The Day of Battle (20 page)

“There’s always some son-of-a-bitch who never gets the word,” a Navy axiom held. In this instance the word failed to reach thousands, at sea and on land. Smaller vessels in particular knew nothing of the jump. Hewitt—who was living on the same ship with Patton—later stated that he first learned the mission had been authorized at 5:47
P.M
. on Sunday, too late to spread the warning and too late to protest. None of the three regiments in the 45th Division sector to the east, where the planes would first make landfall, received notification until after ten
P.M
.; signal officers struggled to decode the messages by moonlight.

Ridgway for six weeks had warned of fratricide, and in late June he advocated scrubbing the proposed jump because the Navy refused to guarantee safe passage for the transport planes over the fleet. A flight corridor had at last been grudgingly promised; but final aircraft routes had not been apportioned by the high command until July 5, and disseminating knowledge of those routes through the invasion forces took several days. After two days of Axis attacks, all troops around the Gulf of Gela were jumpy, and few were skilled at distinguishing friend from foe, especially at night. “Every plane that came over us was fired upon because we could not identify it,” one corporal explained. A particularly vicious raid, the twenty-third of the day, hit the anchorage at 9:50
P.M
., narrowly missing
Boise
and scattering ships to all points.

If Ridgway was anxious ashore, Patton aboard
Monrovia
was hard pressed to heed his own advice to eschew the counsel of his fears. His afternoon bravado melted away as he realized that he was sitting on a tinderbox. At eight
P.M
., he tried to abort the mission only to learn that the 504th was already airborne and beyond recall. In his cabin late that night, Patton confided to his diary, “Found we could not get contact by radio. Am terribly worried.”

No one ever knew who fired the first shot. The lead C-47 arrived at 10:40
P.M
. in the preternatural calm that drifted over the beachhead following the departure of the last enemy raiders of the evening. Amber belly lights flashed the prescribed recognition signal from a thousand feet up. Crossing the coastline thirty miles east of Gela, the planes banked left and the first stick of sixteen paratroopers leaped from the open door onto the airstrip where Ridgway stood craning his neck. Then the rapping of a single machine gun broke the tranquillity, and a stream of the red tracers used by U.S. forces floated up, and up, and up.

The contagion spread in an instant. Fountains of red fire erupted from the beaches and the anchorage. “I looked back,” reported a captain in one of the lead planes, “and saw the whole coastline burst into flame.” Pilots dove to the deck or swerved back to sea, flinging paratroopers to the floor and tangling their static lines. Men fingered their rosary beads or vomited into their helmets. Bullets ripped through wings and fuselages, and the bay floors grew slick with blood. “The tracers going by our plane were so thick that I think I could have read a newspaper,” one lieutenant later reported.

Formations disintegrated. Some pilots flipped off their belly lights and tried to thread a path along the shore between fire from the ships and fire from the beach. Others fled for Africa, chased by tracers for thirty miles. Half a dozen planes were hit as paratroopers struggled to get out the door. “Planes tumbled out of the air like burning crosses,” recalled a soldier in
the 1st Battalion. “Others stopped like a bird shot in flight.” A few pilots refused to drop their sticks, considering it tantamount to murder, although one crew chief told a 504th battalion commander, “It’s a hell of a lot safer out there than it is in here.” Nowhere was safe, of course. Men died in their planes, men died descending in their parachutes, and at least four were shot dead on the ground by comrades convinced they were Germans. Men also died for saying the wrong thing: the paratroopers had been given challenge and parole passwords—
ULYSSES / GRANT
—at odds with those in the 45th Division sector where the fire was heaviest:
THINK / QUICKLY
.

Those watching from the ground would be imprinted with a horror hardly matched through the rest of the war. “No! Stop, you bastards, stop!” the correspondent Jack Belden shrieked above the din. None stopped. Parachutes collapsed or failed to open, and men struck the earth with a sound like “large pumpkins being thrown down.” Others with chutes aflame candlesticked into the sea. Ridgway stared at the carnage in tears, aghast. But it was a young sergeant, Ralph G. Martin, who gave voice to all: “I feel sick in body and soul.”

