Invading Sicily: HMS Tartar in Action, July 1943

HMS Tartar pictured in 1944.

The invasion of Sicily, or Operation HUSKY, as it was known, constituted the largest amphibious landing in history when it began on the night of July 9–10, 1943. It was the largest ever in terms of frontage and divisions landed.

2,900 American, British, Polish, Dutch, Greek, and Indian ships participated in the assault, a number that dwarfed the 670-vessel force that had landed in French North Africa thirty-six weeks prior.

Struggling to describe the vast invasion force congregating off Sicily’s coastline on the night of July 9, renowned British submariner Lieutenant Norman “Bill” Jewell later wrote how “The English language needs a new descriptive noun to replace the hackneyed word armada.”¹ He was right. Only a fleet of that scale could transport the 149,000 men, 14,000 vehicles, 600 tanks, and 2,000 guns involved in the initial landings.

Getting it all ashore was a monumental feat, one of five multi-domain operations unfolding concurrently on D-Day.²

Counting itself as part of this 2,900-vessel act was HMS Tartar, one of the Royal Navy’s few Tribal-class destroyers that managed to survive the war.³

“Lucky Tartar,” as the powerful, heavily-armed escort ship was known, had already been in its share of scraps. It spent much of its time after the outbreak of war hunting enemy warships, escorting troop and evacuation convoys, and conducting rescue and minelaying operations in the frigid North Sea. In 1941, Tartar supported a commando raid in northern Norway, captured multiple Enigma machines in seizure operations, and helped protect vulnerable convoys, some carrying prestigious passengers like King George VI and Winston Churchill. That year, Tartar also witnessed the sinking of the Bismarck.

After further escort stints in Arctic and Atlantic waters, Tartar was eventually reassigned to the Mediterranean, where it took part in Operation PEDESTAL, the the crucial mission to resupply the beleaguered garrison on Malta in August 1942.

Tartar operated inside the Mediterranean off the coast of Algiers during TORCH that November, screened convoys, raided enemy E-boat facilities, and carried out anti-submarine patrols during the ensuing Tunisian campaign, and helped blockade the Cape Bon peninsula at the campaign’s close under Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s famous orders to “sink, burn, and destroy; let nothing pass.”

Sealing off the enemy’s escape route to Pantelleria and Sicily, the Allies’ comprehensive naval blockade prevented a third of Axis shipping from reaching Tunisian shores, allowing a mere seven hundred enemy soldiers to escape across the waterway Italian soldiers dubbed la rota della morte.⁴

By mid-1943, the ship’s 190-man crew, in short, had already experienced a lifetime of adventure–and that was only half of its eventful wartime career. Sicily now beckoned.

What was Tartar’s role during the HUSKY landings? A report⁵ by Major J. Michael Lind, a British army officer aboard the Tartar as an observer during the landings, offers a firsthand glimpse into the chaos, complexity, and scale of modern joint and combined amphibious operations.

At first light on July 8, 1943 (D-2), Tartar sailed with a screen of Royal Navy vessels known as Force H. They were charged with sweeping the Sicilian Channel. The Anglo-American invasion forces were well underway, and Force H’s aircraft carrier, two battleships, and spate of cruisers and destroyers intended to make sure Allied landing craft could approach the Sicilian coastline without incident. Little happened on the daylong patrol, save one false alarm on Tartar’s ASDIC (sonar apparatus) caused by the dropping of a depth charge.

The real work soon began. While American troops prepared to disembark on sandy beaches to the west, British troops prepared to assault ports and beaches along Sicily’s southeastern Pachino Peninsula ahead of their offensive drive up the island’s eastern coastal corridor toward Catania.

The peninsula was divided up into general sectors for British assault forces–BARK in the southwest (Ragusa and its adjacent airfields) and ACID further north (Avola, Cassibile, Syracuse, and Augusta). These were further subdivided for each divisional and brigade landing team.

Assigned to the ACID sector, Tartar joined a convoy of twenty-one large troopships on D-1, the bulk of them oceangoing liners like the RMS Strathnaver and SS Orontes.

