Flying Officer Ray Atkinson towed a Hamilcar glider in Operation Varsity. The flak over the Rhine was apparently fearsome, but he never mentioned it – only the guilt he felt that he and his crew were going back for a hot meal in the NAAFI, while his glider pilots and their troops were descending into hell.
Halifaxes and Hamilcars at Woodbridge lined up ready to take off for the assault across the Rhine in Operation Varsity. Ray Atkinson’s Halifax, 8A-M, is the second from the front on the left of the image. Source: Border Regiment Archives.
Ray Atkinson in his RAF uniform in WW2.
Ray Atkinson volunteered for the RAF in 1941, aged 18. He was a modest man who never spoke of his wartime experiences until he was nearly 80 years old. Then, when he realised that his family wanted to know his story, he wrote it all down. His account describes how he was trained as a pilot in Canada and then posted to an Operational Training Unit flying Whitleys at Abingdon, where a leaflet dropping operation over France first exposed him to enemy fire. From the OTU he was posted to fly heavy bombers for army cooperation tasks. He later flew Halifaxes in support of SOE and Resistance agents all over Europe, before towing a Hamilcar glider during Operation Varsity. This is his story of working with gliders, in his own words:
March 1944: We expected to be posted to a bomber squadron but instead we were sent on courses to do airborne work. That involved glider towing, paratroop dropping and container dropping. Initially we were posted to Sleap near Shrewsbury. Again we flew Whitleys. The hedge at the end of the airfield was only about six feet high but one had the impression that one only just missed it when pulling off Horsa gliders. There Ivor Flack, another pilot who had been on the same course at Abingdon, introduced us to Totopoly. We played it frequently in the evenings when we were not flying.
The Wrekin [hill] was within the airfield circuit and we always kept that in mind when taking off and landing. In bumpy weather Whitley glider towing was quite strenuous requiring constant adjustment of rudder, elevators and ailerons. At take-off the towrope was snaked from the aircraft to the glider and the tail-gunner kept the pilot informed when the rope was tightening and finally about to become taught. He also told the pilot when the glider became airborne.
April 1944: From Sleap we went to Heavy Conversion Unit (HCU) at Tilstock near Whitchurch. There we flew Stirlings, our first experience of four-engined aircraft. We now were given an engineer who had a lot of responsibility for checking and managing four engines and the fuel tanks. A splendid chap, Sgt Tom Bussell, joined my crew. He was about thirty and a policeman in civilian life. Stirlings, though very large for those days, were very light on the controls. They responded about as lightly as Oxfords. They had a bad reputation for getting their extremely long undercarriages buckled. We had to land them without any twist or bounce and keep them perfectly straight until the end of the landing run. I can’t clearly remember but I think that at Tilstock we pulled off Hamilcars as well as Horsas.
August 1944: It was decided that as we were liable to drop paratroops it would be a good idea if we knew what a drop felt like. We were sent to Paratroop Training School at Ringway in Cheshire. The first few days we practised rolling on mats. Then we swung on a rope, let go, landed on a mat and rolled. We also had to sit on a box, upper legs horizontal, lower legs vertically downwards, trunks upright and push off with our hands. That was so as to be able to jump from an aircraft through a hole only about three feet fore and aft and about three feet wide. We were taken up on Whitleys to watch others jump. Then came our turn. We went up sitting looking inwards on a circular bench slung under a balloon. From 1,000ft we jumped. We had static lines which opened our ‘chutes. We didn’t have ripcords to pull ourselves as we would have done in case of baling out in an emergency from an aircraft. One felt a tremendous surge of gratitude when the ‘chute opened and for a few seconds one could bask in the delightful feeling of gazing down on the lovely fields as one fell seemingly slowly towards them. Then one had to remember to position oneself correctly in one’s straps and try to face the way one was being blown and remember what we had learnt about elbows and rolling. A fairly reasonable landing achieved.
Two days later we went up in a Whitley, this time to 800ft. One’s speed on leaving the aircraft helped to open the ‘chute. Again we had a static line and only had to concentrate on clearing the aircraft without catching our backs on where we had been sitting or knocking ourselves out by catching our foreheads on the front of the hole. Again relief when the ‘chute opened but rather less time to enjoy the scenery. I was billeted with a pleasant couple living in a private house away from the training station. When our jumps were over they told us that one of the jumpers staying with them on the previous course had broken his ankle. The old hands on the station sang ghastly songs about the various possible ways of failing to come down to a safe landing. Back to Tilstock for a day or two.
My crew and I were then attached to an operational Stirling squadron in 38 Group at Fairford. We were distributed to different operational crews to experience a container drop over France. Tragically, Tom Bussell, my engineer, and the crew he was with failed to return from their mission. We never knew what had happened. The rest of the crew all came back safely. Tom was replaced as engineer by Paddy Creane, a Southern Irishman. Training was now finished.
My crew was flown to Tarrant Rushton in Dorset to join 298 Squadron of 38 Group, a Halifax squadron. We were now ready to drop containers, tow gliders or drop paratroops. A Canadian pilot, F/O John Taylor, of my Flight showed me how to fly a Halifax. On all my previous flights I had been instructed to a final cockpit check from left to right. The code was “BUMPFF” (Brakes, undercarriage, mixture, pitch, fuel, flaps). John Taylor, however, said “Wal, Atkinson, I always check from right to left.” Single-engined propeller aircraft undergo torque. The propeller turns one way and tries to turn the aircraft the other way. The wing that would have gone down because of the torque is set at a higher angle to compensate in flight. That wing therefore stalls before the lower angle one and that can cause a spin. Twin- and multi-engined craft do not undergo torque but they suffer from tail-buffeting due to the slipstream from propellers. From Oxfords to Whitleys to Stirlings I had been instructed to open the throttles smoothly by leading them from the appropriate side against the swing. If one opened the throttles equally the aircraft would swing considerably.
John Taylor said “Wal, Atkinson, I always open up all four throttles fully immediately and compensate the swing by brake. “ Each wheel had independent braking to make taxiing easier. Anyway, he took off by his method, let me handle the controls for a while, then he did a circuit and landed. Then it was my turn. I thought “Ok, I’ll check from right to left and open up full throttle.” Opening up right away meant one knew if all four engines were working properly and one reached flying speed more quickly. It went off all right and after a couple of hours I was “converted”.
For container dropping we flew only five days before full moon to five days after. We flew fairly low to the dropping zone and dropped the containers from 1,000ft, I think. When we arrived over the dropping zone we flashed two Morse letters as briefed, and if the Resistance people flashed back the two proper different letters we dropped. If not, we were not to drop. The Resistance people laid out flare in a T formation, the stem of the T into the wind and the crossbar on the windward side. We flew over the T into the wind, thus reducing our ground speed and landing the containers fairly near the flares. We dropped over France, then Belgium, then Holland, then Denmark, then Norway as the Allied forces progressed.
Over Holland we flew very low and on one occasion I had to climb and bank to miss a windmill. Once we were just about to leave the Dutch coast on our return when we were shot at with tracer bullets. They seem to approach very slowly at first and then whizz past. I tried to weave as much as possible allowing for the fact that we were very low. We got away all right and laughed at the bad shooting. When we inspected the plane the next morning the ground-staff showed us a jagged hole in the tail plane about twelve inches in diameter. That was only about four feet from Taffy, the rear gunner’s turret. He had laughed the loudest. For Norway we flew very low over the North Sea then climbed quickly to 7,000ft to avoid the mountains. By moonlight from the air Norway is very beautiful.
Ray Atkinson’s pilot’s logbook showing the entry for Operation Varsity, the airborne assault across the River Rhine on 24 March 1945. Operations against the enemy merited red ink. He listed the surnames of his crew: Louis Pantellini, navigator; Eric Smith, bomb aimer; Archibald Norris, wireless operator; Eifion ‘Taffy’ Jones, air gunner; Brendan ‘Paddy’ Creane, engineer.
1945: From Tarrant Rushton we never dropped paratroops. We practised towing gliders, both Horsas and the much bigger Hamilcars. They could carry a small tank or goodness knows how many troops. I can’t remember much detail about Operation Varsity. We flew to Woodbridge which had a mile-long runway and where the Hamilcars were lined up. I think we were introduced to the pilot of the glider we would be towing and his troops.
Ray Atkinson’s Halifax, 8A-M, waiting at Woodbridge to tow a Hamilcar glider to the Rhine in Operation Varsity. Three figures can be seen standing nearby – perhaps groundcrew, perhaps aircrew, perhaps Ray Atkinson and the glider pilots? Detail from the photograph at the top of this article. Source: Border Regiment Archives.
John Taylor was piloting number three combination and I number four. I think about thirty combinations took off from Woodbridge. We flew in fairly close formation. Number two was behind and just to starboard of number one. Number three was behind and just to port of number two and hence in line astern of number one and so on down the line. We released the gliders a few miles the other side of the Rhine. Not long before the release number three peeled off to port. We did not know why as we had not seen any enemy fire. I moved into number three position and we released our glider at the required place. We had a tremendous respect for the glider troops who had to endure a packed journey, face a rough landing, then engage in battle. The pilot had to be an expert flyer and then join in the fighting. All we had to do was to return to a comfortable base.
The Raid Report
After the operation Ray Atkinson filled in a Glider Raid Report form. Here is a selection of answers that he gave to questions on the form:
Station: Tarrant Rushton Serial No: 16 Squadron: 298 A/C: Halifax III Letter & Call Sign: A.M. Captain: F/O Atkinson Navigator: F/O Pantellini Flight Engineer: Sgt Creane W/Op: F/S Norris Bomb Aimer: F/O Smith Gunner: F/S Jones Glider No: 242 1st Glider Pilot: P/O Walker 2nd Glider Pilot: Sgt Knox No. of Troops: 8 Equipment carried: 17 pdr gun & Dodge truck LZ [landing zone]: ‘R’ Time Up: 0720 Time Over LZ: 1037 Time tug down: 1317 How was LZ recognised? Release point – lake crossed & release over LZ ‘A’. Relation of release to LZ: 1.5 miles W of LZ ‘R’. Release height, time & heading: 2500 ASL, 1037 hrs, 077 degrees M. Observations by crew: 1030 hrs Stirling seen to crash after 4 bodies baled out, 5 miles W of Rhine.
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A scan of a poor quality photocopy of a now lost original, showing Ray and his crew posing beside a Halifax
Raid Report courtesy of Steve Wright, author of “The Last Drop”, one of the key books about Operation Varsity. The book can be bought via the publisher [here].
For other articles about Operation Varsity, seehere.
Text of account and personal photographs are copyright The Estate of Ray Atkinson.
Glider 126 made a good landing not far from the LZs, a rare occurrence in Operation Ladbroke. This is the story of the men who flew in her and fought for the Ponte Grande bridge.
Waco glider 126 in the stubble field. Beyond its tailplane on the left, 100 yards away, can be seen the wing of Glider 26 near a farm outbuilding. In the background on the right can be seen what is today the Hotel Villa Fanusa.
Glider: CG-4A Waco 126, “Lil Miss-Take”, serial no. 377102. Glider carrying: Part of Mortar Platoon, 1st Battalion of the Border Regiment. Troops’ objective: Outskirts of Syracuse.
Manifest
1 sjt 1 ord 10 mortar men 1 A tk man 8 men R coy 5 trolleys 2 mortars 132 Bombs
This list has too many men (21) for one Waco (stated maximum capacity 13, excluding the glider pilots, although an extra three seats were added to many Wacos for this operation). Apparently the troops listed above were split between Glider 126 and Glider 126A, which does not have a manifest listed in the original document.
3″ mortars, even broken down into parts, plus mortar bombs in useful quantities, were heavy, and the men had up to 5 miles to go, mostly on dusty tracks. Some form of wheels was essential. Usually glider troops used the airborne handcart for this purpose, not the airborne trolley, which was designed for use by paratroopers, as it could be folded into parachute supply containers. Perhaps there were not enough handcarts to go around, so the platoon was given five trolleys instead.
RAF Tug Pilot’s Report
Tug: Albemarle, letter AB, number P1470, 296 Squadron, 38 Wing RAF. Takeoff: 2006 hrs (9 mins late), Airstrip F, Goubrine No. 1, Tunisia. Priority 2. Tug return: 0210 hrs (50 mins late).
Pilot Officer Wylie: Released at 2252 hrs at 1400 ft.
“Glider released successfully slightly overshot LZ. Struck by .303 bullets, visibility not good. Everything O.K.”
A separate report clarifies that it was the tug, not the glider, that was struck by rifle calibre bullets. This is odd, as the aircraft was presumably way out over the bay, out of the range of Italian small calibre weapons. Some machine guns may have been in tobruks (open-topped concrete or rock emplacements), but mainly they equipped the standard roofed pillboxes on the coast, and these were not well suited to anti-aircraft defence. Yet another report says that an Albemarle gave support to its glider after release by shooting at an Italian searchlight. Perhaps Wylie’s plane was hit in the darkness by stray British bullets.
“Good tow, intercomn failed after 10 mins flight. Glider released at 2310 hours at 1600 ft about 1/2 way across bay between PUNTA DI MILOCCA and MURRO DI PORCO and landed about 1 mile S.W. of L.Z. No casualties but undercarriage came through floor.”
Interestingly, the tug and glider pilots’ reports differ significantly on release time and height. 18 minutes is a lot, for men who had presumably synchronised watches just before take off. As for the height, for many a glider 200 feet was enough to make the difference between landing in the sea or on land, i.e. life and death. Some Wacos had trouble with their altimeters, which registered too high, but a 200 foot margin still seems excessive.
Landing
Green marks the spot. Glider 126 landed just south of and between LZs 1 and 2
Glider 126 landed in a flat, open, stubble field only 300 yards from the south-west corner of LZ 2. It made one of the best landings of the night, close to its LZ and essentially intact. It lost its left wheel completely, possibly ripped off in a heavy landing caused by the altimeter reading being wrong. The loss of the wheel made the glider pivot 90 degrees left. A later examination reported that its right wheel ended up in a ditch, presumably bringing the Waco to an abrupt halt. Another glider, Glider 26, carrying a surgical team under Captain Rigby-Jones, landed only 100 yards away, next to a farm outbuilding. There was a large pillbox behind barbed wire 400 yards to the south of Glider 126.
Narrative
The other half of the mortar platoon, which was in Glider 126a, never arrived. It developed aileron trouble in Africa and released near its own airfield. It damaged its undercarriage in doing so, presumably by landing in the rough.
The large pillbox 400 yards south of Glider 126’s landing spot, as it is today. It had clear sightlines on the glider and may have machine-gunned it.
Not much is known about what happened to the men of Glider 126 after they landed in Sicily. The glider would have made a perfect target for the pillbox only 400 yards away, so perhaps the men were machine-gunned as they disembarked. Glider pilot S/Sgt Jimmy Fairgrieve (of Glider 25) said he saw the First Pilot of Glider 126, S/Sgt Chandler, at the Ponte Grande bridge.
Since Chandler reached the bridge, it’s possible that the rest of the men in Glider 126 also reached it, probably after dawn. Perhaps they were able to lug their 3″ mortar to the Ponte Grande – a mortar was a key part of the defence of the bridge until it ran out of ammunition. If they did reach the bridge, many of the Glider 126 men were probably killed or wounded, as only a dozen or so unwounded men were left out of over 80 when the glider men surrendered to the Italians.
Fairgrieve and Chandler were part of a small group of glider men who hid in a ditch after most of the surviving airborne troops had surrendered to the Italians. According to Fairgrieve, the men were looking ‘glum’. This seems a classic piece of period British understatement – these days the word would probably be ‘gutted’. The men managed to evade capture.
The Site Today
Until only a few years ago the scene was almost unchanged since the time of Operation Ladbroke. Now extensive building of new houses and roads, plus new farming techniques, has changed the look dramatically. The farm is still there, but whenever I have passed the field it has usually been covered with plastic tunnels instead of stubble (the farm is private and did not welcome my curiosity when I knocked). The fine-looking house in the right background of the photograph is now the Hotel Villa Fanusa, named after the area and the nearby beach. The pillbox is still there, and an electricity substation in a small tower that was present in 1943 completes the picture. (Observations accurate at the time they were made, although things may since have changed).
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For other in-depth stories about individual gliders in Operation Ladbroke, click here.
Somewhere somebody has an album with some unique, unpublished photographs of Operation Ladbroke in it. Historians have seen them, but nobody knows where they are now. A plea for bringing them to light.
I’m hoping readers may be able to help track down some photographs of the Ponte Grande bridge near Syracuse in Sicily. The bridge was the primary target for the glider assault during Operation Ladbroke on 9 July 1943. There is also a photograph of the men who fought at the bridge which is now missing. Photographs of the bridge are extremely rare, as are shots of Operation Ladbroke airborne troops in Sicily.
