Posted on 07/10/2013 12:48:20 PM PDT by Kaslin
Seventy years ago this week, U.S. and British Commonwealth troops began Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Foreshadowing D-Day 1944, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower served as overall Allied commander. Like D-Day, Allied airborne soldiers led the Husky assault by parachuting (on the night of July 9, 1943) into olive groves and rock-strewn fields along the island's southeastern shores.
On July 10, seven divisions -- three U.S., three British and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division -- launched an amphibious attack on a 100-mile long front. Despite several successful Axis air attacks on ships and a brazen Italian tank attack on U.S. positions near Gela, by midnight July 10 all seven divisions were ashore.
Putting seven divisions ashore so swiftly was an extraordinary coup. Oh, grievous errors occurred as the buildup proceeded, the most notorious being the July 11 downing of 23 U.S. transports by Allied anti-aircraft fire. The planes were ferrying paratroop reinforcements. Yet in its initial phases Husky demonstrated that the Anglo-American team had learned a great deal since the Operation Torch landings in November 1942. Planning and coordination had improved. North African combat had honed the skills of American forces.
Then came the hard slog, over Sicily's godforsaken rocks.
For the next six weeks, the Germans and a diminishing number of Italians fought brutal delaying actions. German infantry stalled the Commonwealth's east coast advances, south of the city of Messina. The Axis frustrated an American thrust in central Sicily.
The conflicting egos of the two Allied army commanders, Britain's Bernard Montgomery and America's George Patton, sorely tested Allied cooperation. Cool-headed Ike and his combined staff finessed both powerful personalities. The stubborn Montgomery continued to slam his troops against Axis positions near Mount Etna. His was the shortest route to Messina, and Messina, Sicily's route to Italy, was the prize. Messina sits on the western side of the Strait of Messina, known in classical times as Scylla and Charybdis. Capture Messina, and Sicily became an Axis POW cage.
The Germans wanted a bloody slugfest. Patton didn't. He sent mobile units toward the weakly defended northwest sector. On July 22 his troops seized the port of Palermo, as the U.S. 45th Infantry Division cut the long highway connecting Palermo and Messina. The U.S. bagged 20,000 prisoners.
Now U.S. troops pushed east toward Messina. The British kept pounding from the south. The hard slog did not end until Aug. 17. The Allies suffered 25,000 casualties (killed and wounded). The Germans lost 4,700 dead, 14,000 wounded and 5,500 captured. Italians suffered 4,300 dead, 32,000 wounded and 100,000 captured (possibly more).
The Sicily campaign placed Allied troops less than 10 miles (the strait's width) from mainland Italy.
The oh-so-close proximity of large Allied forces to Italy was enticing. And that enticement leads to the biggest historical question tagging Operation Husky: Was taking Sicily the best strategic choice, since it made an invasion of Italy inevitable? From south of Naples to the Po Valley, Italy's rugged and rocky terrain is a defender's delight and attacker's sorrow.
Winston Churchill had sold Sicily as the next logical step. Sicily was the classical route to Rome from North Africa, and knocking fascist Italy out of the war would deal Adolf Hitler's Axis a heavy political loss.
Sicily geographically dominates the central Mediterranean. Husky's advocates noted that for three millennia the island served as the stepping stone of to-and-fro commerce and war between North Africa and Europe.
American military leaders were not convinced. The decisive route to Berlin goes through France -- make the all-out effort there. Churchill also claimed Europe had a "soft underbelly." Italian and Balkan terrain is not soft. Several senior U.S. planners thought Churchill was really trying to defend British imperial interests.
Axis-controlled Sicily had served as a big aircraft carrier for attacking Allied shipping. Under Allied control, those bases would extend air cover to northern Italy and Sardinia. U.S. planners agreed that Husky made operational sense if the goal was securing air bases. But can we stop there, at the strait? Sicily's hard slog was costly. A strategic thrust up Italy's mountainous spine will be as just slow and deadly.
And indeed it was.
One reason the number of Soviet Second Lieutenants lost during WWII is important:
Soviet doctrine called for officers at all levels, who had absolute control and knowledge of tactics, communications, strategy, logistics, etc. due to political considerations.
Senior non-commissioned officers in the Red Army were barely more capable than junior non-commissioned officers, who themselves were barely more knowledgeable (or reliable) than the conscriptees. Those conscriptees who survived battles, AND were vetted and recommended by the ever-present Political Officers, would then be considered for promotion to higher ranks.
In the Red Army, the ability to quote Party doctrine was more valuable than the ability to shoot straight.
Therefore, Wehrmacht tactics called for quickly identifying and targeting Red Army officers, confident in the belief that this would make an unit little better than a gaggle.
USSR lost about 35 million people and 14.5 million soldiers, over a million second lieutenants.
***Served them right. They started WWII when they teamed up with Hitler to divide up Poland.
One interesting thing is that both MacArthur and Bradley each made one massive blunder in their careers, and it was the same one. Both occurred after a brilliant campaign led to a massive route of the enemy, Mac following the Inchon invasion, and Bradley at the Battle of the Bulge. Both refused to believe that the enemy was capable or launching a winter counter attack, even after it was clearly happening.
Still, most great generals have made at least one blunder.
“After gory and costly battles in places like Guadalcanal and Tarawa, he discovered the magic of bypassing islands and leaving enemy strongholds to die on the vine.”
Guadalcanal & Tarawa were Navy/Marine Corps operations, not under the command of MacArthur. I’m sure he noticed those mistakes, but they weren’t his.
