Assignment to Hell (34 page)

As American tanks and trucks rolled by, Vitorria’s peasants would make “V for victory” signs with their fingers. “A few days ago they were holding up their palms in the fascist gesture,” Boyle wrote. “Their hearts are in neither sign. All they really want is some food and peace and to be left alone. They are worn out with war and trouble, death, and high taxes…. The farm animals look better cared for than the women and children.”
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His Vittoria impressions were shared in a remarkable ten-part “invasion diary” that AP proudly pushed across its wire. Installments were written from different spots; each contained Boyle’s quirky insights and humor. After leaving Vittoria and the 45th, he rejoined the Third’s GIs as they slugged northwest toward the coastal hamlet of Agrigento.

Boyle was in Agrigento on July 20, holed up with the men who had saved his life in Morocco, members of the Second Armored Division, when he wrote a letter to an Algeria-based AP editor named Hutchison about his immediate plans. Boyle’s memo to the boss is a fascinating glimpse into the competitive and ethical considerations he faced practically every day.

The PROs of Patton’s favorite armored unit had tipped off Boyle that it would be attacking the airdrome at Castelvetrano, some twenty miles up the coast. Boyle explained to “Hutch” that he’d done some “forecasting” in the article he’d attached, a guesstimate as to when the airstrip would fall into American hands. “The story should be okay,” Boyle wrote, “if we move as scheduled, but appreciate it if you or Stan Gates [another AP colleague]
will phone check G-2 in the morning to see that everything worked out as per the timetable before pushing it through signals.”

Once in Castelvetrano, Boyle explained, he would write a follow-up story that he was planning to courier back to the PROs’ office in Agrigento, “where they will probably send it your way if they can’t find a way to get it out.” Then, understanding that UPI and INS, AP’s competition, would likely have reporters covering the division’s offensive, he pleaded: “
Please
do all you can to get this one through.”

Whatever copy he’d generate up north, Boyle told Hutchison, would be channeled through the Seventh Army’s mobile “message center” to the PROs’ office in Agrigento.
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In Agrigento Boyle talked to a GI who’d witnessed a grisly accident. The Italian unit that abandoned the coastal village left behind eight small tanks. Before the Third Division guys could disarm the tanks, “a small Sicilian boy crawled unobserved into one of them and began fooling with the mechanism,” Boyle wrote. “[The boy] pushed a button and the gun went off with a roar.”

A shell fragment wounded an Allied soldier; another “almost severed” the leg of a little Sicilian girl. “The lad who had caused all the trouble had to be lifted out of the tank by sympathetic soldiers. He was rigid with fright.”
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A day earlier, Boyle had been with the 45th when it overran the central Sicilian crossroads of Caltanissetta. Patton and his entourage were lurking nearby; they decided to celebrate by lunching at a palace that had years before been commandeered by Mussolini’s blackshirts and had, until a few hours earlier, served as the local Axis headquarters. “It looked like the dining room of King Looie the Fourteenth,” a staff officer told Boyle. Patton and his staff, joined by other Allied officers, sat down at an elegant table laid with gold-plated silverware, exquisite porcelain, and an embroidered tablecloth. But the pièce de résistance turned out to be canned C rations—with toilet paper substituting for napkins.

The palace’s spacious roof was later used to dry out a million dollars in gold seal American currency. The money had been in a safe that had gotten
soaked during the Scoglitti landing. The 45th’s finance officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ross N. Routh of Oklahoma City, surrounded the palazzo with armed guards and MPs, then directed a group of men to spread out the cash on the roof. “‘It’s an ill wind,’” Boyle kidded, “but the wind wasn’t blowing that day.”

Boyle concluded his Caltanissetta stories by invoking William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous axiom: “As General Sherman observed, war is a long way from heaven.”
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B
IGART, TOO, WAS GLIMPSING HIS
own corner of the netherworld. On July 19, day ten of the invasion, he joined the 45th as it skirmished along Highway 123 toward Palermo. In the Seventh Army’s frenetic march, first to Palermo, then east along Highway 113 to Messina, the 45th was trailing the Third Division. Truscott’s Third, at Patton’s direction, was throwing a big left hook along the northwestern Sicilian coast. The 45th was countering with a diagonal punch at the island’s midsection, while the First was jabbing up the right-center while protecting Montgomery’s left flank.

