The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Italian commanders quickly got wind of the evacuation scheme and began their own measured withdrawals on August 3. Without informing Berlin or awaiting Hitler’s approval, Kesselring authorized Operation LEHRGANG—“Curriculum”—to begin at six P.M. on Wednesday, August 11, just as Bernard’s battalion was fighting for survival at Brolo. The Hermann Göring Division went first, under a flotilla commanded by the former skipper of the airship Hindenburg; hundreds of shivering malaria patients also huddled on the ferries for the thirty-minute ride across the strait at six knots. Oil lamps flickered on the makeshift piers. Overhead screens shielded the glare from Allied pilots, but every anxious Gefreiter stared upward and listened for the sound of the B-17 bombers that would blow them to kingdom come.
The B-17s never came. Allied commanders had had no coordinated plan for severing the Messina Strait when HUSKY began, nor did any such plan emerge as the campaign reached its climax. Inattention, even negligence, gave Kesselring something his legions never had in Tunisia: the chance for a clean getaway.
British radio eavesdroppers had picked up many clues as early as August 1, including ferry assignments for the four German divisions, and messages about stockpiles of fuel and barrage balloons. But AFHQ intelligence in Algiers on August 10 found “no adequate indications that the enemy intends an immediate evacuation,” although General Alexander had noted signs of withdrawal preparations a full week earlier, in a cable to Admiral Cunningham and Air Marshal Tedder. “You have no doubt co-ordinated plans to meet this contingency,” Alexander added. It was left to Montgomery to belabor the obvious: “The truth of the matter is that there is no plan.” Not until ten P.M. on August 14, four days into the evacuation, did Alexander signal Tedder, “It now appears that [the] German evacuation has really started.” Only a few hours earlier, AFHQ had again reported “no evidence of any large-scale withdrawal.”
Allied pilots had reason to fear the “fire canopy” that Baade’s guns could throw over the strait. But his antiaircraft guns, if plentiful, lacked range. The entire initial production run of the new German 88mm Flak 81, which could reach the rarefied altitude of 25,000 feet and higher where the B-17 Flying Fortresses flew, had been lost in Tunisia. Yet air commanders were reluctant to divert the Allied strategic bomber force, which included nearly a thousand planes, from deep targets in Naples, Bologna, and elsewhere. To be sure, swarms of smaller Wellingtons and Mitchells, Bostons and Baltimores, Warhawks and Kittyhawks raked the strait. Little sense of urgency obtained, however: of ten thousand sorties flown by bombers and fighter-bombers in the Mediterranean from late July to mid-August, only a quarter hit targets around Messina. B-17s attacked the strait three times before LEHRGANG began; yet, as the Axis evacuation intensified on August 13, the entire Flying Fortress fleet was again bombing Rome’s rail yards.
Naval commanders had equal reason to shy from Baade’s ferocious shore batteries and “the octopus-like arms of searchlights.” Admiral Cunningham in Tunisia had famously decreed, “Sink, burn, and destroy. Let nothing pass”; here, he issued no such commandment. “There was no effective way of stopping them, either by sea or air,” Cunningham said, and Hewitt agreed. Patrol boats and small craft staged nuisance attacks, but both British and American admirals declined to risk their big ships. “The two greatest sea powers in the world,” the strategist J.F.C. Fuller wrote, “had ceased to be sea-minded.”
Not once did the senior Allied commanders confer on how to thwart the escape. Increasingly preoccupied with the invasion of mainland Italy in September, they never urged Eisenhower to divert his strategic bombers and other resources for a supreme effort. Nor did he force the issue. On August 10, alarmed at signs of exhaustion, the commander-in-chief’s doctors ordered him to bed. There he remained for three days, “as much as his nervous temperament will permit,” Butcher noted. Perhaps sensing the missed opportunity, Eisenhower on Friday morning, August 13, “hopped in and out of bed, pranced around the room, and lectured me vigorously on what history would call ‘his mistake,’” Butcher added—the failure to land HUSKY forces “on both sides of the Messina Strait, thus cutting off all Sicily.”
