The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Wagging his cane as he stumped among the troops, Roosevelt noted “the sag of their clothes and their tired faces.” Reports spread of nineteen men killed in a German white-flag ruse; anger and bloodlust spread, as well as an odd rumor that B-17s would bomb Etna’s crater to bury the enemy in lava. Artillery boomed around the clock and muzzle flashes rippled like chain lightning along the gun lines. “Shelling these hills,” Hersey wrote, “was like shaking lice out of old clothes.” Every foot soldier approved of the lavish shooting. “I don’t care if I’m paying taxes the rest of my life,” one GI said, “just so they throw that stuff at them instead of throwing me at them.”
Bread trucks brought up nine hundred loaves from a bakery near Gela each morning, then hauled bodies back to the makeshift cemetery at Ponte Olivo. At night the troops huddled close for warmth under blanket tents fashioned to hide their cigarette embers from enemy patrols. “Here we live and fight and die together in a bond of fellowship unequalled anywhere,” Captain Joseph T. Dawson of the 16th Infantry wrote his family on July 31. But with camaraderie also came the solitude and self-doubt that haunted every battlefield. “I find myself jumping at any excuse that will keep me out of the danger zone,” a quartermaster officer told his diary on July 27. “Hell, I’m disgusted with myself. If I knew how, I’d get myself transferred to a really dangerous job, just to see if I could take it.”
Man does what he can and bears what he must. Patton believed an infantry division declined in efficiency after two weeks of sustained combat “due to the loss of riflemen and fatigue”; the 1st Division was entering its fourth week. “When this is over,” one soldier mused, “I won’t mind going back to Wisconsin and looking at cows the rest of my life.” Like so many, Ted Roosevelt also drew comfort from thoughts of a different place. “Has the Boston ivy covered the front of the house? How are the yews?” he asked Eleanor. “Do put in fruit trees. The old trees are bound to die soon.”
Sicilian towns “perched on hilltops like ragged caps stuck on the hoary heads of gray old men,” wrote Don Whitehead, of the Associated Press. No ragged cap perched higher than Troina, fourteen miles northeast of Nicosia on Highway 120 and the highest town in Sicily. Here the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division had halted after the retreat from western Sicily that began three weeks earlier. Torrential rain on July 29 swelled streams and flooded roads, slowing the American pursuit. Grenadier regiments used the respite to dig strongpoints and lay mines in the high ground north and south of Troina, which became a linchpin in the Etna Line. Four artillery batteries occupied gullies east of town, and spotters in field gray climbed the twin spires of the Norman church above the piazza for a panoramic view of Mount Etna. For an armed defender, the westward vista was even more breathtaking: any attacker from that direction would be canalized into a treeless, three-mile stretch of Highway 120. Troina’s twelve thousand citizens fled to the hills or barricaded themselves in their squat stone houses.
Five miles to the west, in the hilltop hamlet of Cerami on Saturday evening, July 31, Terry Allen followed that exposed stretch of highway with his field glasses until it vanished into the hazy, twin-spired redoubt on the next ridge. The sharp scents of eucalyptus and oleander wafted through the decrepit school that now served as a 1st Division command post. Fascist slogans covered classroom walls that shook from the concussive roar of the 155mm Long Tom battery nearby. Within goose eggs drawn on a tactical map, Allen scribbled the letter “E” wherever he thought the enemy had holed up. “This was about as stubborn as any resistance we’ve enountered so far,” he had told reporters. “The fall of Nicosia”—he rendered the name as Nicodemus—“probably means that the Germans will have to retire to their next road net, at Troina.”
