Crisis at Gela: Tanks, Tigers and Naval Guns

SS Robert Rowan explodes off Gela, 11 July 1943. U.S. Navy photograph, National Archives.

Operation Husky · Chapter 4 of 9

Crisis at Gela: Tanks, Tigers and Naval Guns

For forty-eight hours the beachhead hung in the balance as Italian and German armor drove for the sea, and cruisers fired over the dunes to stop them.

10–14 July 1943Gela · Piano Lupo · Biazzo Ridge · Gulf of Gela~28 min read

On the afternoon of 11 July 1943, German tanks rolled across the flat wheat country east of Gela until their commanders could see the transports lying off the beaches. Behind them, columns of Italian infantry had already been shredded in the olive groves north of the town. Overhead, German bombers were working over the anchorage, and within the hour an ammunition ship would vanish in a pillar of smoke so tall that it became one of the defining photographs of the war.

This chapter tells the story of those two days. It is the part of the Sicily campaign where the Axis came closest to doing what it had planned for months: catch an Allied army half-landed and throw it back into the sea. The Hermann Göring Division and the Italian Livorno Division came at the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, Darby’s Rangers, the 45th Division’s flank and Jim Gavin’s scattered paratroopers from three directions. They failed, but not by much, and the reasons they failed say a great deal about how the Allies would fight the rest of the war in Europe.

Guzzoni’s Plan: A Pincer Aimed at Gela

General Alfredo Guzzoni, commanding the Italian Sixth Army from Enna, had studied the island long enough to know where the Allies would land. Gela, with its long sandy beaches, its airfields at Ponte Olivo and Biscari, and roads fanning inland toward Niscemi and Caltagirone, was an obvious target. His defensive scheme rested on a simple idea: let the coastal divisions absorb the first blow, then strike the beachheads with mobile reserves before the invaders could land their artillery and tanks.

Those reserves were few. Kesselring had sent most of the 15th Panzergrenadier Division to the west of the island before the invasion, guessing wrong about where the blow would fall. That left one German formation in a position to hit the American beaches: the Hermann Göring Panzer Division under Generalleutnant Paul Conrath, rebuilt after its predecessor surrendered in Tunisia. It had about 90 Panzer III and IV tanks on 9 July, according to the U.S. Army’s official history, plus a company of 17 Tiger I heavy tanks from schwere Panzer-Abteilung 504 attached to it. Alongside it stood the Italian 4th Infantry Division “Livorno,” about 13,000 men under General Domenico Chirieleison and the only fully motorized Italian division on Sicily, and a handful of mobile groups built around obsolete Renault R35 and Fiat 3000 light tanks.

Guzzoni’s intent was a converging attack. The Hermann Göring Division would drive on Gela from the northeast; Livorno would come from the northwest; Mobile Group E would push straight down Highway 117 into the town. Had the three blows landed together on the morning of 10 July, before a single American howitzer was ashore, the 1st Infantry Division would have faced a crisis it could not easily have met.

They did not land together. Scattered American paratroopers had cut telephone lines all over the southeast, and Allied bombers had wrecked others. Many units never received the corps order for a coordinated counterattack. Conrath, alerted at 2200 on 9 July and unable to reach either corps or army headquarters, telephoned the German liaison general, Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, outlined his plan, and attacked on his own. He did not yet know his division had been placed under Italian XVI Corps for a combined effort. The result, as the U.S. Army historians Albert Garland and Howard McGaw Smyth put it, was a series of separate, uncoordinated thrusts.

10 July: Italian Tanks in the Streets of Gela

Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby’s Force X, the 1st and 4th Ranger Battalions with the 1st Battalion, 39th Engineers, had come ashore at 0335 on 10 July, fifty minutes late, and cleared Gela by 0800 with about 200 Italian prisoners. They had barely begun digging in when the first counterattack arrived. (The landings themselves are told in Chapter 2.)

A column of 13 Italian light tanks with infantry came south down Highway 117 from the direction of Ponte Olivo. The destroyer USS Shubrick took it under fire and set several tanks burning. Nine or ten kept going and broke into the town, but the infantry who were supposed to follow them stayed behind. For about twenty minutes the tanks clattered through Gela’s narrow streets while Rangers and engineers fought them from doorways and rooftops with rifle grenades, bazookas and demolition charges. Darby commandeered a 37mm antitank gun from the beach, manhandled it into action and knocked out a tank himself. The survivors withdrew, their crews badly hurt. Darby received an oak leaf cluster to his Distinguished Service Cross.

