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Категория: Английский язык
The Allies' greatest strategic advantage lay in the wide choice of alternative objectives and in the powers of distraction they enjoyed through their superior sea power. Hitler, while always having to guard against a cross-Channel invasion from England's
shores feared that the Anglo-American armies in North Africa might land anywhere on his southern front between Spain and Greece.
The Allies were preparing to throw some 478,000 men into the Sicily — 150,000 of them in the first three days of the invasion. Under the supreme command of Alexander Montgomery's British 8th Army and Patton's U.S. 7th Army, were to be landed; the British in the southeast of the island, the Americans — in the south. The Allies' air superiority in the Mediterranean theatre was so great by this time, that the Axis bombers had been withdrawn from Sicily in June to bases in north-central Italy.
On July 10, Allied seaborne troops landed on Sicily. The coastal defenses, manned largely by Sicilians unwilling to turn their homeland into a battlefield for the Germans' sake, collapsed rapidly enough. The British forces had cleared the whole southeastern part of the island in the first three days of the invasion, while the Americans took Palermo on July 22.
After the successive disasters sustained by the Axis in Africa, many of the Italian leaders were desperately anxious to make peace with the Allies. The invasion of Sicily, representing an immediate threat to the Italian mainland, prompted them to action. On the night of July 24—25 1943, when Mussolini revealed to the Fascist Grand Council that the Germans were thinking of evacuating the southern half of Italy, the majority of the council voted for a resolution against him, and he resigned his powers. On July 25 the king, Victor Emmanuel III, ordered the arrest of Mussolini and entrusted Marshal Pietro Badoglio with the formation of a new government. The new government entered into secret negotiations with the Allies, despite the presence of sizable German forces in Italy.
A few days after the fall of Mussolini, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in chief in Italy, decided that the Axis troops in Sicily must be evacuated; the local Italian commander thought so too. So, in the week ending on August 16, 1943, the German and Italian troops were safely withdrawn across the Strait of Messina to the mainland, and thus, the operation in Sicily was over with the take over of Messina.
The Allies sustained about 22,800 casualties in their conquest of Sicily. The Axis powers suffered about 165,000 casualties of whom 30,000 were Germans.
