The landing in Scoglitti and the fighting near Santa Croce Camerina

From the mouth of the Dirillo River to Braccetto Point, the beaches were defended by the men of the 178th Infantry Regiment of Colonel Tommaso Franceschelli, part of the 18th Coastal Brigade. The 178th was headquartered in Vittoria and deployed two infantry battalions on the beaches: to the west, from the mouth of the Dirillo to Cape Camarina, the 389th Battalion of Major Roccuzzo, headquartered in Scoglitti; to the east, between Cape Camarina and Braccetto Point, the 501th Battalion of Major Zotta, headquartered in Fattoria Randello. The 537th Machine Gun Company was scattered along the coast.

East of Braccetto Point began the sector of General D’Havet’s 206th Coastal Division, which between Secca Point and the mouth of the Irminio river deployed Lieutenant Colonel Milazzo’s 383rd Battalion (four companies and a cyclist platoon, overall 600 men) and the 511st Machine Gun Company with headquarters in Santa Croce Camerina, reinforced by a 81 mm mortar platoon with two mortars. The artillery in the sector held by the 178th consisted of two 75/27 mm batteries of Lieutenant Colonel Lauritana’s 21st Group (6th Artillery Group, Colonel Giustino Freda). From west to east the following batteries were deployed: the 451st was divided between Casa Strasattata and Zafaglione Point (southwest of Vittoria), the 288th was at Cape Camarina (mouth of the Ippari river, south of Vittoria), the 452nd at Braccetto Point (a little to the west of Santa Croce Camerina. In the sector held by the 383rd Coastal Battalion (123rd Coastal Regiment) the 73rd Battery was deployed, with four 149/35 mm guns (25th Artillery Group), part of the Cozzo Cappello stronghold, east of Santa Croce. A 75/27 mm gun, not part of a battery, was placed at Secca Point with a dual task, both anti-landing and anti-tank; a 47/32 mm gun was placed in Roadblock 451, between Santa Croce and Secca Point, and another was at Roadblock 452, on the Ragusa-Marina di Ragusa-Scicli-Santa Croce crossroads.

Soldiers of the 383rd Coastal Battalion.

When the American 157th Infantry Regiment landed, the captured the beach after overcoming a weak resistance. The Cape Camerina battery was captured, whereas the Scoglitti battery fought back; in this battery an artilleryman, who panicked at the sight of the huge enemy invasion fleet, tried to flee and was killed by his captain with his handgun. The battery opened fire on the landing craft and hit seven of them, until gunfire from the American ships hit and disabled it. The Braccetto Point, Zafaglione Point and Casa Strasattata batteries were neutralized after an hour of shelling.

Colonel Giuseppe Primaverile, in command of the 123rd Coastal Regiment with headquarters in Scicli (the regiment occupied the stretch of coast from Punta Religione to the mouth of the Irminio river, where no enemy landing took place), received a phone call from an outpost that had been captured by American paratroopers; the man at the other end of the line, who by his voice seemed an Italian American, flattered his military valor and suggested that he should better surrender, or else. Primaverile instead ordered a counterattack, which led to the capture of a hundred paratroopers, who were handed over to the Carabinieri of Scicli. Some hours later, the roles would be reversed, and it would come Primaverile’s turn to end in captivity.

“Before dawn on 10 July”, Colonel Primaverile wrote in his report, “the two battalion commanders reported that numerous enemy ships were in the sea off the coast, to the east and to the west. I informed the divisional command, then I ordered the group and battalion commands to open fire as soon as the enemy ships would come within the range of the guns. The first battery to open fire was the 74th, at 4:00, when the enemy ships had closed enought to the coast and had dropped anchor to commence the landing operations. The fire was very effective, as the sea in front of the beach of Scoglitti was packed with enemy ships, estimated to be about 800 [probably exaggerated]. Seven ships were hit, as reported by the Punta Secca naval observation post. The 74th Battery was targeted by naval artillery and silenced after a few shots. The emplacements, the guns, the ammunition depots were destroyed. Losses among the personnel were heavy, as I later learned in captivity; two officers and a dozen of artillerymen killed, many more wounded”.

