The Day of Battle (29 page)

As for Ted Roosevelt, the blow left him “hurt, despondent and mentally in a black cloud,” one officer said. In an open letter to the division he wrote, “I have been ordered away. It is a great grief to me.” In a personal farewell to the 26th Infantry, which he had commanded in the Great War, “he broke down and wept. And the men kept silent.” To Bradley he wrote, “Brad, we get along a helluva lot better with the Krauts up front than we do with your people back here in the rear.” Beetle Smith told him that he was not qualified to command a division; instead, he would move to the newly created Fifth Army as a liaison to French forces. “Of course I was heartbroken,” he told Eleanor, adding with a touch of self-pity, “Everyone loves me but our own high command.” Perhaps trading on her name, she privately wangled an audience at the Pentagon with Marshall, who bluntly told her that Ted “still behaved like a regimental commander” and “did not grasp the full scope of the responsibilities and duties as a brigadier general in an infantry division.”

But Roosevelt also sensed that a larger fate awaited him. Sharing a ride to Palermo with Robert Capa, he recited poetry with his usual fluency while his aide sang cowboy songs. Clues could be found in the dog-eared copy of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
carried in his kit bag: “I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am…. My marks and scars I carry with me.” To Eleanor he later wrote, “The longer I live the more I think of the quality of fortitude—men who fall, pick themselves up and stumble on, fall again, and are trying to get up when they die.”

“In a Place Like This”

R
IDGE
by ridge, road by road, town by town, the island fell to the advancing Allied armies. Montgomery’s right wing, stalled for more than two weeks at Catania, finally lurched forward again, and Tommies sang, “We’re Shoving Right Off.” An Allied battlefront that had meandered for 170 miles inexorably contracted to 45 miles as 100,000 enemy soldiers retreated past Mount Etna into the long funnel of the Messina Peninsula. “I am enjoying this campaign,” Montgomery wrote in his neat black script on August 4. “The Boche is getting very stretched and he cannot possibly stand up to my thrusts.” Others were skeptical of Montgomery’s claim to have cornered the Germans “in queer street.” Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s air chief, wrote a colleague on August 7, “Napoleon insists on his usual frontal attack with no risks.”

But although they were moving in fits and starts—nine thousand yards one day, three thousand the next—moving they were, despite mines, despite booby traps, despite snipers with telescopic sights hiding in baroque hillside tombs. The mayor of Catania surrendered his town with a theatrical affixing of signatures. Of 100,000 houses, only one in five was habitable. Germans had looted everything from beds to dinner forks, blowing up the Bank of Sicily and the Hotel Corona for good measure; British soldiers and hungry Sicilians picked through the leavings. Refugees fought over packets of British biscuits, while old women in black squatted in their doorways as if “they knew that all life was evil,” wrote the reporter Christopher Buckley.

Often enough, the Allied air force solution for interdicting the retreating Germans was to obliterate Sicilian towns, which barely impeded Axis withdrawals but killed thousands of civilians and complicated the Anglo-American advance. Thirty unexploded bombs lay in the rubble at Adrano, on the southwest slope of Etna, a town so battered that combat engineers needed thirty-six hours to carve a single-lane path through the drifted wreckage. “Troops will refrain from shooting Italian carabinieri,” advised signs posted by British officers. “They are entitled to carry rifles.” Battalions leapfrogged one another through thistles and cornflowers, dodging the slap of enemy artillery. A local orchestra greeted Canadian troops in one town, alternately striking up “God Save the King” and “Deutschland über Alles.” In Bronte, on Etna’s northwest shoulder, welcoming civilians chanted “Lord Nelson! Lord Nelson!,” and General Alexander added his name below Kesselring’s in the visitors’ book at an eleventh-century Norman castle that had once belonged to the British naval hero. Across the Catania plain and down the volcano’s lower slopes, British graves dotted the landscape like small mastabas. Identity disks dangled from wooden
crosses, and comrades manning the burial details scrubbed their hands with kerosene and collected the dead men’s helmets for reissue.

Above them all loomed Etna, the mythical forge of Vulcan, scarred with charcoal furnaces and logging roads that were fenced with brush to corral the cattle. Refracted colors danced at sunset above the reeking crater: the air was tinted with sulfates and sublimated chlorides. By August 13, Tommies had nearly circumnavigated the cone, twenty-five miles in diameter. Still, a British colonel scrutinizing a map of territory occupied by the Seventh and Eighth Armies was said to have complained, “That bloody Patton. He has us surrounded.”

