How could the Germans/Italians perform better in the Sicilian/Italian campaign?

What could the German and Italian military leadership have done to perform better than they did in OTL against the Allies during their campaign in Sicily/Italy from 1943 onward?

Cmyers1980 said:

What could the German and Italian military leadership have done to perform better than they did in OTL against the Allies during their campaign in Sicily/Italy from 1943 onward?

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Evacuate the Afrika Korps and as many Italians as possible in 1942-43, rather than trying to fight in Tunisia. Send the Panzer Armee Afrika instead to Sicily to hold it. Don't divert the 1st Panzer division to Greece rather than Sicily. So if you have successfully evacuated most of the Axis forces from Africa in 1942 and early 1943 and used the OTL reinforcements used in Tunisia instead in Italy, plus 1st Panzer, then you'll do better, but might well scare the Allies off from invading and cause them to instead invade Sardinia first. If they decide to go for it anyway, then they'll get a much tougher fight, as US forces won't have combat experience in Africa and there are a lot of highly experienced and well trained Italians and Germans in Sicily. Their only issue is that they will have to deal with Allies air superiority, but without the losses sustained trying to hold Tunisia, plus all the equipment losses there, especially in AAA, then they will have a much better chance defending. As I said probably too good a chance that could scare off the Allies from Sicily.

Yes Wiking, except the OP says from 1943 onwards.

Well, if you mean Italy the country rather than Mussolini better would be for them to negotiate an armistice sooner and have the Allies land their invasion forces more North of Italy to prevent an Axis takeover of the country. Not sure how they can pull that off but with less German foces in Northern Italy before the Allies can cut off the mountain range would mean a less war torn Italy and a quicker end to the war.

On the other side, doing better can't really mean anything for 2 countries loosing the war on all fronts. They can't send more troops as they need to take them away from The East or the Atlantic wall which makes their positions there worse. They can't retreat to a more defensive position unless its behind the major ports and landig areas for an Allied invasion, which basically means behind the Alps and abandoning the Balkans fully. Nothing can be better except perhaps some earlier fully defensive tactics with their airforces and ground forces. But its all only to delay, which means more casualties and destruction.

Keep the Italian armed forces in the fight after Mussillini is captured.
They could further slow the WALLY advance and make Anzio a disaster.
Canadians stall at Ortona.
Royal Marines and SAS stall at the Po River.

a masterful delaying action

at least as far as the Germans are concerned... they got most of their force including all of their equipment aside from combat losses.

doing better depends very much on the strategic objective... if it is to hold Sicily, then there are some considerations that depend on other things happening prior to the campaign.

The Allied deception effort was pretty successful as significant forces were allocated to Sardinia, Greece and Southern France in the expectation of possible Allied landings there (The Man Who Never Was incident is part of that)

So if the Germans have better intelligence, they could easily double their forces allocated to Sicily which might be enough. German counterattacks the first week of the campaign put the Allies in desperate straits on a couple of occasions.

Evacuating earlier from Tunisia, or not committing as many formations would be helpful, but then we need to eliminate Hitler to pull that off.

While the Italians still have a fleet (and so in theory if fuel oil is made available they could sortie) that fleet would be severely outnumbered by the Allied covering force and probably wouldn't even get close.

Committing more aircraft is going to be hard due to competing demands (Citadel is going on at the very same time) and losses were severe in both Tunisia and Stalingrad (mostly transports, but that is a lot of instructors who got killed too, and a substantial number of combat aircraft were also lost).

So if the the troops at Stalingrad break out, or the Axis evacuate instead of trying to hold Tunisia, then potentially far more aircraft are available.

If the objective is just to buy time frankly I don't see how the Germans could have done much better. A number of historians I have read give the Germans a lot of credit for a brilliant delaying action