Last Stand

The last sunset of Fascism was falling on Palermo, the capital and largest city of Sicily, and still the Americans had not arrived. Major General Giuseppe Molinero and his suite waited in their car, peering down a road.

At dusk the first patrols of the Seventh Army appeared. General Molinero tried to surrender to them. They declined the honor. At 7:24 a car appeared with a U.S. corps commander. Diffidently, without pride, General Molinero approached the car and spoke in Italian. An interpreter translated: General Molinero and his troops did not want to fight. But there was a difficulty. Within the city, in the royal palace, was one General Mario Arisio, an unpredictable fellow who also commanded troops. For this Arisio, General Molinero could not speak.

The corps commander borrowed a pillowcase from an Italian householder, had it fastened to the radio mast of his car and drove into the city. In the windless evening the pillowcase hung limp and inconspicuous. An Italian fisherman along the way had a white sheet on a pole. The U.S. general borrowed the sheet for a flag of truce, and drove on through the streets, pocked here & there by bomb marks. At the palace there was no sign of General Arisio. Palermo's chief of police quickly found him. General Arisio as quickly made his position clear: he would accept any terms of surrender.

In the early light of July 23 the U.S. flag rose over Palermo and its 400,000 pliant civilians (see p. 28). "The greatest blitz in history," exuberant General George S. Patton Jr., Commander of the Seventh Army, called the march on the city.

The Collapse. The campaign in western Sicily was all but over. Other ports fell: Marsala and Trapani, naval bases where there was no Italian Navy and no fight on land; Termini, Imerese and Cefalu, east of Palermo on the upper coastal route to Messina and Italy. In twelve days the Seventh Army had fought for its beachheads in southwestern Sicily, fought inland past Barrafranca (see p. 34}, fought for Caltanissetta and (with the Canadians) for Enna in central Sicily. After that, the Italian Army in western Sicily simply quit fighting. Two divisions, the 206th Coastal and 4th Livorno, had shown some spirit. Others, including the 26th and the 28th Infantry Divisions, fought little or not at all. Sicilian militia and thousands of regular soldiers quit the ranks, melted back into their fields and their towns. The British took General Giulio Cesare Gotti Porcinari, and the soldiers said:

"We have taken Julius Caesar."

The Americans had taken, by week's end, 50,000 Italians, and the prisoner traffic on the roads was a military problem.

The Etna Line. On the remaining Axis forces in Sicily an Allied gate was closing. The Axis forces still fighting were mostly German, now facing the possibility that Italy itself might desert them in their rear. They were in the northeast, facing the Canadians and British of General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery's Eighth Army. But the Germans were not unmindful of the Americans in the west and in central Sicily. Unopposed, the Seventh could close in on Messina behind the Germans, shutting their only way out. This week Allied headquarters reported that the Germans had flung a line from Catania and volcanic Mt. Etna in the east to the northeastern coast, between the Seventh and Messina.

The Axis anchor of this line was on the plain of Catania, some three miles south of that stoutly defended port. There, for ten days, Germans of the agile Hermann Goering (armored) Division had held the British, waging battles which were still scantily reported in the U.S. press last week. One explanation of this temporary German success probably lay in an Allied communique of July 16: "The speed of the advance is very satisfactory, but transport and supporting weapons are of necessity limited during the present stages."

Just west of the hard-fighting Britons were the Canadians under 40-year-old Major General Guy Simonds, youngest commander of his rank in the Canadian Army. Lieut. General A. G. L. McNaughton, commander of all Canadian forces, fixed upon keen, slender Guy Simonds two years ago as the coming man of the Canadian Army. This week Guy Simonds and his men, unopposed in the first days of the invasion, apparently were up against the remnants of the Germans' 15th Armored Division, which had retreated across Sicily and joined the Goerings. The 29th (motorized) division, wiped out at Stalingrad and later recreated, backstopped both.

Both in retreat and in their stand near Catania, the Germans already had shown the signs of defeat. Prisoners complained that they were short of tanks, that what tanks they had left were short of fuel. In demolition the Germans had been as skilful as ever. But they were even short of land mines, old standbys of the Wehrmacht in retreat. At this season the rivers were dry, and the Allies had only to march around the ruined bridges. The Germans grew weaker & weaker in the air, until finally Allied soldiers on the ground seldom looked up when they heard a plane. What air support the Germans could muster had to come from the incessantly bombed airdromes of southern Italy.

At week's end General Montgomery met reporters within sight of Mt. Etna. "Well, gentlemen," he said, "this is the first time I ever fought around a volcano." Monty also said: "I am very pleased with the way things are going."

The Germans in eastern Sicily could stage a rear-guard action, covering a retreat of their main forces. Or they could stand. Either choice would delay the Allies. Neither could save Sicily and the nearest approach to the Italian mainland.

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