The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Those who fought and suffered in Italy—that “tough old gut,” as Ernie Pyle called it—were left to extract from the bad time what redemption they could. “Few of us can ever conjure up any truly fond memories of the Italian campaign,” Pyle wrote in Brave Men in late 1944. “The enemy had been hard, and so had the elements…. There was little solace for those who had suffered, and none at all for those who had died, in trying to rationalize about why things had happened as they did.”
He continued:
I looked at it this way—if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives that winter we would save a half million lives in Europe—if those things were true, then it was best as it was.
I wasn’t sure they were true. I only knew I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all.
Faith and imagination were required to elevate the Italian campaign, to see as the poet Richard Wilbur, a veteran of Cassino and Anzio, saw: “the dreamt land / Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.” Even Pyle, who knew better than most that “war isn’t romantic to the people in it,” sensed the sublime in moments “of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our fate.”
George Biddle had found that in “misery, destruction, frustration, and death,” certain annealed qualities seemed “to give war its justification, meaning, romance, and beauty. The qualities of valor, sacrifice, discipline, a sense of duty.” Even Mauldin, that flinty-eyed skeptic, would concede, “I stopped regarding the war as a show to help my career. I felt a seriousness of purpose, and I felt it in my bones.” A medic who had landed at Salerno later wrote his wife, “This is something that is born deep inside us, when we come to know why we are here, when we have learned how very important it was that we did leave you and all we love.”
Somewhere north of Rome, Glenn Gray wrote in his diary: “I watched a full moon sail through a cloudy sky…. I felt again the aching beauty of this incomparable land. I remembered everything that I had ever been and was. It was painful and glorious.”
Another day passed, and another night. The circling stars glided on their courses. The poets and the dreamers again struck their tents and shouldered their rifles to begin that long, last march.
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Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are from U.S. Army Signal Corps archives.
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President Franklin D. Roosevelt with Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill at Shangri-La, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, during an interlude in the TRIDENT conference, mid-May 1943 (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)
The president and prime minister with their Combined Chiefs of Staff in a posed portrait at the White House on May 24, 1943, the last day of the TRIDENT conference. Standing from left to right: Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the senior British officer stationed in Washington; Lieutenant General Sir Hastings L. “Pug” Ismay, chief of staff to Churchill; Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles F. A. Portal, chief of the British air staff; General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff; Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the British First Sea Lord; Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief military adviser; General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff; Admiral Ernest J. King, the U.S. chief of naval operations; Lieutenant General Joseph T. McNarney, an Army Air Forces pilot who served as Marshall’s deputy chief of staff. The senior AAF commander, General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, spent the conference in the hospital for treatment of a heart condition. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)
Allied troops boarding assault craft in a North African port, apparently Bizerte, Tunisia, en route to Sicily for Operation HUSKY in early July 1943
General Dwight D. Eisenhower (left) and General George C. Marshall during a meeting in Algiers in September 1943
Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt (right), who commanded American naval forces during the invasions of Morocco, Sicily, and Salerno, on the deck of his flagship with the war correspondent Quentin Reynolds (U.S. Navy, National Archives)
Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen (left) commander of the 1st Infantry Division, studies a map with the man who became his nemesis, Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley, commander of the U.S. II Corps. Censors have inked out a landmark between the two to avoid pinpointing their location in Sicily.
Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., assistant commander of the 1st Infantry Division during the invasion of Sicily, shown here with his jeep in January 1944. An admirer described him with four adjectives: “Bald, burnt, gnarled, and wrinkled.”
Axis aircraft attack Allied invasion ships in the anchorage off Gela, Sicily, on July 11, 1943. After bombs struck the Liberty ship S.S. Rowan in this area on the same day, one witness described “a flat sheet of crimson fire in a frame of black smoke.”
Dead and dying Italian soldiers lie in a road near Palermo in July 1943, after their truck inadvertently hit an Italian mine while being pursued by U.S. troops. Near a jeep in the background, medics dress the wounds of an American lieutenant.
Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr. (right), commander of the U.S. Seventh Army, at the Royal Palace in Palermo with his rival, General Bernard L. Montgomery (center), commander of the British Eighth Army, and Major General Geoffrey Keyes, Patton’s deputy
Company A of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, on July 28, 1943, moving toward Troina, the highest and perhaps most fiercely defended town in Sicily. “Troina was the toughest battle Americans have fought since World War I,” one general concluded, “and there were very few in that war which were its equal.”
Major General Matthew B. Ridgway (left), commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, with a Signal Corps cameraman in central Sicily, July 25, 1943. “Hard as flint and full of intensity, almost grinding his teeth from intensity,” one subordinate said of Ridgway.
