Could an invasion like Operation Husky have been stopped?

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Deleted member 1487

Reading about the Sicily campaign it was clear the Axis was heavily overmatched due to their losses in Tunisia, leaving very weak air and ground component to resist, which got rolled pretty quickly. But even with a 'full' strength defense including the forces used in Tunisia would an invasion as large and powerful as what the Allies mustered in July 1943 able to be stopped or was it an inevitable victory due to the weight of it and the impact of naval gunfire?

For the sake of argument let's say that instead of holding in Africa after Torch the Axis only moves in long enough to wreck the ports and airfields and buy time for the Axis forces with Rommel to retreat back to Sicily. So the forces used by Rommel after El Alamein and the Tunisian reinforcements are instead all returned to Sicily to plan the defense. The US forces don't then gain much if any experience from Tunisia. What then happens when they invade with the Afrika Korps, 5th Panzerarmee, OTL Sicily reinforcements, and whatever Italians forces were used in Africa were then used to defense Sicily? That would include the Axis air forces not used up defending Tunisia. Could that level of ground and air units have successfully resisted the OTL Allied invasion or would it have only delayed the inevitable?
 
I am not sure about actually stopping and driving the invaders into the sea, but could a successful Axis defense turn the Sicilian beachheads into something like Anzio?
 
If the defenders are concentrated in Sicily, then the Allies simply invade Sardinia, or Crete...
 

Deleted member 1487

If the defenders are concentrated in Sicily, then the Allies simply invade Sardinia, or Crete...
Would they though? The point of the invasion was to open up the Mediterranean to shipping and start engaging Axis troops to distract them from the East. Crete and Sardinia don't do that and Sardinia is outside of single engine fighter range.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Since the Allied expeditionary forces assigned to

Reading about the Sicily campaign it was clear the Axis was heavily overmatched due to their losses in Tunisia, leaving very weak air and ground component to resist, which got rolled pretty quickly. But even with a 'full' strength defense including the forces used in Tunisia would an invasion as large and powerful as what the Allies mustered in July 1943 able to be stopped or was it an inevitable victory due to the weight of it and the impact of naval gunfire?

For the sake of argument let's say that instead of holding in Africa after Torch the Axis only moves in long enough to wreck the ports and airfields and buy time for the Axis forces with Rommel to retreat back to Sicily. So the forces used by Rommel after El Alamein and the Tunisian reinforcements are instead all returned to Sicily to plan the defense. The US forces don't then gain much if any experience from Tunisia. What then happens when they invade with the Afrika Korps, 5th Panzerarmee, OTL Sicily reinforcements, and whatever Italians forces were used in Africa were then used to defense Sicily? That would include the Axis air forces not used up defending Tunisia. Could that level of ground and air units have successfully resisted the OTL Allied invasion or would it have only delayed the inevitable?

Since the Allied expeditionary forces assigned to HUSKY were essentially equivalent to those assigned to OVERLORD, one can argue the Germans did, in fact, try to do just that...

Didn't work any better in 1944 than it had in 1943, however.;)

Best,
 
The Allies would have known the German's OoB due to Ultra, so if it was considered to be too well defended, then they would have gone elsewhere.
 
Would they though? The point of the invasion was to open up the Mediterranean to shipping and start engaging Axis troops to distract them from the East. Crete and Sardinia don't do that and Sardinia is outside of single engine fighter range.

Check a map - Sardinia is also a major threat to passage through the Mediterranean, and Bizerte is closer to Cagliari than Palermo.

Crete also offers the advantage of forward airfields for attacking Ploesti.
 

Deleted member 1487

Check a map - Sardinia is also a major threat to passage through the Mediterranean, and Bizerte is closer to Cagliari than Palermo.

Crete also offers the advantage of forward airfields for attacking Ploesti.
I have, yes I know it is, but its meaningless without removing Sicily, the major impediment to convoy traffic.
Bizerte wasn't the source of air support, that was Malta, 90 miles from Sicily, and some of the small captured islands even closer.

