The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Patton came ashore on Whiskey Knoll near Gela at 9:30 on Sunday morning, wading the last few yards from Hewitt’s borrowed barge in thigh-deep water. Timing his own pulse, he was disgusted to find it slightly elevated. “You had better come now,” he had called to a reporter on Monrovia, “or my men will have killed all the bastards.” Slapping a leather swagger stick in his palm, he looked “beautiful and battle-fevered in boots and whipcords,” the reporter noted. Binoculars and a camera hung from his neck, and in place of his trademark pair of pistols, a single Colt Peacemaker .45 hugged his hip. Crossing the beach, Patton studied a pair of mine-wrecked DUKWs as several German shells exploded in the water thirty yards from shore. “Get your asses off this beach,” he yelled at loitering soldiers in his odd, high-pitched voice, “and go kill those Kraut bastards.”
Aides stripped the waterproofing from his scout car and unfurled a three-star flag on the bumper. Patton intended to drive three miles east on Highway 115, now known as Adolf’s Alley, to see Allen at Danger Forward, but the U.S. flag Darby had tacked onto the Fascist party headquarters in Gela caught his eye and he swerved into town. Darby was off in the killing fields somewhere, but the rooftop offered Patton an Olympian view. Thirty hours into HUSKY, he had only a sketchy notion of how the invasion was progressing: the code rooms on Monrovia had been hopelessly swamped since H-hour, with many urgent messages from Seventh Army units backlogged for eight hours; more routine dispatches were backed up for two days. At least here, Patton could see for himself.
Dust and gray smoke smeared the landscape north and east of town. German tanks pushing past the 26th Infantry on the eastern edge of Highway 117 had crossed the shallow Gela River to menace Adolf’s Alley and Allen’s sanctuary. Italian tanks west of the highway had nosed within a mile of Gela. Patton shouted to a naval ensign with a walkie-talkie in the street below. “Hey, you with the radio! If you can connect with your goddam Navy, tell them for God’s sake to drop some shell fire on the road.” Minutes later thirty-eight shells from the cruiser Boise rushed over the rooftops. Explosions blossomed among the Italian tanks, and a syncopated thunder rolled across town. More blossoms opened, this time from white-phosphorus mortar shells falling among enemy infantrymen. The burning fragments, Patton noted, “seemed to make them quite crazy as they rushed out of the ravine, shrilling like dervishes with their hands over their heads.” A Ranger captain added that “enemy troops could be seen staggering around as if thoroughly dazed…. There were human bodies hanging from trees.” A column of prisoners snaked through the street below. “Make it double time,” Patton barked at the military police escorts. “Kick ’em in the ass.” Under Patton’s glare, the prisoners stumbled into a ragged trot.
The Italian thrust stalled before noon, but now German artillery ranged the town. Two 88mm shells gouged the Fascist headquarters in a spray of steel shards and masonry, and a third holed the roof across the street. “No one was hurt except some civilians,” Patton noted. “I have never heard so much screaming.” The panic intensified with the appearance of two German warplanes. The heavy footfall of approaching bombs, Patton later wrote, caused the locals “to behave in a most foolish manner, running up and down the street…. It was necessary for us to use MPs and rifle butts to solace them.”
If the Italians had been stopped, the Germans had not, and by midday Terry Allen’s right wing faced obliteration. German infiltrators menaced the flank of the lemon grove, where the stink of cordite commingled with the citrus. Panzer fire had begun sweeping the beaches, causing casualties and consternation. German tanks near Santa Spina controlled Highway 115 and stood barely a mile from the waterline; landing craft had taken fire and enemy troops threatened the 26th Infantry supply dumps only seven hundred yards inland. Riflemen pried up slabs of dried mud to build pathetic adobe parapets. On the beach a naval officer “struck a heroic pose, shouting, ‘To arms, to arms!’” Navy yeomen, electricians, and carpenters tittered even as they scrambled for their rifles. Men burned both personal and official papers, including maps, and a radar set was blown up for fear of capture.
