South Yorkshire Times – Saturday 21 August 1943

Sicily and After

Sicily, now cleared of the last traces of Axis opposition, constitutes a useful but not an infallible precedent for the future conduct of the plans of the United Nations. As an exercise in amphibious invasion it succeeded beyond expectation. Command of the beaches was hardly disputed and more men and stores were got ashore in the first wave of assault than seems to have been hoped. This gave the enterprise a flying start and the island was ours in little over five weeks. At one time its seizure promised to be even quicker, but German tenacity and cunning use of topographical aids to defence slowed down the operation and in the end enabled the enemy to make some show of an ordered retreat.

The Nazis, of course, are claiming the whole affair as a triumph for their military tacticians, and have the audacity to suggest that they not only extricated their divisions more or less intact, but also inflicted disproportionate losses on our troops. This mendacious assessment nevertheless probably contains the grain of truth which Dr. Goebbels likes to have as the kernel for his most important misstatements. There was no collapse on the Tunisian scale and so, having managed to preserve a front until the eleventh hour, the Master Race made good use of small craft and the narrowness of the Straits of Messina and ferried a good number of their warriors over to the doubtful sanctuary of the mainland. But they are not out of the wood yet and may find that the Allies can still stretch out a long and predatory arm. British and American aircraft are already showing the routed Germans that this arm hovers menacingly over them. As Mr. Churchill has said, wars are not won by evacuations; those who escaped to fight another day have been defeated once and will be beaten again.

Whatever other blows are in the making, we may be sure that the lessons learned in Sicily will be applied to them. Landings will not always be so readily accomplished, but, given the air and sea superiority which we wielded against Sicily they will be forced with a fair degree of certainty. It has to be remembered, however, that all parts of Europe do not enjoy the same almost consistently good flying weather as the Mediterranean area in summer. Air cover is not therefore an altogether dependable attribute. While the Germans are compelled to learn to manage with diminishing support from their bedraggled Luftwaffe, our troops are becoming used to such cover and collaboration as the Luftwaffe never provided even in its palmy days. That and the fashion in which the Germans created an anti-aircraft umbrella over their three mile escape crossing remind us that highly developed as our combined operations technique is, there remain limitations.

The shortening lines of supply of a retreating enemy (a factor which contributed to Germany’s defeat in 1918) must also be remembered. Sicily is a bright augury for our cause, but we must not be dazzled by the brilliance of this early success. The big battles lie ahead.