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The Rearguard's End. The capture of Randazzo spelled the German rearguard's end. To north and east, along the coastal roads, they fought tenaciously against the U.S. and British forces knifing up the shorelines. But at week's end the remnants were fleeing. On the north coast a second amphibious flanking movement of the Americans cracked their line at Capo d'Orlando and opened up a downhill road to Messina. On the east shore the British pushed up past Riposto, past Taormina, to within artillery range of Italy itself. On neither front was any major contact made with German forces—the speed of the Allied advance was hindered only by mines and demolitions.
A steady bombardment from sea & air rained on the small boats ferrying the Germans from Messina to the mainland. While Allied light and heavy warships steamed into the straits to shell the skittering small craft, Allied aircraft bombed and strafed them from above. The Germans had massed hundreds of ack-ack guns at the straits, as well as heavy batteries of coast artillery—but there was little opposition to the Allies from the air.
The Germans were beaten in the Sicilian skies as decisively as they were beaten on the island's soil. Said Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, commander of the Northwest African Tactical Air Force: "[The Luftwaffe] has been knocked out of the skies so far as we are concerned." How completely the Allies dominated the seas was shown last week when a British task force steamed up to the Gulf of Naples, shelled naval installations there and returned without a scratch.
In so far as the Germans had fought a masterly delaying action in Sicily, possibly a major portion of their troops were salvaged. In the last phases of the battle, the German command did not collapse as in Tunisia; outnumbered though they were, the leaders used their dwindling force effectively, forcing the Allies to fight for every town. The German soldiers, too, although they must have realized for days that Sicily was lost—and apparently were beginning to realize that the war might be lost—put up a bitter last-ditch fight in every machine-gun nest.
But the Allied forces, too, had fought far better than in the Tunisian campaign, had reached a new peak of efficiency in their cooperation. The U.S. forces in particular showed, at Troina, at Randazzo and in their amphibious flanking movements on the northern coast, that they could take the best the Germans had to offer in the worst terrain they had yet seen, terrain in which their advantage in numbers hardly counted because large forces could not be brought into action.
In their advance last week the Allies captured German documents detailing orders to evacuating troops to take all the equipment they could carry with them. These orders said that to Italy, "the passport is a gun." Those words, for the Allies as well as the Germans, could stand as a motto of the Sicilian campaign.