Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #General, #Psychology, #Europe, #History, #Great Britain, #20th Century, #Political Freedom & Security, #Intelligence, #Political Freedom & Security - Intelligence, #Political Science, #Espionage, #Modern, #World War, #1939-1945, #Military, #Italy, #Naval, #World War II, #Secret service, #Sicily (Italy), #Deception, #Military - World War II, #War, #History - Military, #Military - Naval, #Military - 20th century, #World War; 1939-1945, #Deception - Spain - Atlantic Coast - History - 20th century, #Naval History - World War II, #Ewen, #Military - Intelligence, #World War; 1939-1945 - Secret service - Great Britain, #Sicily (Italy) - History; Military - 20th century, #1939-1945 - Secret service - Great Britain, #Atlantic Coast (Spain), #1939-1945 - Spain - Atlantic Coast, #1939-1945 - Campaigns - Italy - Sicily, #Intelligence Operations, #Deception - Great Britain - History - 20th century, #Atlantic Coast (Spain) - History, #Montagu, #Atlantic Coast (Spain) - History; Military - 20th century, #Sicily (Italy) - History, #World War; 1939-1945 - Campaigns - Italy - Sicily, #Operation Mincemeat, #Montagu; Ewen, #World War; 1939-1945 - Spain - Atlantic Coast
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (48 page)
A still from the 1956 film
The Man Who Never Was:
Ewen Montagu, right, plays an air vice marshal; the American actor Clifton Webb, left, plays Montagu.
Then, out of the gloom, came “a flicker of light from
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the leading destroyer of the mighty invasion fleet.” Moments later the ships took on form, as “dark shapes emerged slowly
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from the shadows.” Forgetting the shells dropping around him, Jewell thought he had never seen anything so lovely. “The English language needs a new descriptive
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noun to replace the hackneyed word armada,” he wrote. “As far as my night glasses would carry, I saw hundreds of ships following in orderly fashion.” The destroyer searchlights now picked out the gun emplacements on shore, “like footlights on a stage,”
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and opened fire. “Shells whistled high overhead.”
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Enemy planes screamed over, dropping flares to aid the onshore gunners.
Out at sea, Derrick Leverton admired the flak pouring into the sky “with different coloured tracer”
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and the shimmering light in the sky as the dry wheat fields above the beaches ignited. It was horribly beautiful. “With flares, searchlights and blazing fires,
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plus the vivid chromatic effects of bomb bursts and shell explosions, all of Sicily so far as the eye could reach was like nothing in the world so much as a huge pyrotechnical show.” The first destroyer passed the
Seraph
, her American crew “cheering the stubborn little submarine.”
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Moments later, a small landing craft approached with an American naval captain standing in the stern. Above the noise, he shouted: “Ahoy Seraph.
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The Admiral has sent me over to thank you for a great job of work.” Jewell gave what he later admitted was “a slightly astonished salute.”
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But the captain had not finished his peroration. “You know those boys
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who landed are going to remember for a long time how you guided ’em in.”
This was the moment for the
Seraph
to “slide warily back into the protective darkness.”
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Jewell took a last look back at the shore, where “tiny, darting flashes marked the progress
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of the assault force as the tommy-guns blazed a path through the defenders.” Bill Darby’s U.S. Army Rangers had hit the beach at Gela. Jewell “hoped the friendly, ever-joking colonel
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would do nothing foolhardy.”
