The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
He reduced his own political philosophy to two nouns: democrat and Christian. A bit more nuanced were his inalienable Four Freedoms—of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear—which he had articulated in the State of the Union message of January 1941. Months earlier, he had begun to dream about the postwar world, and if he kept Churchill at arm’s length it was partly because his vision did not include the restoration of colonial empires. Surely he had spoken from the heart in telling the prime minister, “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.” Yet there was also cold conviction in Roosevelt’s observation to his son Elliott: “Britain is on the decline.”
America was ascendant, and Roosevelt had reason to hope that his countrymen possessed the stamina to remake a better world: a forthcoming Roper opinion poll, secretly slipped to the White House on Thursday, revealed that more than three-quarters of those surveyed agreed that the United States should play a larger global role after the war. Nearly as many believed that the country should “plan to help other nations get on their feet,” and more than half concurred that Americans should “take an active part in some sort of an international organization with a court and police force strong enough to enforce its decisions.” The president found it equally heartening that 70 percent approved of his war leadership and two-thirds favored him for reelection in 1944 if the world was still at war.
But if Britain was on the decline, so was Roosevelt personally, as he no doubt realized. Those who had seen him at Casablanca were dismayed at how frail he now looked, and all the pretty stamps in Newfoundland could not fully restore him. “Something at once attractive and pathetic in this man,” a British diplomat wrote in his diary. “The great torso, the huge and splendid head, the magnificent frame, immobile, anchored to a sofa or a chair, carried from room to room.” Roosevelt said little about his health, other than to grouse over a recurrent sinus condition. It was just another secret to keep.
Negotiations resumed at 10:30 A.M. on Monday. Camaraderie and good fun promptly popped like soap bubbles, and for three days the deadlock persisted as the military chiefs haggled. Brooke and his British colleagues renounced both imperial designs in the Mediterranean and any peripheral strategems; rather, they argued, an Italian campaign “in the spirit of the chase” would exploit a Sicilian victory, unhinge Rome, and unbalance Berlin. The Americans refused to concede, and declared that no U.S. ground or naval forces would be released for combat beyond Sicily. Marshall, whose beetling brows gave him a stern Old Testament look, reminded the chiefs “that in North Africa a relatively small German force” had fought an irksome rearguard campaign for six months; a German decision to fight in Italy “might make intended operations extremely difficult and time consuming.”
Nearly three dozen aides and staff officers hovered behind the chiefs, rifling through documents or pulling out those red leather folders to prove this point or dispute that assertion. By 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon, Marshall had reached his limit. The chiefs were scheduled to meet Roosevelt and Churchill at the White House in two hours; to confess that the high command remained at loggerheads would likely mean ceding strategic planning to the president and prime minister, a prospect horrifying to every man in epaulets. Marshall proposed that the room be cleared except for the chiefs. The supernumeraries filed out; ninety minutes later, the door reopened, and on the mahogony table lay an agreement.
It was a curious compromise, because compromise it was. A cross-Channel attack would be launched—the target date was fifty weeks away: on May 1, 1944—“to secure a lodgement on the Continent from which further offensive operations can be carried out.” To help assemble the twenty-nine divisions required for such an invasion, soon to be code-named OVERLORD, four American and three British divisions would be transferred from the Mediterranean after the Sicilian campaign to staging bases in Britain. As for the Med, the Allied commander-in-chief in North Africa, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was instructed to plan whatever operations following the conquest of Sicily seemed “best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces.” The chiefs calculated that Eisenhower eventually would be left with twenty-seven divisions and 3,600 aircraft to continue his war against the soft underbelly, although a direct invasion of Italy was not specified.
The baby had been cut in half, a solution perhaps satisfying to the disputants but rarely auspicious for the baby. As the officers collected their papers and snapped shut their briefcases, a grumble of thunder rolled across Washington. Rain soon lashed the city from the west, breaking the heat.
TRIDENT had another week to run. If the central disagreement had been finessed, a dozen other issues required resolution, from shipping allocations to operations in the Pacific. The social round also continued without mercy. At a reception on the South Lawn of the White House, the Marine Band played Stephen Foster airs and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while guests sipped iced coffee and stared beyond the fence at tourists who stared back. During a British embassy luncheon on May 22, Churchill, fortified with whiskey, declared that he expected “England and the United States to run the world…. Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority?” The bemused vice president, Henry A. Wallace, accused the prime minister of advocating “Anglo-Saxondom über Alles.” Churchill waved away the charge. “We Anglo-Saxons”—he pronounced it schaxons—“are the only ones who really know how to run the show.” Poor Brooke left the luncheon to get a haircut and tumbled down fourteen stone steps; battered and bruised, he found consolation in the purchase of two rare bird books discovered in a local shop.