The hours ticked by as the force plodded toward its objective. Sailors and soldiers scanned the skies, watching for threats and listening for the droning sound of enemy aircraft above the crashing sounds of the sea. The sun rose high overhead, then began to set over the Mediterranean’s western horizon. No activity of note; nothing to report.

Indeed, it was all smooth sailing–until it wasn’t. On the afternoon of D-1 (July 9), an unexpectedly harsh wind from the northwest whipped midsummer swells into whitecaps that slapped hard against the Tartar’s bow. Seasick soldiers dubbed the storm “the Mussolini wind.”⁶ The storm’s gale-force winds (a rarity in the Mediterranean, even in winter) grew so pronounced, Italian coastal garrisons on Sicily retired that night confident in the impossibility of a landing. Overwhelming operational surprise, it seemed, was now a very real possibility. For a few hours, however, many Allied leaders wondered if the storm would spell disaster for their own amphibious and airborne elements.

Fortunately, the storm abated. By dusk, Tartar’s crew discerned the “the peak of Mount Etna and the outline of the Sicilian coast” looming in the distance.

As night fell, they heard the concussive crump of Allied bombs falling on Syracuse, and the percussive rat-tat-tat of enemy AA lancing up to greet them. At 2300 hours, a string of friendly airborne transports whizzed overhead towing gliders at “masthead height,” many of them bound for a tragic end. (The following morning, Tartar’s crew found Avola bay “littered with at least 10 gliders which had been released too early and landed in ‘the drink’”).⁷

Seven miles offshore, the convoy laid anchor. In the darkness, naval crews lowered seasick soldiers into awaiting assault boats (LCAs) floating alongside the troopships.

A destroyer would lead each assault convoy to within 1 1/2–2 miles of its beach objective. From there, the assault craft were guided in by submarine-planted sonic buoys, commando parties, and other navigational aids.

Lind noted “a certain amount of confusion” as the LCAs bobbled into line behind the Tartar. “It could not be definitely ascertained that the complete force was behind us when we headed for the shore,” he wrote. “It was pitch dark and visibility was low. The destroyer did not, in fact, pick up the sonic buoys but nevertheless hit off the right position and the craft went in.”

He couldn’t see much. The crew could only hope the LCAs made it in safely.

What Tartar’s crew did see were two powerful searchlights trained on the oncoming landing craft by dazed Italian defenders. Training her eight quick-firing 4.7-inch (120mm) Mark XII guns ashore, Tartar immediately knocked one searchlight out of commission; friendly troops engaged the other, the flash of grenades and glint of tracer fire visible offshore.

News from the beaches trickled in, sporadic but sure. All objectives were soon in friendly hands. As dawn broke, British vessels began the unending process of ferrying manpower and materiel ashore to support the assault troops.

The beaches came under occasional fire, ranged by Italian and German howitzers and mortars hidden behind the crests of Sicily’s many interior foothills. Tartar’s low trajectory guns proved unsuited to strike these targets, even if there had been a Forward Observation Officer (FOO) team ashore feeding the proper coordinates to Tartar’s gunnery officers via wireless radio sets. As it stood, the ship’s FOO’s had been reassigned to the cruiser Mauritius, and Tartar could provide only general covering fire.

Successive waves of landing craft continued to go ashore, not all unmolested: One LCA took a direct hit and erupted in flames; another Landing Craft, Infantry (LCI) became stranded. The majority, however, “landed and retracted beautifully” in ideal, calm conditions cooled by a gentle Mediterranean breeze. The consolidation of beachheads, seizure of ports, and unloading of naval vessels proceeded at a feverish pace.

Most opposition had ceased by mid-morning. By then, the large British troopships in the ACID convoy felt confident moving in closer to shore (two hundred yards offshore, to be precise) to facilitate offloading efforts. This was a risky move. In other areas, marauding German aircraft had strafed Allied supply vessels with impunity. What was to stop them from doing the same off the coast of Avola?

