The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Churchill was delighted. “I am with you heart and soul,” he cabled Marshall. But the prime minister had his eye on a bigger prize than Salerno or Naples. “Rome,” he advised Eisenhower, “is the bull’s-eye.”
The man in the middle of that bull’s-eye was a specter of the once mighty Duce, to whom even Hitler had displayed deference and affection. His ashy pallor and sunken cheeks made Benito A. A. Mussolini look older than his fifty-nine years and hardly the “head devil” that Roosevelt now called him. He still shaved his head, but more to hide his gray than in a display of Fascist virility. Because of his vain refusal to wear eyeglasses, Mussolini’s speeches were prepared on a special typewriter with an enormous font. Duodenal ulcers—some claimed they were “of syphilitic origin”—had plagued him for nearly two decades, and his diet now consisted mostly of stewed fruit and three liters of milk a day. A German officer in Rome reported, “Often in conversation his face was wrenched with pain and he would grab his stomach.” Once he had demonstrated vigor to photographers by scything wheat or by rubbing snow on his bare chest. Now, wary of assassins, he lolled about the Palazzo Venezia, in a back room with tinted windows and the signs of the zodiac painted on the ceiling. Sometimes he lolled with his mistress, Clara Petacci, the buxom, green-eyed daughter of the pope’s physician, whose wardrobe was filled with negligees and goose-feather boas personally selected by Mussolini.
He had risen far since his modest boyhood as a blacksmith’s son in the lower Po Valley, and he would fall even farther before his strutting hour on the stage ended. As a young vagabond he had been an avowed socialist, stalking the streets with brass knuckles in his pocket and reciting long passages from Dante. His politics devolved to ultranationalism and the Fasci di Combattimento, which he founded in Milan in 1919 and which was the precursor to the Fascist party he rode to power in 1922. By the late 1920s, he had extirpated Italian parliamentary government to become an absolute tyrant—il Duce, the Leader—cleverly accommodating both the Vatican and the popular monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel III. With an autodidact’s quick mind and bombastic oratory, he raised national confidence, stabilized the lira, built a modern military, and boosted farm production by reclaiming vast tracts of swampland. The trains, famously, ran on time. His invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 helped destroy the League of Nations; he empowered Hitler by showing how easily Western democracies could be cowed and by condoning Germany’s Anschluss with Austria. The Führer’s gratitude led to the Pact of Steel in May 1939. “Believe, Obey, Fight,” the Fascist motto advised, and hundreds of thousands of Italian women surrendered their wedding rings to be melted down for Mussolini’s war effort. In Italian cinemas, moviegoers rose as one when the Duce strode across the screen in newsreels; he also required Italians to stand during radio broadcasts of armed forces communiqués, often delivered at one P.M. to ensure a captive audience in restaurants.
Lately the country was getting to its feet mostly for bad news. Italy’s colonial adventures in Eritrea, Somaliland, Abyssinia, and North Africa had been ruinous. Without informing Berlin, Mussolini also had invaded Greece, only to require German help to stave off catastrophe. Rome declared war on supine France in 1940, but thirty-two Italian divisions failed to overwhelm three French divisions on the Alpine front. The Italian air force had been gutted in Libya; two-thirds of the Italian army fighting in Russia had been destroyed; 40 percent of Italian soldiers on Crete reportedly lacked boots; and three-quarters of the merchant fleet had been sunk in the lost-cause effort to resupply North Africa. Raw materials, from cotton to rubber, were now dispensed by the Germans, who even provided the fuel that allowed Italian warships to leave port. About 1.2 million Italian soldiers served on various foreign fronts, along with 800,000 in Italy; but few had the stomach to defend the homeland, much less fight a world war. A German high command assessment on June 30 concluded, “The kernel of the Italian army has been destroyed in Greece, Russia, and Africa…. The combat value of Italian units is slight.”
