European war 2 strategy3/27/2023 The British forces had cleared the whole southeastern part of the island in the first three days of the invasion. The coastal defenses, manned largely by Sicilians unwilling to turn their homeland into a battlefield for the Germans’ sake, collapsed rapidly enough. On July 10 Allied seaborne troops landed on Sicily. The Allies’ air superiority in the Mediterranean theatre was so great by this time-more than 4,000 aircraft against some 1,500 German and Italian ones-that the Axis bombers had been withdrawn from Sicily in June to bases in north-central Italy. 7th Army were to be landed on two stretches of beach 40 miles long, 20 miles distant from one another, the British in the southeast of the island, the Americans in the south. Under the supreme command of Alexander, Montgomery’s British 8th Army and Patton’s U.S. The Allies, meanwhile, were preparing to throw some 478,000 men into the island-150,000 of them in the first three days of the invasion. Having failed to save its forces in Tunisia, the Axis had only 10 Italian divisions of various sorts and two German panzer units stationed on the island of Sicily at midsummer 1943. Hitler, while always having to guard against a cross-Channel invasion from England’s shores, had cause to fear that the Anglo-American armies in North Africa might land anywhere on his southern front between Spain and Greece. The Allies’ greatest strategic advantage lay in the wide choice of alternative objectives and in the powers of distraction they enjoyed through their superior sea power. It was difficult for him to gauge where the Allies would strike next. Hitler’s greatest strategic disadvantage in opposing the Allies’ imminent reentry into Europe lay in the immense stretch of Germany’s conquests, from the west coast of France to the east coast of Greece. The Allied landings in Europe and the defeat of the Axis powers Developments from autumn 1943 to summer 1944 Sicily and the fall of Mussolini, July–August 1943
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