Why Sicily? Strategy, Deception and the Road to Husky

Task Force 85 sails from Oran for Sicily, July 1943. U.S. Navy photograph, National Archives.

Operation Husky · Chapter 1 of 9

Why Sicily? Strategy, Deception and the Road to Husky

A conference compromise, a corpse off Spain, and an island bombed into surrender set the stage for the largest amphibious assault yet attempted.

January – 9 July 1943Casablanca · Washington · Huelva · Pantelleria · Malta~25 min read

On the night of 9 July 1943, some 2,590 Allied ships and landing craft were pitching through a summer gale south of Sicily. Aboard were the men of seven divisions, plus paratroopers and glider troops already in the air. None of them would have been there if a handful of tired men in a Moroccan hotel had not, six months earlier, settled on an island that almost nobody had first proposed as the decisive objective.

Operation Husky was born as a compromise. It was planned by a coalition that disagreed about what should come after it, shaped by a British general who threw out the first plan, protected by one of the strangest deceptions of the war, and prepared by weeks of bombing that turned an Italian fortress island into the first territory ever to surrender to air power. This chapter follows that road, from the last shots in Tunisia to the night the fleet sailed.

After Tunisia: an army with nowhere to go

The war in North Africa ended in May 1943 with a collapse rather than a last stand. Hemmed into the Cape Bon peninsula, the German and Italian armies in Tunisia gave up in masses; the National WWII Museum puts the total at more than 250,000 German and Italian troops taken prisoner. It was an Axis disaster on the scale of Stalingrad, and it left the Allies with a problem that sounds odd today: a victorious army with nowhere to fight.

The Americans had learned hard lessons in Tunisia. At Sidi Bou Zid and Kasserine Pass in February, green U.S. units had been routed; by El Guettar in March they were fighting like veterans. The 1st Infantry Division, the 1st Ranger Battalion and the 9th Division’s artillery all came out of Tunisia hardened and confident. The British Eighth Army had marched from El Alamein to Tunis. Hundreds of thousands of trained men, thousands of aircraft and an enormous fleet of shipping now sat along the North African coast.

The cross-Channel invasion of France could not happen in 1943; the landing craft, the shipping and the trained divisions in Britain were not there yet. Leaving the Mediterranean armies idle for a year was politically impossible, with the Soviet Union bearing the weight of the land war and demanding action. The question was where to strike next, and that question had already been answered, at least on paper, four months before Tunisia fell.

Casablanca: the 18 January decision

In January 1943 Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff met at the Anfa Hotel outside Casablanca in French Morocco. The American chiefs arrived on 13 January; the British, led by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, opened their case the next day. The British came with a plan, a large staff and a supply ship full of reference papers. The Americans came with doubts about everything in the Mediterranean.

The U.S. official history, Garland and Smyth’s Sicily and the Surrender of Italy, describes the Joint Chiefs as worried about two things: a desperate shortage of shipping and the prospect of hundreds of thousands of men sitting idle in North Africa once Tunisia was cleared. Lt. Gen. Brehon Somervell, the Army’s supply chief, estimated that opening the Mediterranean to Allied convoys would save 1,825,000 tons of shipping in the first five months alone, because ships would no longer have to sail around the Cape of Good Hope to reach Egypt, India and the Persian Gulf.

Two islands were on the table. Sardinia was lightly defended and closer to the Italian mainland and southern France. Sicily was bigger, nearer to Allied bases and covered in airfields. Gen. George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, rejected Sardinia because it offered “merely an air advantage,” while Sicily, like a cross-Channel operation, might prove decisive. Adm. Ernest King wanted Sicily because holding it would secure a sheltered sea corridor between the island and the North African coast. Brooke favored Sicily too, though he warned against being drawn into supporting an anti-Fascist uprising in Italy. Roosevelt, characteristically, cut to the problem with Sardinia: after taking it, he said, the Allies could shout “Hooray” and then ask, “Where do we go from here?”

On 18 January the Combined Chiefs agreed to invade Sicily once the Tunisian campaign was over. Garland and Smyth note that it was the only concrete Mediterranean decision taken at Casablanca. What came after Sicily was left open, and that ambiguity would haunt the alliance for the rest of the year.

