if slighted. But when this new and final plan was presented to him, Patton was as good as gold. ‘It is an impressive example of the spirit of complete loyalty and inter-Allied co-operation’, wrote Alexander, ‘which inspired all operations with which I was associated in the Mediterranean theatre.’10
CHAPTER 4
Hitler’s Gamble
GERMAN COMMANDERS IN THIS war were not widely known for their eccentricities, but the senior army officer on Sicily that May certainly stood apart from his peers. Partial to wearing a tartan kilt and a claymore sword slung by his side, Oberst Ernst-Günther Baade had been something of a legendary figure in Rommel’s Afrika Korps, known for his fearlessness, immense charm, wonderful sense of humour and penchant for tapping into British telephone conversations and having a chat in his flawless English with whoever was on the other end of the line. Another favourite trick was calling in to misdirect artillery fire.
Born to wealth in Brandenburg in 1897, Baade had grown up an avid horseman, roaming widely on his family estates. Clever, and intellectually curious, he was immensely well read and spoke not only excellent English but fluent French as well. With a thirst for adventure, he enlisted in the cavalry the moment Germany went to war in 1914, even though he was still just seventeen. Somehow, he survived four years on the Western Front before being gassed very near the end in August 1918, albeit not too severely. He had been making a good recovery by the time the Armistice was signed that November.
It had been Baade’s intention to remain in the army, but with the great cuts in size after the war there was no place for him and so instead, still aged only twenty-two, he had settled on one of the family estates in Holstein in northern Germany, where he became a notable horse-breeder. His ambitions for an army life had not been blunted, however, and just a few years later, in 1924, he was accepted back – into the 14. Cavalry Regiment. Between army duties, he and his wife continued to breed horses and became quite celebrated as international show-jumpers.
Remaining in the cavalry, he served in Poland, then France, and when the Wehrmacht’s last cavalry division was disbanded in 1941, he took over command of the 4. Maschinengewehr Bataillon on the Eastern Front. In April 1942, he was sent to North Africa and soon after took command of the 115. Gewehr Regiment, just in time to join Rommel’s offensive against the British at Gazala at the end of May and personally leading the assault that ended Free French resistance at Bir Hakeim – wielding his claymore as he did so. On one occasion, Baade found himself caught in a British minefield, but persuaded a captured English sapper to lead him through the gap. Once safe, Baade shook the man’s hand, wished him luck and let him go. In the desert he won a Knight’s Cross and a reputation as a superb commander who led from the front; in that, he was cut from the same cloth as Rommel. His men were devoted to him and although higher up the chain his eccentricities – not to say wackiness – and his insistence on old-fashioned military chivalry ruffled feathers, his performances and the esteem in which he was held by Rommel and others ensured he was safe enough. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baade was no great fan of Hitler and the Nazis.
Severely wounded at the Battle of Alamein, he returned to duty in December 1942, but was not deemed fit for combat and so was posted to a staff position at the Italian Comando Supremo, the Italian high command, and then, in April, to Sicily to try to salvage and organize some German units from those returning from Tunisia or those who had been sent south as replacements but had been held back as defeat in North Africa loomed. Division Kommando Baade was the starting point, although by the time of the Axis surrender in North Africa on 13 May, he had formed just one four-battalion panzer-grenadier regiment. Had the Allies been able to hustle their way across the Mediterranean and land right away, the door would have been wide open. Instead, Baade was able to continue building up German forces on the island; by 14 May he had about 30,000 troops, now redesignated Division Kommando Sizilien, and more were heading his way.
Among those moving south were a number of supply and support troops and also flak units, including several batteries drawn from Flak Regiment 7, with a mixture of 88mm anti-aircraft and four-barrelled quick-firing Flakvierling 38s, 20mm cannons. These flak units were veterans of the Eastern Front and had already seen considerable action during the war. One of them included 22-year-old Kanonier Hanns Cibulka from Jägerndorf in Upper Silesia – when he was born, part of the new Czechoslovakia, but now within the German Reich once more.
Cibulka was something of an intellectual and a poet, but in the German army he was a wire man, responsible, within a small team of three, for ensuring the batteries were all connected to battalion headquarters with field telephone wires. Travelling with their wiring equipment in a truck rather than on foot or by horse-drawn cart, the column wound slowly down through Italy. On 14 May they had been south of Rome, but it wasn’t until two days later that they finally reached the Straits of Messina. It was 3 a.m., still dark, and both sides and the water in between seemed to be still, quiet and devoid of life. A ferry was waiting ready; first to load were the headquarters company, including the wire team and their truck. An hour later they pushed off.
The sea was dead calm, but a cold breeze blew gently over them, dawn breaking in the east. As they pushed further out, the water began to swell, splashing on to the wooden deck. Then the sun rose, glistening, dispersing the fog – and suddenly there was Sicily, at first a narrow blue strip and then, as they drew closer and the morning mist cleared, so Messina seemed to rise up and, behind the city, the grey hills. ‘In the coastal waters, colourful sails,’ wrote Cibulka in his diary, ‘at the pier a few men are sitting and fishing, on the beach promenade trees stand in joyful green.1 The air that blows over from the land is warmed by the sun, but on the tongue, I don’t know where from, a salty, bitter taste.’
An air raid siren rang out and moments later, they saw them: four-engine bombers, thundering over ponderously in close formation, their shapes clear against the steel-blue sky. Cibulka and his comrades stood on the pier watching, waiting apprehensively for the bombs to start falling, but the Flying Fortresses moved on in the direction of the mainland. The anti-aircraft gunners along the heavily defended straits opened fire, the sky suddenly full of clouds of bursting shells. The noise was immense – the guns, the explosions, the roar of engines. Suddenly there was a bright flash, an explosion. Cibulka and his friend Arno stood by the truck, their heads craned skywards, watching as a wing plunged down into the sea in a slow, sloping arc. ‘So this is what death by air looks like,’ he thought to himself.2 ‘What is left of the ten-man crew is a single parachute that descends slowly and pendulously over the waterway.’ And then, in what seemed like no time at all, the Straits of Messina were empty again. So, this was Sicily. Cibulka remembered a line from Goethe’s Italian Journey. ‘Italy without Sicily makes no picture in the soul: here is the key to everything.’3
Cibulka and his comrades had no idea where they were headed, although news from North Africa had reached them by now. German plans at this moment were still very uncertain, the German high command disconcerted, to say the very least, by the disaster that had just occurred in Tunisia, following hot on the heels of the catastrophe at Stalingrad. Urgent plans needed to be made to try to repel the next enemy onslaught – wherever that might be – while also working out what to do about Italy, an ally that was clearly on the ropes.
A striking feature of Nazi Germany was the truly appalling way in which it treated its allies, with the possible exception of the Japanese, whom they largely ignored apart from a bit of intelligence sharing. All Germany’s other allies, whether Romania, Hungary, the Balkan states, Bulgaria or even Finland, were browbeaten and bullied and treated with little more than contempt. Only the Axis alliance with Italy, first signed in 1936 and then militarized with the Pact of Steel in May 1939, had begun on reasonable terms, not least because initially Hitler had been rather inspired by the Italian dictator Mussolini, and the two had struck up something akin to a real friendship.
That, however, soon turned sour when Germany began planning for the invasion of Poland without any prior consultation with Italy whatsoever. The cynical
