The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Pressure gradients and barometric millibars interested Patton not at all. “How long will the storm last?” he demanded.
Summer blows in the Med typically were short-lived, Steere replied, and the fleet would be sheltered in Sicily’s lee. “It will calm down,” he added, “by D-day.”
“It better,” Patton said.
By noon on Friday, as the fleet drew near Malta, the wind had freshened from the west, turning the sea a forbidding hue and sculpting crests from the wavelets. Soon the halyards and the railings moaned, the nasty lop grew heavy with foam, and the bedpan LCIs—landing craft, infantry, denounced by one soldier as “flat-bottomed delight[s] of Satan”—began taking seas over solid. Barrage-balloon cables stretched on the horizontal as sailors in slickers tried to reel them in, cursing what was now widely decried as a “Mussolini wind.” One by one the cables snapped, and soon two dozen balloons sailed up and east and out of sight. By late afternoon the wind reached a gale-force thirty knots—force 7 on the Beaufort scale—with green seas piled so high the smaller craft could no longer see one another and helmsmen struggled to avoid collisions. Gloomy, fearful soldiers clung to stanchions and ladders. “We could barely stand on deck,” Ernie Pyle wrote aboard Biscayne, “and our far-spread convoy was a wallowing, convulsive thing.”
Never had the amphibious vessels been tested in such seas. The LCTs, reduced to three knots, danced like corks on the spindrift. “Huge chunks of green water cascaded back over the flat open decks,” one Navy lieutenant recorded. Many LCTs, he added, “had at least one engine out, so when they lost steerage way they had to fall off to leeward and come around 180 degrees to get back on course.” The square-bowed LSTs lurched up from the sea, then dropped into the next wave with a thud and a heavy shudder. An Army engineer colonel reported that his LST rolled “47 degrees each way as I watched the roll indicator…. The LST would be rolling, rolling, and rolling, the roll pendulum swinging so that we expected her to turn right over.” Destroyers weaved among the smaller craft, signaling orders to compensate for the wind by steering “nothing to the right of north all night,” rather than the planned course of 020 degrees. Several of the GOLDRUSH pontoons broke loose from their tow ships; two tugs lumbered through the gale to fetch them back. Twenty-ton landing craft swung on their davits like charms on a watch chain; aboard the transport Florence Nightingale, one boat broke free and smacked against the bridge and fantail with each roll of the ship until it too was lassoed.
“You probably enjoy the slow rise and fall of the deck, or even its more violent heaving if you happen to be in a storm,” advised a paperback book for soldiers titled What to Do Aboard the Transport. Even “the sickest landlubber,” the book added, soon “laughs at some other fellow with a green look about the gills.”
No one was laughing. “All of us are miserable, anxious, jam-packed, overloaded and wet,” a soldier in the 26th Infantry wrote. “No place to be sick except on one another. There are no heroes, just misery.” “First I am afraid that I shall die,” a soldier in the 18th Infantry noted, “then afraid that I won’t.” Soldiers had been issued a chemical concoction called Motion Sickness Preventative, but most still resorted to the items officially labeled “Bags, Vomit for the Use of,” or hung their heads over the side, “moaning softly as if it were a secret shame.” A private first class wrote his girlfriend in Brooklyn that these were “the most miserable moments ever spent in my life.”
Some tried for a semblance of stability. Aboard H.M.S. Strathnaver, a dinner of clear soup and lamb cutlets was served to Welsh soldiers, who belted out “Land of My Fathers.” But most troops “swung in their hammocks, green and groaning,” a Canadian soldier wrote. “Everything that was not lashed down had come adrift: kitbags, weapons boxes, steel crates of ammunition, mess tins, tin helmets.” On LST 386, the only unfazed passengers had four hooves: thirty African donkeys had been boarded until Eisenhower found sturdier mules. “Ship rolled thirty degrees and pitched fifteen,” a naval officer recorded. “Donkeys were unconcerned, and seemed to enjoy their hay splashed with salt water.” A Ranger sergeant who found his miserably ill platoon hiding in a lifeboat reflected that at least their emptied stomachs would reduce the chance of peritonitis from gut wounds. “When I get off this boat,” one corporal vowed, “I’m going to walk and walk and walk.”
