Sicily and the Surrender of Italy

United States Army in World War II Mediterranean Theater of Operations Sicily and the Surrender of Italy by Albert N. Garland and Howard McGaw Smyth Assisted by Martin Blumenson CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY UNITED STATES ARMY WASHINGTON, D.C., 1993 Chapter XXII The QUADRANT Conference and the Quebec Memorandum Even as the military operations on Sicily neared an end, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, together with their chief military and political advisers, in August 1943 met in conference at Quebec. Code-named QUADRANT, this meeting was the focal point in the formulation of Allied strategy for the second half of 1943. Marking a new stage in the Anglo-American strategic argument toward delimiting Mediterranean operations and solidifying the cross-Channel plan, the conference incidentally and accidentally provided the final conditions for Italian surrender, determined the methods of applying the terms, and gave final approval to an invasion of the Italian mainland. Strategic Issues at Quebec Toward the end of July, the Joint War Plans Committee of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had suggested that the decisive action against the Axis had already taken place in the successful Russian counteroffensive against the Germans, together with the Anglo- American superiority established in the air and on the sea. Since Germany, the committee said, was no longer capable of defeating the Soviet armies, the assumption that Anglo- American power had to be directed primarily to relieve the pressure on Russia was no longer valid. Hence, the argument ran, the cross-Channel attack could not inflict the decisive defeat on Germany; it could only, in conjunction with continued Russian advances, deliver the final blow. The members also suggested that an inflexible adherence to the cross-Channel concept was incorrect; that the decision to remove seven battle-tested divisions from the Mediterranean was unsound. Robbing the Mediterranean offensive of momentum might nullify the attempt to knock Italy out of the war or to exploit Italian collapse into an invasion of southern France. Furthermore, the committee believed that the Allies had not given due consideration to the possibility that Germany might defend Italy with strong forces.1 The return of seven divisions from the Mediterranean to the United Kingdom by 1 November was the crucial agreement through which General Marshall had sought to make it possible to direct the weight of Anglo-American power into the cross-Channel blow, thereby limiting the Mediterranean offensive to a subordinate role. Although some men who served him had doubts, Marshall believed that the decisive defeat of Germany could be inflicted on the classic battlegrounds of northern France and nowhere else. Among the British planners who served Churchill, some were quite sympathetic with Marshall's strategic view. Yet the British Chiefs of Staff had a genuine conviction that the elimination of Italy from the war was a prerequisite for a successful cross-Channel attack, and that everything possible should be done to make sure that the attack against Italy would knock it out of the war. Despite the qualifications and shadings around the edges of agreement, an acute conflict of views prevailed between Churchill and Marshall. The latter held resolutely to the concept that the British Isles constituted the only base in which to gather sufficient power for a decisive blow against the heartland of Germany. He had no hope for decisive results by an offensive into the Balkans, with or without Turkish support. He considered attempts to reach the German heart by way of the Italian peninsula, the Postumia-Ljubljana gap, or the Danube valley to be logistically and strategically unsound. He did not believe it possible to inflict a decisive defeat on the German armies by landing in Italy and pursuing them up the ridges of the Italian peninsula and over the Alps, whether toward Austria or toward France. He wanted a main effort in the cross-Channel attack, a simultaneous diversionary amphibious landing in southern France, and the continued employment of limited holding forces in the Mediterranean. This Marshall believed to be the best way to achieve decisive defeat of Germany in the west. Despite the TRIDENT agreements, there were indications that Mr. Churchill and his advisers shrank from the plan to strike the main blow across the Channel in 1944. At the Algiers conference in late May, immediately after TRIDENT, General Brooke had privately told General Eisenhower that he would be glad to reconsider the cross-Channel project, even to the extent of eliminating it from Allied strategy, for he feared that a ground conflict in a large theater would be disadvantageous for the Allies and might result in tremendous losses.2 Churchill at a later date frankly told General Wedemeyer that if he had been able to persuade the Combined Chiefs of Staff the Allies would