On July 10, 1943, approximately 160,000 Commonwealth and US troops made a series of amphibious landings on Sicily, the island just off the coast of Italy, the first time in three years that the Allied armies found themselves back on the European continent after Hitler’s blitzkrieg had chased them off at Dunkirk on the French coast.
The Sicily landings were noteworthy for more than just the scale of operations — they were, in fact, larger than the better-known Normandy landings in France a year later. There were astonishingly few casualties — roughly 153,000 soldiers were alive at the end of the campaign, far more than the planners had estimated.
There was good reason for this high survivor rate. When the first Allied landing craft hit Sicilian shores, the cream of the German army was waiting for them elsewhere, in Greece and Sardinia which Hitler was convinced were the real targets of the Allied invasion.
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