End Game: Lehrgang, Messina and What Sicily Changed

Italian prisoners with improvised surrender flags, reported as near Messina, August 1943. U.S. Army photograph.

Operation Husky · Chapter 9 of 9

End Game: Lehrgang, Messina and What Sicily Changed

More than 100,000 Axis soldiers slipped across two miles of water while the Allies raced for an empty city, and Italy left the war within weeks.

26 July – 9 September 1943Strait of Messina · Messina · Cassibile · Salerno~25 min read

At 0635 on 17 August 1943, General der Panzertruppe Hans-Valentin Hube sent a short signal from the Italian mainland: “Operation LEHRGANG completed.” The last German rear guards had crossed the Strait of Messina about two hours earlier. An hour after the signal, a German assault boat picked up an eight-man Italian patrol from the Sicilian shore. They were the last Axis soldiers to leave the island. At about the same time, American patrols were walking into the empty, broken streets of Messina, and George Patton was on his way to claim the city before the British could.

The race to Messina is the most famous story of the Sicily campaign. It was a real race, run hard by both Allied armies, and the Americans won it by a matter of hours. But the prize was a city the enemy had already left. While the Allies fought their way up the island, the Germans and Italians had carried more than 100,000 men, about 10,000 vehicles and much of their heavy equipment across two miles of water under the noses of the strongest air forces and navies in the Mediterranean.

This final chapter tells how they did it, how Messina fell, what the 38-day campaign cost and won, and how it reshaped the war: Mussolini’s fall, Italy’s surrender signed in a tent in Sicily, the landings at Salerno, and the lessons the Allies carried from Sicily’s beaches and skies to Normandy.

Deciding to Go

The Germans began planning to leave Sicily almost as soon as they arrived in strength. On 26 July, the day after Mussolini’s arrest, the German high command ordered preparations for a possible evacuation. The next day Field Marshal Albert Kesselring briefed his commanders that if Italy left the alliance they were to “evacuate all troops from Sicily.” Hube began preparing at once, and the Germans pulled out of Nicosia that same evening.

On 2 August Kesselring approved a detailed evacuation plan drawn up by Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin, Hube’s chief of staff, and on 3 August he told the high command the crossing could be made in five nights. The Italians, for their part, began a limited evacuation of their own on 3 August. On 8 August, after General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin reported on the state of the front, Kesselring ordered Hube to proceed. He did so on his own authority, without first seeking Hitler’s approval. When the high command learned of the order on 9 August, it accepted it as a fait accompli. The same day the Italian supreme command ordered General Alfredo Guzzoni to help defend Calabria and begin evacuating Italian forces; Guzzoni and his Sixth Army headquarters crossed on 10 August, leaving Hube in command of everything still on the island.

Late in the afternoon of 10 August Hube issued the formal order. Operation Lehrgang, a German word meaning “training course,” would run for five nights, beginning on the night of 11/12 August. The front would fall back in three large bounds across the narrowing northeastern tip of Sicily, pausing at each phase line while the divisions sent up to two-thirds of their men back to the embarkation points. The rear guards would hold each line just long enough.

The German reasoning was simple. Sicily could not be held against two Allied armies with command of the sea and air, and with Italy wavering, every German division would soon be needed on the mainland. Men and guns saved from Sicily would be men and guns available to defend Italy. Kesselring had no intention of losing them in a Sicilian Stalingrad, six months after the real one and three months after the surrender of the Axis armies in Tunisia. The trick was to hold the Allies long enough to get away, and the mountains of the northeast, the shortening front and the Strait’s own defenses gave the Germans the means to do it.

1. 26 JulyGerman high command orders preparations for a possible evacuation.
2. 27 JulyKesselring briefs commanders; Hube begins preparations; Germans leave Nicosia.
3. 2 AugustKesselring approves von Bonin’s evacuation plan.
4. 3 AugustItalians begin a limited evacuation; Alexander asks Cunningham and Tedder to coordinate action against it.
5. 8 AugustKesselring orders Hube to proceed, without first asking Hitler.
6. 9 AugustGerman high command accepts the decision; Italian supreme command orders Guzzoni to evacuate.
7. 10 AugustGuzzoni’s headquarters crosses; late afternoon, Hube issues the Lehrgang order.
8. 11/12 AugustFirst full night of German ferrying.
9. 13 AugustBy evening, 15,000 German troops, 1,300 vehicles, 21 tanks and 22 assault guns are across.
10. 16/17 AugustLast German rear guards cross; Hermann Göring Division leaves last.
11. 17 August, 0635Hube reports “Operation LEHRGANG completed.”