“It is astonishing that the enemy has not made stronger attacks in the past days,” the commander of the Messina flotilla, Captain Gustav von Liebenstein, told his war diary on August 15. The evacuation was so unmolested that crossings soon took place by day, exploiting “Anglo-Saxon habits” during the early morning, lunch hour, and tea time. The Italian port commander departed Messina on August 16 after setting time bombs to blow up his docks. Two hundred grenadiers held a crossroads four miles outside the city, then fell back to board the last launches; German engineers cooled a wine bottle by towing it in the sea, and drank a toast as they neared the Calabrian shore. An eight-man Italian patrol inadvertently left behind was plucked from the shore by a German rescue boat at 8:30 A.M. on Tuesday, August 17, just as Allied troops converged on Messina.
They were among 40,000 Germans and 70,000 Italians to escape. Another 13,500 casualties had been evacuated in the previous month. German troops also carried off ten thousand vehicles—more than they had brought to Sicily, thanks to unbridled pilferage—and forty-seven tanks. The Italian evacuees included a dozen mules. “The Boche have carried out a very skillful withdrawal, which has been largely according to their plan and not ours,” a British major noted.
Kesselring declared the German units from Sicily “completely fit for battle and ready for service.” That was hyperbole; since July 10, Axis forces had been badly battered, by the Allies and by malaria. But those escaping divisions—the 15th Panzer Grenadier, the 29th Panzer Grenadier, the 1st Parachute, and the Hermann Göring—would kill thousands of Allied soldiers in the coming months. “We shall now employ our strength elsewhere,” Captain von Liebenstein wrote as he reached the mainland, “fully trusting in the final victory of the Fatherland.”
At ten A.M. on August 17, Patton arrived on the windswept heights west of Messina where Highway 113 began a serpentine descent into the city. Waiting on the shoulder, Truscott tossed a welcoming salute. As in Palermo, he had been ordered not to enter the town before his army commander, and Truscott earlier this morning had rejected the surrender proffered by a delegation of frock-coated civilians. A platoon from his 7th Infantry had reached central Messina at eight o’clock the evening before, swapping shots with stay-behind German snipers, until a Ranger battalion and other U.S. troops arrived with orders “to see that the British did not capture the city from us.” By the time a colonel from Montgomery’s 4th Armoured Brigade arrived, with bagpipes and a Scottish broadsword in the back of his jeep, the Yanks had staked their claim. Bradley was furious upon hearing that Patton had organized his own hero’s entry even as some enemy troops remained on Sicily. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Now George wants to stage a parade into Messina.”
Patton had a fever of 103 from a lingering case of sandfly fever, and Bradley’s sentiments concerned him not at all. The race to Messina was won; the campaign for Sicily was over. On a concrete wall above the highway the word “DUCE” was painted in white letters big enough to be seen from the Italian mainland. Hazy Calabria lay across the strait, whose waters were home to Scylla, twelve-footed, six-headed, barking like a puppy while she devoured half a dozen of Odysseus’ oarsmen. German shells fired from the far shore spattered into Messina below or raised towering white spouts in the harbor. “What in hell are you standing around for?” Patton demanded.
Down they raced through the hairpin turns at breakneck speed, an armored car and Patton’s command vehicle leading the cavalcade. “Doughboys were moving down the road towards the city,” noted Lucas, who had arrived with Patton’s entourage. “They were tired and incredibly dirty. Many could hardly walk.” A shell slammed into the hillside above the highway, wounding a colonel and several others in the third car of the procession. Patton sped on.
Messina was a poor prize. Sixty percent of the city lay in ruins, the cathedral roof had collapsed, and German troops had b
Although three-quarters of Messina’s 200,000 citizens had fled the city, a throng lined the streets to greet Patton. Clapping solemnly, they tossed grapes and morning glories. At the city hall piazza, in a ragged ceremony expedited by howling shell fire, the mayor formally tendered Messina to the conquerors.
“By 10 A.M. this morning, August 17, 1943, the last German soldier was flung out of Sicily,” Alexander cabled Churchill, “and the whole island is now in our hands.”
