborne assault. British and American paratroopers had fought in North Africa, but only in battalion-sized drops. Nobody on the Allied side had yet put a regiment or a brigade into battle from the air at night.

Husky called for both. The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division under Maj. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway had arrived in North Africa in the spring and trained in the heat around Oujda in French Morocco. Its 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, commanded by 36-year-old Col. James M. Gavin and reinforced as a regimental combat team with the 3rd Battalion of the 504th, artillery and engineers, would make the first American regimental combat jump of the war. The 504th, under Col. Reuben H. Tucker, would follow as a reinforcement when called.

The British 1st Airborne Division under Maj. Gen. G. F. Hopkinson provided two brigades for Husky: the 1st Airlanding Brigade, glider-borne infantry under Brig. Philip Hicks, and the 1st Parachute Brigade under Brig. Gerald Lathbury. Their gliders would be flown by the army pilots of the Glider Pilot Regiment, commanded by Col. George Chatterton.

The aircraft and crews came mostly from the U.S. Army Air Forces. The 52nd Troop Carrier Wing had 227 C-47s available for the American paratroopers. The 51st Troop Carrier Wing supplied most of the tugs and gliders for the British, alongside RAF Albemarles and Halifaxes of No. 38 Wing. Many of the American crews were newly trained in formation flying and had little experience navigating over water at night, let alone under fire.

Ridgway saw the biggest danger clearly. According to the official history, he was “most anxious lest his follow-up units draw fire from the large number of naval vessels which would be off the beaches.” On 22 June naval representatives refused to guarantee a definite corridor for airborne missions after D-Day, and Ridgway recommended that no further airborne movements be made after D-Day unless one was provided. On 7 July, three days before the invasion, the Navy assured him and the troop carrier commanders that fire would be withheld if the flights followed designated routes and made their last leg over land. That assurance would be tested four nights later.

Ladbroke takes off

The British glider operation, codenamed Ladbroke, had one objective: the Ponte Grande, the bridge that carries the coast road over the Anapo River just south of Syracuse. If the 1st Airlanding Brigade could seize it and the high ground around it, and stop the defenders from blowing it, the 5th Division coming ashore at Cassibile could drive straight into Syracuse, the best port in southeastern Sicily.

At 1842 on 9 July, according to Garland and Smyth, 109 American C-47s and 35 RAF Albemarles and Halifaxes began taking off towing 144 gliders, mostly American-built Waco CG-4As, which the British called Hadrians, with a handful of the larger British Horsas. Tugwell’s count is 136 Wacos and 8 Horsas. The Horsas had been towed from England to North Africa for the operation. The force carried roughly 2,000 men of the 2nd South Staffordshire Regiment and the 1st Border Regiment, with engineers and supporting troops.

The plan was fragile from the start. Chatterton had protested it. His pilots had trained on the Horsa, and most had flown the Waco only briefly; by one account they averaged about four and a half hours on the type, with just over an hour of it at night. The flight was about 450 miles, flown low over the sea, with a turn at Malta, where a cone of searchlights gave the formations a final navigational fix. The gliders were to be released offshore and glide in to landing zones on the Maddalena peninsula and around the bridge, in the dark, onto ground broken up by stone walls and terraces.

Then the wind came up. The same gale that pitched the invasion convoys about tossed the tug-and-glider combinations around the sky. Seven failed to clear the North African coast. Over the sea the formations loosened and lost each other. As they approached Sicily, searchlights came on and antiaircraft guns opened fire.

Gliders in the sea

What happened next is one of the grimmest episodes of the invasion. Under fire, in high winds and in darkness, many tug pilots released their gliders too early, well out to sea. Some gliders were cast off at the wrong height or the wrong distance; some tow ropes broke. Heavily loaded Wacos, built of steel tube and fabric, could not reach the coast. They came down in the sea, and many of the men inside, weighed down with weapons and equipment, drowned.

The numbers are disputed, and the sources count different things. Garland and Smyth estimate that about 115 gliders were released in roughly the right area, carrying more than 1,200 men; only 54 landed in Sicily and just 12 on or near the correct landing zones, while the rest fell into the sea. The CMH campaign pamphlet says that of 144 gliders, 12 landed on target, 69 crashed into the sea and the rest were scattered. The Airborne Assault Museum’s ParaData says “78 gliders landed in the sea.” Samuel Mitcham’s account counts 65 released too early and lost at sea, 12 on target and 59 landing up to 25 miles away, with about 252 men drowned. Gen. Sir John Hackett, quoted by the Malta Aviation Museum, put it starkly: “Over three hundred British Airborne soldiers drowned.”

Mitcham gives the 1st Airlanding Brigade’s losses as 313 killed and 174 wounded or missing, and the Glider Pilot Regiment’s as 14 killed and 87 wounded or missing. Survivors in the water clung to floating wreckage through the night; some were picked up by landing craft and warships of the invasion fleet the next morning, others swam ashore. Hackett and other British officers bitterly blamed the inexperienced American tug crews, who, he said, were flying C-47s “with no crew protection and no self-sealing tanks” and cast off over the sea at night in high winds. American airmen pointed to the gale, the flak and a plan that had asked too much. Both sides had a case. The deeper fault lay in sending half-trained crews on a complicated night mission in bad weather.

Ponte Grande: eight officers and sixty-five men

Out of the wreckage of Ladbroke came one of the great small-unit actions of the war. Staff Sgt. Dennis Galpin of the Glider Pilot Regiment was flying a Horsa carrying Lt. L. Withers and No. 15 Platoon of the 2nd South Staffords. Released about 500 feet over the sea, according to his award citation, Galpin glided some six miles under antiaircraft fire and searchlights, swinging out to sea to dodge the flak, and came in low to find the bridge lit up by a searchlight beam. He put the glider down in a field close to the Ponte Grande.

Withers split his platoon, sending half across the river to attack from the far bank, and took the bridge in a rush. The Italian defenders were driven off, and the British pulled the demolition charges from the bridge and threw them into the river. Through the rest of the night, stragglers from other gliders that had landed far from their zones made their way to the sound of the fighting. By dawn, according to Garland and Smyth, the force holding the bridge numbered eight officers and 65 men, fewer than 100 of the more than 2,000 who had set out from Tunisia.

They held through the morning against growing Italian counterattacks supported by artillery and mortars. Ammunition ran low. By 1500 only 15 of them were still unwounded. At 1530 they were overrun, and eight men escaped south toward the beaches. The rest were taken prisoner.

But the bridge still stood, its charges gone. Within the hour a column of the British 5th Division, with artillery and tanks, came up the road from Cassibile, retook the Ponte Grande intact and drove on into Syracuse, freeing some of the captured glidermen on the way. Syracuse fell that evening. A port that the Allies had expected to fight for over days was in their hands before the end of D-Day, and a handful of glider soldiers had made it possible.

Gavin’s scattered drop

The American drop, called Husky No. 1, was bigger and more ambitious. Gavin’s 505th Parachute Regimental Combat Team, with the attached 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, the 456th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion and a company of the 307th Airborne Engineers, was to land on the high ground at Piano Lupo, where the roads from Niscemi and Biscari met about seven miles inland of Gela, and block the Axis counterattack routes to the 1st Division’s beaches.

About two hours after the gliders, 222 C-47s of the 52nd Troop Carrier Wing took off from their Tunisian fields in five groups. The planned drops ran from 2330 on 9 July to 0006 on 10 July. About 3,400 paratroopers were aboard. The route took them past Malta, then northwest to the Sicilian coast near the mouth of the Acate River.

It came apart in the dark. The wind, estimated by the official history at about 30 miles an hour, pushed the formations off course. Haze, dust and fires on the ground obscured the checkpoints, and a quarter moon gave little light. Inexperienced navigators missed their landmarks. Some pilots, under flak for the first time, took evasive action and lost the formation. Jumpmasters stood in the doors looking down at a coastline that did not match their maps.

The result was the widest scatter of the war to that date. By Garland and Smyth’s count, 33 sticks came down in the British Eighth Army’s area to the east, 53 in the 1st Division’s zone around Gela, and 127 inland from the 45th Division’s beaches between Vittoria and Caltagirone. Eight aircraft were shot down by antiaircraft fire after dropping their men. Only the 2nd Battalion, 505th, under Maj. Mark Alexander, landed more or less together, and even it was about 25 miles from its drop zone. Eight planes of the second serial put most of Company I on the correct drop zone.

