Sicily '43. James Holland

of fighter cover for his operations in southern Tunisia. Coningham and Kuter had told him this was not possible, prompting ire from Patton and an increasingly heated exchange that ended with Coningham accusing the American of crying wolf. Tedder had been furious with Coningham for threatening Anglo-US relations, while Alexander had thought Patton had rather deserved it. On Tedder’s insistence, however, Coningham was forced to apologize and visited Patton in person. They shook hands and lunched together, and, as Patton noted, ‘We parted friends.’7

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

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

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

      CHAPTER 6

      Corkscrew

      ‘FOLLOWING THE LOSS OF Tunisia,’ wrote General der Flieger Wolfram von Richthofen, C-in-C Fliegerkorps II, on 23 May, ‘the island chain comprising Sardinia–Sicily–Crete represents the advanced defence line of Southern Europe.1 Should the enemy succeed in gaining a foothold in one of these islands, he will have achieved a penetration into Fortress Europe which would signify a grave threat to the defence of the mainland. Every last man and weapon must be rallied to prevent this happening.’ Von Richthofen made the point that at the moment of assault the enemy would be at his weakest because he would be in landing craft and devoid of cover. Therefore all Luftwaffe personnel, unless servicing aircraft or directly employed in flying operations, would be issued with weapons and given training, and would be expected to help repel the enemy in the event of an invasion attempt.

      It was all a bit desperate and smacked of panic. It would, of course, have been far better that Hitler, recognizing there was now no reasonable chance of winning the war, threw in the towel right away and saved a huge amount of carnage, but that was never going to happen. To start with, the Nazis already had too much blood on their hands; and secondly, Hitler had always been a black-and-white kind of person. There would be the Thousand Year Reich or there would be Armageddon, but no half measures. Tragically for Germany and for all those fighting the war, Armageddon now looked a dead cert. The only question was how long it would take.

      Von Richthofen now had his air forces spread to the four winds in an attempt to counter every eventuality. One of the features of the glory days of the Blitzkrieg – and indeed of earlier German and, before that, Prussian, successes – was the concept of the Schwerpunkt: literally a ‘heavy point’, meaning a concentration of forces to deliver a maximum punch. These days, though, the Luftwaffe, like every other part of the Wehrmacht, were on the defensive and thinly spread. As a result, there were Luftwaffe units in Greece, in southern Italy and on Sardinia as well as Sicily, where there were now three Gruppen of JG 53, the Ace of Spades, each with three Staffel or squadrons; there was also one Gruppe, the second, of JG 27; and there were two Gruppen of Macky Steinhoff’s JG 77, with the third based on Sardinia.

      The air defence was supposed to be a joint effort by Germany and Italy, but the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica were like an estranged couple reluctantly still cohabiting but barely speaking to one another. Certainly there was no shared doctrine or even common operational orders. The Luftwaffe had radar on the island and ground controllers, for example, but the Regia Aeronautica did not and the Germans were not about to share it – a bizarre state of affairs. They would pass on information if asked, but that was about it. As it happened, the Italians rarely did ask.

      There were still a number of Italian bombers and torpedo bombers and seven gruppi of fighters on Sicily. Among the bombers were the Cant Z.1007s of the 27° Gruppo Bombardimenti at Gela–Ponte Olivo: three-engine bombers that could each carry a rather underwhelming 1,200kg of bombs. Reasonably quick and with good visibility for the crew, the Z.1007 none the less suffered from poor reliability and was woefully underarmed, with just four machine guns. Nor did it particularly help that the fuselage was mostly made of wood.

      Among the aircrew at Ponte Olivo was 22-year-old Melino Barbagallo, part of an air force unit called Carro 1000, a radio service group named after the 1,000-watt radio they used on the ground to communicate with aircrew. Very often he would be sent up into the air as a spare radio operator and technician; since joining the Regia Aeronautica, he’d been up on a number of different bombers and missions. A native Sicilian, born and raised in Catania, from an early age he had dreamed of becoming a pilot but had left school at sixteen without either the right academic qualifications to be accepted for flying training or a wealthy enough father to pay for it. Even so, he still managed to join the air force rather than the army or navy, and was sent to Milan to train as a radio operator. From there he was posted back to Sicily, and to Gela–Ponte Olivo. He had been thrilled – at last he was able to see up close many of the various aircraft of the Regia Aeronautica. He was soon carrying out operations against Malta and against Allied shipping, including attacks on the Allied PEDESTAL convoy. ‘I was really passionate about the war,’ he said.2 ‘I wanted to defend my country and I really wanted to take part in the war until the end.’

      The Italian air forces would soon be leaving the island, but the German fighter boys were staying put, for the time being at any rate. Macky Steinhoff felt weighed down by a constant feeling of impending doom he couldn’t shift, made worse by the knowledge that as commander of an entire fighter Geschwader he was responsible for the men under his charge. Most of the pilots were still boys – there were a few old-timers, Experten with more than twenty-five victories to their name and Knight’s Crosses dangling round their necks – but the majority were no older than twenty-one at most.

      He had taken over command of JG 77 in Tunisia in the latter half of March, having been given some leave following a long tour in the Caucasus and Crimea, on the southern Eastern Front. It had been good to spend some time with his wife, Ursula; but then had come a call from General der Jagdflieger Adolf Galland offering him a choice of commands: either France or North Africa. He chose the latter. ‘I had never been there,’ he admitted, ‘and I think the adventure appealed to me.’3

      Steinhoff’s predecessor at the head of JG 77 had been Joachim Müncheberg, one of the legends of the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm and a commander much loved by his men. In 1941, from Sicily, Müncheberg had led a fighter group against Malta that in two months had shot down forty-three Hurricanes for not one loss of their own; Müncheberg had claimed twenty of them. By the time he died on 23 March 1943 in a mid-air collision with an American Spitfire, he had 135 aerial victories to his name. His loss seemed to symbolize a terrible realization that the Luftwaffe’s glory years lay behind them. ‘I knew him,’ said Steinhoff, ‘and he was a great pilot, good man, great sense of humour and a fine gentleman.’4 Müncheberg’s shoes were hard to fill, but Steinhoff had a pretty impressive record himself, having shot down some 152 Soviet aircraft over the Eastern Front. As he had quickly discovered, however, Allied fighter pilots were of a different calibre from those of the Red Army: on one of his first missions in Tunisia he had had his radiator shot out by a Spitfire, forcing him to crash-land in the desert. Despite