Rarely content and never quiescent, Churchill now threatened to overplay his hand. He kept Roosevelt up until 2:30 in the morning of Monday, May 24. (After TRIDENT, the exhausted president would flee to his Hyde Park estate and sleep ten hours for three consecutive nights.) Later that day the prime minister sought to repudiate the compromise reached by the chiefs, because it failed to specifically advocate an invasion of Italy. He also raised the notion of a continued attack into Yugoslavia and Greece. To Lord Moran, his personal physician, Churchill added, “Have you noticed that the president is a very tired man? His mind seems closed. He seems to have lost his wonderful elasticity…. I cannot let the matter rest where it is.”
Harry Hopkins warned Churchill to do just that or risk an ugly rupture; even Roosevelt complained that the prime minister was acting like a “spoiled boy.” Chastened, Churchill agreed instead to fly from Washington to Algiers to confer with Eisenhower, taking in tow both a scuffed-up Brooke and a grumpy Marshall, who likened himself to “a piece of baggage.” Hopkins told Moran, “We have come to avoid controversy with Winston. We find he is too much for us.” The physician agreed that Churchill “is so taken up with his own ideas that he is not interested in what other people think.”
Still, the sweep of his rhetoric proved a tonic, as it had so many times before. At noon on a bright Wednesday, a joint session of Congress convened in the House of Representatives, joined by the British ambassador’s son, a young subaltern who had lost both legs in North Africa and who was wheeled into the House gallery by his tall, stooped father. Churchill had spent nearly ten hours the previous day dictating speech drafts to his long-suffering typists, and he now stood at the podium, grasping the lapels of his dark suit, rolling his vowels and reminding free men everywhere that the road was long, but the cause was righteous. “War is full of mysteries and surprises. A false step, a wrong direction, an error in strategy, discord or lassitude among the Allies, might soon give the common enemy power to confront us,” he said. “It is in the dragging-out of the war at enormous expense, until the democracies are tired or bored or split, that the main hopes of Germany and Japan must now reside.”
After fifty minutes he finished, as he often finished, by taking flight:
By singleness of purpose, by steadfastness of conduct, by tenacity and endurance—such as we have so far displayed—by this and only by this can we discharge our duty to the future of the worl
Roosevelt had remained at the White House to avoid crowding Churchill in the limelight. He listened to the speech on the radio he kept in the left drawer of his big desk. “Winston writes beautifully,” the president told his secretary, “and he’s a past master at catch phrases.”
The conference sputtered to an end without the wistful sense of brotherhood that had characterized Casablanca. Mutual confidence remained a sometime thing; the ideal of an epoch when good men dared to trust one another was still imperfectly realized. They were tired of arguing, tired of shouldering the burdens they shouldered, tired of the whole catastrophe. They knew the hard time had come, and that it would require hard men.
For the Americans, the first leg of the century’s most grueling race had come to an end, its emblem the Afrika Korps prisoners now trudging into camps in Kansas and Oklahoma. That leg, from Pearl Harbor through the capture of Tunisia, had required spunk and invention, unity and organizational acumen. Now the long middle leg of the race was about to begin, of uncertain duration, over an undetermined course, and few doubted that new virtues would be needed: endurance, impenitence, an obdurate will.
For the first time, the Allied high command had met with a clear sense that the war, at least in Europe, would be won—someday, somehow. “The mellow light of victory begins to play over the entire expanse of the world war,” as Churchill would tell the House of Commons in June. During the conference, daily reports of U-boat sinkings affirmed that the tide in that particular struggle had turned, dramatically and irreversibly. The joint communiqué drafted for TRIDENT by Roosevelt and Churchill evinced a bluff optimism while proferring a few white lies, such as the assertion that “there has been a complete meeting of minds” about all theaters, including “the war in the Mediterranean.”
Despite this glossing over, a plan now existed where there had been no plan. The British had succeeded in keeping the war centered in the Mediterranean, at least for a year, and in making the elimination of Italy from the Axis partnership an immediate goal. Churchill had again thwarted the American impulse to muscle up in the Pacific theater at the expense of the Atlantic (although, in the event, the U.S. war against Tokyo would be prosecuted almost as furiously as the European struggles). Assistance to China would continue, and Allied bomber fleets would grow ever larger, until they virtually blackened the skies over Germany and eventually Japan. The British had made extravagant claims—“over-egged the pudding,” as one critic put it—to overcome Yankee skepticism by asserting that Germany was unlikely to fight hard for mainland Italy; that the long-term Allied commitment in Italy was likely to call for only nine divisions and to require no substantial occupation; and that a hard fight in the Mediterranean could end the war in 1944. All of these prophesies proved false.
The Americans had managed to put brakes on the Mediterranean campaign: seven divisions would decamp for Britain in the fall, and no additional reinforcements would be sent south. They also extracted a pledge that the Allies would invade western France by a specific date. The deal, Roosevelt told an aide, was “the best I could get at this time.” Neither the president nor his warlords had answered the legitimate British questions about how, if the plug were pulled in the Mediterranean, German forces would be engaged during the many months until OVERLORD could be mounted in France; or how the Russians would be mollified if the Anglo-Americans took a powder for those many months; or whether it would not be prudent to draw Axis forces from the Atlantic Wall by making Berlin reinforce its southern flank.