Gavin himself came down in a field with no idea where he was. His aircraft had missed several checkpoints, and he was not sure he was even in Sicily. The CMH pamphlet places his landing about 25 miles southeast of his drop zone. He gathered about 15 men, captured an Italian soldier, and through the night and the next day led his small group toward the sound of the guns, fighting several skirmishes on the way.

Small groups, big effects

A scattered drop is a disaster for the men in it. It can be a disaster for the enemy too. Across southeastern Sicily on the night of 9/10 July, small groups of American paratroopers did what they had been trained to do when lost: they gathered whoever they could find, attacked whatever was nearby, cut telephone wires, ambushed vehicles and shot up anything that moved on the roads. To the Italian and German commanders trying to make sense of the reports, it seemed that paratroopers were everywhere, and the exaggerated reports of their numbers helped slow and confuse the Axis response.

Some groups did exactly what the plan had asked. At the Ponte Dirillo, the bridge carrying the coast road over the Acate River, about 85 men of Company G, 505th, under Capt. James McGinity, landed about three miles from their objective, marched to it and seized it, even though the demolition section that should have helped them had been dropped somewhere else. They held it until the 45th Division arrived.

At Piano Lupo itself, fewer than 200 paratroopers, many of them from Lt. Col. Arthur Gorham’s 1st Battalion, 505th, gathered on the high ground at the road junction that was the regiment’s main objective. They attacked the Italian strongpoints there and, on 10 July, met the 16th Infantry pushing up from the beaches. Together they fought off Italian tanks and then the Hermann Göring Division’s first attack. On 11 July Gorham’s paratroopers, with a bazooka, accounted for one of the German tanks that broke into the lines at Abbio Priolo, as told in Chapter 4. Gorham himself was killed in the fighting there.

Elsewhere, Maj. Alexander’s 2nd Battalion, landed intact but far to the east near the 45th Division’s sector, cleared Italian positions around Santa Croce Camerina and helped the Thunderbirds forward. Dozens of smaller parties fought isolated actions that no one ever fully recorded. Some were captured; some were killed; many walked for days to rejoin their units. On D-Day the Seventh Army listed 700 men missing, most of them scattered paratroopers.

Biazzo Ridge: Gavin’s stand

Gavin’s walk toward the guns ended at a low ridge east of the Acate River, about four miles from the sea. At 0230 on 11 July his little group made contact with American troops five miles southeast of Vittoria. By about 0500 he was in Vittoria, collecting paratroopers and three airborne pack howitzers. West of the town he found Maj. Edward Krause with about 180 men of the 3rd Battalion, 505th, a force that grew to about 250. He also picked up some 40 men of Company L, 180th Infantry, and 20 paratroop engineers.

Gavin started west along the road toward Gela. At about 0900 his lead elements ran into a German column heading for the mouth of the Acate River: an infantry-heavy battle group of the Hermann Göring Division from Biscari, with Tiger tanks in support. Gavin attacked at once, took the ridge, which the Army histories call Biazzo Ridge, and dug in. The CMH pamphlet describes his opposition as some 700 German infantry, a battalion of self-propelled artillery and a company of Tigers. Gavin had a few hundred lightly armed paratroopers.

Through the morning and into the afternoon the Germans attacked the ridge. The paratroopers had bazookas, which bounced off the Tigers’ frontal armor, and little else that could stop a tank. One of the airborne 75mm pack howitzers was manhandled to the top of the ridge and fired at point-blank range, knocking out a Tiger. Two half-tracks towing 57mm antitank guns of the 179th Infantry arrived and engaged the other Tigers. A naval gunfire party and a liaison party from the 45th Division’s 189th Field Artillery Battalion arrived and began calling in fire.

Around 1500 the Germans broke off. Late in the afternoon eleven Sherman tanks of the 753rd Medium Tank Battalion came up, and shortly after 2000 Lt. Swingler arrived with about 100 more paratroopers on 45th Division trucks. About 45 minutes later, after a heavy artillery concentration, Gavin counterattacked down the ridge toward the river, stopping at dark. The Germans pulled back toward Biscari. Conrath had already ordered a general withdrawal of the Hermann Göring Division beginning that night.