Since December 1942, Mussolini had vainly urged Hitler to draw back from the Eastern Front, or even to forge a separate peace with Moscow. With combat casualties approaching 300,000, Italy found itself in the “ridiculous position of being unable either to make war or to make peace.” On July 18, the Duce cabled Berlin: “The sacrifice of my country cannot have as its principal purpose that of delaying a direct attack on Germany.” A day later, in a hastily organized meeting in Feltre, fifty miles from Venice, that sacrifice grew starker. At eleven A.M., Hitler launched into a gadding monologue in which he acknowledged being “of two minds” about how to defend Sicily, while insisting that HUSKY must become “a catastrophic defeat, a Stalingrad” for the Anglo-Americans. Thirty minutes later an Italian officer, said to be “white with emotion,” interrupted to inform Mussolini in a stage whisper that a massive air raid had just ripped up Rome.
Months in the planning, this first attack on the capital targeted the Littorio rail yards, a sprawling hourglass-shaped network through which flowed most train traffic to Sicily and southern Italy. “It would be a tragedy if St. Peter’s were destroyed,” General Marshall had said in late June, “but a calamity if we failed to knock out the marshaling yards.” More than five hundred bombers carrying one thousand tons of high explosives flew from bases in North Africa and Pantelleria. Roman Catholic aviators had been offered the option of skipping the mission; red stickers on navigation maps highlighted the Vatican and various historic sites with “Must Not Be Harmed” warnings. Even so, a Catholic chaplain stood on one runway and bellowed at departing B-26s, “Give them hell!”
Hell they got. As Pope Pius XII watched through binoculars and the Italian king peered through a telescope—“Look!” the monarch exclaimed. “Perfect formation!”—bombs tore up the Littorio yards, but also struck an adjacent working-class neighborhood. “It was the Americans,” a mortally wounded boy screamed, “the sons of bitches.” (A BBC broadcast the next day infuriated the Yanks by stressing that the raid had been exclusively American.) Estimates of the dead ranged from seven hundred to three thousand, with many more injured. A single thousand-pound bomb struck the Basilica of San Lorenzo, first built in the fourth century and considered among Rome’s finest churches. The explosion destroyed the façade, damaged the twelfth-century frescoes, and left roof trusses, splintered beams, and bricks heaped in the nave. Priests strolled through the flaming streets, flicking holy water on the rubble.
At Feltre, Hitler rambled on for two hours to a stupefied Mussolini as courtiers scurried in and out with grim updates from Rome. At length the Duce took leave to return to his capital. “We are fighting for a common cause, Führer,” he said.
A week later, on Sunday, July 25, Mussolini arrived at his enormous office in the Palazzo Venezia at eight A.M. He granted clemency to two condemned partisans and studied his daily compendium of telephone intercepts and informant reports. Over a lunch of broth and stewed fruit, he reassured his unsettled wife that “the people are with me,” then changed from the gray-green uniform of the First Marshal of the Empire into a dark blue suit and fedora. The king had asked to see him.
Rarely had the Duce faced such challenges as now besieged him. For ten hours the previous day he had battled the Grand Council of Fascism, a phony parliament of his own creation whose members had last met in 1939. Mussolini’s efforts to shrug off reverses in Sicily and elsewhere provoked reproachful glares. Dressed in black Saharan bush shirts, the councilmen had voted nineteen to seven, with one abstention, to ask the king to take command of the Italian armed forces. “When tomorrow I shall relate to him what has happened tonight, the king will say, ‘The Grand Council is against you but the king will stand by you,’” Mussolini warned before stalking from the chamber. “Then what will happen to you all?”
Shortly before five P.M., the Duce’s three-car convoy sped up the Via Salaria in northern Rome to the great eighteenth-century hunting estate at Villa Savoia. Here the king now lived in a handsome yellow palace set among pines and holm oaks. M
A millennium of royal inbreeding had disserved Victor Emmanuel III. Barely five feet tall, with malformed legs and a stunted intellect, he was said to be “taciturn and diffident,” “as indifferent as marble under a flow of running water.” Mussolini, his partner for more than two decades, privately called him “the little sardine.” Now seventy-three, he preferred to talk of hunting ibex in the Alps, or how he once shot twenty-eight woodcock on the estate of the king of Naples. But on this Sunday afternoon the discussion must necessarily turn to politics; Victor Emmanuel ushered the Duce into his corner study, where an aide stood with an ear pressed to the outer door.