At the closing press conference Roosevelt announced that the Allies would accept only the “unconditional surrender” of Germany, Italy and Japan. Churchill, who had cleared the formula with the War Cabinet, gave it his full support. For Italy, whose people were already sick of the war, the phrase would complicate every attempt to negotiate a way out over the coming summer.

Choosing a date: the moon, the fleet and the paratroopers

Picking a date for Husky meant reconciling two branches of the armed forces whose needs were opposites. Paratroopers and glider pilots needed moonlight to find their drop zones. The navy wanted darkness to bring a vast fleet close to a hostile shore without being seen. The British planners first proposed 22 August, a compromise date set by the phase of the moon. Admiral King thought that far too late and proposed 25 July; the Combined Chiefs quickly approved it.

In the end even July 25 slipped. Eisenhower judged that a second-quarter moon between 10 and 14 July would give the right balance: enough light early in the night for the aircraft, then darkness for the ships as the moon set. Moonlight, he wrote, was “mandatory for the air force.” D-Day was fixed for Saturday, 10 July 1943, with H-Hour at 0245. The airborne drops were timed for about midnight, some two and a half hours before the first boats touched down.

That moon schedule explains a great deal of what happened. It is why the gliders and paratroopers of Chapter 3 flew over a dark sea in a rising wind, why the landing craft of Chapter 2 came in under a moon that had already set, and why there was no flexibility to wait when a gale blew up on the afternoon of 9 July.

1. 14–24 Jan 1943Casablanca Conference; on 18 January the Combined Chiefs agree to invade Sicily after Tunisia.
2. 19 AprHMS Seraph leaves the Clyde carrying “Major William Martin.”
3. 30 Apr, 0415Seraph surfaces off Huelva, Spain, and releases the body.
4. 2 MayThe revised, concentrated Husky plan is accepted.
5. 8 MaySpanish officials pass the Mincemeat letters to German intelligence. Heavy bombing of Pantelleria begins the same day.
6. 12–25 MayTRIDENT Conference in Washington; Tunisia has fallen on 13 May.
7. 11 JunPantelleria’s garrison of 11,420 surrenders as British troops land.
8. 12–14 JunLampedusa, Linosa and Lampione surrender.
9. 2 JulLt. Charles B. Hall scores the 99th Fighter Squadron’s first aerial victory, near Castelvetrano.
10. 4–5 JulU.S. assault divisions embark at Oran and Algiers; Canadian convoy losses to U-boats.
11. 9 Jul, eveningGliders and paratroopers take off from Tunisia; the fleet rides out a gale south of Sicily.
12. 10 Jul, 0245H-Hour.

TRIDENT and the argument over what comes next

Tunisia fell on 13 May. The day before, Churchill and the British chiefs had arrived in Washington for the TRIDENT conference, which ran from 12 to 25 May. Sicily was settled; the argument now was about what Sicily was for.

Churchill wanted to use all the Allied strength in the Mediterranean through 1943 and to knock Italy out of the war, even at the cost of delaying the cross-Channel attack. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder favored invading the Italian mainland, which he called “the backdoor of Germany’s vitals.” Marshall saw a trap. He feared that Mediterranean operations would swell beyond their planned size, swallowing the men and ships needed for France. “The decisive effort,” he insisted, “must be made against the Continent from the United Kingdom sooner or later.”

The compromise, reached on 19 May, satisfied both sides just enough. The cross-Channel invasion was set for 1 May 1944. The Mediterranean command was told to plan operations “to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces,” but it would have to send seven divisions back to Britain from 1 November 1943. Sicily, in other words, would be a stepping-stone with a fixed budget. Every decision Eisenhower made that summer, including his caution about the mainland, was shaped by those seven divisions he knew he would lose.

The strategic link to the Eastern Front was real, and it ran both ways. Just three days after the Allies landed in Sicily, on 13 July, Hitler called off Operation Citadel, his offensive at Kursk, citing the need to send forces to Italy. Historians still argue over how much weight Sicily carried in that decision compared with the Soviet counteroffensive, but the timing was not coincidence.

