Sicily '43. James Holland

JG 77. Among those flying over Palermo on 9 May was Lieutenant Jimmy Bruno, co-pilot on a B-17 Flying Fortress of the 99th Bomb Group. Bruno had not been alone in groaning inwardly during the briefing that morning after photo reconnaissance revealed that Palermo was now bristling with anti-aircraft guns. Their task was not to hit the harbour on this occasion but to fly over it and try to knock out as many anti-aircraft positions as possible. This, they all knew, would make it easier for them to return in future; but it only took one well-aimed shot to bring down a bomber and its crew. In any case, they could hardly expect to destroy all those flak positions in one raid.

      Bruno had been brought up near Waukesha, Wisconsin, and had decided he had to become a pilot after seeing the pioneering aviator Charles Lindberg fly over the family farm back in August 1927, when he had been eight years old. ‘Aviation is in its infancy,’ he had later written in his high school yearbook; ‘the opportunities are unlimited.’13 Just over a decade later, in 1939, he’d taken his first flying lesson, in a Piper Cub, and a short while after that he and a friend bought an OX-5 Curtiss Pheasant biplane for $175 – a small fortune for the two young men, but as far as they were concerned a bargain for the dream it enabled them to fulfil. Another couple of years on, in September 1941, having brushed up his academic qualifications, Bruno applied to join the US Army Air Forces and was accepted, beginning his flying training the following February. So rapidly was the new force expanding that entire bombardment and fighter groups were being formed as one, and Bruno’s entire Class 42-1 were all posted to 99th Bombardment Group, newly formed on 23 January 1943. Two months later they’d flown to North Africa, where they were sent to the newly completed air base at Navarin, near Oran in Algeria, arriving at their tented home on 27 March. Four days after that they flew their first mission, to bomb Villacidro airfield in southern Sardinia. Since then, Bruno and the rest of Lieutenant Blaine Bankhead’s crew had completed seven missions.

      On this eighth mission, they reached Palermo without a hitch and flew low over the city, their bomb-bay doors already open. Flak was bursting all around them but they dropped their bombs and managed to get clear away without damage, although Bruno saw one Fortress come down. ‘This particular mission was extremely discomforting to me,’ Bruno admitted, ‘and I sensed the other men on my plane were equally uneasy about it.’14 They made it back to Navarin safely, only to head back the following morning to hammer Trapani.

      Once the Tunisian battle was finally over, Tedder and Spaatz agreed a timetable for HUSKY. From 16 May to 6 June, bombers would range widely over the Mediterranean area without focusing especially on Sicily. Between 6 and 13 June, the key islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa would be the focus, before normal strategic bombing ops would resume. Finally, from 3 to 9 July, heavy and systematic attacks upon Axis air bases on and close to Sicily would be the priority.

      The swift smashing of Pantelleria was to be another early test of the Allies’ new-found dominance of the skies. Lying almost halfway between Sicily and Tunisia, some 63 miles to the south-west of the former and 53 miles from the latter, it had been an Italian military zone since 1926; and it contained a key airfield, one that would be very useful for the Allies to capture before HUSKY as a base for Allied fighters, which would then be within range to support the Americans when they landed at Licata and Gela on the southern Sicilian coast.

      Capturing Pantelleria, though, was potentially a very tricky proposition. It was well defended, with over three hundred concrete gun emplacements and a plethora of pillboxes built into the cliffs; an amphibious assault had just one small beach to land, and had also to cope with vicious offshore currents and an unusually high surf for the Mediterranean. There were also some twelve thousand Italian troops crammed into this 10-mile-long bean-shaped island. For Operation CORKSCREW, Eisenhower asked Admiral Cunningham to provide a powerful naval striking force and also earmarked the British 1st Division for a landing. First, though, Allied bombers would blitz Pantelleria and reduce its defences as much as possible. ‘I want to make the capture of Pantelleria a sort of laboratory to determine the effect of concentrated heavy bombing on a defended coastline,’ Eisenhower wrote to Marshall.15 ‘When the time comes we are going to concentrate everything we have to see whether damage to materiel, personnel and morale cannot be made so serious as to make a landing a rather simple affair.’

