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CHAPTER 1
The Long Path to HUSKY
IN THE LAST WEEK of June 1943, from Egypt across North Africa to Algeria and northern Tunisia, Allied troops were getting ready for what was to be the largest amphibious invasion the world had ever known. A pivotal moment in the war had been reached. On the Eastern Front, German forces were about to go on to the offensive once more, this time to try and straighten the Kursk salient following the retreat from Stalingrad back in February. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had been withdrawn after catastrophic losses, allowing Allied shipping finally to flow freely across that vast ocean for the first time since the start of the war. British and American bombers were attacking the Reich both day and night, while – after three long years of fighting – all of North Africa was now in Allied hands. And the future of Italy looked uncertain, to say the least, the Fascist state now reeling in the face of plummeting public morale, a string of military defeats and an economy in shreds.
There was a palpable sense that the noose was starting to tighten around Nazi Germany; and yet for the Allies to cross the sea and capture Sicily would be a mammoth undertaking. The challenges of such an operation, both logistically and in the levels of coordination needed between services and between coalition partners feeling their way in this war, were immense. Hovering over the Allies, too, was the knowledge that less than a year hence they would be attempting to cross the English Channel and invade German-occupied France; the last sizeable strike, at Dieppe in August 1942, had been an utter disaster. If Sicily went wrong, if it turned into catastrophe or even a long and bloody slog, then the ramifications would be enormous. The long road to victory would become even longer; the cross-Channel attack might have to be postponed. Reverses, at this critical stage in the war, simply could not be countenanced. They were unthinkable.
The stakes, then, could hardly have been higher. The invasion of Sicily had to be a success. Yet for the senior Allied commanders far away across the Mediterranean, in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt – from where the troops who would soon be attempting to land there were training – conquest of this ancient, even mystical, island seemed a very formidable undertaking indeed.
Most of the men now being put through their paces in North Africa were oblivious to such concerns. Training at Kabrit near the Suez Canal were the men of 69th Brigade, part of 50th ‘Tyne Tees’ Division, who would be part of the British landing force around Avola on the east coast of Sicily – not that Bill Cheall and the lads of the 6th Green Howards had any idea of that. ‘We realised that we were going to invade somewhere,’ noted Cheall, ‘but, of course, how could we know where at that time?’1 The war had already been going on a long time for Cheall, a former greengrocer from Middlesbrough in north-east England. Joining the Territorial Army in the spring of 1939, aged just twenty-one, he had been mobilized on the outbreak of war that September, and had served in France with the 6th Green Howards. Escaping from Dunkirk, he’d then begun the process of retraining before being laid low with chronic sinusitis and so had not gone overseas with the battalion when they’d first been posted to the Middle East. Instead, he’d spent some time with the 11th Battalion, before finally being shipped overseas and rejoining his old unit at the end of March 1943. He’d been shocked by how few were left from the battalion that had escaped from Dunkirk, but after the Battle of Wadi Akarit, when Eighth Army had crashed into the Italians in southern Tunisia back at the beginning of April, he had begun to realize why. Being in the infantry was a tough, bloody, attritional business. Sooner or later, one was bound to come a cropper. One just had to hope it wouldn’t be a fatal one.
They’d advanced to Enfidaville further north in Tunisia, then had been pulled out of the line. At the time, no one had the faintest idea why, but they were glad to be spared the final battles of the long North African campaign, which had not finally ended until mid-May. Back they went, some 2,000 miles, past previous battle sites, down into Libya, through Cyrenaica and then finally into Egypt once more. The carnage of war had been evident all the way: burnt-out tanks and vehicles, guns and the vast detritus of war. As they’d passed back through Wadi Akarit, Cheall had said a small prayer to himself. ‘I imagined the faces of the pals I had lost,’ he noted, ‘and could see them just as they were before they gave their lives.’2 Eventually, they’d stopped at Sidi Bishr near Alexandria before moving again to Kabrit. Training continued, including Exercise BROMYARD in the Gulf of Aqaba, where they relentlessly practised amphibious assaults. The heat was intense and the flies as much a nuisance as they had ever been, but Cheall reckoned that by the beginning of July none of them had ever been fitter.
Not far away at another camp at El Shatt was their sister battalion, the 1st Green Howards. Unlike the 6th Battalion, the 1st had yet to see action, having spent the war so far training in England, Northern Ireland and, more recently, Palestine. The 1st Battalion would be part of 5th ‘Yorkshire’ Division, which was appropriate enough since the Green Howards hailed from that county of northern England, and were originally named after the landowner who had been the regiment’s colonel back in the eighteenth century.
One of the officers, the commander of B Company, was quite a sporting celebrity. Major Hedley Verity was one of the finest spin bowlers ever to play cricket for Yorkshire and England, and in 1934 had taken fifteen wickets in England’s biggest ever victory over Australia. Verity had considered joining up in 1938 during the Munich crisis, but Arnold Shaw, the colonel of the Green Howards and an old friend, suggested he first read some military textbooks and advised him to get in touch again should war break out. That winter, Verity had read voraciously during the England tour of South Africa before returning home for the final season before the war. Yorkshire once again won the championship that summer with Verity cleaning up Sussex, taking six wickets for 15 runs on Friday 1 September, the day Germany invaded Poland. On the Saturday, he travelled back to Yorkshire with the rest of the team, on Sunday Britain declared war, and on Monday Verity got back in touch with Colonel Shaw and joined up.
Quiet, unassuming and always generous towards others, he quickly showed a natural aptitude for military tactics. The best spin bowlers have both sharp intelligence and a tactical mind, and Verity brought these skills to soldiering. Unsurprisingly, his men and his peers all adored him, while in between training sessions he never tired of playing morale-boosting games of cricket. Since his arrival in the Canal Zone there had even been a match in which Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey, commander of XIII Corps, had played. A keen cricketer since his schooldays, Dempsey had been as overawed as most others to have the celebrated England player among his men. The chance to face the bowling of this sporting star had been too good to pass over.
Not all British troops scheduled for Operation HUSKY, as the Sicily invasion was code-named, were in the Middle East. Some had been training in northern Tunisia, including much of Major-General Vyvyan Evelegh’s 78th ‘Battleaxe’ Division, which was not to be part of the first wave of invasion troops but was to be kept in reserve, most likely landing a week or two later. Major Peter Pettit was second-in-command of the 17th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, a lawyer from London who had joined the part-time ranks of the Honourable Artillery Company as a nineteen-year-old. During his twelve years of pre-war service with the HAC, he’d taken his soldiering seriously and had risen to acting major, and in March 1941 he had transferred out of the territorials and into the regular army by joining the 17th Field Artillery. A further eighteen months had been spent in England training until finally he and the regiment were posted overseas to Tunisia, where they’d been fighting with First Army in the north of the country since the previous November. The 17th had performed well in North Africa, but Pettit, now aged thirty-four, was not a man to sit on any laurels and took the business of being a gunner very seriously. Aware how vital the artillery had become in the British way of war, he thought deeply and carefully about how it could best support the infantry and armour, writing down his thoughts about the relative values of different types of barrages and fire support patterns, and ensuring there had been no let-up in training. ‘Training from 0600 to 1200,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 June, ‘and training from 1700