The Ferry Fleet

The man who made the plan work at sea was Fregattenkapitän Gustav von Liebenstein, appointed sea transport leader for the Strait. He pulled the competing army, navy and air force ferry flotillas into a single service. By the end of July he had 33 naval ferry barges (Marinefährprahme, or MFPs), 12 Siebel ferries, 2 naval gun lighters, 11 large engineer landing craft able to carry two trucks each, and 76 motorboats for personnel.

The MFP was a flat-bottomed, diesel-powered barge of about 80 to 100 tons that could carry several trucks or a few tanks at about eight knots. The Siebel ferry, two pontoons joined by a deck and pushed by aircraft engines, could carry about a dozen vehicles or 250 men; some were armed as floating flak platforms. Liebenstein increased the number of ferry routes, shifted landing sites to confuse Allied bombers, and cut loading and unloading times by building ramps so vehicles could drive straight on and off. By 10 August his service could carry about 8,000 men a night.

Four of six routes were reserved for the evacuation: routes 1 and 2 for the 15th and 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions, route 3 for the XIV Panzer Corps headquarters, and route 4 for the Hermann Göring Division and elements of the 1st Fallschirmjäger Division, with a fifth kept as a spare. Men crossed only at night at first; equipment moved day and night, in a strict order of priority: antitank guns first, then artillery, then self-propelled guns, then trucks. As the days passed and Allied interference proved weaker than feared, the Germans began crossing in daylight too.

A Flak Umbrella over the Strait

Kesselring had appointed Colonel Ernst-Günther Baade commandant of the Strait of Messina in mid-July, with control of Liebenstein’s ferries, the coastal and naval artillery, an engineer landing battalion and the antiaircraft guns on both shores. Garland and Smyth credit him with “about five hundred guns,” most of them dual-purpose weapons that could fire at aircraft or ships. A German report of 14 August lists 333 antiaircraft guns on hand; other reports give more. The 15th Panzergrenadier Division gave him its two heaviest batteries, 170mm guns that could reach more than ten miles. Kesselring later said of Baade that “he seems to have overlooked virtually nothing and to have provided virtually everything.”

Allied airmen called the flak over the Strait the heaviest in the Mediterranean. “The fact that anything at all reached the Italian mainland was solely due to the flak batteries,” the German fighter general Adolf Galland said later.

Why the Allies did not stop it

The Allies knew what was coming. On 3 August Alexander asked Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder to coordinate their efforts against an evacuation. On 5 August Seventh Army intelligence wrote that “in all probability evacuation is taking place.” By 9 August a British intelligence summary was asking “who can walk back the fastest.”

Yet no joint plan was ever drawn up. Cunningham judged that there was no “effective method” of stopping a night evacuation by small craft with sea or air power, and that his larger warships could not enter the Strait until the coastal batteries had been knocked out. He did not want to repeat the Dardanelles of 1915, when Allied battleships had been mauled by Turkish shore batteries and mines. Tedder agreed to go after the batteries, but the heavy bombers of the Northwest African Strategic Air Force had other targets on the mainland, and a ban on using them over the Strait was lifted only with conditions. British Wellington bombers attacked by night from 5 to 9 August. American B-17s flew only three daylight missions against Messina. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, who had earlier said a “positive physical barrier” was needed at night, declared on 11 August that the withdrawal could be handled “with our own resources and naval assistance.”

The fighter-bombers and medium bombers that did attack were spread across the island’s roads, the Etna towns and the beaches, and the Germans learned their rhythms: an hour after dawn, an hour before dusk, the lunch hour. Allied light naval forces, motor torpedo boats and gunboats, probed the Strait at night but turned away when they met Axis patrols. Montgomery canceled two commando landings the Royal Navy had prepared, and the American end-runs on the north coast (Chapter 7) were too small to trap anyone.

Garland and Smyth place the root of the failure in the Allied command system itself. Alexander’s army group, Cunningham’s fleet and Tedder’s air forces had separate headquarters in different places, and no one below Eisenhower had the authority to make them act as one. The Royal Air Force’s Air Vice-Marshal Harry Broadhurst, whose fighter-bombers supported the Eighth Army, put the cost bluntly in hindsight: “we could have turned their success into a disaster.”

