The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
If hundreds of combat leaders at all ranks proved their mettle under fire, others failed to measure up. The sorting out of the capable from the incapable continued, and Truscott’s critique in relieving a regimental commander in August showed how ruthless that sifting could be: “You lack clear, calm judgment and mental stability under stress of battle, and you are unduly influenced by rumors and exaggerated reports.”
But it was at higher echelons that leaders had yet to prove themselves entirely worthy of the led. Montgomery showed signs of being “a superb leader but a mediocre manager of armies in battle,” as the historian Geoffrey Perret put it, “unable to tell a sufficiency from a superfluity.” Patton had retired to the royal palace with his demons. Alexander had been conservative, unimaginative, and easily bamboozled by subordinates; his generalship in Sicily was “feeble from beginning to end,” the British biographer Nigel Hamilton concluded. As for Eisenhower, notwithstanding his growth since TORCH ten months before, all too often he still failed to grip the reins of his command, day by day and hour by hour. He had yet to become a great commander because he had yet to demonstrate the preeminent quality of a great captain: the ability to impose his will on the battlefield.
Still, they owned the island. Rome was closer; Berlin was closer. An enemy who a year earlier had been ascendant was now in retreat, everywhere. Half a million German soldiers lay dead, with as many more captured or missing. After Sicily, a Luftwaffe commander wrote, few could doubt “that a turning point had come and that we were on the road to final defeat.”
The troops stood down. Many would soon decamp to prepare in Britain for OVERLORD, including Omar Bradley and the 1st, 9th, 2nd Armored, and, eventually, 82nd Airborne Divisions, as well as three British divisions. Others were consigned to the long Mediterranean campaigns ahead. Patton’s sense of deflation was a common malady. “Have been in the dumps,” Truscott wrote Sarah on August 25. “War would be OK if it was all fighting. It’s these interims that give one the heebie-jeebies.”
Perhaps the heebie-jeebies came from reflection, the rare chance to consider what they had been through and what they still faced. Audie Murphy, already describing himself as “a fugitive from the law of averages,” wrote, “I have seen war as it actually is, and I do not like it.” Paratrooper Jim Gavin lectured himself in his diary: “I have many more battles ahead of me…. Fight intensely, smartly, and tough. Take chances personally and in matters of decision.” In a note to his daughter, he dreamed of taking a postwar pastorate, “with nothing to do but care for the flowers and meditate on the wickedness of the world.”
Ernie Pyle found melancholy harder to shake than battlefield fever. “Yesterday is tomorrow,” he wrote, “and Troina is Randazzo and when will we ever stop and, God, I’m so tired.” Noting that “I couldn’t find the Four Freedoms among the dead men,” he wrote to his wife, Jerry, in New Mexico, “The war gets so complicated and confused in my mind; on especially sad days it’s almost impossible to believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery.” Zealous MPs ticketed Pyle three times in one day for not wearing his helmet and leggings. A provost marshal commuted the $40 fines when Pyle agreed to recite ten times: “I’m a good soldier and will try to conduct myself as such by wearing my helmet and leggings at all times.” After four hundred days overseas, he needed a long rest.
Several hundred thousand soldiers found at least a brief respite in the benign late-summer Mediterranean. Jack Toffey wrote Helen in mock complaint that he had “gotten fat and lazy and bored during the past 10 days since the battle ended here.” His gimpy knee often stiffened; on August 31 he would turn thirty-six. Although much fighting remained, “we are certain now we can lick this guy,” he told her, “and lick him we intend to”—but he permitted himself a postwar reverie, pondering whether “our new car should be a Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, or what?” Someday, peace would return. “I’ll get all cleaned up and never get disheveled again,” he wrote. “What a dude I intend to be.”
Battalions set up wineshops and charged ten cents for a canteen cup of “Dago red.” “Migrant women” plied their trade in fleabag bordellos; some, for privacy, carried their own doors from room to room. The rates of venereal disease soared and the 82nd Airborne opened a medically certified brothel in Trapani under a supervising officer soon known as the Madam; Gavin noted in his diary, “Rates at 25 lire per piece.” Troops stocked up on souvenirs, including overpriced hankies with “Sicilia” embroidered in the corner. At night they watched movies on bedsheet screens, visible from both sides, and sang new camp ditties, including “Luscious Lena from Messina” and “Filthy Fannie from Trapani.” “I haven’t seen a spigot since I left the United States,” a 1st Division soldier commented. “It’s a little thing, but it means a great deal.” Snippets of Italian entered the soldier patois, including “Prego, Dago” and “Grazie, Nazi.”