West of the town a battalion of the Livorno Division advanced in close formation, the way infantry had attacked in 1917. The Rangers had already turned captured Italian coastal guns around, and they opened fire with those, with their own mortars, machine guns and rifles. No Italian soldier reached the edge of Gela that day. Garland and Smyth record that the survivors simply fled.

Piano Lupo: Paratroopers and the 16th Infantry

Seven miles east of Gela, the road from Niscemi meets the coastal highway at a road junction the Americans called Piano Lupo. It was the 505th Parachute Regimental Combat Team’s key objective for the night jump of 9/10 July, and it was the hinge on which the whole 1st Division beachhead turned. Whoever held it controlled the best route for German armor to reach the beaches.

The drop had gone badly. Of Colonel James M. Gavin’s roughly 3,400 paratroopers, only scattered handfuls landed near their zones; fewer than 200 men held Piano Lupo on the morning of 10 July. (The full airborne story is in Chapter 3.) Yet those paratroopers, gathered under officers like Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Gorham, joined forces with the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, as it pushed inland from the beaches.

About 20 Italian tanks of Mobile Group E came down the Niscemi road first, rolling through naval gunfire at Piano Lupo and turning west onto Highway 115 toward Gela. The forward battalions of the 16th RCT had nothing heavier than infantry weapons, but they knocked out two tanks and halted the column. With no infantry beside them and under counterbattery fire, the Italian tankers turned back north. Their own infantry had stayed under cover.

Then came the Germans. Conrath’s tank-heavy force, with a two-battalion tank regiment, two armored artillery battalions and reconnaissance and engineer battalions fighting as infantry, had been due to attack before 0900. Air strikes, ambushes by roving paratroopers and poor march discipline slowed it badly. It did not hit Piano Lupo until 1400, about five hours late. Five- and six-inch shells from the cruisers and destroyers offshore, together with small-arms fire, stopped the tanks near Casa del Priolo. Conrath ordered a fresh attack at 1500, but it never built momentum, and he called it off.

The 16th Infantry’s messages that afternoon have the clipped relief of men who had expected to be overrun.

The Tigers and the 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry

East of the Acate River, Conrath’s second force had a very different composition: a two-battalion infantry regiment on trucks, an armored artillery battalion, and the company of 17 Tigers. Its target was the 45th Infantry Division’s left flank, where the 180th Infantry had landed near Scoglitti.

It jumped off at 1400 on 10 July, lost contact with division headquarters almost at once, and ran into the 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry, supported by a single battery of the 171st Field Artillery Battalion. By 1530 it had stopped. The Tigers, 56-ton machines built for the steppe, were hemmed in by stone walls and olive groves; some had defective steering. Inexperienced junior officers and green troops did the rest.

Conrath was furious. When he finally reached the column he relieved its commander. The new commander put the Tigers in front and attacked again. This time the attack rolled over the 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry, and captured its commander, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Schaefer, along with most of the battalion. Only when the 3rd Battalion, 180th Infantry, came up and held its ground did the German force break. Garland and Smyth describe it fleeing until its own officers stopped it short of Biscari.

Kesselring later judged that Conrath’s command on 10 July “was not fortunate.” He faulted, in particular, the separation of tanks from their armored infantry, the cardinal sin of German armored doctrine. The record supports him. On a day when the Americans had no tanks ashore and almost no artillery, the strongest German division on Sicily attacked late, in pieces, and in the wrong country for its heaviest weapons.

11 July: The Most Perilous Day

By the evening of 10 July, both sides were preparing for a second round. At about 2000, Guzzoni ordered the Hermann Göring and Livorno Divisions to attack the Gela beachhead together the next morning, and the reinforced 207th Coastal Division to strike at Licata. In Rome, Kesselring, without communications to Guzzoni, independently ordered Conrath to attack toward Gela on the morning of 11 July, reasoning that only German troops were offering real resistance and that the blow had to fall before the Americans landed their armor. Conrath, briefed at XVI Corps headquarters at Piazza Armerina, reorganized his division into three groups: two tank-heavy forces west of the Acate and one infantry-heavy force east of it.

The Americans were also on the move. At midnight the 26th and 16th Infantry jumped off toward Ponte Olivo airfield and Niscemi. Lieutenant Colonel John Corley’s 3rd Battalion, 26th Infantry, was stopped within thirty minutes by heavy fire on Highway 117. On the right, the 16th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion reached the Abbio Priolo ridge at 0530 with Gorham’s paratroopers, just in time to meet the German main effort.

