The Day of Battle (17 page)

For weeks, Axis reconnaissance had deflected hints of invasion, including the presence of half a dozen hospital ships at Gibraltar on July 1—Italian pilots eventually counted sixteen in the Mediterranean—and the massing of landing craft and gliders in Tunisia. Yet Allied deception efforts for months had kept Axis intelligence off balance and befuddled. The British, for example, had created a fictional “Twelfth Army,” supposedly based in Cairo, with the notional mission of invading the Balkans through Greece in the early summer of 1943. Particularly successful was Operation
MINCEMEAT
, which featured a corpse later celebrated as “the man who never was.” A British submarine had dumped the body, dressed as a major of the Royal Marines, off the southern coast of Spain in late April. Manacled to the dead man’s wrist was a briefcase containing forged documents; these, it was hoped, the Spanish authorities would share with the Germans. The Spanish duly obliged. Subsequent Ultra intercepts revealed that German intelligence, convinced that the “major” had drowned in a plane crash, considered the documents further evidence that the main Allied blow would fall on Sardinia and Greece rather than Sicily.

Six immobile and badly armed Italian coastal divisions now guarded the Sicilian shore, backed by four Italian infantry divisions positioned inland with two capable German units: the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division in western Sicily, and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division in the east. The first unequivocal alert had been issued on Sicily at 6:40 on Friday evening, July 9. Allied bombs had shattered the rudimentary Sicilian telephone system, so some units got the word but others did not. A few Italian commanders, presuming that no fool would attack in such foul weather, went to bed. Exhortations at one
A.M
. Saturday to defend “this most precious piece of Italian soil” fell on deaf or sleeping ears. British Spitfires, using signals intelligence to pinpoint the German Luftwaffe headquarters, shot up the San Domenico Palace—a grand hotel in Taormina, once favored by D. H. Lawrence—and unhinged the Axis air defenses just as invaders approached the island.

Little was expected from the Sicilian coastal divisions, and that expectation was fully met. Training had recently been reduced because of footwear shortages, and Italian coastal artillery was limited to the pea-shooter range of nine thousand yards, further impaired by morning glare that blinded defenders facing south and east. The Syracuse garrison commander was killed in the invasion’s first minutes, and his skittish counterpart in Augusta spiked his guns without a fight. Italian foot soldiers surrendered by the thousands, or peeled off their uniforms and melted into the refugee hordes streaming inland.

The German response in those first irrecoverable hours, if less timid, was hardly impressive. Sicilian communications were so crude that the commander of the Hermann Göring Division first learned that he was under attack in a radio alert from Frascati, the German headquarters near Rome. Orders to subordinate commanders proved tardy or contradictory. The repositioning of one regiment was delayed when a courier carrying the movement orders died in a car wreck. Efforts to fling seventeen big Tiger tanks into the fight near Gela on Saturday were beset by mechanical breakdowns, poor leadership, naval gunfire, and the difficulty of picking a path through the olive groves. Fantasy prevailed over hard fact: Comando Supremo, the Italian high command in Rome, announced at noon on July 10 that the Gela and Licata landings were “almost cleaned up”; some Anglo-American troops were even said to have reembarked in their amphibious contrivances. A subsequent dispatch from Rome asserted that “the enemy is still actively landing but he is constantly in crisis.”

Such fairy tales did not deceive the man who would ultimately direct the defense of Sicily. For now he remained at his Frascati headquarters, sifting
through the fragmentary reports, rumors, and mendacities arriving from the island. But his tactical influence could already be felt on the young campaign, as well as his unquenchable optimism and a gift for battlefield improvisation. The Allies knew Field Marshal Albert Kesselring all too well. As the senior German commander in the Mediterranean—in effect, Eisenhower’s counterpart—Kesselring had thwarted a quick Allied victory in Tunisia, fought the Anglo-Americans to a bloody draw for months, then dodged both capture and recrimination when Hitler’s no-retreat decree consigned Axis forces in Africa to destruction. Ostensibly, he served under Italian authority, as a sop to the Pact of Steel signed in 1939, and to Mussolini’s proprietary claim on the Mediterranean; in reality, he answered to Berlin and had few equals in any army. Kesselring was loyal to Hitler as “Germany’s savior from chaos,” and he had long found it “possible to ignore the less pleasing things” in the Nazi regime. Hitler repaid the loyalty with a field marshal’s baton, which an aide carried in a zippered leather case.