Biazzo Ridge cost the 505th dearly; dozens of paratroopers were killed on the slope. But it kept a strong German battle group from reaching the 45th Division’s beaches on the most dangerous day of the campaign, and it showed that lightly armed airborne troops, well led, could stand against armor if they had to. Gavin received the Distinguished Service Cross. The ridge is spelled “Biazzo” in the Army histories and “Biazza” in many popular accounts; both refer to the same ground.

Night of 11/12 July: Husky No. 2

On 11 July, with the Gela beachhead under attack, Patton called for his airborne reserve. The 504th Parachute Infantry, less its 3rd Battalion, which had jumped with Gavin, would drop that night onto the Gela–Farello landing ground east of Gela to reinforce the 1st Division. With it would go the 376th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion and Company C of the 307th Airborne Engineers, 2,008 troops by the troop carriers’ count and 2,304 by another report, in 144 C-47s of the 52nd Troop Carrier Wing.

The route had been designed to keep the planes away from the fleet. After passing Malta the formations would make landfall near Sampieri, on the coast east of the American beaches, then fly a corridor two miles wide at 1,000 feet over the Allied front line northwest to Farello, approaching the beachhead from the land side as the Navy had asked.

Everyone involved knew the danger. At 0845 on 11 July, Patton’s headquarters sent a top-priority message to his principal subordinate commanders directing them to notify all units, especially the antiaircraft battalions, that paratroopers would drop on the Gela–Farello landing field at about 2330 that night. Ridgway went ashore and checked antiaircraft crews himself. Of six he visited, five had received the warning. The sixth had not.

The ships offshore had spent two days under air attack. The destroyer Maddox had been sunk on 10 July. That afternoon German bombers had set the ammunition ship Robert Rowan ablaze off Gela, and she had blown up in a column of smoke that could be seen for miles. Gunners on every ship and on the beaches had been firing at aircraft for two days, and they were exhausted and nervous.

At about 2150 on 11 July, a heavy German air raid struck the Gela area and the anchorage. Bombs fell among the ships and on the beaches, and every gun in range fired back. The raid lasted about an hour. The German bombers withdrew just before the first troop carriers crossed the coast.

The lead planes reached the drop zone and their paratroopers jumped. Then a single gun opened fire, by most accounts from a ship or a position near the beach, and within moments the fire spread along the whole beachhead and out across the fleet. Ships and shore batteries that had just been fighting German bombers now poured fire into the slow, low-flying C-47s in their corridor. Transports burst into flames and fell into the sea or onto the plain. Others were hit as their paratroopers stood in the doors, and men jumped from burning aircraft or were shot as they came down. Some pilots turned back out to sea and ran into the fleet’s fire again.

Of the 144 aircraft that took off from Tunisia, 23 never returned and 37 came back badly damaged, a loss rate of 16 percent. Six were shot down before their paratroopers could jump. Eight turned back to North Africa without dropping, carrying 12 officers and 92 men, among them four dead and six wounded who were taken off the planes. The 504th’s casualties for the night were 229: 81 dead, 132 wounded and 16 missing. The 52nd Troop Carrier Wing listed 7 dead, 30 wounded and 53 missing as of 24 July.

Brig. Gen. Charles L. Keerans Jr., the 82nd’s assistant division commander, was aboard one of the planes that did not return. He was never found.

Tucker’s own plane flew through the smoke of the burning Robert Rowan and reached the drop zone late, after the others had scattered. He jumped near Gela and, on landing, ran to a group of American tanks whose crews were firing at the aircraft overhead and stopped them. The next morning he counted only about one rifle company and one artillery battery present for duty from the roughly 2,000 men who had set out. By late afternoon on 12 July, as stragglers came in, the 504th had 37 officers and 518 men effective.

Who fired first?

The question was asked at once and never conclusively answered. The board of inquiry convened by Allied Force Headquarters, in Garland and Smyth’s dry phrase, “uttered only generalities.” Everyone agreed that advance warning had been sent, but some units denied receiving it. Some witnesses claimed that German bombers had mixed in with the friendly column; others claimed the first fire came from the enemy. At least one plane was brought down by enemy machine-gun fire near Comiso. But survivors reported that the heaviest fire came from Allied guns to the left of the corridor, along the beaches and from the ships, not from in front of them.