What Got Across

The Germans and Italians carried out the most successful evacuation of the war in the Mediterranean, and the numbers are still argued over. The differences come mostly from what each source counts: some include the 12,000 men and 4,500 vehicles the Germans had already sent back between 1 and 10 August, before Lehrgang formally began; some count only the five nights of the operation; Garland and Smyth give a progress figure for the evening of 13 August as well as their totals.

Whatever figure one chooses, the result is the same. The Army’s campaign pamphlet sums it up as “more than 100,000 men and 10,000 vehicles” in the first seventeen days of August. Four German divisions, the 1st Fallschirmjäger, the Hermann Göring, and the 15th and 29th Panzergrenadier, got away with most of their men and much of their equipment. Within a month they were fighting the Allies again at Salerno.

The Italian Evacuation

The Italians ran their own evacuation, separately from the Germans and largely ignored in English-language histories. It began on 3 August, earlier than the German one, under the Italian navy’s commander in the Strait, Rear Admiral Pietro Barone. Italian sources credit him with carrying out the withdrawal without losing a single man to enemy action. His service had one train ferry that could lift 3,000 men a trip, two small steamers and four navy-manned motor rafts. When the train ferry caught fire, the motor rafts took over, carrying some 20,000 men at about 1,000 per trip.

More Italians crossed than Germans: 62,000 by the German official history’s count, 70,000 to 75,000 by Garland and Smyth’s, with between 227 and 500 vehicles, 75 to 100 guns and, the official history notes, 12 mules. The last Italian officer to leave was Colonel Ettore Monacci, who commanded the Italian Army troops at Messina. The figures undercut a common picture of the Italian army in Sicily as nothing more than a crowd of surrendering men. Tens of thousands of Italians did surrender; tens of thousands more marched to the Strait and crossed in good order.

The Night of 16/17 August

By 15 August the American and British columns were converging on Messina from the west and south. The 3rd Division’s 7th Infantry entered Barcellona at 0930 that morning, about twelve miles from the city, where the coast road turns inland over the Peloritani mountains. On the east coast, a British force of about 400 men, No. 2 Commando under Lieutenant Colonel Jack Churchill with tanks of the 4th Armoured Brigade, landed near Scaletta and Cape d’Ali on the night of 15/16 August, met the tail of the Hermann Göring rear guard north of Scaletta, and was held up by a demolished bridge.

On the evening of 16 August a reinforced platoon of Company L, 7th Infantry, under First Lieutenant Ralph J. Yates, pushed down from the hills into the city proper. Across the Strait, the German batteries in Calabria were firing on anything that moved along the Messina waterfront. In the dark, the last German rear guards were filing aboard the last ferries a few miles to the north.

Early on 17 August patrols from other battalions of the 7th Infantry and a platoon of the 1st Battalion, 157th Infantry, entered Messina and met only occasional rifle fire. At 0635 Hube sent his signal from Calabria.

17 August: “A Jolly Good Race”

At 0700 Major General Lucian Truscott received the civil dignitaries of Messina on the heights above the city. About an hour later Colonel Michele Tomasello offered the formal military surrender. Truscott had been told by Major General Geoffrey Keyes to wait for Patton, so he sent Brigadier General William Eagles into the city to arrange the ceremony. Eagles’s mission, in the words of the Army’s campaign pamphlet, was “to see that the British did not capture the city from us after we had taken it.”

Patton reached the ridge at 1000. Finding his officers waiting, he asked, “What in hell are you all standing around for?” and drove down into Messina in a motorcade while German guns across the Strait shelled the road all the way in. In a park in the city he met the senior British officer of the column that had arrived from the south, who shook his hand.

It was a jolly good race. I congratulate you.— The senior British officer to Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., Messina, 17 August 1943 (Garland & Smyth, ch. 21)

Patton had his city and his headlines. The American army that the British had planned to use as a flank guard had taken Palermo and Messina and covered more ground than any Allied army on the island. But the race had been run for prestige as much as for military effect. Montgomery and Patton’s rivalry was real; so was their outward courtesy, captured in photographs at Palermo, where Patton saw Montgomery off at the airport after a visit.

For the people of Messina, liberation came to a ruined city. Months of bombing had wrecked the port and the old center; the Germans had blown what they could not carry; and German guns in Calabria went on shelling the city in the days after it fell. In the weeks that followed, residents who had fled to the hills came back to what was left of their homes, and Allied Military Government trucks brought flour landed from schooners to end a bread shortage.

Scorecard: 38 Days

The campaign lasted 38 days, from the landings of 10 July to the fall of Messina on 17 August; 40 calendar dates if one counts from the glider and parachute take-offs on the evening of 9 July. In that time the Allies took an island of almost 10,000 square miles defended by 200,000 or more Italian troops and, at the peak, up to about 60,000 Germans.