Leading from the front, since he knew no other place to lead from, Bill Darby stormed up the beach like a man possessed, which he was, through the defenses, and straight on to the town of Gela, much of which had already been demolished by the naval guns. Italian troops of the Livorno Division attempted to make a stand at the cathedral and were swiftly overwhelmed by the Rangers. Darby personally held off an Italian counterattack by light Renault tanks, armed only with a .30-caliber machine gun mounted on his jeep. Realizing that something more substantial was needed, he ran back to the beach, obtained a 37 mm antitank gun, opened its ammunition box with an ax, and then, with the help of a captain, used it to blow up another Italian tank as it bore down on his command post. For good measure, he popped a grenade on the tank hatch, and its terrified Italian crew immediately surrendered. Some twelve hours into the invasion, Darby took a rolled-up American flag from his backpack and nailed it to the door of the Fascist Party headquarters in Gela’s main square. After the battle of Gela, Patton awarded Darby the Distinguished Service Cross and a promotion to full colonel. He accepted the medal and turned down the promotion, again. “Darby is really a great soldier,”
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marveled Patton.
To the east, Major Derrick Leverton was taking the invasion at a more leisurely pace. Having “wished my chaps good luck
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… all perfectly normal and matter-of-fact,” the undertaker waited on deck to be called to the landing craft. “As there was still a bit of time in hand,
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I went to sleep.” Leverton holds the distinction of being the only man to doze off in the middle of the biggest seaborne invasion man had yet staged. There was, he recalled, “quite a bit of banging about
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going on in the background,” but Derrick had no problem dropping off. As acts of heroism go, this very nearly compares to the exploits of Colonel Darby.
“It was getting close to dawn,
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and the hills could just be seen in silhouette” when Leverton clambered into the landing craft. In a few minutes he was ashore, after wading through the wreckage of gliders that had made “slightly premature landings.”
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Two dead paratroopers lay on the beach. Leverton was the last man to be upset by the sight of dead bodies. “The first thing I was conscious
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of,” he said later, “was the delicious smell of crushed thyme.” He and his men headed to the spot chosen for the gun emplacement, straight through a minefield. “Occasional mines went off,
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making a hell of a row and a lot of black smoke.” While his guns were unloaded, Leverton decided it was time for a cup of tea. His rations, he was delighted to find, contained “tea-sugar-and-milk powder,”
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which could be brewed simply by adding hot water. “Most nourishing, appetising and intelligent,”
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thought Drick. Then he was dive-bombed.
This, he told his mother in a letter, “added zest to the party.”
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“As the bombs came down,
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I hopped down beside a stone wall. A lot of dust and stuff flew about, and when I got up I found a bit of stone as big as a football had been blown out of the wall a few feet from my head.” Only an incurable optimist like Leverton could see the bright side of being bombed: “Another bomb fell in the sea
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and splashed us with nice cool water.” In case of further attacks, the undertaker instructed his men to dig “little graves about three feet deep
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which were most comfortable.” The guns had still not been unloaded, so Leverton tucked himself up in his foxhole and went back to sleep. Unlike his nourishing nap on the boat, this sleep was less restful. “I had rather an awful sort of dream
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of dive bombing and so forth and I woke up with a glorious sort of feeling that it was only a dream, when I realised it wasn’t a dream and the blighters were just above me in their dive.” The bombs caused only minor damage, although, as he wrote to his parents, “the concussion in my grave
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jarred a bit.”
By nightfall, the guns were assembled and in action. To Leverton’s satisfaction, one dive-bomber was shot down on the first day. Over the next six weeks, eleven more kills would follow, “plus quite a lot of ‘possibles’
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and ‘damaged.’” Leverton was happy. “Our chaps are very bucked at knowing we were the first battery to go into action in Europe since Dunkirk.”
It was hot on the beach, and organizing the guns in long drill slacks and gaiters was sweaty work. “I didn’t feel I was suitably dressed
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for the job,” wrote Major Leverton. “I therefore designed myself
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a utility invasion suit, consisting of a thin shirt, my blue Jantzen swimming shorts, a pair of blue gym shoes and a tin hat. An excellent and highly recommended costume.”
And so, as the bombs fell around him, this heroic British undertaker sat in his own grave, wearing his swimming trunks and a helmet, drinking a nice cup of tea.
