The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
It was said that he was “a born leader, not a made one.” It was said that he “was an English country gentleman, almost uneducated, who never read a book.” It was said that he could not write his name before the age of ten, but now spoke French, Italian, German, Russian, and Urdu. It was also said that he “might have been a greater commander if he had not been so nice a man and so deeply a gentleman.” And it was said that he had gone over the top thirty times in the Great War before being wounded, and that, in hopes of sharing his good fortune, Irish Guardsmen liked to tread in his footsteps when crossing no-man’s-land. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, even said of him, “To be clever is not everything.” Whatever Alexander’s shortcomings, Macmillan observed, “he has the great quality of seeing the point.” Patton, unbeguiled, noted in his diary that Alexander “has an exceptionally small head. That may explain things.”
Oblivious to the anguish that his July 13 order had caused the Americans, Alexander nevertheless sensed the tension in Patton’s voice. He wondered, he later confessed, whether the impetuous American might simply strike off on his own, declaring, “The hell with this.” True, he doubted that the Yanks could pull their weight. As he had written Brooke, even Eisenhower, Patton, and other U.S. commanders “are not professional soldiers, not as we understand that term.” Yet Alexander saw no harm in allowing them to give it a go. With a nod of that solid-bone, beautifully coiffed, exceptionally small head, he turned Patton loose.
Off Patton’s forces went at a gallop, west by north, an army unreined. In truth, many had slipped their fetters in advance of Alexander’s approval. Patton on Friday had dispatched a huge reconnaissance force ten miles up the coast to Agrigento, “loveliest of mortal cities,” in the opinion of the poet Pindar, where men once slept on ivory beds and interred their favorite horses in lavish tombs, and where the apricot-tinted Doric temples still had few equals outside Greece. Darby’s Rangers assembled in an almond orchard a mile north of Agrigento’s harbor, Porto Empedocle, then attacked with five companies in skirmish lines, followed by three battalions from Truscott’s 3rd Infantry Division. Sweeping over strongpoints, they routed the defenders and took six thousand prisoners.
Unaware that Agrigento and the port had fallen, the light cruiser Philadelphia unlimbered her guns until frantic soldiers on the docks arranged oil barrels to spell YANK and U.S. ARMY for a spotter plane overhead. Sailors recased the guns, and several giddy Rangers, fortified with local cognac, emerged from a haberdashery wearing stovepipe hats and black wedding togs. Of greater value were three safes found in an Italian naval headquarters; after heaving them out of a second-story window, soldiers cracked them with farrier tools, crowbars, hand grenades, and rocks. Inside they found charts of enemy minefields, code books, and demolition plans for Palermo and Messina.
Axis troops not captured or killed drew back. “During the night of 17/18 July,” Seventh Army’s log recorded, “enemy withdrew from contact along the entire line.” Truscott summoned his regimental commanders, ordered them to reach Palermo in five days or less, then hoisted a bottle of scotch for a toast: “To the American doughboy.”
Off they went again at a gallop, again west by north. Among those American doughboys was the nineteen-year-old son of a Texas sharecropper who in the next two years would become the most celebrated soldier in the U.S. Army. A fifth-grade dropout, he had picked cotton, worked in a filling station, and fixed radios. Until enlisting, he had never been a hundred miles from the four-room shack in Hunt County that housed eleven children. The Army had issued him a uniform six inches too long in the sleeves and tried to make him a cook. In basic training, he balked at buying GI insurance because “I don’t intend to get killed any way and it costs pretty high”; he still owed money for his mother’s funeral. Bunkmates in the States had called him Baby—he weighed 112 pounds—but the nickname disappeared as he added muscle. This week he had been promoted, so he was now Corporal Audie Leon Murphy.