After a few rambling sentences, interspersed with phrases in Piedmontese dialect, the king came to the point. Mussolini must resign. He would be replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a former chief of the armed forces. “Dear Duce, the situation is beyond remedy. At this moment you are the most hated man in Italy. You have not a single friend left, except for me,” the king said, then shrugged. “I am sorry, but the solution could not be otherwise.”
Even at five feet, seven inches, Mussolini towered over his monarch. “You are making an extremely serious decision…. The blow to army morale will be great.” Before turning on his heel he added, “I am perfectly aware that the people hate me.” In the entry foyer, the king shook Mussolini’s hand and shut the door, looking more shriveled than ever. “That,” Queen Helena observed, “was not at all nice.”
Mussolini strode across the courtyard toward his car only to be intercepted by a captain of the carabinieri. “Duce, I have been ordered by the king to protect your person.” An ambulance backed up from the foot of the drive, its rear door yawning. The officer took Mussolini’s arm. “You must get into this.” Soon the vehicle careered down the Via Salaria and through the streets of central Rome. Across the Tiber they sped to a police barracks in Trastavere, where guards stood with bayonets fixed. Mussolini emerged to stand with arms akimbo, fists on his hips, staring at the slogan painted on a courtyard wall: “Credere, Obbedire, Combattere.”
A few minutes later, he was bundled back into the ambulance and driven to another barracks, in Via Legnano. Escorted to a small room, he refused dinner and complained of stomach pains. “My physical person interests me no longer,” Mussolini told a physician summoned to examine him, “only my moral personality.” At eleven P.M., he switched off the lamp but could still see a light burning in the adjacent room where a sentry kept watch. A nearby telephone rang and rang. No one answered.
A radio bulletin at eleven P.M. sent delirious Romans spilling through the blacked-out streets in their pajamas and nightgowns. “Citizens, wake up!” they yelled in the Via del Tritone. “Mussolini is finished!” Strangers embraced and danced in the cobblestone piazzi. Tricolors flapped from passing trucks, soldiers sang political songs not heard for twenty years, and a mob—“shouting all the invectives in the Roman vocabulary”—kicked and punched the darkened Palazzo Venezia as if the building itself had caused their misery. Torch beams played across the now vacant balcony where the declaiming peacock had struck so many poses. Bonfires crackled with furniture ransacked from the Fascist party headquarters. “Viva l’Italia!” they roared, and a few German soldiers, assuming that the war was over, joined the celebration.
“One did not see a single person in Rome wearing the Fascist badge,” wrote Marshal Badoglio, who succeeded Mussolini as head of state. “Fascism fell, as was fitting, like a rotten pear.” Even Mussolini’s own newspaper on Monday morning replaced the usual front-page photograph of the Duce with one of Badoglio.
The new regime quickly assured Berlin that the Pact of Steel endured, and that Italy would prosecute the war against the Anglo-Americans with vigor. Few believed it. “The Duce will enter history as the last Roman, but behind his massive figure a gypsy people has gone to rot,” Joseph Goebbels told his diary. “The only thing certain in this war is that Italy will lose it.”
But in Rome a young woman spoke for a nation when she confided to her own diary on July 26: “Italy has had enough of heroes.”
Fevers of an Unknown Origin
PATTON had settled comfortably into Palermo’s flat-roofed Royal Palace. Long tongues of scarlet carpet rolled through corridors lined with silk-upholstered chairs and gilt mirrors etched with the Savoy coat of arms. Half a dozen vaulted antechambers separated Patton’s bedroom from the immense state dining room, and heroic oils of Hercules’ labors decorated an assembly hall the size of a basketball court. During mass in the Palatine Chapel—the writer Guy de Maupasssant had likened walking through the chancel to entering a jewel—Patton knelt beneath the coffered wooden ceiling and prayed to Christ Pantocrator.