M
USSOLINI WAS WOKEN
by an army colonel at six in the morning to be told that the invasion of Sicily was under way. Il Duce was bullish: “Throw them back into the sea,
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or at least nail them to the shore.” He had been right all along: Sicily was the obvious target. “I’m convinced our men will resist,
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and besides the Germans are sending reinforcements,” he said. “We must be confident.”
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Never was confidence more misplaced.
By the end of the day, more than one hundred thousand Allied troops were ashore, with ten thousand vehicles. The Italian defenders surrendered in large numbers, often simply stripping off their uniforms and walking away or running. Sicilian cheers, not bullets, greeted the invaders in many places. The British Eighth Army had expected some ten thousand casualties in the first week of the invasion; just one-seventh of that number were killed or wounded. The navy had anticipated the loss of up to three hundred ships in the first two days; barely a dozen were sunk.
The butcher’s bill would be far smaller than Montgomery had feared, yet the invasion was still a bloody and chaotic affair. The airborne landings proved horrifically costly. Of the 147 gliders that set off from Tunisia, nearly half crashed in the sea, forced off course by strong winds and enemy flak. Just twelve landed in their assigned zones. The British held the bridge at Ponte Grande for seven hours, until the dwindling force of paratroopers ran out of ammunition and was forced to surrender. To the west, some three thousand paratroopers of the Eighty-second Airborne Division were supposed to land near Gela but ended up scattered by the storm across southeast Sicily, some as much as sixty miles off target. More than one in ten died in the first three days of fighting. Randall Harris, a sergeant in the Rangers, was one of the first onto the beach: he turned to see his company commander’s chest opened up, as if on a dissection table, by a mine. “I could see his heart beating.
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He turned to me and said ‘I’ve had it, Harry,’ then collapsed and died.” Aircraft carrying a second wave of paratroopers were shot to ribbons by “friendly fire” from the ground, resulting in the loss of twenty-three planes. “Stop, you bastards,
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stop!” screamed war correspondent Jack Belden as the gunners opened fire on what they assumed were enemy planes. At least four American paratroopers, mistaken for Germans, were shot dead on landing.
But amid the fratricidal confusion, deception and surprise continued to provide a vital protective armor.
At eleven o’clock the previous evening, André Latham, Agent Gilbert, had sent a wireless message to his German handlers: “Most important. Have learned
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from reliable source that large force now on its way to Sicily. Invasion may be expected hourly.” He was only telling the defenders what they already knew, for the first major alert had reached Italian coastal units several hours before Jewell dropped his homing buoy. By then, it was far too late for the defenders to make adequate preparations, and the bombing of the Sicilian telephone network ensured that many units remained unaware of the attack until it was well under way. Some went to bed, assuming the enemy would not be so rash as to attack in the middle of a storm. The Italian commander in Sicily was fully expecting an attack—indeed, the Italian intelligence services were never as taken in by the deception as their German counterparts—yet owing in part to Operation Derrick, the secondary deception, the assault was expected in the west, not the south.
As predicted, the response of the German divisions, stationed inland, was more vigorous. But by the time the Germans counter-attacked on Sunday, July 11, crucial hours had been lost and the Allied beachhead was firmly in place. Spitfires attacked the Luftwaffe’s Sicilian headquarters, disorienting what remained of German air defenses at the crucial moment. Field Marshal Kesselring had sent the Fifteenth Panzer Division to intercept the expected invasion in the west of the island, leaving the Hermann Göring Panzers to absorb the brunt of the assault. The Germans did nothing to hide their disgust as the Italian troops melted away and the coastal defenses collapsed like sand castles in a hurricane. A message to Berlin, sent on the day after the landings, reported the “complete failure of coastal defence”
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and noted sourly that “on enemy penetration many
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of the local police and civil authorities fled. In Syracuse, the enemy landings gave rise to plundering and rioting by the population, who accepted the landings with indifference.” So many Italians surrendered in the first two days that the long lines of prisoners impeded the advancing troops. Kesselring complained that “half-clothed Italian soldiers
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were careering around the countryside in stolen lorries.”