The Blockhouse on the Ponte Grande
In the first case, somewhere there is an album of photographs, apparently taken after the war. Perhaps the photographer had fought in Sicily. I was told about this album by a man who was in contact with the family that owns the album, but he has since lost their contact details. There were five photographs on one particular page. The centre one was of the fishing village of Scoglitti (where American forces landed during Operation Husky on 10 July 1943), but the other four were of the Ponte Grande bridge and the area around it. Captions were along the lines of “Bridge near Syracusa”. Uniquely, a couple of the photos show the blockhouse / pillbox on the bridge. No other photographs of the blockhouse are known to exist.
Survivors of the Battle
The other case of a lost photograph concerns a group photo which glider pilot H N ‘Andy’ Andrews says was taken after the battle. Andrews flew Waco 10 during Operation Ladbroke, barely reaching land next to an Italian searchlight, way south of the LZs. He carried some senior officers, including Colonel ‘Jonah’ Jones, who next day led the men in a successful attack on an enemy howitzer battery. As a result Andrews did not reach the bridge until after the battle for it was over.
In his book ‘So You Wanted to Fly, Eh?’, Andrews wrote how “Richard N Clark and Jack Battersby in Waco 67” took part in the battle for the bridge, were captured and then released. “Later they took a photograph with a ‘liberated’ camera showing a group of survivors; it is believed that it is the only photograph still available.” Andrews did not include the photograph in his book, and his son says it is not in his father’s papers. The photo seems to have about 50 people in it, in four rows. Andrews identifies many, but not all of them. Many names are those of Operation Ladbroke glider pilots, including: Barclay, Scott, Landsell, Cairns, Morgan, Leadbetter, Hay, Coates, Barnwell, Hill, Nutton, Cushing, Reddish, Clarke, Smith, Stewart.
It would be sad if these unique images were lost to the history of this remarkable operation.
‘Nothing Is Impossible’ is the best account we have of Operation Ladbroke by somebody who was there. Now the second edition greatly expands Victor Miller’s original telling.
Review of ‘Nothing is Impossible – A Glider Pilot’s Story of Sicily, Arnhem and the Rhine Crossing’ by Victor Miller, 2nd edition published 17 June 2015 by Pen & Sword.
[This review focuses primarily on the chapters about Operation Ladbroke and Sicily. The chapters about the Arnhem and Rhine landings are only incidentally covered.]
‘Nothing Is Impossible’ by Victor Miller remains a unique book among those that tell the story of Operation Ladbroke, the massed glider assault that opened the Allied invasion of Sicily. It is unique in several ways. It is a gripping first-person account by a glider pilot who was one of the very few who landed in the immediate area of the LZs, and who was one of the few who survived the fighting on the Ponte Grande bridge. It is also extremely fresh, having been written shortly after the events it describes from diaries kept at the time. Pages of sketches and maps from his wartime notebook are reproduced, another unique feature. Miller includes details in his story which, at the time he wrote it, had appeared nowhere else, and which still remain unique, but which can be confirmed by modern research. This lends enormous credibility to the accuracy and authenticity of his account.
What I wrote about Peter Davis’ book ‘SAS Men In The Making’ (which describes Davis’ landing with the SAS at Cape Murro di Porco not far from Miller) applies equally to Miller’s book. Such accounts, “recorded while the memories were still fresh by articulate, intelligent writers, are doubly precious because they are full of the details usually lacking in accounts made many years later. There are details of place, details of atmosphere and, perhaps most valuable of all, details of emotions. The combination brings history to life.”
‘Nothing Is Impossible’ was not published when it was first completed, and the first edition did not appear until 1994. The new edition is not simply a reprint. In fact it is massively expanded. A rough estimate, based on average words per line and lines per page, is that the main text of the book is about 80% longer, excluding new appendixes. Two of the key chapters about Sicily, compared to the first edition, have extra sketches and maps and about 40% more words. And it is not just a case of whole new sections. Hardly a paragraph from the first edition remains unchanged, and new words, phrases and sentences appear throughout.
What appears to have happened is that in the 1994 edition Miller’s original account was severely pruned. This immediately raises the question whether anything of great narrative importance got lost. Based on a brief comparison of the Sicily chapters, it would seem not. However some valuable details have been put back – one particular new paragraph, for example, gives us more information about where Miller was posted on the river bank, both the location and its tactical aspects. It seems the main effect of the pruning was to make the first edition read a little more like an airport novel in style, and the lack of this pruning in the second edition has presumably restored Miller’s own voice, and more of his thoughts and reactions, which makes the account more engaging and interesting.
Apart from new appendixes, box-outs and prefatory pages, the other key changes in the second edition are the appearance of more of Miller’s own photographs and sketches, and some extra maps based on the sketch maps in the notebook. This new material is both useful and valuable, but it could have done with a more thorough proofreading. However the typos and small errors that appear here and there in it are not typical of the book – the main text is excellent.
The strengths of the first edition of the book – the gripping narrative and its extraordinary historical value – remain intact, but now there’s much more of it. Even if you already own the first edition, the second edition is so different that it is worth buying as well.
Chris Miller, Victor’s son, shepherded the latest edition into print, but apparently a lot of the editing work was shouldered by Chris’ brother Peter, who sadly died before its completion. Victor’s brother also helped out. It must have been a massive undertaking, and we owe the Miller family our gratitude for ensuring the publication of Victor’s outstanding and unique account.
If you like undiluted collections of veterans’ accounts of airborne operations, this book is for you. If however you prefer your history with, well, a bit of history, then you could find this book frustrating.
Review of ‘PARAS – Voices of the British Airborne Forces in the Second World War’ ed. Roger Payne, published 2014 by Amberley.
[This review is based on the hardback edition and focuses primarily on the Sicily accounts in the book.]
There is no doubt that the accounts of veterans of WW2 are historically extremely valuable (for examples of outstanding book-length accounts, see Peter Davis’ ‘SAS: Men in the Making’, and Victor Miller’s ‘Nothing is Impossible’). There is also no doubt that we owe our veterans our undying gratitude and respect. But just because a narrator was an eye-witness does not make his version gospel, and the rule of the fog of war usually meant that individuals often did not see the bigger picture. For these reasons alone, personal testimony deserves as much careful editing as any other kind of history, and not just of the raw text. In this book, however, multiple accounts of variable quality stand alone.
‘PARAS Voices of the British Airborne’ consists almost entirely of short accounts by veterans of Britain’s airborne divisions in WW2, many of them excellent. Despite the title, however, not all of these men were paras. Glider pilots feature, as well glider troops, and some of them objected to being lumped together with parachutists by the press. The soldiers of the glider battalions were not taught to parachute, and many resented having their (arguably even more dangerous) method of arriving on the battlefield overlooked.
One problem with the book is that you often cannot tell quite who an account is by. Yes, a name is given at the start of every account, but usually not the unit the man belonged to, nor his rank, nor the where, when, and why of the story. In these cases you have to work all this out by yourself from the contents of the account, and sometimes you cannot. This seems to be taking the primacy of the verbatim voice of the veteran too far. Sometimes you cannot even tell if the section is by a historian or a veteran. The first section, which looks like all the others, is in fact by the editor, which makes you question later sections.
As regards Operation Ladbroke, the massed glider assault on Syracuse that began Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, there are only six accounts, amounting to about 3% of the book’s total text. Three accounts are about gliders in the sea, and, of these, two are available in similar versions online at the Pegasus Archive and BBC People’s War. One of the six accounts is by Jim Wallwork (of Pegasus Bridge fame) whose story is already well known, and another sounds as if the man was in Wallwork’s glider. Finally there is one account that is apparently second hand, i.e. by somebody who was not in the action of the story, but reporting what happened to a mate (another already published story).
Regarding the later parachute attack on the Primosole Bridge near Catania in Sicily, there are two (possibly four) accounts by British veterans and one interesting letter from a German soldier. The two ‘possible’ accounts might be about the Primosole drop, but, for reasons given above, it is hard to tell.
The bulk of the book is taken up with training, Tunisia, Normandy, Arnhem and the Rhine.
There are some excellent accounts in this book, but they are let down, particularly from the point of view of a historian, by the lack of context and editing. There is no contents page and no index (so it’s hard to return to an account you remember). The accounts are not strictly chronological within their chapters, so, for example, Tunisia and Sicily accounts are intermixed. There are no footnotes, and no bibliography or sources. The last would be welcome even if only saying “unpublished manuscript”, “interview with editor” or similar. Given these lacks, it is no surprise that there are no maps. It would not have taken much effort, and surely it would not have degraded the veteran’s authentic voice, to give his rank and unit (e.g. South Staffords or Border), and to briefly set the scene for the action he was taking part in.
It could also have been useful to edit out the more obvious mistakes by some veterans, such as mixing up the Ponte Grande, Primosole and Pegasus bridges, substituting Germans for Italians, labelling 5 Division as 5 Corps, or attributing Lieutenant Colonel Walch’s leadership to Colonel Jones. Admittedly such correcting or interpreting work would have taken a lot of effort, and times are hard enough in publishing already. It could also have resulted in distraction from the verbatim account, and maybe even give offence to the veterans or their families. As things stand however, not only might you sometimes struggle to work out precisely what is happening, you may also feel you cannot trust some of what you are reading, and this undermines and distracts.
All this said, some of the pieces in the book are outstanding, and it does provide a very large collection of accounts, many (most?) apparently not previously published. If that is what you like, or you are a fan of the bare-text “voices” trend in publishing, then this is a book well worth buying.
“The SAS Pocket Manual” might fit into the pocket of your camouflage smock, but it’s not exactly a manual. Really it’s an interesting collection of original archive documents, only some of them from manuals.
Book review: ‘The SAS Pocket Manual’, ed. Christopher Westhorp, published 21 May 2015 by Bloomsbury.
‘The SAS Pocket Manual’ is an interesting collection of documents disguised as a publishing gimmick. The gimmick involves the book having the size, weight, look, feel and even title of a WW2 soldier’s manual. If you pick it up in a bookshop and flick through it, you will see some pages that look like they come from manuals – how to use a Bren gun, how to drive a Jeep, how to use explosives. But the book is not the facsimile of an SAS training manual that you might have thought it was going to be.
It is however, in other ways, similar to a facsimile, inasmuch as it reproduces historical documents verbatim, with limited intervention by the editor. None of these documents are directly about the SAS Special Raiding Squadron (SRS) and its actions in Sicily in support of Operation Husky and Operation Ladbroke. Some, however, bring authentic insights into the early days of irregular warfare, special forces and the formation of the SAS and especially its ethos. Later documents about the SAS in North West Europe describe a type of fighting very different to North Africa and Sicily.
This book is not big (128 pages, small format), but it is not particularly expensive either, and it is worth it, from a Sicily antecedents point of view, for those background documents. These include:
selected passages from David Stirling’s own account of his founding of the SAS
a 1939 British Army treatise on guerrilla warfare
lectures from a Lochailort Commando training course on demolitions
Randolph Churchill’s account to his father, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, about the abortive SAS raid on Benghazi in June 1942 makes good reading, as does an article by an American reporter that appeared in ‘The American Magazine’ in July 1942. Then there is a January 1943 proposal from Captain George Jellicoe, later head of the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), the sister unit to Paddy Mayne’s SRS. He emphasises the opportunities for raiding among the Greek islands in the Eastern Mediterranean. In early July 1943 just such raids went in against German airfields to prevent air attacks on the slow moving invasion convoys headed from Egypt to take part in Operation Husky in Sicily.
From a historian’s point of view, it is good that there is an index, a bibliography, an introduction with footnotes, and useful notes at the back on the source of each document. That said, most of the documents are presented in chapters which do not begin with an explanation, and the context has to be hunted down in the editor’s introduction or in the back of the book.
This book has two great virtues: some transcriptions of interesting historical documents and some exciting action narratives (although none of either kind of document is about Sicily). What it does not have is the virtue of being, based on its cover, what it appears to be.
The 2nd battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment was chosen as the leading glider assault troops for Operation Ladbroke, the opening move of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily. These are the orders they were given just days before the battle.
Waco glider 29 made a decent enough landing in a field full of tomato canes, after descending through power cables, losing its wheels and breaking its wing. Its position was exactly between LZs 1 and 2, one of the few almost accurate landings. It carried half of 6 Platoon of B Company of the 2 South Staffords in Operation Ladbroke. B Company’s task was to take the strongpoint codenamed Bilston.
Operation Order No. 1 for the 2 South Staffords was signed off on the afternoon of 4 July 1943, only five days before the Allied air armada took off for Sicily. It was at about this time that the airborne troops waiting in camps in Tunisia began to be briefed on their mission. The inside walls of tents were lined with giant blow-ups of aerial photographs, while tables were strewn with maps. Although the hammering heat of the North African sun outside was oppressive, it was preferable to those stifling briefing sessions, which had to be held inside for reasons of secrecy, as the camps were not behind the tall walls of a regular barracks, but in open olive groves.
The men of the Staffords learned that they were to be part of Operation Ladbroke. It was their job to act as the proverbial tip of the spear for the entire invasion of Sicily, landing before any other forces on the night before D Day (10 July 1943). ‘C’ Company was to land by glider and seize the Ponte Grande bridge (codename Waterloo) in a coup-de-main attack that would prevent the bridge from being destroyed. ‘A’ Company was also to land by glider in another coup-de-main attack, to seize the nearby railway bridges (codename Putney). Other Staffords companies were to seize strongpoints on the roads leading to the bridges, or neutralise gun batteries.
All of this was designed to facilitate the capture of Syracuse (codename Ladbroke, hence Operation Ladbroke). Syracuse was Eighth Army’s primary objective for D Day. The rapid capture of the port was considered vital to the success of the invasion, as its harbour was needed for unloading supplies and reinforcements. But the main seaborne forces of the Eighth Army were not due to land until nearly dawn, and their closest landing beach was many miles south of Syracuse. So 1 Border Regiment, the Staffords’ sister battalion in the gliderborne 1 Air Landing Brigade, was to land at the same time as the Staffords, and then pass through their positions and seize the outskirts of Syracuse.
As described elsewhere here, the plans went wildly awry. None of the identified strongpoints were captured by the glider troops. Nor were the gun batteries. Nor were the railway bridges. No airborne troops attacked Syracuse that night. Nearly half the gliders landed in the sea, and many others either never reached Sicily or landed too far away. The one bright spot, and it was a bright spot, was the initiative of Lt Lennard Withers, in command of a single platoon of ‘C’ Company, whose Horsa glider was the only one of the four destined for the Ponte Grande that actually made it. Withers’ platoon took the bridge alone and, with some reinforcement during the night, held it long enough for it to be saved from demolition.
The transcription of Operation Order No. 1 that follows is only a selection of sections from a much longer document that came complete with appendixes and diagrams that are also not reproduced here. The formatting has been kept as it was in the original, as have spelling and other mistakes, to give the full flavour of the original. Text in italics between square brackets is editorial.
As a boy, Italian historian Tullio Marcon lived through the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. This is the background to his story of that eventful summer.
Tullio Marcon was 13 in 1943, and living in Augusta, an important Italian naval base. He was there when Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, began. In later life Tullio was a civil engineer and also a leading historian of World War 2 in the south-east corner of Sicily. His book “Assalto a Tre Ponti” (“Attack on Three Bridges”) was the first book in Italian to tell, in a popular and accessible way, the story of the British part of the invasion. The three bridges referred to in the title were those attacked by British airborne and commando troops: the Ponte Grande bridge (Operation Ladbroke), the Malati bridge and the Primosole bridge. Over the course of 35 years he also published three editions of the story of his beloved home city, Augusta, during the war.
He was one of the founders of the excellent Museo dello Sbarco, the Museum of the Landings (the invasion), in Catania. It was here that I met him in 2004. After showing me and my wife around the museum, he guided us to other wartime sites in the area. He was very kind, and very knowledgeable, and very passionate about his subject.
He asked me if I would try to tell, in English, the story of the invasion as he experienced it in Augusta. He hoped some British regimental magazine might be interested. Later that year he sent me his account in Italian, with notes to help me in making the translation. He jokingly said that he hoped, as a result of his story being read by British veterans, that he might get a letter announcing the discovery in the UK of his Balilla uniform (apparently taken during the invasion by a British soldier as a souvenir).
My Italian at that time was almost non-existent, and I was translating Tullio’s account one word at a time with a dictionary, while trying to teach myself Italian. The work went slowly, fitting in between other projects and personal distractions. I made preliminary investigations with some journals, but without luck.
