RAF were doing theirs – and were also split up between Eastern Air Command in Algeria and Tunisia, and the Desert Air Force and other units of RAF Middle East. The set-up had been designed in this way to support the landings and on the assumption that Tunisia would be swiftly captured; but by the end of 1942 it was clear that this had been wishful thinking. Spaatz, quite rightly, had felt that the dispersal of command and total lack of any coordinated close air support doctrine had been threatening to undermine the material strength being thrown into the theatre.
But everything the Allies had been doing in Tunisia in terms of air power had been new. Even in Libya, where Mary Coningham had been developing his Desert Air Force into a finely tuned tactical force offering close air support, he and his men had still been feeling their way and working out methods on the hoof. What’s more, they only had Eighth Army to support, whereas in north-west Africa there were the American, French and British ground forces to support, all new to fighting and each with different structures and attitudes to air power. Joined-up thinking on air power was decidedly lacking. Yet if they were feeling their way, it was hardly surprising. After all, just three years earlier the United States had only had an air corps amounting to a handful of fighter planes; it had already come an incredibly long way in really no time at all.
Clearly, unifying the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean had been essential; and it had been done, as part of the shake-up in February 1943 in which Eisenhower had been made Supreme Allied Commander and Alexander put in charge of 18th Army Group. Tedder had become C-in-C Mediterranean Air Command and so the overall Allied air commander. Under him fell RAF Malta, RAF Middle East and also the new North African Air Force, which was by far the largest single command now in the Mediterranean. This was given to Spaatz, and directly under him was now the Northwest Africa Strategic Air Command headed by another American hot-shot, Major-General Jimmy Doolittle, a celebrated aviation pioneer and a household name back in the States. In the same reorganization, all Allied tactical air forces were handed over to Coningham, first as Air Support Tunisia but then renamed North African Tactical Air Force, which also fell within Spaatz’s command. Coningham’s new deputy was Brigadier-General Larry Kuter, who had helped write the USAAF’s strategic air doctrine; he too was supremely competent and forward-thinking, and was eager to hone this exciting and rapidly developing weapon every bit as much as Tedder, Spaatz, Coningham et al. Nor was that all. Also under Spaatz’s umbrella were coastal air operations against Axis shipping and the all-important training command.
It was notable how well these commanders, different people all, and suddenly thrown together, seemed to get on. A pioneering spirit welded them together. For sure, ruffles occurred along the way – including a fairly major spat between Coningham and Patton in March during the latter’s command of US II Corps. Patton, with no understanding at all of the new doctrine being developed for close air support, had angrily demanded a permanent umbrella of fighter cover for his operations in southern Tunisia. Coningham and Kuter had told him this was not possible, prompting ire from Patton and an increasingly heated exchange that ended with Coningham accusing the American of crying wolf. Tedder had been furious with Coningham for threatening Anglo-US relations, while Alexander had thought Patton had rather deserved it. On Tedder’s insistence, however, Coningham was forced to apologize and visited Patton in person. They shook hands and lunched together, and, as Patton noted, ‘We parted friends.’7
At the start of the Tunisian campaign, Allied soldiers on the ground had grumbled that the Luftwaffe appeared to roam at will above them; by the end, there were no such complaints. Day by day, week by week, the Allied air forces began increasingly to dominate the skies. The American and British contribution in terms of numbers, logistics and effort was simply immense. By the last days in Tunisia, some three thousand Allied aircraft were dominating barely three hundred of the Axis. This level of commitment produced more than a hundred new airfields in the theatre, and all-weather ones at that, which required labourers, concrete, graders, bulldozers and other plant – almost all of which had to be shipped from the United States or Britain. After Kasserine, five new airfields were built around the nearby town of Sbeitla – all within seventy-two hours.
Meanwhile, in the skies, increasingly confident and more experienced airmen were winning the day. On Palm Sunday, 18 April, intelligence reached Coningham’s air forces that around a hundred Ju52 transport planes were approaching Tunis. It was late afternoon and in all, four squadrons of Kittyhawks and eighteen Spitfires climbed into the air to try to intercept the fleet of enemy transports. In what became known as the ‘Palm Sunday Turkey Shoot’ no fewer than seventy-four Luftwaffe aircraft were shot down.
No matter that on the ground, US troops were still a little green and learning the ropes, or that British forces were still working out an effective way of war; in the air, in a matter of months, the Allies had transformed their offensive capabilities.
CHAPTER 6
Corkscrew
‘FOLLOWING THE LOSS OF Tunisia,’ wrote General der Flieger Wolfram von Richthofen, C-in-C Fliegerkorps II, on 23 May, ‘the island chain comprising Sardinia–Sicily–Crete represents the advanced defence line of Southern Europe.1 Should the enemy succeed in gaining a foothold in one of these islands, he will have achieved a penetration into Fortress Europe which would signify a grave threat to the defence of the mainland. Every last man and weapon must be rallied to prevent this happening.’ Von Richthofen made the point that at the moment of assault the enemy would be at his weakest because he would be in landing craft and devoid of cover. Therefore all Luftwaffe personnel, unless servicing aircraft or directly employed in flying operations, would be issued with weapons and given training, and would be expected to help repel the enemy in the event of an invasion attempt.
It was all a bit desperate and smacked of panic. It would, of course, have been far better that Hitler, recognizing there was now no reasonable chance of winning the war, threw in the towel right away and saved a huge amount of carnage, but that was never going to happen. To start with, the Nazis already had too much blood on their hands; and secondly, Hitler had always been a black-and-white kind of person. There would be the Thousand Year Reich or there would be Armageddon, but no half measures. Tragically for Germany and for all those fighting the war, Armageddon now looked a dead cert. The only question was how long it would take.
Von Richthofen now had his air forces spread to the four winds in an attempt to counter every eventuality. One of the features of the glory days of the Blitzkrieg – and indeed of earlier German and, before that, Prussian, successes – was the concept of the Schwerpunkt: literally a ‘heavy point’, meaning a concentration of forces to deliver a maximum punch. These days, though, the Luftwaffe, like every other part of the Wehrmacht, were on the defensive and thinly spread. As a result, there were Luftwaffe units in Greece, in southern Italy and on Sardinia as well as Sicily, where there were now three Gruppen of JG 53, the Ace of Spades, each with three Staffel or squadrons; there was also one Gruppe, the second, of JG 27; and there were two Gruppen of Macky Steinhoff’s JG 77, with the third based on Sardinia.
The air defence was supposed to be a joint effort by Germany and Italy, but the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica were like an estranged couple reluctantly still cohabiting but barely speaking to one another. Certainly there was no shared doctrine or even common operational orders. The Luftwaffe had radar on the island and ground controllers, for example, but the Regia Aeronautica did not and the Germans were not about to share it – a bizarre state of affairs. They would pass on information if asked, but that was about it. As it happened, the Italians rarely did ask.
There were still a number of Italian bombers and torpedo bombers and seven gruppi of fighters on Sicily. Among the bombers were the Cant Z.1007s of the 27° Gruppo Bombardimenti at Gela–Ponte Olivo: three-engine bombers that could each carry a rather underwhelming 1,200kg of bombs. Reasonably quick and with good visibility for the crew, the Z.1007 none the less suffered from poor reliability and was woefully underarmed, with just four machine guns. Nor did it particularly help that the fuselage was mostly made of
