The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
A few dozen wretched San Pietrans emerged from the ruins to huzzah their liberators. The dim, fetid caves below the village were “the nearest thing to a journey in Dante’s Inferno that I was to know in the war,” wrote J. Glenn Gray, an Army intelligence analyst. “Children were screaming, old men and women coughing or moaning, while others tried to prepare gruel over smoking coals.” Some 140 San Pietrans were dead, one villager in ten. A baby’s corpse lying in the mud was repeatedly run over by military vehicles before someone finally noticed and a medic buried the remains. Graves registration men arrived with their leather gloves to police the battlefield, folding the hands of dead GIs across their chests before lifting them into white burial sacks. As the soldier-poet Keith Douglas wrote, “About them clung that impenetrable silence…by which I think the dead compel our reverence.”
Those who had fought for the past ten days supposedly “slept where their bedding fell from the truck.” San Pietro had cost Fred Walker’s 36th Division twelve hundred battle casualties, and two thousand nonbattle losses; the 143rd Infantry Regiment alone lost 80 percent of its strength. Engineers, tankers, Rangers, paratroopers, and the Italians who also fought for the village had hundreds more killed, missing, sick, and injured.
At an evacuation hospital near Mignano, patients lay listening to the shriek of artillery, calling out the guns by millimeter. A chaplain played “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” on his Victrola. Margaret Bourke-White spied “a small grim pile of amputated legs” covered with canvas outside a surgical tent. When one dying Texas boy asked for watermelon, a surgeon replied, “They’re not in season, son.” To Bourke-White he added, “They often ask for their favorite food when they’re near death.”
As the front lurched forward another mile or two, John Lucas advised his diary on December 18, “We find the country thick with dead as we advance…. I think the swine have taken a lacing.” But, the VI Corps commander added, “Rome seems a long way off.” A 36th Division soldier offered his own summary: “This is a heartbreaking business.”
For John Huston, the battle for San Pietro went on. The director’s footage of the star-crossed tank attack was dramatic but incomplete. Although he later claimed to have done most of his filming “during the actual battle,” Huston in fact spent two months staging elaborate reenactments in olive orchards and on Monte Sammucro, using 36th Division troops. Casualty scenes were staged in a hospital, a dead German in a foxhole was actually a GI actor in a grenadier uniform, and sequences inside the ruined village were filmed at another town accidentally bombed by American planes. After draconian editing by George Marshall, who ordered the film cut from fifty minutes to half an hour, Huston added a brief introductory speech by Mark Clark and a soundtrack that included the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. San Pietro would be released nationwide in the spring of 1945 to rhapsodic reviews. Time called it “as good a war film as any that has been made.”
The telegram announcing Henry Waskow’s death would arrive at his Texas home on December 29, delayed by the War Department along with similar notifications until after Christmas. Henry’s mother had been troubled with premonitions, and when the family appeared to break the news she blurted out, “I was right, wasn’t I? Henry’s gone.” Pyle’s column would appear on January 10, 1944, covering the entire front page of the Washington Daily News. Hollywood seized on the story and a year later released The Story of G.I. Joe, with Burgess Meredith as Pyle and Robert Mitchum as a “Captain Bill Walker,” who dies on a mountainside in Italy.
But Waskow had the final word, a “last will and testament” mailed to his sister for safekeeping and made public more than fifteen years after his passing. “I would have liked to have lived,” he told his parents in a ten-paragraph meditation. “But, since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much, dear ones, for life in the other world must be beautiful, and I have lived a life with that in mind all along. I was not afraid to die, you can be assured of that.”
I will have done my share to make this world a better place in which to live. Maybe when the lights go on again all over the world, free people can be happy and gay again…. If I failed as a leader, and I pray God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try.
“I loved you,” he added, “with all my heart.”