Colonel Reuben H. Tucker, the thirty-two-year-old commander of the 504th, managed to jump onto the proper landing zone despite gunfire that killed his crew chief and put a thousand holes through his C-47. After rolling up his chute, Tucker stomped from tank to tank ordering the crews to stop shooting at his men with their .50-caliber machine guns. Too late. The final formation of two dozen planes was hit hardest, with half shot down. One pilot dropped his paratroopers, then took fire from eight ships as he banked back to sea; hit by more than thirty shells that left the cockpit instruments in his lap, he managed to ditch and escape in a rubber raft. The C-47 carrying Tucker’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Leslie G. Freeman, crashed five hundred yards from shore after being struck in the right engine by gunfire that also wounded three troopers. Marksmen on nearby ships sprayed the sinking wreckage with bullets. “Eleven more men were wounded or killed after we landed on the water,” Freeman reported, including a lieutenant shot in the face after swimming to the beach.

At last the shooting ebbed, the guns fell silent, and an awful epiphany seeped across the beachhead and through the fleet, that men-at-arms had done what men-at-arms most fear doing: they had killed their own. Twenty-three planes had been destroyed, and another thirty-seven were badly damaged. Investigators put the casualties at 410, although the actual number long remained in dispute. That the mission had been a fiasco—among the worst friendly fire episodes in modern warfare—was beyond haggling. “The safest place for us tonight while over Sicily,” one pilot said, “would have been over enemy territory.” As late as July 16, Ridgway would
report that he could account for only 3,900 of the 5,300 paratroopers who had left North Africa for Sicily on the ninth and eleventh.

Those who survived that Sunday night would never forget, even as they looked for ways to forgive. As he was carried away on a stretcher with a bullet in his shoulder, one paratrooper told an officer, “I was glad to see that our fellows could shoot so good.”

Eisenhower arrived at the beachhead on Monday morning, July 12, ignorant of the previous night’s fratricide. No one during his daylong visit thought to enlighten him. For the past two days on Malta he had been both giddy at
HUSKY’
s apparent early success—“By golly,” he exclaimed, “to think we’ve gone it again!”—and splenetic at the absence of hard news, particularly from Patton. He studied Cunningham’s maps, rocked in a wicker chair in his Lascaris office, cadged dry cigarettes from reporters, and paced on the beach. “Ike had the fidgets,” his naval aide, Commander Harry C. Butcher, wrote in his diary. “Lay on sand awhile, then got up and dug holes in the sand with a stick.” To John Gunther he complained, “They treat me like a bird in a gilded cage.” To see the battle for himself, he had boarded H.M.S.
Petard
in Valletta harbor and at two
A.M
. Monday set sail for Sicily at twenty-six knots.

The destroyer made landfall at Licata just as a lovely Mediterranean dawn tinted the distant hills with orange and gold. Columns of greasy smoke spiraled above the beach, but from two miles out the prevailing impression was “complete serenity,” wrote a British officer aboard
Petard.
“More like a huge regatta than an operation of war.” Shortly after six
A.M
., the destroyer’s captain, dressed in a blue turtleneck and shabby white shorts, pointed to
Monrovia,
anchored five miles off Gela. Eisenhower crossed to the flagship in a bouncing launch to be greeted by the usual bosun’s trill—“I never know what to do when they pipe me on,” the commander-in-chief had muttered—as well as a smiling, saluting Kent Hewitt and a smiling, saluting George Patton.

Patton led the way to his cabin, where blue and red battle lines had been neatly drawn on a large map of Sicily. The Allies now had eighty thousand troops ashore, with seven thousand vehicles, three hundred tanks, and nine hundred guns spread on a hundred-mile arc across an island the size of Vermont. The British Eighth Army had captured Syracuse, and Augusta would fall soon. A tumultuous welcome from Sicilian civilians cooled when it became clear that the Tommies had little extra food to share. But instead of the anticipated ten thousand British casualties in the first week, there would be only fifteen hundred. General Montgomery had begun to wheel toward Catania, only twenty miles north of Augusta and the last sizable city before
Messina on the island’s northeast tip. Brash as ever, Montgomery confidently predicted he would reach Catania as soon as Tuesday night.