The senior airmen and admirals each drew their own conclusions. Tedder, the Allied air commander, sent Eisenhower a blunt assessment:

Gen. Carl Spaatz, commanding the Northwest African Air Forces, called the failure to restrict all antiaircraft fire during the approach and drop “the greatest mistake.” Admiral Cunningham defended his gunners with a sailor’s realism: “All ships fire at once at any aeroplane particularly low flying ones which approach them.” He blamed mainly bad routing and navigation, noting that some formations had strayed over the fleet.

Ridgway, whose division had paid the price, refused to look for scapegoats. He opposed disciplinary action, writing:

The losses are part of the inevitable price of war in human life.— Maj. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, 82nd Airborne Division, on the night of 11/12 July 1943 (quoted in Garland & Smyth, ch. 9)

Looking back, the causes were plain enough, even if blame was not. The warning had gone out, but not to every gun crew, and not in a form that could stand up to a German air raid ending minutes before the transports arrived. The corridor crossed the beachhead and ran close to the fleet. The pilots could not always hold it. There was no reliable way for a gunner in the dark to tell a C-47 from a Junkers. And once one gun fired, Tedder was right: nobody could stop the rest.

Fustian: the Primosole Bridge

Two nights later it happened again, this time to the British. Operation Fustian was meant to open the road to Catania. The 1st Parachute Brigade, 1,856 men under Brig. Gerald Lathbury, would seize the Primosole Bridge, a steel girder bridge carrying the main coast road over the Simeto River at the southern edge of the Catania plain, along with the high ground to the south, and hold until the 50th Division arrived from Lentini. Its three battalions were the 1st under Lt. Col. Alastair Pearson, the 2nd under Lt. Col. John Frost and the 3rd. An earlier British airborne plan to seize a bridge near Augusta, Operation Glutton, had been cancelled because the ground troops were advancing so fast.

On the evening of 13 July the paratroopers took off from Tunisia in 105 American C-47s and 11 RAF Albemarles, with 19 gliders, 11 Horsas and 8 Wacos, towed by Albemarles and Halifaxes and carrying the 6-pounder antitank guns of the 1st Airlanding Anti-Tank Battery. ParaData gives the total as 113 parachute aircraft and 16 gliders. The route passed close to the invasion fleet off the east coast.

Allied ships opened fire on the formation as it approached, again mistaking the transports for enemy aircraft. Then Axis antiaircraft fire along the coast hit the scattered planes. By the counts gathered in the main English-language accounts, 11 aircraft were shot down by Axis flak, 2 by Allied naval fire and 2 more were lost in a collision, 14 in all. Nine turned back after the naval fire and 10 more aborted. Only 39 aircraft dropped their men within half a mile of the drop zones. ParaData estimates that only about a quarter of the brigade landed accurately; Mitcham puts the number who reached the bridge at about 295.

It was enough to take the bridge. About 50 men of Pearson’s 1st Parachute Battalion rushed it in the early hours of 14 July, drove off the Italian defenders and removed the demolition charges. As more paratroopers and a few of the antitank guns arrived, they built a small perimeter around the bridge, while Frost’s men took part of the high ground to the south.

They were not alone on the Catania plain. Elements of the German 1st Fallschirmjäger Division had been flown in from 12 July, some of them dropped near Catania only hours before the British, and the 1st Fallschirmjäger Machine Gun Battalion arrived by road. ParaData names the German 4th Fallschirmjäger Brigade among the units that counterattacked. Through 14 July, German paratroopers, machine-gunners and artillery pressed in on the bridge from the north. In one of the very few battles of the war in which British and German paratroopers fought each other for the same objective, the Red Berets held until their ammunition was nearly gone, then withdrew to the high ground south of the river around 1700.

The 50th Division’s leading tanks and infantry reached the paratroopers that evening. Over the next two days the Durham Light Infantry battalions of the 151st Brigade fought to get the bridge back in a bitter battle among the vineyards and irrigation ditches along the Simeto. The 9th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, alone suffered about 100 casualties, 34 of them killed. The bridge was finally secured, intact, on 16 July. British airborne losses in Fustian were 141 dead and 168 wounded or missing.

Primosole was saved, but the road beyond it was not. The Germans dug in north of the Simeto, and the Eighth Army spent three weeks on the Catania plain. British troops did not enter Catania until 5 August, as Chapter 6 describes.

