Overseas Operations

Two thousand warships, transports and landing boats churned the dark waters of the ancient sea. Planes roared off to the north, loaded with paratroops or towing gliders packed with infantrymen.

The assault on Sicily had begun. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied commander in North Africa, had set in motion the largest amphibious military operation ever attempted--not excepting Xerxes' expedition against Greece (1,000 boats, 200,000 men). Now for a few hours he had to live with the bleak inner loneliness that comes to a commander when he has made his cast and must wait for the fall of the dice, wondering whether he has anticipated everything, what will go wrong, how well reality will fit the shape of his intricate, painstaking plans.

But Ike Eisenhower stood the ordeal well, so well that excited Correspondent John Gunther compared him to "a perfectly confident and unworried father awaiting the birth of a healthy baby." Like an expectant father, the general was up most of the night, driving out with a few officers of his staff to wave a farewell salute to one of the Allied air fleets taking off. Around midnight he went to the Naval War Room, where British Admiralty officials, who were in charge of the tactical operation until the troops actually landed, had the latest information to give him. Later he got three hours of sound sleep on a cot, awoke at 4:30 a.m. to have tea with the Royal Navy men and hear the news: landing operations were going according to plan.

Then the general went back to his own quarters (but only for a fresh uniform) and started on the messages and orders of the second day. His only propitiatory gesture to the gods of war and luck had been a judicious rubbing of his seven pocket pieces--a collection of old coins which includes a cartwheel silver dollar, a British five-guinea piece and a French franc.

Attack on the Beach. While Ike Eisenhower caught his brief nap, war broke loose on the southeastern shores of Sicily. First a blistering wave of air power flicked over the elected zones. Then the destroyers stood in from the sea and began a graceful, weaving parade offshore, their guns shooting tongues of flame at enemy pillboxes and strong points on land. Farther out battleships lobbed their heavy shells in high-arc interdictory fire to smash highways and crossroads deeper in the invasion area.

From transports standing between the destroyers and the battleships came swarms of landing boats, dashing through the hot red tracer fire from enemy shore batteries and machine guns, grinding to a halt on the steep shores, discharging their men, then hastening back to the transports for another load. Engineers and assault infantrymen led the way ashore, scurried to cover, set up machine guns, charted underwater obstacles at the landing points, then started clearing away barbed wire with Bangalore torpedoes.

Heavier landing craft, following in, brought more troops, light vehicles, anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns. Then as the beachheads were established, the Army started its materiel pouring in--armored cars, field artillery, heavy trucks, supplies, ordnance repair crews, signal equipment.

By daylight a young reconnaissance pilot, roaring overhead to make photographs in his P-38 Lightning, beheld a vast, fascinating panoply of war spread out beneath him. Allied warships* were cruising in toward shore, turning loose murderous salvos at the enemy coast, then swerving out to avoid coastal defense batteries. The ships had kindled a chain of smoke and flame extending ten miles inland.

There were ships as far as you could see on the cobalt blue water; the landing barges looked like squirming black fish streaming in & out from the shore. Destroyers were laying down smoke screens to help the landing craft approach safely. The screens mingled with clouds of smoke from the burning land, where shells had spread fires in the dust-dry countryside; everything that could burn was alight.

Attack in the Air. The same reconnaissance pilot saw not a sign of enemy opposition in the air; in that fact lay one of the greatest advantages of the invasion. Crushing Allied power had cleared the way--had, in fact, made the whole operation possible.

That air power was being wielded with fluid brilliance by a pair of past masters: Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, as Commander in Chief of Allied Mediterranean Air Command, and Lieut. General Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, as Commander of the Northwest African Air Force. Their main striking weapons were Major General James H. Doolittle's Strategic Air Force (heavy bombers over main objectives in the enemy rear) and Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham's Tactical Air Force (close support of the embattled ground forces). Together they formed an almost perfect team, welded and tempered in the African victory.

Strictly according to plan, the path of invasion had been smoothed by ferocious air bombardment of Sicily's airdromes, ports and supply lines. The real pounding had started on June 11, the very day that the outpost island Pantelleria went groggy and collapsed under the rain of bombs. It had gone on in a sonorous crescendo, rising to a peak in the final week when the big Axis air base at Gerbini caught 20 full-scale raids in one day, and targets were so much in demand that American Liberators politely timed their arrival overhead for the exact moment when British Wellingtons were completing their business.