Now fifty-seven, he had a face full of flashing teeth, which expressed both his Bavarian bonhomie and the nickname—“Smiling Albert”—coined by his soldiers. “Kesselring is a colossal optimist,” Hitler had said on May 20, “and we must take care that this optimism does not blind him.” An artilleryman who in midcareer had learned to fly and transferred to the Luftwaffe, he had a knack for the narrow escape, demonstrated most recently during an Allied bombing raid on Marsala in May that killed two staff officers; Kesselring fled the upper floor of a shattered building by rappeling down a rope to the street, badly skinning his palms.

For six months he had pondered how to defend southern Europe, and for six weeks he had believed that the next Allied blow would likely fall on Sicily. Kesselring’s overarching strategic concept involved keeping the war as far from the Fatherland as possible for as long as possible; as an airman, he had a vivid understanding of what Allied possession of bomber bases in Italy would mean for Munich, Vienna, and Berlin. Unlike many German generals—including his rival, Erwin Rommel—he considered all of Italy defensible,
if
the Italians would fight. Kesselring believed they would, although his Italophilia was tempered with sardonic disdain. “The Italian is easily contented,” Kesselring said. “He actually has only three fashionable passions—coffee, cigarettes, and women.” As for the Italian man of arms, he was “not a soldier from within.”

Kesselring in late spring had dismissed Sicilian defenses as “pretty sugar pastry,” but reports on July 10 that entire Italian divisions were evaporating disheartened even the “colossal optimist.” If Allied forces also landed in
Calabria, on the toe of the Italian boot, Sicily could become a “mousetrap,” with the result that another Axis army would be annihilated. To forestall this calamity, Kesselring realized, German forces on the island must strike before Allied troops consolidated their beachheads. The 15th Panzer Grenadier Division was too far west to attack quickly, because the field marshal, against Italian advice, had just shifted the grenadiers across 155 miles of bad roads to meet landings in western Sicily that now seemed unlikely. That left the Hermann Göring panzers to take the fight to the enemy. Badly mauled in Tunisia, the division had been hurriedly rebuilt and now mustered nine thousand combat troops with ninety Mk III and Mk IV tanks, in addition to the seventeen Mk VI Tigers.

From Frascati, Kesselring dictated an order to the division commander, General Paul Conrath: counterattack Gela at first light on Sunday, July 11, and drive the invaders into the sea. “Herr Feldmarschall,” Conrath had told Kesselring, “immediate advance on the enemy is my strength!”

Brigadier General Ted Roosevelt had insisted on splashing ashore in Gela with the first assault wave from the U.S.S.
Barnett.
On Beach Green 2 before dawn on Saturday, he sent a heartening dispatch back to the ship—“The Romans are fleeing inland”—then spent the rest of the day helping the 1st Division make land behind him. As the sun rose and concussion waves from the naval guns shimmered across the sea, Roosevelt scuttled about on his stubby, puttee-wrapped legs with “the twinkling walk of a sandpiper on the beach.” He wore no tie and often no helmet, and his rumpled uniform fit him like an olive-drab sack. The artist George Biddle described him in four adjectives: “bald, burnt, gnarled, and wrinkled.” Despite congenitally weak vision, Roosevelt often disdained eyeglasses, and more than once he had given a tactical briefing with a map tacked upside down by practical jokers on the division staff. Occasionally he burst into verse—an admirer deemed him “one of the world’s most fluent reciters”—and “in a rhythmic state of mind” he spouted passages of Kipling,
Pilgrim’s Progress,
and the iambic pentameter of his favorite poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson. A bum knee and a rheumatic hip forced Roosevelt to carry a cane, which he wielded as if it were a rapier, slicing the air and pointing at exits through the dunes. Rarely did he speak at any volume lower than a bellow, and now in his foghorn voice he roared, again and again, “Get into the battle!”

“I will always be known as the son of Theodore Roosevelt,” he had written in 1910, at the age of twenty-three, “and never as a person who means only himself.” He spent the subsequent three decades proving himself wrong. Decorated for valor in the 1st Division during the Great War—he
had been gassed at Cantigny and wounded at Soissons—young Ted then amassed both a fortune and a reputation independent of his father. A wealthy investment banker by age thirty, he lost the 1924 New York gubernatorial race to Al Smith by 100,000 votes, then pressed on in various public and private roles: as the governor of Puerto Rico and the Philippines; as the author of eight books; as a senior executive at American Express and Doubleday; as an early activist in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and as an explorer and a hunter, whose trophies for the Field Museum in Chicago included the rare mountain sheep
Ovis poli
and a previously unknown deer subsequently named
Muntiacus rooseveltorum
. He was plainspoken—“I’m anti-bluff, anti-faker, anti-coward, that’s all”—and unaffected. “Do fill your letters with the small beer of home, the things we knew in the kindly past,” he had written his wife, Eleanor, on June 5. “Also gossip. I love gossip.” A week later he wrote her a poem that began, “This dark, grim war has swallowed all / That I loved.”