Who won? In the narrow sense, the Allies, decisively: they took Sicily in five and a half weeks, destroyed or captured most of the Italian forces on the island, broke Mussolini’s regime and gained bases from which to invade Italy. The U.S. Army, which had stumbled at Kasserine Pass only five months earlier (told in our Kasserine series), proved it could plan and fight a large campaign. Garland and Smyth note that the Seventh Army was the first American field army to fight as a unit in the war, established a secure beachhead within 72 hours, and showed the American infantryman to be “a first-class fighter.”

In the operational sense, the verdict is mixed. The Germans fought a model delaying campaign with four divisions against two Allied armies, inflicted heavy losses, and escaped with their units intact. Garland and Smyth blame the cautious final plan, “essentially Montgomery’s,” with its single main thrust up the east coast; Alexander’s decision of 12–13 July to let the Eighth Army take the American road north, which they call the campaign’s turning point; and a committee-style command that never produced a joint plan to stop the evacuation. Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, the German liaison general, wrote that when he looked at the Allied plans he could not “refrain from criticism.” His colleague von Bonin called the withdrawal a “glorious retreat.”

The scale of the effort shows in the support figures Garland and Smyth record. Retreating Axis engineers destroyed 130 highway bridges and cratered roads in 40 places, and American engineers had to rebuild or bypass them as they advanced. Almost 9,000 Signal Corps troops rehabilitated 4,916 miles of telephone wire and laid nearly 1,800 miles of spiral-four cable. II Corps artillery alone fired more than 120,000 rounds of 105mm howitzer ammunition, 34,000 rounds of 155mm howitzer ammunition and 6,000 rounds from its 155mm guns. Sicily was a campaign won as much by trucks, wire, bridges and shells as by infantry.

Armistice: Cassibile, Salerno and Italy’s Exit

Sicily brought down Mussolini. The landings, the bombing of Rome on 19 July and the collapse of the Italian army on the island convinced the Fascist Grand Council and King Victor Emmanuel III that the war was lost. On 25 July the King dismissed Mussolini and had him arrested, and Marshal Pietro Badoglio formed a new government with the public promise that “the war continues,” as told in Chapter 5. Privately, Badoglio’s government began looking for a way out.

Italian envoys, led by General Giuseppe Castellano, made contact with the Allies in Lisbon in August. On 3 September 1943, in a tent at an Allied camp near Cassibile, a few miles from the beaches where the British 5th Division had landed on 10 July, Castellano and Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, signed the short armistice. The same morning, Montgomery’s Eighth Army crossed the Strait of Messina to Calabria in Operation Baytown, meeting little resistance.

Eisenhower announced the armistice on the evening of 8 September, and Badoglio confirmed it on Italian radio soon after. The next morning, 9 September, the U.S. Fifth Army landed at Salerno. The Germans were ready. Their plan to seize Italy, Operation Achse, went into effect at once: German troops disarmed the Italian army in Italy, France and the Balkans, occupied Rome, and, on 12 September, freed Mussolini from his mountain prison on the Gran Sasso. The King and Badoglio fled south. On 13 October 1943 Italy declared war on Germany.

At Salerno the Allies met the divisions that had escaped from Sicily. The Hermann Göring Division and the 15th and 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions were among the forces that counterattacked the beachhead and came close to driving the Fifth Army back into the sea. The 1st Fallschirmjäger Division would later hold Cassino through the winter and spring of 1944. The price of the escape across the Strait was paid in Italy over the next twenty months.

Lessons Carried to Normandy

For the Americans and British, Sicily was the full-dress rehearsal for the invasion of France. Many of the men, units and methods that landed in Normandy eleven months later had been tested on the island.

Airborne

The airborne operations in Sicily were nearly a disaster: gliders released over the sea, paratroopers scattered across sixty miles, and 23 transports shot down by Allied guns on the night of 11/12 July (Chapter 3). Eisenhower doubted that division-size airborne operations were worth the cost. A board under Major General Joseph Swing studied what had gone wrong and recommended better training for troop-carrier crews, clear routes and recognition procedures for transports, and closer coordination with naval and ground forces; pathfinder teams to mark drop zones were developed in the same months. A large airborne exercise in North Carolina in December 1943, the Knollwood maneuver, persuaded the doubters. The 82nd Airborne Division, with Matthew Ridgway in command and James Gavin as assistant division commander, jumped into Normandy on the night of 5/6 June 1944 using the lessons of Sicily.