The Allies had a plan where there had been no plan, but whether it was a good plan remained to be seen. Certainly it was vague. How Italy should be knocked out was left to the theater commander, General Eisenhower, and the concomitant goal of containing “the maximum number of German forces” implied a war of attrition and opportunism rather than a clear strategic objective.
The dispatch of Allied armies to North Africa and now to Sicily had created its own momentum, its own logic. In an effort to square the circle, a slightly cockeyed strategic scheme emerged that would guide the Anglo-Americans until the end of the war: a relentless pounding of Festung Europa from the air and from the southern flank, setting the stage for a cross-Channel invasion aimed at Berlin. Whether a meaningful Mediterranean campaign could be waged without endless entanglement, and whether the enemy reacted as Allied strategists hoped he would react also remained to be seen.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the men meeting at TRIDENT was not the sketching of big arrows on a map but rather the affirmation of their humanity. This was their true common language: the shared values of decency and dignity, of tolerance and respect. Despite the petty bickering and intellectual fencing, a fraternity bound them on the basis of who they were, what they believed, and why they fought. It could be glimpsed, like one of Brooke’s beautiful birds, in Churchill’s gentle draping of a blanket on Roosevelt’s shoulders; and in their grim determination to wage war without liking it.
At four P.M. on Tuesday, May 25, precisely two weeks after his arrival, Churchill strode down the narrow corridors of the West Wing to the Oval Office. His departure by flying boat from the Potomac off Gravelly Point was set for the next morning, his luggage was packed, his farewells were bid or soon would be bid. The code name for the morning flight had been repeatedly amended in the past forty-eight hours from WATSON to REDCAR to STUDENT, and the prime minister, evidently finding none of those words suitably warlike, had lobbied in vain to get it changed again, to NEPTUNE.
Roosevelt sat in the armless wheelchair. Sunshine flooded the Rose Garden outside the French doors. Bulletproof glass had been installed in the windows facing south, but the president had rejected several of the more hysterical security proposals, including machine guns on the terrace and air locks on the outer doors to thwart a poison gas attack. With Churchill at his side, he gave a nod and an aide opened the office door to admit a large gaggle of reporters for the 899th press conference of Roosevelt’s presidency.
“We are awfully glad to have Mr. Churchill back here,” he told the scribes after they had shuffled in. “Considering the size of our problems, these discussions have been done in practically record time.” Roosevelt swiveled toward the prime minister. “I think that he will be willing to answer almost—with stress on the almost—any question.”
“Mr. Prime Minister,” a reporter said, “can you tell us generally about the plans for the future, probably beginning with Europe?”
“Our plans for the future,” Churchill replied, “are to wage this war until unconditional surrender is procured from all those who have molested us, and this applies equally to Asia and to Europe.”
Roosevelt beamed. “I think that word ‘molestation’ or ‘molesting’ is one of the best examples of your habitual understatement that I know.”
The reporters tittered. “I am curious to know,” another asked, “what you think is going on in Hitler’s mind?” The titter turned to boisterous laughter.
“Appetite unbridled, ambition unmeasured—all the world!” the prime minister said. “There is no end of the appetite of this wicked man. I should say he repents now that he did not curb his passion before he brought such a portion of the world against him and his country.”
“Do you care to say anything about Mussolini and Italy?”
Churchill scowled. “I think they are a softer proposition than Germany.”
On it went, query and response, and the reporters were so beguiled that by the end they had interrupted with laughter twenty-one times.
The Allies had no intention of keeping Italian territory after the war, or of matching Axis barbarities, Churchill added. “We shall not stain our name by an inhuman act.” As for the Italian people, they “have sinned—erred—by allowing themselves to be led by the nose by a very elaborate tyranny.” But they “will have their life in the new Europe.”
Churchill rose to his full five feet, seven inches. “We are the big animal now,” he said, “shaking
The door opened and the reporters reluctantly began to file out. Seizing the moment with unsuspected agility, the prime minister climbed up onto his chair, tottered unsteadily for a moment, then stood above the popping flashbulbs and the grinning president and the applauding scribes, flashing the V-for-victory sign with his stubby fingers, over and over again.
Part One
1. ACROSS THE MIDDLE SEA
Forcing the World Back to Reason
THE sun beat down on the stained white city, the July sun that hurt the eyes and turned the sea from wine-dark to silver. Soldiers crowded the shade beneath the vendors’ awnings and hugged the lee of the alabaster buildings spilling down to the port. Sweat darkened their collars and cuffs, particularly those of the combat troops wearing heavy herringbone twill. Some had stripped off their neckties, but kept them folded and tucked in their belts for quick retrieval. The commanding general had been spotted along the wharves, and every man knew that George S. Patton, Jr., would levy a $25 fine on any GI not wearing his helmet or tie.