“Some thought of the Spanish Armada,” another Canadian wrote, “and some asked the question, ‘Is God on our side or not?’” Those classical scholars who had tried recalling their Thucydides now remembered that Aeolus, the mythical Greek custodian of the winds, supposedly lived on a floating island near Sicily; they swapped stories of seafarers who had fallen foul of Mediterranean weather, beginning with the Spartan king Menelaus, whose homebound fleet had been blown from Troy to Egypt, and St. Paul.
Others held more practical colloquies. “It’s goddam foolish, I tell you,” an officer on the Barnett declared. “What’s the use of going ahead with the invasion when your boats aren’t even going to reach shore?” An Army captain agreed. “It’s not fear. No, goddamit! It’s not fear. There’s just no sense in risking the whole invasion in this sea.” Aboard the Samuel Chase, Rear Admiral John L. Hall, whose charges included the 1st Division, considered signaling Hewitt to recommend a delay, then told his staff, “We’re not going to be the first to yelp.” The fleet beat on.
On Monrovia, Hewitt stared at the heaving sea and listened to the wind tear at the rigging. The whitecapped Mediterranean looked as if it were dusted in snow. He pondered whether to break radio silence and contact Admiral Cunningham on Malta to suggest a postponement. Some smaller craft had no radios, so spreading word of any delay through the fleet would take at least four hours. As he watched an LSI buck the waves, Hewitt observed that at least the wretched soldiers aboard would be “all the more willing to get ashore.” Bad as this was, the Atlantic before TORCH had been worse.
Late on Friday afternoon, he summoned Commander Houdini to the bridge. Steere that morning had predicted winds of twenty-seven knots; they now had reached thirty-seven, with twelve-foot seas. Though nervous, the aerologist stuck to his forecast. The “whole wind structure” would ease after nightfall, he explained, even if strong winds persisted aloft. Steere had scribbled his H-hour forecast in longhand, like a racetrack tout posting odds: “Northwest winds 10–15 knots decreasing, with inshore breakers 3–4 feet or less.”
Hewitt took the bet, nodding without a hint of emotion or even concern. They would continue toward Sicily unless ordered to the contrary.
“Always the vibration,” a British soldier wrote in his diary, “the heaving and rolling, the dim blue lights below deck, and the masses of bodies, in bunks, or moving blindly to the lavatories awash with urine.” Like many others, Captain Joseph T. Dawson of the 1st Division wrote a final letter to his family in Texas: “My heart is filled with unspeakable tenderness for you one and all…. We are trying to measure up. God grant that we may do our task.”
By six P.M. the sea had grown so nasty, one naval commander observed, that “even the destroyers were taking it green.” As daylight ebbed, the wind intensified. Officers of the deck throughout the fleet ordered smoking lamps extinguished. At 6:52 P.M., Monrovia’s log recorded the sighting of the tiny island of Gozo, nine miles off the starboard beam. Just beyond, through the gloom and flying spray, lookouts spied the sheer cliffs of Malta. The fleet beat on.
Seeking sanctuary from the folderol, Eisenhower had warned Marshall that during his stay on Malta “my communications with Washington and London will be almost nil…because of the need for reserving signal communications for operational matters.” The gambit failed; Washington and London showed no reluctance to pepper the commander-in-chief with advice and queries, including a message from Marshall on Friday afternoon asking, “Is the attack on or off?” Eisenhower studied the cable and muttered, “I wish I knew.”