At 0600 the attack began. The main German tank column came down the Niscemi road toward Piano Lupo. Mark III and IV tanks swung around the west flank of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, at Abbio Priolo. The battalion held with bazookas, part of the regimental antitank company and eight 105mm howitzers of the 7th Field Artillery Battalion, which fired 561 rounds. Conrath regrouped and attacked again, trying to envelop both flanks. By about 1100 the Americans had been forced back to Piano Lupo under the cover of artillery and naval gunfire, roughly to where they had started at midnight.

Meanwhile the second German tank force drove south from Ponte Olivo, down Highway 117 and across the open Gela plain toward the beaches. This was the moment the official history calls the most dangerous of the campaign. German tanks reached the coastal highway west of Santa Spina, about 2,000 yards from the water. At Hermann Göring headquarters someone reported that the Americans were re-embarking. Guzzoni was reportedly elated. The postwar record shows no such American order; the official historians suspected that an intercepted message had been misread.

The men who stopped the tanks on the plain were mostly gunners and infantry fighting from the sand. The 32nd Field Artillery Battalion, which had come ashore by DUKW, fired point-blank into the German armor. The 16th Infantry’s Cannon Company opened up from the dunes. Four of the ten medium tanks of Colonel I. D. White’s Combat Command B, 2nd Armored Division, which had struggled ashore through soft sand overnight, joined in, as did men of the 18th Infantry and the 41st Armored Infantry. The naval guns offshore fell silent here because the two sides were too close together. Sixteen German tanks were left burning on the Gela plain. Shortly after 1400, Conrath called off the attack.

At Piano Lupo, around the same hour, six German tanks that had broken into the lines of the 1st and 2nd Battalions, 16th Infantry, were disabled or driven off. The garrison of the road junction had held for two days.

The Livorno Division’s last attack

West of Gela the Italian part of the pincer went in on schedule and was destroyed. Chirieleison sent three columns: one from the north, one along the Gela–Butera road from the northwest, and one southeast from Butera Station. The northern column, supported by the remnants of Mobile Group E, ran into the Rangers. Captain Lyle’s two Ranger companies on the west side of town fired captured Italian artillery and 4.2-inch chemical mortars into the advancing infantry, then called in the light cruiser USS Savannah, which fired almost 500 six-inch rounds into the column. When the guns stopped, the Rangers rounded up nearly 400 prisoners. The Butera column met a company-size patrol from the 3rd Division and pulled back.

Garland and Smyth’s verdict is blunt: the Livorno Division “was finished as an effective combat unit.” More than half the Italian soldiers in the Gela attack were killed or wounded. Lyle later said there were human bodies hanging from the trees. It is worth remembering this when reading the popular story that Italian soldiers in Sicily would not fight. Livorno’s infantry walked into naval gunfire in the open and kept coming until there were not enough of them left to continue. By the end of the campaign, only about 4,200 of its 13,000 men reached the mainland.

Navy to the Rescue: Cruisers Over the Dunes

If one force can be said to have saved the Gela beachhead, it was Task Force 81, Rear Admiral John L. Hall’s attack force, and especially its cruisers and destroyers. The infantry ashore had almost no artillery on 10 July and very little on the 11th. Offshore lay the light cruisers Boise and Savannah, a screen of destroyers including Shubrick, Jeffers, Glennon, Butler and Beatty, and the British monitor HMS Abercrombie with her two 15-inch guns. Their gun crews could not see the targets. Shore fire control parties with the infantry and spotter floatplanes catapulted from the cruisers did the seeing for them.

The numbers are startling. In the 45th Division’s sector, the 180th Infantry’s surviving 2nd Battalion, down to fewer than 200 men under Lieutenant Colonel Cochran, lost contact with its own regiment. Cochran found the 171st Field Artillery Battalion and, through its radios, the Navy. Between 0730 and 1030 on 11 July the destroyer USS Beatty fired 799 five-inch rounds into a single German column. Other destroyers joined: Laub fired 751 rounds, Cowie 200 and Tillman 46. West of Gela, Savannah’s almost 500 six-inch shells broke the Livorno attack.