Then, to my tremendous shock, I learned that on 14th October 2006 Tullio had died, not long after seeing the final edition of his Augusta book to the presses. That day Augusta lost a favourite son, Sicily lost a great historian, and the world lost a gentleman.
Unable to give him the pleasure of seeing his story published in English, to my regret I then set the work aside for over ten years. Now, in his memory, here it is.
As a 13 year old boy, Italian historian Tullio Marcon lived through the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. The Fascist creed he had been taught crumbled along with Italian resistance, especially when he met Allied soldiers and discovered they were not monsters. This is his story.
For the background to this story, see this post. Text in [square brackets] is editorial.
An old Sicilian lady sits on a chair in the street, as they do to this day, but it’s 1943 and her home has been reduced to rubble by Allied bombing.
When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, I was living in Venice. Like all boys of my age, I was a Balilla [a boy in a compulsory junior Fascist youth organisation] who believed in my country, and in its right as a poor nation to make itself one of the rich ones, like, most of all, Great Britain. It was this that they taught us in school and in the parades on “Fascist Saturday”. And this was why I became good at identifying the RAF aircraft which bombed the nearby industrial zone. It is certainly to the RAF’s credit that it spared this city, which is unique in the world. Perhaps for this reason, when a Wellington bomber was shot down by the AA defences, its crew was given a tour of Venice in a motorboat before it took them to prison. A way of saying “thank you”?
In 1941 we moved to Taranto, the main Italian naval base. There, for over a year, we endured many bombing raids and suffered from hunger. The rationing was very strict in the city, more so than in the countryside. So we moved again in the summer of 1942 to Augusta [in south-east Sicily], where my mother was from. We hoped to find a little more bread there, even if it was closer to the war and, in particular, to [British] Malta, whose aircraft were always very active over Sicily. Augusta, being a front-line naval base, had been among its usual targets since 1940.
Nevertheless, by 1943 the strategic importance of Augusta had greatly diminished, precisely because of the intensification of the air attacks. The submarines that were based there were withdrawn to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Only the naval reconnaissance group remained, whose seaplanes suffered ever heavier losses from enemy fighters. RAF bombers conducted nuisance raids by night which damaged the people’s morale. These also wore out the AA guns, which by now had been in use for three years without spare parts. American bombers, on the other hand, operated in daylight, and every day they passed over Augusta, headed elsewhere, apparently ignoring it.
We could not know if and when it would be our turn, but we hoped to be spared. But the arrival in port of a petrol tanker, which had to unload fuel, broke the spell. On 13 May, 50 Liberator bombers came to sink it. They did not succeed, but instead inflicted dozens of casualties on the civilian population, and caused severe damage to houses. When the AA batteries saw that their barrage was ineffective because of the great height of these four-engined planes, the sense of being completely at the mercy of the enemy foreshadowed the by now imminent collapse.
Evacuation
Sicilian children run up steps towards the cave house that has become their home, to escape from the Allied bombing of the towns.
The town was now without water and light, and the streets were piled with rubble, so the remaining citizens who had not already abandoned Augusta were forced to do so. They took refuge in the surrounding countryside in the houses of parents or friends, in caves excavated from the rock, or even in the open, beneath the trees, helped by the mild weather of the approaching summer. The evacuation naturally caused many difficulties in getting food, given that the distribution points for rations were moved to places many kilometres apart, which had to be reached on foot under the hot sun. There was also the threat of being strafed, as the Malta Spitfires attacked everything that moved. Only the garrison of the Italian Navy remained in Augusta. We evacuated to a house belonging to my parents three kilometres from the town, on a hill we called “il Monte” [“the mountain”, i.e. Monte Tauro, a ridge north-east of Augusta].
In the vicinity there was an AA battery, which I visited, like all the boys, being curious about cannons and machine-guns. The AA gunners took a liking to me. These were not young men, some were unfit for normal military service, and most were recruited locally. They were enrolled in the Militia [Milmart], which in Italy was entrusted with the AA defences. It was the military arm of the Fascist party, so they wore black shirts. In the battery – numbered AS674 – they knew me as the boy who was familiar with aeroplanes. It was precisely through being a good spotter that one morning I was the first to recognize a formation of Boston bombers which appeared suddenly at a very low altitude, but which flew past, headed elsewhere. For a few weeks the Germans also deployed a battery of 88mm flak [anti-aircraft] guns nearby. The 88mm guns were much more effective than our 76mm guns. However I was not allowed near the flak battery, so I could not familiarise myself with them. In any case, even if the regime promoted friendship with “Comrade Richard”, the rapport between the allies was never warm [“Camerata Richard” was an Italian popular song praising the German soldier as ally].
Italian uniforms and a 76/40 gun in the museum at Chiaramonte Gulfi. This dual-purpose gun was the staple artillery piece of the batteries of the Piazzaforte Augusta-Siracusa.
When on 11 June Pantelleria surrendered and was occupied by the Allies, those living in Sicily had no doubt that the invasion of the island was only a matter of weeks away. The island was now under siege, attacked from the sea and from the air. Any vessel which ventured out onto the water was attacked, and often sunk. One was torpedoed on 15 June by a British submarine a few miles from Augusta, in full sight of the people (myself included) who could see it from “il Monte”. There was no hour of the day or night when we did not hear air raid sirens.
The Allied air offensive became overwhelming in the first week of July, helped by almost total lack of opposition in the air, after the Italian and German fighters had been almost completely destroyed on the ground. In an attempt to shelter from the bombs, we spent the night in a neighbouring house, near which had been dug a deep shelter several metres under ground, but it was humid, infested with fleas, foul smelling and crowded. In the end I decided to trust to luck and I stayed outside. On 9 July there was an unreal calm, and since a very strong wind rose which made the sea rough, we thought – and the Armed Forces HQ in Sicily also thought – that this night the enemy would not land. But this illusion only lasted until ten in the evening.
Invasion
At that time, from Augusta, we saw and heard the flashes and roar of AA fire at Syracuse, twenty kilometres distant to the south – a diversionary bombing by Wellingtons was underway to protect the landing of the glider brigade [Operation Ladbroke]. There followed a silence fraught with uncertainty. Nobody managed to sleep. At last, at about three in the morning on the 10th, we learned that a landing in force was underway between Syracuse and Cape Passero. We were told this by a couple of officers who had also been evacuated to a nearby house, who came to say goodbye because they had been called urgently to Augusta. The word “invasion” then spread rapidly, accompanied by fear of what would happen with the arrival of the enemy, now considered inevitable. Indeed propaganda had over time convinced the civilian population that they would be submitted to many abuses, especially by negro troops, as had happened in 1941 at Benghazi according to a booklet, distributed the year before, with the eloquent title of “What the British did in Cyrenaica”.
The enemy, that is to say the British Eighth Army, arrived at Augusta two days later, at sunset on 12 July. The [SAS] men of the Special Raiding Squadron [SRS] attacked from the sea, landing in the city with its now-deserted houses. Meanwhile, the British 17 Infantry Brigade arrived from inland, after defeating the resistance of an Italian battalion and some German tanks. I have described what happened in these two days elsewhere [in his books]. I will only say that, apart from air attacks, we suffered an entire day of naval bombardment, which was an extremely stressful experience, accompanied by hunger – there being little or nothing to eat – and by lack of sleep – it being almost impossible to fall asleep.
As for me, I was curious like all the boys about the extraordinary things that were going on. Ignoring the risks, I watched out in the open, and I could see how the situation was deteriorating. It was something I would never forget. What particularly dented my Balilla creed was witnessing, on 11 July, the sabotaging of the guns so that the enemy could not use them. The gun crews then left, removing their black shirts, as it was rumoured that the British executed Fascists. It was not true, but we did not know that until afterwards. It was then that I had the feeling that this was the end of an Italy in which we had been made to believe. The trauma for my generation – which was seared by this experience – lasted a long time, and has never completely healed.
On 13 July, early in the morning, after our fourth sleepless night, having heard artillery in the distance and the sounds of vehicles close by, we decided to return for a few hours to our house. It was about 100 meters from the one with the shelter, where we had gathered on 9 July. So my mother took my hand and we went out cautiously, not knowing what we would find outside. With astonishment mixed with fear we saw what we could not have imagined – the olive grove we had to cross was full of tents and soldiers. The British were there, with their “Tommies” and their “Jocks”, and their helmets that looked like frying pans. They were intent on making the first tea of the day on some tiny stoves, or digging holes in the ground where they could lie down in the event of an air attack.
Chocolate
Boys will be boys. Sicilian children swarm all over a British Sherman tank. Note the lack of shoes, due to shortages of all kinds. Later, shoes would be cut from the rubber of the many vehicle tyres discarded by the Allies.
We were amazed to see that all this took place in silence, without the clamour that would be heard in an Italian or German camp. This was why we had heard nothing during the night. We went hesitantly along the path, without the soldiers paying us any attention, but then one of them approached us smiling and said “Good morning”. This was an unexpected way for an enemy to behave. My mother understood the greeting, but could not speak English, so she answered in French with a shy “Bonjour”. The soldier held out a tablet, asking me in English: “Do you like chocolate?” I looked at my mother, who held me back from taking it, fearing that it was poisoned. Then the soldier understood, and took a piece and ate it laughing, saying “Good, good”. The ice was broken. Our meeting with the “enemy” had come about in a most unexpected way, even if tinged with caution, which was reciprocal. Indeed, when the soldiers came later to ask for water to drink, which we drew up from the well, they made a sign for us to drink it before they did. They also feared that it might be poisoned.
Others also had positive experiences with the “invaders”, noting that the soldiers showed interest first in the dogs, then in the children and finally in the adults. It was reassuring to see that many of them had large rosaries around their necks, and so must be Catholics like us. They were Scots. Towards evening, after a German air attack, while we were in the house with the shelter, we saw some soldiers heading towards it. Even though it seemed there was nothing to fear, it was still too early for us to feel safe. We above all feared that they would rape a woman. Among some 40 people, the men were few and not young, many of us were only boys and there were women both old and young. After a rapid discussion among the adults, it was decided that the soldiers on the terrace would be welcomed only by older ladies, none of whom were attractive!
To this day I ask myself what these young men thought of such a welcome! But it did not last long, because we saw that they were only seeking company, they were kind, and they carried biscuits and corned beef. In fact, they were all very different from what we had feared. In this way, from that evening on, the visits became a pleasant routine, overcoming the language barrier with the universal language of gestures. The soldiers often sang songs like “Rosamunda” [“Roll Out the Barrel”], “Donkey Serenade” and also “Lili Marlene”. All of them were homesick, and often showed us photographs of mothers and wives. Naturally the young women and the girls were also by now in the group, and one soldier made eyes at them. He especially seemed to like one of them, one of my cousins called Maria, who was blonde like an English girl. Perhaps he was in love, for one day I saw that he had painted the name “Mary” on his truck!
But do not imagine that the war was over for us. The port of Augusta, full of [British] ships of every kind, attracted the attention of the Luftwaffe by day and night. Sometimes, however, the particular sound of their engines made me believe they were Italian aircraft. Then, it was a case of mixed feelings. Because they were ours, I hoped they would not be shot down, but at the same time I was afraid of ending up under their bombs. And then there were the problems of survival, first among them being food, which was scarce and lacking protein. We had forgotten the taste of butter and meat, and also sugar and pasta.
An Incident
In an attempt to improve the nutritional value of our food, especially important for growing children like me, we decided to ask the soldiers for help, but bartering, not begging. The only thing which we could exchange, having seen that it was very welcome, was wine. So one day I went to the tent in the camp where the food reserves were kept and showed the corporal in charge a bottle of wine. I got him to understand that I would give it to him in exchange for a tin of corned beef. The proposal was warmly welcomed, and the corporal told me to come again the next day with more wine. And so I did, receiving not one but two tins, because the quality was good. All this, which allowed us to taste meat again after weeks, depended however on the exchange of wine, which got scarcer and ran out after a few days. So one morning the corporal saw me with empty hands, and I made him understand that the wine was finished. He then raised a hand and showed three fingers, then four, indicating that he would give four tins for a bottle. Faced by my helplessness, eventually he was convinced and, as a gesture of sympathy, he made me a present of two tins.
Meanwhile, the area was filled with men and vehicles of all kinds, among which those little machines called Jeeps intrigued us. The mass of vehicles was incomprehensible to us. We realised that we had been at war with the whole world, seeing among the soldiers those with “Canada” or “Australia” written on their sleeves. They were united by a single badge, the crossed shield of the Eighth Army. Generally, the rapport between the soldiers and us boys was friendly, but in my case at least there was on one occasion a little incident.
I never asked any questions, but if somebody asked me if I was a Balilla I did not deny it. This little pride of mine was noticed by a soldier in the camp who, evidently, wanted to teach me a lesson. So one day as I was going along the path, he stopped me, picked up an abandoned Italian field cap, ground it under his feet and whistled the “Marseillaise”. My humiliation was such that I picked up a wooden mallet (for driving in tent pegs) and I threw it at the soldier’s legs. I knew perfectly well that I was committing a serious act, but I did so without regret. By chance, the sergeant in charge of the camp had seen it all. He called me and the soldier over, and made us stand in the middle of a clearing. Then he called all the soldiers out of the tents and made them form a semicircle around us. He began to speak, and I thought of the sorrow my mother would have for the punishment that I knew for certain would be inflicted. Instead, at the end of talking, the sergeant said something sharp to the soldier, and then shook my hand! Years later, I understood that on this occasion I had witnessed how little credence the British give to the motto: “My country, right or wrong”.
Aircraft Recognition
Royal Marines man a captured 76/40 gun, the standard gun in batteries like AS674, which Tullio Marcon visited as a boy. This one is in AS309, defending British shipping in the harbour at Syracuse.
Of many things I remember that happened to me that historic summer of 1943, I pick a couple concerning my great interest in aircraft and Battery AS674, of which I have already spoken. A few days after the occupation, I again began wandering about the area. I looked with sadness at our guns, disfigured by explosions, and at the Bofors [AA guns] which the 2 Royal Scots Fusiliers had placed alongside. These Scots let us boys come close to look at the Bofors, which we did with interest, as our army did not have it. One morning when I was there, a Warhawk fighter flew low over us, and I instinctively pointed and shouted “Curtiss”. A gunner heard me, called me over and, showing me a booklet with the silhouettes of 30 aircraft, made me understand that he would give it to me if I could recognize at least ten. I accepted gladly, and the exam began. He covered the name of the plane with his finger and I, if I recognized it, gave its name, in Italian of course, and mispronouncing some a little. But that was good enough. I passed the exam with 15 marks out of 30 and the booklet was mine. I still have it, and it is one of many souvenirs of that period.
The soldiers liked me, this boy who passed the test, and who asked neither for chocolate or biscuits, but only for “aircraft recognition books” (these three words being the first English that I ever learned). So I was allowed to return to Battery AS674 to read the gunners’ magazines and books about aircraft. On one of these mornings the battery was surprised by an unexpected attack by dive bombers against a convoy which was entering port. As usual a barrage of fire rose against the attackers. Everything was firing, from 3.7 inch [heavy AA guns] to Tommy guns and you needed a lot courage to face that reaction. As usual, I did not seek shelter, and a soldier planted a helmet on my head and gave me some binoculars, pointing upwards: “Germans, Junkers 88!”. I looked and, with a pang in my heart, I saw that they were not Ju 88s, but our Re 2002s. Their desperate action was not rewarded with success, because the ships dodged their bombs.
Tracer from Allied anti-aircraft fire during a night raid by Axis bombers.
That which I had read about so many times in the newspapers was now in front of my eyes – the Italian air force was attacking. By an irony of fate, however, we were now on the other side of the front. I prayed that our courageous men would all return to base, but years later I learned that some of them were shot down by Spitfires which were waiting for them above. When the attack ended, I tried to tell the soldiers that these were Italian aeroplanes, so they would understand that Italians were also capable of fighting bravely. But it was useless. By now the Allies thought everything that flew was German. Even the chivalrous respect of their enemy was denied to these Italian pilots.
The peaceful evening visits on the terrace by the soldiers became a regular occurrence. This was also happening in all the other houses on “il Monte”. On the evening of 25 July, they arrived saying: “Mussolini finito, kaput”. We did not have a radio, as it was forbidden to keep one, so we did not know what was happening in Rome. The soldiers were curious to see the reaction of the people to the news, and they were very surprised to see that there was not much reaction. They could not know that long since, especially in Sicily, Mussolini had lost whatever respect he had because of the war, which had turned out to be an unforgivable mistake. Further, the invasion made Italy seem far away, relegated to secondary importance, regardless of the events that happened there. But perhaps it was also hard for the British to understand how Sicilians handled the great upheavals of history.
Black Soldiers
Photocopy of an Italian propaganda poster identifying black Allied troops as a threat to Italian women. It reads “LIBERATORS – Made in Anglo-America”. Sicilians found it was completely false. Source: Tullio Marcon
In early August, the time came for the soldiers camped nearby, including those at AS674, to leave. I remember how on the last evening, a Scotsman sat alone on an isolated rock with his bagpipes, and played one of those Highland airs that so evoke the cold and mist. But a triumphant Sicilian sunset, coloured red and violet, contrasted visibly with his music, which seemed veined with sadness. The next day the soldiers came to say goodbye to us in the manner of friends. It was an extraordinary thing, because we were in effect still enemies. But it was also an example of the human solidarity that exists away from the flags. They had understood our sufferings, and we in turn knew they returned to fight, risking death.
To make matters worse, we were told the camp would be taken over by negro soldiers of the auxiliary services. This upset the people, because they feared the violence which Italian propaganda had described. These negro troops had British officers and sergeants, and were in fact very disciplined. They had a variety of tasks: laying smoke during the nightly air raids, unloading supplies and ammunition, and distributing water from tanker trucks.
The houses on “il Monte” had cisterns that collected rain water, which was used for drinking and washing. But that summer there was such overcrowding, following a spring with poor rainfall, that reserves were minimal. So the occupation HQ ordered that each group of refugees should be given water from tanker trucks driven by negroes. When our turn came, the tanker truck pulled up in front of the house where the women were waiting with bottles, buckets and other receptacles. The driver held up a bar of soap and rubbed it between his hands, to show how to use it. The women roared with laughter, one woman saying to him in Italian (which he could not understand): “So it’s come to this, that you have to come from Africa to teach us to use soap!”
Our fears about the behaviour of the negroes soon vanished. They were gentle and you could see they were a little shy. The white men who commanded them also adopted the habit of coming to pass some hours on our terrace, as the Scots had before them. They left about 9pm. Half an hour later, some negroes also sought out our company. They came timidly onto the terrace, sat down and tried to say something that was difficult to understand. We learned they were from Kenya and Uganda, that they were Catholics. They were homesick, having left many children at home. They made it clear to us that it would be better not to tell their superiors that they visited, to avoid being reprimanded. We kept their secret, because they were good and kind.
On the subject of kindness, I remember an episode with a man called Moses and a companion whose name I do not recall. One evening, we got them to understand that the next day my mother and I would be going to Augusta, to get our house ready for our return, and so we said goodbye to them. They told us to wait a few moments, and went towards their camp. They came back a little later with two identical parcels, which they warmly begged us to accept. In each they had put a tin of meat, a packet of biscuits and some sweets, because they thought we would find nothing to eat in Augusta. If this was not disinterested kindness of spirit, I do not know what is!
Home
I have talked about returning home. It was at the beginning of September, and finally AMGOT [the Allied occupation government] authorised visits in groups, before allowing the population to finally return to their houses, despite a thousand difficulties. Up until that moment, access to Augusta was prohibited, because of the air raids, but also because the management of the naval base was easier without the population present.
A crowd of Sicilian onlookers, including children the age Tullio Marcon was at the time, watch as the pipers of a Scots regiment prepare to play.
When permission was given to return for three hours only, my mother and I went – on foot, naturally – towards Augusta, meeting more and more people along the way. There was a brief low-level air attack which caused everybody to scatter under the trees, then we resumed our march. At one point, we encountered a band of the 6 Seaforth Highlanders, and were amazed to see the musicians wearing kilts. I remember that the bass drummer was a giant some six and a half feet tall, wearing a leopard skin. Shortly before this, while we were in the column of people on the road, an MP on a motorcycle stopped suddenly in front of my mother and me, exclaiming threateningly: “You’re Germans!” The misunderstanding arose because we were both blonde-haired in a crowd of black-haired people. Finally, he was convinced and allowed us to proceed.
In town, the engineers had removed the rubble, but we had to walk on a carpet of shell splinters and unexploded ammunition. Many houses were hit after 13 May, and others were occupied by the troops of the British garrison. With our hearts in our mouths we picked our way towards our home, which was on the first floor of an apartment block. We saw it from afar – the building was still standing. We climbed the stairs anxously, afraid we would find the house occupied. It was empty. But after the initial relief passed, we discovered it was missing the camp beds, a table, chairs and other things, which certainly – as we had seen – had been used by the soldiers to make their camps more comfortable. It was war. Many drawers of the wardrobes were open, but not much was missing.
One thing that was missing was my Balilla uniform: the black shirt, the shorts, the grey-green knee socks, the blue neckerchief, the black fez and the badges bearing the profile of Il Duce [Mussolini]. I’m sure some soldier took my uniform as a souvenir. And I still wonder if by chance it survives to this day in some corner of Britain!
A peaceful beach today was once a scene of death. Its horror was painstakingly photo-graphed by the cameramen of a US film unit. Their images reveal a harrowing truth about Operation Ladbroke.
A Waco glider in the sea by three distinctive rocks. The Terrauzza tuna factory and pillbox can be seen in the background. Operation Ladbroke, Sicily.
The same three rocks and the same view today.
In the corner of the bay where the cliffs of the Maddalena Peninsula meet the flat agricultural lands south of Syracuse in Sicily, there is a beach. It is near an old tuna factory, in an area called Terrauzza. It is not a beach in the holiday sense of soft sands, though the sun is hot, the waves gentle and the clear water beckons. Instead it is a thousand yards of sharp and jagged rocks. At its eastern end a short, steep road descends from the foot of the peninsula’s stony spine.
The ruined Terrauzza tuna factory and pillbox today.
Near where the road meets the shore, a pillbox dominates the beach from high on the bluffs above. Its companion pillbox at the other end of the beach, near the ruined tuna factory, has slipped into the sea. Back in 1943, the two pillboxes were perfectly sited for their machine guns to sweep the beach with a murderous cross-fire. Now it is a peaceful scene, but in July 1943 it was a scene of horror. In peacetime the waters of the bay were bloody with the trapping and slaughter of thousands of tuna, but in war it was the turn of men.
When director Lieutenant H. Bollerman and his film crew of the 4 Camera Detachment of the 12th Combat Camera Unit parked their truck at the bottom of the road on 20 July 1943, they must have been shocked by what they saw. The CCUs had been set up under the guidance of Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers Studios in Hollywood, at the special request of Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of staff in Washington DC in charge of all the US Army air forces. The job of the CCUs was to provide propaganda footage of Allied air successes. Their film crews were used to riding in bombers and watching their bombs explode 20,000 feet below. But 4 Camera Detachment was attached to Troop Carrier Command, and had been sent to Sicily to film USAAF Waco gliders on the ground. The Wacos had landed on the night of 9July 1943 while spearheading the invasion of the island.
A newsreel of the time boasted that the American Waco was a wonder weapon, able to land silently behind enemy lines with troops ready to leap out into instant action. The newsreel also claimed Wacos were being churned out by the factory production lines in stupendous quantities. The reality in North Africa was somewhat different – there were not enough Wacos where and when they were needed. The British 1 Air Landing Brigade (1ALB) was slated to use them for Operation Ladbroke, the airborne assault on Syracuse, and barely received enough in time to train with them before the invasion. 1 ALB’s main landing zones near Syracuse were west of the beach, among the flat arable fields behind Terrauzza.
The idea of the Waco as wonder weapon was challenged by what 4 Camera Detachment found in those fields, which hardly counted as propaganda proving Allied air successes. It is no surprise that the unit’s footage never made it into newsreels shown in the movie theatres of the USA. The crew had been filming the Wacos for several days. Shot after shot showed the charred skeletons of Wacos that had burned. Many of those that had not caught fire had suffered smashed cockpits, broken wings, ripped sides, torn off wheels. Some Wacos were embedded in stone walls or cactus hedges. The crew filmed Wacos tangled in wires, and photographed trees and telegraph posts with their tops shorn off by the descending gliders.
They filmed detritus lying all around the wrecks: a Sten gun, two airborne helmets, tools, a mortar bomb, a phosphorus grenade. This abandoned debris, along with discarded, bloody bandages, told them that things had not gone well for many of the airborne troops who had landed in these gliders. A few Wacos had landed intact and perfectly, but the many others lying like broken birds seemed a haunting indictment of the whole concept of this wonder weapon. The men of 4 Camera Detachment had also come across some Italian bodies as yet unburied, but still all these sights cannot have prepared them for what they saw that day at the rocky beach. As far as the eye could see along the shore, wrecked gliders lay drowned or hooked on rocks, and the bloated bodies of British airborne troops rotted in the sun or bobbed obscenely in the sea.
A Night of Terror
Terrauzza & Operation Ladbroke
What had happened? What had happened was, after investigation, easy to say: out of nearly 150 gliders that took off from Tunisia for the invasion, about half landed in the sea, most of them in the waters off Terrauzza. Hundreds of men had drowned. How and why it had happened was harder to say. In essence, the gliders were released too far from the shore to reach it. But for more than 70 years since that day, argument has continued over who was to blame, and for what, exactly. Suffice it say that Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have understated the case when he penned a remark on the memo that informed him of the airborne casualties. He wrote simply: “This was a very serious disaster.”
Flight Officer Michael Samek was second pilot in glider 99, which was carrying 16 men of the Border Regiment. Samek was one of about 20 American glider pilots who had volunteered to be seconded to the British Glider Pilot Regiment for Operation Ladbroke. The request for volunteers seems to have been at least partly motivated by the American need to have their own observers learning at first-hand about the performance of the new wonder weapons, in what was, after all, the Waco’s first ever action. Samek’s report to his superiors recounts events typical of that night, but the formal, military style conveys none of its horrors:
“The cabin started to fill with water at once. The undersigned forced his way out of the Glider from the side, right behind the co-pilot’s seat, and took position on the right wing near the center, helping to rescue two (2) men through a hole in the top of the fuselage … The Glider was kept afloat by the wings and all passengers took positions on the left and right wings respectively. It appeared only twelve (12) of the eighteen (18) men who started on the journey were present; therefore, six (6) must be considered lost at sea … The ocean was rough and waves swept the wrecked Glider, making it difficult to remain in place. The drift was approximately southwest.
Some time later … it was decided among the survivors to try and swim for shore; the undersigned, having lost his life preserver, decided to stay by himself. After approximately three (3) hours’ swimming, the sound of voices was audible and the undersigned, after swimming towards the sound, found the wreckage of Glider 100, and decided to stay there. After some time, it became light and the faint outlines of the invasion fleet could be seen in the distance.”
Samek spent three hours alone in the dark in the swell, yet his account of it is dry. His report went on to make suggestions for improvements, one of which is telling. Apparently the glue used on the wooden parts of the wings made sharp edges, which lacerated the hands of the men clinging desperately to the gliders in the heavy seas, adding to their torments.
For all the formality of Samek’s account, it cannot obscure what was a horrifying experience. The gliders sank lower and lower as the hours passed, or broke up. The life preservers that had been issued to the men were little more than a blow-up rings. They were not enough to save the lives of the many men who could not swim. These non-swimmers clung terrified to the wings with all their strength as each successive wave pounded over them. Eventually, exhausted, they were washed away in the swell and drowned.
The main seaborne landings were taking place six miles away (and all the way down the east coast of Sicily from there), but there was at least one troopship closer to the bay off Terrauzza: HMS Ulster Monarch. Its LCAs were carrying a squadron of SAS raiders to a landing spot under the cliffs of Cape Murro di Porco, at the tip of the Maddalena Peninsula. The primary task of the SAS was to knock out a battery of heavy guns on the cape that threatened all the troopships, and all the thousands of soldiers they carried. On the way in to the cliffs, the tough SAS warriors had their hearts torn by piteous cries from airborne troops drowning in the dark, but they had to ignore them.
After disembarking the SAS, the empty landing craft returned to pick up survivors. Many men were rescued this way. Samek was not picked up until HMS Beaufort, a destroyer on anti-submarine patrol near the cape, stopped to help. Samek learned that Beaufort had spotted gliders in the water the night before, but she did not stop until the sun was well up, some nine hours later. Many glider men must have drowned because their potential rescuers had higher priorities in the brutal business of war.
Grim Record
Now, ten days later, it was the job of Lieutenant Bollerman and his film crew to photograph the results of this debacle. They unpacked their kit and set up the tripod on the truck for their first shot. It showed the length of the beach with its wrecked gliders in the water, and the Terrauzza tuna factory and pillbox in the far distance. They then set about the grim business of walking along the beach and filming the bodies and the gliders close up. After ten days in the sea, the bodies were bald and swollen, their KD shorts and bush shirts stretched grotesquely tight. In what was probably a Freudian slip, or at least a slip of the pen, when typing up captions later, a CCU man wrote that the bodies were “odious”. Although seeing men in this state must indeed be a hateful experience, the bodies themselves were more pitiful than loathsome, and surely the writer meant “odorous”. For the stench of corruption and death on the beach was terrible.
A British naval intelligence-gathering unit, 30 Commando, was lodged in a farmhouse nearby, presumably not out of choice, but by now all the country around Syracuse was packed with the units of General Montgomery’s Eighth Army and its huge logistical tail, and space was at a premium. It was not only the smell in the intense heat that was hard for the commandos. Each day they made a point of burying the airborne dead as the gliders and bodies drifted in. It was hard, unpleasant work, for the ground was rocky, and the bodies tended to fall apart. Some bodies had bullet holes in their heads, where the men had been shot by Italian machine gunners in the pillboxes as they tried to swim ashore.
Later all these bodies were exhumed and most are now in the beautifully-kept Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery west of Syracuse. Many lie in single, named graves, but some bodies could not be identified. One grave contains the bodies of no less than nine glider pilots, unknown, albeit, in Kipling’s majestic phrase, “Known Unto God”. The cemetery is full of moving epitaphs engraved on the headstones, some formal, some prayers, some poetic, others touchingly personal. Yet in some ways, 12 CCU’s unedited reels are the most moving, if most shocking, epitaphs of all, showing in all its horror the true nature of the heroism of the men of 1 ALB.
Staff Sergeant Dennis Galpin’s glider landing during Operation Ladbroke was famously perfect. But where was it exactly? And is that his glider in the well-known photo?
There is a well-known IWM photograph of a Horsa glider taken in Sicily after Operation Ladbroke (see it on the IWM website). It has appeared repeatedly in histories because it was, until now, the only known picture of a Horsa from Operation Ladbroke. Nobody seemed sure exactly where it had been taken. Although it was suspected that it was Galpin’s glider, this was far from certain. The uncertainty was not helped by the IWM description, which states the glider landed “off course”, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Now new evidence in the form of a previously undiscovered film helps prove it. It is indeed Galpin’s glider.
In the newly discovered film, glider 133 (Galpin’s glider) is photographed from the other side, facing north-east towards the Ponte Grande bridge. The cameraman was apparently keen to show Allied tanks and vehicles streaming northwards along Highway 115 and crossing the bridge to Syracuse. The long south ramp of the bridge, which is still there today, can clearly be seen in the background.
Galpin’s Horsa glider, lit by the searchlight, descends past the Ponte Grande bridge.
Any doubts about the exact location of the landing are removed by an aerial photograph taken two days later on 12 July. It shows Galpin’s glider in the middle of LZ3 South, with its nose slewed into a ditch. The wheel tracks of its landing show that Galpin came in from almost due east, passing over the south ramp of the bridge as he did so. His flight path is exactly on a line from Maniace Castle in Syracuse across the bay, where there was a searchlight. There was also a searchlight at the nearby gun battery codenamed Gnat. In lighting up Galpin’s Horsa as he descended, one of these searchlights could not help but light up the bridge as well, guiding him in.
Galpin’s Horsa glider appears on the left of this aerial photo taken on 12 July. It was slewed right by hitting the ditch, as the short track made by its wheels shows. The south ramp of the Ponte Grande bridge, and part of the Mammiabica canal, are visible top right. Source: GPRA
Although LZ3 South now has olive trees growing in it that were not there in 1943, its basic topography has not changed. The ditch that brought glider 133 to a sudden halt is still there. The exact landing spot is where that ditch now comes into a corner made by two lines of olive trees. Horses graze, and even in summer there is standing water in the low-lying meadows.
Looking north from the Temple of Zeus across LZ3S towards the line of the Mammaiabica canal. The arrow shows where Galpin’s glider came to a stop. The photograph was taken in the heat of July, but the standing water emphasizes the marshy nature of the water meadows either side of the rivers.