The Allied Air Force, in its new A36 fighter-bombers, sprang a particularly nasty surprise on the enemy during the pre-invasion cleanup. An adaptation of the North American Mustang (P-51) the A36 is a 400-mile-an-hour single seater, equipped with dive brakes and wing bomb racks. It functions as a dive or glide bomber or as a low level strafing ship, specializing in such small but worthwhile targets as truck convoys, trains and power stations.

As a sweet and final touch only a few hours before the invasion's jump-off, a special flight of Liberators wheeled in over Taormina and dumped heavy demolition and incendiary bombs on the San Domenico hotel, which Allied intelligence had discovered to be the Axis military headquarters. The hotel and the city's nearby telephone and telegraph building were reduced to heaps of smoking rubble, paralyzing the nerve center of the island's defense organization at least temporarily.

Attack from the Air. Overwhelming superiority in the Sicilian skies made it possible for the Allies to employ airborne troops on a large scale. Paratroop transports and glider trains would have been sitting ducks for strong enemy fighter squadrons. As it was, substantial forces of U.S. and British parachutists and glider infantry led the way for the entire invasion, striking at key points in from the coast during the darkness about three to four hours before the coastal landings began.

Scanty details of the operation disclosed that the U.S. airborne troops dropped in the western part of the target area, while the British jumpers and glider-men landed in the eastern zone. They reported taking their first objectives with "negligible" casualties, and two days later made contact with the main invasion forces.

Attack Overland. U.S., British and Canadian troops brought the war to Sicily's shores, but headquarters gave no hint of the proportions or numbers involved. Axis sources (probably exaggerating) estimated that the Allies had about 30 divisions (roughly 450,000 men) available for the invasion. London military spokesmen, in turn, guessed that the Italians and Nazis might have 300,000 troops to defend the island.

Commanding the Allied invasion forces were two hard-driving veterans of the African campaign: General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery and Lieut. General George Smith Patton. General Montgomery's famous Eighth Army was believed to have been reshuffled since the final African victory, with several new units added, among them Canadians. General Patton was leading a newly created Seventh U.S. Army, apparently formed from the main units of the II Corps with added infantry, armor and airborne troops.

Some of the landings met surprisingly little resistance, others fought their way through stiff local opposition. Most serious counterattack in the early hours of the operation was directed against U.S. troops around Gela. It collapsed when a timely naval bombardment smashed a strong Axis armored detachment moving up on the roads north of the town.

By the third day the historic seaport of Syracuse was in British hands, and minesweepers were at work cleaning up the harbor channels for transports and supply ships to move in. Twelve other towns had been taken, among them Gela, Licata and Pozzallo. Several airfields had been seized, and on Tuesday Ragusa and Augusta fell. Fresh units of British troops were landed that day farther north near Catania; beyond that lay Messina, key to the defense of the island. Some elements of Patton's U.S. forces on the southern side were pushing westward toward Porto Empedocle, others were fanning inland toward the eastern Catania Plain to cover the British left flank.

General Eisenhower visited Sicily during the day, to see for himself the progress achieved in carrying out the master battle plans he and his brilliant deputy commander, General Sir Harold Alexander, had drawn up. Ike Eisenhower toured the occupied zone in a jeep, talked with Canadian soldiers on the Pachino peninsula, conferred with his field commanders. Before boarding an amphibian jeep to return to the British destroyer which had ferried him over from headquarters, the General said he was satisfied.

The first job of the Allies had been obvious: to establish the beachheads, get hold of some airports, cut the road and railroad lines into the invaded area, secure one or more good seaports. That first phase had gone well. But sterner fighting lay ahead. The enemy was playing the game according to rule, gathering up his mobile reserves, including crack German and Italian divisions of far-better battle quality than the garrison and coast-defense troops which had been brushed aside. He was almost certainly preparing to counterattack.

Allied air reconnaissance traced the assembling of Axis reserves, observed heavy troop movements on many roads leading to the occupied southeastern zone. Promptly the A-36s sallied forth again, ripping at the columns and destroying or damaging 400 trucks in a day. The air assault went on, as Liberators went north to blast Axis airfields on the toe of the Italian boot. They badly damaged the big air base at Reggio Calabria.

Ships were pouring more Allied men and machines into the fight, while the planes tried to seal off the Axis line of reinforcement across the Strait of Messina. The Allied problem now was to keep the initiative, keep the enemy off balance, keep advancing. The invasion of Sicily was an accomplished fact; the Battle of Sicily was now being fought.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.