The Day of Battle (10 page)

His cosmology was simple. “You are fighting for the right to live as you please, providing you don’t get in someone’s hair,” he told soldiers in Algiers on June 19. “We are fighting for liberty and the dignity of the human soul.” He promised, if given the chance, to have Mussolini shot. “I’m not one who finds it difficult to hate my enemies.” John Eisenhower, a shrewd observer of his father, noted that he pursued war with the same calculating intensity that made him an outstanding bridge and poker player, persuaded that “the Almighty would provide him with a decent set of cards…. He appeared not to share the metaphysical feeling that God-owed him anything specific, such as good weather on a given day.”

Yet as a field marshal he had built a spotty record in North Africa, and his aptitude remained unproven. “A coordinator rather than a commander,” one British general wrote. Another asserted that “he was not a soldier, he was just a compromiser.” Marshall believed he was so preoccupied with the politics of coalition warfare that “he had little or no opportunity to keep in touch with the troops.” In truth, he lacked a great battle captain’s endowments: to see the field both spatially and temporally; to intuit an opponent’s intent; to subordinate all resistance to an iron will.

He was indeed a compromiser, a coordinator, but that was precisely what this war—this total, global war—required. Eisenhower had long recognized that in such an existential struggle the most robust coalition would likely prevail; he also intuited that centrifugal forces, from national pride to personal vainglory, threatened every alliance. He was a master of the sensible compromise, convinced that an Allied commander must lead by considering disparate national viewpoints “to solve problems through reasoning rather than by merely issuing commands.” John Gunther had noted that “lots of Americans and British have an atavistic dislike of one another”; a senior British general warned General Brooke at the
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conference that “there is going to be grave risk of open quarrels unless someone can go round daily with a lubricating can.” Eisenhower carried that can, and nearly everyone trusted him to apply it judiciously. His British political adviser, the future prime minister Harold Macmillan, considered Eisenhower “wholly uneducated in any normal sense of the word,” yet “compared with the wooden heads and dessicated hearts of many British soldiers I see here, he is a jewel of broadmindedness and wisdom.”

The long summer twilight lingered in the west when Eisenhower finished a pot of tea and emerged from Verdala Palace for the short ride to his command post. His stomach, he confided to an aide, felt like “a clenched fist.” For two decades he had been plagued with intestinal ailments linked to stress, ever since the death of his elder son from scarlet fever in 1920.
Before the war he had been hospitalized repeatedly for enteritis and intestinal obstructions. (A disabling injury to his left knee in the 1912 West Point–Tufts football game had led to seven other hospitalizations.) A respiratory infection picked up at dank Gibraltar in November had never completely resolved, and Eisenhower’s chain smoking—he was up to sixty or more Camels a day—was hardly salutary. Although he paid John $1.50 a week
not
to smoke at West Point, Eisenhower’s habit had become so compulsive that he sometimes lit up in flight even when the crew of his B-17 Flying Fortress warned of gas fumes.

Cigarette in hand, he was escorted to the beetling walls above Grand Harbour. Landing craft and warships packed the port and inlets to the harbor’s mouth at Fort St. Elmo. Tars scaled the superstructures on a pair of battleships—back at Malta for the first time in over two years—while Maltese waved from their precarious balconies above the docks; aboard H.M.S.
Nelson,
a band had been playing “Every Nice Girl Loves a Sailor.” Eisenhower and his aides marched into the Lascaris Bastion, a tunnel complex originally dug by the Knights of Malta and now converted into a Royal Navy command post. Condensation glistened through whitewash on the limestone walls. Lascaris was bombproof, convenient, and wretched. Uniforms grew moldy in a day, and many staff officers suffered from lung afflictions or pappataci fever, passed by the biting sand flies. Portions of the citadel remained insufferably hot, while other chambers were so chilly that Eisenhower called for his overcoat. Even Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, the British naval commander in the Mediterranean who welcomed Eisenhower, conceded the place was “extremely smelly.” Officers condemned to Lascaris fortified themselves at two o’clock each afternoon with gin and orange juice or banana cordials.

