Operation Husky Read online

  Loyal Edmonton Private Sam Lenko jumped off an LCA ramp into nine feet of water carrying three hundred rounds of Bren gun ammunition, two days’ worth of rations, three grenades, his Lee-Enfield rifle, and a huge amount of bullets for it. He went right to the bottom, floundered to the surface, and would have drowned had a Royal Marine sergeant not dragged him to where a line had been strung from an LCI to the shore. Staggering onto the beach, Lenko saw an Italian soldier ahead. Shouldering his rifle, Lenko drew a bead. The Italian’s uniform was ragged and he wore no shoes. His rifle was a great long antique-looking thing. “He’s just a kid,” Lenko thought. “Shoot him, Sam,” a man next to him hissed. The boy’s eyes were wide with fright, the knuckles of his hands white. “Shoot him, Sam,” the man urged again. Lenko lowered his rifle. “Look, he ain’t even got any shoes for Christ sake. I can’t shoot him.” He waved an arm at the boy. “Vi!” Lenko shouted—which his study of an Italian handbook aboard ship had taught him meant “Go!” Taking the hint, the boy chucked his rifle aside and sprinted inland.18

  When the RCR’S ‘B’ Company landed, Captain Strome Galloway plunged into water up to his waist and waded ashore. One of his platoon commanders, Lieutenant Freddie Syms, was already there. “No mines, keep going,” he shouted to Galloway. The men trotted to a vineyard. “Here we stripped off our ‘Mae Wests’ and reorganized for our belated attack on the [Maucini] battery. BHQ [battalion headquarters] landed beside us, under a forest of aerials. I never saw so many wireless sets in my life,” Galloway later wrote.19

  Over in the Seaforth’s sector, Lieutenant Colonel Bert Hoffmeister had also landed with his battalion headquarters. It had been an inglorious moment. The ramp at the front of the craft jammed, but when Hoffmeister tried to climb over, his weight caused it to release. The battalion commander plunged headfirst into four feet of water “and came up spluttering.” After wading ashore, Hoffmeister realized he “hadn’t a clue” where they were. “I was standing up there trying to see something that looked familiar.” Only after Major Henry “Budge” Bell-Irving took a patrol forward for a short reconnaissance did Hoffmeister learn that the Seaforths had landed left of the PPCLI and were on the wrong section of Sugar Beach. The battalion’s two reserve companies and the headquarters support platoons were all landing around Hoffmeister. There was nothing he could do but start organizing his men to move west past the PPCLI and then to their objectives. The two assault companies were already doing precisely that, their commanders thinking along the same lines and recognizing that they had to get back into the right position before heading for the inland objectives. Hoffmeister’s biggest worry was that in pulling off this manoeuvre, the PPCLI and Seaforths would end up “shooting each other up.” Thankfully, there was little interference from the Italians, for “had we been under heavy fire and in the full confusion of our first battle it could have been a very costly and disastrous thing for 2nd Brigade.”20

  SOME OF THE Seaforths had arrived at the beach aboard an LCI. From its deck, Corporal Bob Hackett “could make out the figures of men running to and fro. Everything seems under control, and in our hands, with the exception of a stretch of beach to the right,” he later wrote in a letter to his family. “There we could see smoke screens, and could hear the firing of automatic weapons, so that we concluded close hand fighting had been encountered. Soon we touched down, and rubber boats we had brought with us for the purpose of ferrying [mortar] bombs to the shore proved useless on account of the big swell running. It was then decided to get the men off first by letting them wade in. The first batch to go in were . . . English Pioneers, and of the whole lot two could swim. As you jumped from the boat the water rose to your hips, but as you advanced toward the shore it became deeper, and with the swell behind you, and handicapped by equipment, it was all the sturdiest individual could do to make shore.” Hackett was among these stronger men. He and Company Sergeant Major Joe Duddle dumped their equipment. Driving a bayonet into the sand to serve as an anchor and attaching a rope to it, they then spooled the line back out to the LCI for those men who were not strong swimmers to hang onto and pull themselves shoreward.