The element of surprise and sheer scale of the invasion played a vital role in blunting German air attacks. On D-Day, Tartar’s crew intercepted a telling radio transmission between two German pilots: “We can do no good here,” they were purported to have said, “this is a really big show.” Having intercepted accurate enemy reports detailing the size and course of the convoys with the same radio set, Lind believed the transmission to be genuine.

By early afternoon on July 10, the Royal Navy had put two divisions ashore in an almost “holiday atmosphere” of unfettered optimism. Insulation from enemy air attacks did not last forever; intermittent aerial attacks brought merchant and naval crews back to reality. One audacious FW190 pilot drew fire so a formation of Ju88s could drop their bombs on the ACID convoy; thereafter followed a constant flow of alarms and radio chatter as AA crews with itchy trigger fingers attempted to repel incoming raids.

“It became very obvious,” Lind wrote, “how difficult it is to distinguish even a Spitfire when flying high and in an intensely blue sky. One was certainly shot down, and, it was rumored, two more.”

The raids grew more intense as night fell. Emboldened by the cover of darkness, shortly after midnight on D+1 (July 11), a German pilot dropped a bomb that struck and exploded in the stern engine room of the SS Talamba, a fully-lit hospital ship sitting off the coast of Syracuse.

Tartar rushed to the scene, finding the stricken vessel “with her stern awash and most boats gone.” While Tartar spearheaded the rescue operation, the Talamba listed to starboard, crumpled in half, and sank “all in the space of about two minutes.” The ship’s crew took in nearly two hundred survivors, and all four hundred of the Talamba’s wounded were safely evacuated.

Syracuse fell that morning. Tartar and other screening vessels swept a channel into the harbor, and later that day scuttled a explosive-laden merchant vessel knocked out by an enemy bomb. The next day, D+2, Tartar was called off a bombardment mission on the port of Augusta to escort the Eskimo, a damaged British destroyer, to Malta for repairs.

It was on Malta where Lind came across a irate Italian POW, a general said to have been in charge of one of Sicily’s many coastal garrisons. The Italian, Lind observed, “considered we had been very unfair in coming in on a rough night and with no moon, as all his soldiers had gone to bed. If there is any truth in this story, it would indicate that the reports overheard by Tartar’s Dutch interceptors cannot have been relayed to the coast defenses and that the use of rather unusual weather conditions pays.”

The end of Lind’s report contains a multitude of lessons gleaned during the naval phase of Operation HUSKY. He lavishes praise on the Royal Navy, laments the “great difference between the silhouette photograph taken from a model [of Sicily] and the actual silhouette of the ground” at night, and the unreliability of navigational instruments aboard smaller landing craft. He called for more rigorous training to simulate the process of forming up behind navigating ships in the dark, but acknowledged that “no amount of dryshod training” could approximate the “strange conditions” of a nighttime landing.

Shore bombardments, in general, worked incredibly well in support of assault forces. Forward Observation Officer teams needed more training alongside their naval counterparts to facilitate joint cooperation. Close air support was conspicuous for its absence, the majority of Allied aircraft plastering Sicily’s inland airfields, enemy columns, and infrastructure while the assault unfolded.

Moreover, by highlighting the vulnerability of merchant vessels in traditional ship-to-shore operations (like those undertaken by the British during HUSKY–offloading troops from troopships into smaller vessels offshore and ferrying them back and forth between objectives), Lind stressed the revolutionary nature of shore-to-shore amphibious techniques facilitated by new open-bowed landing craft like the Landing Ship, Tank (LST) and the DUKW amphibious truck. Tested for the first time in the American sectors, the LSTs proved capable of offloading their cargo on open beaches faster than similarly-sized ships contending for berths at congested British-captured ports—certainly far faster than anyone predicted prior to the landings.

“It was a great privilege to watch this very successful landing operation,” Lind said. As an Army officer aboard a naval vessel, he appreciated how far “naval and army co-operation” had come in a few short years and complimented the Air Force’s ability to establish air superiority over the island, an achievement amply illustrated in the intercepted “warning cries of the German airmen reporting Spitfires above, below, ahead, astern, and abeam.”

“It was a combined operation in every sense of the word,” he concluded, and everyone, including the Tartar, had a critical role to play.