The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Montgomery presented this maneuver as a fait accompli to General Harold R.L.G. Alexander, the senior ground commander for HUSKY and Eisenhower’s British deputy, even though U.S. troops stood within half a mile of the highway and were much nearer to Enna than the British. Alexander accepted the impetuous deed without demur, and late Tuesday night he instructed Patton to get out of the way: “Operations for the immediate future will be Eighth Army to continue on two axes.” Eisenhower declined to review the issue, much less intervene. Offering Eisenhower criticism of the British, General Lucas observed, “is like talking to a man about his wife.”
Baleful consequences followed. Only two roads, hugging the island’s east and north coasts, led to the ultimate prize of Messina, and the British now claimed both. Had the Yanks seized Enna by Friday, July 16, they might have severed the main escape route for Axis forces hurrying from western Sicily toward the bridgehead now forming on Mount Etna’s flanks. Instead, Patton’s army would be relegated to the role of flank guard for the British. The 45th Division began trudging back to the beach for a shift to the west, and Omar Bradley scrambled to regroup his corps engineer, medical, ordnance, quartermaster, and signal units. Montgomery now was driving on divergent axes toward objectives forty-five miles apart—coastal Catania and inland Enna—with half his army trundling into poor tank country beyond support of the Royal Navy. Any hope for a quick Allied triumph had vanished, as soon became evident to every man with a map.
The Americans were furious. “My God,” Bradley told Patton, “you can’t allow him to do that.” But stung by Eisenhower’s rebuke aboard Monrovia and reluctant to raise Cain after the paratrooper debacle, Patton remained docile, confining his anger to a slashing diary entry—“What fools we are”—and muttering private imprecations: “Tell Montgomery to stay out of my way or I’ll drive those Krauts right up his ass.” An enraged Bradley later declared the pilferage of Highway 124 “the most arrogant, egotistical, selfish and dangerous move in the whole of combined operations in World War II.” The British move “tends to sell us down the river,” Patton’s deputy, Major General Geoffrey Keyes, wrote in his diary.
Beyond any tactical impact, the episode inflamed chauvinistic tensions in the British and American camps. “The feeling of discord lurking between the two countries…has increased rather than decreased,” Harry Butcher had noted after the Tunisian victory. “It is disheartening and disconcerting.” Alexander, for one, remained imprinted with the disagreeable image of fleeing U.S. troops during the Kasserine Pass rout six months earlier; like Montgomery and many British officers, he harbored a supercilious disdain for American fighting qualities. Yank resentment at that hauteur fueled the anglophobia afflicting the American high command. Patton already believed that Eisenhower was “a pro-British straw man” and that “allies must fight in separate theaters or they will hate each other more than they do the enemy.” Now attitudes hardened, and mistrust threatened to mutate into enmity. “At great expense to ourselves we are saving the British empire,” Lucas complained, “and they aren’t even grateful.” Another American general suggested celebrating each July 4 “as our only defeat of the British. We haven’t had much luck since.”
“What a headache, what a bore, what a bounder he must be to those on roughly the same level in the service,” a BBC reporter wrote of Montgomery. “And at the same time what a great man he is as a leader of troops.” That contradiction would define Montgomery through Sicily and beyond, confounding his admirers and infuriating his detractors. “A simple, forthright man who angered people needlessly,” his biographer Alan Moorehead concluded. “At times a real spark of genius…but [he] was never on an even plane.” Even the official British history of the Mediterranean war would acknowledge his “arrogance, bumptiousness, ungenerosity…[and] schoolboy humour.” American disdain for Montgomery tended toward dismissive condemnation: “a son of a bitch,” declared Beetle Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff. His British colleagues, whose scorn at times ran even deeper, at least tried to parse his solipsism. “Small, alert, tense,” said Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, “rather like an intelligent terrier who might bite at any moment.” Montgomery so irritated Andrew Cunningham—“he seems to think that all he has to do is say what is to be done and everyone will dance to the tune he is piping”—that the admiral would not allow the general’s name to be uttered in his presence. “One must remember,” another British commander said of Montgomery, “that he is not quite a gentleman.”