  Hackett went out in the water to help however he could. The British pioneers—engineers who were to help with preparing the beach for heavy vehicle landings—were mostly Londoners who acted as if the only water they had ever seen before was in a bathtub. “It was a tough job as many panicked,” Hackett wrote, “and I am sure would never have made it had we not been there to help them. One poor fellow near me . . . went under a dozen times before I reached him. I grabbed him, pulling him to the rope, and at the same time he clutched frantically, dragging me under with him. Finally I had to knock him out and dragged him by the feet with his head under water to the shore. He was absolutely purple, so I administered artificial respiration until he came around. I was pleased I had gone to this trouble as his face revealed such gratitude. Finally, after two hours in the water I got cramps and had to give up. I went back on board, and the navy were marvelous. They wrapped me in blankets and gave me tea, which brought me around in nothing flat.”21

  Seaforth Sergeant Bill Worton credited the rope with saving his life. A member of the battalion mortar platoon, he went into the water carrying his regular equipment and a 3-inch mortar’s heavy base plate. Unable to swim a stroke, Worton would surely have drowned had he not flailed out and caught hold of the rope. Still clutching the base plate, the sergeant was able to drag himself ashore.22

  For the Seaforths, very little seemed to be going smoothly. Their transport vehicles, particularly those of the Bren carrier platoon, had been loaded on a ship called Alcinous and were being offloaded onto the deck of a Landing Craft, Mechanized. Private Angus Harris, a Bren carrier driver, watched his carrier rising in slings above the ship as he started down a scrambling net to board the LCM. Suddenly, “someone screamed a warning. My carrier dangled, one end down, from its sling. One crewman had been slow in casting off the sling and the roll of the ship had jerked it into the air like a fish on the line. The landing craft, rising and falling like giant swoops on the waves, was twenty feet away. The carrier, four tons of armour plate, and loaded with high explosive, swung out and then in with a crash against the ship’s side. I shot up the scrambling net like a cork out of a bottle and watched the proceedings from the safety of a higher deck. The crewmen winched up the carrier until it cleared the deck again, where it swung like a huge pendulum, brushing everything in its path in wild crashing sweeps.

  “For some moments the carrier dominated our part of the invasion. But finally the crew of the landing craft brought it around to the other side of the ship where there seemed to be more protection, and finally coerced the maverick down and subdued it. The other carrier and the crews, myself included, followed, and we put off for Sicily.”23

  Over in 3 CIB’S sector, the LCI carrying ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies and the battalion headquarters of the 48th Highlanders had repeatedly struck the sandbar while trying to get to the beach. Unable to find a route around it, the crew finally grounded the craft on the bar and left it to the infantry to get ashore on their own.24 “We were beyond cursing,” Lieutenant Bob Moncur later said. “We just stood there in a group and stared hopelessly at each other.” The beach lay about two hundred yards away and a swimmer sent to test the depth returned with news that, shoreward of the sandbar, the water was about nine feet deep and stayed beyond wading depth until just before the water-line. Company Sergeant Major Gordon Keeler and some men swam in with a rope in tow. They planned to use the same “rope trick” that had well served the Seaforths. ‘A’ Company’s Major Ken Whyte was the first out of the boat, loaded down with his gear and weapon, trying to simultaneously swim and pull himself along the rope one-handed. All he accomplished was a dislocated shoulder. The two men behind him nearly drowned, and all three were pulled back aboard the LCI.25 When the rope drifted on the current to foul in the props of two LCMS broken down near the beach, the venture was abandoned.

  Lieutenant
Colonel Ian Johnston had, meanwhile, swum in and was stalking up and down the beach looking for a way to rescue his battalion. Finally he noticed the DUKWS, which had landed the two RCR and one Hasty P assault companies, milling around in the surf with no apparent purpose. Johnston pressed them into service and soon DUKWS were ferrying the men ashore.26 Bailing out of their DUKW, the battalion’s pipers strode up to the top of the beach, skirling away in full spate.27

  AT 0645 HOURS, Major General Guy Simonds was confident the Canadians were solidly ashore and reported to xxx Corps commander Lieutenant General Oliver Leese that all the first objectives had been captured. The goal now was to land the rest of the division, expand the bridgehead, and, most importantly, seize Pachino airfield.28

  Shortly after 0700 hours, the brigade headquarters sections of 1 CIB and 2 CIB began the run in. Brigadier Howard Graham had divided his section between two LCAS so that he would lead one ashore and Robert Kingstone, his brigade major, the other. But as Graham’s LCA was being lowered, a heavy swell struck it, smashed the stern against the side of Glengyle, and damaged both propeller and engine. When the other LCA was safely lowered, the entire brigade headquarters descended the scramble nets and squeezed aboard.