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the senior German commander in the Mediterranean, was a former artilleryman who had learned to fly and had transferred to the Luftwaffe. An exceptional tactician who believed that most of Italy could be defended, Kesselring argued for a strategic concept that involved keeping the war as far from the Fatherland as long as possible. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Riflemen from the 143rd Infantry Regment, 36th Infantry Division, wade toward the beach at Paestum, south of Salerno, at the start of Operation AVALANCHE on September 9, 1943. The milky haze from artificial smoke was intended to blind German gunners on the high ground ringing the landing sites.
U.S. Navy sailors and Coast Guardsmen hug the shingle during a German air raid on the anchorage at Salerno. Debris from an exploding bomb can be seen in the background. The wire mesh laid across the beach was intended to improve traction for military vehicles.
Major General Ernest J. Dawley commanded the U.S. VI Corps during the landings at Salerno in September 1943. A stocky, cautious artilleryman from Wisconsin who had been described in his West Point yearbook as “a quiet lad that one seldom sees or hears of,” Dawley had warned his superiors before Salerno, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew, and chew damn well.”
Lieutenant General Richard L. McCreery commanded the British X Corps at Salerno, anchoring the Allied left flank. A pious, blunt Anglo-Irish cavalryman—“tall, lean, and vague,” as one American described him—McCreery still limped from a World War I wound and tended when aggravated to lower his voice to a near-whisper.
U.S. infantrymen push past the Temple of Neptune at Paestum, center of the American sector during the landings around Salerno Bay. Still among the grandest complex of Doric temples outside Athens, Paestum had been a 6th-century B.C. Greek colony, famed in antiquity for roses and violets.
The Tabacchificio Fioche, known to American troops as the Tobacco Factory, just north of the Sele River at Salerno. A stronghold of five brick buildings with massive walls, red tile roofs, and small windows resembling gun ports, the co
The cruiser U.S.S. Savannah, on fire and down in the bow on September 11, 1943, after a German radio-controlled bomb, known as a Fritz-X, punched through No. 3 turret and detonated belowdecks, killing more than two hundred sailors. No U.S. Navy warship in World War II would be struck by a larger bomb. One witness reported, “That hit wasn’t natural.”
Benito Mussolini on September 12, 1943, just before climbing into the cockpit of the Storch airplane that will carry him from the Gran Sasso ski resort where he had been imprisoned by Italian authorities following his arrest. On Hitler’s orders, German paratroopers led by Captain Otto Skorzeny landed by glider on the mountaintop to free the Duce without firing a shot.
Naples and its famous bay, with Vesuvius in the background. Captured on October 1, 1943, the city for Allied soldiers soon became “the nearest symbol of every man’s immediate aspirations,” one British officer wrote, “a fairyland of silver and gold.”
American infantrymen in an assault boat haul themselves across the Volturno River in mid-October 1943 during the first major river crossing in Europe by Allied troops. By moving quickly on a broad front, and by leaving the main roads to infiltrate around enemy strongpoints, Allied forces advanced thirty-five miles past Naples before rain and stiffening German resistance slowed the pace.
A wounded German prisoner awaits medical treatment along the bank of the Volturno on October 17, 1943.
A U.S. soldier north of the Volturno disables a mine, which has been discovered by the engineer holding his metal detector. “All roads lead to Rome,” quipped General Harold Alexander, the commander-in-chief of Allied forces in Italy, “but all the roads are mined.”
Lieutenant Colonel John Toffey, Jr., as a battalion commander in the 3rd Infantry Division after the Volturno crossing. A combat commander since the invasion of North Africa, Toffey possessed “the bones and confirmation of a steeple-chaser rather than a racehorse,” according to the combat artist George Biddle, who made this sketch on October 30, 1943. (Courtesy of John J. Toffey IV and Michael Biddle)
A Harvard-educated World War I veteran, George Biddle was a fine writer as well as a talented draftsman. Of the Italian campaign he wrote, “I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire.”
Ships ablaze in Bari harbor after German bombers struck the Adriatic port in a surprise raid on December 2, 1943. Seventeen Allied ships were sunk in what was described as the “costliest sneak attack since Pearl Harbor.” The explosion of a munitions ship secretly carrying mustard gas caused mass casualties among servicemen and Italian civilians.
British infantrymen in early December 1943 cling to the face of Monte Camino, described by one Tommy as a “steep solid rock leading God knows where.” Stone breastworks offered little protection against German mortar fragments or the frigid cold. “A small earthquake added to the unpleasantness,” a Scots Guard account noted.
Eisenhower (left) and Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, near the Mignano Gap in central Italy in December 1943. A few days later, Eisenhower would leave the Mediterranean to take command of OVERLORD, the invasion of France.