With luck, Allen hoped, the enemy would counterattack before the attack began this evening, exposing himself to those Long Toms and other guns. But U.S. intelligence now believed the Germans would continue falling back through Troina toward Messina. “Germans are very tired, little ammo, many casualties, morale low,” the 1st Division G-2 concluded on July 29. II Corps today had reported, “Indications are Troina lightly held”; refugees also claimed that few German soldiers occupied the town. Allen had planned to envelop Troina with two infantry regiments supported by 165 artillery tubes, but these heartening reports and the easy seizure of Cerami caused him to pare back the attack to a single regiment, the 39th Infantry, which had been loaned to him from the 9th Division several days earlier. Air reconnaissance could have revealed the true extent of German fortifications, but the latest film had been flown to North Africa for processing, and printed photos had not yet returned to Sicily. “You give your orders and the division will execute them,” Allen told reporters. “The rest is chance.” A soft hiss escaped from his perforated cheeks.
With his saddle-hardened gait, Allen strode to a secluded olive grove a hundred yards from the command post. “This war is really a very disagreeable job,” he had written his wife, Mary Fran, two days before, “with long periods of tough going and the relaxation periods for the 1st Division are few and far between.” Still, a break was in sight. Bradley planned to supplant the Big Red One with the rest of the 9th Division, which had recently arrived from North Africa. Tempting as it might be to let the newcomers carry the fight immediately, Allen would remind his officers of “our moral obligation to capture Troina before being relieved.”
He sank to his knees beneath the gray-green boughs of an ancient olive. Asking God to spare the division “unnecessary casualties,” he prayed that “tonight no man’s life will be wasted.” Upon rejoining his troops, a grizzled sergeant told him, “Hell, Terry, stop worrying. We’ll take the goddam town for you.”
As the long summer twilight faded in the west, three thousand soldiers from the 39th Infantry shuffled across the broken ground on either side of Highway 120 below Cerami. Their fatigue pockets bulged with toilet paper, K ration cans, and extra ammunition. Don Whitehead watched the columns snake toward Troina, jaggedly silhouetted on the horizon. “Every time I have watched troops plod into battle,” he wrote, “I have choked back a desire to sob.”
Coordinating the attack from an orchard command post was a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel named John J. Toffey III. Sweat soaked his wool shirt, and tiny dust devils boiled beneath his boots as he paced between the map boards and radio transmitter. “Can you put mortar fire in the vicinity of 492-140?” Toffey asked, clutching the handset. “I want to get every goddamned weapon you’ve got and put them on 492-140. Do you understand? Okay. Get going.”
He was a big man, six foot one and two hundred pounds, with such sporty good looks that he had once appeared in an amusing cover picture for Collier’s magazine outfitted in a bathing suit and polo helmet while carrying a baseball glove, tennis racket, fishing rod, and golf clubs. His educational pedigree included Phillips Exeter Academy and Cornell. His father had fought with Pershing in Mexico and eventually retired as a major general in command of the New Jersey National Guard. His grandfather had earned the Medal of Honor for valor at Missionary Ridge in 1863. “It is very nice to read of a battle,” John Toffey, Sr., had written, “but to be near to one is not so nice and I never want to be near one again.” On April 14, 1865, while recuperating from battle wounds in Washington, D.C., he had attended the play at Ford’s Theatre and witnessed Lincoln’s murder. According to family lore, Toffey testified at the conspirators’ trial—he had corraled a runaway horse possibly used in the crime—and watched them hang.
Young Jack Toffey, who had sold bottle caps in Ohio during the Depression, had proved worthy of his military lineage. Called to federal service from the National Guard in 1940, he landed with Truscott’s force in Morocco during TORCH, then commanded a battalion through the Tunisian campaign until shot in the knee at Maknassy in late March. “Missed all bones,” he wrote his wife, Helen. “Don’t worry about a thing.” After two months’ recuperation, he limped back to duty as executive officer of the 39th Infantry, just in time for Sicily. Toffey’s eventful f
Nine months at war had also aged him beyond his years. Both battle-wise and battle-weary, he was emblematic of the field-grade officers—major through colonel—who had learned much through hard combat and whose influence on a hundred European battlefields would be both decisive and disproportionate to their numbers in the U.S. Army. It was Toffey and his breed who would have to fix the tactical shortcomings the Army had revealed in Tunisia, such as the failure to seize high ground or to anticipate the German penchant for immediate counterattack; the defects in patrolling and map reading that got entire battalions ambushed or lost; and the inability to coordinate infantry, armor, and the other combat arms.