He asked for strength—“I know I have been marked to do great things,” he wrote his brother-in-law—but his heart’s desire was Messina, 147 tortuous miles to the east. The coup in Rome, while a pleasant surprise, had little impact on the Sicilian battlefield: no Germans had been deposed, and it was mostly Germans who blocked the roads to Messina. On July 23, having recognized that Eighth Army needed help, Alexander authorized the Americans to attack eastward on two roughly parallel roads: Highway 113, which hugged the north coast, and Highway 120, an inland route. Patton mailed Franklin Roosevelt a tattered Corps of Engineers map of Sicily, with a thick green line showing that Seventh Army occupied more than half the island “as of July 26.” Above a tally of prisoners captured and guns seized, an arrow pointed to Messina with a blue crayon notation in Patton’s jagged hand: “We hope!” In his reply the president proposed “that after the war I…make you the Marquis of Mt. Etna.”
With victory in western Sicily, the fame Patton so ardently craved was finally his. Both Time and Newsweek had featured him on their covers this month. “Monty hardly figures at all in the papers,” Bea told him on July 30. “Everyone wonders what he is doing and why he doesn’t go ahead.” Patton’s army now exceeded 200,000 men, but true glory required audacity. “I have a sixth sense in war as I used to have in fencing,” he told her. “Also I am willing to take chances.” If taking chances cost lives, c’est la guerre. He advised Bradley, whose II Corps had met stiffening German resistance in central Sicily, that if he could reach Messina a single day earlier “by losing additional men,” then he must “lose them.” To Middleton, the 45th Division commander, he added on July 28, “This is a horse race, in which the prestige of the U.S. Army is at stake. We must take Messina before the British.” When soldiers captured a fleet of Volkswagen staff cars, Patton offered to share them with Hewitt’s officers if the Navy helped him reach Messina first.
Each morning his armored cavalcade bolted out of Palermo, trailing banners of dust across the Sicilian outback. On Highway 113 or Highway 120, Patton would hop from the command car with its radios and map boards, clasping his hands high like a prizefighter and urging his legions eastward. When enemy shells burst nearby he again timed his pulse, reproaching himself for the slightest upward tick. “You have killer eyes, just like I have,” he told a wounded artillery captain in a hospital ward near Palermo. “Get back up to the front as soon as you can.” At another ward, full of amputees, an orderly found him sobbing in the latrine. “It is hard to be an army commander and a hero at the same time,” he told Bea.
Stress frayed him. Always irascible when his blood was up, he now seemed erratic and even abusive. Happening upon a narrow bridge where 2nd Armored Division tanks had been delayed by a peasant with a mule cart, Patton broke his swagger stick over the man’s head, ordered an aide to shoot the mule, then had carcass and cart shoved into the creek bed below. When a gun crew took cover in a stand of trees during a German air attack, Patton reportedly charged them with his pistol drawn. “Get back on that gun, you yellow bastards,” he roared. “And if you leave it again, I’ll shoot you myself.” When a company commander in the 16th Infantry wh
At night he returned to his palace, to the Savoy china and the bloodred carpet, where he charmed staff officers at the long mess table with amusing tales of campaigns past. Then, abruptly drawing himself up, he said, “Let’s talk about tomorrow.” And after they had talked about tomorrow and drafted their battle plans, he would step onto the balcony behind the huge rosewood desk in his office. Below lay his fiefdom, the cruel city where for more than a century the Inquisition had its headquarters, where mafiosi had forced paupers to pay for the right to beg on the church steps, where for sport African immigrants had been doused in tubs of whitewash. Old men sat at green baize tables in the steamy night, playing cards and sipping ink-black wine.
“Wars are not won by apparent virtue,” Patton observed, “else I would be in a hell of a fix.”
Meticulous and even finicky in his warfighting, Patton was casual to the point of indifference about the more prosaic elements of running an army. Logistics snarled repeatedly in Sicily. In some sectors gunners ran desperately short of artillery shells, while mountains of small-arms ammunition accumulated. Lessons learned in North Africa were forgotten in Sicily, including the need for a disciplined air-raid warning system; at Palermo, a single gunshot caused a “wholesale exodus of dock workers” stampeding to shelters. Patton “never bothers his head about such things,” John Lucas noted in his diary.