Palermo falls to Patton's Seventh Army
By mid-July 1943, the Allies had already fought through scattered paratroop landings and stubborn coastal defenses to gain a foothold on Sicily. General George S. Patton pushed his U.S. Seventh Army across the island's western half, and on July 22 his forces entered Palermo, the island's capital, against collapsing Italian resistance. The city's fall gave the Allies a major port and supply base to support further operations toward Messina. The Germans still held the island's northeast, and Messina remained weeks away.
Palermo was Patton's first captured capital of the war and the moment the American press began treating him as a household name. The campaign that followed built the reputation, and the temperament, that carried him into Normandy and the drive across France a year later.
QHow did the Allies convince Axis commanders to look the other way from Sicily?
Weeks before the landings, British intelligence floated a corpse off the Spanish coast dressed as a Royal Marines officer and carrying fake documents describing planned invasions codenamed Operation Brimstone (Sardinia) and an invasion of Greece. The operation, run under the cover name Mincemeat, worked well enough that German attention drifted away from Sicily in the run-up to July 9. Combined with an intensive bombing campaign against Sicilian airfields, it left the island's defenders shorter on aircraft and less prepared than they might have been.
QWhat went wrong for the British glider troops on the first night?
Of 147 gliders sent in to seize bridges and high ground ahead of the main landings, only 12 came down on or near their intended targets. High winds off the coast scattered the rest across the countryside or into the sea; Major General George F. Hopkinson of the 1st Airborne Division himself ended up in the water and had to be pulled aboard the landing ship HMS Keren.
QWhat amphibious vehicle changed how the Allies kept troops supplied on Sicily's beaches?
General Sir Harold Alexander singled out the DUKW, a six-wheeled amphibious truck that could drive off a ship, swim ashore, and keep rolling inland without unloading onto a dock. He called it a revolution in beach maintenance, since it let supplies move directly from ship to front line without the bottleneck of a captured port, a problem that mattered enormously before Palermo's harbor was secured.