Clearly, claims that Galpin landed 50 yards from the bridge are wrong. The well-known contemporary magazine illustration by Bryan de Grineau (not available online) is also wrong, but can be forgiven in the name of dramatic licence. It shows the Horsa almost touching the ramp. There are many other departures from reality in it, even though de Grineau got his information directly from Lieutenant Colonel George Chatterton, the commander of the glider pilots in Sicily. But de Grineau’s painting is a brilliant piece of journalistic illustration just the same. Its purpose was not accuracy, but morale-building wartime propaganda and a celebration of British dash and daring.
The aerial photo shows that Galpin in fact landed nearly 500 yards from the bridge. Not that this in any way lessens his achievement. The immediate area either side of the south ramp had a convergence of electricity poles and cables (also still there today), shown on the map below, that were a hazard for a descending glider. Also on the map, the darker shaded triangle shows LZ3 South. The X-marks-the-spot shows that Galpin landed as near the centre of LZ3S as makes no difference.
The map also shows the route chosen by Lieutenant Lennard Withers to attack the bridge. He was commander of the platoon of 2 South Staffords in the glider. His initiative in attacking the bridge may have saved the day. But his approach to the bridge was sensibly circuitous, and relied on tackling the pillbox from the rear. Again, the facts belie the de Grineau illustration, which shows troops pouring out of the glider and straight onto the bridge in a frontal assault, firing from the hip as they went.
Map showing LZ3, the landing spot of Galpin’s Horsa glider, and Withers’ route to the Ponte Grande bridge.
Some critics deprecate the choice of landing zones as being entirely inappropriate for gliders (LZ3S having, for example, glider-stopping ditches in it, like the one that stopped Galpin). The map and the photographs show that there wasn’t really anywhere else. To the south-east of the bridge were marshes and salt pans. The north side of the bridge was where all the pillboxes and barbed wire were sited. The land between the rivers was full of tall trees. To the south was a ridge fronted by cliff-like bluffs cut by gullies.
Some of these critics then say that paratroopers should have been used instead of glider troops. There are several reasons why they were not, not the least being that gliders were perfectly suited to coup-de-main work, as they allowed (when things went well) a silent approach, a precision landing and troops ready to deploy instantly as a single body.
Galpin’s glide showed what could be done. Despite the non-arrival of all the other Horsas headed for LZ3, Withers and his men seized the bridge and prevented its demolition. The spectacular pay-off could be seen exactly as the film cameraman arrived to photograph it: tanks and vehicles pouring across the Ponte Grande bridge into Syracuse.
Notes on the IWM Photograph
The new photograph of Galpin’s Horsa and the Ponte Grande bridge (above) comes from a 35mm film in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. The film is AYY 510/14. The image posted here is low resolution for the web. To reproduce it, apply to the IWM for a licence for commercial use, and for a list of film laboratories who can make high resolution copies and frame grabs.
The colour painting used on this page and in the banner for this website was specially commissioned from aviation artist Anthony Cowland. For more information, see [here].
Books about the Italian artillery of WWII are rare, even in Italian. This one in English is extremely welcome, but may slightly disappoint students of Operation Ladbroke and the fall of the Piazzaforte Augusta-Siracusa (PA-S).
Book Review: ‘Italian Artillery of the Second World War’ (aka ‘Italian Artillery of WWII’) by Enrico Finazzer and Ralph A Riccio, published 28 September 2015 by MMP Books.
Three years ago, ‘Le Artigliere del Regio Esercito nella Seconda Mondiale’ by Enrico Finazzer was published in Italy. Serious students of the invasion of Sicily, starved of decent sources about Italian artillery, rushed to buy it. In it they found many of the guns used by the Italian forces in Sicily, but, disappointingly, not the two main guns used by the Milmart, the ‘Black Shirt’ Fascist militia that manned the coastal gun batteries – the 76/40 and the 102/35. These guns feature heavily in the story of the PA-S (see this post).
Thinking that this new book in English might rectify the problem, those same serious students may rush to buy it as well. They will be amply rewarded if they do, but not as regards those two Milmart guns, which are still missing. This is not surprising, as the current book is based on Finazzer’s original, although much improved. The book’s co-author, Ralph Riccio, seems to have contributed greatly to this, not least because he was channelling the spirit of Nicola Pignato. Pignato was the doyen of military historians of the Italian Army, and especially of its hardware, such as tanks. Sadly, he died in 2010. In addition to the personal loss, this is a great loss to historians, as he was probably the leading expert in his field. In particular, he was working with Riccio on an unfinished book about Italian artillery. Did this lost book give details of the two missing Milmart guns?
It is perhaps unreasonable to expect Milmart or Navy coastal guns to have appeared in Finazzer’s original book: the title said it dealt with guns of the ‘Regio Esercito’, i.e. Army, a distinction which some buyers might have missed. In the new English edition the rationale for excluding guns like the 76/40 is explained: ” … older pieces or war booty guns and howitzers were assigned to static or coastal artillery duties … and are not within the scope of this book”. That said, the book does list many older and war booty types, as well as self-propelled guns, artillery tractors, German guns, and of course the standard newer WW2 army guns. There are 48 entries in the Contents page.
Nevertheless, some of the guns in the book were involved in the Allied invasion of Sicily, Operation Ladbroke and the defence of the PA-S in July 1943, including:
105/28, deployed in the battle for Solarino
149/35, in batteries belonging to the army corps
75/27, attached to Army battalions
149/12 and 149/13 (sources differ), assigned to roadblocks
75/97/38, a powerful German interim design
The possibility of the latter’s presence in Sicily is confined to a footnote, but is known to be definite from photographs in the IWM.
Finazzer’s original book was welcome. Compared to some older books which may have covered more types, but with only sketchy information, his book went into detail about the guns. The current reworking of the original is even more welcome. A comparative sampling of a few guns shows that the text has been very usefully expanded, and there are now numerous line drawings. The book is twice the size of its Italian predecessor. There are new photographs, and the new format allows them to be printed larger. Finally, the book is in well-written English. It is a must-have for students of artillery or the Italian Army, and for anybody seriously interested in the Allied invasion of Sicily.
For a very detailed study of Italian AA guns in WW2, such as the 76/40 and 102/35, see issue 18 of the dossiers issued every two months by Storia Militare magazine: “L’Artiglieria Controaerei Italiana sino al 1943” by Filippo Cappellano. Italian language only.
In 1943 British glider troops seized the Ponte Grande, a bridge near Syracuse, Sicily, launching the Allied invasion of Italy. Now Roberto Piccione builds bridges between former enemies.
Roberto Piccione in an old WW2 gun battery, with Syracuse in the background across the bay.
Beside a perfect tourist cove, where no tourist goes, opposite the golden walls of the old fort of old Syracuse across the bay, stands a derelict World War II gun battery. All the pillboxes, emplacements, bunkers, command centres, barracks, shelters and ammunition dumps still remain, crumbling in the sun, or pitched into the sea from crumbling cliffs.
Modern graffiti in garish colours shares wall space with neatly painted Fascist slogans, whose black lettering remains perfectly preserved deep in the cool tunnels, but whose sentiments were obsolete even before this place faced its test in the battle for which it was built.
Roberto Piccione is showing me round the site. As we walk among the jumbled concrete, talking, he bends, hardly breaking his stride, to pick up something nestling among the mandrake flowers in the sandy soil. He shows me a bent and corroded rifle cartridge. “We could look it up later, to find out if it is British or Italian,” he says. It could be either, for on the night of 9/10 July 1943 an SAS raiding party, together with some mislaid British airborne troops, came here to prevent the battery from barring Syracuse harbour or shelling the Allied seaborne forces landing further south at Cassibile and Avola. These landings marked the permanent return of Allied troops to the Continent, and were the first in a series of assaults that carried the Allies into Germany (although not, in the end, through Italy), to end the war in Europe.
The modern Ponte Grande bridge beside the ruined piers of the old bridge.
It has poured with rain for the last few days, veritable biblical deluges by English standards, and it is the rain that has brought the buried detritus of war to the surface. A similar autumnal deluge apparently washed away, after the war, the Ponte Grande, the old bridge south of Syracuse that those mislaid airborne troops had been sent to (and did) capture on that flare-filled night of fire and fear in 1943.
Roberto, who is a youthful 37 and lives in Syracuse, runs Impavidus, a charitable association dedicated to the remembrance of those far off days in this corner of Sicily. Impavidus helps anybody with a stake or an interest in lo sbarco (as the landings are known), whether they be octogenarian veterans of the airborne and seaborne operations, or modern soldiers keen to learn lessons from this landscape and its history, or friends and relatives of those who fought and died here.
Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, Syracuse
In July 2003, for example, Impavidus assisted veteran Allied glider pilots returning to Sicily to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the landings. Last year soldiers from the modern South Staffordshire Regiment visited Sicily on a training exercise. The Staffords (one of the units involved in the 1943 airborne landings) were guided around the battlefields by Impavidus, which may be one reason why they did not get mislaid this time around. On another occasion, at the request of a veteran who could not come to Sicily and whose friend was killed beside him during the landings, Roberto took a photograph of the friend’s grave in the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Syracuse and sent it to England.
Pillbox with modern Ponte Grande bridge over the river Anapo in the background
Doing this is far from easy. The memory of the war in Sicily, like the indestructible bunkers visible everywhere along the coast and on the old main roads, looms large, if generally unremarked from day to day. Like the buried spent munitions, however, those years also lie hidden, and reminders awaken memories many would rather forget.
Roberto tried hard to find Italian veterans willing to meet the British soldiers, usually a clubbable bunch who view the meeting of old adversaries and allies after all these years as a pleasure and a privilege. He did not have much success. “Italian witnesses don’t come forward,” he says, “because they probably feel they will either be tarred as Fascists, or shamed for having run away.” Although modern Britons will see no shame in the Italian reaction against Fascism in the war’s later years, and in their effectively siding with the Allies before as well as after the armistice in September 1943, many older Italians are only slowly coming round to seeing how precious their memories are to their countrymen.
Readers of Impavidus’s website may also be puzzled to see this disclaimer on its home page: “Whatever the veterans’ nationality, the Association is apolitical, and in no way propagates or disseminates any political or ideological agenda”. When I first read that, I wondered why anyone would think a charitable association helping veterans and researchers would be anything but apolitical, but this of course is a very English view to take.
Roberto explains that there are in fact a few local groups interested in the history and memory of lo sbarco, but that they tend not to cooperate, each having its own very strong views and each going its own way. “It’s very political,” he says. “If you’re on the left, you can’t be on the right, and vice versa. It’s sad how we don’t help each other and keep each other informed, but that’s very Sicilian. Impavidus believes in helping everybody”. This is not simply altruistic, as Roberto believes that casting your bread upon the waters will bring the fabled thousand-fold return. When it comes to discussing the site of a possible further museum about lo sbarco, however, Roberto is firmly on the side of his home town, and favours Syracuse over rival contenders such as Catania, Avola or Cassibile.
Roberto and Prof Michele Piccione, Avola 2004
Before I leave Sicily Roberto arranges for me to meet his father, Prof. Michele Piccione, who was present when the British landed. He was a driver and despatch rider in the Italian army, and was in Avola on a training course. He was captured and kept in a makeshift POW camp next to the beach, where the prisoners helped out in the bloody aftermath of strafing attacks made on the beach by German aircraft. We meet on the promenade of that very beach in Avola, and I am overwhelmed once again by the Sicilian custom of showering gifts on strangers like me. As his father talks, recounting his experiences here, I can see where Roberto gets much of his character from, and how both father and son share that strange mixture of calm, generosity, passion and independence which seems to characterize the people of this island.
Like many Sicilians who first met the British when invaded by them, Prof. Piccione remembers the relief that local people felt to discover that the British were not monsters, and the fair play and sympathy they received from them. Many developed a fondness for their former enemies that remains strong to this day. Despite this, remembering does not come easy. When I ask that absurd but indispensable old journalistic standby, how does he feel about it now, he replies, visibly moved: “It is not a nice period of my life to remember”. I am also moved, but more by the generosity of spirit that has nevertheless brought him to this once horrific place to help me understand what it was like, and what it all might mean now. It seems he has inspired the same courage, the same generosity and the same vision in his son.
The information in it relates to that time. Roberto has since (2014) become a fully qualified tour guide, and arranges personalised guided tours for individuals and groups to Sicily’s many historic sites and sights. He also leads battlefield walks and tours.
It’s an extraordinary story: in July 1943, Italian Admiral Leonardi manned an abandoned gun battery almost alone against the might of the Royal Navy. Firing several shots, he forced a British ship to turn and flee. But is the story true?
The fresh-water cistern at battery AS362 in 2015. Is this the symbolic site of an act of Italian heroism and leadership by Admiral Leonardi?
Admiral Priamo Leonardi was in 1943 the commander of the Piazzaforte Augusta-Siracusa (PA-S), a fortified zone on the east coast of Sicily that surrounded the port cities of Augusta and Syracuse. The PA-S was controlled by the Italian Navy. However, apart from a few companies of sailors, it was mainly garrisoned by second-line territorial army troops, who manned pillboxes and roadblocks. There were also some artillery batteries belonging to the army corps. But its key defences were the many coastal gun batteries in the zone. These were crewed by men of the Milmart, a fascist “Black Shirt” militia. There were 24 of these batteries, spread over some 30 miles as the crow flies, from south of Syracuse to north of Augusta. This mix of separate services and fiefdoms, across such a large area, did not bode well for a coordinated defence.
The Allied invasion of Sicily began on 9th July 1943 with Operation Ladbroke, a massed glider assault designed to facilitate the rapid capture of the port of Syracuse. The British airborne troops first seized the Ponte Grande, a bridge which crossed the river Anapo just south of the city. Leonardi’s HQ was further north, near Augusta, but as soon as he understood the scale of the attack he rushed to the front line facing the Anapo, to assess the situation and encourage the recapture of the bridge.
He was later criticised for gadding about the battle zone, out of contact, instead of coordinating his forces from his HQ. At times the roads in the PA-S were, it seems, full of officers looking for him. On the other hand, he might have been even more out of touch if he had stayed at his HQ. Italian telephone and radio communications were poor even before the invasion, and failed or were cut as the fighting increased.
One contemporary commented that Leonardi was rather “garibaldino”, impetuous. The word is a reference to the Italian hero Garibaldi, a dashing freedom fighter and the figurehead of the forces that brought about the unification of Italy. Certainly, following his excursion to the Anapo front, Leonardi spent the next few days dashing from unit to unit, to bolster morale and to keep in touch with his disparate and dispersed forces. He was also described as “valoroso”, and so recklessly brave that he almost seemed to be courting death. It was said that he did all one man could do to defend his command.
Milmart on the Maddalena
Crucially, however, it was early on Leonardi’s watch, where he wasn’t watching, that the PA-S began to collapse around his ears. While he faced front, concerned about events south of Syracuse, he wasn’t looking backwards at events around Augusta. Events south of Syracuse were certainly bad enough. While the bulk of the British seaborne forces landed some miles away, the SAS (operating as the SRS or Special Raiding Squadron under Major Paddy Mayne) were landed on the Maddalena Peninsula just south of the city. The peninsula was poorly defended by a few second-line territorials, but it was also the site of no less than four Milmart gun batteries. Here, in the words of a British admiral, the SAS “carried fire and the sword” to the hapless Italian defenders. Two of the batteries were overwhelmed. The crews of the other two batteries sensibly ran away. So great was the threat to Syracuse that the first Italian regular army unit to arrive in the area to support the PA-S was directed urgently towards the Maddalena Peninsula. It was ordered to throw the SAS back into the sea.
One of the Italian batteries taken by the SAS, here manned by Royal Marines. The troopships in Syracuse’s harbour beyond give an idea of how close HMS Ulster Monarch must have looked to battery AS362. This is a 76/40 gun in battery AS309. The site is now a hotel. Source: NARA
The abandonment of the last two Maddalena batteries by their Milmart crews was the beginning of a tear, that turned into a rip, that became a rent, that finally tore the PA-S apart. Unbeknownst to Leonardi, the Milmart crews of many of the remaining batteries in the whole of the rest of the PA-S now abandoned their posts. Many of the militia men were local. Mistakenly fearing instant execution by the British for being fascists, they removed their incriminating black shirts and melted back into the population. Others headed for Messina, the naval base in the far north of the island, hoping to escape to the mainland. Before they left, they disabled or sabotaged their guns, so nobody else could use them. Many of the batteries had not fired a shot that day, except perhaps at passing aircraft or imagined raiders. And not one of them was immediately threatened by the British, who were still many miles away.