      Conscious this was to be an important test for Allied air power not just in the Mediterranean but more generally, Spaatz recruited a British medical doctor and research anatomist to help him. Professor Solly Zuckerman had been brought into Combined Operations, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s commando and raiding organization, and had been introduced to Spaatz that March when the air chief had briefly been back in England. The two had hit it off immediately. ‘They were men who were learning,’ wrote Zuckerman of Spaatz and his staff, ‘as I was learning, and unlike some professional military people whom I had met, there was no assumption of superior knowledge and no assurance that they knew how Germany was going to be defeated.’16 In May, Zuckerman was asked to come to North Africa, and since he was between jobs he readily accepted, arriving on the 22nd. After being briefed by Tedder he was sent straight to Spaatz’s headquarters with the challenge of applying his scientific and analytical techniques to the feasibility of an assault on Pantelleria. After two days of studying intelligence data on Italian morale on the island and also the island’s defences, Zuckerman concluded it was certainly possible. Spaatz, who was always looking for new ways to advance air power and very happy to think outside the box, brought Zuckerman into his staff and asked him to prepare a detailed bombing plan.

      This was delivered to Spaatz on 2 June, using not only intelligence on Pantelleria’s defences but also data previously gathered about the effectiveness of various bombs. No one had ever applied this level of number-crunching data analysis to the bombing of a specific target before. Neutralizing strongly prepared defensive positions by air power alone, Zuckerman admitted, had previously been considered next to impossible. ‘In so far as the task has never before been attempted on any large scale,’ he wrote, ‘Operation CORKSCREW thus becomes a test of the tactical possibilities of this form of air attack, and an exercise in the most economical disposal of the available air strength.’17 It was no wonder the Allied commanders were going to follow CORKSCREW with a mixture of excitement and nervous apprehension. It felt, understandably, like a big moment in the Allies’ journey with air power.

      It was also an operation that required not only strategic bomber forces but also the Coastal Air Force and the medium twin-engine bombers of Coningham’s Tactical Air Force, as well as his fighters for escort duty. The organization and administration of such an operation fell squarely within Air Commodore Tommy Elmhirst’s remit; Coningham had never been one for paperwork, which was why Elmhirst had always been such an invaluable sidekick. Elmhirst, however, had been in Algiers helping to prepare detailed plans for HUSKY. Arriving back at the villa after three weeks away, he was told they were on forty-eight hours’ notice for CORKSCREW. Hurriedly phoning round the bomber wing commanders, he asked whether they had enough bombs and fuel. To a man, they replied that they did not. After managing to secure a loan of a hundred army trucks, he arranged for them to set off at dawn the next morning for their ammunition dumps 50 miles behind the old front line. ‘My situation was saved!’18 recalled Elmhirst. ‘But my staff for once got the rough edge of my tongue.’ Coningham’s and the Tactical Air Force’s blushes had been spared.

      With a naval blockade of the island already in place, bombers had already begun to strike before Zuckerman had delivered his detailed plan to Spaatz. Heavy bombers flew over the island on 1 June. Also flying that day were the 99th Fighter Squadron, the first all-black air unit to see action in the war. Racial segregation was still a feature of the US armed forces, although a growing number of more enlightened senior commanders, not least Tooey Spaatz, were working to use African-American troops at the front line. Spaatz had inspected the 99th FS at Oujda in Morocco on 19 May, meeting the men and talking with their commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the son of the first black US general. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Davis impressed me most favourably,’ he noted in his diary, ‘both in appearance and intelligence.’19 Colonel Davis was remarkable for having graduated from West Point despite suffering four years of racism and silent treatment, largely shunned by his contemporaries. Indeed, all the men in the 99th Fighter Squadron were impressive because all had had to overcome so much to be there.

      Among them was Lieutenant Charlie Dryden