The command team

Casablanca also settled who would run Husky, and the answer was a committee. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander in chief in North Africa, would be supreme commander. Under him sat three British officers: Gen. Sir Harold Alexander as deputy and ground commander, Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham for the naval forces, and Tedder for the air. Garland and Smyth report that Eisenhower was “infuriated” by this structure, which left him a chairman more than a commander, but he was persuaded not to protest.

Alexander’s headquarters became 15th Army Group, named for the sum of its two armies. The U.S. Seventh Army, activated off the coast of Sicily on 10 July from the I Armored Corps headquarters, was commanded by Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. It would be, in the official history’s words, “the first United States field army to fight as a unit in World War II.” Its II Corps was led by Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley. The British Eighth Army was commanded by Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery, with Lt. Gen. Miles Dempsey’s XIII Corps and Lt. Gen. Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps.

At sea, Vice Adm. H. Kent Hewitt commanded the Western Naval Task Force, which carried the Americans: more than 1,700 ships, craft and boats, counted in a footnote of the official history as 601 ships and 1,124 shipborne landing craft. Under Hewitt were three attack forces: Rear Adm. Richard Conolly’s Task Force 86 for Licata, Rear Adm. John L. Hall’s Task Force 81 for Gela and Rear Adm. Alan G. Kirk’s Task Force 85 for Scoglitti. Adm. Sir Bertram Ramsay led the Eastern Naval Task Force, which carried the British and Canadians.

The personalities mattered as much as the wiring diagram. Alexander was a gentleman-general, courteous and calm, who tended to trust Montgomery’s judgment over Patton’s. Montgomery was brilliant at the set-piece battle, vain, and convinced that the Americans were not yet ready for a leading role, a view Tunisia had done little to change in British minds. Patton was a cavalryman in temperament who wanted to prove the U.S. Army could fight as well as anyone, and who chafed at any role that looked like guarding someone else’s flank. That is exactly the role he was given.

The plan nobody liked

The first Husky plans, drawn up in the spring while the commanders were still fighting in Tunisia, spread the landings across the island. The idea was to seize as many ports and airfields as possible at once: British landings in the southeast near Syracuse and American landings in the northwest near Palermo, with further assaults in between on later days. The logic was supply. Planners in 1943 did not believe large armies could be kept going over open beaches for long, so the early capture of ports seemed essential.

Montgomery tore it apart. As the CMH campaign pamphlet Sicily explains, the two halves of the dispersed plan were too far apart to support each other, and each could be defeated in turn. Montgomery insisted on concentrating both armies in the southeast, where their beachheads would touch and the fighter umbrella from Malta could cover them. Eisenhower accepted the argument. The revised plans were accepted on 2 May. Patton, who stood to lose his Palermo landing, wrote in his diary that the new arrangement was “better in many ways than the old.”

Under the final plan, the Eighth Army would land on a front of about 40 miles from the Pachino peninsula north along the Gulf of Noto toward Syracuse, then drive up the east coast to Catania and Messina. The Seventh Army would land on the Gulf of Gela at Licata, Gela and Scoglitti, seize the airfields inland and protect the British left. Alexander himself described Patton’s army as the shield in his left hand and Montgomery’s as the sword. No one on the American side missed the meaning.

The plan said little about what would happen after the beaches were secure. There was no agreed scheme for trapping the Axis armies before they could escape across the Strait of Messina, the two-mile-wide channel to the mainland. That omission, the subject of Chapter 9, would cost the Allies dearly in August.

Operation Mincemeat: the man who never was

Everyone in the Axis high command who could read a map knew Sicily was the obvious target. Churchill reportedly put it bluntly: anybody but a fool would know it was Sicily. The British deception planners’ job was to persuade Berlin that the obvious was a bluff. Their most famous tool was a dead man.

The scheme was devised by Lt. Cdr. Ewen Montagu of naval intelligence and Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley, working with the Twenty Committee that ran Britain’s double agents. They would plant a body at sea off the coast of Spain, dressed as a staff officer who had died in an air crash, carrying letters that revealed false invasion plans. Spain was neutral but full of German agents, and the Spanish authorities could be relied on to let the Abwehr see what washed ashore.

