The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Their pervasive “civilianness” made them wary of martial zeal. “We were not romantics filled with cape-and-sword twaddle,” wrote John Mason Brown, a Navy Reserve lieutenant headed to Sicily. “The last war was too near for that.” Military life inflamed their ironic sensibilities and their skepticism. A single crude acronym that captured the soldier’s lowered expectations—SNAFU, for “situation normal, all fucked up”—had expanded into a vocabulary of GI cynicism: SUSFU (situation unchanged, still fucked up); SAFU (self-adjusting fuck-up); TARFU (things are really fucked up); FUMTU (fucked up more than usual); JANFU (joint Army-Navy fuck-up); JAAFU (joint Anglo-American fuck-up); FUAFUP (fucked up and fucked up proper); and FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition).
Yet they held personal convictions that were practical and profound. “We were prepared to make all sacrifices. There was nothing else for us to do,” Lieutenant Brown explained. “The leaving of our families was part of our loving them.” The combat artist George Biddle observed, “They want to win the war so they can get home, home, home, and never leave it.” A soldier in the 88th Division added, “We have got to lick those bastards in order to get out of the Army.”
The same surveys that worried Eisenhower revealed that the vast majority of troops held at least an inchoate belief that they were fighting to “guarantee democratic liberties to all peoples.” A reporter sailing to Sicily with the 45th Division concluded, “Many of the men on this ship believe that the operation will determine whether this war will end in a stalemate or whether it will be fought to a clear-cut decision.” And no one doubted that come the day of battle, they would fight to the death for the greatest cause: one another. “We did it because we could not bear the shame of being less than the man beside us,” John Muirhead wrote. “We fought because he fought; we died because he died.”
A later age would conflate them into a single, featureless demigod, possessed of mythical courage and fortitude, and animated by a determination to rebalance a wobbling world. Keith Douglas, a British officer who had fought in North Africa and would die at Normandy, described “a gentle obsolescent breed of heroes…. Unicorns, almost.” Yet it does them no disservice to recall their profound diversity in provenance and in character, or their feet of clay, or the mortality that would make them compelling long after their passing.
Captain George H. Revelle, Jr., of the 3rd Infantry Division, in a letter to his wife written while bound for Sicily, acknowledged “the chiselers, slackers, people who believe we are suckers for the munitions makers, and all the intellectual hodgepodge looking at war cynically.” In some measure, he wrote on July 7, he was “fighting for their right to be hypocrites.”
But there was also a broader reason, suffused with a melancholy nobility. “We little people,” Revelle told her, “must solve these catastrophes by mutual slaughter, and force the world back to reason.”
Across the great southern rim of the Mediterranean they staged for battle, the farm boys and the city boys, the foresters and the steelworkers and at least one horse mill fixer. Much of the American effort centered in Oran, two hundred miles west of Algiers on the old Pirate Coast, where billboards above the great port now advertised Coca-Cola and Singer sewing machines. Two of the five U.S. Army divisions that would participate in the HUSKY assault mustered in Oran. The 2nd Armored Division had begun loading on June 21 after traveling five hundred miles by rail across the Atlas Mountains from bivouacs in Morocco, where locust swarms had dimmed the sun and training began at four A.M. to avoid the midday heat: temperatures could reach 140 degrees inside a tank. Only a hundred flatcars in all of North Africa were sufficiently sturdy to carry a thirty-two-ton M-4 Sherman, and the division’s journey had taken a month; the erratic French colonial rail system so enraged one captain that he forced the engineer at gunpoint to keep moving.