It took Bigart and the 45th six days to catch up to the Third outside a coastal village about halfway between Palermo and San Stefano called Cefalù. On July 25, the 45th ran into resistance as the enemy briefly dug in along the town’s limestone cliffs. “Shells from the enemy’s mobile 88-millimeter all-purpose guns came whining across the hills. There were snipers in every crevice,” Bigart wrote. With his field glasses, he could see two German Mark IV tanks duck behind a promontory a mile or so up the coast. “At that distance,” Bigart wrote, “[the tanks] looked like black beetles squeezing through a narrow crack.”

Along with the
Stars and Stripes
’ Jack Foisie, Bigart was given the okay to check out the town once the enemy abandoned it. “We swept the surrounding hills with field glasses, found no hint of snipers and advanced cautiously,” Bigart wrote. Cefalù consisted of about a dozen stone houses, all of which fronted the road. “A shell had opened the front of one house, baring the squalor of a typical Sicilian home. The inhabitants had fled.”

Bigart and Foisie spotted a white flag being waved from a dwelling and
assumed it was enemy soldiers wanting to surrender. Instead three middle-aged civilians emerged, grinning and flashing the V salute. The road was littered with debris left behind by fleeing soldiers: soap tins, shaving brushes, bags of biscuits, and bedrolls. “There was no sign of German dead, for the Germans are very diligent in disposing of their killed,” Bigart wrote.

It somehow didn’t seem like a real war, Bigart mused. “War is associated with mud, foul weather and hostile civilians. There is none of that here. The weather has been perfect and the civilian conduct exemplary.”
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Later that same day the war became very real for Bigart. The retreating Germans turned to fight at Capo Raisigelbi, a few miles east of Cefalù. Bigart had completely caught up with Patton’s advance elements. Soon he was “passing columns of [American] foot soldiers, hot and grim after a day in the foxholes just ahead.”

Bigart, presumably still with the
Stars and Stripes
’ Foisie, was in a jeep that was being driven by a GI. No one stopped them or discouraged the jeep from lurching ahead. About two miles east of the village they turned a corner and were nearly deafened by the roar of an American artillery battery.

“Our driver suddenly remembered a date he had in Palermo. We had gotten ahead of the infantry. An artillery major informed us dryly that the Germans were just around the bend. Our infantry had gone into the hills on a flanking mission, and there the main column was canalized on the narrow coastal strip between sea and cliff.

“We got out of there in a hurry. As we raced back for the shelter of the town, a shell stirred the dust 500 yards from the road and the blast reverberated from the great cliff of Cefalù. We had caught up with the war.”
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Bigart stayed caught up. In fact, from that moment until the Japanese surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS
Missouri
twenty-six months later, he was almost never more than a bend away from the action.

T
HREE DAYS AFTER ACCIDENTALLY STUMBLING
onto the howitzer, Bigart found himself flirting with another front line, this one seven or eight miles
up the coast in a village called Castel di Tusa. It was Bigart’s first up-close encounter with Nazi depravity.

At midmorning on July 28, Bigart was tailing a 45th Division patrol that had been ordered into Castel di Tusa to make sure that the Germans had completely pulled out. The GIs “bolted into the town, advancing in a stealthy half-crouch, from house to house along both sides of the coastal road,” Bigart wrote. “The shell-pocked houses were empty, the dusty street deserted except for starving cats.”

For the first time in many hours German artillery shells were not pummeling the town. “There was no sound,” Bigart wrote, “but the dull roar of the Sirocco [Italian for “tropical gale”] carrying its stifling blasts of hot wind and dust through the mountain pass.” As the patrol approached an abandoned railroad tunnel on the western edge of town, the Americans heard “an incoherent babble of voices and children wailing.” Inside, they discovered three hundred townspeople, including scores of babies and small children. Abandoned by the town’s Fascist leaders, who had “fled in panic before the American advance,” the villagers had been huddled in the tunnel for six days, subsisting on meager rations. Many were starving, begging soldiers for food and water.