Pleased as he would have been to surround Montgomery, Patton in fact was trying to encircle at least part of the retreating Axis army. The U.S. 9th Division, supplanting the 1st, bulled its way down Highway 120 from Troina to Randazzo, where only five houses in a town of fourteen thousand people remained livable. So many dead littered Randazzo—perhaps the most damaged place in Sicily—that “after a conference with the priest it was decided to burn the bodies in gasoline,” an Army report noted. “I feel like crying lots of times,” a soldier wrote his family, “but I don’t think it would help me much in a place like this.”

To exploit the flanking opportunities afforded by his command of the sea, Patton on August 10 ordered Bradley to mount an amphibious end run the following morning by landing a battalion twelve miles behind German lines, on Sicily’s north coast. In seizing Monte Cipolla, which loomed above coastal Highway 113 near Brolo, U.S. troops could sever the escape route for the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division rear guard and give Truscott’s 3rd Division a direct avenue to Messina, forty miles to the east. If bold, the plan was undermanned, as Allied amphibious operations so often were, and it led to another of the ugly confrontations that bedeviled Patton across Sicily.

Truscott, who was to provide a battalion from his 30th Infantry Regiment for the landing, requested a day’s postponement to position artillery and infantry support closer to Brolo. Bradley agreed; he considered the operation “trivial” and even “foolhardy,” and he resented Patton’s meddling with the corps commander’s tactical prerogatives simply to beat Montgomery into Messina. But the delay irked Patton: after several testy phone calls on Tuesday evening, August 10, he drove to the 3rd Division command post at 9:45
P.M
., flushed with anger.

He found Truscott in an olive oil plant outside Terranova, pacing with a map in his hand. “What’s the matter with you, Lucian?” Patton said. “Are you afraid to fight?”

“General,” Truscott said, his carbolic growl in sharp contrast to Patton’s shrill pitch, “you know that’s ridiculous and insulting.”

“General Truscott, if your conscience will not let you conduct this operation, I will relieve you and put someone in command who will.”

“General, it is your privilege to reduce me whenever you want to.”

“I don’t want to,” Patton said. “You are too old an athlete to believe it is possible to postpone a match.”

“You are an old enough athlete to know that sometimes they are postponed.”

“This one won’t be,” Patton said. “Remember Frederick the Great:
L’audace, toujours l’audace!
I know you will win.”

Having pulled rank to settle the matter, Patton looped an arm around Truscott’s shoulder. “Let’s have a drink—of your liquor.” Returning to Palermo and his bed in the Royal Palace, Patton confessed to his diary, “I may have been bull-headed.”

It went badly. Lieutenant Colonel Lyle A. Bernard, a wiry thirty-three-year-old, arrived two miles off Brolo at one
A.M
. Wednesday with his understrength 2nd Battalion in nine vessels, protected by the cruiser
Philadelphia
and six destroyers. As an orange quarter moon set in the west, the men climbed into their DUKWs and landing craft. The strains of “Night and Day,” played on a harmonica, carried across the water. “Why don’t we do this more often?” someone quipped. Shortly before three
A.M
. the first wave scooted across the shingle and into a lemon grove. “Watch the fucking barbed wire!” a voice called. Two rifle companies held the coastal flats while two more scaled Monte Cipolla, clutching at tuft grass to avoid pitching backward. But five tanks and a battery of self-propelled howitzers found that the underpasses in a railroad embankment along Highway 113 were too narrow to squeeze through from the beach; before long, each tank was stuck in a ditch or immobilized from butting into stone orchard walls. Eight Germans had been captured in their sleep atop Cipolla, but soon enough the alarm sounded. Colored flares drifted overhead, and German tracers flailed the hill, the beach, and the sea. Don Whitehead, among several reporters with Colonel Bernard, noted the “sense of absolute confusion that falls over every amphibious landing.”

Daybreak brought death, as German gunners began to see their targets. Fifteen soldiers died stringing phone wire uphill, along with thirteen of fifteen mules hauling ammunition.
Philadelphia
opened fire at 10:25
A.M
., then steamed for Palermo with her escorts for fear of a Luftwaffe attack; an urgent plea from Truscott brought the cruiser back for another forty minutes of shooting before she sailed away again.