He had a slow, stooped gait, as if stalking prey. Audie Murphy’s marksmanship derived from squirrel hunting, but he would learn to stalk Germans by the smell of their tobacco smoke. Hunt County had put a flinty edge on him. “There never was a peace time in my life, a time when things were good,” he later said. “I can’t remember ever being young in my life.” When a chaplain tried to nudge him closer to God, Murphy replied, “You do the prayin’ and I’ll do the shootin’.” As the 1st Battalion of the 15th Infantry Regiment plunged through the Sicilian interior, he did his first real shootin’ while leading a patrol. Two Italian officers bolted from an observation post, and as they mounted a pair of white horses, Murphy dropped to a knee. “I fire twice,” he recalled. “The men tumble from the horses, roll over and lie still.” Many more would lie still before Murphy could return to Texas festooned with medals, but he had already shed any illusions. “Ten seconds after the first shot was fired at me by an enemy soldier,” he said, “combat was no longer glamorous.”
Unlike Tunisia, where hills were named by their height in meters, “here there was usually a small town on top with some Dago name that no one could pronounce,” an artillery sergeant wrote. One by one they fell, often without a skirmish: Sciacca and Lercara Friddi and Castelvetrano. Cheering locals greeted them with figs, almonds, and sometimes a stiff-armed Fascist salute. “Kiss your hand! Kiss your hand!” obeisant peasants yelled with such fervor that an annoyed major banned the phrase. White bed-sheets fluttered from every house in Prizzi, where Truscott bought a fine Italian saddle as a trophy for Patton. Italian troops from the Assietta and Aosta Divisions surrendered by the thousands, grousing at German betrayal. “One never seemed to be able to do enough to please them,” an Italian POW explained.
Emulating Stonewall Jackson’s foot cavalry, Truscott’s infantry covered thirty miles or more a day in blistering heat and through dust said to be “composed of a mixture of chalk and cattle dung.” “We are walking at the rate of 4.5 miles an hour,” a private in the 15th Infantry told his diary. “Boy are my dogs barking now.” The surging ranks reminded Truscott of “waves beating on an ocean beach.” Alexander made a halfhearted effort from La Marsa to moderate the advance, but Seventh Army staff officers ignored his message. “Mount up and continue,” Patton told his armor crews. “Don’t stop except for gas.” Omar Bradley conspicuously displayed in his II Corps headquarters a map of Sicily upon which the territory seized by U.S. troops was shaded in blue, sharply contrasting with the smaller, red-hued area held by the British.
From a roadcut in the ridge above Palermo, Truscott squinted through the midday haze at the ancient city on Thursday, July 22. Houses and apartment buildings spilled down the slope to the sea in a terra-cotta jumble redolent of blood oranges and smoke. Fires danced on the lowering hills as far as Monte Pellegrino, sparked by artillery or rearguard Italians burning munitions. Thousands of hungry refugees now camped in these highlands; judging by the desperate faces Truscott had seen while driving from his command post in Corleone, no cat in Palermo was safe from the carving knife.
Belisarius in A.D. 535 had captured the city from the Goths by hoisting archers to the mastheads of his fleet with ropes and pulleys so they could shoot over the harbor ramparts. Such tactics were hardly needed now. Palermo was defenseless, ripe for plucking. Comando Supremo a few hours earlier had ordered port demolitions to begin, and Truscott could hear the echo of explosions along the quays. Two infantry regiments stood poised above the city, but Patton forbade further advance until tanks arrived to spearhead the procession. “Everything was arranged so that Georgie could make a grandstand entry with tanks and what-not,” Truscott wrote Sarah.
Hours passed. Italian envoys in shabby suits came and went under flags of truce, pleading for someone to accept the city’s surrender. At six P.M., Seventh Army authorized reconnaissance patrols to enter the city and secure the docks. Truscott sent two battalions.
Into the city they clattered, into a cadaverous and ruined city, dismembered by months of Allied bombing. “Street a
Whole blocks of shapeless rubble. Parlor, bedroom, and bath exposed…by the fantastic projectile that strips away the façade and leaves intact the hat on the bureau, the mirror on the wall, the carafe on the night table.