Crete also has the disadvantage of being far away from Allied land bases, meaning only carrier aircraft can support the landing and there are a maze of small islands to deal with that would impede traffic; you'd need to capture nearby islands before going after Crete, which the Aegan campaign demonstrated as being a bad idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecanese_Campaign

The Allies would have known the German's OoB due to Ultra, so if it was considered to be too well defended, then they would have gone elsewhere.
Where that would make strategic sense for the necessary resources invested? Sardinia got the bulk of Italian fortification construction after the fall of Tunisia, so would have been a tougher nut to crack, especially as the landing area is extremely obvious and well fortified:
sardinianewzzz.gif


You would have to do a frontal assault on Caligari to capture a port and coming in from the West isn't going to yield much other than an Anzio situation. Crete has major issues too as a target, not least of which they cannot come in from the North and all the major air bases/ports are then outside of range of land based aircraft and easy capture, meaning you'd have only carrier aircraft against well supplied and supported ground aircraft.
Eastern-Mediterranean-map.jpg


WWIIEurope18.gif


Map%20of%20Crete%20WWII.jpg
 
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TFSmith121

Banned
The Allies were running east-west convoys in the Med

The Allies were running east-west convoys in the Med before HUSKY, however; once Tunisia fell in May, the Allies had land-based air cover from Morocco to Egypt (and north to Syria and Cyprus, for that matter), plus Malta and Pantellaria after CORKSCREW.

Sicily was not needed as far as opening the Med to Allied shipping.

Best,
 

Deleted member 1487

The Allies were running east-west convoys in the Med before HUSKY, however; once Tunisia fell in May, the Allies had land-based air cover from Morocco to Egypt (and north to Syria and Cyprus, for that matter), plus Malta and Pantellaria after CORKSCREW.

Sicily was not needed as far as opening the Med to Allied shipping.

Best,
East-West is not West-East major supply convoys to Asia from Britain. Do you have a source on this so we can look into what the details were?
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Look up the GTX/XTG and GUS/SUG convoys

East-West is not West-East major supply convoys to Asia from Britain. Do you have a source on this so we can look into what the details were?

Look up the GTX/XTG and GUS/SUG convoys.

The Tripoli-Alexandria leg (and back) was in operation by January, 1943; a special convoy ran west to east the full length of the Med in May, and the full GTX/XTG route (all the way to Gibraltar and back, east-west and west-east) was open by June - a month before HUSKY (see Roskill):

By the 15th of May a channel two miles wide and 200 miles long had been swept from the Galita Channel to Sousse, and thence on to Tripoli.Nearly 200 moored mines were cut. That day Cunningham signalled that 'the passage through the Mediterranean was clear', and that convoys from Gibraltar to Alexandria could be started at once. The Admiralty sent its congratulations. The Navy thereupon took up the second of the two new duties mentioned - that of escorting these ships safely through the waters which had for so long been closed to our shipping. The first convoy consisted of four fast merchant ships. Escorted by the A.A. cruiser Carlisle and four destroyers they reached Tripoli on the 22nd. Four more merchantmen joined up there, and the Malta destroyers strengthened the escort for the second part of the journey. All ships arrived safely at Alexandria on the 26th. It was the first through-Mediterranean convoy to run since operation 'T[SIZE=-1]IGER[/SIZE]' in May 1941. After this special convoy a regular series (called GTX and TXG) was started between Gibraltar and Alexandria. The saving of shipping achieved by the reopening of the Mediterranean was enormous. Before operation 'T[SIZE=-1]ORCH[/SIZE]' was launched the Naval Staff estimated that it would bring us at least a fifty per cent saving of shipping bound for the Middle East, and about a twenty per cent saving of ships sailing to and from India. In addition more than half of the eighty-five ships permanently employed on the WS convoy route could, so they expected, be released. At the end of 1942 the prospective gain was assessed at about a million tons of shipping; and a further half million tons in French ports had come into our use. On the other hand we lost over a quarter of a million tons of shipping during the North African campaign; delays and postponements of Atlantic convoys had deprived Britain of a million tons of imports, and the enemy gained to his use some 875,000 tons seized in the Mediterranean ports of metropolitan France. Although therefore in terms of statistics the saving of tonnage to the Allies was not very much greater than the losses suffered and the gains received by the enemy, in terms of strategy the advantages to our cause were immense. Quite apart from merchant shipping, our warships and maritime aircraft could now be more economically employed, and more advantageously disposed.

http://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/UK-RN-II/UK-RN-II-19.html

Whatever the strategic point of HUSKY, it was not to open up the Mediterranean convoy routes.