Eisenhower strode through Pinto Tunnel with Cunningham, past a gallery of sheds used by officers whose staff functions were denoted by cabalistic symbols scratched on their door placards. His own office measured fourteen by ten feet; the furnishings included a wicker chair and an oil stove burning next to a single table draped with a gray blanket. A rug tossed on the clay floor barely mitigated “a chill that had been gathering for four hundred years.” Eisenhower found it hard to keep his cigarettes dry.

He shrugged off the discomfort and trailed Cunningham into a large war room with a forty-foot vaulted ceiling and enormous maps affixed to each wall. A twenty-by-thirteen-foot mosaic, compiled from five hundred photo reconnaissance missions, revealed all ten thousand square miles of Sicily. Gunther’s jaw dropped at the cartographic display, and he marveled in his notebook at the “infinitude of detail, their extreme up-to-dateness, and the
wonderful draftsmanship and lithography they represent. Have the Germans as good maps as these really super-maps, I wonder?”

Cunningham, his red-veined face florid above the white collar of his uniform, pointed out the colored lines that plotted the steaming Allied flotillas, from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules. Collectively they represented 160,000 troops, 14,000 vehicles, and 1,800 guns aboard 3,000 vessels. Radio silence had been imposed across the fleets, the admiral added, so little was known about their progress except that three Canadian ships traveling from Scotland had been sunk by U-boats in the western Mediterranean; the Canadians had lost several dozen men, several dozen guns, five hundred trucks, and much of their communications gear. Under a relentless Allied air bombardment of Sicily—the detonations could be heard on Malta on quiet evenings—most surviving Axis planes had fled from the island to the Italian mainland. But precisely how alive the enemy was to the impending invasion was unknown. Cunningham cocked an eyebrow at the fancy maps, as if considering his favorite expression: “It’s too velvet-arsed and Rolls-Royce for me.” Son of an Edinburgh anatomy professor, Cunningham—who served as Eisenhower’s chief naval deputy—had first come under fire in the Boer War, at age seventeen; now sixty, he remained fearless, pugnacious, and convinced that the optimum range in any fight was point-blank. Gunther noted that the underlids of his sailor’s squint were “lined with bright red, like a bulldog’s.”

Eisenhower studied the central Mediterranean. Sicily, a triangular rock the size of Vermont, lay ninety miles north of Tunisia and only two miles off the toe of the Italian boot. Its eastern end was dominated by Mount Etna, an active volcano ten thousand feet high and twenty miles in diameter. “The coast is everywhere scalloped with wide, sweeping bights separated from each other by capes,” an Allied terrain study noted. AFHQ planners had contemplated every inch of that three-hundred-mile coastline, scrutinizing thirty-two beaches as potential landing sites. Sicily had been overrun by even more successive invaders than Malta had endured: Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Spaniards, Bourbons. And soon, the Anglo-Americans. “Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe and violence,” the American writer Henry Adams observed. “For a lesson in anarchy…Sicily stands alone and defies evolution.”

An amphibious landing on a hostile shore, Eisenhower knew, was the hardest operation in warfare: wading ashore under fire, building a secure lodgement beyond the beach, then breaking free to the interior. In the long history of combat, the amphibious art had been mastered by no one. For every successful landing—such as the American assault at Vera Cruz in
1847—there was an equivalent catastrophe, like the British debacle at Gallipoli in 1915. For every failure—as of the Spanish Armada, or the Mongols in Japan—there was a military leader too daunted even to try, including Napoleon and Hitler, both of whom declined to cross the English Channel.

If amphibious warfare was inherently difficult, the Allies seemed determined to make it harder. The Combined Chiefs had ordered Eisenhower to begin planning
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on January 23; initial schemes focused on seizing Sicilian ports and airfields, with the intent of putting ten divisions ashore within a week of the first assault. Yet he and his lieutenants remained distracted by the Tunisian campaign; their various headquarters were so far-flung—from Cairo to Rabat—that couriers shuttled more than two thousand miles every day, delivering documents, maps, and messages. The main planning cell occupied the unheated
école normale
outside Algiers, where officers typed with their gloves on.

Eisenhower in March and again in April warned that
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would fail if the landing forces encountered “well-armed and fully organized German forces,” which he defined as “more than two divisions.” The British chiefs in London accused him of “grossly exaggerating” enemy strength, and Churchill sputtered with indignation at “these pusillanimous and defeatist doctrines…. What Stalin would think of this, when he has 185 German divisions on his front I cannot imagine.” Duly chastened, Eisenhower forwarded a plan under which British troops invaded Sicily’s southeast coast to seize the ports at Augusta and Syracuse, while the Americans landed in the west to take Palermo.

