Invasion Of Sicily Quotes

Is it fair for the bears to come down to where humans live, looking for food? Is it fair for the Duke's soldiers to shoot at them? Is it fair for the bears to crush them with giant snowballs? Often, if you point out something that isn't fair, someone will reply, "Life isn't fair." What is to be done with such people?

Think of George Washington, putting everything he had into the American Revolution, and then saying, “The event is in the hand of God.” Or Eisenhower, writing to his wife on the eve of the Allied invasion at Sicily: “Everything we could think of have been done, the troops are fit everybody is doing his best. The answer is in the lap of the gods.” These were not guys prone to settling or leaving the details up to other people—but they understood ultimately that what happened would happen. And they’d go from there. It

But despite the pressure, Italian authorities refused to cooperate. The Allied invasion of Sicily in July, Mussolini’s subsequent fall from power, and his replacement as head of government by Marshal Pietro Badoglio ended any lingering hopes of the French and German authorities that the Italians would release foreign Jews in their zone and ease the pressure on Vichy officials to arrest Jewish citizens.

American intelligence officers, somewhat better informed than the Duce, understood that for the projected invasion to be successful it was vitally important to have the Mafia firmly on the Allied side.

Then one of them asked me what those Italian volunteers were really coming to do in Sicily. ‘They are coming to teach us good manners,’ I replied in English. ‘But they won’t succeed, because we think we are gods.’ “I don’t think they understood, but they laughed and went off. That is my answer to you too, my dear Chevalley: the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they consider they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral.

They were sometimes closer to truth than the government wanted radio to be. Anticipating an invasion of Sicily, Robson sent writer Allan Sloane to Massachusetts, where engineers were being trained in the art of beachhead landings. “I knew they were gonna go in someplace,” he said, “and there had to be beachfront landings. So we knew ahead of time all the techniques that were being taught, and we just dramatized a textbook landing.” The news bulletins came on a Friday evening, Robson remembered. “I called Allan and asked how the script was going. He said he was nearly finished. I said, ‘You’d better be finished, because we’re goin’ with it on Sunday.

If you look at a map, you will see that the country of Italy is shaped like a boot, and that the island of Sicily appears to be something that Italy is kicking. What do you think Sicily has done to annoy Italy?

Three hundred DUKWs and other vessels swarmed between island and mainland “like so many gnats on a pond,” a witness reported, and this first invasion of continental Europe—an all-British operation code-named BAYTOWN—had proved so placid that Tommies soon called it the Messina Strait Regatta.