That he had been raised in wild, remote Tasmania explained much to many. Son of a meek Anglican bishop and a harridan mother who conveyed her love with a cane, Montgomery emerged from childhood as “the bad boy of the family,” who at Sandhurst severely burned a fellow cadet by setting fire to his shirttail. “I do not want to portray him as a lovable character,” his older brother said, “because he isn’t.” Mentioned in dispatches six times on the Western Front, he carried from World War I the habits of meticulous preparation, reliance on firepower, and a conception of his soldiers “not as warriors itching to get into action, which they were not, but as a workforce doing an unpleasant but necessary job,” in the words of the historian Michael Howard. He also accumulated various tics and prejudices: a habit of repeating himself; the stilted use of cricket metaphors; an antipathy to cats; a tendency to exaggerate his battlefield progress; “an obsession for always being right”; and the habit of telling his assembled officers, “There will now be an interval of two minutes for coughing. After that there will be no coughing.” No battle captain kept more regular hours. He was awakened with a cup of tea by a manservant at 6:30 A.M. and bedtime in his trailer—captured from an Italian field marshal in Tunisia—came promptly at 9:30 P.M.
In Africa he had seen both glory, at El Alamein, and glory’s ephemerality, in the tedious slog through Tunisia. Montgomery much preferred the former. Now the empire’s most celebrated soldier, he received sacks of fan mail, including at least nine marriage proposals, lucky charms ranging from coins to white heather, and execrable odes to his pluck. Professing to disdain such adulation, he had a talent for “backing into the limelight,” as one observer remarked. On leave in London after Tunis fell, still wearing his beret and desert kit, he checked into Claridge’s under the thin pseudonym of “Colonel Lennox,” then took repeated bows from his box seat at a musical comedy as ecstatic theatergoers clapped and clapped and clapped. “His love of publicity is a disease, like alcoholism or taking drugs,” said General Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff, “and it sends him equally mad.”
Success in snatching Highway 124 would encourage Montgomery to disregard both peers and superiors, especially the indulgent Alexander. “I do not think Alex is sufficiently strong and rough with him,” General Brooke wrote of Montgomery in his diary, adding, “The Americans do not like him and it will always be a difficult matter to have him fighting in close proximity to them.” If audacious among allies, Montgomery became ever more cautious with adversaries. “The scope of operations must be limited to what is practicable,” he advised John Gunther in Sicily. “The general must refuse to be rushed.” Still, his own men cherished his ability to convince them “to believe in their task, to believe in themselves, and to believe in their leader.” Sailing about in the big command car, he stopped to ask a Canadian unit, “Do you know why I never have defeats?”
Well, I will tell you. My reputation as a great general means too much to me…. You can’t be a great general and have defeats…. So you can be quite sure any time I commit you to battle you are bound to win.
In a printed broadside to Eighth Army he asserted that thanks to “the Lord Mighty in Battle,” the enemy had been “hemmed in” on the northeast corner of Sicily. “Now let us get on with the job,” Montgomery urged. “Into battle with stout hearts.” To Brooke in London he later added, “All goes well here…. We have won the battle.”
Neither assertion was true. On the third day of the invasion, Field Marshal Kesselring had arrived in Sicily from Fra
Montgomery had expected the Catanian plain beyond Augusta to provide a flat alley for his armor, much as the desert had. Instead, he found “a hole-and-corner area, full of lurking places,” in one soldier’s description, with irrigation ditches and stone farmhouses perfect for concealing antitank weapons. “This is not tank country,” a British officer lamented. Another Tommy complained that Sicily was “worse than the fuckin’ desert in every fuckin’ way.”
