The Day of Battle (23 page)

Pitched fighting persisted south of Catania along the Simeto River, where Hermann Göring troops and German paratroopers battled with backs-to-the-wall fury. “The enemy is tough. A real lot of sods,” a British officer said. “When we kill them they have sneers on their faces.” John Gunther described Tommies lying in “foxholes, sucking lemons. The earth is khaki-colored here, and they melt into it.” All things white were hidden to avoid attracting Luftwaffe marauders; at the first hint of an air raid, shavers even toweled the lather from their faces. “Get down, Jock,” a Scots officer called to an exposed soldier. “You’ll get pipped.”

Many were pipped anyway. Dead men shored the reedy banks of creeks and irrigation ditches, and a grisly sunken road dubbed Stink Alley was “paved with bodies.” Medics jabbed the moribund with morphine and waited for them to die. “It would seem hard to tell the dead from the living,” a regimental commander wrote. “I realized that you
could
tell them apart, because the flies walked on the faces of the dead.” Close combat proved especially confusing in Sicilian vineyards, now in full leaf; enemy machine-gunners fired on fixed lines a few inches above the ground, raising welts of dust and wounding many in the feet and legs. At night in the moonlight, “shadows cast by the vines looked like moving men.”

By Sunday morning, July 18, Montgomery conceded that his coastal thrust had sputtered into stalemate. Eighth Army casualties approached four thousand, including seven hundred dead. Efforts to burn the enemy out with RAF incendiaries failed when Sicilian flora proved disappointingly fire-resistant. Ordering a single division to hold the Simeto front, Montgomery shifted forces from his XIII Corps to the west in another effort to flank Axis defenses by further dividing his army. “I am pushing the offensive hard on the left, where the resistance is not so strong. The enemy is now hemmed in at the northeast corner,” he wrote the 51st Highland Division commander on July 21. “I am sending you 50,000 cigarettes as a present to the division.” Eisenhower, who had predicted the fall of Sicily by late July, began to grumble in Algiers. “Why doesn’t Monty get going? What’s the matter with him?” Gunther could have told him: “Both sides are tired, and whereas we are exposed in the plain, the Germans are high up, with good cover.”

The Germans are high up, with good cover
. Here in Sicily was revealed a ground truth that would obtain until the war’s end twenty-two months hence: on no battlefield did topography dictate fate more than in vertical Italy. Officers pondered their 1-to-50,000 maps and realized that the compressed contour lines signified not only slope and steep ascent, but plunging fire and enemy omniscience. A
Gefreiter
with Zeiss binoculars and a field telephone could rain artillery on every living creature in sight.

For now the whitewashed houses and tile roofs of unattainable Catania shimmered in the midday haze, five miles to the north, down a road lined with fluttering poplars and hidden guns. Beyond the town loomed the pyramidal mass of Mount Etna, mysterious and indifferent.

“How I Love Wars”

P
ATTON
had been sulking outside Gela in a confiscated Fascist villa notable for its wardrobe of black shirts and a squawking menagerie of tropical birds in gilded cages. Fine tapestries covered the walls and the Seventh Army commander slept in a sturdy four-poster. “We can sit comfortably on our prats while Monty finishes the goddam war,” a staff officer said bitterly. That was unlikely. On Saturday morning, July 17, Patton rose from his prat, grabbed a map, and flew to Tunisia, determined to get his army back into the battle.

He found General Alexander at his headquarters in the village of La Marsa, on the northern lip of the Gulf of Tunis. A chapel nearby consecrated the spot where Louis IX of France died of typhoid in 1270 while
leading the Eighth Crusade. Across the blue bay loomed the jagged silhouette of Cap Bon, where the final fragments of the Axis armies had sought refuge before surrendering two months earlier. Alexander and staff officers of his 15th Army Group—the nomenclature reflected the sum of his subordinate Seventh and Eighth Armies—occupied tents in the white-walled garden and orangery of a villa deeded to Queen Victoria by the bey of Tunis. German commanders had used the manor house during their seven-month occupation; they absconded with the furniture but left untouched the English books, including a set of Benjamin Disraeli’s novels. Senior British officers now messed in the dining room beneath a domed ceiling and arabesque traceries. “No fuss, no worry, no anxiety—and a great battle in progress,” Harold Macmillan, the ranking British diplomat in North Africa, noted in his diary that weekend. “This is never referred to, except occasionally by some of the American officers on Gen. Alex’s staff, but is understood to be going on satisfactorily.”

Not in Patton’s view. He unfolded his map and came to the point with a jabbing finger. “Have I got to stay here and protect the rear of Eighth Army?” he asked Alexander. “I want to get on with this and push out.” The enemy was “back on his heels.” Sixty thousand Italian troops remained in western Sicily, but Ultra two days earlier had revealed German plans to abandon half the island; demolitions were ordered for Trapani, the little port on Sicily’s northwest coast where Aeneas’ father had died. The best way to shield Montgomery’s flank, Patton said, would be to sunder the island by driving Seventh Army north, toward Palermo. A gleam lit his gaze as he pointed to Sicily’s largest city on the north coast, eighty miles from Gela. In his mind’s eye, American tanks swept from the rolling hills and into Palermo’s central piazza with a panache even Erwin Rommel had never achieved. “The glamour of capturing Palermo,” Lucian Truscott later noted, “attracted Georgie Patton.”