Among HUSKY units, the 45th Infantry Division, comprising 21,000 soldiers in 19 ships, plus 46,000 tons of equipment—including 4 million maps—in 18 others, was unique in sailing directly from Hampton Roads to Sicily, with a one-week stop in Oran. Its embarkation in Virginia on June 8 had been beset by the usual SNAFUs, TARFUs, and JANFUs: a frantic, last-minute plea to the War Department for mine detectors; the diaspora of an engineer battalion across all nineteen troopships; and the stunned realization that the Army landing craft crewmen with whom the division had trained for weeks on the Chesapeake Bay had been abruptly ordered to the Pacific, to be replaced by Navy crews unfamiliar with both the 45th Division and the boats they were to man. Also, by the time the nineteenth ship slipped her lines, AWOLs had become so numerous that one regimental stockade was dubbed Company J, for jailbird. Still, the passage was pleasant enough: Red Cross girls passing out paper cups of iced tea; “Happy Hour” boxing matches on the weather deck; messboys dancing on the fantail as steward’s mates beat time with their hands on the taffrail; afternoon naps in lifeboats swaying from their davits. One officer played classical music over his ship’s public address system; when the contralto Marian Anderson sang “Ave Maria,” a sailor remarked: “God, but isn’t it good to hear a woman’s voice again?”
The 45th was a National Guard division, among eighteen that had been federalized early in the war. Some Regular Army officers sneered that “NG” stood for “no good,” and most of the Guard’s senior officers had been purged by the War Department for age or incompetence. But the Pentagon considered the 45th—known as the Thunderbirds—“better prepared than any division that has left our control to date.” They were westerners, with one regiment derived from Colorado mining camp militias like the Wolftown Guards and the Queen’s Emerald Rifles. Two other regiments hailed from Oklahoma, and their ranks included nearly two thousand Indians from fifty-two tribes, including Cherokee, Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, and Navajo. On the night before the departure from Virginia, an artillery captain had organized a spirited war dance around a roaring council fire.
Now their week in Oran was up and the Thunderbirds shuffled back to the ships, at least a few emerging from the red-light district known as Chancre Alley. “I know I have a fighting outfit,” said their commander, Major General Troy H. Middleton. “I can tell that from the provost marshal’s report.” Up the gangplanks they trudged; at the top each man received a life vest and a tiny bottle of brandy against seasickness. Finance officers brought aboard $2 million for the division payroll, drawn from the Bank of Oran; when a sack stuffed with ten thousand dimes burst and scattered coins across the deck, a quick-thinking officer called the troops to attention while paymasters crawled around the immobilized soldiers, scooping up coins.
Along with the money and the ninety tons of maps, stevedores had loaded two hundred Silver Stars, six thousand Purple Hearts, and four thousand other decorations for valor; in the coming months those medals proved but a down payment on the courage required of the 45th. As the ships began to warp away from the Oran piers on the afternoon of July 4, some soldiers pulled out bricks to use as whetstones: General Patton had inspected the division a few days earlier and declared their bayonets too dull for the harsh work ahead.
Three hundred and forty crow-flying miles east of Algiers, more U.S. legions prepared for battle in the treeless flats around Lake Bizerte, a shallow bay south of Tunisia’s second-largest city. In early May, the retreating Germans had scuttled a dozen ships atop one another like jackstraws across the bay’s narrow neck; Navy salvage divers for weeks trisected the sunken vessels with saws and acetylene torches, then dynamited the sandy bottom beneath the hulks to blow the wreckage down and reopen the channel.
Now Lake Bizerte presented “a solid forest of masts”: LSTs and LSIs (landing ship, infantry) and LCTs (landing craft, tank) and the eleven other species of amphibious vessels. Ancient French hydroplanes and rusting scows, destroyed in the Tunisian campaign, lay half submerged along the shore, cluttering the waterway so that cumbersome landing craft routinely “ran into sunken ships, each other, on the rocks, and into anchored vessels,” one witness reported. Popular doggerel held that ?
Here had gathered three of the Army’s most celebrated units: the 1st and 3rd Infantry Divisions, and, farther south near Kairouan, the 82nd Airborne Division. In a scheme that would be replicated before Normandy, troops were assigned to areas coded by state and city: a regiment might bivouac in “Florida,” with battalions at Miami, Daytona, and Jacksonville, or in “Texas,” at Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth.