  The young naval petty officer commanding the LCA turned to Graham. “Which direction do we take, sir?” He had been told to follow the first LCA to the beach. Hiding his consternation, Graham patted the anxious-looking youth on the shoulder and said, “Okay, Admiral, steer for the shore and when you see a water tower, as you should in a few minutes, just steer for it and we’ll all be happy. It’s at the edge of an airfield near Pachino and that’s where I’m bound for.” Sure enough, the water tower soon came into sight about three miles inland from the beach. Unable to navigate around the sandbar, the LCA grounded on it. A DUKW came alongside and everyone piled in. The amphibious truck quickly deposited the men on the beach, and Graham stepped on the sand of Sicily without getting his feet wet.29

  No vehicles had been landed in 3 CIB’S sector yet, and all those of the brigade headquarters had been lost anyway aboard the sunken ships. One of the brigade’s wireless sets was a heavy No. 22 that required three men to carry it in the absence of any vehicle. But Brigade Major Kingstone and a couple of men quickly solved the problem by commandeering a donkey and cart from a Sicilian farmer. When they mounted the wireless, the cart tipped back on its two wheels so far that the little donkey was lifted up off its feet. Only when a man on either side of the donkey leaned on the shafts to which it was tethered were its feet brought back on the ground and it could then go forward. With donkey and cart trailing behind, inexpertly driven by one of Graham’s men, the brigade headquarters moved along the beach until it reached its originally agreed rally point. Graham said they would stay there until the RCR silenced the Maucini battery, after which brigade headquarters would move to a nearby position.30

  While Graham and his team had been getting ashore, Brigadier Chris Vokes and his brigade headquarters had arrived on Sugar Beach aboard LCAS. The Edmontons had already landed and the beach was fully secure. When the ramp went down, Vokes turned and shouted, “Follow me, men.” The brigade’s intelligence officer, Captain Norman Pope, was unable to disguise a smile, but Vokes appeared not to notice. Vokes was carrying a riding crop and his revolver, having loaded Pope down with everything else. Pope “had his map. I had his binoculars, I had my own stuff... I was like a ruddy Christmas tree . . . I was carrying a big map board which I was hoping to keep records on of where units had got to as their reports came in. When I stepped off the ramp, we stepped . . . into about three-and-a-half feet of water and my knees buckled because the sand gave way underneath me and I went face flat forward into the water. Anyway, it was a beautiful sunny day, stinking hot.” Pope figured he would dry out in no time.31

  Bark West hummed with activity. At 0900, Landing Ship, Tank 321 pulled up 180 feet off Roger Beach’s Red sector and the first tanks from the Three Rivers Tank Regiment growled off the front ramp into six feet of water and clawed their way ashore. By 1015, ‘C’ Squadron had removed the waterproofing kit from its Shermans and reported being available for service.32

  Landing craft plied back and forth between the shore and transports. Teams of engineers equipped with bulldozers were carving a path through the dunes to enable vehicles to exit the beach. Engineers also blasted a gap in the sandbar off Sugar Amber to enable boat traffic to more easily come and go. Royal Canadian Army Service Corps personnel were also on the beach supervising the landing of equipment and establishing a vehicle concentration area for offloading supplies. Provost marshals, in their red caps, directed traffic and imposed order. Except for the exotic location, Bark West was taking on the appearance of an amphibious landing training beach in Britain.33

  Aboard Hilary, however, Simonds and his staff were anxious. Despite his confident message to xxx Corps that the first objectives had been taken, the divisional commander worried that the delay landing 1 CIB had thrown the operational plan badly behind schedule. Because divisional headquarters had lost all its vehicles, Simonds decided that for now the operations staff would remain on Hilary. Only he and a small group that could fit into a single Jeep would go ashore, equipped with a wireless set that could link through the more powerful communications equipment on Hilary to the brigade and battalion headquarters.34

  THE DIFFICULTIES 1ST Canadian Infantry Division faced in the landings were not unique. Elsewhere the Allies had encountered similar problems. On Eighth Army’s far right, 5th British Division of XIII Corps either was delayed in getting its brigades ashore or landed them in the wrong place. Still, by evening its 17th Brigade entered and secured the town of Siracusa. This was the primary objective for the corps to win on D-Day. At Avola, twenty miles to the south, 50th Division had been thrown into confusion by the storm, many of its troops being landed in scattered groups. Although the assault battalions sorted themselves out quickly enough and pushed through to most of their objectives, the follow-on forces and buildup “from the sea was unpunctual and confused: equipment and stores went astray or arrived in the wrong order; by nightfall only nine field-guns were in action,” the British official historian recorded.35

  The Canadian 80th and 81st Landing Craft, Mechanized flotillas were in the thick of this jumble, but Norm Bowen, a coxswain on one of the LCMS, considered it far more organized than any other amphibious operation he had been on. Dieppe had been bad; North Africa “a disaster.” Compared to those, “Sicily was a little more controlled.” But it was still a madhouse with landing craft jostling for position and narrowly avoiding collisions, the coxswains yelling and hollering at each other to make way. Out to sea, the warships were blasting away and shells screamed continuously overhead. It was always the same, Bowen thought. “The noise goes right through you until you are shaking right through to your inner core and, boy, sometimes you are on queer street for a couple days after.” Bowen was getting increasingly edgy and nervous, the product of having been in one too many amphibious operations. In addition to the big ones, such as Dieppe and North Africa, he had served in a dozen commando raids. So far, however, he was holding up fine on this job and the lack of opposition from the beach helped a lot.36

  Well to the left of the beach where Bowen’s LCM was operating, things had gone extremely well for 231st Brigade, landing as the right-flank unit of xxx Corps. The LCAS of the Canadian 55th and 61st flotillas were among those tasked with getting this brigade onto its beach. Pilots aboard motor launches had originally been assigned to guide the LCAS to their correct landing spots, but owing to the rough seas only one of these managed to marry up with the flotillas. One group of the 55th Flotilla finally “struck off on its own for the beaches.” A single LCA, commanded by Lieutenant H.E. Trenholme, Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve, headed for its beach with a team of engineers aboard who were to land after the assault troops signalled it was secure. When Trenholme pulled into the beach, however, he came under Italian fire and quickly backed away. “Believing they h
ad gone to the wrong beach, they struck off again, finally returning to this beach at 0452 when the breakwater, mined by the enemy, was blown up on their approach.”37 The 51st Highland Division, landing in the centre of the corps, had some difficulty locating the correct beaches and most of the brigades were slightly delayed in getting ashore. But the resistance from the Italians defending the beaches was so negligible that they were easily secured and the buildup was soon on schedule.

  Forty miles west of the Canadians, the 45th U.S. Division had landed as the right-hand formation of II Corps. Rough seas, sandbars, and rocks all conspired to create chaos. The 157th Combat Team lost twenty-seven men, drowned when landing craft broached. Left of this unit, the 180th Combat Team became completely disorganized. Problems kept piling up as the buildup proceeded through the day, but still the division managed to secure its beachhead and advance to Vittoria.

  Facing Gela, the 1st U.S. Division landed in the right place, at the right time, and met little resistance. By 0800 hours, the town was secure and the division was moving inland. But it soon faced some stiff counterattacks from the Livorno Division’s 33rd Regiment, which delayed progress. The fleet landing this division was also struck by several German air raids, which sank the U.S. destroyer Maddox and caused heavy loss of life. Strong surf conditions and sandbars off the beaches also delayed the landings of tanks, which put the division at a considerable disadvantage when two battle groups of Hermann Göring Division counterattacked it.

  More exposed to the storm than any other Allied division, 3rd U.S. Division off Licata had difficulty launching its assault craft, and landings were about ninety minutes behind schedule. Despite some initial stiff resistance, however, the division quickly secured the beach. By day’s end, the Americans were all in solid positions after achieving advances ranging between one to two miles inland. Each beachhead, however, was significantly separated from the others, so that the divisions were operating virtually as independent forces.38