Resistance in Scoglitti was scarce. The Italian soldiers who had survived the naval bombardment were stunned and discouraged, and many surrendered when the landing troops of the 45th Division arrived; the others were easily overcome. The Americans lost 27 men killed or drowned.

Near Villa Criscione, on the road between Santa Croce Camerina and Marina di Ragusa, Roadblock 452 was located, commanded by 24-year-old Lieutenant Giuseppe Saija from Messina (123rd Coastal Regiment) and armed with one anti-tank gun, two machine guns and some rifles. During the night and the following morning, the roadblock was first attacked by dozens of American paratroopers, and then by troops from the 45th Division; Saija’s men – a command platoon that had been hastily repurposed into a machine gun platoon – repelled several attacks, and the lieutenant himself was wounded in the action. Colonel Primaverile sent reinforcements to help this stronghold, but they were intercepted and destroyed en route by American troops; he requested the divisional command to send more troops, but he was told that there were no more reserves. Primaverile then turned to the Ragusa Military District and asked for help; the district sent a truck with fifty men led by a Captain, but they too ran into American soldiers, who inflicted serious losses upon them and prevented them from reaching Roadblock 452.

Lieutenant Antonio De Franciscis of the 383rd Coastal Battalion, 123rd Coastal Regiment (28 years old, from Noto), in command of a cyclist platoon who had been sent to reinforce the roadblock, was encircled with his men by American troops, but was able to break the encirclement; the cyclists reached their destination and joined the defenders of the roadblock, where they held out for several hours, until they ran out of ammunition. The anti-tank gun and the machine guns fired until the last bullet, then the defenders used hand grenades for the last defense; the attackers were supported by mortars and tanks.

After prolonged resistance, the soldiers of the 45th Division finally captured the roadblock at 13:00 on 10 July. Of the soldiers in the roadblock, three had been killed and a dozen wounded in the fighting; on the Italian side it was estimated that about thirty Americans had been killed, but this may be an exaggerated estimate. One of the defenders of Lt. Sajia’s roadblock, 31-year-old Corporal Rosario Granata from Castel di Judica (Catania), was awarded the Silver Medal for Military Valor for his behaviour: he personally fired a machine gun, inflicting casualties on the attackers who were trying to encircle the roadblock, until he was seriously wounded; even then, he refused to leave his weapon and had to be forcefully carried away to a dressing station.

The soldiers of Roadblock 452 with their chaplain.

More to the west, American paratroopers eliminated the command of the 501st Coastal Battalion in the Randello farm, owned by marquis Arezzo.

More American paratroopers were meanwhile operating behind the Italian first line; the Italian soldiers in the area, who expected that the enemy would come from the sea, were caught by surprise when they were attacked by the paras that came from the opposite direction. In Santa Croce Camerina, the command of the 383rd Coastal Battalion (held by the 53-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Francesco Milazzo, from Palermo), reinforced by some Carabinieri and about fifteen civilian volunteers armed with rifles and hand grenades (including a Giovanni Giannone and an old sea captain, named Marinelli), skirmished with the paras, killing or capturing several of them. Meanwhile the American troops of the 45th Division, supported by some tanks, advanced towards this town, whose defense mainly consisted of two roadblocks: one of them was located at Villa Comitini and was manned by 22 men, commanded by Captain Vincenzo Serra (commander of the 3rd Company of the 383rd Coastal Battalion); the other was located in the hamlet of Case Camemi and was manned by fifteen soldiers of the 511th Machine Gun Company (belonging to the "Guardia alla Frontiera", the Italian Border Guard, but attached to the 123rd Coastal Regiment), commanded by Lieutenant Giunio Sella.

The soldiers of "Caposaldo Case Camemi".

The American attack began at 7:30; both strongholds were overrun after a dogged resistance. Both Captain Serra and Lieutenant Sella were among the dead.