Lessons: from Sicily to Normandy

Sicily nearly ended the American experiment with airborne divisions. The scattering of the paratroopers and glidermen on the night of 9/10 July, followed by the shooting down of friendly aircraft on 11 and 13 July, in Garland and Smyth’s words “almost brought American airborne efforts in World War II to an end.” Many senior officers became convinced that “the basic structure of the airborne division was unsound.” Eisenhower himself told Marshall that autumn that he doubted whether division-size airborne units could be controlled in battle and suggested breaking them up into smaller, self-contained combat teams.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Swing, the American airborne adviser at Allied Force Headquarters, studied what had gone wrong. He identified five causes: insufficient planning, weeks earlier, to coordinate routes with all the forces involved; troop carrier formations that could not follow the routes they were given, partly because of poorly trained pilots and partly because the routes were too complicated; a rigid rule that naval forces fire on any aircraft within range at night, whatever efforts it made to identify itself; an enemy bombing raid that coincided with the arrival of the airborne force; and ground commanders who failed to warn their antiaircraft gunners.

The airborne commanders fought back. Swing went back to his own 11th Airborne Division in the United States and, in December 1943, staged a large-scale test in North Carolina, the Knollwood maneuver, flown from the airfields around Camp Mackall and Fort Bragg. The night drops and glider landings went well enough to persuade the War Department to keep its airborne divisions. In North Africa, the 82nd developed pathfinder teams, small groups of paratroopers who jumped first with radar beacons and lights to mark the drop zones for the main force. They were used for the first time in September 1943, when the 82nd jumped to reinforce the beachhead at Salerno, accurately and with no friendly-fire losses.

The procedural lessons were written into the plans for Normandy. Airborne routes were laid out to keep the troop carriers away from the invasion fleet. Naval and ground antiaircraft gunners were placed under strict fire-control orders during airborne operations. Allied aircraft were painted with black and white recognition stripes before D-Day, a measure that grew from the same fear of friendly fire. Training for troop carrier crews in night formation flying and navigation was expanded. None of it made Normandy’s drops tidy, but the main assault lifts on the night of 5/6 June 1944 did not suffer anything like the slaughter over Gela.

The men themselves drew a simpler lesson. Gavin, who became one of the most thoughtful airborne commanders of the war, concluded that scattered paratroopers who kept fighting could achieve results out of all proportion to their numbers, because the enemy could never know where they were or how many there were. Biazzo Ridge, Piano Lupo, Ponte Dirillo, Ponte Grande and Primosole all proved it. The cost of learning it, in the sea off Syracuse and in the sky over Gela, was paid by men who never reached the ground.

1. 22 JuneNavy declines a guaranteed corridor for post-D-Day airborne missions; Ridgway objects.
2. 7 JulyNavy assures Ridgway fire will be withheld if flights follow designated routes.
3. 9 July, 1842Ladbroke tugs and gliders begin taking off from Tunisia.
4. 9 July, about 2 hours later222 C-47s carry Gavin’s 505th PRCT toward Sicily; drops planned 2330–0006.
5. 10 July, nightGliders released short; Galpin lands by Ponte Grande; Withers takes the bridge.
6. 10 July, 1530Ponte Grande’s defenders overrun; within the hour the 5th Division retakes it intact.
7. 11 July, 0845Patton’s headquarters warns units that paratroopers will drop at Farello about 2330.
8. 11 July, 0900–1500Biazzo Ridge: Gavin holds against German infantry and Tigers.
9. 11 July, about 2150German air raid on Gela lasts about an hour.
10. 11/12 July, nightHusky No. 2: Allied fire downs 23 of 144 C-47s; Keerans lost.
11. 13/14 JulyFustian: 1st Parachute Brigade takes Primosole Bridge.
12. 14 July, about 1700Paratroopers withdraw from the bridge to the high ground south of the Simeto.
13. 16 JulyPrimosole retaken intact by the 50th Division.

While the paratroopers fought for the bridges and the ridges, the main Axis blow was falling on the Gela beachhead itself. On 11 July Italian and German tanks drove to within sight of the sea, and the fate of the American landing depended on the 1st Division, Darby’s Rangers, a few paratroopers and the guns of the fleet. Chapter 4 tells the story of that crisis.