This catastrophe for Italian honour and Italian arms was a godsend to the British. When it was learned that Augusta had been abandoned, Operation Glutton was cancelled. This was an airborne operation designed to seize a bridge outside Augusta, in much the same way that the Ponte Grande had been seized outside Syracuse. Now it was superfluous. Meanwhile the Royal Navy rushed ships directly to the harbour at Augusta. This would have been impossible if all the batteries had still been manned. The SAS were also despatched to the city to seize it in a seaborne landing, while the main British forces slogged up the road from Syracuse. The scene was set for Admiral Leonardi’s Wild-West-style, lone-gunslinger shoot-out with the Royal Navy.
Duel at High Noon (-ish)
Leonardi was not totally absent from his HQ during the invasion. He kept returning there between his field trips. On one of these touch-base visits he spoke to two Milmart men whom he had requested as liaison officers. One of them told Leonardi that it might be possible to put his battery back into action. The battery was situated on the heights of Mount Tauro, east of Augusta. It was a dual-purpose battery, designed for both anti-aircraft and anti-ship fire, and it had clear views of the waters off Augusta. Rather than being blown up, its guns had been disabled by removing the breech blocks and throwing them into the cistern of the battery’s fresh water reservoir. This meant that the guns could be reactivated simply by retrieving and refitting the breech blocks.
In gung-ho, Captain-Kirk style, Leonardi did not delegate and despatch a team, but instead decided to go and see for himself. Not only did he not delegate, but he also took with him his chief of staff, the man whom he normally left behind to look after the HQ and act as his deputy in his absence. Given how it was becoming apparent that he did not know whom he could trust, this made desperate sense. The other people in the Admiral’s vehicle on this extraordinary trip were his driver and the Milmart officer.
One version of the story almost sounds as if Leonardi was alone at the guns. Clearly he wasn’t, but compared to the 100-odd Italian heavy guns around Augusta and its bay, and the 1000-plus men that should have been manning those guns, he might as well have been. The story tells how Leonardi and his tiny force found the breech blocks in a well or ditch, remounted them, and then fired with such bravado at a British destroyer entering Augusta’s harbour that it turned and fled. The wrath of the Royal Navy was then visited on the admiral and on the battery in a storm of fire from two cruisers.
The open breech of an Italian Breda 76/40 gun, standard equipment in the batteries of the PA-S. The breech block is on the right. This gun is in the excellent military museum at Chiaramonte Gulfi.
In his history of the invasion of Sicily an Italian general later exclaimed: “If these few shells had this effect, imagine if all the batteries had gone into action!” But of course, the Royal Navy would never have let that happen. It was precisely because of this extravagance of seaward-facing guns that the assault on Augusta was originally planned to take place from the air and the land, and not (except for long-range barrages at a safe distance) from the sea. It was only the unexpected abandoning of Augusta, and of the batteries, that allowed the Navy to try to capture the city.
Leonardi’s own account of what happened is a little drier and more credible than the story above: “Driver Caraco was roped and lowered into the cistern. He brought to the surface a couple of breech blocks, and these were remounted on the guns. The front of the battery faced the harbour of Augusta. Since an enemy destroyer was exploring the entrance of the harbour, we tried to fire one of the guns. Given the lack of a range-finder and the state of the sights, the few shots we fired were wildly inaccurate and so we stopped.” Leonardi does not say that the destroyer fled (he does not mention it again at all). He goes on to say that on his return to HQ he ordered the head of the Milmart to scrape together a crew and have it sent to put the battery back into action, however limited. Leonardi also does not mention coming under fire at the battery, although he does describe the routine heavy shelling that several British ships applied to the area as a whole, and to the batteries in particular. He himself saw the two cruisers when he was at the battery (which British records show was specifically targeted, but earlier in the day).
So what did happen to the destroyer he fired at? If there is a hint of comic opera in the story of the driver lowered into the cistern, two very senior officers serving the gun and all firing wildly, then what happened to the British ships could to be read as a full-blown bedroom farce. Twice the Royal Navy thought the coast was clear, and ships tried to enter the harbour (read: boudoir). Twice these ships carried senior admirals (read: aging lotharios). Presumably the British admirals were keen to taste the thrill of victory at first hand (it seems Leonardi was not the only Captain Kirk in Augusta that day). Twice these ships suddenly came under desultory gunfire (read: cuckolded husband), and twice they rushed for the exit (read: bedroom window). Ships collided. Ships could not fit through the narrow gate in the boom fast enough. Despite the threat, the naval officers were having a whale of a time. As one British captain signalled his admiral later (his ship having temporarily flown the flag of St George, which indicated the presence of an admiral, when it carried him into the harbour): “We are all most grateful for an amusing break in monotony whilst wearing your flag.”
SAS Shoot-Out
So it is in fact possible that the shots fired by Leonardi did indeed bring about a sudden exit of British shipping from Augusta’s harbour. But what does all this have to do with the SAS? The incident with Leonardi, the battery and the destroyer took place in the early afternoon of 12 July 1943. The SAS did not try to land in the city until nearly sunset. But when they did, they came under a blizzard of fire from machine guns and, yes, some shots from a battery. The SAS’s mother ship was HMS Ulster Monarch, in peacetime a passenger ferry that crisscrossed the Irish sea. Now she was anchored just off Izzo Point, at the southern tip of Mount Tauro east of Augusta, and was right under the bluffs where battery AS362 was sited. AS362 was the battery identified by Leonardi’s chief of staff as being the battery where he and his boss had made their stand (although other sources thought it was battery AS674, further inland). A post-war inquest reported that the battery was also manned again later in the day, so perhaps it was indeed the guns of Leonardi’s battery that were firing on the SAS and their escorts.
The rocks of Izzo Point seen from the top of the bluffs close to battery AS362, possibly the site of Admiral Leonardi’s heroic stand. HMS Ulster Monarch anchored 2 cables (about 350 yards) from the point to launch the SAS.
Judging by the response of the three British destroyers accompanying Ulster Monarch, the threat could precisely have been coming from the AS362 bluffs. An Admiralty photo in the Imperial War Museum (here) shows a destroyer, in a sea splashed with gunfire hits, blasting the headland where the battery was sited. Smoke or dust, probably from the explosion of naval shells, can be seen drifting across the top of the bluffs. Ulster Monarch herself added to the fire of the destroyers with her lone 12 pounder gun (for an SAS eye-witness account of this, see Peter Davis’ recently-published book). Under this barrage of protective fire, the SAS in their landing craft ran the gauntlet intact and landed on the east side of the deserted city.
Is it true then that Leonardi’s almost single-handed reviving of the battery had not only delayed the British entry into Augusta, but also threatened to blow the SAS out of the water? We will never know for sure, but it is tantalisingly possible. Whatever the case, it is an extraordinary tale of an extraordinary man.
Aftermath
The Armed Forces commander in Sicily at the time wanted to court-martial Leonardi for incompetence, but he was overtaken by events. There were accusations of betrayal and cowardice. The Fascist rump republic condemned Leonardi to death in his absence. The sentence fell away when Fascism did. A post-war commission of enquiry into his actions and the collapse of the PA-S was established, staffed by senior officers of both the Army and Navy. After gathering extensive evidence, they exonerated Leonardi. Later still, an author was prosecuted for defamation after accusing Leonardi and other Navy officers of conspiracy and treason. Leonardi was again exonerated. But to this day there are conspiracy theorists who think this was all a whitewash and cover-up. Anyone who has seen the thousands of pages of testimony in the archives in Rome will find this unlikely. Although some of these records of course contain the usual partiality and self-serving exculpations (as do the memoirs of many a British senior officer), nothing in them indicates a cover-up.
Update 8 December 2016:
Since writing this piece, I have seen the account by the Milmart officer who was the fourth person in Leonardi’s car, Eduardo Caforio. It makes it clear that the gun battery in question was AS674, not AS362. Caforio describes remaining at the battery after Leonardi left. He later fired 27 shells at a British destroyer that was protecting “a passenger ship of more than 10,000 tons” which was landing troops. Although this tonnage is too great for Ulster Monarch, Caforio was presumably mistaken or exaggerating, as there were no other troopships in the vicinity, so it must have been Ulster Monarch.
Until now, book-length personal records of the SAS in Sicily, written while memories were fresh, totalled exactly one. For fans and historians who find such first-hand accounts invaluable, Peter Davis’ exciting new book has doubled our treasure.
Book review: ‘S.A.S. Men in the Making. An Original’s Account of Operations in Sicily and Italy’ by Peter Davis MC, published 3 August 2015 by Pen & Sword.
“SRS, prepare to embark”. This was the chilling phrase broadcast over HMS Ulster Monarch’s tannoy as the ship anchored in the waters off Cape Murro di Porco south of Syracuse on the night of 9/10 July 1943. It alerted the SAS men of the Special Raiding Squadron (SRS) that they would soon be in action. Their target was a heavily defended Italian gun battery sited on top of the cliffs of the cape. The men had been told that the fate of the whole invasion of Sicily depended on them. In the eerie glow of combat lighting, they now waited in final suspense. Each man knew it was possible that he might not survive the night. On the order “SRS, stand by to embark”, the men headed towards the oiling doors where they would climb into their landing craft. Here they waited again, but already activity was subduing anxiety. At last the call came: “SRS embark”. Apprehension vanished.
Peter Davis was there that night.
As the last veterans of WW2 die, the opportunity to hear vivid stories directly from them dies with them. There is a profound sense that there will soon be, if not already, no more new tellings. So the publication of Peter Davis’ account of the invasion of Sicily is as surprising as it is rare. Until now, the only full account of Sicily written shortly after the war by an SAS veteran was Derrick Harrison’s excellent “These Men are Dangerous”. Harrison was a section commander alongside Davis. Both accounts, recorded while the memories were still fresh by articulate, intelligent writers, are doubly precious because they are full of the details usually lacking in accounts made many years later. There are details of place, details of atmosphere and, perhaps most valuable of all, details of emotions. The combination brings history to life.
Davis’ son Paul found the manuscript of his father’s account when going through his papers some 18 years after he died. It was apparently written immediately after the war based on wartime diaries, while Davis was waiting to go to Cambridge University. Its original title was “Stand By to Embark”. Although redolent of high drama, this phrase would have meant nothing to most people, so it is undoubtedly wise, in this age of internet search key words, that the title was changed.
The first two chapters describe how Davis’ unit, 1 Special Service Regiment, was amalgamated with the SAS and posted to Kabrit in Egypt at about Christmas time 1942. The heady days of SAS exploits in the desert were already over, as Eighth Army was at the gates of Tripoli and Tunisia. Davis saw no action with the SAS in North Africa, but he was part of Paddy Mayne’s SRS, a subdivision of 1 SAS Regiment, from day one. The story of the SRS, from training, through the invasion of Sicily, to finally leaving the island, occupies chapters 3 to 8. Later chapters describe the invasion of mainland Italy and then the anti-climax of returning to the UK via North Africa at the end of 1943. Davis wraps up his text without covering actions in 1944 and 1945 in North West Europe, but an appendix provided by his son gives some information on these.
In terms of narrative, Davis’ Sicily account can be compared to Harrison’s, which is not surprising, as they were both in 2 Troop. Davis covers the taking of Lamba Doria (the battery on the cape), and also the taking of “the second battery” (AS493) further inland on the ridge of the Maddalena Peninsula. He does not mention the remaining two batteries on the peninsula, which were taken by another troop.
He describes the depressing effects of constantly seeing crashed gliders and the dead bodies of airborne troops who had taken part in Operation Ladbroke. At one point there was a fire-fight between glider troops and the SAS, whose unorthodox uniforms did not at first look British. Davis was not to know it, but the SAS actions in the Maddalena Peninsula had a dramatic effect on the unfolding of the airborne troops’ battle for the Ponte Grande bridge and the race for Syracuse.
During the landings at Augusta two days later, Davis was in the second wave, and his account is particularly strong on the jittery night spent in the deserted city. He then describes in detail what is hardly touched on by most writers, the days spent camped at various sites north of Augusta, constantly under enemy air raids and overwhelmed by flies and mosquitoes. These were not days of combat, but they greatly flesh out our understanding of what it was like to fight on the island.
There are also many photographs, many of them apparently never published before.
Davis’ tone is pitched well throughout. Although he tells the funny stories that soldiers are so fond of, they do not dominate or distort the history. One of Davis’ great strengths is that he never shies away from admitting to the effects of fear and apprehension, whether learning to parachute, waiting to fight, or staring into the enemy-filled night. There are no false heroics here.
He struggles, understandably but successfully, to describe the remarkable nature of the men of the SAS, whom he clearly loved: the roguishness, the disciplined indiscipline, the heroes conjured out of those whom society might well look down on. His account is a tribute to these men, and an attempt to hold on fiercely to times he would never see again, and would always miss.
This book is a wonderful find. Many thanks to Paul Davis for bringing his father’s account out into the world.
The seizing of the fortress of Eben-Emael was an extraordinary coup. Germany’s best glider pilots gave Hitler much to crow about, and the Allies much to fear. Was this spectacular glider assault strategically necessary, or was it a barn-storming diversion and a propaganda stunt?
Morning mist shrouds the huge hill that is the fortress of Eben-Emael. In the distance is Bloc 6, one of the six massive bunkers that defended its exterior.
The fort at Eben-Emael is big. As you approach, you see a hill, and might well wonder if the fort is somewhere on top of it. Then you see the massive entrance bunker, and realise that the entire hill is itself the fort. So of course the top of the fort is also big. It is also flat, and arranged like a huge sports arena, with bunkers and gun emplacements on embankments placed around the field like spectator stands. On the one hand, this big flatness seems to beg for the glider assault which took place here. On the other, it seems a miracle that any gliders survived landing in the centre of the ring of guns.
The story is well known, but bears a brief retelling. On 10 May 1940, the first-ever airborne assault by glider was launched by the Nazis. They landed troops on top of the Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael, where the highly-trained engineers in the gliders promptly disabled observation posts, defences, and heavy guns. These guns guarded three bridges over the deeply-cut Albert Canal, on the Belgian border. They threatened German forces punching through Holland via Maastricht, who needed the Albert Canal bridges intact so they could deploy quickly into the heart of Belgium, and head towards France. So neutralising the fort’s ability to use its guns was only part of the plan. The Germans also launched history’s first ever glider coup-de-main assaults on bridges, and seized two of the three Albert Canal bridges before they could be blown up by the Belgians.
The Albert Canal at Veldwezelt, near Eben-Emael, the site of the first-ever assault by glider designed to take a bridge (like Operation Ladbroke). The depth and width of the canal made a formidable obstacle.
The Germans were inventive and clever. The use of gliders at Eben-Emael was not the only innovative part of the operation. The German engineers were also equipped with hollow charge explosives, which could penetrate steel and concrete many times more effectively than normal explosives. Their use at the fort was another first in the history of warfare. In Rotterdam, German float planes carrying troops landed on the river, in a manner similar to a land-based glider assault, to seize bridges.
The Germans were also underhand and ruthless during the invasion of the Low Countries. The German ambassador did not inform the determinedly neutral Belgians that their nations were at war until after the attack had begun, and the fort and bridges had already been seized. German commandos were dressed as Dutch policemen to dupe the defenders of the bridges in Maastricht. The civilian centre of Rotterdam was bombed despite a ceasefire. Civilians were executed. British prisoners of war were massacred.
The Power of Propaganda
Memorial in Blegny, where Belgian civilians were massacred by the Germans during WW1.
Unlike atrocity propaganda during World War I (WW1), when Germans were falsely accused of bayoneting and eating Belgian babies, these breaches of the codes of war by the Germans actually happened. Hypocritically, it was in the name of these same codes, which they themselves had breached, that the Germans shot civilians. The locals were accused of being “franc tireurs”, civilian snipers, some of whom, it was claimed, had falsely put on uniforms, and so were not protected by the Geneva Convention. “Franc tireur” propaganda was as old as WW1, and beyond, back to the Franco-Prussian war. Propaganda is powerful stuff – it breeds hatred of the enemy, depersonalises him as subhuman, and gets used to justify almost any horror. It even turns the tide of global conflicts by helping bringing initially neutral nations like the USA into wars they at first avoided.
The propaganda impact of Eben-Emael hinged on how terrifyingly easy the Germans made it look. It is claimed that the fort was said to be impregnable, although not by the German military, who merely described it as the strongest of the Belgian forts, and surely not by the Belgian military, who knew forts could only delay. But forts can delay to strategic effect. The Belgians say that their forts around Liege delayed the Germans for 10 days during WW1. They say that the “miracle of the Marne”, when the French stopped the German juggernaut outside Paris in 1914, was only possible because of this delay. The aim was the same in World War 2 – the Belgian forts would delay the Germans at the border long enough for British and French forces to push into Belgium and hold the line.