“A Tank Too Big for the Village Square”
LIFE in exile had its compensations for George Patton. As the viceroy of Sicily, he slept in a king’s bedroom on three mattresses and dined on royal china. Every day he rode an Italian cavalry horse in the Palermo palace riding hall, serenaded by a mounted band and attended by 120 plumed, saber-wielding carabinieri. With a snub-nosed Colt revolver in his pants pocket (“for social purposes only,” he said), Patton also took daily walks of precisely two miles, which a trailing driver measured on the jeep odometer. “I can now chin myself five and a half times and do it three times a day,” he told his diary, impressive enough for a man who had turned fifty-eight on November 11.
On mild afternoons Patton sailed the Gulf of Palermo or swam at his beachhouse, where a young female attendant insisted on helping visitors disrobe. There was quail hunting with Sicilian guides at a beautiful lodge in the mountains. To brush up his French—just in case—he listened to language lessons on phonograph records. On cold winter nights he stirred the embers of a blazing fire while sipping wine and reading a biography of Wellington, later regaling his staff officers with stories of the Iron Duke. He flitted conspicuously about the Mediterranean; Marshall and Eisenhower hoped the enemy would assume he was preparing another invasion force. Sardinia intrigued him, but Cairo was “really a disgusting place. It looks, and the people act, exactly as they did in New York in 1928.” He wrote verse, including a poem titled “God of Battles”—“Make strong our souls to conquer”—for which Women’s Home Companion paid him $50. Visitors came and visitors went, including John Steinbeck and Marlene Dietrich, who thought Patton looked “like a tank too big for the village square.” He even found time to reopen Palermo’s opera house with a sold-out performance of La Bohème. Crowds packed the balconies and thronged the streets outside to listen by loudspeaker. As the house lights dimmed, a beam on the royal box revealed Patton holding an American flag, arm in arm with Palermo’s mayor, who held an Italian tricolor. The audience cheered wildly, then wept from the overture through the final arias. For days, snatches of Puccini could be heard around the city from would-be Mimìs and Rodolfos.
Yet even a heartsick bohemian swain could not have been more miserable than Patton. A few months earlier he had commanded a quarter million men; now Seventh Army was reduced to a shell of five thousand, and in late November even his signal battalion was plucked away for service in Italy. “It almost looks like an attempt to strip the body before the spirit has flown,” Patton wrote. John Lucas during a visit found him “very depressed,” and a British general thought he looked “old and dessicated,” chin-ups notwithstanding. His chief engineer strolled into Patton’s office one day to find him “literally cutting out paper dolls” with a pair of scissors. On November 7 he had written Bea that in the 365 days since the TORCH landings, “I have been in battle seventy-two days.” She replied with an eight-syllable telegram: “Atta boy. Love. Confidence. Pride.”
Still, he had not heard a shot fired in anger since mid-August, except during occasional air raids. (German prisoners-of-war were issued wicker baskets and ordered to collect body parts from the rubble.) Gesturing vaguely toward the front, Patton told an old friend, “I want to go out up there where it is hot, with an enemy bullet in the middle of my forehead.” When Jimmy Doolittle flew in for a chat, Patton threw his arms around the airman with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I didn’t think anyone would ever call on a mean old son of a bitch like me,” he said. As the 1st Division sailed from Syracuse for Britain, Patton waved farewell from a harbor barge, blowing kisses and yelling God-bless-yous. Still resentful at the treatment of Terry Allen and Ted Roosevelt, soldiers stood three deep at every rail and peered from every porthole, utterly
“You need have no fear of being left in the backwater of the war,” Eisenhower had told Patton, but that was before Patton slapped the two soldiers. For more than three months that secret had held, with at least sixty reporters in Algiers and Italy sitting on the story. But Sicily now felt like the ultimate backwater. Patton tramped around Gela and other Sicilian battlefields, reliving past glories while disparaging the commanders struggling on the Winter Line. “I wish something would happen to Clark,” he told his diary. Montgomery was simply “the little fart.” To Bea he wrote with his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar: “Send me some more pink medecin. This worry and inactivity has raised hell with my insides.”