More than sixty churches had been damaged. At the National Library, “stacks full of rare books lay open like a sliced pomegranate.” Drifts of rubble stood so deep near the waterfront that streets could no longer be recognized as streets, though a marble plaque still affixed to one battered house noted that Goethe had lived there in 1787. Forty-four ships had been sunk along masonry quays smashed to powder. The explosion of an ammunition freighter had raised a wave powerful enough to toss two other vessels onto the moles. Wreckage from hundreds of smaller craft cluttered the port. Salvage teams soon would find tons of unexploded land mines and other ordnance washed by tidal currents along the muddy harbor floor. In the Piazza Vigliena, a small army of bedraggled Italian soldiers stood in ranks, waiting to surrender. Priests in black soutanes genuflected and urchins on the Via Maqueda offered to sing Verdi arias for candy. American troops seized two large trucks, one full of new typewriters and the other full of sweet Sicilian nougat. In the coming days, they would find half a million tons of naval stores at Palermo, including crated matériel addressed to Herr Rommel in Alexandria, Egypt, his destination until Alamein had reversed his course.
Major General Geoff Keyes, Patton’s deputy, arrived in Palermo’s western outskirts at 7:15 P.M. He found an Italian general, Giuseppe Molinero, blotting his damp brow after fruitless hours of trying to capitulate. Searching for a translator, Keyes fastened on a Hungarian-born news photographer named Endre Friedmann, better known as Robert Capa. That Capa spoke no Italian hindered the negotiations—“Stop that jabbering, soldier!” Keyes demanded at one point, “I want unconditional surrender and I want it immediately!”—but the gist soon emerged. “General Molinero says he is through and will fight no more.” Sadly, the general lacked the power to surrender all forces in Palermo. Keyes bundled Molinero into his scout car; a white pillowcase requisitioned from a Sicilian housewife and tied to the radio antenna hung too limply, so an aide held a bedsheet lashed to a fishing pole as they drove to the Royal Palace on Via Vittorio Emanuele. Italian soldiers cheered and civilians tossed flowers and lemons. The proper general could not be found—Truscott’s efficient men had arrested him earlier—so the weary Molinero agreed to exceed his authority. Palermo fell at last, formally and finally. Keyes checked into the Hotel Excelsior Palace, took a bath, and went to bed.
Patton woke him at ten P.M., flask in hand, giddy at his own flowers-and-lemons entry. “It is a great thrill to be driving into a captured city in the dark,” he jotted in his diary. Patton moved into the king’s apartment in the Royal Palace, dining on captured German champagne and K rations served on House of Savoy china. Built by Saracens and enlarged by the Normans in the twelfth century, the palace was a fit if dusty abode for a conquering hero. “All sorts of retainers live in holes about the place and all give the Fascist salute,” Patton noted.
“The occupation of western Sicily must be considered as complete,” Kesselring sourly advised Berlin on July 24. From the assault at Agrigento through the capture of the Trapani naval commander—who surrendered his sword and field glasses—American casualties totaled less than 300; some 2,300 Axis troops had been killed or wounded, and another 53,000 captured, nearly all of them Italian. Yet it was a slender triumph, strategically insignificant, and Patton’s gaze soon swiveled east, where the real fight for Sicily must occur. Over highballs in the palace on July 26, he confided to Truscott that he would “certainly like to beat Montgomery into Messina.”
Still, they savored the moment. “You will have guessed where I am and what I have been doing,” Truscott wrote Sarah. “It has been a grand experience and we have opened lots of eyes.” Patton summarized his sentiments in four words to Bea: “How I love wars.”