This drew unexpected fire from Eisenhower’s flank. The Eighth Army commander, Bernard Montgomery, had resisted involvement in
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planning while he was occupied with the Tunisian campaign: “Let’s finish this show first,” he snapped. When he eventually turned his attention to Sicily, Montgomery spread a large map of the island on the floor of his bedroom and mused aloud, “Well, now let’s see how it would suit us for this battle to go?”

The existing plan suited him not at all, and he promptly shoved a spanner in the works. “It has no hope of success and should be completely recast,” Montgomery declared. Falsely claiming that AFHQ planners had assumed that “opposition will be slight”—in fact, they presumed stiff resistance—Montgomery condemned all such “wooly thinking” and warned, “Never was there a greater error.” By late April, he was in full throat, forecasting “a first-class military disaster…. I am prepared to carry the war into
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with the Eighth Army but must do so in my own way.” To his superiors, he proposed sliding Patton’s Seventh Army under his command; to his diary he was even blunter: “I should run
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.”

Rather than divide the force, Montgomery argued, the attack should consolidate on the southeast coast, where American and British divisions could lend mutual support. With the invasion only two months away and the Combined Chiefs about to meet at the
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conference in Washington, Eisenhower convened another planning conference in Algiers on May 2. Over a lobster lunch—the lobsters cost AFHQ a thousand francs each—Montgomery pressed his point, then followed Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter B. “Beetle” Smith, into the men’s latrine to continue the argument, first from an adjacent urinal and then with arrows sketched on a steamed mirror. “The Americans,” a senior British staff officer, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Gairdner, told his diary, “are beginning to feel that the British Empire is being run by Monty.”

A day later, Eisenhower broke the deadlock and accepted the Montgomery plan, shrugging off protests from Admiral Cunningham and others who preferred naval dispersion and the seizure of more airfields. Patton rebuffed Kent Hewitt’s plea that he also contest the revised plan since American forces would no longer have the quick use of Palermo’s port. “No, goddammit,” Patton replied. “I’ve been in this Army thirty years and when my superior gives me an order I say, ‘Yes, sir!’ and then do my god-damnedest to carry it out.”

To his diary, General Gairdner confessed, “I can’t understand how democracies wage war.”
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now called for seven divisions—four British and three American—landing abreast across a hundred-mile span of southeastern Sicily. The seaborne force would also be preceded by portions of two airborne divisions, a wrinkle that required attacking in the second quarter of the July moon when it would be light enough for paratroopers to see but dark enough to cloak the approaching armada. Thirteen Allied divisions ultimately would be committed to the invasion.

Of the 300,000 Axis troops defending Sicily, the bulk were in Italian units of doubtful pluck. One American intelligence officer described the two German divisions as “strictly hot mustard”; as for the Italians, “Stick them in the belly and sawdust will run out.” Thanks to Ultra, the extraordinary British ability to intercept and decipher coded German radio traffic, Eisenhower knew a great deal about his enemy’s strength and disposition. An Ultra team—those admitted to the great secret were said to be “bathed in the blood of the lamb”—was at his disposal on Malta, as well as in Algiers. Since first breaking a radio message encrypted with a German Enigma machine in 1940, Ultra cryptologists at Bletchley Park, north of London, had intercepted and broken thousands of messages to provide “a panoramic knowledge of the German forces.” By mid-1944 nearly fifty sep
arate Enigma codes would be deciphered, including a new German army code called Albatross that had just been broken on June 2, and others named Hyena, Seahorse, Woodpecker, and Puffin.

Eisenhower also knew that the Italian navy—the only substantial Axis naval force in the Mediterranean, with six battleships and eleven cruisers—lacked radar, fuel, and aircraft carriers. The Italian air force had lost 2,200 planes in the past eight months and had little sense of the Allies’ whereabouts. “No one,” an Italian admiral complained, “can play chess blindfolded.” Not least, Eisenhower had a good sense of Italy’s social disintegration under the pressures of war and Allied bombing: coal and food shortages, labor strikes, rail disruptions, even a profound lack of lightbulbs.