The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
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.”
Now the hour for pirates and freebooters had come round. Just after dawn on Sunday, July 11, Roosevelt drove in his jeep, Rough Rider, from the division command post in a lemon grove beyond Beach Green 2 to the 26th Infantry sector east of Gela. The mild Sabbath morning kissed the vineyards and orchards of the plain, which stretched north for eight miles to a crown of low hills beyond Ponte Olivo airfield. The division since first light had been making for those hills on a six-mile front: the 26th Infantry up Highway 117 on the left, and the 16th Infantry on the right up Highway 115 and the gravel road to Niscemi.
Roosevelt hopped out of the jeep and hurried to the regimental radios clustered beneath a camouflage net. Reports from the lead battalions were fragmented and unnerving: advancing U.S. infantrymen had smacked into advancing Axis tanks. German panzers were driving south from Ponte Olivo, southwest from Niscemi, and west from Biscari. Italian troops from the Livorno Division had massed farther west for an attack on Gela. At 6:40 A.M., at least a dozen German tanks swept past the pinned-down 3rd Battalion of the 26th Infantry on Highway 117, midway between Gela and Ponte Olivo. Swerving southeast across the wheat fields, the panzers were rolling toward the
Through his field glasses, Roosevelt squinted at the amber dust boiling on the northern horizon. A pair of Mk IV tanks with gray camouflage splotches bolted cross-country at top speed in an attempt to draw fire; to one officer they resembled “setters trying to flush quail.” Other panzers worked the subtle folds and creases in the plain. Muzzle flashes stabbed the dust. Soon the morning air thickened with shouts and cackling machine guns and the scarlet gash of tank fire.
Shortly before seven A.M., Roosevelt rang the 1st Division command post on the field phone. “The 26th on our left has had a tank attack. Don’t know how bad as yet,” he told a staff officer. “Let me speak to General Allen.” Upon hearing Allen’s voice, Roosevelt wasted no time. “Terry, look. The situation is not very comfortable out here. The 3rd Battalion has been attacked by tanks and has been penetrated. The 2nd Battalion is in support, but that is not enough. No anti-tank protection. If we could get that company of medium tanks it sure would help.”
Each battle report seemed more dire than the last. Panzers had infiltrated the rear of the 3rd Battalion, firing into foxholes and trenches. Low on bazooka and mortar rounds, the American rifle platoons leapfrogged south, pulling back three miles to the outskirts of Gela. “The 26th here is catching hell,” Roosevelt told a division staff officer shortly after eight A.M. “What about a company of medium tanks? Not unloaded yet? Goddamn it, I’ll come and pull those tanks out myself. We don’t want them tomorrow.” An hour later he told Allen, “Situation not so good.”
Between phone calls he stumped about with his gamecock gait, brandishing his cane to rally the riflemen in their holes. “These guys can’t hit me! They’ve been trying through two world wars. And if they can’t hit an old grandfather like me, they surely can’t hurt you,” he barked. “Do you know who those bastards are? The Hermann Göring Division. We beat their asses in North Africa and we’re going to do it again.” Later he would tell Eleanor: “The old man still can fight.”
In the lemon grove near Green 2, the 1st Division command post was identifiable only by a small sign—“Danger Forward”—and the radio antennas poking out from behind a stone wall. Here another old soldier also had his blood up. He was saddle-nosed and leathery, and deep pleats framed his brown eyes. Gray flecked the blue-black hair that bristled beneath his helmet rim, and he walked, one observer wrote, with “the slightly rolling gait of a man who has spent a great deal of time on horseback.” Like Ted Roosevelt, he had been annealed in the Great War: a bullet through the face in the Argonne had perforated both cheeks and at times still caused him to emit a curious, leaky-tire hiss. Like Ted Roosevelt he also cherished the Big Red One, with that unconditional loyalty unique to comrades; their rivalry for the division’s affections had contributed little to good order and discipline.
Yet neither order nor discipline had ever loomed large for Terry de la Mesa Allen. Before flunking out of West Point, he had amassed demerits for tardiness, bathing at midnight, yawning in class, yelling during a fire drill, and breaking ranks to pet a dog. As a young officer he “loved horses, women, dancing, and drinking,” and as a major he graduated at the bottom of the staff college class in which a certain Major Eisenhower finished at the very top. Yet he knew how to fight and he knew how to lead, and the Army valued both enough to make Allen the first among his former West Point classmates to wear a general’s stars. Now he wore a pair, the insignia of a major general.
