and British soldiers pushed back the Axis forces farther and farther until most were trapped in a northeast corner of the island. As July turned to August, Patton and Montgomery and their armies battled against determined German troops dug into the mountainous Sicilian terrain. Hitler instructed his forces to make contingency plans for withdrawal but to continue to fight fiercely against the Allied advance. On July 25, the day after Mussolini’s arrest, the first Italian troops began withdrawing from Sicily. By the time Hitler redirected his troops in the summer of 1943, a massive Allied invasion force was sailing to Sicily. There was only one problem: The recovered body–which was not a Royal Marine but actually a homeless man from Wales who had committed suicide–and its documents, were an elaborate British diversion called Operation Mincemeat.
THE ITALIAN MAN WHO WENT TO MALTA MOVIE FULL
Hitler studied the captured plans carefully, and, taking full advantage of their top-secret details, directed his troops and ships to reinforce the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, west of Italy, against an impending Allied invasion. Documents in an attaché case handcuffed to the officer’s wrist provided a goldmine of intelligence about the Allies’ secret plans, and German agents quickly sent the documents up the chain of command where they soon reached German leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).
In April 1943, a month before the Allied victory in North Africa, German agents recovered the body of a British Royal Marine pilot from the waters off a Spanish beach. The invasion was assisted by some subterfuge. The stepping stone to its mainland would be the island of Sicily, in part because the Allies could depend on fighter cover from air bases on British Malta, 60 miles south of Sicily and recently freed from a siege by Axis forces.ĭid you know? British Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu (1901-1985), mastermind of Operation Mincemeat, described the ingenious counterintelligence operation in his 1954 book "The Man Who Never Was." A 1957 film of the same name featured Montagu in a cameo as a British intelligence officer critical of the plan. With the huge Allied army and navy in the southern Mediterranean now freed for further action, British and American strategists faced two options: Transfer these forces north for the impending invasion of Europe from the English Channel, or remain in theater to strike at southern Italy, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) called “the soft underbelly of Europe.” At this crossroads, the Allies, after some dissension, decided to press north into Italy. When the Allies won the North African Campaign on May 13, 1943, a quarter-million German and Italian troops surrendered at Tunisia, on the north coast of Africa.
and Great Britain successfully drove German and Italian troops from Sicily and prepared to assault the Italian mainland. The Allies’ Italian Campaign began with the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. The Allies decided to move next against Italy, hoping an Allied invasion would remove that fascist regime from the war, secure the central Mediterranean and divert German divisions from the northwest coast of France where the Allies planned to attack in the near future. After defeating Italy and Germany in the North African Campaign (November 8, 1942-May 13, 1943) of World War II (1939-45), the United States and Great Britain, the leading Allied powers, looked ahead to the invasion of occupied Europe and the final defeat of Nazi Germany.
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