Crouched in a trench at the aptly named Danger Forward, Allen—bleary-eyed and gray with fatigue—sifted through battle reports and pleaded for more firepower. Firepower arrived, and with it salvation. Four artillery battalions, with a dozen guns each, as well as the platoon of Sherman tanks and half a dozen cannon and antitank companies, finally trundled across the beach and into the dunes. “There’s plenty of good hunting up there,” the 1st Division artillery chief, Brigadier General Clift Andrus, told the arriving gunners. Smoking his pipe and polishing his spectacles, Andrus—a Cornell University civil engineer known to the troops as Mr. Chips—evinced the same sangfroid he had displayed at Kasserine Pass and El Guettar. Strolling from battery to battery, he pointed at targets with his walking stick and ordered the gunners to try ricochet fire, which had proved particularly lethal to enemy foot soldiers in Tunisia. Behind a battery of 155mm Long Toms, firing over open sights at the approaching panzers, a lieutenant reportedly drew his .45 and threatened to shoot any man who abandoned his gun.
Then, above the whine of artillery shells, came the locomotive shriek of Boise’s shells: fifteen 6-inch airbursts every six seconds, ripping up wheat fields and vineyards and Germans alike. She nearly sat on the beach, edging to within three thousand yards of the waterline as leadsmen took soundings in the chains; another cruiser, U.S.S. Savannah, joined the barrage, along with four destroyers that drew even closer at twelve hundred yards.
German tanks began to burn: first two, then six, then a dozen and more. U.S. infantrymen heard trapped crews screaming half a mile away, until the ammunition cooked off and the screaming stopped. “I was hit on the left side of the turret,” an officer in a Tiger unit later recalled. “Fortunately it didn’t penetrate, but rivets flew about our ears.” A grenadier shot by a 16th Infantry rifleman tumbled beneath the tracks of tank; later, upon inspecting the body, the rifleman “took hold of his hair to pull his face around but he was melted right into the ground.”
At two P.M., Conrath called off the attack. The panzers pulled back, slowly at first, then gathering speed when the naval shells thickened until they were rushing to the rear as if the landscape had somehow tipped northward. At four P.M. the Hermann Göring Division headquarters reported, “The counterattack against the hostile landings has failed.” Terry Allen urged his exhausted troops to “sock the hell out of those damned Heinies before they can get set to hit us again.” As for the day’s events, the twinkle returned to his red-rimmed eyes. “The situation could have been critical,” he told Don Whitehead. “As it was, it was merely embarrassing.”
Patton returned to the beach late in the day, still in full throat and still impeccable despite having been bombed, strafed, and shelled. During the afternoon he had tracked down Ted Roosevelt in Gela—rebuking him for failing to seize Ponte Olivo airfield already—and later he smoked a victory cigar while visiting Allen’s command post. He ate his K ration lunch with a portly, white-haired brigadier general named William J. Donovan, a millionaire Wall Street lawyer whose résumé also included the Medal of Honor and three Purple Hearts in World War I and whose friend Franklin Roosevelt had appointed him director of the Office of Strategic Services. Donovan had come ashore from the Samuel Chase and spent the day shooting at Italians, “happy as a clam,” a 1st Division captain reported. “You know, Bill,” Patton said, “there are two things in life that I love to do—fucking and fighting.” Donovan nodded. “Yes, George, and in that order, too.”
Patton’s cigar was fairly won. Two Axis divisions had been repulsed and were now skulking off into the Sicilian hinterland. “I had the bitter experience to watch scenes during these last days that are not worthy of a German soldier,” Conrath fulminated in a July 12 field order that threatened summary executions for cowardice and rumor-mongering. On the Seventh Army left, Truscott’s 3rd Division was pushing inland; on the right, paratrooper Gavin repulsed a sizable armor and infantry force
Patton prowled the beach, waiting for his barge. Spying several soldiers digging foxholes amid stacks of five-hundred-pound bombs, he advised them that “if they wanted to save Graves Registration burials that was a fine thing to do, but otherwise they better dig somewhere else.” At that moment German planes strafed the beach and the men plunged back into their lairs; Patton strutted and clucked until he had shamed them from the holes. By the time he regained Monrovia, the sun was sinking in the western Mediterranean and he was drenched with sea spray. “This is the first day in this camapign that I think I earned my pay,” he told his diary. “I am well satisfied with my command today.”
