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Sicily '43. James Holland
Читать онлайн.Название Sicily '43
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isbn 9780802157201
Автор произведения James Holland
Издательство Ingram
For the OKW – the men trying to plan and shape Germany’s war while also acting as Hitler’s mouthpiece – the loss of Tunisia had far-reaching and decidedly grave consequences. No longer was the war in the south restricted to the arm’s-reach safety of the North African coastline; it now encompassed the entire sweep of the Mediterranean.
Deputy Chief of the OKW Operations Staff was Generalleutnant Walter Warlimont, a 48-year-old career soldier and former artilleryman who had served on the operational planning staff since before the war. This had given him almost daily access to Hitler and the largely unenviable task of trying to put the Führer’s wishes into some kind of action. It also meant that right now, with North Africa lost, some serious plans needed to be made and in quick order. Warlimont’s staff soon produced figures to suggest that by reopening the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal the Allies had freed up around 2 million tons of shipping for the movement of troops and supplies, which was certainly not good news.
Worse, though, was the realization that the Allies now had vast armed forces in the Mediterranean and were almost certain to send them across the sea for an assault on a major Axis stronghold in the southern theatre. It was Warlimont’s job to try to work out where that might be and to prepare for such an eventuality. And it was also the task of his team to consider what the Germans might do about their Italian ally, an appreciation they set to work on immediately. The ‘Survey of the Situation Should Italy Withdraw from the War’ was prepared on Hitler’s direct instructions and was an extraordinary admission of just how low relations between the two allies had sunk.
Hitler’s view was that the most likely target for further Allied action in the southern theatre was the Balkans. His lack of geopolitical understanding repeatedly hindered German strategy; he was utterly incapable of looking at any situation except through the prism of his own world-view. The Balkans were the part of the southern flank he feared losing most; so that was where the Allies would strike. Whenever he tried to put himself into the Allies’ shoes, he merely transposed his own thoughts on to their situation. The reason for this obsession with the Balkans was because this route into Europe led directly to the Romanian oilfields, some of Nazi Germany’s most prized assets, as well as to critical supplies of bauxite, copper and chrome that came from the area. With much of the Balkans, from Greece to Yugoslavia, now in revolt against their German occupiers, the region seemed ripe for the Allied plucking – along with the fact that long stretches of its coastlines were poorly and thinly defended by Italian troops who had not been given any updated equipment since 1941. That there might not be anything like enough beaches or ports, or half-decent internal infrastructure, or that it was way beyond Allied fighter cover – an absolute non-negotiable prerequisite for any major amphibious landing – does not appear to have swayed him from his conviction that the Balkans were now the Allies’ major goal. The Balkans, he announced on 19 May, were ‘almost more dangerous than the problem of Italy, which, if the worst comes to the worst, we can always seal off somewhere.’4
Warlimont, though, was aware, as were others, that the Allies would need a stepping stone in crossing the Mediterranean, and that Sicily, Sardinia or even Corsica were the most likely targets. Clearly, it was essential to keep the Allies as far away from the southern Reich as possible, and this meant sending reinforcements into Italy and also the Balkans. These would have to come from the Eastern Front but could also be drawn from France, since it now seemed unlikely the Allies would attempt a Channel crossing any time soon.
Hitler broadly accepted Warlimont’s appreciation, although he seems to have become convinced that the first stepping stone would be Sardinia, not Sicily. This was in large part due to Operation MINCEMEAT, a rather ghoulish intelligence wheeze by the British Secret Intelligence Service and their XX ‘Double Cross’ Committee, who had had the idea to take the corpse of a Welsh down-and-out who had killed himself with rat poison, dress him up as an officer and dump him from a submarine just off the southern Spanish coast. No longer would the dead man be Glyndwr Michael; he was now (Acting) Major William Martin of the Royal Marines. No small detail was overlooked: about his person were letters between ‘Martin’ and his fictitious girlfriend, receipts, and various other seemingly innocuous details that lent verisimilitude to the whole elaborate scam. Most importantly, though, he was carrying documents relating to Allied plans to make landings in southern Greece at Cape Araxos and Kalamata. There was also a reference to ‘sardines’, which was supposed to be perceived as a possible coded clue to an operation against Sardinia. The body was prepared to look as though the man had died in a plane crash, and was dropped close enough to the Spanish coast to ensure that it would be washed up on the beach and picked up by the Spanish authorities, who would pass all the information on to the Germans. ‘Major Martin’ was put into the sea in the early hours of 30 April and everything went exactly according to plan, so that by 14 May British cryptanalysts had decoded German ciphers warning that an Allied invasion was expected in the Balkans.
MINCEMEAT was certainly ingenious, but one of the reasons it worked was because it reinforced a conclusion upon which Hitler had already decided. What’s more, it wasn’t the only piece of intelligence chicanery employed by the British. The Axis were also led to believe a Twelfth Army had been established in the Middle East, ready to invade Greece, even though in reality it was every bit as fictitious as Major Martin and simply a cover name for Eighth Army. In Greece itself, Operation ANIMALS was carried out by a British Special Operations Executive (SOE) mission led by Brigadier Eddie Myers, a quiet and methodical engineer turned sabotage maestro. In just over three weeks between 29 May and 23 June, Myers and his team carried out some forty-four acts of sabotage in Greece, cutting telephone wires, blocking roads, blowing railway lines, destroying the Asopos viaduct and blocking the Métsovo pass, all of which was supposed to make the Axis believe the Allies would be landing in Greece, and possibly Sardinia, but certainly not Sicily.
Clever as all these elaborate deception plans were, however, they couldn’t obscure the fact that Sicily was just such an obvious choice, despite Hitler’s view to the contrary. It was the only target that afforded realistic fighter cover, and it was very obviously the target that promised the most bang for the Allied buck. Certainly, Feldmarschall Kesselring remained convinced Sicily would be the Allies’ target – and so too did Mussolini, for what it was worth. At any rate, neither MINCEMEAT nor any of the other deception plans were responsible for changing the entire course of the Second World War, as has often been claimed by film-makers’ and publishers’ hyperbole. What does seem clear is that Hitler had already decided on the Balkans and possibly Sardinia as the targets, intelligence scams or no, while those who were convinced, rightly, it was going to be Sicily were not dissuaded by any washed-up corpse or blown-up viaduct.
Far more corrosive for Axis fortunes in the Mediterranean was the growing toxicity of the alliance, for wherever the Allies struck it was absolutely clear by now that neither the Germans nor the Italians trusted the other one inch. Germany was actively planning for life without its Italian ally, while most senior Italian commanders were wondering how they could extricate themselves from the war with the minimum amount of German retribution, which, for obvious reasons, was feared might be terrible indeed.
With the loss of North Africa, Hitler accepted the writing was on the wall for Italy but – perhaps because of a lingering affection for Mussolini – he did not want to accept that Il Duce might now stab him in the back and take Italy out of the war. Instead, the Führer had become convinced that Mussolini was in poor health and now, at sixty, too old to hold on to the reins of power with his former iron grip. After all, Il Duce was not the absolute leader that Hitler was; Italy was still a monarchy, and because of that there were checks on his power.
‘Do you think’, Hitler asked Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz on 14 May after the latter’s return from a seven-day visit to Rome, ‘that the Duce is determined to go all the way with Germany right to the end?’5 Without Mussolini, Hitler knew, Germany’s partnership with Italy would be over; it had always been the two leaders’ personal relationship that had