Eighth Army’s attempt to break through along the coast was first checked by yet another airborne fiasco, a mission patched together on short notice to seize the Primosole Bridge, seven miles south of Catania. Paratroopers and glider infantry on the night of July 13–14 ran into the now familiar hellfire from confused Allied ships, some of which mistook cargo racks on the aircraft bellies for torpedoes. Those managing to reach the coast met sheets of Axis antiaircraft fire. Fourteen planes were lost, a couple of dozen turned back to Tunisia without dropping, and 40 percent of the surviving planes suffered damage. By mischance, German paratroopers also jumped at the same time on adjacent drop zones. “One shouted for comrades and was answered in German,” a paratrooper recalled. Of nearly two thousand men in the British parachute brigade, only two hundred reached the bridge, which they held with a few reinforcements for half a day until being driven off. By the time Tommies recaptured the bridge at dawn on Friday, July 16, the Germans had cobbled together a defensive belt just to the north that would halt Eighth Army for a fortnight. “It was yet another humiliating disaster for airborne forces,” said Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, a much decorated battalion commander, “and almost enough to destroy even the most ardent believer’s faith.”
The XXX Corps, dispatched by Montgomery to the northwest on Highway 124, hardly fared better. Here hills were stacked on more hills in a Sicilian badlands, and hill fighting never suited Eighth Army: Montgomery “seemed to mislay his genius when he met a mountain,” his biographer Ronald Lewin observed. The terrain’s constricted visibility “makes for general untidiness,” a British officer complained, and exposure to the July sun “is like being struck on the head.” Every road and goat path was mined; soldiers perched like hood ornaments above the front bumpers of their creeping vehicles, scrutinizing the track for telltale disturbances. Artillery crashed and heaved, day and night. “We break the farmer’s walls, trample his crops, steal his horses and carts, demand fruit and wine,” a soldier wrote in his diary. “If he is unlucky he gets his home smashed by shells, his crops devoured by fire.” Canadian troops howled with outrage upon finding their dead disinterred and robbed of their boots. Refugees desperate for meat could be seen wrapping dead dogs in butcher paper.
Pitched fighting persisted south of Catania along the Simeto River, where Hermann Göring troops and German paratroopers battled with backs-to-the-wall fury. “The enemy is tough. A real lot of sods,” a British officer said. “When we kill them they have sneers on their faces.” John Gunther described Tommies lying in “foxholes, sucking lemons. The earth is khaki-colored here, and they melt into it.” All things white were hidden to avoid attracting Luftwaffe marauders; at the first hint of an air raid, shavers even toweled the lather from their faces. “Get down, Jock,” a Scots officer called to an exposed soldier. “You’ll get pipped.”
Many were pipped anyway. Dead men shored the reedy banks of creeks and irrigation ditches, and a grisly sunken road dubbed Stink Alley was “paved with bodies.” Medics jabbed the moribund with morphine and waited for them to die. “It would seem hard to tell the dead from the living,” a regimental commander wrote. “I realized that you could tell them apart, because the flies walked on the faces of the dead.” Close combat proved especially confusing in Sicilian vineyards, now in full leaf; enemy machine-gunners fired on fixed lines a few inches above the ground, raising welts of dust and wounding many in the feet and legs. At night in the moonlight, “shadows cast by the vines looked like moving men.”
By Sunday morning, July 18, Montgomery conceded that his coastal thrust had sputtered into stalemate. Eighth Army casualties approached four thousand, including seven hundred dead. Efforts to burn the enemy out with RAF incendiaries failed when Sicilian flora proved disappointingly fire-resistant. Ordering a single division to hold the Simeto front, Montgomery shifted forces from his XIII Corps to the west in another effort to flank Axis defenses by further dividing his army. “I am pushing the offensive hard on the left, where the resistance is not so strong. The enemy is now hemmed in at the northeast corner,” he wrote the 51st Highland Division commander on July 21. “I am sending you 50,000 cigarettes as a present to the division.” Eisenhower, who had predicted the fall of Sicily by late July, began to grumble in Algiers. “Why doesn’t Monty get going? What’s the matter with him?” Gunther could have told him: “Both sides are tired, and whereas we are exposed in the plain, the Germans are high up, with good cover.”