He took little interest in governing Sicily, which desperately needed a caring hand. Allied planners, drawing on irrelevant experiences from the U.S. Civil War and the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I, had assumed the Italian economy would “maintain itself at a minimum subsistence level,” particularly in agrarian Sicily. That proved dead wrong. By early winter, to forestall famine and bread riots, Allied commissaries were forced to provide flour for three-quarters of the Sicilian population. At feeding centers, starving women feigned pregnancy with pillows stuffed beneath their skirts to claim an extra ration. Black marketeering drove up the price of salt a hundredfold, to 350 lire per kilo.
Shortages plagued the island, from coal and fertilizer to nails and lightbulbs. Typhoid appeared. Officers also reported “some recrudescence of Mafia activities,” including occasional murders with the lupara, a sawed-off shotgun that was the traditional weapon of choice for revenge killings. Power outages were chronic, and courts handed down criminal sentences by matchlight. Occupation authorities jailed sixteen hundred “politically dangerous” Sicilians for months and scissored Fascist cant from school textbooks, but the locals still greeted Allied soldiers with absentminded Black Shirt salutes. The liberators soon grew weary of the liberated. “The Sicilian has been found by experience to be utterly untrustworthy,” U.S. Army logisticians complained. “They adopt every possible ruse to cheat and generally outwit us.” OSS agents agreed. “Lying, stealing, and general dishonesty…can be considered a prevalent folk characteristic.”
Whatever mild curiosity Patton evinced in these local affairs vanished after the slapping story broke at home in late November. The Quaker muckraker Drew Pearson, apparently tipped off by an OSS source, broadcast a garbled but uncensored version of the incidents during his weekly radio show. Beetle Smith in Algiers made matters worse by disingenuously insisting that Patton had not been reprimanded, distinguishing between an official censure and Eisenhower’s personal castigation in August.
Politicians and the press were in full throat overnight. “Army regulations specifically forbid this sort of thing,” complained a former artilleryman from Missouri, Senator Harry S. Truman. Editorial opinion ranged from the condemnatory (the Raleigh News and Observer: “A man who cannot command himself lacks the supreme virtue”) to the indulgent (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer held that “allowances must be made for the feelings of a high-spirited man under the stress of battle”). By mid-December, the White House and War Department had received fifteen hundred letters, pro and con, though a Gallup poll indicated that by a four-to-one margin Americans opposed sacking Patton.
“I am not so sure that my luck has held,” Patton told Bea on December 4, adding, “The only thing to do is do nothing and make no excuses.” In a conversation with Clark he contemplated retirement, then privately complained that the Fifth Army commander “treated me as an undertaker treats the family of the deceased.” As usual his contrition was inconstant, a blend of contumacy, repentance, and irony. Of Drew Pearson he wrote, “I will live to see him die.” He told Kay Summersby, “I always get in trouble with my goddam mouth. But if this sort of thing ever comes up, I’ll do it again.” When Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair wrote that “in all frankness your temper has long threatened to undo you,” Patton replied that in striking the soldiers “I was putting on an act.” Perhaps his most reflective moment came in a note to a friend in December: “Very few of us fail to make mistakes. This does not excuse mistakes, but it at least puts us in good company.”
Eisenhower had kept faith with his old friend, even as he recognized that personal foibles limited his utility in high command. While privately recommending Patton for another army command, he told Marshall, “I doubt that I would ever consider Patton for an army group or any higher position.” In December, in the semiannual evaluations of his chief subordinates, Eisenhower rated Patton “superior” and ranked him fifth among the two dozen lieutenant generals he knew. Patton was “impulsive and flamboyant,” Eisenhower added, and “should always serve under a strong but understanding commander.”
Deliverance came from Franklin Roosevelt, a strong but understanding commander-in-chief. On Wednesday, December 8, en route to Washington after the conferences in Cairo and Teheran, the president landed at Malta for a quick inspection of the dockyard and then flew on to Sicily. Escorted by a dozen P-38 fighters, the aircraft touched down at two P.M. at Castelvetrano, fifty miles southwest of Palermo. Patton and Clark, who had flown in from the Winter Line, braced at attention at the foot of the ramp.