He now made war without illusions and certainly without pleasure. “War is as Sherman says and has no similarity with cinema or storybook versions,” Toffey had written in North Africa. He tried simultaneously to care for his family, to care for his men, and to study the military art even as he practiced it: sending money orders and war bonds to Helen, who waited for him in Columbus with their two children; procuring thirteen hundred steaks for a holiday dinner in the unit mess; subscribing to Infantry Journal; reading War and Peace. “Every day is that much nearer the end,” he wrote. “I still miss you terribly—a condition which will not improve.” The wound in Tunisia sharpened his senses of irony and mortality. Three generations of Toffeys in uniform was enough, he told Helen; he hoped that John IV, age twelve, “will be a doctor or lawyer and stay the hell out of the army & if he does go in the army let him stay out of the infantry.” To be near to a battle is not so nice, his grandfather had written, and I never want to be near one again. Jack Toffey understood that perfectly, though for now he had a job to do. “Been feeling a little rocky lately—but the knee is okay and feels better tonite,” he wrote before Troina. “Short on sleep and tired but today was a good day for us.”
The next six days, however, would be bad for all of them. The 39th Infantry’s right wing edged to within a mile of Troina on Sunday, August 1. But lacerating mortar and machine-gun fire greeted the regimental left, and by midnight counterattacking grenadiers had shoved much of the regiment back to the high ground near Cerami, even whittling one battalion to three hundred men. “There is a hell of a lot of stuff there,” a 1st Division officer warned. “We’ll be moving right into the teeth of the enemy.” Allen seemed to concur, and directed two additional regiments to loop north and south in a double envelopment. But then, perhaps hoping to avoid those “unnecessary casualties” he had prayed over, Allen rescinded his order and chose to let the 39th Infantry again try to take Troina alone.
The regiment’s new commander—Jack Toffey’s superior—was a wizened, dish-faced, Vermont-born legend, Colonel Harry A. “Paddy” Flint, whom Patton deemed the “bravest goddam soldier in the whole goddam Seventh Army.” At fifty-five, Flint had survived innumerable polo injuries and, in 1940, an apparent stroke; as his men tried to winkle the Germans from their strongpoints, he stood on a prominent rock, stripped to the waist, with a black bandana knotted around his neck, rolling a Bull Durham cigarette with one hand and bellowing, “Hell’s bells. Lookit them lousy Krauts. Couldn’t shoot in the last war. Can’t shoot in this one.” Later in the battle, a young artillery commander, Lieutenant Colonel William C. Westmoreland, found Flint and Ted Roosevelt playing mumbletypeg with a jackknife. Advised that half of Westmoreland’s ancient howitzers had broken recoil systems, “so you can expect half the firepower you’ve received before,” Flint replied, “It don’t make no difference. Just fire them twice as fast.” Not to be outdone, Roosevelt upon being told that the division had fired a million dollars’ worth of ammunition, ordered, “Spend another million.”
Bravado would not win the day, or the next day, or the day after that. Allen finally recognized the need for a full-throated attack, ordering his 26th Infantry to loop north, the 18th Infantry to drive from the south, and the 16th Infantry to slice straight toward Troina with the weary 39th. “Troina’s going to be tougher than we thought,” he told Bradley by phone. “This will mean we can turn over to the 9th Division a tight zone. If it’s all right with you, we can do this.”