Best,
 
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The Allies were running east-west convoys in the Med before HUSKY, however; once Tunisia fell in May, the Allies had land-based air cover from Morocco to Egypt (and north to Syria and Cyprus, for that matter), plus Malta and Pantellaria after CORKSCREW.

Sicily was not needed as far as opening the Med to Allied shipping.

Best,

I was about to say...


...
Whatever the strategic point of HUSKY, it was not to open up the Mediterranean convoy routes.

Best,

Yet thats what Brooke argued for so strongly at The Symbol confrence in Jan 1943. To the point of dismissing a March 1943 attack on Sardinia, and of course a 1943 invasion of France. Every account of that confrence claims Brooke came armed with a crate of binders filled with data showing Allied cargo shipping capacity at the end of 1942 & projections for 1943. Be interesting to hunt down those documents & cross check them against any other records of Allied cargo shipping capacity.
 
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Would they though? The point of the invasion was to open up the Mediterranean to shipping and start engaging Axis troops to distract them from the East. Crete and Sardinia don't do that and Sardinia is outside of single engine fighter range.

Actually it is in range. The P40E models could reach the southern portion and the P47s arriving in the spring of 1943 certainly could range all of it. Add in some carrier avaiation & such a attack is doable. There was staff work done in January 1943 in support of a proposed March attack on Sardinia.
 
Check a map - Sardinia is also a major threat to passage through the Mediterranean, and Bizerte is closer to Cagliari than Palermo.

Quite true. The Axis were launching attacks on Allied ships along the Algerian coast from November through January 1943. Not really sure when they stopped or why.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Consider the source...

Yet thats what Brooke argued for so strongly at The Symbol confrence in Jan 1943. To the point of dismissing a March 1943 attack on Sardinia, and of course a 1943 invasion of France. Every account of that confrence claims Brooke came armed with a crate of binders filled with data showing Allied cargo shipping capacity at the end of 1942 & projections for 1943. Be interesting to hunt down those documents & cross check them against any other records of Allied cargo shipping capacity.

Field Marshal Brooke was many things; audacious was not one of them.

The first Malta convoy after TORCH was PORTCULLIS, a five ship convoy (MW 14) in Nov-December, 1942, that arrived from Port Said with 50,000 tons of supplies, and the first to arrive without any losses since 1941. Nine more ships arrived in convoys MW 15 thru 18, with 16,500 tons of POL and and 53,100 tons of general supplies and military materiel by the end of December, while 13 ships returned to Alexandria as convoys ME 11 and 12.

So Malta is well and truly relieved a month after TORCH, and east-west and west-east convoys are running the full length of the Med by May-June (a month or more before HUSKY); Sicily was not necessary for either of the above goals, obviously.

Best,
 
Field Marshal Brooke was many things; audacious was not one of them.

The first Malta convoy after TORCH was PORTCULLIS, a five ship convoy (MW 14) in Nov-December, 1942, that arrived from Port Said with 50,000 tons of supplies, and the first to arrive without any losses since 1941. Nine more ships arrived in convoys MW 15 thru 18, with 16,500 tons of POL and and 53,100 tons of general supplies and military materiel by the end of December, while 13 ships returned to Alexandria as convoys ME 11 and 12.

So Malta is well and truly relieved a month after TORCH, and east-west and west-east convoys are running the full length of the Med by May-June (a month or more before HUSKY); Sicily was not necessary for either of the above goals, obviously.

Best,

& we have had the entire conversation about outflanking the entire Axis position in Italy/Sicilly via Sardinia. More than once I remember. The only question we cant answer is it Hitler would stubbornly order Kesselring to sit tight in the stratigic trap of Tunisia while the Allies hammered Italy into surrender from Sardinian airbases...
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Except that if the OP's conditions are accepted

& we have had the entire conversation about outflanking the entire Axis position in Italy/Sicilly via Sardinia. More than once I remember. The only question we cant answer is it Hitler would stubbornly order Kesselring to sit tight in the stratigic trap of Tunisia while the Allies hammered Italy into surrender from Sardinian airbases...

Except that if the OP's conditions are accepted, the Germans aren't in Africa to any extent, and the Italian are left holding the bag.

Best,
 
Well if Italy and Germany retreated to Tunisia or even Sicily after Torch, then airbases in Libya could be built to give better cover to any invasion or Crete. One the Allies can get more airbases to allow fighters and bombers to attack Sicily, then you may have an attrition battle akin to the BoB, with the sides reversed.
 
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