“The soldier’s greatest nightmare is to think he is being sent up to death foolishly,” an aide later wrote. “Men didn’t feel that way under Allen.” A devout Roman Catholic, he regretted missing mass on this eventful Sunday morning, but he had privately prayed, as he always prayed before battle, for the souls of his men. As for generalship, he believed that “tactics are nine-tenths audacity,” and his favorite military adages had a primitive simplicity: “Find ’em, fix ’em, and fight ’em,” for example, and “You win or die.” Allen’s political philosophy was no more sophisticated. “It’s crazy, this war,” he said with a shrug. In June he advised his men, “Do your job. We don’t want heroes—dead heroes. We’re not out for glory. We’re here to do a dirty, stinking job.” At the same time he wrote his young wife, Mary Fran, “I feel sure that my luck will continue to hold in the future.”
That luck had been sorely tested already this morning. “Couriers dashed in and out of the grove,” wrote the reporter Don Whitehead. “Field telephones rang and men shouted into radios. Shells whined over.” An agitated staff officer appeared and Allen said, “Don’t tell me. I can guess. They’ve attacked from the east and west.” The officer nodded. On the division’s right flank, the 16th Infantry was even more deeply embattled than the 26th Infantry on the left. The 16th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion held for two hours against forty panzers at Abbio Priolo on the Niscemi road before at least two companies broke, shoving past officers trying to stop them. “The men felt utterly frustrated because they had nothing with which to fight the tanks. Some of them were crying,” a captain reported. By late morning, the survivors had dug in under scorching fire along a ridge at Piano Lupo, where their advance had begun at midnight. “Hell, let’s not wait for them to attack us. Let’s attack them first,” a lieutenant said, then fell dead with a bullet in the head.
At 10:10 A.M., the 3rd Battalion reported thirty panzers northeast of the Gela-Niscemi road junction, before adding: “We are in heavy conflict with tanks.” By now the regiment had lost six of nine antitank guns, and two battalion commanders had been badly wounded. Officers were reduced to sniping at observation slits with their .45-caliber pistols. The few artillery tubes ashore had begun firing furiously at nine A.M. with powder charge 5 for a range of 6,000 yards; by 10:30, as retreating riflemen streamed past, the gunners had cut their powder to charge 1 for targets less than a mile away. “Situation critical. We are being overrrun by tanks,” the 16th Infantry commander told Allen. “We have no idea what is going on to the east of us.”
Allen climbed to the crest of a dune behind the command post, cheeks hissing, a map tucked under his arm. “The plain,” an artilleryman later wrote, “was a mass of bursting shells, burning tanks and confusion.” Behind Allen, the beach was hardly more orderly. Italian dive-bombers had struck the roadstead at dawn; since then, scarcely half an hour had passed without another Axis air attack. Of Allen’s ten requests for air support missions on Saturday and Sunday, only one was met: Allied fighters—flying from North Africa and Pantelleria Island—were too busy protecting the fleet. Patton had ordered his floating reserve ashore early that morning, but the four 18th Infantry battalions landed with little more than they could carry. Some heavy weapons mistakenly landed in the 45th Division zone to the southeast, forcing the gun crews to plod for miles up the shingle; antitank guns for the 26th Infantry were lost when LST 313 took an Axis bomb in the tank deck and burned to the keel. Two 1st Division signal trucks had also been destroyed, including one carrying thirty miles of phone wire, and a third, full of radio equipment, lay in seven feet of water. The Gela beaches remained so crowded that several dozen landing craft circled offshore or returned to their mother ships, unable to penetrate the broached vessels and supply crates heaped along the water’s edge. Mortarmen borrowed fishing dinghies to row their ammunition ashore.
“I want tanks and I don’t give a damn where they come from,” Allen said. More than sixty M-4 Shermans would make land on July 11, but only a platoon—four tanks—made it beyond the dunes and into the battle on Sunday morning. Others were stopped by broken pontoons, congestion, and confusion, to say nothing of the complete dearth of functioning radios on armor vehicles ashore. Shermans crossing the beach found that the steel matting laid for traction snarled in their tracks and bogey wheels, requiring extensive pruning with large shears. Tanks that skirted the mats bogged down in the steep dunes, throwing one or both tracks.
Allen could hardly have dared to hope that comparable woes afflicted General Conrath at the Hermann Göring command post in Priolo, but
From his sandy perch above the lemons and the panoramic chaos, Allen knew that to be untrue, but he also knew that it could be true if the tide did not turn soon. As he watched the panzers edge closer to the beach, a mob of 18th Infantry soldiers scampered back through the dunes. “They are carrying armloads of blankets, shovels, binoculars, and weapons in what seems like complete disorder,” an 18th Infantry lieutenant reported. A staff officer asked Allen whether other troops should also retreat. “Hell, no,” Allen replied. “We haven’t begun to fight. They haven’t overrrun our artillery yet.”