As for his own Seventh Army, Patton pointed to Truscott’s 3rd Division on the left—already across the Yellow Line and nearing Canicattì, fifteen miles inland—and Middleton’s 45th Division on the right, a bit scattered but pressing toward the upland town of Vizzini. Comiso airfield had fallen Sunday afternoon, and 125 enemy planes had been captured, 20 of them still flyable. American troops had seized Ragusa, which technically stood in the Canadian sector, and amused themselves there by answering phone calls from anxious Italian garrisons further up-country. In the center, Patton reported, the Hermann Göring Division counterattack had forestalled Allen’s 1st Division, but Ponte Olivo airfield would surely fall this morning. The enemy’s distress was apparent in a message found banded to a homing pigeon, which on Sunday had landed on a U.S. minesweeper instead of flying to the Italian XII Corps headquarters. From an Italian coastal division, it read, “Heroic infantry and artillery still doing their duty after fifteen hours of fighting against tremendous odds…. Send more pigeons.” A Royal Navy officer had advised: “Cross-examine in pigeon English, and release.”

Hardly had the briefing ended than Eisenhower rounded on his army commander, and Patton’s smile vanished. During the
TORCH
landings, Patton had earned a rebuke for failing to notify Eisenhower at Gibraltar of his progress in Morocco, and now he had repeated his sin. The high command in Washington and London wanted information, Eisenhower complained, and what was an ignorant commander-in-chief to tell them? How should he know whether Seventh Army needed help, particularly in the air? Harry Butcher, who witnessed the tongue-lashing, wrote, “When we left General Patton I thought he was angry. Ike had stepped on him hard. There was an air of tenseness.”

Forty-five minutes after boarding
Monrovia,
Eisenhower climbed down to the barge for the return trip to
Petard
. “Patton stood at the edge of the rope ladder looking like a Roman emperor carved in brown stone,” Gunther wrote. “He waved goodbye.” Thirty minutes later, the
Monrovia
radio room decoded a message confirming that nearly two dozen “of our own troop transport planes [were] shot down last night.” The report never caught up with Eisenhower. He spent the morning cruising the Sicilian shore, stuffing cotton in his ears during a brief exchange of salvos with a German shore battery, then riding a DUKW through hundreds of naked Canadian soldiers bathing in the creamy surf near Cape Passero. “I have come to welcome Canada to the Allied command,” he declared, sweat beading on his broad forehead.

Eisenhower ended the day with a tumbler of gin, courtesy of the Royal Navy, and the conviction that
HUSKY
was unfolding rather well. “Provided everything goes satisfactorily,” he privately informed reporters, “we should have Sicily in two weeks.” Given limp Italian resistance, he had begun to believe that Allied forces should carry the fight to mainland Italy. Still, he was irked at Patton. Notwithstanding their twenty-year friendship, he told Butcher, he wished that Seventh Army for the rest of the Sicilian campaign could be commanded by his West Point classmate Omar Bradley, whom he considered “calm and matter-of-fact.”

Only after returning to his dank command post in the Lascaris Bastion late Monday night did Eisenhower learn of the airborne calamity. His irritation at Patton now turned to fury. Face flushed, lips pursed, he dictated a scathing message to the army commander at 11:45
P.M
., the syllables popping like whip cracks: “You particularly requested me to authorize this movement into your area. Consequently ample time was obviously available for complete and exact coordination of the movement among all forces involved.” Such a catastrophe implied “inexcusable carelessness and negligence on the part of someone.” Patton was to initiate an “exhaustive investigation with a view to fixing responsibility.”

Investigations would go forth, sins of omission and commission would be duly documented, but no blame was ever formally assigned. Pentagon censorship kept the incident secret until many months after the Sicilian campaign ended. Hewitt angrily denied any culpability, as did everyone else involved. Eisenhower’s air chief deemed the mission “not operationally sound,” although the top AFHQ airborne adviser, fatuously determined to fashion a silk purse from the sow’s ear, declared himself “well pleased with the entire operation” in Sicily.

Patton considered the 504th’s misfortune “an unavoidable incident of combat.” But as he moved into the marble-floored, bedbug-ridden Geloan villa that would become his first headquarters ashore, he felt the sting of Eisenhower’s castigation. “If anyone is blameable, it must be myself, but personally I feel immune to censure,” Patton wrote in his diary on July 13. “Perhaps Ike is looking for an excuse to relieve me…. If they want a goat, I am it.”