Word: messina
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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...
...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...
...Battle of Sicily was in its final phase. Not once did Allied pressure relax in the last 50 miles to Messina. On Aug. 2, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery of the British Eighth Army and Lieut. General George Smith Patton Jr. of the U.S. Seventh started an offensive. Within a week the generals and their men had cracked the enemy line from Mt. Etna to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Harried by land, sea and by air, the Germans fell back toward Messina's crescent beach. Less than four miles across the treacherous strait lay one castlecrowned heights of Italy...
Germans Backward. On the retreat to Messina there was no rest for the Germans. The big guns of U.S. warships tore into them on the north coast road; the Royal Navy ripped the highway on the island's other side. Over Messina converged the Allied air arm, bombing and gunning, by day and night, the barges and small boats shuttling Germans from Sicily to Italy, from the whirlpool of Charybdis to the rock of Scylla...
...Allied sea-&-air control had failed to blockade the Germans on Sicily. By air, through the fiercely bombed ports of Messina and Milazzo, and probably through obscure landing points on unoccupied beaches, the Germans brought enough troops to replace losses and actually to increase their front-line strength...