Lieutenant Giunio Sella, unlike most of the officers and men in the Coastal Divisions, was not a Sicilian. Aged 31, he hailed from the village of Quarone Sesia, in the Piedmontese province of Vercelli in north-western Italy: basically from the opposite end of the Italian peninsula.

On the morning of 10 July, some peasants who had gone to their fields to reap the wheat – as always, as if an invasion wasn’t underway – noticed two American paratroopers hiding below a carob tree. The peasants ran to Villa Spadola, where Lieutenant Sella had established the headquarters of his little unit, and informed him of their find. Sella rushed upstairs, looked out of the window and shouted “Halt!”, his gun aimed at some paratroopers; he was immediately shot, and tumbled down the stairs, mortally wounded. Members of the Spadola family carried him to a bed, where he first asked for water, then he asked them to write to his mother. He died shortly thereafter; the Spadolas wrapped his body in a bed sheet and was buried him in a nearby field, where they erected a simple gravestone.

Lieutenant Giunio Sella, killed at Case Camemi (Santa Croce Camerina) on 10 July 1943.

Captain Vincenzo Serra, instead, was a Sicilian; aged 46, he hailed from Roccapalumba, a village in the province of Palermo. He had received the order to “resist on the spot” and carried it out; with his stronghold surrounded by dozens of paratroopers, he rejected several demands to surrender and fought back throughout the night, repelling attacks launched from three sides, until ten in the morning of 10 July. In the end, he was mortally wounded by a burst of machine gun while firing a submachine gun on the assailants. The owner of Villa Comitini, Giorgio Comitini, rode off on horse to look for the village’s doctor, but when he arrived on the site it was too late. It was Comitini who took upon himself the task to write a letter to Serra’s family, informing them of the fate of their relative. Serra’s body was dumped in a mass grave, but Comitini retrieved it and later delivered the remains to the family.

Captain Vincenzo Serra, killed at Santa Croce Camerina on 10 July 1943.

In the afternoon, the commander of the 383rd Coastal Battalion decided to retreat to the north, after being insistently urged to do so by the village’s parish priest, Don Vincenzino Di Quattro, who feared a massacre of the inhabitants if the village was to become a battleground. Lieutenant Colonel Milazzo would be later captured along with many of his men. At 15:45 the American troops entered Santa Croce Camerina.

The remains of the soldiers killed at Case Camemi and Roadblock 452 were buried by the locals in a mass grave in a nearby field. More bodies, strewn around in Santa Croce Camerina and its hamlets, were collected by garbage trucks and buried in another mass grave in the town’s cemetery. Others yet lay unburied for days in the surrounding countryside, half-devoured by stray dogs. An unknown soldier, killed by a hand grenade in a pillbox near the fence of Villa Criscione, was buried there at the foot of a dry-stone wall. The body of Private Giorgio Leone, a 31-year-old Sicilian from Modica, was found in the hamlet of Pianicella, near Camemi, and buried in the Ragusa cemetery; the body of Private Giuseppe Drago, 29, from Comiso (Ragusa), killed in action on 10 July at Kilometre 10 on the Comiso-Santa Croce di Camerina provincial road, was buried on the spot. The remains of Antonino Carnemolla, a 41-year-old guardia di finanza from Ragusa, were retrieved on 3 December 1943, nearly five months after his death; those of Corporal Enrico Gigliolini (from Ascoli Piceno in the Marche region, central Italy) were found in the countryside near the hamlet of Cozzo Telegrafo in 1947, four years after the invasion of Sicily. The body of 29-year-old Private Giuseppe Rinaldi, from Nissoria, who was killed in action at Roadblock 452 (he was a member of Lt. De Franciscis' cyclist platoon), was never found; his son Filippo, who was four months old at the time, only learned about the place and circumstances of his father’s death after seventy years.

Private Giuseppe Rinaldi, killed at Roadblock 452 (Santa Croce Camerina) on 10 July 1943.