Boise worked over the column coming down from Niscemi, firing on targets called in by her floatplane pilots. Army observers credited the cruiser with 13 tanks, a claim the ship’s crew relished. Postwar analysis, summarized in the Wikipedia account of the battle that draws on Samuel Eliot Morison and Robert Cressman, suggests most of the tanks destroyed on the plain were actually knocked out by Combat Command B’s Shermans and the field artillery. What is not in dispute is the effect of the naval fire on German movement: columns that came within range of six-inch guns broke up, scattered and lost their timing.

Had we only known what we were shooting at, we would have cut loose with the whole fifteen-gun battery.— Captain of USS Boise, quoted by Samuel Eliot Morison (via Garland & Smyth, ch. VII)

There were limits. On the plain on the afternoon of 11 July, the ships could not fire because German tanks were mixed in with the American infantry. Air support was worse. On 10 July, the 1st Division and Seventh Army made six requests for direct air support; none was flown. On the 11th, the 1st Division made five more, and one was flown, in the late afternoon. The system that routed requests from Sicily through North Africa simply could not respond in time. It was a lesson that would be paid for again at Brolo in August and would shape the air–ground arrangements used in France a year later.

At night the bombardment continued. The monitor HMS Abercrombie, a shallow-draft gun platform built to shell coastlines, fired her 15-inch guns into the hills on the night of 12 July. U.S. Navy photographers aboard Boise caught the muzzle flashes lighting up the sea. Two days later Abercrombie would move west to support the 3rd Division’s push on Agrigento.

Patton Comes Ashore

Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. had spent D-Day aboard the headquarters ship USS Monrovia, frustrated by fragmentary reports. On 10 July he had already ordered the floating reserve, Major General Hugh Gaffey’s 2nd Armored Division (less Combat Command A, which was with the 3rd Division at Licata) and the 1st Division’s 18th RCT, to land in the 1st Division’s zone. The landing was slow and messy. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. reported Yellow and Blue beaches heavily mined, so Gaffey switched to Red Beach 2. The 18th RCT’s first wave was not ashore until 2130; an officer and two enlisted men drowned in the surf. Two platoons of medium tanks landed at 0200 on 11 July and promptly bogged down in soft sand.

On the morning of 11 July Patton went ashore himself. He found Gela under attack and walked into the middle of the fight, a decision characteristic of the man and much remarked on by those who watched him. At the Rangers’ command post he urged Captain Lyle to keep firing on the Italian infantry. Garland and Smyth record his reported words to Lyle: “Kill every one of the goddam bastards.” Later that day he pressed Major General Terry Allen to take Ponte Olivo and Niscemi, objectives the 1st Division had been supposed to reach already.

Patton’s presence mattered less for tactical direction than for nerve. His reputation and his visible confidence on the beach steadied a headquarters that had spent the morning watching German tanks approach. By nightfall the 1st Division beachhead was secure, linked to the 3rd Division on its left, and the 2nd Armored Division had landed tanks, light tanks and artillery.

That same morning, at 0845, Patton’s headquarters sent the top-priority warning that the 504th Parachute Infantry would drop on the Gela–Farello landing ground that night. What happened when those transports arrived over the anchorage, minutes after a German air raid, is told in Chapter 3: 23 aircraft lost, 37 badly damaged, and 229 casualties in the 504th before the regiment could fight.

Death From the Air: Maddox, Robert Rowan and the Anchorage

The Luftwaffe had lost most of its Sicilian airfields to Allied bombing before the invasion, and more than half of the Axis aircraft on the island had been withdrawn by 10 July. Those that remained, along with bombers flying from the mainland, concentrated on the crowded anchorage off Gela. On 10 July the Luftwaffe flew about 370 sorties and the Italian air force 141, according to figures cited in the Wikipedia account of the battle. They did real damage.

USS Maddox: two minutes

Before dawn on 10 July, the destroyer USS Maddox (DD-622) was on antisubmarine patrol about 16 miles off the beaches with Task Force 81. A German dive bomber put a bomb into her after magazine. The ship rolled over and sank in about two minutes, one of the fastest losses of an American warship in the war. The Navy’s Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships records that her captain, Lieutenant Commander Eugene S. Sarsfield, stayed aboard to oversee the abandonment and went down with her; he received a posthumous Navy Cross. Seventy-four men survived. With a crew of about 284, roughly 210 were lost; some accounts give 211 or 212.

The same day, LST-313 was hit off Gela with 21 men killed, and the transport USS Barnett was struck during the raids, with 7 killed and 35 wounded. Gunners on every ship stood at their mounts day and night, and every approaching aircraft became, in their minds, a German one. That habit of mind, born of real danger, would have terrible consequences on the night of 11/12 July.

