World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF SICILY: To Charybdis, the Scylla

The Battle of Sicily was in its final phase. Not once did Allied pressure relax in the last 50 miles to Messina. On Aug. 2, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery of the British Eighth Army and Lieut. General George Smith Patton Jr. of the U.S. Seventh started an offensive. Within a week the generals and their men had cracked the enemy line from Mt. Etna to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Harried by land, sea and by air, the Germans fell back toward Messina’s crescent beach. Less than four miles across the treacherous strait lay one castlecrowned heights of Italy.

One month after the Allied landings, the Italians had quit fighting in Sicily, the Germans faced another Cap Bon, though with some hope of evacuating a remnant. In Sicily, the Axis had lost 125,000 men captured, uncounted thousands dead and wounded, uncounted hundreds of planes, tanks, trucks and guns. They had won a month’s time to bolster Festung Europa; but they had surely hoped for more. The Allies had practiced amphibious invasion on a grand scale, had sealed their control of the Mediterranean. Now they stood a step from the European main.

Yanks Forward. In the final push, U.S. troops drove forward in the north, Canadians in the center, Britons in the south. The Yanks found the terrain worse than Tunisia. The parched, brown land tossed in rocky ridges like the arrested waves of a stormy sea. The roads twisted through the valleys and German guns covered them from the slopes. The Yanks’ job was to blast those slopes and scale them, one by one.

Fiercest were the five days around Troina, a craggy road junction shielding the German position on Mt. Etna’s northwest shoulder. The first combat team thrown against Troina by Major General Terry Allen’s ist Infantry Division bounced back hard. German howitzers and mor tars skillfully held the hilltops. The ist Division massed its artillery, called in dive-bombers of the Tactical Air Force. For 72 hours the dust of an Allied barrage hung over the German emplacements. Then the ist Division smashed forward and through Troina.

Along the north coast, where the road chews through solid rock, the Germans set off demolition charges. The Yanks had to toil over and around obliterated roads; artillery had to be ferried up by sea. Then from ferrying guns the Seventh Army proceeded to ferrying troops. In a bold pre-dawn landing behind the German lines the Americans captured San Agata and Sari Fratello, surprised and destroyed a column of enemy reinforcements.

Canadians Forward. As the Eighth Army’s “left hook,” the Canadians shared the job of outflanking Catania, the eastern anchor of the German line. They slugged a path across the terraced hills. They tried their bayonets and lungs in vicious charges through vineyards and lemon orchards. They helped the British into Regalbuto and Centuripe. From that high ground they could roll up the whole German line on Mt. Etna’s western slope. General Montgomery could now begin the envelopment of Catania, and thereby spare his men a costly frontal assault.

Tommies Forward. Under savage artillery and mortar fire the Eighth Army leveled a road across the dried river bed of the Dittaino. This was part of the “left hook.” In the first were the British 78th Division (veterans of Tunisia’s Long Stop Hill), the soth Northumbrians and the 51st Highlanders. Between Centuripe and Paterno they tangled in the hardest struggle of the campaign. But the men that punched forward and the men left behind broke the Etna line, tore away Catania’s flank.

On the night of August 4 the Tommies heard dynamite detonating in Catania, saw flames stabbing skyward. The Germans were destroying and evacuating. At 8:30 a.m. the Eighth marched past shattered pillboxes into Sicily’s second city, the biggest city yet taken by a British army in World War II. Bomb-weary, hungry Sicilians stepped from the ruins, with cheers of relief, and cries for bread. For General Montgomery, it was another famous victory. From Catania and Paterno the Eighth thrust columns up the west and east slopes of Mt. Etna for the cleanup in Sicily.

Germans Backward. On the retreat to Messina there was no rest for the Germans. The big guns of U.S. warships tore into them on the north coast road; the Royal Navy ripped the highway on the island’s other side. Over Messina converged the Allied air arm, bombing and gunning, by day and night, the barges and small boats shuttling Germans from Sicily to Italy, from the whirlpool of Charybdis to the rock of Scylla.