Air and ground

No close air support missions were flown for American troops in the first 48 hours ashore, and friendly bombing hit the goums at Troina and Bernard’s command post at Brolo. The Allied air forces in Sicily were organized to win air superiority and to bomb communications, and they did both well. What they had not yet learned was how to work hour by hour with troops on the ground. The fix took time. The close air support that served the armies in France in 1944, with air controllers traveling with the leading ground units, drew on hard lessons learned in Sicily and Italy.

Amphibious logistics

Sicily was the first time the Allies landed a whole army across open beaches against a defended coast in Europe. They learned that LSTs could unload tanks and trucks over false sandbars if Seabee pontoon causeways bridged the gap; Seabees landed more than 10,000 vehicles over causeways in 23 days. They learned what the DUKW could do in its European debut, carrying troops and cargo from ship to dump without stopping at the waterline. They learned how fast beaches could clog, how vulnerable crowded anchorages were to air attack, and how naval gunfire could break an armored counterattack, as it had at Gela.

Command

Sicily also sorted the American commanders. Bradley, steady and well liked by Eisenhower, was chosen to command the First Army in Normandy. Patton, brilliant in pursuit but discredited by the slapping incidents, waited eleven months for the Third Army. Truscott went on to command VI Corps at Anzio and later the Fifth Army. Several of the divisions that fought in Sicily, the 1st Infantry, the 9th Infantry, the 2nd Armored and the 82nd Airborne, sailed for England to prepare for the invasion of France; the 3rd and 45th stayed in the Mediterranean for Salerno, Anzio and southern France.

Remembering Husky

The dead of Sicily lie at Nettuno, Agira, Catania, Syracuse and Motta Sant’Anastasia, and their stories are told in Chapter 8. The campaign is also remembered on the island. Catania’s Museo Storico dello Sbarco in Sicilia 1943, in the converted sulfur refinery complex known as Le Ciminiere, tells the story of the landings and the campaign from both sides. Canadians mark 10 July as the anniversary of their army’s first great campaign of the war, and the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment still calls it “Pachino Day.”

Five Americans earned the Medal of Honor in Sicily. Their citations sketch the campaign from the first night at sea to the last mountain battles.

What Sicily Changed

Sicily did not end the war in Europe, and it did not destroy the German army in the Mediterranean. It did something less dramatic and more lasting. In five and a half weeks it changed the shape of the war.

It took the first of the Axis powers out of the fight. Mussolini fell while the battle was still raging, and the armistice that ended Italy’s war was signed on Sicilian soil, at Cassibile, a few miles from the invasion beaches. Germany had to find divisions to occupy Italy and replace the Italian garrisons in the Balkans and southern France, at the very moment it was losing the initiative in the East. On 13 July, three days after the landings, Hitler called off his offensive at Kursk, citing Sicily among his reasons (told in our Kursk series). Allied shipping could now pass through the Mediterranean with far less danger than at any time since 1941, shortening the route to India, the Middle East and the Soviet Union.

It made the Allied armies that invaded France. The U.S. Army that landed in Sicily was still learning from Kasserine; the one that left had learned to plan a field-army campaign, to land and supply a force across open beaches, to fight in mountains, to use naval gunfire, and to coordinate air power with ground forces. The airborne arm survived its near-disaster and reformed itself. American and British commanders who would lead in Normandy, from Bradley to Ridgway and Gavin, and on the British side Montgomery and Dempsey, had tested themselves against each other and the Germans. The partnership between the Allies, strained by the boundary dispute and the race to Messina, held.

And it exposed the cost of divided command. The Germans escaped across the Strait because no single Allied commander below Eisenhower could make the armies, navies and air forces act together. That lesson, too, reached Normandy, where Eisenhower held real authority over all three services.

For the people of Sicily, the summer of 1943 brought bombs, battles, hunger and occupation, and also the end of twenty years of Fascism. For the soldiers of four nations who fought there, it brought a short, hard campaign that history has often treated as a prelude. It was more than that. The road from Licata and Gela and Pachino led to Salerno, Anzio and Rome, and to the beaches of Normandy.

This chapter ends the narrative of Operation Husky. For quick answers on the campaign, from “Why Sicily and not Sardinia?” to “How many Germans escaped?” and “Did the Mafia help?”, see the Invasion of Sicily FAQ. To explore the whole collection, with the 38-day timeline, the interactive atlas, every chapter, and the unit and hero profiles, return to the Operation Husky hub.