Wind and weather dominated the discussion in Admiral Cunningham’s office as the hours ticked by. Chagrined meteorologi
Eisenhower reviewed his options, lighting one damp cigarette from another. Staff officers calculated that if the invasion were postponed, two to three weeks would be needed to remount it. No doubt by then the enemy would be alert, and perhaps was already: the fighter control room inside the bastion reported a German reconnaissance plane near the fleet at 4:30 P.M. and another at 7:30. Like Lieutenant Commander Steere, forecasters on Malta believed the storm would soon pass. So too did Cunningham, who had sailed these waters for the better part of a half century, and who once cited “recklessness and callousness” as the most vital qualities of a commander.
Eisenhower was usually quick to make a decision, and he made one now. “The operation will proceed as scheduled,” he cabled Marshall, “in spite of an unfortunate westerly wind.” Cunningham sent his own signal to the Admiralty in London: “Weather not favourable. But operation proceeding.”
With “rather fearful hearts”—in Cunningham’s phrase—they broke for dinner. Driving to Verdala Palace, Eisenhower eyed the spinning windmills above Valletta; the man who preached the importance of believing in luck now wondered aloud whether his had run out. “To be perfectly honest,” another British sea dog, the lanky Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, told him over dinner, “it doesn’t look too good.”
After coffee, Cunningham rejoined them for a drive to Delimara Point, where an octagonal black-and-white-banded lighthouse crowned the island’s southeast corner. Half a dozen searchlight beams pointed straight up as a signal to the waves of transport planes—some towing gliders, others full of paratroopers—that now began to appear overhead. Cunningham counted sixty-four aircraft, while Eisenhower, neck craned, rubbed his lucky coins and murmured a prayer for “safety and success.” Had he watched more closely, he might have seen that many planes bucking the winds missed the vital turn at Delimara, continuing east rather than swinging due north.
Back in the Lascaris war room, the great wall maps charted the armadas as they inched toward Sicily: American convoys mostly west of Malta, the British mostly east. Cots and blankets had been dragged into an air-conditioned room nearby, but anxiety kept the men edgy and awake. Eisenhower prattled on about writing a book, perhaps an anthology that would profile two dozen public figures; he would “paint each one’s character” and “tell some stories.” Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, the senior air commander in the Mediterranean, reflected on the Punic Wars and previous invasions. “Fancy invading Italy from the south,” Tedder said. “Even Hannibal had the sense to come in with his elephants over the Alps.” Farther down the tunnel an officer shaving with an electric razor provoked a shrill protest that “some unmentionable noise” was making it “quite impossible for any signals to be picked up.”
At ten P.M., Eisenhower scribbled a note to Mamie. “I’m again in a tunnel, as I was at the beginning of last November, waiting, as I was then, for news.
Men do almost anything to keep from going slightly mad. Walk, talk, try to work, smoke (all the time)—anything to push the minutes along…. Everything that we could think of to do has been done; the troops are fit; everybody is doing his best. The answer is in the lap of the gods.
Death or Glory
PATTON woke to a loud crash against his cabin porthole. He lurched from the bed, fully uniformed, momentarily convinced that a bomb had struck Monrovia. Cocking an ear topside to the clank of tackle being loosened, he soon realized that a broken davit had let a landing craft slip from its pulley and smack against the ship’s hull. One man had pitched overboard but soon was fished out. As the commotion subsided, two other sounds were conspicuous by their absence: the wind had died, and the flagship’s engines had stopped. An odd, portentous hush settled over Monrovia.
Patton hitched up his whipcord breeches and straightened his blouse. He had dozed off after inviting the ship’s chaplain in for a final prayer. Strange dreams had troubled his sleep, of a black kitten and then of many cats, spitting at him. “We may feel anxious,” he scribbled in his diary, “but I trust the Italians are scared to death…. God has again helped me. I hope He keeps on.”