“Tonight Wear White Pajamas”
KENT Hewitt had spent his Sunday fighting the naval war, a few thousand yards seaward of Patton’s terrestrial battle. Pillars of black smoke and a faint clamor carrying from the beach implied the tumult ashore, but Hewitt had been far too busy to do more than cast an occasional glance inland.
His own losses were modest if worrisome: Axis air attacks kept intensifying as enemy pilots evaded Allied radar by sneaking through valleys notched across the coastal plain. The battleship H.M.S. Nelson had been attacked three times on July 10 but fourteen times today. A bomb detonated under the Barnett—Ted Roosevelt’s ship—ripping a hole in hold number 1 and killing seven men. The hospital ship Talamba, illuminated and bedizened with huge red crosses, was sunk five miles offshore. “With a cracking, hissing sound her stern went under, her bows reared up and she began to slide under,” a British lieutenant reported. “People were jumping off her sides.” The loss of LST 313 and twenty-two souls at Gela on Saturday had been equally grim. An Me-109 attacked out of the late afternoon sun so stealthily that not a defensive shot was fired until bombs were falling. Trucks loaded with mines and ammunition blew up, catapaulting men from the main deck a hundred feet into the air; flaming axles and fenders rained across the beach. Fires raged, flash-burned men lay on the bow ramp reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and all engines were stopped so that those who had leaped overboard might not be sucked into the propellers. LST 313 settled on the bottom with a final, delphic distress call: “This goddamn thing isn’t working.”
At noon on Sunday, Hewitt boarded the minesweeper U.S.S. Steady and steamed west to inspect Truscott’s landings. No sooner had the admiral arrived off Licata than ten dive-bombers hit the quays and beaches, straddling half a dozen LSTs with bombs and setting fire to another. By three P.M., when Steady came about to return to Gela, Hewitt had witnessed five more attacks.
Each successive raid vexed him more. Nearly five thousand Allied planes had been amassed for HUSKY, but Hewitt had little idea where they were or what they were doing. For months he and Patton had hectored the U.S. Army Air Forces for what the admiral decried as an “almost complete lack of participation in battle planning” and for drafting an air plan “unrelated to the military attack plan and naval attack plan.” Neither he nor Patton knew which Sicilian targets would be bombed, or “what, when, or where fighter cover would be provided.”
Air Force commanders, wary of “parceling out” their aircraft or giving “personal control over the air units” to their Army and Navy brethren, countered that to neutralize Axis airpower they must concentrate Allied planes on targets—such as enemy airfields and supply lines—often invisible from the battlefront. Because the Navy insisted on deploying all aircraft carriers to the Pacific, not enough fighters were available in the Mediterranean to protect the beachheads during sixteen hours of daylight. Firing from Allied ships on friendly planes had become so promiscuous that air patrols originally planned for altitudes of five thousand feet had been forced up to ten thousand.
Considering that the Navy had been prepared to lose up to three hundred ships on July 9 and 10, actual sinkings by air attack through Saturday night—a dozen vessels—had been light indeed. That hardly appeased those under incessant bombardment on the beach and in the anchorage. Hewitt was angry, Patton was disgusted—“We can’t get the goddamn Air Force to do a goddamn thing”—and a young soldier, when told of the impenetrable air umbrella ostensibly provided by Allied fighters, rolled his eyes to the heavens and said, “Only the good people can see them.”
