The Passport Is a Gun

A British airman last week coasted high over the Messina Strait between Sicily and the Italian mainland on a mission of photoreconnaissance. The air was clear and still, visibility unlimited. Looking out, the pilot could see the length & breadth of Sicily and, on the other side, the full expanse of the Italian toe. Between the two, the narrow straits looked "so small you could jump across them--a blue ditch."

"In a great semicircle to the north and south," the airman told a New York Herald Tribune correspondent, "the sea was flat and empty, but below me things were happening. There were barges and landing craft fully loaded. Our photographs proved they were leaving Sicily and empty ones were hurrying back. . . .

All of them were acting like frightened minnows. . . . They twisted and turned like the little boats in a pleasure pool on a bank holiday. . . ."

That airman saw the beginning of the end, which was finally to come this Tuesday as the American armies swept into the escape port of Messina.

The Rearguard's Fight. The little craft were taking the main forces of the Germans to the mainland. Left in the brown, rocky hills and steep-sided valleys to the westward was only a rearguard: battalions whittled down to companies, companies reduced to platoon strength.

The rearguard of the Wehrmacht fought stubbornly and well, strongly entrenched with machine guns and 88-mm. guns, sowing its path of retreat with mines and demolition charges. But the rearguard could not hold; it could only delay--in the north, the center and the east--the steady pressure of the British and Americans toward Messina.

The strongpoint of the German rear guard was Randazzo, an ancient town built on the lava-strewn northern slopes of Mt. Etna in the most rugged countryside the Allied troops had yet encountered.

Randazzo was the last fort of the Etna Line, a vital center of communications for the Germans. They fought for it like tigers--500 to 600 of them, forcing Italian soldiers to fight with them. They held it for the better part of a week while Allied bombers and artillery reduced its houses to a heap of rubble. The battle for Randazzo was one of the bloodiest in the entire Sicilian campaign.

The troops which took Randazzo were veterans of Tunisia: the U.S. 9th Division (not heretofore reported in Sicily) and the British 78th Division. The Americans, who had been fighting their way up the highway from Troina (see p. 30), were first to enter the town. They found it deserted and aflame, racked by explosions.

The British, who had circled Etna from Catania, joined them soon afterward. From the twisting mountain roads they could see, far in the distance, the shimmering blue of the Messina Strait.

The Rearguard's End. The capture of Randazzo spelled the German rearguard's end. To north and east, along the coastal roads, they fought tenaciously against the U.S. and British forces knifing up the shorelines. But at week's end the remnants were fleeing. On the north coast a second amphibious flanking movement of the Americans cracked their line at Capo d'Orlando and opened up a downhill road to Messina. On the east shore the British pushed up past Riposto, past Taormina, to within artillery range of Italy itself. On neither front was any major contact made with German forces--the speed of the Allied advance was hindered only by mines and demolitions.

A steady bombardment from sea & air rained on the small boats ferrying the Germans from Messina to the mainland. While Allied light and heavy warships steamed into the straits to shell the skittering small craft, Allied aircraft bombed and strafed them from above. The Germans had massed hundreds of ack-ack guns at the straits, as well as heavy batteries of coast artillery--but there was little opposition to the Allies from the air.

The Germans were beaten in the Sicilian skies as decisively as they were beaten on the island's soil. Said Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, commander of the Northwest African Tactical Air Force: "[The Luftwaffe] has been knocked out of the skies so far as we are concerned." How completely the Allies dominated the seas was shown last week when a British task force steamed up to the Gulf of Naples, shelled naval installations there and returned without a scratch.

In so far as the Germans had fought a masterly delaying action in Sicily, possibly a major portion of their troops were salvaged. In the last phases of the battle, the German command did not collapse as in Tunisia; outnumbered though they were, the leaders used their dwindling force effectively, forcing the Allies to fight for every town. The German soldiers, too, although they must have realized for days that Sicily was lost--and apparently were beginning to realize that the war might be lost--put up a bitter last-ditch fight in every machine-gun nest.

But the Allied forces, too, had fought far better than in the Tunisian campaign, had reached a new peak of efficiency in their cooperation. The U.S. forces in particular showed, at Troina, at Randazzo and in their amphibious flanking movements on the northern coast, that they could take the best the Germans had to offer in the worst terrain they had yet seen, terrain in which their advantage in numbers hardly counted because large forces could not be brought into action.

In their advance last week the Allies captured German documents detailing orders to evacuating troops to take all the equipment they could carry with them. These orders said that to Italy, "the passport is a gun." Those words, for the Allies as well as the Germans, could stand as a motto of the Sicilian campaign.

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