With the brim of his hat tipped up to catch a few final minutes of Mediterranean sun, Roosevelt took a jeep tour of the airfield before presenting the Distinguished Service Cross to Clark and several others for their heroics at Salerno. A receiving line formed, and as Patton shuffled past, a beaming Roosevelt grabbed his hand and held it for a long moment. According to Clark’s later recollection, the president murmured, “General Patton, you will have an army command in the great Normandy operation.”
He had been reprieved. In a secluded corner away from the president’s entourage, Patton glanced about to be certain that he was alone and then burst into sobs. For a full minute he wept, tears of relief, of regret, of gratitude, and surely of defiance coursing down his cheeks. Wiping his eyes, he gathered himself and strutted back to the jeep to join the president for cocktails at the officers’ club.
Official redemption would arrive several weeks later, in a message ordering him to the United Kingdom to take command of the new U.S. Third Army. His country needed him, and the forces of righteousness also required him. Had Patton known that he had but two years to live, he hardly would have cared. He had already heard the summons of the trumpet.
“My destiny is sure,” he would tell his diary on Christmas Day, “and I am a fool and a coward ever to have doubted it.”
A Gangster’s Battle
THE forces of righteousness also required Bernard Montgomery, but for the moment they required him in Italy, on the Adriatic front.
While Clark’s Fifth Army struggled up the west coast, Eighth Army since invading Calabria had traced the ancient Crusaders’ Coast for four hundred miles. Five divisions—Brits, Kiwis, Indians, and Canadians—armed with nearly seven hundred guns and two hundred tanks had pushed back four German divisions on a forty-mile front. With Fifth Army threatening Rome from the south, Montgomery intended to seize the seaside resort of Pescara, halfway up the boot, before swinging west on Highway 5 across the mountains through Avezzano to approach the capital from the east. Alexander hoped that if attacked on a broad front, from sea to sea, “the enemy would be sufficiently stretched to prevent him massing for the defense of Cassino.”
That strategy still seemed plausible on November 20, when Eighth Army attacked the Sangro River, establishing a bridgehead on the far shore and nearly obliterating the German 65th Division, whose commander forfeited his right arm during an air attack. By early December, with thousands of Allied planes providing support and British tanks deftly maneuvering through snowdrifts, the Sangro defenses had been unhinged. New Zealand troops pushed into the crossroads town of Orsogna before panzers pushed them out again. “The Germans are, in fact, in the very condition in which we want them,” Montgomery declared. “We will now hi
Alas, no. The Bernhardt Line defenses extended nine miles deep north of the Sangro, in what Alexander came to call “ridge and furrow country.” Montgomery discovered, as Clark had, that superior Allied air, artillery, and armor could be checked by poor weather, hellish terrain, and a stubborn Feldwebel with an antitank gun. A British analysis warned that for Sherman tank crews, “the average range of vision was about 50 yards, and the average range at which tanks were knocked out about 80 yards…. To hesitate spells death.” In one especially trying stretch, German axes felled a half mile avenue of poplars, which had to be cleared from the road with bulldozers and chains at a rate of an hour per tree.
Drenching winter rains abruptly widened the Sangro from one hundred feet to four hundred and more, sweeping away so many bridges that an official history damned “this malignant river, rising to flood and fury.” A half dozen ambulances returning to an aid station were halted so long by a washed-out bridge that the medics ran out of morphine. “I could hear the wounded men inside moaning dreadfully and shrieking,” a Canadian officer wrote. Battle casualties, as well as sickness and injury, gnawed at Eighth Army; losses in the 78th Division would total ten thousand in the second half of 1943.
The Adriatic, in fact, was “an unprofitable sector” with “no real strategic objective,” as an astute New Zealand brigadier, Howard K. Kippenberger, recognized. Montgomery lacked the combat power and reserves to reach Pescara, much less Avezzano or Rome. A giddy AFHQ intelligence summary on December 4 declared, “The enemy has lost the initiative…. The Winter Line has been breached and overrun in the Adriatic sector.” Perhaps it seemed so in Algiers, but on the actual battlefield a strategy of maneuver had quickly devolved into a strategy of attrition and mutual bloodletting. An Eighth Army pause in early December let Kesselring’s troops regroup; two more attacks on Orsona failed, leaving the New Zealanders stymied.