Robert Rowan: 421 aboard, 421 saved

Shortly before 1400 on 11 July, Junkers Ju 88s caught the Liberty ship SS Robert Rowan in Gela roads. She was loaded with ammunition and carried 334 soldiers of the 18th Infantry, 46 Navy armed guard sailors and 41 merchant crew. Bombs started fires in her holds. Everyone aboard got into boats and away. About twenty minutes later the cargo detonated in a column of smoke that rose thousands of feet over the gulf.

A Navy photographer caught the moment, and the picture became one of the most reproduced images of the Mediterranean war. It is often captioned as if it showed a ship lost with all hands. The opposite is true. Not one of the 421 men aboard died. The destroyer USS McLanahan tried to sink the burning hulk with gunfire, but in the shallows it would not go down; it lay in the bay for years, a navigational hazard and a landmark.

Biazzo Ridge: Gavin’s Stand

While the 1st Division fought for Piano Lupo and the plain, the decisive action on the eastern side of the battle was fought by a few hundred paratroopers who were not supposed to be there at all.

Jim Gavin had come down about 25 miles southeast of his drop zone. He spent D-Day collecting stragglers and walking toward the sound of the guns. At 0230 on 11 July, five miles southeast of Vittoria, his group made its first contact with another American unit, Company I of the 45th Division’s 179th Infantry. He entered Vittoria about 0500 and moved west on Highway 115, picking up Edward Krause’s 180 paratroopers of the 3rd Battalion, 505th, and about forty men of Company L, 180th Infantry, along the way.

Around 0900, near a farmhouse called Casa Biazzo on a low ridge east of the Acate River, they collided with the Hermann Göring Division’s eastern column, the same infantry-and-Tiger force that had overrun the 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry, the day before. Gavin attacked. At about 1000 he ordered an advance west toward Ponte Dirillo, and four Tiger tanks stopped it cold.

What followed became airborne legend. A paratrooper crew dragged a 75mm pack howitzer, a light gun built to be dropped by parachute, to the crest of the ridge and knocked out a Tiger at point-blank range. Two half-tracks of the 179th Infantry towing 57mm antitank guns engaged the others. Naval gunfire and liaison parties from the 189th Field Artillery Battalion arrived, and in the afternoon eleven Shermans of the 753rd Medium Tank Battalion came up. By about 1500 the Germans pulled back. Shortly after 2000, Lieutenant Swingler arrived with about 100 more paratroopers. After an artillery concentration, Gavin’s men attacked again about forty-five minutes later and scattered the Germans in front of them. At dark he halted and dug in along the ridge.

Gavin received the Distinguished Service Cross for Biazzo Ridge. More important was what the fight did to Conrath. When he learned of the losses on the ridge, he decided on his own initiative to break contact near Gela and withdraw toward Caltagirone, which his division reached on the night of 13 July. Von Senger had wanted him to wheel east toward Vittoria and Comiso; after Biazzo Ridge, Conrath had no appetite for it.

The Armor Tally: What the Axis Lost

How many tanks did the Axis lose at Gela? The honest answer is a range. The Hermann Göring Division had 90 Panzer III and IV tanks on 9 July. Fifty-four were operational on 11 July and 45 on 14 July. Garland and Smyth, working from German records, estimated the division’s tank losses from 10 to 14 July at a minimum of 26 and a maximum of 45. Ten of the 17 Tigers were lost, some to gunfire and some to mechanical failure and abandonment. Sixteen German tanks burned on the Gela plain on 11 July alone.

The Italian losses are harder to count, because the mobile groups’ light tanks were often destroyed piecemeal and their records lost. What is clear is the human cost: more than half the Italian soldiers who took part in the Gela attack were killed or wounded.

Why the Beachhead Held

Look at the Gela crisis from Conrath’s side, and the outcome seems almost perverse. He had the strongest armored force on the island, including its only Tigers, and a two-day window in which the Americans had few guns and no tanks ashore. He reached the coast road. And he lost.

Four things decided it.

The first was naval gunfire. Six-inch and five-inch guns firing at observed targets, directed by shore fire control parties and floatplanes, gave the infantry ashore the artillery they did not yet have. Beatty’s 799 rounds, Savannah’s 500 and the steady fire of Boise and the destroyers broke up columns before they could deploy and wrecked the Livorno Division almost by themselves. The Army’s commanders came away from Gela convinced, and they planned Normandy accordingly.