It was expected that the Germans would have to reduce the forts the way they did in WW1 – by super-heavy artillery, and by its terrifying new equivalent, the Stuka dive-bomber. The old WW1 forts around nearby Liege also put up a fight in WW2, and it was many days before they all fell. Some fired bombardments onto Eben-Emael once they knew the Germans were on top of it.
One of four massive triple casemates for artillery on top of Eben-Emael (for scale, note the person on the left). This casemate faces the glider landing zone. Only one gun remains – the other apertures have been blocked.
It certainly served German propaganda to have Eben-Emael declared impregnable, as it made their achievement seem super-human. But the assault could so easily have failed. Claims that the fort was defenceless against airborne attack are simply untrue. It’s true that the flat top of the fort was not obstructed with poles, barbed wire or other obstacles to airborne landings. It’s probably also true that nobody even faintly imagined an attack by glider when the fort was designed. And although the top of the fort was big, it was barely big enough, and the Germans had to enlist some of their pre-war civilian glider champions to achieve the landings.
But there were many defences facing inwards towards the arena-like landing zone: heavy bunkers with multiple machine guns, heavy turrets with double cannons that could be fired like giant shotguns, and casemates full of artillery that could be used the same way. The men inside the fort greatly outnumbered the Germans on top. There were also multiple anti-aircraft (AA) machine guns, some fighting foxholes, and the raised embankment around the arena was protected by a wide apron of barbed wire inside the ring. And then there were the nearby forts which could pound the top of the Eben-Emael with artillery fire.
Examining a hole in an armoured turret made by a hollow-charge explosion, which left an imprint of the turret’s camouflage netting in the steel. In the background is part of the flat arena on top of Eben-Emael, and three more of its massive defences.
So the fort fell quickly not just because the Germans were well-trained, clever, innovative, courageous, aggressive and underhand. Eben-Emael also fell because the Belgian planners and commanders at all levels made many, many mistakes, both before and during the battle, some of them so foolish it almost defies belief. Almost none of the defences were used, or were used too late and to no effect.
A Waste of Effort?
Would the Germans have abandoned their invasion if Eben-Emael had not fallen so quickly? Certainly not. Not least because the attack through Holland and Belgium was partly a diversion, bait designed to draw the Allied forces deep into Belgium and into a trap. The main strike, the one that would close the trap behind the Allies, came through further south, behind them, through the Ardennes. The Ardennes region of Belgium was supposedly “impassable” to modern armies, and was comparatively undefended. This “impassable” has shades of the supposedly “impregnable” Eben-Emael. It seems nations believe their own propaganda only at their peril.
Does this mean the glider assaults on the Albert Canal bridges and Eben-Emael were tactically unnecessary? The Allies certainly did not think so. They quickly identified the bridges as bottlenecks through which the bulk of the German forces were passing. Unfortunately, not quickly enough. Belgian and British fliers in obsolete aircraft made heroic attacks on the bridges, but not until two days later. The Germans were amazed that these came in only after they had had time to erect plentiful AA defences, and many of the planes were shot down.
The Germans did indeed need to cross the bridges quickly, to prevent giving the Allies time to organise a coherent defence, and to save casualties. Also, if they were stalled behind the border, the threat and the bait effect would be less, and the Allies could face back towards the Ardennes assault behind them.
The risk was thus worth it. Like the loss of the Allied pilots who risked all to bring down the Albert Canal bridges, there is a brutal logic to sending a few men to achieve strategic miracles. If they succeed, the dividend is out of all proportion compared to the loss of the men if they fail. In the case of Eben-Emael, the dividend was not just an operational and tactical success for the Germans – it was also a huge propaganda success, and a personal fillip for Hitler, who had himself come up with the idea of using gliders on the fort.
The speed and ease with which an extremely costly defensive asset was taken out of play shocked the Allies. It also raised the question of where, if anywhere, was safe from airborne attack. The possibility of airborne forces appearing deep behind the front lines forced defenders to defend everywhere, and not just at the front. During Britain’s invasion scare during the summer of 1940, the fear of German parachutists became a national obsession. Five days after the fall of Eben-Emael, English intellectuals Virginia Woolf and her Jewish husband discussed how they would kill themselves when the Germans landed, to avoid going to the concentration camps.
Ironically, although the Eben-Emael propaganda coup may have terrified and demoralised the Germans’ enemies, it may also have backfired. The dangers of believing your own myths were again evident when the Germans later tried to take the island of Crete almost solely by airborne assault, and suffered terrible casualties. The falling off from the previous sense of superiority was so steep that the Germans never again launched an airborne assault. Meanwhile their enemies, the British and the Americans, were galvanised by Eben-Emael into setting up their own parachute and glider forces.
The story of Eben-Emael is also part of the story of this website’s main focus, Operation Ladbroke. Here the British, in imitation of the Germans, landed glider troops to seize the Ponte Grande bridge near Syracuse, to expedite a rush into enemy territory. But the airborne landings in Sicily, as for the Germans in Crete, did not go as planned. For a while the Allies, like the Germans, seriously considered scrapping their airborne forces. But they did not, and among later airborne failures there were also great successes. But none quite equalled the shining example of the German exploit at Eben-Emael.
One of two huge, inward-facing bunkers on top of Eben-Emael which were equipped with multiple machine guns, designed to sweep the top with fire. Left of the ivy, and partly covered by it, is a huge hole made by German hollow-charge explosives, now blocked up.
The man Hitler ordered to organise the landings along the Albert
Canal was Kurt Student. Read his analysis of Allied airborne plans
for the invasion of Sicily (including Operation Ladbroke) here.
The fort at Eben-Emael is (at the time of writing) only open to
the public without reservation one weekend a month, nine months of
the year, although groups can go with 2 weeks reservation notice.
Check the official Eben-Emael official website for details.
American tug pilots in Operation Ladbroke were roundly condemned for unilaterally releasing their gliders, many of which landed in the sea off Sicily. Is there more to the story? Previously unpublished evidence helps clarify an enduring mystery.
Drowned Operation Ladbroke Waco glider. In the background is the Costa Bianca and the ridge of the Maddalena Peninsula, south of Syracuse in Sicily.
Squadron Leader Lawrence Wright was Operations Officer of 38 Wing RAF (British Royal Air Force). The Wing provided the Albemarle and Halifax aircraft which towed many of the gliders of 1st Air Landing Brigade to Sicily during Operation Ladbroke on 9 July 1943. All gliders not towed by 38 Wing were towed by American pilots.
Wright wrote about his experiences in 38 Wing in his book “The Wooden Sword” (1967). He comes across as an authoritative, intelligent, urbane, witty and credible witness. However, one of his statements in the book is potentially misleading, yet it has often been repeated, and it has become a key component in one of the sore points of the operation. While listing the many reasons why so many gliders ended up in the sea, he wrote:
“At least ten tug pilots had themselves released the ropes, and only one of these gliders reached land. In 38 Wing there was an unwritten law (and it was observed on this operation) that the rope was never released at the tug end, except in dire emergency.”
Without explicitly mentioning Americans, Wright is nevertheless explicitly claiming that it was American tug pilots, not British ones, who released the ropes. Wright also implies that these American releases were the cause of 90% of these gliders ending up in the sea. His statement has been taken to mean that American pilots who released their gliders were especially culpable, and that this was a major cause of the tragedy of drownings that befell so many glider troops. For most glider pilots and soldiers, many of whom could not swim, and whose lives depended on the pilots of their tug plane, being forcibly released in the wrong place, to land in the sea, probably did indeed seem an outrageously culpable act.
Map showing the planned release zone and glide paths for the glider landing zones south of Syracuse in Sicily in Operation Ladbroke.
At the heart of the issue is the fact that either the tug or the glider could unilaterally release the tow rope at their end, thus breaking the towing connection. This left the heavy rope either trailing behind the powerful tug, or hanging from the front of the engineless glider.
Also central to the Ladbroke story is the fact that the glider release point was set at 3,000 yards (nearly two miles) offshore, in order to keep the tugs safe from Italian anti-aircraft fire. This was done primarily because the Allies had a great shortage of transport aircraft for airborne troops, and they were all needed for airborne operations on the following days. The tugs may have been safe 3,000 yards out to sea, but for a glider the margin for error was slim, and those that were released much further out than this, or too low, had little or no chance of reaching land. Control of that margin for error was out of the glider pilots’ hands, as the tugs were responsible for navigation to the release point.
Statistics
The tugs were provided by both American and British squadrons. Gliders numbered 1 to 54a were towed by the 60th Troop Carrier Group (TCG) of the American 51st Troop Carrier Wing (TCW), while gliders 55 to 104 were towed by its 62nd TCG. The remaining gliders, 105 to 135, were towed by two British RAF squadrons, 295 and 296 of 38 Wing. There was considerable rivalry between the American and British contingents. All the troops in the gliders were British, as were the great majority of glider pilots, although some American volunteers flew as glider co-pilots.
Wright got his figure of ten gliders from the debriefings of the tug pilots conducted by 38 Wing, along with debriefings of glider pilots or, in their absence, their senior surviving passengers. The debriefings were conducted by 1st Airborne Division. Taking these together with other sources not used by Wright produces totals that are higher than Wright’s. Debriefing reports and personal accounts allow at least 22 apparently forcibly released gliders to be identified by number: 5, 17, 21, 22, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 45, 53, 53a towed by 60 TCG (total 15), and 56, 64, 68, 69, 71, 81, 96 towed by 62 TCG (total seven). A summary report produced by 60 TCG on 17 July says a total of 15 gliders (which agrees with the identifiable total) were released by the tugs in that group alone. The equivalent report by 62 TCG doesn’t mention releases by tug at all.
Of the 22 identifiable gliders, eight reached land (5, 26, 33, 37, 38, 45, 69, 81), leaving 14 in the sea. These 14 represent only about a fifth of all those gliders that landed in the sea. Clearly, being released by the tug did not of itself cause a glider to land in the sea, and most of the gliders that did land in the sea did so for reasons other than simply being unilaterally released by the tug.
Note that these figures do not include the cases where glider pilots released when their tug took violent evasive action they could not follow, or when they were ordered by the tug to release, even though they thought they shouldn’t. On the other hand, there were also some cases where glider pilots argued against releasing when ordered to by the tug (but only if their intercom was working, and many weren’t), and as a result they were not released by the tug, later releasing themselves.
Accounts
All of the identifiable releases by tug were made by American tug pilots, not RAF ones, which allowed Wright to make his comment about unwritten RAF rules being observed by RAF pilots. It seems nobody told the American pilots about the unwritten rule. In fact, quite the reverse. In an account written a few days after the operation, Flight Officer Michael Samek, an American volunteer co-pilot in Waco glider 99, recalled being told at a briefing that if the glider did not release when ordered to by the tug, it would be released by the tug. He was also told this could cause the rope to snap back and damage the flimsy canvas, plywood and pipe-work Waco glider. This happened to Waco glider 5, piloted by Staff Sergeant George Redway: “I reached out for the release lever but before I could manipulate it the rope came flying back, the heavy attachment at the tow-plane end smashing through the bottom of the cockpit of the glider.” Glider 5 did make land, but only by about ten feet.
More serious is what the 60 TCG report of 17 July says happened to glider 39: “[Tug] #39 cut when S/L [searchlight] on Maddelena peninsula flashed on a/c. [aircraft] rope cut back clipping port elevator – dove out of control, landed in water.” It is not known how reliable this account is, as it contradicts an earlier statement. It also implies a catastrophic descent, but at least one man seems to have survived, glider pilot Staff Sergeant John Ainsworth. According to his commendation for a Military Medal, he swam ashore, knifed two sentries, took a rifle and fought throughout the battle. However the commendation also mentions other survivors, and in what appears to be Ainsworth’s debriefing report, no mention is made of such a crash. An extensive investigation was later conducted into the gliders that ditched in the sea or burned, in order to find out what happened to the men reported missing, so that their families could stop agonising. The National Archives in Kew have investigative reports on nearly 60 Ladbroke gliders, but there is no sign of one for glider 39.
In Samek’s case, the threat of damage from a cable backlash, plus fear that hanging on would disrupt the element (an element was a formation of four gliders which were all meant to release together), was enough to make glider 99’s pilots release themselves when ordered to by the tug. Samek says they did this even though they could not see any landmarks indicating that they were at the correct release point. The whole element of four gliders ended up in the sea, by some accounts four or five miles offshore.
The US tug pilots certainly seem to have felt no shame in revealing that they had released their gliders. The debriefing record for the pilot in the C-47 towing Redway’s glider 5, said:
“He had notified the glider to cut loose twice; so he finally cut the glider loose at the last possible place at 22:12.”
Other records were similar:
“Pulled up after they saw that they were too far out. Went up then to 2000 feet and released glider while on the turn.”
“His glider would not release; so he cut it loose at 22:45.”
“They were not in communication with their glider and had had to cut him loose.”
The gliders from two of these tugs ended up in the sea: one landed half a mile from shore, while the other was one of several which
“landed in the water at distances from coast which made estimate of these distances impossible”.
At the time of the debriefing, when the tug pilots made these statements, it was believed that the percentage of accurate releases and successful glider landings was very high. The disastrous magnitude of the sea ditchings emerged only slowly. The tug pilots must have felt shock and guilt when they later learned what had really happened. They were, after all, only young men of a mainly citizen army, prone to enthusiasms, fears and hopes, just like the troops they transported.
Orders
Samek’s claim about being briefed that the tugs were under orders to release is backed up by documentary evidence. Lieutenant Colonel George Chatterton, commanding officer of the glider pilots, later cited a pre-invasion instruction: “In event of failure to release, tug will release glider on approaching coast running N.W. to S.E. from LZs”. This coastline was the Costa Bianca on the south-west side of the Maddalena Peninsula, and its line marked the furthest boundary of the release run.
Further, the Operation Instruction (OI) issued to 296 Squadron of 38 Wing (the RAF Albemarles) on 8 July stated: “Towropes will be dropped immediately after releasing gliders. If the glider pilot has not released when the end of the ‘release leg’ is reached, the tug pilot will release the cable.” The first sentence about dropping the ropes is identical to one in the Field Order (FO, the US equivalent of an OI) issued on 7 July by the American 51 TCW to the American tug pilots.
This is not surprising, as 38 Wing was under the command of the 51 TCW, and the RAF OI was apparently based on the US FO. However the second sentence is absent from the FO. This implies that the written requirement for tugs to release gliders was introduced by the RAF, even though it surely originated higher up the chain of command. Somewhat surprisingly, Wright himself, author of the comment about the unwritten rule, signed this OI.
When it comes to undermining Wright’s assertion in his book, however, it gets worse. A contemporary post-op report by 296 Squadron (British Albemarle tugs) admitted, without any sign of it being a problem:
“Gliders released mostly on the first run, others on the second or third runs on receiving the order by intercommunication or signal light from the tug, or were jettisoned by the tug pilot”.
The phrase slips into the list so innocuously that it bears repeating: “Gliders … were jettisoned by the tug pilot“. This directly contradicts Wright’s claim about the unwritten rule. It means that British tug pilots as well as American ones released gliders unilaterally. So either the rule did not exist at this stage of the war, or it was disregarded by British as well as American pilots.
Given the instructions in their orders, it could be argued that the tug pilots would have been more culpable if they had NOT released their charges when they thought they should. After all, they had been explicitly ordered to release them, a fact not mentioned by Wright in his comment. Nevertheless, with so many lives at stake, perhaps the tug pilots should have tried longer and harder to ensure the safety of their gliders, by getting to the right spot before releasing them. Some did, after going around for second, third or more passes. Unfortunately, some did not.
Your correspondent dropped behind the lines on the weekend of D-Day 2004 to send back an eyewitness despatch from the struggle to organise and celebrate the anniversary of the greatest airborne operation in history.
Last Post – last salute, last goodbye? A US airborne veteran pays his respects to lost comrades at a D Day memorial at Chef du Pont in Normandy in 2004. To his left, a new generation follows suit.
NORMANDY, 4-7 JUNE 2004. 60 years after the invasion of German occupied Europe by British, American, Canadian, Polish and French forces, hundreds of thousands of veterans, visitors and VIPs from these nations, as well as from liberated countries like Holland, reinvaded a heavily defended Normandy last weekend.
Officially, they came to commemorate and honour the sacrifice of those who fought and gave their lives so that we might be free today. Unofficially, they also came out of duty, out of curiosity, to search for memories, to find meaning, to play at being soldiers, to sell mementoes, to meet heroes, to catch at the hem of fading glory, or simply to party.
“It was something we had to do,” said a British officer on the windswept top deck of the ferry Normandie, as it followed in the ghostly wake of long-scrapped Allied assault ships and approached the mouth of the river Orne at Ouistreham, on the easternmost edge of the invasion zone.