Harold Alexander studied the map, his head swiveling from Catania in the east through the still uncaptured inland crossroads at Enna to the Sicilian west. Except for a fascination with Kesselring—he devoured a biographical sketch compiled by Ultra intelligence analysts—Alexander’s generalship lacked intellectual depth or even curiosity, relying more on his legendary sangfroid. “He’s bone from the neck up,” one British general insisted, and even Brooke conceded that he “had no ideas of his own.” Yet Alexander possessed a sterling reputation, built at the cannon’s mouth, and he looked the part: immaculate, unfazed, in command. His steep-peaked Guardsman’s cap, high boots, and breeches “conveyed an air of Czarist Russia,” one admirer said, and in fact he had once fought the Bolsheviks in Latvia as a volunteer in a unit of ethnic Germans. “He looked as though he had just
had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home,” wrote one journalist. “His well-shaped face, with its fine thin-nostriled nose, level eyes and well-trimmed mustache, was plainly pinkish under its tan.” The “chestnut hair was sleekly brushed and parted high on the left side.” Only a touch of gray at the temples, and the violet pouches beneath his eyes, hinted that Alexander was fifty-one and responsible for several hundred thousand souls.

It was said that he was “a born leader, not a made one.” It was said that he “was an English country gentleman, almost uneducated, who never read a book.” It was said that he could not write his name before the age of ten, but now spoke French, Italian, German, Russian, and Urdu. It was also said that he “might have been a greater commander if he had not been so nice a man and so deeply a gentleman.” And it was said that he had gone over the top thirty times in the Great War before being wounded, and that, in hopes of sharing his good fortune, Irish Guardsmen liked to tread in his footsteps when crossing no-man’s-land. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, even said of him, “To be clever is not everything.” Whatever Alexander’s shortcomings, Macmillan observed, “he has the great quality of seeing the point.” Patton, unbeguiled, noted in his diary that Alexander “has an exceptionally small head. That may explain things.”

Oblivious to the anguish that his July 13 order had caused the Americans, Alexander nevertheless sensed the tension in Patton’s voice. He wondered, he later confessed, whether the impetuous American might simply strike off on his own, declaring, “The hell with this.” True, he doubted that the Yanks could pull their weight. As he had written Brooke, even Eisenhower, Patton, and other U.S. commanders “are not professional soldiers, not as we understand that term.” Yet Alexander saw no harm in allowing them to give it a go. With a nod of that solid-bone, beautifully coiffed, exceptionally small head, he turned Patton loose.

Off Patton’s forces went at a gallop, west by north, an army unreined. In truth, many had slipped their fetters in advance of Alexander’s approval. Patton on Friday had dispatched a huge reconnaissance force ten miles up the coast to Agrigento, “loveliest of mortal cities,” in the opinion of the poet Pindar, where men once slept on ivory beds and interred their favorite horses in lavish tombs, and where the apricot-tinted Doric temples still had few equals outside Greece. Darby’s Rangers assembled in an almond orchard a mile north of Agrigento’s harbor, Porto Empedocle, then attacked with five companies in skirmish lines, followed by three battalions from Truscott’s 3rd Infantry Division. Sweeping over strongpoints, they routed the defenders and took six thousand prisoners.

Unaware that Agrigento and the port had fallen, the light cruiser
Philadelphia
unlimbered her guns until frantic soldiers on the docks arranged oil barrels to spell YANK and U.S. ARMY for a spotter plane overhead. Sailors recased the guns, and several giddy Rangers, fortified with local cognac, emerged from a haberdashery wearing stovepipe hats and black wedding togs. Of greater value were three safes found in an Italian naval headquarters; after heaving them out of a second-story window, soldiers cracked them with farrier tools, crowbars, hand grenades, and rocks. Inside they found charts of enemy minefields, code books, and demolition plans for Palermo and Messina.

Axis troops not captured or killed drew back. “During the night of 17/18 July,” Seventh Army’s log recorded, “enemy withdrew from contact along the entire line.” Truscott summoned his regimental commanders, ordered them to reach Palermo in five days or less, then hoisted a bottle of scotch for a toast: “To the American doughboy.”

Off they went again at a gallop, again west by north. Among those American doughboys was the nineteen-year-old son of a Texas sharecropper who in the next two years would become the most celebrated soldier in the U.S. Army. A fifth-grade dropout, he had picked cotton, worked in a filling station, and fixed radios. Until enlisting, he had never been a hundred miles from the four-room shack in Hunt County that housed eleven children. The Army had issued him a uniform six inches too long in the sleeves and tried to make him a cook. In basic training, he balked at buying GI insurance because “I don’t intend to get killed any way and it costs pretty high”; he still owed money for his mother’s funeral. Bunkmates in the States had called him Baby—he weighed 112 pounds—but the nickname disappeared as he added muscle. This week he had been promoted, so he was now
Corporal
Audie Leon Murphy.

He had a slow, stooped gait, as if stalking prey. Audie Murphy’s marksmanship derived from squirrel hunting, but he would learn to stalk Germans by the smell of their tobacco smoke. Hunt County had put a flinty edge on him. “There never was a peace time in my life, a time when things were good,” he later said. “I can’t remember ever being young in my life.” When a chaplain tried to nudge him closer to God, Murphy replied, “You do the prayin’ and I’ll do the shootin’.” As the 1st Battalion of the 15th Infantry Regiment plunged through the Sicilian interior, he did his first real shootin’ while leading a patrol. Two Italian officers bolted from an observation post, and as they mounted a pair of white horses, Murphy dropped to a knee. “I fire twice,” he recalled. “The men tumble from the horses, roll over and lie still.” Many more would lie still before Murphy could return to Texas festooned with medals, but he had already shed any illusions. “Ten
seconds after the first shot was fired at me by an enemy soldier,” he said, “combat was no longer glamorous.”

Unlike Tunisia, where hills were named by their height in meters, “here there was usually a small town on top with some Dago name that no one could pronounce,” an artillery sergeant wrote. One by one they fell, often without a skirmish: Sciacca and Lercara Friddi and Castelvetrano. Cheering locals greeted them with figs, almonds, and sometimes a stiff-armed Fascist salute. “Kiss your hand! