Sicily '43. James Holland

low, with fewer than two hundred Italians killed and the same again wounded. But the shattering mental effect of having some 6,200 tons of bombs dropped on to their positions had very effectively broken the will of the Italian defenders.

      Spaatz was elated; so were all the Allied commanders. ‘Pantelleria’, noted Tedder, ‘was the first defended place to be reduced to surrender in the Second World War as a result of air and naval bombardment alone.’28 That was true enough; but more than that, for HUSKY it meant another airfield under Allied control closer to Sicily. It also suggested the Italians might not fight as hard in the coming battle as some had feared. No one was feeling complacent. But the Allies could now look towards the invasion with a little more confidence than they had before. CORKSCREW had been a resounding success.

      CHAPTER 7

      Man of Honour

      THE PRE-WAR BAEDEKER GUIDE to southern Italy and Sicily warned that under no circumstances should the traveller attempt to visit Sicily during the months of July and August because of the appalling heat and prevalence of disease. The Allied planners were not taking any heed of that, but they were preparing a booklet for the Allied soldiers about to take part in HUSKY, which was to be issued to every single serviceman and included a brief history of the island and an outline of what they might expect when they got there, from climate to the living conditions of ordinary Sicilians, along with a handful of useful words and phrases. ‘The Island,’ the Soldier’s Guide to Sicily stated matter-of-factly on page 1, ‘has a long and unhappy history that has left it primitive and undeveloped, with many relics and ruins of a highly civilized past.’1 Sicily in 1943 was an island that had been rather left behind; the Allies might have been about to re-enter Europe, but this wasn’t a Europe many of them would recognize: parts of Italy – Sicily in particular – were very different from the modern, industrialized and increasingly urban worlds of Britain, the United States and Canada.

      Shaped not unlike a stone-age flint arrowhead, with the point facing west, Sicily was, in many ways, trapped in a world that had barely changed in a thousand years: it was a place where agriculture dominated the economy and class dominated society, and where the peasants, which meant most of the population, were as poor, downtrodden and oppressed as they had ever been. In winter there could be vicious soaking downpours, which often did more harm than good as there were no dams or reservoirs to make the most of the rainfall, causing mudslides that could block roads to and from the hilltop towns for weeks. In the spring and early summer, Sicily would be briefly bathed in soft green and a multitude of wild flowers; but then came the long, volcanically hot summer, baking the hilly and mountainous interior into a brutal, bleached landscape that became more desert than farmland. In high summer, the air would be as still as the inside of an oven one day but the next whipped by dust storms brought on the North African scirocco.

      Nor was this tough landscape improved by the dominating presence of Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, looming high over the north-east corner of the island and on clear days visible from even distant parts. It was like an all-seeing god, standing sentinel, occasionally with volcanic steam hanging over the top like a white cap. Sometimes, of course, it would erupt. Back in 396 BC, an eruption had stopped the Carthaginians in their tracks; another in 122 BC had destroyed much of Catania, lying just to the south-east of the mountain. Catania was nearly overrun again in 1669, while almost all of the town of Mascali, lying on the coast to the east of Etna, was swamped by lava barely more than a decade before the war in 1928.

      Volcanic eruptions were one threat to the livelihoods – and lives – of Sicilians; earthquakes were another. At 5.20 a.m. on 28 December 1908 a massive quake hit Messina, swiftly followed by a 40-foot-high tsunami along the coastline. More than 90 per cent of Messina was destroyed and tens of thousands killed – possibly as many as a hundred thousand.

      Along with natural disasters and a savage climate, Sicilians over the centuries had also had to deal with marauders and invaders. It was an island with an astonishingly rich history. Those modern, twentieth-century troops who had been taught Latin and Greek during their schooldays would have remembered that Sicily was the place where Daedalus, the first aeronaut, landed – according to the myth – and where, in Homer’s tale, Odysseus tricked and blinded the Cyclops.

      Sicily had always been a bridge, or stepping stone, from one world to another – first to the ancient Greeks, then to the Romans and Carthaginians. Over time it was occupied by Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, before becoming a vassal to the Bourbons of the Holy Roman Empire, then to Napoleon, then back to the Bourbons once more. Over and over, successive powers arrived in Sicily, imposed themselves and ruled with an iron rod until usurped by someone else. The one constant was the appalling treatment of the native Sicilians. At the same time, the island was subjected to regular raids by pirates from Arabia, from Africa – from all over. This turbulent history gave rise to one of Sicily’s characteristic features: the lack of villages or isolated settlements. It was never safe to live in small communities, and so most Sicilians lived in towns, more often than not perched high on a hill for safety. Daily, the menfolk would leave the town and head down into the fields to eke out a pitiful living, then, the backbreaking day done, trudge back up to their homes.

      Even by 1943, Sicilians for the most part were still living lives of appalling poverty. There was an electricity grid, but by no means all homes were connected, certainly not in the more remote towns of the mountainous interior. Only around two-fifths of the population had access to running water and those were mostly in the cities – the majority of the island’s towns, perched atop hills and mountains, were dependent on wells and rooftop water tanks, just as they had always been. This also meant modern sanitation was the preserve of the elites only. Most people simply threw effluent into the street.

      Mario Turco lived in the coastal town of Gela. Thirteen years old, he was from a working-class family but they were better off than many. His father and uncle ran a construction business – in fact, one of their jobs had been to put up some wooden buildings for the Regia Aeronautica at the nearby Ponte Olivo airfield. Mario was one of five children, which was not at all unusual. There was no luxury and very little spare cash; life was simple. Turco was happy enough, however. ‘I had a good childhood,’ he said.2 ‘My father made sure we had everything. We all went to school.’ Food was simple, too: milk for breakfast, pasta for lunch, vegetables and fish for supper, meat once a week. ‘During the war,’ he said, ‘meat was scarce and expensive or it wasn’t available at all.’3 Not only was there severe rationing in Italy, often it was impossible to get even what little was supposed to be available – increasingly so on Sicily as the war progressed, primarily because the transport system was on the point of collapse due to the loss of shipping and, more recently, Allied air attacks on the railways.

      There were hardly any vehicles in Gela – just a few cars for the most senior town officials, but no trucks, although that had been the case before the war too. ‘People used to move on farm wagons,’ said Turco, ‘on donkey-drawn carts.’4 There was a cinema in town, and a public radio in the town club – a kind of community centre – where people could hear the news. Otherwise, contact with the outside world was minimal; for Mario Turco, Gela was his entire world.

      In contrast, sixteen-year-old Vincenza La Bruna, who lived in the town of Regalbuto in the eastern centre of the island, not far from the foot of Etna, lived a life of grinding hardship. There were nine crammed into their family home – her parents, her grandmother and six children. Vincenza went to school for just three years, and much of the rest of her time was spent working. ‘At home,’ she said, ‘but there was also work to do in the fields.5 At home there was a donkey and mule to look after too, and some chickens and a pig to feed. There was no lack of work.’ The family even had to make their own shoes – simple wooden clogs – although much of the time they wore nothing. ‘We were barefoot,’ said Vincenza, ‘like slaves.’6 Despite the animals and chickens, food was short, increasingly so as the war progressed. Boiled wheat berries became the staple.

      Mario Turco was healthy enough as a boy, helped no doubt by swimming almost daily in the sea, but disease was rife on Sicily. In the plains in the west near Trapani, on the southern coastal strip and in the larger,