The “Dugout” tag comes from his departure from Corregidor — which was ordered.
Probably his biggest mistake was abandoning the planned defense of Bataan & Manila Bay by initially opposing the Japanese landings in Northern Luzon. That cost him men & materiel when he should have been husbanding his resources. Given the Navy’s predicament after Pearl Harbor, relief wasn’t coming, so it probably made little difference.
MacArthur probably made a few mistakes in the early operations on New Guinea, but he learned very quickly from those.
All-in-all, a very capable theater commander.
That would be General Lucas at Anzio.
Disagree that MacArthur was a bad general.
How so?
Before the German-Soviet alliance, the Soviets had tried to form an alliance with Britain and France, aimed at containing Germany.
The talks failed. Some historians blame that on Britain and France, who did not want to have to go to war to defend Russia.
If those talks had succeeded, perhaps there would have been no WW II, in Europe at least.
Guadalcanal was crucial in preventing the Japanese from advancing farther south towards New Zealand and thereby severing the supply route to Australia. Tarawa was all on Nimitz.
Just finished a book titled Operation Mincemeat. Basically a diversionary ploy by the British to deceive the Germans into thinking the attack on southern Europe by the Allies would be Sardinia and in the eastern Med Greece, a two pronged attack, instead of single assault on Sicily.
The Germans were duped by this ploy and didn’t concentrate their forces on Sicily which was the logical Allied attack point. Interesting story.
Try finding a reference to that monniker in any newspaper prior to rumors of MacArthur eying the Whitehouse in '44.
Not until Jimmuh Cartuh forgave Europe’s war debt.
Macarthur isn’t even on the map.
Ambrose Everette Burnside
Wouldn't have mattered not one bit.
The actual strategy of defending the beaches was a good one and had the green Filipino troops of Dec '41 not lost their nerve, the Japanese invasion probably would have been repulsed on the beaches. The same Filipino troops that lost their nerve on the beaches began badly mauling the Japanese one month later on Bataan.
I'd argue that the French and the British never really recovered from WW I. The best and brightest of their populations were slaughtered.
What WW I started, WW II finished off. And here we are today.
Patton, for all his bluster, was a serious student of ancient military history. What he saw developing was something like what happened in the second Punic War, and what Rome had done about it was to hop the periphery of the island clockwise, south to north. Once you hit Messina, Italy is a short boat-ride away. We took 100,000 Italian POWs because we had them encircled.
There were other issue surrounding that particular attack at that particular time. Stalin had been (rightfully, in my opinion) demanding a second front to relieve pressure on his own. It was well-known that a channel crossing would take assets we did not have in place and technology that didn't even exist yet. Both the Brits and the U.S. were deployed to North Africa at that point, also over ground that the Carthaginians and the Romans had fought. Sicily was an obvious stepping stone.
That was not lost on the Germans, themselves students of ancient warfare. It partially explains, I suspect, why they managed to leave the Italians holding the bag (it was their own territory, after all) and retreat slowly up the length of Italy. My late father followed them step for step the entire route, and his descriptions of the terrain match those of the article, sans a few expletives about managing mules through the Italian mountains.
What Churchill meant by "soft underbelly" was that the Germans didn't have defense in depth there to the degree to which they did on the Eastern front or that they still were developing at the Atlantic Wall. German planners felt that a slow retreat through Italy would buy them the requisite time, and for the most part they were correct; what happened, however, was a shortage of assets to develop a fourth front north of there once the third opened on June 6, 1944, in Normandy.
Sicily and the Italian campaigns had as much to do with political considerations as strategy. The Allies couldn’t leave the fighting to the Russians while waiting for the main invasion in France, and they had two armies in the Med with nobody to fight. Perhaps if they had ignored the political issues and those divisions in Italy had been at Stalingrad instead, the fight on the Eastern Front would have been more drawn out, but when you have allies, you often have to do things more for their benefit that your own.
OK, I think you won that one, but I'll try a weak parry with Beauregard and maybe McClellan. Naw, I still think you won. ;-)
Yeah, allies. That’s the ticket.
No, what he meant by, “soft underbelly,” is, it was economically in the best interest of the British Empire to occupy Sicily.
The point is that MacArthur was capable enough to have learned from the errors in both campaigns without making them himself.
Guadalcanal is a rather interesting study in military importance. The truth of the matter is that it was very costly for both sides in terms of men and material invested for little strategic importance.
Henderson Field, the focal point of the battle, was important only because it was the focal point of the battle. Certainly, when the battle begin, both sides felt it had great importance, coming so soon after the massive Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway.
But the harsh truth (albeit in 20-20 hindsight) was that it was basically a frontier airfield which the Japanese were ill-equipped to use after the loss of so much air power and four carriers at Midway. Yes, it could have potentially extended their power toward Australia and New Zealand to bomb and open up invasion routes, if they'd had the men and material available for such an operation, but they didn't.
As for the Americans and Aussies, once we won uncontested control of Guadalcanal, Henderson field was actually used for little more than a convenience stopover between our bases in New Guinea and Australia's more developed east coast, a role which had been ably filled by less developed Australian bases on the northeast coast prior to the construction of Henderson Field.
Henderson Field played almost no role in neutralizing the large Japanese naval base at Rabaul. In fact, we really never did anything more than bomb Rabaul as it turned out to be one of those places which could be bypassed. There was still a substantial Japanese military presence in Rabaul which was in near starvation conditions when it was finally allowed to schedule surrender sideshow just a few days after the main unconditional surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay.
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