Sicily 1943: the Faustian pact of the allies with the Mafia to defeat Mussolini and Hitler

A tourist guide from the 1930s advised never to go to Sicily in July and August. “Imagine how terrible it was to participate in the Allied invasion of the island in the summer of 1943, at 48 degrees and wearing a steel helmet. It must have been like having your head in a furnace “, he explains, putting himself in the shoes of the soldiers, the British historian James Holland, who interviewed survivors and visited battle scenes, where bunkers and remains of cannon batteries can still be explored at Capo Murro di Porco. Where it was the largest amphibious operation in history (surpassing the future Normandy landing), christened Husky, participated 160,000 British, American and Canadian soldiers, with 3,000 ships and 3,400 aircraft. It started on July 10 and ended on August 17. In just 38 days, the allies, after “a Faustian pact” with the Mafia (as you will detail below these lines), they conquered by land, sea and air a rocky and primitive island infested with mosquitoes, falling ill with malaria and under that scorching sun. They achieved their main objectives: “Overthrow fascism and leave Italy out of the fray. On July 25, just two weeks after the start of the campaign in Sicily, the dictator Mussolini was deposed and in August, Italy surrendered. They tightened the knot against Hitler and their increasingly weak Axis allies, “Holland says of an assault in which, on average, 237 Axis soldiers and 146 allies were killed daily.

After rehearsals like ‘The rise of Germany’ or ‘The allied counterattack’, the historian has returned to Barcelona to present the more than 800 pages of ‘Sicily 1943. The first assault on Fortress Europe’ (Attic of the Books), where he focuses on an episode of the Second World War that, despite its importance, “has been forgotten from the narrative of the war, there is no successful film about it, unlike, for example, with D-Day, and it has been overshadowed by what happened afterward. “

Luce Holland is wearing a green mask with the shield of the British tank regiment of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, to which he has dedicated his next book, ‘Brothers in arms’. With Generals Patton and Montgomery at the helm, he notes, “Husky meant the union between the United States and Great Britain to 50% in a campaign, showing the incredible speed with which the Americans began to lead the military career rearming from scratch in just three years and becoming leaders. ”

The operation in Sicily came after the battle of Tunis in North Africa, with the victory of the allies, who were able to use the troops and resources that were deployed there. “If they were successful, they would force the Germans to leave all of Italy and it would serve them to learn lessons for Normandy, for which they had to wait until 1944, on coordinating and executing an operation with air, land and naval forces”, explains Holland (1970 ), an exponent of the new generation of historians who seeks to relieve the established Max Hastings or Antony Beevor, as well as the presenter of documentary series such as ‘Nazi mega-structures’.

Always giving as much importance to military history as to logistics and human experience, he has dived in diaries of those who lived the events. In that Sicily of 1943, misery reigned among civilians and low morale, among Italian soldiers, after the defeat in Tunisia. Follow, for example, the story of naive ‘lieutenant’ Livio Messina, 21, who remembered the first dead he saw, a girl of about 18, naked in her bed, probably hit by shrapnel in a bombardment. “She looked pretty, but her skin was already pale and waxy.” “You can hardly find someone less trained than him to do what he had to do,” Holland thinks of the young man. It illustrates the poor training of the Italian troops. Emotionally, physically and militarily he was not prepared. At the beginning of the war he spent most of his time with a prostitute who slept with him for free. When the allies arrived he was terrified and kept trying to escape. He no longer wanted to be a soldier but to have a happy and peaceful life. Who can blame him? ”

There was “an abysmal difference between Messina and the German paratrooper Martin Pöppel“, at 23 years of age, a lieutenant with the wood of an officer who had passed through the marine section of the Hitler Youth, “as motivated and well-trained as the American and British airborne troops” he would face.

Another actor in Operation Husky was the Onorata Società (the Honorable Society), that is, the Mafia, that dominated Sicilian life. “After several hard blows by Mussolini against the Mafia, which had sent many to prison and made others flee to the United States, in Sicily in 1943, the organization was as if in hibernation, latent. The allies decided to agree and collaborate with the Mafia to coerce Italian troops to surrender. ” And the gangsters benefited by revitalizing their power and becoming richer and more powerful.

“Long live the Mafia!”

Holland speaks fascinated by the connections of the American Intelligence with the capo Lucky Luciano, who from the New York prison, where he was serving a sentence, managed the strings from a distance. His right hand, Vito Genovese, was in that Sicily organizing collaboration with Colonel Charles Poletti, former governor of New York elected chief of civil affairs in Palermo. It was he who appointed the most veteran mobster on the island as mayor of the town of Villalba, Calogero Vizzini, Don Calò, who they remember chanted that day by the crowd at 65 with a “Long live the Mafia!”

Rico’s belly

Don Calò, who claimed to have encouraged Sicilian soldiers to lay down their arms riding on an American Sherman tankHe dressed like a nondescript country man, but his pronounced belly gave away his wealth on a squalid island where there were few fat people. “He was a great corrupt person who even today everyone knows who he was. He has an impressive family tomb,” the historian noted on the spot.

According to Holland, “the priority of the allies was the success of the operation even if that meant making an agreement with the Mafia to obtain their help. When they arrived they discovered that the Italian troops were almost surrendered but before the invasion they did not know what resistance they would encounter, they thought that they would find a more iron defense, because the ports of Messina, Catania or Palermo were protected by naval guns and cliffs could hide bunkers and machine gun nests enemies. So they were cautious and smart and minimized the chances of failure. “

Believing to die

The author intertwines war stories and anecdotes, such as the surprise of those who discover they have crossed a minefield without knowing it, the massacres carried out by some officers who, out of hatred for the enemy, shot numerous German and Italian prisoners, or the reaction of the one who believed he died – Rangers Lieutenant Bing Evans – after receiving a head impact, bleed and see the bullet hole going through his helmet: the projectile miraculously passed between the cover and the coating. Also, the despair of the American sergeant James Altieri seeing two old women crouched next to the corpses of two Italian soldiers and a young woman rushing over another who was lying lifeless in a pool of blood: “I couldn’t take that anymore. It is hard enough for a soldier to be driven to kill, but to witness the pain of the enemy’s women it is so distressing that it is unbearable. ”

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