Sicily '43
A Times Book of the Year
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
'James Holland is the best of the new generation of WW2 historians.' Sebastian Faulks
'Holland's skill lies in bringing these warriors to life with vivid prose.' The Times
Shortlisted for the 2021 British Army Military Book of the Year
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This is the story of the biggest seaborne landing in history.
Codenamed Operation HUSKY, the assault on Sicily on 10 July 1943 remains the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted. That day, over 160,000 Allied troops were dropped from the sky or came ashore to begin the fight for Europe.
The subsequent thirty-eight-day Battle for Sicily was one of the most dramatic of the entire war, involving daring raids by special forces, deals with the Mafia, attacks across mosquito-infested plains and perilous assaults up almost sheer faces of rock and scree.
Made worse by virulent disease and extreme heat, the Allies also had to fight their way across an island of unforgiving landscape and limited infrastructure against a German foe who would not give up.
Victory would signal the beginning of the end of the War in the West. From here on, the noose began to tighten around the neck of Nazi Germany. The coalition between the United States and Britain finally came of age. And it was a crucial dry run for Operation OVERLORD, the invasion of Normandy on D-Day a year later.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Holland (Normandy '44) chronicles the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily in this expert account. In 38 days, 160,000 American, British, and Canadian troops overcame geographical challenges and fierce German resistance to reach the Straits of Messina. Holland documents how Allied commander Gen. Sir Harold Alexander arrayed his invading forces; recounts how the Tuskegee Airmen helped counter the Luftwaffe; notes cooperation between American intelligence agents and local Mafia dons; and argues that the Sicily invasion provided crucial lessons for the D-Day landings in Normandy. Holland also offers astute assessments of commanders Bernard Montgomery ("highly competent" yet seemingly unaware of his "appalling rudeness") and George Patton ("obsessed with fears of failure and his own mortality") and includes the perspectives of frontline combatants and eyewitnesses, including Canadian infantryman Farley Mowat and American reporter Ernie Pyle. Aspects of the Sicily campaign, Holland writes, recalled the trench warfare of WWI; one of the final battles, for the mountain fortress of Troina, was "a terrible, bloody slugging match," where "horrendously depleted" German forces matched "every act of astonishing heroism from the Americans." Marshalling a wealth of primary and secondary sources into an engrossing narrative, Holland fills a yawning gap in histories of WWII. This magisterial account is a must-read for military history fans.