The exact number of Italian soldiers who died in the fighting in the area of Santa Croce Camerina is not known; local researchers have identified many of them over the last years, especially among the soldiers who hailed from Sicily, but many others remain unknown. Among those identified, besides Captain Serra and Lieutenant Sella, are Corporal Enrico Gigliolini, Private Emanuele Lombardo (31 years old, a Sicilian from Vizzini), Corporal Alfio Abate (44 years old, a Sicilian from Bronte), Private Giovanni Cencic (33 years old, from Caporetto/Kobarid in the Julian March, now Slovenia), Private Vittorio Corte (also 33, a Piedmontese from Terzo), Private Angelo Del Bene (35 years old, a Campanian from Marcianise), Private Giuseppe Di Caro (31 years old, a Sicilian from Siracusa), Private Giuseppe Di Pietro (28 years old, a Sicilian from Buscemi), Private Giuseppe Drago, Corporal Giovanni Maglione (34 years old, a Piedmontese from Borgomasino), Corporal Vincenzo D’Addetta (46 years old, an Apulian from Carpino), Private Umberto Scaranto (20 years old, a Venetian from Baone), Private Ennio Buralo, all killed in Santa Croce Camerina; guardie di finanza Antonino Carnemolla and Salvatore Tribastone (47 years old, a Sicilian from Ragusa), killed while opposing the landings at Braccetto Point; Private Giorgio Leone (31 years old, a Sicilian from Modica) of the 361st Anti-Paratrooper Squad and Private Vincenzo Borcellato, killed in Marina di Ragusa; Private Gaetano Licitra (31 years old, a Sicilian from Acate), Private Franco Bovi (23 years old, a Lombard from San Benedetto Po), Private Arcangelo Cartiglia (31 years old, a Sicilian from Ragusa), Private Giuseppe Casiraro (31 years old, a Sicilian from Modica), Private Mario Cinnirella (35 years old, a Sicilian from Caltagirone), Private Pasquale Cocchiara (33 years old, a Sicilian from Vittoria), Private Primo Dell’Ospedale (35 years old, an Emilian from San Clemente), Private Giuseppe Denaro (31 years old, a Sicilian from Modica), Private Giombattista Di Martino (31 years old, a Sicilian from Comiso), Private Angelo Emanuello (34 years old, a Sicilian from Grammichele), Private Gaetano Laporta (30 years old, a Sicilian from Barrafranca), Private Giovanni Lentini (35 years old, a Sicilian from Vizzini), Second Lieutenant Salvatore Nicosia (49 years old, a Sicilian from Chiaramonte Gulfi), Private Biagio Occhipinti (31 years old, a Sicilian from Comiso), Private Giorgio Occhipinti (31 years old, a Sicilian from Ragusa), Private Amedeo Pieri (36 years old, an Emilian from Cesena), Private Sebastiano Pizzimento (31 years old, a Sicilian from Militello), Private Salvatore Sottosanti (30 years old, a Sicilian from Ramacca), Private Guglielmo Spadola (30 years old, a Sicilian from Modica), Private Giuseppe Terravazzi (31 years old, a Lombard from Caronno Pertusella), all killed on 10 July in Scoglitti. Private Giovanni Landro (30 years old, a Sicilian from Santa Domenica Vittoria), wounded in action, who died on 3 August in Field Hospital No. 5.

Many others were declared missing, their remains buried in unmarked spots of the Sicilian countryside: Private Giuseppe Rinaldi, Corporal Antonino Lorefice (29 years old, a Sicilian from Scicli), Private Nicolantonio Carrozza (35 years old, a Campanian from Campolattaro), Private Salvatore Di Francesco (26 years old, a Neapolitan from Calandrino), Private Vito Gravina (28 years old, a Sicilian from Chiaramonte Gulfi), Private Silvino Martinetti (33 years old, a Piedmontese from Camburzano), Private Angelo Ragaglia (a Sicilian from Lentini, who was killed just five days before his 30th birthday), all of whom became missing in the area of Santa Croce Camerina. Some others survived the fighting only to die in captivity in North Africa, such as Private Giuseppe Michele Bassis, Private Settimio Fiani, Private Giuseppe Gullotta, Private Giovanni Messina.