The officer was referring to the crusade against Hitler. “The issues were clearer then,” he explained, alluding by contrast to ideologically messy conflicts like today’s “crusade against evil” in Iraq.
Below decks, actor and veteran Richard Todd was surrounded by colleagues and fans. Todd starred in Darryl F Zanuck’s star-studded 1962 D-Day epic, “The Longest Day”. He played Major John Howard, commander of the glider force that seized the bridge over the Orne canal, now known as Pegasus Bridge, an operation in which Todd himself fought.
Around him 80-year-old British veterans in berets and blazers loaded with medals gloried in their momentary celebrity status. They shook proffered hands, signed autographs, had their pictures taken with fans, or flirted cheekily with 50-year-old girls. The disparity with the normal treatment we accord our elderly was poignant.
Pegasus Bridge, Benouville
Near midnight on Friday at Benouville, the site of Pegasus Bridge, French volunteers were still frantically assembling and painting a replica Horsa glider for an inauguration ceremony the next day. With Prince Charles as guest of honour, security was tight, and the volunteers were under orders to leave promptly. Helicopters patrolling with searchlights and armed anti-terrorist troops on motorcycles ensured that they did not forget.
The barely finished replica of a Horsa glider at Benouville, waiting for Prince Charles and Jim Wallwork to ascend the stairs in the morning on the 6oth anniversary of D-Day, 6 June 2004.
It was at this time of night, on the night of 5– 6 June 1944, that Major Howard’s tiny force from the British 6 Airborne Division landed next to the bridge in Horsa gliders. Many years later, still indomitable, Howard led a tiny force of elderly residents against state nannyism in his old people’s home. Making a stand against being treated like a child during a government anti-salmonella drive, he protested: “If I was old enough then to face the risks of dropping behind enemy lines, then I’m old enough now to face the risks of eating a boiled egg.”
Howard’s mission in the short hours of darkness before D-Day was to take the Orne canal bridge by coup de main, and then hold it against German counter-attacks on the flanks of the beachhead. The assault was successful, and a cafe next to the bridge owned by M. and Mme. Gondree became the first house to be liberated on D-Day.
Six decades later, the party outside the Cafe Gondree went on until dawn. Groups of modern paratroopers, re-enactors, WW2 vehicle collectors and military fans sang raucous songs, including some from the wrong world war, like “Inky, Pinky, Parlez-Vous?” A young drunk shouted at passers-by approaching the bridge: “That’s right, you cross it, we took it.”
A veteran claimed to have talked to the piper of Lord Lovat’s commandos, the seaborne force which relieved Howard’s men on D-Day. He said the piper told him that he had not, as reported, played his bagpipes while the commandos marched onto the bridge under fire. A plaque on the wall of the cafe’s car park implies otherwise. The myths of D-Day are inescapably full of such misty-eyed Darryl F Zanuck moments.
Cafe Gondree beside Pegasus Bridge on the Orne Canal, 7 June 2004
On Sunday 6 June 2004, a cordon sanitaire descended on the bulk of the Norman coastline, from Sword Beach in the East, to “Bloody Omaha” in the West, to keep back the hordes of tourists and terrorists expected to logjam the roads. Bayeux and Arromanches themselves became doubly defended super-citadels within this zone, to protect visiting premiers like Bush and Chirac. Ironically, their relationship as allies is as frosty today as that between Roosevelt and De Gaulle was all those years ago.
St Mere Eglise
On the extreme western edge of the invasion zone the town of Sainte Mere Eglise was also locked down, and almost as hard to get into as 60 years before. It was around this town that US airborne troops landed to take the bridges over the Merderet river, in an operation whose goals exactly mirrored those of their British counterparts on the Orne to the East.
St Mere Eglise, 2004 – a security team waits at dawn for the D Day anniversary invasion
In honour of another (real-life) Darryl F Zanuck moment, the full-size effigy of a paratrooper, whose parachute caught that night on the spire of the church, hung in his harness above the vast sound system in the town square.
Every thronging street was wreathed with smoke, not from fires started by high explosives, but from barbecues every 100 paces. Consumed with armfuls of fresh baguettes the size of bazookas, more Merguez and Toulouse sausages were fired on grills this weekend than similarly sized .50 calibre rounds were fired that midnight long ago.
In perfect summer weather, the kind that people remember for decades, 50,000 visitors yomped like paratroopers the hot two miles from the town to the drop zones, to watch 600 soldiers parachute from wave after wave of transport aircraft, some of them jet-powered giants shaped like Thunderbird 2. Then the crowds yomped back again for hours of music in the square, fireworks, and yet more sausages.
Red, white and blue – a French aerobatics team crayons the national colours of the Allied countries onto the sky in memory of D Day
After two exhausting and dehydrating days, the veterans, some of whom had been on the go since the end of May, were wilting, as were the visitors and French officials. There was another official ceremony on Sunday evening at the site of Sainte Mere Eglise’s Cemetery Number One (there were so many dead then that the temporary graveyards needed numbering). Immediately recognisable by their white hot-dog vendor look-alike caps, it was obvious that embarrassingly few US veterans occupied the seats reserved for them.
The wife of the commander of a modern parachute unit consoled a veteran whose own wife was too afflicted by arthritis to come: “There’ll be another. There sure is enough of them to go round, these ceremonies.” With unintended irony, passing in the street, a member of one official choir called out to a member of another: “Is this your last ceremony?”
Part of a mass parachute drop near St Mere Eglise, 60th anniversary of D Day, June 2004
Too many ceremonies, too few veterans. An elegiac sense of finality and loss pervaded all the exhibitions, junketings, memorial services and wreath layings. Everybody, especially the old soldiers themselves, knew that there may be hardly any veterans still present at the next decennial.
Despite the overload of heat, well-meant gratitude, parties, ceremonies, services and sausages, there was one emotion, however unbearable, whose surfeit was borne by all regardless: sorrow. Although evident everywhere, this common humanity shone brightest, not in the official, mass events, but in small, intimate memorial ceremonies shared by veterans and French locals. Many were held at the dozens of crossless calvaries that dot the villages, water meadows and hedge-lined lanes of the Cotentin bocage.
Chef du Pont
Private Bill Tucker jumped that distant night with the 505 Regiment of the US 82Airborne Division. On Saturday morning he witnessed the unveiling of a new stone near Fresville which marked the spot where seven of his fellow paratroopers fell to a single machine gun burst. “After all these years, it’s good that it’s closed out, “ he said. “Now we won’t need to lay roses every year just to mark the place. Now other people can remember for us.”
Corporal Harry Hudec, attending a ceremony by the bridge at Chef du Pont, jumped with the 508. Although surrounded by veterans and their wives, he seemed alone, as if somewhere far away. He dried his eyes constantly during the long wait for the ceremony to begin. Still a great bear of a man, although bowed at 82, he approached the impossibly young officers of the colour party of the honour guard of the modern 508th, to exchange a few comforting words of bluff and masculine banter, his voice gruff with age.
He sat restlessly amongst the places of honour again, again with his handkerchief in his hand, dabbing repeatedly, remembering the lost, never to be refound camaraderie of the young men with whom he faced death, who found death in this place.
Apparently readier to jump into flak-filled darkness than endure this haunted waiting any longer, he finally called out, as perhaps he did that fear-filled night so long ago, “Come on, let’s go, let’s get this thing done!” In so doing, he spoke the words that a whole, now passing generation did, when they were young.
Although events continued on Monday, all over Normandy the red, white and blue flowers of the wreaths, as yet unwilted, lay unremarked at the foot of wayside memorial stones deep in the empty countryside. There was utter stillness in the great heat. Finches sang, the elder flower and the rambling rose reclaimed the hedgerows.
German General Kurt Student’s June 1943 report reproduced in full.
One month before Operation Ladbroke, the opening glider assault in Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, the leader of Germany’s airborne forces produced an intelligence report. It predicted with startling accuracy how the Allies would use their glider and parachute units.
General Kurt Student was one of Hitler’s most capable commanders, and was in charge of all German airborne forces. It was Student who oversaw the brilliantly successful use of airborne troops at fort Eben-Emael during the blitzkrieg attack on France and the Low Countries in May 1940. He also masterminded the successful capture of Crete in May 1941 by airborne troops alone, despite heavy resistance from the British defenders. He was a thoroughly experienced master of the airborne art (on the debit side, he was held responsible for the first wave of German reprisals against civilians in Crete, and was found guilty after the war of executing Allied POWs on the island).
In spring and early summer 1943, Major General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, former CO of the British 1st Airborne Division and a founding figure for Britain’s airborne forces, was working in Algiers with General Eisenhower’s planners, advising on the airborne aspects of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily. Among Browning’s key senior staff was Lieutenant Colonel A G Walch, who later flew into Sicily alongside the glider assault troops, ostensibly as an observer, but ending up taking charge of the surrounded British defenders at the Ponte Grande bridge.
On 18 June 1943, only three weeks before the invasion, Walch signed a document on behalf of Browning, and circulated it to Allied senior officers in Algiers, and especially to the British and American airborne divisions destined for Sicily. The document was an intelligence report by Student outlining what he saw as the Allies’ probable use of airborne forces in Sicily. Clearly the German assessment was known to the Allies at the highest level. If, however, they were concerned by it, it was too late to undo many weeks of planning at such short notice.
Predictions and Plans Compared
General Student’s report is an astonishing document, as it is accurate in almost every respect. In some ways, this vindicates the Allied plan, as even the enemy came to the same conclusions as General Montgomery, commanding officer of the British 8th Army which had the task of taking south-east Sicily.
In other ways, the report highlights the great risks of Operation Ladbroke, the British glider landings on the first night of the invasion, which were designed to facilitate the capture of the vital port city of Syracuse. Student’s opinions differed from the Operation Ladbroke plans in several ways.
Student did not mention the landing zones chosen by the British as suitable for airborne landings (the main LZs were in fact crisscrossed by lines of trees and thick stone walls).
He thought at least a half moon was needed for a night glider landing (a quarter moon was chosen by the British, as a compromise with the needs of the Royal Navy).
He thought glider landings at night would require a flare path (an idea at first rejected by Allied planners as prejudicial to surprise, but then quickly endorsed as a result of Operation Ladbroke’s scattered crashes).
All three choices (of LZs, quarter moonlight, no landing aids) may have given the British tactical surprise, due to being out of line with Student’s expectations. If they did, however, then they did so only at a great cost in lost and damaged gliders.
Dated exactly one month before the invasion, Student’s report is such an extraordinary document that it is reproduced in full below.
Student’s knowledge of the type and approximate number of gliders and tugs in North Africa implies that he had regular updates from local spies near the Allied air bases. His presumption, however, that the Allies would at least have added self-sealing tanks to the C-47 was, sadly for their crews and the troops in them, unfounded.
Student’s opinion on why airborne troops should not be used to soften beach defences from the rear is almost exactly what Browning said his opinion on the subject was in April / May 1943. By the time Browning said this in a speech in August , of course, he had already seen Student’s report.
Student was mistaken in some points of detail, as opposed to principle, simply because he did not know, for example, that the Allies did in fact have dummy parachutists and that Sicilian radar would be jammed and confused by aircraft as opposed to airborne.
His mention of the bridge over the River Simeto (the Primosole bridge) was prescient, if obvious – it was precisely the primary target for Operation Marston (aka Operation Fustian), the British 1st Parachute Brigade drop designed to hold open the road to Catania. His focus on the Primosole bridge may have profoundly affected the outcome of 8th Army’s progress, as the day before the British paras dropped, Student’s own paras dropped into the area to prevent them. The end result was that 8th Army got stuck south of Catania for many days, and in the end was beaten to Messina by the US Army under Patton, even though the Americans had gone round the long way via Palermo.
The sole recommendation that Student made in his report was that the landward defences of the Italian ports should be overhauled and adapted to defeat airborne attempts to attack the ports from the rear, which was of course exactly what Operation Ladbroke was designed to do (Ladbroke was the codename for the port of Syracuse). By the time Student made this suggestion, however, it was too late. There was less than a month until the invasion, and the Italians in Sicily lacked almost everything necessary to make these changes.
The Report
The full text of General Student’s report, as translated by Allied intelligence staff:
The Horsa glider coup-de-main landings in Sicily and Normandy are umbilically linked. The one gave birth to the other. Glider pilot Jim Wallwork, justly remembered for his extraordinary feat at Pegasus Bridge, was also present in Sicily, although with somewhat different results.
The original Pegasus Bridge preserved at Benouville, photographed only moments before the exact anniversary of the assault. The bridge was glider pilot Jim Wallwork’s D Day objective.
The time: two hours before midnight, the 5th of June, 2004, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The place: Benouville, a hamlet on the river Orne, in Normandy, France. Outside the Cafe Gondree, next to the bridge, a packed crowd of revellers is drunkenly singing old war songs such as ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. Nearby, French technical students are frantically putting the final touches to a full-size replica of a glider. It bears the markings of one of three gliders full of troops that were sent here to seize this bridge during the opening moments of D-Day. French motorcycle police with machine guns are trying to get the students to go home. For tomorrow Prince Charles is coming here to meet Jim Wallwork, the pilot of that glider, and the police want no loose ends. Normandy is being locked down tighter than it was on D-Day itself, in anticipation of a mass invasion by tourists and terrorists. Before he shuts the gate behind the last volunteer, the students’ supervisor checks both ways for patrolling policemen, and then kindly lets me in to take a photograph:
Barely-ready replica Horsa at Benouville. The steps are for the ascent of Jim Wallwork and Prince Charles the next day. Horsas like this were also used in Operation Ladbroke.
Now wind back the clock 60 years, to just after midnight, the 6th of June, 1944. Six miles from its target, Jim Wallwork’s glider bucks as he releases the tow cable. As the roar of the tug plane’s engines fade into the distance, the 30 heavily armed men sitting behind him fall silent. Using only a stopwatch and compass, ignoring the moonlit landscape below, he flies by the numbers. The river shines like a mirror in the darkness. Making a last turn, he suddenly sees the field right in front of him. He’s coming in too fast. A drag chute snaps open for two seconds, then it’s gone. The glider tears along the ground, bouncing, smashing, sparks flying from barbed wire entanglements. The nose ploughs into the end of the field and the cockpit disintegrates. Wallwork is thrown through the air. He passes out.
Wind back the clock again, this time by 11 months, to July 1943. The place: Syracuse, Sicily. The Allied invasion of Italy begins with Operation Ladbroke, a night glider drop to capture a vital bridge near that ancient town. Wallwork’s tug plane is hopelessly lost. It has been towing his glider up and down the coast of Sicily now for what seems like hours. Finally it casts him off. He lands 56 miles from the bridge. He and his men start walking.
The landings are a disaster. Only one glider lands intact near the bridge. There is only one stills photograph and a little cine footage of Operation Ladbroke gliders among all the rolls of film from Sicily now in the Imperial War Museum, and they are of this lone glider. Is this because this glider is the sole spectacular success, and official war photographers are not meant to commemorate what might look like failure?
Of the other gliders, over half land in the sea, and many soldiers drown. Others gliders disintegrate against cliff faces or stone walls, others blow up on landing. One reputedly assaulted the wrong Mediterranean island, Malta. Back in Sicily, only about 10% of the force, a dozen or so gliders, land on or vaguely in the vicinity of their landing zones south of the bridge. The surviving men capture it and hold the bridge, for some 16 hours, before it’s recaptured by Italian forces. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister at the time and staunch proponent of the invasion of Sicily, later called it “a forlorn feat of arms”.
An analysis of the operation was conducted afterwards, and many lessons learned. Not enough lessons perhaps, because nearly a year later, on D-Day in France, many gliders also went wildly astray in the darkness. Not Jim Wallwork’s, however, despite, or perhaps precisely because he had missed his target in Sicily by 56 miles.
Now wind the clock forwards those 11 months, back to that midnight where we left Jim Wallwork lying unconscious in a French field. He has landed his glider exactly where he was supposed to, just yards from the bridge in Benouville. His passengers storm out of the glider and seize the bridge. Here is the scene. This impressive piece of precision parking will be later described by an Air Chief Marshal as “the greatest feat of flying of the Second World War”.
For the final time, let’s wind that clock – this time forwards 60 years, back to where our story began, on the anniversary of D-Day in 2004. In the great heat of a perfect June day, Prince Charles and Jim Wallwork swelter in the cockpit of the replica glider. As they emerge, journalists bombard them with questions. Wallwork is reticent and plays down his role. Was it the greatest feat of flying? No, he says – his crash-landing simply “took out the barbed wire so the fellows dashing out wouldn’t tear their trousers.” He seems reluctant to say more. After 60 years of telling, this story ends here.
Read a fuller account of the 2004 60th anniversary of D-Day
celebrations here.