He found Hewitt on the bridge. The quarter moon had set shortly after midnight, but stars threw down spears of light and the fleet stood in black silhouette against the gray horizon. Commander Steere had been right, again: the wind had ebbed to below ten knots; there was good visibility and a moderate swell. Monrovia’s radar had detected the Sicilian coast at 22,000 yards—thirteen miles. Then several destroyers knifed forward until they spotted blue lights, flashing seaward from a scattered school of British submarines. With doughty, rule-Britannia names like Unruffled and Unseen and Unrivalled, the subs had been lurking off the coast for two days to serve as beacons guiding the invasion convoys to their proper beaches. The skipper of the submarine H.M.S. Seraph later recalled, “As far as my night glasses could carry, I saw hundreds of ships following in orderly fashion, each keeping its appointed station.” Monrovia and her sisters dropped anchor in fifty fathoms six miles from the coast, on station and on time. Hewitt also had been right, again.
He and Patton now raked the shore with their field glasses. Allied bombing earlier in the evening had set fire to the stubble in Sicilian wheat fields near the sea. Patton watched “a mass of flames” engulf a two-mile corridor directly inland. “All the beach seems to be burning,” a soldier noted. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., a matinee idol with more than sixty film credits who was serving as a Navy Reserve lieutenant on Monrovia, jotted in his diary, “Apparently the big ships have not yet been seen from the shore.”
The HUSKY commanders intended to land the equivalent of 67 assault battalions—each with approximately 800 men—on 26 beaches along 105 miles of coastline. The British beaches chosen for General Montgomery’s Eighth Army lay to the east, from Cape Passero on the island’s southeast tip up through the Gulf of Noto almost to Syracuse. Hewitt’s armada had split near Malta into three prongs, which would land the three assault divisions in Patton’s Seventh Army along a forty-mile crescent on the Gulf of Gela. Farthest west, the 3rd Division now lay off Licata; farthest east, and closest to the British, the 45th Division lay off Scoglitti; in the center, with Monrovia, the 1st Division prepared to seize Gela. The objective for each division was the Yellow Line, a notional demarcation ten to thirty miles inland that would push enemy artillery beyond range of captured coastal airfields. Patton estimated it would take five days for his army to reach the Yellow Line. Beyond that he had no orders.
Since landing at Cadiz in 1625, the British over the centuries had embarked on some forty overseas military campaigns, with fortunes ranging from glorious to catastrophic. The Americans were somewhat newer at the expeditionary game, but Yanks and Tommies concurred that, as a British official history warranted, “invasions from the sea were professionally recognized to be all-or-nothing affairs.” Death or glory was back in fashion.
Now those Yanks and Tommies made ready; so, too, the Canadians. “You will find the Mediterranean still choppy,” a lieutenant advised over the Ancon’s PA system, “but compared to what it was only a short time back, as quiet as if God had put his hand on it.” Lights below burned blue or red to enhance night vision. Indonesian waiters in white coats struck little gongs to call British troops to an early breakfast; on Strathnaver’s E-deck, the Dorsets shared mugs of tea and fancied they could smell Europe. GIs wrapped their dogtags in black
They had reached “the victim coast of Sicily,” a soldier in the 45th Division told his father. A naval officer transporting the same unit described “wild Indians still playing poker and sharpening knives, betting on who’ll get the first Italian.” One officer on the Biscayne’s weather deck later wrote, “The fellow standing next to me was breathing so hard I couldn’t hear the anchor go down. Then I realized there wasn’t anybody standing next to me.”
Ted Roosevelt took time aboard the Barnett to finish his eleven-page letter to Eleanor: “The ship is dark, the men are going to their assembly stations…. Soon the boats will be lowered away. Then we’ll be off.”
“Land the landing force!” The order echoed down the chains of command east and west. “Aye-aye. Land the landing force.” Soldiers in the British 50th Division shuffled single file, company by company, from the dim hold to the assembly deck on Winchester Castle. Sailors handed stiff tots of rum to the Dorsets on Strathnaver and pumped bilge oil over the side to calm the sea. “Do you hear there? Serial one! To your boat stations, move now,” an amplified voice called on Derbyshire. “Serial two! Stand by.” A soldier in the Canadian 1st Division, Farley Mowat, heard clattering steam winches lower the landing craft; on deck each man “gripped the web-belt of the man ahead…. The dim glow of blue-hooded flashlights gave a brief and charnel illumination.”