peace with the Allies? This was, of course, a vain hope, but conversations were had and meetings held, although nothing much seemed to come of them – not least because it was obvious that if Italy did somehow make peace with the Allies, the country would most likely be invaded by Germany. The payback, inevitably, would be appalling. Italy found itself between a rock and a hard place.
Mussolini knew it too. He wrote a long letter to Hitler pleading with him to sue for terms with Stalin and turn his attention closer to home, in the south. The Führer simply ignored it; obsessed though he was with his southern flank, Hitler’s ideology and that of National Socialism was wedded to the struggle against Bolshevism and racial battle in the east. None the less, in Rome the plots continued to thicken, and although none of them seemed to get much beyond the conversational stage, conspiracy, as von Neurath had discerned so palpably, was in the air.
In February, Mussolini had had a clear-out, sacking those he thought most likely to be plotting and the most outspokenly pessimistic. One of those to go was his son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, one of the playboys Hitler had scorned, but a clever man, who had far greater geopolitical awareness than his master and who had seen the writing on the wall a long time earlier. Ciano, a serial philanderer, was made Ambassador to the Vatican. ‘The ways which Providence chooses’, he wrote in one of his last diary entries, ‘are indeed sometimes mysterious.’10
The change of team at the top made little difference. Mussolini had become isolated; he was sick and alone. He held no reciprocal affection for Hitler, who seemed to rant at him whenever they met. When more German troops were proposed to help shore up Italy and Sicily in May, Mussolini turned down the offer, fearing further humiliation and ulterior German motives. Hitler felt betrayed by Italy; Mussolini felt betrayed by Hitler, also dating back to 1939, for embroiling Italy in a war for which it had clearly not been ready. Neither man was prepared to consider his own culpability for the disasters that now faced their respective countries.
Wracked with stomach pains, surrounded by men he could no longer trust, Il Duce began to go a little mad on occasion. In early June, Carlo Pareschi, the minister for agriculture, admitted during a meeting that the harvest so far had not brought the yields hoped for. Mussolini suddenly cut in. ‘A few days ago,’ he said, ‘I was in the countryside and I saw what the birds get up to.11 They land on the stem, and their weight bends the ear of the wheat so that they remain hidden. Then they eat the grain.’ His solution was to kill the birds. ‘Kill them all!’ he exclaimed.
In many ways, the immediate fate of Mussolini was in the hands of King Vittorio Emanuele. Tiny of stature and pretty tiny of mind too, the King had sanctioned Fascism and had sanctioned a catastrophic war; now he seemed less concerned about the fate of his people, and more about the fate of the monarchy and whether it would survive any peace with the Allies. He also worried whether it would survive an invasion by the Germans. Whatever course it took, the future looked far from rosy, and if the King was considering removing Mussolini he did nothing about it. For the time being, Mussolini would remain Il Duce.
Meanwhile, across Italy, civil strife grew worse. The country was being bombed – not, perhaps, with the same city-flattening treatment that was starting to be meted out on Germany, but by the end of 1942 some 25,000 homes had been destroyed in Turin, while more than half a million people had been evacuated from Milan. Food shortages were really beginning to bite, especially in the cities – most people were living off less than 1,000 calories a day, which was not enough – and other commodities were in short supply too. There was little petrol. Corruption and black marketeering were rampant, making life even more miserable for the masses. Hundreds of thousands of young men were now locked up in Allied or Russian prison camps.
And nowhere was the misery of war felt more keenly than in the south – and especially in Sicily, the island off the toe of the mainland that was part of Italy but also not part of it. On Sicily, for centuries home to a mass of impoverished, beaten-down peasants, life was especially tough. It was soon to become a lot tougher.
CHAPTER 5
Air Power
ON THURSDAY, 22 APRIL 1943, two Spitfires from Takali airfield on the tiny island of Malta took off at first light and, banking, turned and headed north in the direction of Sicily. A year earlier, the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica had done their level best to crush the island and pummel it into the sea. Lying 60 miles to the south of Sicily, Malta lay directly in the path of any Axis shipping heading to North Africa. From this island, torpedo bombers, fighter aircraft, submarines and warships could all operate against the Axis supply line. The most successful Allied submarine of the war, HMS Upholder, had operated from Malta. So too had Force K, two cruisers and two destroyers that had played havoc with Axis shipping, so much so that in November 1941, 77 per cent of all Rommel’s supplies crossing the Mediterranean had been sent to the bottom. A few weeks later, his forces were driven back across Libya. Feldmarschall Kesselring, newly appointed C-in-C South, realized that Malta needed to be neutralized: its port facilities wrecked, its RAF contingent destroyed, its airfield made unusable, its harbours inaccessible for both warships and submarines. Luftflotte II, an entire air army, had been sent to Sicily for the purpose.
In April 1942, 6,728 tons of bombs had been dropped on the island, sixteen times the amount that had destroyed the English city of Coventry back in November 1940. Some 841 tons had been dropped on Takali airfield alone, and a similar amount on neighbouring Luqa. On five separate days that month there had been just one serviceable fighter left for the RAF to fly, and on one day, 14 April, there had not been a single one. Malta had been a brutal place to be back in April 1942.
Kesselring had not been able to finish the job, however. Malta had been on its knees, but his Luftwaffe were needed across the sea in North Africa to support Rommel’s planned offensive at the end of May 1942. More Spitfires had reached the island and the fightback had begun in the air, and very successfully too, but by June the island – and the fighter pilots – were beginning to starve. By July the situation was desperate. And by August, the shortages were so dire it had seemed that Malta might have to surrender after all. One last effort was made to save the island with the mounting of the most heavily defended Allied convoy of the entire war: Operation PEDESTAL. The Allies were determined the convoy should get through, the Axis were equally set on ensuring it failed. A mighty battle raged the length of the western Mediterranean as bombers, U-boats and fast torpedo boats were all flung at the convoy. Of the fourteen vessels that set sail, just five made it, including the one tanker, the Ohio, which despite being hit ten times and even having a crashed Stuka dive-bomber land on its decks, managed to limp in, woefully low in the water and with two destroyers lashed either side because its engines had stopped. It reached Grand Harbour on 15 August 1942, the Feast Day of Santa Maria, the most important festa in Malta’s calendar. A miracle had occurred. Malta had been saved.
In October the same year Kesselring had made one more effort to extract this thorn in the Axis side, but by then the island was bristling with fighter planes and his air forces were shot down in droves. Now, a year on from the height of the Malta Blitz, the island was still looking bashed and beaten, rubble still lay in the streets and life was tough for the Maltese, many of whom had been made homeless, but it was also awash with Allied fighter aircraft. How the tide had turned.
The two Spitfires taking off that early morning were from 249 Squadron, a Battle of Britain veteran fighter unit that had been operating from the island for more than two years, since the spring of 1941. Pilots had been rotated in and out, however, and the two now heading north had both been on Malta a few months only. One was the newly promoted Squadron Leader John J. Lynch Jr from Alhambra, California, just twenty-four years old; the other was even younger, twenty-year-old Flying Officer Irving ‘Hap’ Kennedy, from Cumberland, Ontario.
Since the outbreak of war, the RAF had attracted – and welcomed – pilots and aircrew from all around the world, and certainly the fighter pilots on Malta had always been a fairly polyglot bunch. Johnny