None of the namesake camps were as pleasant as their originals. At first light the Arab vendors appeared, selling lemonade, or “wog wine,” or haircuts, or ceramic “Roman” vases. By midmorning the heat was beastly, with Saharan winds “like a wall of fire” and tepid drinking water sprinkled with peppermint to make it palatable. Flies and mosquitoes infested the straddle-trench latrines and the mess tents where cooks made hash for tens of thousands on captured German field ranges. Commanders tried to occupy their men with morning hikes or full-contact volleyball. Anglers in the 19th Combat Engineers dropped half-pound blocks of TNT in Lake Bizerte, collecting enough belly-up fish in two hours to feed nearly two hundred men. Officers in the 82nd Airborne bought ten young bulls, a flock of sheep, and four thousand liters of beer for a preinvasion barbecue.
They were in an ugly mood, spoiling for a fight. Paratrooper marksmen “have practiced on some menacing looking Arabs,” Colonel James M. Gavin, who commanded a regiment in the 82nd, wrote his daughter. “It makes [the Arabs] mad to get shot and we should stop it.” Dummy tents and phony radio transmitters began to appear in Florida and Texas and Virginia and Kentucky, as the troops were trucked company by company to loading points around the lake. Herded by bellowing sergeants, they shuffled aboard the LSTs and LSIs and LCTs, every soldier’s identity checked against a cumbersome passenger list; eight clerks assigned to each convoy kept twenty-three copies of the manifests, and a typical convoy—for reasons known only at echelons above reason—required more than six thousand pages of names.
Congestion and confusion remained the order of the day: truck drivers took wrong turns; sailors removed cargo from overloaded vessels only to have soldiers stow it back aboard; an ammunition dump caught fire, and flames jumped the firebreaks to consume two thousand tons of munitions in a spectacular series of explosions; novice boat crews fouled their anchors, and shouted curses carried across the water as they tried to free themselves with chains and hawsers and grappling hooks.
No wrong turn or fouled anchor could stop them, of course. Brute-force momentum—and ingenuity, and willfulness—had carried them this far and would carry them farther. One by one the vessels moved into the lake and assembled into color-coded convoys. Sweating soldiers settled belowdecks or found a patch of topside shade. Gazing north toward the open Mediterranean, they packed away their newly issued sulfa powder and battle dressings, wondering precisely where in this world they would need such things.
Still farther east the British made ready, from Benghazi to Haifa and Beirut. Eighth Army had fought across North Africa in various guises since 1940 and now resembled, one admirer wrote, “a vast gypsy camp on the move, or a tribal migration.” Snatches of Arabic seeded the soldiers’ palaver, notably maleesh, “no matter,” and bardin, “in a little while.” Many wore a mauve ointment on their arms and faces as treatment for septic desert sores caused by prolonged exposure to dust and sand. War weariness also afflicted them—no ointment could soothe three years of fighting. One soldier confessed to “some disintegration of corporate purpose,” a state of affairs given voice by the drunken veterans who strode through their battalion encampments barking, “Fuck the bloody fuckers, we’re doing no more fucking fighting.”
But fight they would, bardin. One armada gathered in the northern Gulf of Suez, with regiments such as the Dorsets and Devons and Hampshires aboard, respectively, the former liners Strathnaver, Keren, and Otranto. White-coated Indian waiters served four-course dinners and the men sang nostalgic Edwardian airs—“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!”—before cashing in their sterling for invasion currency. The fleet squeezed through the Suez Canal in early July, past sunken wrecks and the open-air cinemas at Ismailiya. At Port Said, one regimental history recorded, “a great bathing parade was ordered and all the troops were taken ashore to march through the town” to the beach, which soon was covered for miles with naked Tommies. The troops gathered “round a huge desert campfire, consuming as much beer as possible,” then marched back to their ships behind kilted pipers in white spats and full skirl.
On July 5, the invasion armada assembled in the Mediterranean roads off the Egyptian coast. Some efforts to boost morale simply annoyed the men, for example the incessant playing of “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” over the loudspeakers of the ship carrying the 2nd Inniskillings. Padres offered eve-of-battle prayers, asking a “special intercession…for the recapture of Europe.” Signalmen in khaki shorts wigwagged their flags at departing ships from the quays at Tripoli and Alexandria. Sergeants hectored the men to take their antimalaria pills, prompting one soldier in the 1st Royal Tank Regiment to conclude, “Like fat cattle who are pampered to the very doors of the slaughterhouse, it was important that if and when we died we should be in good health.”