The coroner for North London, Bentley Purchase, found them a body: a homeless Welshman named Glyndwr Michael, from Aberbargoed, who had died after eating rat poison containing phosphorus, which left few obvious traces. He was given a new identity as “Major William Martin, Royal Marines,” complete with a fiancée’s photograph and love letters, theater ticket stubs, a bank overdraft letter and a briefcase chained to his belt. The key document was a personal letter from Lt. Gen. Sir Archibald Nye, the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to Alexander, written to suggest that the real targets were Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily as the cover.

The submarine HMS Seraph, commanded by Lt. Bill Jewell, sailed from the Clyde on 19 April with the body packed in dry ice in a steel canister. At 0415 on 30 April she surfaced off Huelva on Spain’s Atlantic coast. Jewell had the canister brought up, read Psalm 39, and the body was eased into the water and pushed toward shore by the wash of the submarine’s screws. A local fisherman found it about 0930.

The Spanish navy kept the briefcase at first and resisted German demands for it. German sympathizers photographed what they could, and after the Abwehr’s man in Madrid, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, appealed to higher authority, the damp letters were removed without the envelopes being opened, copied, dried and resoaked. The information reached the Germans on 8 May. When the briefcase came back to London, forensic tests on 11 May showed the letters had been opened and read.

Ultra intercepts soon showed the Germans taking the documents seriously. Brig. Leslie Hollis, secretary to the Chiefs of Staff Committee, sent a message to Churchill, who was in Washington for TRIDENT:

What did the deception actually achieve? Hitler told Mussolini that Greece, Sardinia and Corsica had to be held “at all costs” and ordered the experienced 1st Panzer Division from France to Salonika in Greece, according to the historians Denis Smyth and Ben Macintyre. Macintyre adds that German strength on Sardinia doubled to about 10,000 men by the end of June. The National WWII Museum’s summary is that German resources shifted toward Sardinia and Corsica, and only two German divisions faced the landings.

Mincemeat was one thread in a wider deception program, codenamed Barclay, that also used fake radio traffic, double agents and a phantom British Twelfth Army in the eastern Mediterranean. It did not keep the Germans out of Sicily; they were reinforcing the island throughout June. Its value lay in spreading German reserves thinly across the whole Mediterranean, so that when the blow fell the reinforcements were in the wrong places.

For half a century “Major Martin” remained anonymous. Montagu told the story in his 1953 book The Man Who Never Was without naming the dead man. In 1996 the amateur historian Roger Morgan found the name Glyndwr Michael in records at the Public Record Office, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission later added a postscript to the headstone in Huelva’s cemetery identifying him. A theory that the body came from the carrier HMS Dasher, which exploded in March 1943, has been dismissed by Smyth on the basis of the official records.

Pantelleria: Operation Corkscrew

Halfway between Tunisia and Sicily lies Pantelleria, a volcanic island of 32 square miles that Mussolini had fortified as Italy’s Gibraltar, complete with underground hangars cut into the rock. Its airfield and radar station sat directly across the routes the invasion convoys would take. Eisenhower decided to take it first, and to test an idea that air enthusiasts had argued about since the 1920s: could bombing alone force a defended position to surrender?

Operation Corkscrew began with bombing on 8 May. From mid-May, according to the British official history by Brig. C. J. C. Molony, Allied aircraft dropped about 6,400 long tons of bombs in 5,218 sorties, with some 1,400 tons on 10 June alone. Warships shelled the harbor. The garrison, about 11,420 men of the Brigata Mista Pantelleria under Adm. Gino Pavesi, could do little but shelter in caves.

On 11 June the British 1st Infantry Division landed. White flags went up before the assault troops got off the beach, and the whole garrison surrendered with very light losses; Molony counts 39 Italian dead. Lampedusa, a smaller island to the south, surrendered on 12 June after its own pounding. Linosa followed on 13 June and the rocky islet of Lampione on 14 June. In one widely retold episode, an RAF Swordfish pilot who landed on Lampedusa short of fuel found the garrison eager to surrender to him. Allied losses for the whole operation were about 15 aircraft.