The Germans are high up, with good cover. Here in Sicily was revealed a ground truth that would obtain until the war’s end twenty-two months hence: on no battlefield did topography dictate fate more than in vertical Italy. Officers pondered their 1-to-50,000 maps and realized that the compressed contour lines signified not only slope and steep ascent, but plunging fire and enemy omniscience. A Gefreiter with Zeiss binoculars and a field telephone could rain artillery on every living creature in sight.
For now the whitewashed houses and tile roofs of unattainable Catania shimmered in the midday haze, five miles to the north, down a road lined with fluttering poplars and hidden guns. Beyond the town loomed the pyramidal mass of Mount Etna, mysterious and indifferent.
“How I Love Wars”
PATTON had been sulking outside Gela in a confiscated Fascist villa notable for its wardrobe of black shirts and a squawking menagerie of tropical birds in gilded cages. Fine tapestries covered the walls and the Seventh Army commander slept in a sturdy four-poster. “We can sit comfortably on our prats while Monty finishes the goddam war,” a staff officer said bitterly. That was unlikely. On Saturday morning, July 17, Patton rose from his prat, grabbed a map, and flew to Tunisia, determined to get his army back into the battle.
He found General Alexander at his headquarters in the village of La Marsa, on the northern lip of the Gulf of Tunis. A chapel nearby consecrated the spot where Louis IX of France died of typhoid in 1270 while leading the Eighth Crusade. Across the blue bay loomed the jagged silhouette of Cap Bon, where the final fragments of the Axis armies had sought refuge before surrendering two months earlier. Alexander and staff officers of his 15th Army Group—the nomenclature reflected the sum of his subordinate Seventh and Eighth Armies—occupied tents in the white-walled garden and orangery of a villa deeded to Queen Victoria by the bey of Tunis. German commanders had used the manor house during their seven-month occupation; they absconded with the furniture but left untouched the English books, including a set of Benjamin Disraeli’s novels. Senior British officers now messed in the dining room beneath a domed ceiling and arabesque traceries. “No fuss, no worry, no anxiety—and a great battle in progress,” Harold Macmillan, the rankin
Not in Patton’s view. He unfolded his map and came to the point with a jabbing finger. “Have I got to stay here and protect the rear of Eighth Army?” he asked Alexander. “I want to get on with this and push out.” The enemy was “back on his heels.” Sixty thousand Italian troops remained in western Sicily, but Ultra two days earlier had revealed German plans to abandon half the island; demolitions were ordered for Trapani, the little port on Sicily’s northwest coast where Aeneas’ father had died. The best way to shield Montgomery’s flank, Patton said, would be to sunder the island by driving Seventh Army north, toward Palermo. A gleam lit his gaze as he pointed to Sicily’s largest city on the north coast, eighty miles from Gela. In his mind’s eye, American tanks swept from the rolling hills and into Palermo’s central piazza with a panache even Erwin Rommel had never achieved. “The glamour of capturing Palermo,” Lucian Truscott later noted, “attracted Georgie Patton.”
Harold Alexander studied the map, his head swiveling from Catania in the east through the still uncaptured inland crossroads at Enna to the Sicilian west. Except for a fascination with Kesselring—he devoured a biographical sketch compiled by Ultra intelligence analysts—Alexander’s generalship lacked intellectual depth or even curiosity, relying more on his legendary sangfroid. “He’s bone from the neck up,” one British general insisted, and even Brooke conceded that he “had no ideas of his own.” Yet Alexander possessed a sterling reputation, built at the cannon’s mouth, and he looked the part: immaculate, unfazed, in command. His steep-peaked Guardsman’s cap, high boots, and breeches “conveyed an air of Czarist Russia,” one admirer said, and in fact he had once fought the Bolsheviks in Latvia as a volunteer in a unit of ethnic Germans. “He looked as though he had just had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home,” wrote one journalist. “His well-shaped face, with its fine thin-nostriled nose, level eyes and well-trimmed mustache, was plainly pinkish under its tan.” The “chestnut hair was sleekly brushed and parted high on the left side.” Only a touch of gray at the temples, and the violet pouches beneath his eyes, hinted that Alexander was fifty-one and responsible for several hundred thousand souls.