German artillery, the survivors told Bigart through a GI translator, had been “spitefully” shelling both ends of the tunnel to ensure that none of the townspeople could escape. Villagers blamed local Fascists for colluding with the Germans to keep them trapped.

The fighting around Castel di Tusa presaged the wicked warfare to come on the Italian mainland. “This narrow ribbon of dust will never be forgotten by the American and German soldiers who fought for three days in the citrus orchards and vineyards along the way,” Bigart wrote in a separate article two days later.

Castel di Tusa’s Fascist leaders made things even harsher by secreting themselves on cliff ledges where they could spot American troop movements coming from the south or west. The Germans had given the Fascists a radio to signal camouflaged gunners in Mosto three miles east. Between pounding the townspeople in the railroad tunnel and raining shells on the advance elements of the 45th and Third, the guns stayed busy for days.

Most of the Fascists got out when the Germans did, but the mayor and the town marshal remained. An American counterintelligence officer fluent in Italian jeeped into Castel di Tusa while it was still being shelled to arrest the two officials, locking them up in the
municipio
(city hall) near the church. Once the shelling stopped, a jeep-load of officials from AMGOT (the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories) drove into the piazza and began restoring law and order. The AMGOT unit included a doctor from Philadelphia, a post office clerk from San Francisco, and an inspector from Scotland Yard.

London’s erstwhile detective immediately walked over to the old Fascist headquarters, with Bigart trailing. A crowd of a hundred young men, many of them deserters from the Italian army, was loitering out front. The door was cracked open from the inside by a recently deposed Fascist potentate, giving Bigart the chance to display his gift for searing irreverence.

“Guiseppe Pollizzi is thirty-eight years old, a stout man with a comfortable paunch and a well padded posterior. Jowls hung from his face like the folds of an ill-fitting overcoat. His eyes were wide, brown and bovine and suited Guiseppe’s present role of cowlike meekness.”
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The next day, after Bigart and the 45th had inched their way another couple of miles up the coast, Homer found himself near “a crowded, filthy little town of 7,000” called San Stefano. The Axis forces had done a number on the village.

“They blew up bridges over a dozen deep gulches west of the town,” Bigart wrote. “They planted thousands of tank and personnel mines in the dry flats of the San Stefano River. Hillside farms with their ponderous masonry made perfect pillboxes. Road blocks of solid concrete made the highway impassable for guns.”

Because of these entrenchments, a frontal assault would have been foolhardy. “A reversion to frontier warfare was essential,” Bigart informed readers. GIs in small clusters were forced to “shoot and scoot,” à la John Wayne in a Western, up one ridge, then another. The slope of one hill was so severe that two mules died trying to haul heavy mortars to the summit. After capturing one village in a valley five miles southwest of San Stefano,
the Americans had to endure “murderous artillery fire” from Germans holed up in the hills.

“That night, no one slept,” Bigart wrote in a piece published a week later, on August 6. “Huddling under the stone arches of the village, the troops could see the sharp flashes of the German mortars an instant before the shells came down. A man who had lost his child in the bombardment went screaming through the street unmindful of the shrapnel that beat like rain against the cobbled road.”
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It took days, but slowly the men of the 45th began closing in on San Stefano from the south, buttressed by elements of the Third moving in from the west. Many of the guys in the 45th were out of rations, but Sicily offered some of the finer foraging fields of the war: vineyards, olive and almond groves, and the occasional lemon orchard. At nine a.m. on July 31, the Germans finally deserted the village and began retreating down Highway 113, harassed by fire from the destroyer
Rowan
.

“Even then the town was precariously held,” Bigart observed. “The long bridge across the San Stefano River had been demolished and in the dry bed of the river German personnel mines had been sown thicker than grass.”

Bigart watched in horror as a battalion of men from a reserve unit advanced single file into a disguised minefield, suffering dreadful casualties. “The German mine is a vicious little instrument. It springs three to six feet into the air, exploding with a sharp retort similar to rifle fire. A half dozen of these shots had us leaping into a ditch,” he wrote. Bigart and the GIs he was with thought they were under sniper attack. They froze until someone yelled, “Stay where you are: the whole damn river is mined.”
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