Back at the Gela roads aboard Steady, Hewitt was on the minesweeper’s bridge when the Liberty ship S.S. Rowan—stuffed with ammunition and gasoline—caught a pair of bombs in the number 2 hold and another next to a gun tub. After twenty minutes of futile firefighting she was abandoned and an hour later, as Hewitt watched, blew up with a roar seen and heard halfway to Africa. One eyewitness described “a flat sheet of crimson fire in a frame of black smoke…. Pieces of the twisted metal and flaming wood hissed into the water as far as a mile distant.” Broken in half, Rowan refused to sink despite 5-inch destroyer shells pumped point-blank below her waterline. She settled in just seven fathoms and would burn for two days as a beacon for enemy pilots. By twilight’s last gleaming on Sunday, German planes sprinkled magnesium parachute flares to make the roadstead even brighter. They drifted like tiny suns over the fleet, reminding every swab and soldier—and admiral—of his vulnerability.
Just across Highway 115, a few hundred yards east of Terry Allen’s command post, another major general stood on a makeshift landing strip and eyed the glowing night sky with trepidation. Matthew B. Ridgway was handsome, graceful, and charismatic. He was “hard as flint and full of intensity, almost grinding his teeth from intensity,” in James Gavin’s description, to the point that George Marshall had once counseled Ridgway to “cultivate the art of playing and loafing.” Vaulting from major to brigadier general in eighteen months, Ridgway as a two-star now commanded the 82nd Airborne. Soldiers later dubbed him “Old Iron Tits” for his affectation of attaching a hand grenade and a first-aid kit to his chest harness. “There’s a right way,” they said, “a wrong way, and a Ridgway.” He was “brave under fire to the point of being exhibitionistic,” Gavin recalled, and so despised the Germans that in battle “he’d stand in the middle of the road and urinate…. Even with his penis he was defiant.” God, he believed, would preserve him at least until the final defeat of the Third Reich.
He was less certain how the Almighty felt about the 82nd on this Sunday night. One of his regiments, under Gavin, was already scattered across half of Sicily, and another was now en route to the island. At 8:30 this morning, on orders personally issued by Patton, Ridgway had summoned the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment from Tunisia with a coded radio message: “Tonight wear white pajamas.” Twenty-three hundred men were to reinforce the Big Red One by jumping from 144 planes before midnight. Some planners had advocated a daylight drop, or, now that German troops had retreated, simply landing the C-47s near the beach to discharge the paratroopers. Yet, once again, plans had been made, orders had been issued, and a cruel inflexibility gripped both plans and orders. Patton before leaving Monrovia this morning had drafted a notification to his four divisions of the impending jump, adding, “It is essential that all subordinate units be cautioned not to fire on these friendly planes.” Although Patton signed the order at 8:45 A.M., congestion in Monrovia’s signal room kept it from being coded and dispatched until 4:20 P.M. Ridgway this afternoon had traipsed among antiaircraft batteries along Green 2 asking whether the gunners knew that “aircraft bearing friendly parachute troops” would soon be overhead: five crews had in fact heard, while a sixth had not.
“There’s always some son-of-a-bitch who never gets the
Ridgway for six weeks had warned of fratricide, and in late June he advocated scrubbing the proposed jump because the Navy refused to guarantee safe passage for the transport planes over the fleet. A flight corridor had at last been grudgingly promised; but final aircraft routes had not been apportioned by the high command until July 5, and disseminating knowledge of those routes through the invasion forces took several days. After two days of Axis attacks, all troops around the Gulf of Gela were jumpy, and few were skilled at distinguishing friend from foe, especially at night. “Every plane that came over us was fired upon because we could not identify it,” one corporal explained. A particularly vicious raid, the twenty-third of the day, hit the anchorage at 9:50 P.M., narrowly missing Boise and scattering ships to all points.
If Ridgway was anxious ashore, Patton aboard Monrovia was hard pressed to heed his own advice to eschew the counsel of his fears. His afternoon bravado melted away as he realized that he was sitting on a tinderbox. At eight P.M., he tried to abort the mission only to learn that the 504th was already airborne and beyond recall. In his cabin late that night, Patton confided to his diary, “Found we could not get contact by radio. Am terribly worried.”