have gone through Turkey and the Balkans from the south and into Norway on the north, thus surrounding the enemy and further dispersing his forces.3 The British Chiefs of Staff immediately after TRIDENT fully recognized the priority of operations in the western Mediterranean directed by AFHQ over those projected by the British Middle East Command: ACCOLADE (seizure of the Dodecanese) and HARDIHOOD (aid to Turkey to induce it to enter the war). They instructed General Wilson, the Middle East commander, to make some of his resources available to General Eisenhower.4 Despite the American JCS veto against employing American ground forces east of Sicily, British strategists kept the Aegean-Balkan area in mind as a potential route toward the Danube once Italy was knocked out of the war. During July the British representatives in Washington, on orders from London, kept pressing the CCS to allot resources to General Eisenhower beyond those allocated at TRIDENT. The JCS, however, continued to insist that Eisenhower's invasion of the Italian mainland could be made without additional resources. When the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, visited England in July, he became alarmed by what he heard from Churchill and Eden. Mr. Stimson suggested that political reasons made it necessary to press for a cross-Channel attack. Though Mr. Churchill seemed to understand--"he confined his position to favoring a march on Rome with its prestige and the possibility of knocking Italy out of the war"--Eden contended for carrying the war into the Balkans and Greece. Both American and British officers working on plans for the cross- Channel attack gave Stimson an impression that the great threat to the plan came from the danger of becoming too deeply involved in the Mediterranean. When Marshall suggested on 16 July that AFHQ study the possibility of an amphibious attack in the Naples area, Churchill interpreted it as an indication that Marshall was shifting from his basic position. A transatlantic phone call quickly reassured Stimson that he knew Marshall's mind better than Churchill did. Yet the check received by the British Eighth Army before Catania led Churchill to speak of a cross-channel attack as producing a Channel full of corpses.5 The vision of occupying the Italian capital captivated Churchill's mind, and Rome was the minimum territorial objective in Italy acceptable to him. Still, he told Stimson that if by good luck the Allies gained the complete capitulation of Italy, he would favor going as far as the northern boundary. Stimson received the impression that Churchill was looking "constantly and vigorously for an easy way of ending the war without a trans-Channel assault." At Algiers, however, Stimson was relieved to find Eisenhower in agreement with Marshall's basic idea--the attack on Italy was to be for a limited objective, one not impairing or substituting for the cross-Channel attack, but rather one that would aid and facilitate it. At AFHQ, Mr. Stimson gained the impression that the Foggia airfields were considered the main objective of the campaign.6 Upon returning to Washington Mr. Stimson on 4 August sent a recommendation to the President. "The main thing therefore to keep constantly in mind," he wrote, "is that the Italian effort must be strictly confined to the objective of securing bases for an air attack and there must be no further diversions of the forces or matériel which will interfere with the coincident mounting of the ROUNDHAMMER [cross-Channel] project."7 On 9 August, General Marshall called on the President in order to ascertain the President's views and the American position to be presented at the impending Quebec Conference. Roosevelt stated that in a choice between cross-Channel invasion and the invasion of the Italian mainland he would insist on the former. But he felt that more could be done for the latter than had been proposed. The seven battle-tested divisions should be moved to England, but perhaps an equal number of divisions could go from the United States directly to Italy. He stated that he would resist an operation into the Balkans or any expedition that might involve a heavy loss of ships and landing craft without the possibility of achieving decisive results. He thought that the Allies should secure a position in Italy just north of Rome and occupy Sardinia and Corsica, thus setting up a serious threat to southern France.8 The following day Secretary of War Stimson called on the President. He presented a memorandum making a plea for holding to the American strategic concept. As a result of talks, personal contacts, and conversations during his recent overseas trip, Stimson said, he had reached the conclusion that there was no rational hope for a successful cross-Channel attack under a British commander. He urged that the American Government take the leadership, insist on a cross-Channel attack, and guarantee its execution by securing the appointment of General Marshall as its commander.

Load more