Snaring the Head Devil
AFTER months of procrastination and discord, the Allied high command had yet to agree on what to do with the million-man Anglo-American army in the Mediterranean once the campaign ended in Sicily. At the TRIDENT conference in Washington, the Combined Chiefs—with the approval of Roosevelt and Churchill—had instructed Eisenhower to devise a plan “best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces.” The prime minister believed any such plan must include an invasion of mainland Italy. He hectored Eisenhower to that end, as he had hectored the president.
“No objective can compete with the capture of Rome,” Churchill insisted. In a whirlwind visit to Algiers after TRIDENT, and in countless messages since, he had argued that if Berlin were uncoupled from its staunchest ally, German troops would be forced to supplant several dozen Italian divisions occupying the Balkans and southern France; that, in turn, would weaken Hitler’s defenses in western Europe before the Allied cross-Channel attack, tentatively planned for the spring of 1944. If more Allied soldiers were needed for an Italian campaign, Churchill would strip British forces in the Middle East. If more ships were needed to transport and supply that invading army, he would snatch food from British tables by diverting cargo vessels. “It would be hard for me to ask the British people to cut their rations again, but I would gladly do so,” he vowed. When Eisenhower balked at such blandishments, Churchill lamented that the Allied commander was “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
As the prime minister’s rhetoric grew febrile, metaphors piled up. On July 13, urging bold action as far up the Italian boot as possible, Churchill declared, “Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest-bug from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee…. Tell the planners to throw their hat over the fence.” He privately acknowledged that “the Americans consider we have led them up the garden path in the Mediterranean—but a beautiful path it has proved to be. They have picked peaches here, nectarines there. How grateful they should be!”(“Many of the Italian peaches,” a U.S. Army commander later commented, “had gonorrhea.”)
Eisenhower in May had leaned toward carrying the fight to the Italian mainland. But George Marshall’s wariness, Churchill’s chronic fixation on the Balkans, and the imminent return to England of seven British and American divisions, as agreed at TRIDENT, gave him pause. So too did contradictory assessments from his staff. An intelligence study in late June concluded that the Italian “population is war weary and apathetic, sees little hope of victory…and is becoming increasingly hostile to the growing German control.” Bombing, amphibious landings, and a quick march toward Rome “might well cause a collapse in civilian will to resist”; if Italy collapsed, German forces “will withdraw and resistance met will be slight.” Yet Eisenhower’s intelligence chief warned on June 25 “that present indications are that Germany intends to reinforce Italy.” Three days later, his operations chief cautioned that “the terrain through which we shall then have to force our way north is very mountainous and difficult in the extreme.”
Success in Sicily tipped the scale. Having gained their first foothold in occupied Europe, sober men in Washington, London, and North Africa felt the euphoric impulse to roll the dice again. On July 17, shortly after Patton had left his meeting in Tunisia with Alexander, Eisenhower convened a conference of senior commanders at La Marsa. Without excessive deliberation, they agreed to advise the Combined Chiefs—Eisenhower called them the Charlie-Charlies—that “operations should be carried onto the mainland of Italy.” Eisenhower sent the recommendation a day later, and at the same time canceled a proposed invasion of Sardinia. On July 20, the Charlie-Charlies consented, and another die had been cast.
Vital issues remained unsettled, and much dickering followed. Where in Italy should the invading host land? Capture of the great port at Naples was paramount, but Naples Bay had been heavily fortified with fifty big guns and lay just beyond range of Spitfires flying from Sicily. Air cover for the invasio
For now, analysis went begging. As to where the attack should fall, Eisenhower focused on a broad bay 30 miles southeast of Naples and precisely 178 miles from northeast Sicily: a Spitfire outfitted with an extra gas tank had a range of 180 miles, which permitted ten minutes’ combat time before the pilot was forced to return to base for refueling. “If it is decided to undertake such operations,” the AFHQ staff recommended on July 24, “the assault should be made in the Gulf of Salerno.” Two days later the Charlie-Charlies concurred, authorizing an invasion at Salerno “at the earliest possible date” after the conquest of Sicily.