Around 18:00 a group of American paratroopers of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment occupied the village of Marina di Ragusa, a little to the east of Cape Scalambri; at the same time, the Secca Point stronghold and Roadblock 451, south of Santa Croce, that had been reinforced by Italian Navy personnel, also fell. At 19:00, after spirited fighting, naval gunfire finally silenced the 73rd 149/35 Battery. The Cozzo Capello stronghold (Captain Guglielmo Tarro), of which this battery was part, held out until eleven in the following morning, when Tarro and his men surrendered after destroying the surviving guns and burning some secret documents.

Fighting took place in Donnalucata between the 2nd Company of the 381st Coastal Battalion (reinforced by sailors and by 27 armed civilians) and American paratroopers. The Italian soldiers of the 389th Coastal Battalion had tried to oppose the enemy landing, but their resistance had been sporadic and ineffectual. After overcoming the coastal defenders, at 14:00 the Americans captured the village of Scoglitti and its anchorage, and the 179th RCT advanced towards Vittoria with a pincer movement, along Highway 115 on the left and along the Scoglitti-Vittoria road on the right. No more obstacles stood in their way now; at 14:00 the first troops of the 179th RCT entered Vittoria from Via Milano, where they fought a skirmish with a small group of retreating Italian and German soldiers. After capturing the town, they proceeded towards Acate.

The fighting in this area is thoroughly described in the book “La battaglia degli Iblei” by Domenico Anfora, who during his research cross-referenced Italian, American, British and German documents. On the American side, Samuel M. Mitcham and Friedrich von Stauffenberg in their book “The Battle for Sicily” brush off the fighting near Scoglitti and Santa Croce Camerina with the following description: “…meanwhile, despite the confusion on the beaches, Colonel C. M. Ankcorn got elements of his 157th RCT moving inland on the morning of D-Day. Advancing quickly, he captured his first objective, the town of Santa Croce Camerina, at about noon. It was not much of a battle because there were no Germans in this sector and the Italians (the 501st Coastal Defense Battalion) were putting up only perfunctory resistance. As the Americans approached the town, white flags began to appear. Five hundred Italians surrendered and others took to the hills. Ankcorn was joined in the village by a battalion-sized contingent of U.S. paratroopers, who had earlier captured the nearby village of Marina di Ragusa and frightened the defenders of Cape Scaramia (the Italian 383rd Coastal Defense Battalion, on the extreme right wing of the 206th Coastal Defense Division) into surrender or retreat. About two hours later, at 2 P .M ., the 1st Battalion of the 179th RCT finally captured Scoglitti from the rapidly disintegrating 389th Coastal Defense Battalion of Colonel Sebastianello’s 178th Coastal Defense Regiment”. Von Stauffenberg, a German, is hell-bent on showing that his countrymen successfully defended Sicily for weeks against overwhelming odds and despite the ineptitude and cowardice of their Italian allies – a common refrain among German historians, always seeking to blame any defeat on their allies (especially if Italian, but this has been historically extended to Romanians, Austro-Hungarians, Hungarians, and others, depending on the war Germany lost). Samuel W. Mitcham is one in many American historians enamoured with the Wehrmacht, always ready to take any German source as the Holy Bible and apparently not even aware of the existance of Italian sources. After all, in his “Blitzkrieg no longer” Mitcham goes on to describe how Italian deserters looted the Sicilian villages they passed through, while in reality anyone who will take some time to inquire – whether from official documents or from old Sicilians who can still remember – who carried out widespread looting, and to a lesser extent rape and murder of Sicilian civilians, will easily find the answer: enraged German soldiers. This is happened in Pedara, Castiglione di Sicilia, Mascalucia, Randazzo, Adrano, Biancavilla, Calatabiano, Pedara, Belpasso, Valverde, Trecastagni and other towns and villages, and is well documented; but Mitcham could never believe that his noble German soldier, fighting for the Fatherland and even his inept Italian allies, could ever do such a thing. He wasn’t a Nazi, after all.
Samuel Eliot Morison, in “Sicily-Salerno-Anzio”, is even more dismissive.