On Sunday morning, August 29, Eisenhower flew from Algiers to Catania, escorted on the final leg by four Spitfires. In the resort town of Taormina, he joined Montgomery for a sumptuous lunch. The table was set with linen, silver, and bone china in the dining room of an elegant Fascist villa from which the Eighth Army commander hiked down to the sea for a daily swim. Later in the afternoon, the two generals drove north to Messina and stood on the corniche, scrutinizing the Calabrian shore with their glasses. The spoor of the departed enemy littered the beach. On a sunny veranda nearby, a British artillery chief invited his guests to select targets on a map brought with their afternoon cocktails; pushpins marked the chosen aim points and a few minutes later, as the gin drained from their tumblers, a salvo of several hundred shells arched across the strait toward the Italian toe. “It was most spectacular,” one guest exulted.
Soon the idyll would end. As Gavin subsequently wrote his daughter, “We in our hearts know of the hunger, heartaches, and graves yet ahead of us.” Also scanning the Calabrian coast, the reporter Alan Moorehead mused:
One was hardly prepared for its nearness…. When one looked across at that other shore, the mainland of Europe, the vineyards and village houses were utterly quiet and all the coast seemed to be gripped in a sense of dread at what inevitably was going to happen.
Part Two
4. SALERNO
“Risks Must Be Calculated”
A gentle breeze barely riffled the sea, and a clement sun climbed through the early hours of Friday, September 3, 1943. Sicilian mongers peddled lemons and gladioli to British soldiers in battle kit queued up along the beaches. Three hundred DUKWs and other vessels swarmed between island and mainland “like so many gnats on a pond,” a witness reported, and this first invasion of continental Europe—an all-British operation code-named BAYTOWN—had proved so placid that Tommies soon called it the Messina Strait Regatta. Only massed artillery broke the tranquillity: more than five hundred guns stood barking wheel-to-wheel on the slopes above Messina. Royal Navy ships, now steaming with impunity through the straits, added another hundred tubes to the cannonade. Rockets arced toward the Calabrian shore like “a kind of upward flowing yellow waterfall,” wrote Alan Moorehead. “The noise was monstrous.”
Just eight thousand Germans still occupied the entire foot of the Italian boot, and orders had long ago been issued to abandon Calabria—although again without notifying the Italians. Allied intelligence since August 30 had detected ample signs that Axis troops would retire northward rather than fight for the toe, but the ponderous invasion preparations continued, including a creeping barrage reminiscent of the Somme. British guns would fire 29,000 rounds on this Friday morning; the enemy in reply fired none.
General Montgomery sipped his morning tea in a seaside olive orchard and scanned the first reports from Eighth Army’s vanguard, now poking through the battered streets of Reggio di Calabria on the opposite shore. German troops had melted into the hills. Montgomery lingered at a sound truck parked by the Messina beach to offer his thoughts to the BBC and to record a suitably lionhearted proclamation for Eighth Army. “I think that?
To Italy he went, standing erect and khaki-clad in the DUKW’s bow, his sharp chin lifted like a ship’s figurehead. Several hundred cartons of cheap Woodbine cigarettes had been stacked along the hull. His batman would bring Montgomery’s twittering aviary of parakeets and canaries, kept in cages outside his trailer; he hoped to find a pair of lovebirds for sale, although another feathered camp follower—a handsome peacock—had appeared at last night’s dinner table on a platter, roasted and garnished. Several hundred yards from shore, the DUKW nuzzled up to a Royal Navy corvette. Scrambling aboard, Montgomery descended to the cramped wardroom, where he drank three cups of coffee and nibbled on cookies while telling reporters how he planned to wage war in Italy:
You must never let the enemy choose the ground on which you fight…. He must be made to fight the battle according to your plan. Never his plan. Never…. You must never attack until you are absolutely ready.