Perhaps not quite all, for certainly he loved the Big Red One, as the 1st Division styled itself. “Ted Roosevelt is perhaps the only man I’ve ever met who was born to combat,” wrote the veteran war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, and soon after returning to active duty in 1941, Roosevelt became the division’s assistant commander. “Whenever you write a message, remember you’re writing it for a damned fool,” he advised junior officers. “Keep it clear and simple.” Troops adored his bluff pugnacity and considered him “an intellectual because he carries a considerable stock of books in his blanket roll,” observed the journalist A. J. Liebling. A 26th Infantry medic recalled, “When he got up to leave, we willingly got up and saluted.” In the Tunisian campaign, he again demonstrated extraordinary valor, winning the Distinguished Service Cross at the battle of El Guettar. Patton in his diary in late June deemed Roosevelt, now fifty-five, “weak on discipline and training but a fine battle leader…. There are too few.”

That he was “weak on discipline” was hard to dispute, and in that deficiency lay controversy and consternation. When another general complained that Roosevelt and the 1st Division commander, Major General Terry Allen, “seem to think the United States Army consists of the 1st Division and eleven million replacements,” Roosevelt quipped, “Well, doesn’t it?” In Tunisia he told the troops, “Once we’ve licked the Boche, we’ll go back to Oran and beat up every M.P. in town.” The division’s return to Algeria after the Tunisian campaign had indeed left a “trail of looted wineshops and outraged mayors.” Some troops fired at Arab peasants from troop train boxcars “just to see them jump,” admitted a 26th Infantry soldier, who added, “Too much vino, too cocky, and too much steam to blow off…. We just plain didn’t give a damn for anyone or anything.”

Toxic rumors that the 1st Division would be sent home from Africa—regimental bookies offered even money that they would be back in the States by August 1—simply fueled resentment when Patton instead requisitioned the Big Red One for his Sicilian spearhead. Grievances large and small accumulated: at being kept in filthy if durable wool combat uniforms when rear-echelon troops were switched to cooler khaki; at seeing men who had never heard a shot fired in anger sport the new brown-and-green African campaign ribbon; at service troops hoarding Camels and Lucky Strikes while sending inferior cigarettes to the frontline units. Patton’s taunting helped not at all. “The yellow-bellies of the First Division don’t need khakis,” he told Terry Allen; most of the troops, Patton added, likely would be “killed trying to invade Sicily.”

By late May, when the division bivouacked in a sere, shadeless camp outside Oran, not far from the
TORCH
invasion beaches of 1942, the troops agreed that the city should be liberated again. Swaggering eight abreast down Oran sidewalks, they shoved the khaki-clad into the gutters and ripped the campaign ribbons from khaki blouses. One group, slapping three months’ pay on the bar of the Florida Club, told the barkeep, “Let us know when this is up.” A division memo decried “excessive drunkenness” and the troops’ “disheveled appearance”; brass knuckles and contraband German Lugers were confiscated, and a five
P.M
. curfew was imposed in the city’s taverns. Still the “second battle of Oran” raged on, featuring “lively brawls in which sides were chosen by the cloth worn.” An 18th Infantry soldier noted: “Truckloads of gun-toting GIs and cocky junior officers take over Oran…scaring civilians indoors and bringing M.P.s.” Roosevelt inflamed the men by implying they need not salute officers outside the division, and an unconfirmed rumor put Terry Allen in the middle of an 18th Infantry scrap with MPs.

Higher authority was “bitched, buggered and bewildered,” Roosevelt acknowledged. General Lucas told his diary on June 27, “The division has been babied too much. They have been told so often that they are the best in the world that so far as real discipline is concerned they have slipped.” Eisenhower was furious, and ordered Allen’s immediate superior, Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley, to expel the 1st Division from Oran. For a prim sobersides like Bradley, the Oran rampage was yet another black mark in the ledger of black marks he had kept since Tunisia on the division and its commanders, whom he considered “freebooters.” The 1st, Bradley sniffed, “was piratical at heart.”