A British airman last week coasted high over the Messina Strait between Sicily and the Italian mainland on a mission of photoreconnaissance. The air was clear and still, visibility unlimited. Looking out, the pilot could see the length & breadth of Sicily and, on the other side, the full expanse of the Italian toe. Between the two, the narrow straits looked "so small you could jump across them—a blue ditch."
"In a great semicircle to the north and south," the airman told a New York Herald Tribune correspondent, "the sea was flat and empty, but below me things were happening. There were barges and landing craft fully loaded. Our photographs proved they were leaving Sicily and empty ones were hurrying back. . . .
All of them were acting like frightened minnows. . . . They twisted and turned like the little boats in a pleasure pool on a bank holiday. . . ."
That airman saw the beginning of the end, which was finally to come this Tuesday as the American armies swept into the escape port of Messina.
The Rearguard's Fight. The little craft were taking the main forces of the Germans to the mainland. Left in the brown, rocky hills and steep-sided valleys to the westward was only a rearguard: battalions whittled down to companies, companies reduced to platoon strength.
The rearguard of the Wehrmacht fought stubbornly and well, strongly entrenched with machine guns and 88-mm. guns, sowing its path of retreat with mines and demolition charges. But the rearguard could not hold; it could only delay—in the north, the center and the east—the steady pressure of the British and Americans toward Messina.
The strongpoint of the German rear guard was Randazzo, an ancient town built on the lava-strewn northern slopes of Mt. Etna in the most rugged countryside the Allied troops had yet encountered.
Randazzo was the last fort of the Etna Line, a vital center of communications for the Germans. They fought for it like tigers—500 to 600 of them, forcing Italian soldiers to fight with them. They held it for the better part of a week while Allied bombers and artillery reduced its houses to a heap of rubble. The battle for Randazzo was one of the bloodiest in the entire Sicilian campaign.
The troops which took Randazzo were veterans of Tunisia: the U.S. 9th Division (not heretofore reported in Sicily) and the British 78th Division. The Americans, who had been fighting their way up the highway from Troina (see p. 30), were first to enter the town. They found it deserted and aflame, racked by explosions.
The British, who had circled Etna from Catania, joined them soon afterward. From the twisting mountain roads they could see, far in the distance, the shimmering blue of the Messina Strait.