ABSTRACT
The invasion of North Africa and the lengthy Tunisian campaign had inevitably drawn the Allies into a Mediterranean strategy, and Sicily was the obvious target. Sicily also offered easier Allied access to mainland Italy. Italian troops defended the Sicilian coast while Field Marshal Kesselring, Adolf Hitler's commander in Sicily and southern Italy, held the less numerous but more mobile German forces in reserve. On September 12, German commandos, led by Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny, landed in gliders on the mountaintop where he was held prisoner, rescued him, and escaped by plane. Hitler now installed the Duce as ruler of a puppet Fascist state in northern Italy. Pietro Badoglio wanted to switch sides and join the British and Americans in ridding Italy of the Germans, but the Allies, primarily at American insistence, clung to their doctrine of unconditional surrender. Dwight Eisenhower moved to London to become supreme commander of the long-delayed cross-channel invasion, with Montgomery as his field commander.