“Situation still critical,” Bernard radioed Truscott from his hilltop command post. Grenadiers in coal-scuttle helmets crept through the purple shadows below. Puffing on his red pipe, Bernard told Whitehead, “We’ll catch hell this afternoon.” Panzer shells ignited grass fires that burned through the phone wire linking Bernard to his troops and to naval gunfire observers on the flats below. Water and ammo ran short, and men laid fir boughs across their slit trenches for shade from the molten sun. At four
P.M
., lusty cheers greeted seven U.S. attack planes as they roared over the hill; the cheering stopped when two bombs fell on Bernard’s command post in a cauldron of flame and whizzing metal, killing or wounding nineteen. Other errant bombs hit the artillerymen below, wrecking the four remaining howitzers. Men swore, and wept, and swore some more. A wounded medic tried to amputate his own shattered arm with a pocketknife. German tank and machine-gun fire intensified. “Enemy counterattacking fiercely,” Bernard radioed Truscott. “Do something.”

At five
P.M
.
Philadelphia
again reappeared from the dreamy sea mist, firing a thousand shells in fifteen minutes and battling Focke-Wulf marauders before once more sailing for Palermo, this time for good. Bernard sent runners to summon survivors on the flats to join him in what he now called “our little old last stand circle.” A few on the beach instead escaped by swimming westward. Dusk soon brightened the tracers. Wind tossed the olive boughs below, and bullets sang all about. Bernard pulled on his dead pipe. Men hacked at their foxholes with entrenching tools.

At dawn on Thursday, August 12, a sentry came running. The Germans had vanished, falling back to Cape Calavà, where they would blow a 150-foot mountainside section of Highway 113 into the sea, and then to Messina. “There are troops moving on the road with vehicles, sir,” he told Bernard. From the west, soldiers of the 30th Infantry soon wheeled into view. Greasy smoke spiraled above the lemon grove. The morning air stank of cordite and sweat and burning fuel.

An open command car flying three-star pennants pulled up on the highway. Patton stood in the rear, his helmet gleaming in the sun. “The American soldier is the greatest soldier in the world,” he proclaimed. He pointed to Monte Cipolla with his swagger stick. Men and mules lay like stepping stones up the blackened slope.
L’audace
had cost Bernard’s battalion 177 casualties, to little effect. “Only American soldiers can climb mountains like those,” Patton said. Listening near the road, Whitehead jotted in his diary, “The whole little tableau sickened me.”

Field Marshal Kesselring had long realized that Sicily would be lost even as he insisted that his forces on the island could tie up a dozen Allied divi
sions for some time. Berlin wondered who was tying up whom. Mindful of Stalingrad and Tunis, the high command had insisted as early as July 15 that “our valuable human material must be saved.” On July 26, Berlin ordered preparations made for the island’s evacuation; the message was hand-carried to Kesselring in Frascati to avoid alerting the Italians. With Mussolini deposed, Hitler feared that the Badoglio regime would use the abandonment of Sicily as an excuse to renounce the Pact of Steel.

The defense of the Strait of Messina fell to an unorthodox colonel from Schleswig-Holstein named Ernst-Günther Baade. A devotee of Aristotle and Seneca who printed small volumes of verse for his friends, Baade favored a kilt rather than trousers, with a holstered Luger worn instead of a leather sporran. By August 10, he had made Messina perhaps the most heavily defended spot in Europe. Five hundred guns bristled on the Sicilian shore and on mainland Calabria, two miles across the strait. Engineers prepared a dozen camouflaged ferry sites on both sides of the water and assembled thirty-three barges, seventy-six motorboats, and a dozen Siebel ferries, big rafts with twin airplane engines mounted on pontoons and originally designed in 1940 for an invasion of England. Baade even cached food, brandy, and cigarettes for the rear guard.

Twelve thousand German supernumeraries and more than four thousand vehicles quietly left Sicily in early August; Kesselring calculated that five nights would be needed to evacuate the rest. With precise choreography, combat units fell back on five successive defensive lines, a retreat aided by the tapering shape of the Messina Peninsula. Vehicles that could not be evacuated were sabotaged by bashing fuel pumps and distributors with hammers and hatchets. “The hand grenade is especially effective,” one directive advised. Enormous bonfires consumed surplus matériel, with German troops “yelling as they hurled it into the flames: crates, chairs, tents, camp beds, telephones, tools…all doused with petrol.”