Pantelleria’s fall gave the Allies an airfield 63 miles from Sicily and removed a radar post that could have warned of the invasion fleet. It also convinced some airmen that bombing could do what armies did, a lesson that was only partly true. Pantelleria was an isolated garrison with no hope of relief and, by most accounts, little will to fight on. Sicily would be a very different problem.

The air campaign: clearing the sky

Pantelleria was one part of a much larger air offensive. From mid-May until D-Day, Allied air forces flew 42,227 sorties against Sicily, Sardinia, southern Italy and the airfields that fed them. By common reckoning they destroyed 323 German and 105 Italian aircraft for the loss of 250 Allied planes. Heavy bombers hit the ports of Palermo, Messina and Naples; medium bombers and fighter-bombers worked over the Sicilian airfields at Gerbini, Catania, Comiso, Biscari and Trapani.

By the end of June the Allies had 670 first-line aircraft packed onto Malta, Pantelleria and Gozo, within easy range of the beaches. Three Spitfire wings moved from North Africa to Malta that month, bringing the island to 20 fighter squadrons. Twelve former Axis airfields on Cape Bon were handed to the XII Air Support Command and the Tactical Bomber Force. The air plan itself was a sore point with the ground and naval commanders: it said little about direct support of the troops on the beaches, and one American general called it a “most masterful piece of uninformed prevarication.” That gap would be felt off Gela in Chapter 4.

By 10 July more than half of the Axis aircraft that had been in Sicily had pulled back to the mainland or Sardinia. Italy still listed about 1,400 aircraft on paper, but the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica could mount only 370 and 141 sorties respectively on D-Day itself. The wrecks that Allied photographers found on the island’s airfields later that summer told the story.

Among the units flying over Pantelleria and Sicily was a squadron the U.S. Army had treated as an experiment. The 99th Fighter Squadron, the first Black fighter unit in the Army Air Forces, trained at Tuskegee, Alabama, and flew P-40 Warhawks from Tunisia. According to the American Battle Monuments Commission, its pilots had their first encounter with enemy aircraft over Pantelleria on 9 June. On 2 July, escorting B-25s near Castelvetrano in western Sicily on his eighth mission, 1st Lt. Charles B. Hall shot down an enemy fighter, the squadron’s first aerial victory.

The defenders: Guzzoni’s 6th Army

Sicily was defended, on paper, by the Italian 6th Army under Gen. Alfredo Guzzoni, a veteran recalled to active command in the spring of 1943. From his headquarters at Enna in the center of the island he held nominal command of every Axis soldier on Sicily, Italian and German, through two Italian corps: XII Corps in the west and XVI Corps in the east.

The CMH pamphlet estimates the Italian garrison at 200,000 to 300,000 men; other counts run from about 131,000 combat troops to 252,000 in all. Most belonged to six coastal divisions, among them the 206th and 207th that would meet the landings, and to coastal brigades and port defense units. They were spread thinly along hundreds of miles of shore, poorly armed, often older reservists, and many were Sicilians who had no wish to see their towns destroyed. Behind them were four mobile divisions: the 4th Livorno (about 13,000 men, the only fully motorized Italian division on the island, under Gen. Domenico Chirieleison), the 54th Napoli, the 26th Assietta and the 28th Aosta, plus small mobile groups with obsolete French and Italian tanks.

The real fighting strength lay in two German divisions, about 30,000 men at the start. The Hermann Göring Panzer Division, a Luftwaffe formation rebuilt after its predecessor was destroyed in Tunisia, was commanded by Gen. Paul Conrath. Sources credit it with about 9,000 men and roughly 80 to 90 Panzer III and IV tanks; attached to it was the 2nd Company of the 504th Heavy Tank Battalion with 17 Tiger I tanks, the only Tigers on the island. The 15th Panzergrenadier Division, formed from the improvised “Division Sizilien” under Gen. Eberhard Rodt, was a solid motorized infantry formation.

Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in the south, had little faith in the Italian units and believed the Germans would effectively be fighting alone. Shortly before the invasion he moved most of the 15th Panzergrenadier Division to western Sicily, where an Allied landing near Palermo or Marsala seemed plausible. That left only the Hermann Göring Division within striking distance of the American beaches, a choice the CMH pamphlet singles out as decisive in the first days. Later the Germans would fly and truck in the 1st Fallschirmjäger Division and the 29th Panzergrenadier Division, and Gen. Hans-Valentin Hube’s XIV Panzer Corps would take over the German battle.

Guzzoni’s own plan was realistic. He expected the Allies to come ashore in the southeast and around Gela, and he intended to hold the beaches with the coastal divisions just long enough for the mobile Italian and German divisions to counterattack before the invaders could bring their armor ashore. Everything depended on speed, on Italian coastal troops fighting harder than anyone expected, and on the German and Italian commands cooperating smoothly. None of those things was assured.

Sailing: 2,590 ships converge

The armada that sailed for Sicily is counted in different ways, depending on what each source includes. The CMH pamphlet counts 2,590 vessels on the night of 9/10 July. The National WWII Museum says more than 3,000 ships; the Navy’s Seabee history says about 3,200 ships and landing craft. The Western Naval Task Force alone had 601 ships and 1,124 shipborne landing craft. In all, about half a million Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen took part in the operation.

The convoys came from all over the Mediterranean and beyond. The 45th Infantry Division, fresh from the United States, re-embarked at Oran on the afternoon of 4 July after a final rehearsal; CCA of the 2nd Armored Division also sailed from Oran. The 1st Infantry Division boarded transports in Algiers harbor the next afternoon, with some units staging through Tunis. The 3rd Division sailed from Bizerte. British divisions loaded in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Malta.

The 1st Canadian Infantry Division and the 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade came the farthest, sailing from the Clyde in Scotland. Their convoys paid the price before reaching the battle: German U-boats sank three ships, and, according to Veterans Affairs Canada, 58 Canadians drowned, with about 500 vehicles and several guns lost. Their names are on the Cassino Memorial in Italy. The Canadian story continues in Chapter 6.

The assembly ports were themselves targets. German and Italian bombers raided Bizerte and other harbors as the shipping gathered. On the transports, men did what soldiers have always done before an invasion: they cleaned weapons, wrote letters, played cards and went to church.

The convoys followed carefully staggered routes, converging on Malta, which served as a navigation mark and a command center. Eisenhower, Alexander and Cunningham gathered on the island, and the underground Lascaris War Rooms beneath Valletta became the nerve center of the operation.

On 9 July the weather turned. A strong wind, near 30 miles an hour, whipped up the sea, scattered the convoys’ formations and left thousands of soldiers seasick in the landing craft. The troops called it the “Mussolini wind.” At Malta, Eisenhower consulted Cunningham’s meteorologists, who forecast that the wind would drop by midnight. He decided against postponement. That evening, from airfields around Kairouan and Sousse in Tunisia, the first troop carriers rose into the gale with the gliders and paratroopers who would open the invasion.

On the eve: what the planners got right and wrong

By the night of 9 July the Allies had done a great deal right. They had chosen an objective within fighter range, concentrated their landings, spread the enemy’s reserves with deception, seized the islands that flanked the approaches and won command of the air. They had also built a new kind of amphibious fleet, with LSTs, LCIs, LCTs and DUKWs that would put armies across open beaches in ways the 1942 planners had not imagined.

They had also left problems unsolved. The air plan was vague about supporting the troops ashore. The airborne operations depended on inexperienced pilots flying complicated routes at night over an Allied fleet that had not been firmly told to hold its fire. There was no plan for the endgame at Messina. And the command arrangement left Alexander to referee two army commanders whose rivalry would shape the whole campaign.

For all that, the Combined Chiefs had their answer to the question of where to fight in 1943. The answer was a mountainous, sun-baked island of four million people, roughly the size of Vermont, that had been conquered by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans and Spaniards and was about to be fought over again.

At 1842 on 9 July, the first tug aircraft began rolling down the dusty strips of Tunisia, each towing a glider packed with British infantry bound for a bridge outside Syracuse. Behind them came 222 American C-47s carrying the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne. Their story belongs to Chapter 3. First, in Chapter 2, we go ashore with the seven divisions that hit the beaches at 0245 on 10 July.