Hills were won and lost, won again and lost again. By now the Germans had dug in so deep that even the observers droning overhead could not spot the smokeless powder from their artillery and antitank guns. To break the stalemate, Allen ordered a renewed assault in the early minutes of August 3, with the attack weighted in the south. At daybreak, the 16th Infantry was pinned down by gashing German fire; when the enemy counterattacked with panzers and infantry, only deft shooting by Clift Andrus’s division artillery kept the regiment from being overrun. By late afternoon, attackers and defenders had become so intermingled in the gullies southwest of Troina that American guns fell silent for fear of hitting friendly troops. When grenadiers infiltrated within a stone’s throw, riflemen called out the day’s challenge—“Chocolate”—and listened for the authorized parole: “Bon-bon.”
Progress was no better in the north. Troops from the 26th Infantry fought with grenades, pistols, and rifle butts up and down a bitter knoll known as Hill 1035. The sharp pops of detonating mines were often followed by the howl that signified another severed foot or leg. Not until full dark, at eleven P.M., could the wounded be evacuated. Brush fires made the scorching days hotter still, and putrid German bodies polluted a creek trickling through a ravine. “Something is burning out front,” a 16th Infantry battalion radioed. “We are running low on ammunition.” Mule trains brought some supplies, but bundles dropped from aircraft fell mostly into enemy hands, and men chewed wheat straw to quell their hunger. Repeated air strikes by AAF planes beginning late Wednesday afternoon, August 4, cheered every GI except those bombed by mistake. A sergeant whose troops came under attack ordered his men to peel off their undershirts and spread them along a ditch embankment. “For some reason, the pilots were supposed to recognize the shirts as those of friendly troops,” wrote Don Whitehead, who was among those stripping. “By the laundry mark, I suppose.”
At dusk on Thursday, rifle companies throughout the 1st Division had been reduced by two-thirds, to sixty or seventy men; Company I of the 26th Infantry reported seventeen fit for combat. The commander of Company F in the same regiment lay with a radio a mile north of Troina as his unit was overrun, calling in barrages within fifty yards of his foxhole. “Perhaps,” he wrote his father, “my luck won’t hold up forever.” Recovered from battlefield fever, Ernie Pyle showed up in Cerami to begin working on another bout. “Through our glasses the old city seemed to fly apart,” he wrote after watching Troina bombarded. “Great clouds of dust and black smoke rose into the sky until the whole horizon was leaded and fogged.” Dressed in his “usual collapsible style,” Pyle was caught in an air attack without his helmet and covered his head with a shovel. He regretted “the terrible weariness that gradually comes over everybody…. You just get damned sick of it all.”
Terry Allen was damned sick of Troina, and he meticulously planned a final assault for Friday, August 6, to outflank the town and obliterate any remaining Germans. Only when the first patrols crept into the outskirts after dawn did it become clear that the enemy had pulled back, fearful of encirclement. In launching two dozen counterattacks during the past week, the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division had lost more than sixteen hundred men. As the grenadiers scuttled down Highway 120 toward Cesarò and Randazzo, leaving the prints of their hobnailed boots in the dust, Kesselring also authorized Hermann Göring troops to pull out of Catania, on the coast. The Etna Line had snapped, to be replaced by a succession of defensive bulwarks across the Messina Peninsula.
“Town clear of enemy,” a patrol reported shortly before ten A.M. Only misery remained. Troina was “found to be in a greatly destroyed condition,” an Army after-action report noted. Reporters creeping into town were more explicit.
Some 150 bodies lay in the streets and inside a feudal tower. A nauseating stench seeped from Troina’s cellars. Broken water mains bubbled, and an unexploded bomb blocked a church aisle. At city hall, wounded civilians sprawled “naked on shutters or stretchers. Their skin was gray,” George Biddle reported. An infant found in the ruins clutched his dead mother’s hair so desperately that rescuers had to snip away a few locks. Whitehead pushed through a massive oak door leading into the fetid cathedral crypt. In the feeble light he found hundreds of refugees living in their own filth. “Men, women and children crouched like animals over their little hoards of food and piles of belongings,” he wrote. A young girl told him in English, “We’ve been miserable but now everything is changed.”