Returning topside, he waved to the hooting troops packed to the gunwales in a passing landing craft. The Italians would likely fold “within six weeks,” Montgomery predicted, but the Germans “will fight.” As for this invasion, BAYTOWN, “it’s a great satisfaction.” His black-and-red pennant snapped from the corvette’s mast.
In truth, he was peeved and disgruntled, and already had begun sulking in his trailer. Alexander had brushed aside his advice on how to fight the Italian campaign and Eighth Army was relegated to a supporting role; BAYTOWN had even shrunk to a mere four battalions until Montgomery’s protests restored his invasion force to two divisions, the British 5th and the Canadian 1st. No effort had been made to coordinate Eighth Army with Fifth Army, now scheduled to land three hundred tortuous road miles north at Salerno in less than a week. To beach an army in the toe made little sense, even as a diversion; Montgomery thought it “daft.” Alexander’s instructions on whether to simply open the Messina Strait or to begin tramping up the length of Italy had been vague; when pressed to name an objective, he simply urged Montgomery to do what he could. Mounting BAYTOWN meant that AVALANCHE, the Salerno invasion, would be smaller and would comprise mostly inexperienced units and commanders. Eisenhower had prodded Montgomery to jump the strait sooner, but Eighth Army “wanted everything fully prepared” before moving. Again Eisenhower did not insist.
Strategic guidance was no more enlightened. Roosevelt and Churchill had convened another conference in mid-August, this time in Quebec. They reaffirmed the OVERLORD invasion of western Europe for the following spring, but the British still considered an extended campaign in Italy vital to that cross-Channel attack because it would siphon German reserves from the Atlantic Wall. The Americans disagreed, incessantly reciting Napoleon’s maxim that Italy, like a boot, should be entered only from the top. Eight hundred miles long, it was the most vertebrate of countries, with a mountainous spine and bony ribs. No consensus existed on what to do if the Germans fought for the entire peninsula, or whether this was a worthwhile battleground if Italy quit the war.
A shout rose from the shingle just north of Reggio as the corvette drew close and troops ashore realized that Montgomery had come to join them. Clambering back into another DUKW, he rolled onto the continent at 10:30 A.M., goggles around his neck and beret cocked just so, tossing cigarettes with a grin. Hundreds of Italian soldiers also rushed to the beach “with hands upraised, shouting, laughing,” eager to help unload enemy stores. Montgomery made straight for the local Fascist headquarters, where he purloined a sheaf of stationery on which he would scribble his correspondence for months. That evening he ate an early dinner and retired to bed with a novel. In a note to General Brooke in London before he drifted off, Montgomery wrote, “The only person who does not get tired is myself.”
The next days passed with little sense of urgency. German demolitionists had wrecked bridges and road culverts, but active resistance was mounted only by a puma and a frightened monkey, both fugitives from the Reggio zoo. Fuel and ammunition dumps swelled in size. Eighth Army scouts pushed from the toe to the instep, at times conducting reconnaissance from the passenger carriages of local trains. Wild orchids and golden gorse grew in the uplands where for centuries Greek and Roman ship-wrights had cut their timber. Women with scarlet petticoats beneath black skirts glided through the little villages, bundles of firewood balanced on their heads. The scent of crushed fennel sweetened the air, and nights grew chill as the soldiers tramped away from the Jasmine Coast and into the mountains. Canadian troops shivered in their khaki drill shorts, and some rifled through the abandoned uniform closets of the Blackshirt Legion for warmer garb.
Alexander advised London on September 6 that the Germans were resisting Eighth Army “more by demolition than by fire.” In fact, as Brooke acknowledged the same day, “no Germans troops have been met so far.” On the night of September 7, in a modest effort to flank the enemy, several battalions sailed from Messina with the intent of landing near Pizzo, on the Gulf of St. Eufemia, twenty-five miles northeast of the toe. “Everything went wrong,” a Royal Hampshire account conceded. The wrong battalions landed on the wrong beaches in the wrong sequence. “Our exact whereabouts was not known to our naval friends,” the Dorsetshires reported. “It was a pitch black night with no moon.” Commando landing craft went astray; among the first Dorsets finally ashore was “an NCO with a bag of mail over his shoulder.” A light drizzle of German mortar shells turned into a deluge, with “many casualties suffered by those in the craft or trying to land.” The expedition accomplished little. A German war diary several days later noted that, in Calabria, “the enemy is not crowding after us.”
