Sicily '43. James Holland

at all over the militia units or navy or Regia Aeronautica. Leonardi was right – there was no joined-up approach to the defence of the island at all. Clearly, this could not be allowed to go on; and, since Roatta was a wily operator, he managed to secure a decree from the Italian general staff, the Comando Supremo, that made him overall Armed Forces Commander, Sicily, a post that gave him control of some seven military and nine civilian defence agencies on the island. The only parts of Sicily’s defence that eluded him were the three naval fortress areas of Messina–Reggio in the north-east, Trapani in the west and Augusta–Syracuse in the east.

      With the vastly increased power and authority that came with his new title, Roatta had set about licking Sicily’s defences into shape. Both troops and locals were drafted in to build bunkers, lay mines and wire, and create anti-invasion obstacles along the island’s beaches. Frustratingly for Roatta, however, many of the resources earmarked for Sicily ended up being sent to Tunisia, where they were lost for ever, either sunk en route or taken by the Allies. The general had demanded and had been promised some 160,000 tons of cement a month. Only around 7,000 tons had ever reached him.

      On 13 May, the very day North Africa was lost, Ammiraglio Arturo Riccardi, the head of the Regia Marina, the Italian navy, held a conference in Rome. The report on Sicily made for grim listening. Allied bombing was causing mayhem and had cut off almost all coastal traffic, which was principally how Sicily was supplied. By May 1943, almost all of Italy’s merchant fleet was at the bottom of the Mediterranean; in fact, between November and the middle of May, Allied aircraft had sunk over 170 Axis ships and damaged a further 120, while Allied naval forces had sunk several hundred thousand tons of shipping too. Unlike the Allies, whose shipyards in the United States and Britain were building new vessels at an unprecedented rate, neither the Italians nor the Germans had any means of either building or bringing into the Mediterranean any more freighters. They were simply running out of shipping, which was why there were just forty small vessels left for maritime supply of Sicily. This meant that the population, already underfed at the best of times, was suffering even more severely from food shortages – and this went for the military as well as the civilians. It also meant there was little chance of Roatta getting the cement he needed – or much else besides, including boots, the shortage of which had repeatedly and bizarrely plagued the Italian army ever since it had gone to war. Many of the men in the coastal divisions were now wearing sandals or going barefoot – and so disabled by this that training had been affected. As it happened, there were warehouses full of boots; but they were all far too big and so had remained where they were.

      The failure of Roatta’s attempt to provide Sicily with adequate defences also explained why, at Gela, some bunkers were now being made of cardboard instead of concrete. Tenente Giuseppe Bruccoleri was an engineer whose particular task of setting up barrage balloons around Italy had exempted him from overseas service; then his mother, who had a connection to Mussolini, wrote to Il Duce explaining that she had already lost her husband to war in 1917, and needed her son back home in Gela. Incredibly, Mussolini personally agreed to post Bruccoleri to Sicily, where he was to oversee the elevation of barrage balloons at Augusta but then could return to Gela – although he was to take his balloon company with him and set up a telephone switchboard in his house, and help with the preparation of local defences. This he did; and, since there was not enough cement, he and his men made fake bunkers out of cardboard. The idea was to fool the Allies into thinking Gela had stronger defences than it did. Bruccoleri’s story reveals one of two things: either Mussolini really was going a little mad, or the Italian army had by now become so institutionally broken that an officer could be sent home because his mother had the influence to demand it and end up overseeing the construction of cardboard pillboxes. Whichever was the case, it was certainly no way to fight a war.

      Generale Roatta did his best, but even for a mover and shaker like him, the current shortages and endless difficulties now facing the Italians were insurmountable. In the middle of May, he made a speech which was thought to be just a little bit too disparaging about the Sicilians and questioning their patriotism. The Comando Supremo, nervous that the gulf between Sicily and the rest of Italy was already dangerously wide, recalled him, appointing him to the top job in place of Ambrosio – which was why he was in Rome talking to von Neurath, reflecting on the invidious situation in which they now found themselves.

      The decision to push Roatta upstairs also revealed the stark limits to Fascism’s power; no German general would have been removed for fear of worrying the locals, after all. In his place arrived Generale Alfredo Guzzoni, sixty-six years old and retired since May 1941 after a long career that had begun in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911. Small, heavy-set and with little obvious enthusiasm for the posting, he had never once before set foot on Sicily. Nor had his new chief of staff, Colonnello Emilio Faldella, who was much younger and more obviously energetic. In fact, Faldella and Guzzoni had never met one another before either, so their appointments were curious ones. It was now June, and as the Axis were all very well aware, an Allied invasion, wherever it fell, could not be long in coming.

      On 22 June, Generalleutnant Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin was summoned to see Hitler at the Berghof, the Führer’s home in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Recently returned from commanding 17. Panzer Division on the Eastern Front, von Senger had been enjoying a very rare stint of leave; now, on joining Hitler, Keitel and Warlimont at their daily situation conference, he was told he was being sent to Sicily as German liaison officer to the Italian Sixth Army. His brief was somewhat loose. Hitler talked at length about the possibilities of defending Sicily, should it come to that, but was still undecided about how many German units he should commit. Baade’s newly constituted Division Kommando Sizilien was already there and a second division, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, was also on its way. Others were potentially waiting in the wings. Generalleutnant Hans-Valentin Hube, one of Hitler’s favourites, was also now in southern Italy. Due to the machinations of the Italian royal court and general staff, he reported, it was likely the Italians would soon defect and be out of the war – although it was felt the Allies had already missed the boat by not invading Sicily immediately after their landings in north-west Africa.

      Afterwards, von Senger lunched with Warlimont, who believed that in the event of a major Allied attack on Sicily, it would be best to transfer the mass of Axis troops to the mainland. ‘This appreciation and definition of my task,’ noted von Senger, ‘were not in line with those of Hitler.’16

      Von Senger was precisely the kind of military aristocrat Hitler loathed. The feeling was mutual. ‘I detested him,’ wrote the general, ‘for all the misfortune he had brought upon my country.’17 Born near the Swiss border in 1891, Frido von Senger had been educated in part at Eton College in England and then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, which had helped give him a slightly broader world-view than many of his peers. A fine military career had followed, initially in the First World War, then between the wars and now in this current conflict, where he had proved outstanding, both a deep student of warfare and also a compassionate and highly regarded general. A fine, indeed world-class, equestrian like Baade, he was also a devout Catholic, a cultured intellectual and, along with Kesselring, less prone than many senior Germans to regarding all Italians as feckless Latin types deserving only of deep contempt. This made him an ideal choice to play the go-between with German and Italian forces, regardless of what Hitler thought of him personally.

      Three days later, von Senger was in Rome meeting with Kesselring, who talked far more optimistically about the chances of preventing an invasion of Sicily. The Allied assault on Dieppe back in August 1942 had been easily repulsed, he pointed out. Von Senger was not so sure; he felt the Allied victory in North Africa marked an entirely new phase of the war that did not augur well. On the other hand, he agreed that German forces could not fight two opponents – both the Allies and the Italians, should they defect. Von Senger would need to tread sensitively and carefully, Kesselring warned him; Sicily was a tinderbox, and the Germans would disregard the primacy of Guzzoni on the island at their peril. While Kesselring and von Senger were singing from the same hymn sheet with regard to relations with their Italian comrades in arms, the same could not be said of General von Richthofen, who told von Senger, in no uncertain terms, that the Luftwaffe was going its own way. Unlike Kesselring, Guzzoni or Mussolini, he was convinced Sardinia was the most likely target for the Allies and so had already begun moving his air forces there. ‘All this revealed’, commented