Operation Husky: Sicily, 1943
The largest amphibious assault yet mounted — the invasion that carried the war onto Axis home soil and toppled Mussolini within a fortnight.
Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, opened on the night of 9–10 July 1943 — at the time the largest amphibious assault ever mounted, its landing frontage broader even than D-Day’s would be. Behind an armada of some 2,500 ships, Patton’s US Seventh Army and Montgomery’s British Eighth Army poured onto the southern and south-eastern coasts, preceded by airborne landings that the wind and nervous Allied gunners scattered — the friendly fire off Gela alone downed some 23 C-47s carrying the American 504th Parachute Infantry.
The thirty-eight-day campaign that followed was fought in ferocious heat across the mountains toward Messina. German armour — the Hermann Göring Division and the Tigers of s.Pz.Abt. 504 — counterattacked the beachheads at Gela, and Axis aircraft hurled themselves at the invasion fleet, but the Allied grip only tightened. Though the defenders slipped some 100,000 troops back across the Straits of Messina in a skilful evacuation, the strategic verdict was decisive: Mussolini fell on 25 July 1943, and within weeks Italy was suing for peace. Every machine below has its own page in the archive.