Montgomery meanwhile made himself comfortable. He offered visiting journalists glasses of spiked lemonade and tours of the new shower and tub in his personal trailer, “happy as a youngster with a new electric train.” The birds chirped in their cages. Was it true, he asked the reporter Quentin Reynolds, that fashionable girls in New York now wore Monty berets?
On Sunday, September 5, Eisenhower hosted a small bridge party at his seven-bedroom estate in Algiers, the Villa dar el Ouard: Villa of the Family. Often to relax he played Ping-Pong on the green table in his library, or sang old West Point songs at the grand piano in the music room. But cards remained his favorite pastime, and for this game he rounded up three skilled players: Harry Butcher, Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, and the chief of staff for Clark’s Fifth Army, Major General Alfred M. Gruenther. Tricks were taken, tricks were lost, and between hands there was little palaver. Clark seemed preoccupied and failed to count trump properly; he and Butcher lost the rubber to Eisenhower and the formidable Gruenther, who as a young lieutenant had supplemented his Army pay by refereeing professional bridge tournaments in New York.
Reluctantly, they threw in their cards. Summoning his limousine, Eisenhower bundled Clark and Gruenther in back and rode with them to the port, now alive with the usual embarkation frenzy of shouting stevedores and swinging booms. The commander-in-chief gripped Clark’s hand—they had been close friends for three decades, since the academy—and wished him godspeed, then watched the two officers stride up the gangplank to join Kent Hewitt on his new flagship, the U.S.S. Ancon. Antennae wrapped her superstructure like a spider’s web. Thirty staff officers of Fifth Army soon boarded, as well as a few commanders who had come to bid Clark good luck. Among the well-wishers was Truscott. “Hell, Lucian,” Clark told him. “You don’t have to worry about this operation. This will be a pursuit, not a battle.”
Exhausted from the long weeks of preparing his army, Clark soon retired to his cabin, where the bunk barely accommodated his six-foot-three-inch frame. Before flicking off the light, he opened a small volume called The Daily Word. “With Thee I am unafraid, for on Thee my mind is stayed,” read the entry for September 5. “Though a thousand foes surround, s
“The best organizer, planner and trainer of troops that I have met,” Eisenhower had written of Clark to Marshall two weeks earlier. “In preparing the minute details…he has no equal in our Army.” It was precisely these attributes that had led Eisenhower to choose Clark for the immensely complex challenge of flinging an army onto a hostile shore, a task that would make him the senior American field commander in Italy. Long-limbed and angular, with a thick lower lip and prominent Adam’s apple, Clark had dark eyes that constantly swept the terrain before him. To a British general, he evoked “a film star who excels in Westerns.” When speaking, Clark often paused to purse or lick his lips; the ears flattened against his skull accentuated a long, aquiline nose that suggested a raptor’s beak. “A fine face, full of bones,” George Biddle observed. “An intelligent face and an expression of kindliness about the mouth.”
He had been born into the Army and grew into a frail, skinny officer’s son whose father let him attend “the college of your choice, providing it’s West Point.” As the youngest member of the entering class of 1917, Clark was promptly powdered, diapered, and put to bed early. Descended from immigrant Romanian Jews on his mother’s side, he had himself baptized as an Episcopalian in the academy chapel. At age twenty-two, soon after graduation, he was commanding a battalion in the Vosges Mountains when German shrapnel tore through his shoulder and ended his war. Promoted twice during his first four months of service, he thereafter remained a captain for sixteen years, battling both national indifference to the Army and poor health: he suffered from a heart murmur, ulcers, a diseased gallbladder, and various infections. In 1923, he met the widow of a West Point classmate who had committed suicide two years earlier. Four years older than Clark and a graduate of Northwestern University, Maurine Doran, known as Renie, was petite, lighthearted, and his equal in intelligence and ambition; they married a year later.