A deflated Patton was more prosaic in his diary entry that Tuesday afternoon: “I feel let down.”
He soon would feel worse. At noon on the same day, as the Messina ceremony concluded, Eisenhower in Algiers was rereading a detailed account of the slapping affair that had been sent directly to the AFHQ surgeon general by a medical officer in Sicily. Corroboration soon came from several incensed reporters who had quickly pieced together the story and alerted Harry Butcher and Beetle Smith. “There are at least fifty thousand American soldiers who would shoot Patton if they had the slightest chance,” Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s advised Butcher. Ushered into the commander-in-chief’s office at the Hôtel St. Georges, Demaree Bess of the Saturday Evening Post told Eisenhower, “We’re Americans first and correspondents second.” But striking a subordinate was a court-martial offense. “Every mother would figure her son is next” to be slapped, Bess added. Sympathetic to Eisenhower’s dilemma over how to handle his most aggressive field commander, the reporters agreed to kill the story “for the sake of the American effort.” British hacks showed similar restraint; of the sixty Anglo-American reporters in Sicily and North Africa, not one wrote a word.
Eisenhower agonized through several sleepless nights. Patton was selfish, he declared while pacing in Butcher’s bedroom one evening, and willing to spend lives “if by so doing he can gain greater fame.” Still, he added, “in any army one-third of the soldiers are natural fighters and brave. Two-thirds inherently are cowards and skulkers. By making the two-thirds fear possible public upbraiding such as Patton gave during the campaign, the skulkers are forced to fight.”
Such dubious arithmetic hardly excused reprehensible behavior, and Eisenhower’s five-paragraph letter of censure, delivered to Patton by the AFHQ surgeon, was harsh:
I must so seriously question your good judgment and self-discipline as to raise serious doubts in my mind as to your future usefulness…. No letter that I have been called upon to write in my military career has caused me the mental anguish of this one.
On Eisenhower’s insistence, Patton was to apologize to the individuals he had offended; Lucas, who flew to Palermo on August 21 to hand Patton the Distinguished Service Cross won at Gela, also suggested that he publicly voice contrition for his “intemperate language.” No other punishment was meted out, for now. A secret inspector general’s report warned that the affair would likely leak and “result in embarrassment to the War Department.” But Eisenhower chose not to tell Marshall; he offered only a vague allusion to the army commander’s “habit of impulsive bawling out of subordinates.” Patton, he added, “has qualities that we cannot afford to lose unless he ruins himself.”
Patton groveled in his reply to Eisenhower, voicing “my chagrin and grief at having given you, a man to whom I owe everything and for whom I would gladly lay down my life, cause for displeasure with me.” Privately, he vacillated between penitence and defiance. “I admit freely that my method was wrong,” he told his diary. But to a friend he wrote, “If I had to do it over again, I would not make a single change.” Using his private nickname for Eisenhower, he wrote Bea on August 22: “I seem to have made Divine Destiny a little mad, but that will pass.”
As ordered, he apologized to Private Kuhl, who subsequently posited that Patton “was suffering a little battle fatigue himself.” After a similar session with Private Bennett on August 21, Patton hosted a dinner in the royal palace for the entertainer Bob Hope and his troupe, who “sang and carried on until after midnight.” When the singer Frances Langford finished crooning “Embraceable You,” Patton cornered Hope and threw an arm around his neck. “You can do a lot for me,” Patton said. “I want you to go on radio when you get back. I want the people to know that I love my men.”
His oblique public confessions, delivered to five divisions over a week beginning on August 24, used a script of nineteen paragraphs, punctuated with much extemporaneous cussing. “I have been guilty on too many occasions, perhaps, of criticizing and of loud talking,” he said, speaking from a makeshift stage. “I am sorry for this.” Some units rejected even such a mild self-reproach. “No, General, no!” troops in Truscott’s 60th Infantry shouted. Exuberantly tossing their helmets, they thundered “Georg-ie! Georg-ie!” with such passion that Patton could not make himself heard. “The hell with it,” he said, then drove off in his command car, standing and saluting as tears streamed down his cheeks.