Many regretted leaving Africa, where they had been “sleeping under great ripe stars.” Here Eighth Army had found as much glory as perhaps could be found in modern war. Here, too, they would leave thousands of comrades in African graves. “Yet we went with light hearts,” the tanker added, “for somewhere at the end of all this we could go home.”
The Monrovia singled up her lines shortly after ten A.M. on Tuesday, July 6, heaved in the starboard anchor, and with the help of two tugs edged from the Basin de Vieux to the twelve-fathom line outside the Algiers port. To Kent Hewitt’s chagrin, as the French harbor pilot stepped over Monrovia’s side to return to shore, he yelled, “Have a good trip to Sicily!” Counterintelligence officers ordered the pilot and his tug crews arrested and held incommunicado until the landings had begun.
Despite elaborate security precautions, Hewitt remained uncertain whether HUSKY’s secrets still held. Sealed maps of Sicily and other classified documents had been delivered throughout the fleet by armed couriers, to be stored before sailing under lock and key. Not until the last minute were Italian-speaking interpreters sent to their respective Army units. Yet breaches had occurred; there was loose talk on the wharves, while on some ships the premature distribution had occurred of “The Soldier’s Guide to Sicily,” which featured a large silhouette of the island on the cover. A British officer in Cairo had even sent his gabardine uniform to be dry-cleaned with a notebook containing the HUSKY battle plan left in the pocket; security agents raided the shop and found that the incriminating pages had been torn out and used as scratch paper to write customer invoices.
As Hewitt paced Monrovia’s flag bridge, listening to the commotion of eight hundred men practicing abandon-ship drills, he had a thousand other details to contemplate besides whether the Germans knew he was coming. The fleet included twenty LSTs carrying ten thousand gallons of water each. Was that enough? Seventeen hospital ships had been sent to North Africa, of which five now sailed toward Sicily. Was that enough? Six hundred miles of African coastline and the sea approaches to Malta had been swept for mines. Were they completely clean? What about enemy submarines? Hewitt had lost several ships and 140 men to U-boats after the landin
As for the eighty thousand soldiers now in his custody, Hewitt could only take comfort in his favorite maxim: You do everything you can, then you hope for the best. Disagreements with the Army, which had begun a year earlier during the preparations for TORCH, had continued during the HUSKY planning. Some frictions were petty: Army and Navy supply officers had jacked up Algerian warehouse prices by bidding against each other, and the Army insisted on calling Monrovia a headquarters ship when any fool knew it was a flagship. Hewitt had been astonished, a few days earlier, to find sentries posted on Patton’s orders outside Monrovia’s operations room, barring access to the admiral’s own staff—that indignity had soon been corrected. More troubling had been Patton’s months-long refusal to move his headquarters from Mostaganem, nearly two hundred miles from Algiers; the distance had made joint planning more difficult.
Still, Hewitt and Patton had found common ground and even mutual affection. The formality of TORCH, when they addressed each other as “Admiral” and “General,” had yielded to a more intimate “Kent” and “Georgie.” Patton was ecumenical enough to occasionally side with the Navy, as in one recent dispute when Army planners—contrary to Hewitt’s advice—proposed to slip troops onto the Sicilian beaches in rubber boats. “Sit down!” Patton had finally snapped at his officers. “The Navy is responsible for getting you ashore and they can put you ashore in any damned thing they want.” To celebrate their final evening on land, Hewitt on Monday night had invited Patton and several other generals to dinner at the admiral’s quarters, a villa requisitioned from a Danish vintner. After several hours of convivial drinking Hewitt helped the generals to the staff cars that would take them to their ships; more sober than most, Patton on his way out the door studied the risqué wall frescoes of half-nude women and muttered, “Thank God I live in a camp.”