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They met relatively little serious resistance and, by the time they had occupied the port on July 22, more than 50,000 prisoners had been taken. soldiers advanced steadily toward Palermo, a strategically important seaport.
Lieutenant General George Smith Patton, who commanded the American 7th Army, did not agree with this change in emphasis and told his troops to head west instead. On July 12, Augusta had come under British control, and General Bernard Montgomery ordered his men to mount an attack on Messina to the north. However, these did not make a difference to the eventual outcome. The Axis were misled by the widely scattered Allied paratroopers into thinking that the invasion was on a massive scale, and requested reinforcements. forces succeeded in holding their ground until covering fire from the Navy drove off the tanks. Later in the afternoon, a Panzer division of heavy Tiger tanks joined the defense, but the Americans managed to land 18 Regimental Combat Team and the 2nd Armored Division by evening. divisions on the other coast of the island had a much harder time of things, with both Italian and German airplanes offering strong resistance to the invasion. This allowed the Allied guns and tanks to be landed quickly, and Panchino was in British hands by nightfall. The British forces had the easier time of the two groups, with relatively little fight being put up by the Italian defenders. Warships were based off the coasts in order to provide covering fire. forces, with American divisions attacking the western coasts and the British the east. The main assault on the Sicilian coast was a joint effort between British and U.S. paratroopers, more than 2,700, ended up quite widely spread, some landing as much as 50 miles away from their targets. Many of the pilots used had little experience of combat and a combination of this inexperience, dust being thrown up from the dry ground, and fire from anti-aircraft guns meant that the U.S. Meanwhile, American paratroopers were attempting a landing in another part of Sicily, but this operation, too, went far from smoothly. Even so, the British were successful in taking and holding the bridge. However, the landings were fraught with problems: 200 men were drowned when their gliders crashed into the sea, many more landed in areas away from their target, and only 12 landed in the right place. Their task was to take control of a bridge, the Ponte Grande, some distance to the south of Syracuse. The first landings were made by the British, using more than 130 gliders of the 1st Airlanding Brigade. The landing craft were slightly delayed in reaching the island because of a storm, but in fact this also helped the Allies: the Italian defense forces had been placed on a lower than usual state of alert because it was thought that the poor weather would have made an attack unlikely. On July 9, Allied convoys came together near the British-held island of Malta, and from there they made for the southern coast of Sicily. Lathbury died age 71 on in Mortimer, Berkshire. After this, the Allies paused for around a month to take stock of their positions and prepare for the main assault. This occurred when the 1st Division of the British army, under command of General Sir Gerald William Lathbury landed on June 11. A more specific assault was also made on Pantellaria, a southern Italian island, and this was the first part of Italy to surrender to Allied forces. Supreme command of the invasion was placed in the hands of the American General, Dwight David Eisenhower, who oversaw the combined airborne and amphibious assault.īefore the main part of the operation began, there was a concerted bombing campaign of Italian targets, including some in Sicily. At this conference, Franklin Delano Rooseveltagreed with Winston Churchilland General Charles de Gaulle an invasion of Sicily should be mounted later that year.
#World war 2 operation husky in sicily us army free
The main Western Allied powers – the United States, Britain, and the Free French – had met in Casablanca in January 1943. Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Italy, was forced out of office by Adolf Hitler as a result of his defeat.
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The invasion was a success for the Allies, and their victory allowed them to use Sicily as a launchpad for the full Italian Campaign. These were then followed up with land battles lasting around six weeks.
The campaign ran from early July to the middle of August, and consisted of airborne and amphibious operations at first.
#World war 2 operation husky in sicily us army code
Operation Husky was the code name given to the Allied invasion of the island of Sicily in World War II, which took place in the summer of 1943.
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