The second was the field artillery and the infantry’s refusal to give ground. The 7th Field Artillery’s eight howitzers at Abbio Priolo, the 32nd Field Artillery firing over open sights on the plain, the Cannon Company in the dunes: these were the weapons that killed tanks at close range when the ships could not fire. The 16th Infantry, veterans of North Africa, held Piano Lupo through two days of attacks. Their division’s earlier ordeal in Tunisia is told in our El Guettar chapter of the Kasserine Pass collection.

The third was the airborne drop that “failed.” Gavin’s paratroopers were scattered across sixty miles, but small groups of them cut wires, ambushed columns and blocked crossroads all over the Hermann Göring Division’s rear. Their nuisance value slowed the German approach marches by hours on 10 July, and at Biazzo Ridge they inflicted a blow that persuaded Conrath to withdraw.

The fourth was the Axis’ own failure to coordinate. The German and Italian divisions attacked separately, at different times, on different days. Kesselring in Rome and Guzzoni in Enna issued overlapping orders without being able to speak to each other. German tanks were separated from their infantry; Italian infantry advanced without armor and Italian armor advanced without infantry. Each blow, landed alone, could be parried.

There was one more effect, felt far from Sicily. On 13 July, with the Hermann Göring Division in retreat and the British already in Syracuse and Augusta, Hitler summoned his commanders on the Eastern Front and told them he was halting Operation Citadel, the great offensive at Kursk, in part because he needed forces to shore up Italy. The Kursk collection tells that side of the story. The connection is easy to overstate, since the Soviet defenses had already stalled Citadel, but the Gela crisis and its outcome were part of the reason the largest tank battle in history ended when it did.

1. 9 July, 2200Conrath alerts the Hermann Göring Division.
2. 10 July, before dawnUSS Maddox sinks in about two minutes off Gela.
3. 10 July, 0335–0800Darby’s Force X lands and clears Gela.
4. 10 July, morningItalian tanks of Mobile Group E break into Gela; Rangers drive them out.
5. 10 July, 1400Both Hermann Göring task forces finally attack, five hours late.
6. 10 July, about 1530Tiger column halted, then overruns 1st Bn, 180th Infantry, after a change of commander.
7. 10 July, about 170016th Infantry: “The tanks are trying to withdraw.”
8. 10 July, about 2000Guzzoni orders a combined attack on Gela for the morning.
9. 11 July, 0600The second Axis attack begins.
10. 11 July, 0730–1030USS Beatty fires 799 rounds for the 180th Infantry.
11. 11 July, about 0900Gavin’s force meets the German column at Biazzo Ridge.
12. 11 July, late morningGerman tanks reach the coast road about 2,000 yards from the beach; Savannah breaks the Livorno attack west of Gela.
13. 11 July, shortly before 1400Ju 88s hit the Robert Rowan; all 421 aboard escape before she explodes.
14. 11 July, about 1400Conrath calls off the attack; 16 German tanks burn on the plain.
15. 11 July, about 1500Germans withdraw from Biazzo Ridge.
16. 11/12 July, nightFriendly fire downs 23 C-47s carrying the 504th Parachute Infantry.
17. 12 July, nightHMS Abercrombie bombards the hills.
18. 13 JulyHermann Göring Division reaches Caltagirone; Hitler halts Operation Citadel at Kursk.

The Gela crisis was over by the evening of 11 July, though few on the beach could be sure of it until Conrath’s withdrawal became clear on the 12th and 13th. The beachhead the Hermann Göring Division had come to destroy was now the springboard for everything that followed. The 1st Division pushed north to take Ponte Olivo airfield and Niscemi, objectives it had been meant to hold on the first day. The 45th Division closed on Biscari and Comiso. And at Biscari airfield on 14 July, men of the same 180th Infantry that had been overrun by the Tigers would carry out two killings of prisoners that remain the darkest episode of the American campaign, told in Chapter 8.

What Came Next

The crisis at Gela convinced Patton that his army could hold anything the Axis threw at it, and it convinced him, too, that the role assigned to Seventh Army in the campaign plan, guarding Montgomery’s left flank, was beneath it. Within forty-eight hours of Conrath’s withdrawal, Alexander would hand the road the Americans had counted on to the British. Patton’s answer, a dash across western Sicily to Palermo, is the story of Chapter 5: Patton Unleashed.