(See Cover)
For 20 days terror fell from the sky. Each day it grew worse. The intervals grew fewer when troops could smoke with out a bomb blast blowing the cigarets out of their fingers. This was the "prolonged, scientific and shattering" bombing which Winston Churchill had threatened six months before. It had come with a fury such as no spot on earth had experienced before. "Impregnable" Pantelleria, Benito Mussolini's Gibraltar in what he once called Mare Nostrum, was doomed.
Twice the Italian garrison had been invited to surrender. Admiral Gino Pavesi, senior Italian officer, and his men clung to Pantelleria's 32 sq. mi. of volcanic rock. Each refusal increased the tempo of attack. First the Spadillo airfield was blown to bits. Then the island's one good harbor, a nest for E-boats and submarines harassing the Sicilian straits, was smashed. Low-flying planes bounced their bombs down ramps leading to underground hangars. "Pattern bombing" crushed gun emplacements one by one.
From June 1, the U.S. and British cascaded 7,000,000 lb. of bombs on the island. On the 18th day of attack more bombs were dropped than had been loosed on Tunisia, Sicily, Sardinia and the Italian mainland during the entire month of April. On that day, while Allied fighters sent at least 37 Axis planes screaming into the sea, Allied bomber traffic was so heavy that pilots had to circle about, trying to keep out of each other's way while waiting their turn to sight their targets.
On the morning of June 11 Admiral Pavesi sent a message to an American air base: "Beg surrender through lack of water." At 11:40 a.m. planes over the island and lookouts aboard cruisers and destroyers offshore (General Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham were aboard the British cruiser Aurora) spotted two signals : a white cross on the airfield, a white flag on the wrecked harbor installations. By 12:22 p.m. British landing parties had scrambled ashore, mopped up a few troops who had either not been informed of the surrender or could not see their own signals through Pantelleria's shroud of brushwood smoke. The landing party herded together the first 8,000 bomb-dizzy troops while 50 German dive-bombers, sneaking south from Sicily in the hope of a sudden kill, were slapped about by Allied fighters.
Pantelleria, site of an early Neolithic culture, conquered in the course of history by Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks and Italians, a stepping-stone from Africa to Europe and a vital traffic control on one of the sea's busiest highways, was in Allied hands. It was a stone under Mussolini's Italian boot. His toe is certain to be tromped on. His heel is in hot water, his bottom fair game for a pincers movement.