Italian women washing clothes in a village trough in central Italy as an Allied convoy crawls through mud that seemed to grow thicker and deeper by the day
Fifth Army engineers finish a bridge across a streambed in central Italy to replace the span destroyed by German demolitionists. In twenty months of fighting in Italy, the Allies would erect three thousand spans, with a combined length of fifty-five miles. This one took ten hours to build.
The view of Monte Sammucro from German positions on Monte Lungo. Highway 6 runs across the bottom of the photo, while a secondary road angles around Dead Man’s Curve toward San Pietro, seen clinging to the lower slopes of the massif. The pinnacle of Sammucro, nearly four thousand feet high, was known as Hill 1205.
In covering the fighting at San Pietro, Ernie Pyle wrote about the death on Monte Sammucro of Captain Henry T. Waskow. “Beloved Captain,” his most famous dispatch, was perhaps the finest expository passage of World War II. But Pyle told a friend, “I’ve lost the touch. This stuff stinks.”
“He was never young,” a school classmate once said of Henry Waskow, “not in a crazy high school-kid way.” To his family in Texas, Waskow wrote, “If I failed as a leader, and I pray God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try.” (Texas Military Forces Museum)
In the mountains near Venafro, an Italian mule skinner (right) helps secure the body of a dead American soldier for removal to a temporary military cemetery. Blood stains can be seen on the stretcher.
U.S. troops from the 504th Airborne Infantry Regiment and 143rd Infantry climb through the rubble of San Pietro on December 17, 1943. A gunner described the village as “one large mound of desolation.”
Christmas dinner 1943, on the hood of a jeep. The striped unit patch on the sleeve and helmet of the soldier on the right shows that he belongs to the 3rd Infantry Division; the other two men served in the 163rd Signal Company.
After a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, Winston Churchill rose from his sickbed in Tunisia for a Christmas lunch with Eisenhower (left) and Alexander (center). The prime minister, who is wearing his “siren suit” and Chinese dressing gown with blue-and-gold dragons, had begun pressing for a surprise Allied landing behind enemy lines at Anzio.
Mortar crewmen drop another round down the tube near the Rapido River on January 24, 1944. Before the attack, the 36th Division commander, Major General Fred L. Walker, had scribbled in his diary, “We are undertaking the impossible, but I shall keep it to myself.”
Two signalmen use a pig sty as a message center during the battle for the Rapido, January 23, 1944. A censor has marked through the sign indicating that the men belong to the 143rd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Division. Observed one sergeant, “Anybody who had any experience knew this ain’t the place to cross the river.”
Before leaving the Mediterreanean for Britain, Patton (left) in mid-January 1944 made a final trip to Italy to see his former deputy, Major General Geoffrey Keyes, now commanding the U.S. II Corps. “The impetuous, vitriolic, histrionic Patton is considerably leavened by the calm, deliberate, circumspect Keyes,” a War Department observer had reported to Washington.
Once described as an “amiable mastiff,” Major General Fred L. Walker had been Mark Clark’s instructor at the Army War College in the 1930s. As the Rapido attack turned into a debacle, Walker’s disaffection increased. “The stupidity of some higher commanders seems to be profound,” he wrote. (Texas Military Forces Museum)
Anzio was the birthplace of two notorious Roman emperors, Nero and Caligula. Her sister city, Nettuno, can be seen down the coastline (center right), just beyond the dark patch of the Borghese estate; the seventeenth-century villa commandeered by Mark Clark as a Fifth Army command post is also visible in the center of the estate. Beyond the coast, the Pontine Marshes stretch to the distant hills.
The Pontine Marshes for centuries had been a malarial dead zone until Mussolini transformed the region into “smiling fields” with enormous pumps. As the Allied armies neared Rome, German demolitionists flooded 100,000 acres of farmland to make the area both impassable and hospitable to malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Colonel William O. Darby, seen here as a regimental commander in the 45th Division in April 1944, listened on the radio as much of the Ranger force he had built and led was destroyed at Cisterna a week after the Anzio landings.
Major General John P. Lucas in his VI Corps office in Nettuno on February 10, 1944, shortly before the German counterattack that nearly shattered the Allied beachhead. Regarding the Anzio invasion, “Old Luke” told his diary, “This venture was always a desperate one.”
Four pilots from the 99th Fighter Squadron on January 29, 1944, shortly after each had shot down a Germa
In Hell’s Half Acre at Anzio, troops in early April 1944 dig in another hospital tent against German artillery and air attacks. In a single episode two months earlier, a Luftwaffe pilot jettisoned his bombs during a dogfight over the beachhead and the blasts killed twenty-eight people—including three nurses, two doctors, and six patients.