Others were less indulgent. Before noon on Friday, August 27, a day “hotter than the hinges of Hades,” the entire 1st Division marched into a natural amphitheater along the Palma River. “Arms will not be carried,” a division directive advised, and officers added, “There will be no booing.” Massed regimental bands played martial airs as Patton’s car pulled to the stage, siren wailing, through a sea of olive-drab wool. After speaking for twenty minutes, he concluded with an accolade—“Your fame shall never die”—then saluted the colors and sped away.
Fifteen thousand men sat in stony silence. “That has got to be the weirdest speech ever made by an American general,” a 26th Infantry captain muttered. Patton “used so much profanity that it wasn’t clear to me what he was talking about,” one soldier said, while another complained, “That fucking fucker of a general swears too fucking much.” Some wondered whether he was apologizing for sacking Allen and Roosevelt. Most did not care. They were silent “to express our rejection of his presence here,” explained an artillery sergeant, who added, “We despise him.”
Patton returned to the palace. His exile had begun, and he could only hope that it would end before the war did. “I shall be very glad to get out of this infernal island,” he wrote a friend. “It is certainly the most desolate and dreary place that I have ever been in.” To Beatrice he mused, “I have been a passenger floating on the river of destiny. At the moment I can’t see around the next bend, but I guess it will be all right.”
The thirty-eight-day campaign had ended, and another ten thousand square miles of Axis-held territory shifted to the Allied ledger. Patton deemed HUSKY “a damn near perfect example of how to wage war,” and without doubt clear benefits obtained. Mussolini’s downfall had been hastened. Mediterranean sea-lanes were further secured, along with southern supply lines to the Soviet Union and southern Asia via the Suez Canal. Allied air bases sprouted on Sicily as quickly as engineers could build them. German pressure had eased on the Russian front, where Hitler in July canceled a major offensive at Kursk after only a week, in part to divert forces to Italy and the Balkans.
American confidence, so badly battered at Kasserine Pass, was fully restored; four more Army divisions had become combat veterans, joining the four annealed in Tunisia. Cooperation between naval and ground forces had improved, and the many lessons learned, in mountain warfare and sniping tactics, in the arts of camouflage and combat loading, would be useful in Italy and beyond. The experience of launching a vast amphibious invasion against a hostile shore would be invaluable for the invasions yet to come, notably at Normandy. “We know we can do it again,” said Brigadier General Ray McLain, artillery commander of the 45th Division, “because we have succeeded.”
The butcher’s bill was dear for both sides. Ameri
For the Allies the campaign had been “a great success, but it was not complete,” as a German admiral put it. Barely fifty thousand Germans had overcome Allied air and sea supremacy, and the virtual collapse of their Italian confederates, to hold off an onslaught by nearly half a million Anglo-Americans for five weeks. Kesselring considered much of the American effort misspent on seizing “uninteresting territory” in western Sicily; he detected an aversion to risk in Allied commanders, and now believed that he had a clear sense of his foes for future battles. HUSKY also exposed lingering combat shortcomings and revealed a few new ones. Rugged terrain could annul the advantage of a highly mechanized but roadbound army. “Vertical envelopment,” whether by parachute or glider, had yet to prove its value; in 666 troop carrier sorties flown over Sicily, the Allies lost 42 planes and had another 118 badly damaged, many from friendly fire. The meshing of infantry, armor, artillery, air, and other combat arms into an integrated battle force—the essence of modern combat—remained ragged; at times it was unclear whether Allied air and ground forces were even fighting the same campaign. Eisenhower claimed that the “international and interservice spirit” was now “so firmly established…that it was scarcely necessary any longer to treat it as a problem.” This was sheer fantasy. Relations between flyboys and ground-pounders were almost as badly strained as those between Brits and Yanks. As the historian Douglas Porch later wrote, “Sicily demonstrated the many limitations of interservice and inter-Allied cooperation, ones that foreshadowed problems that the Allies would encounter in Italy.”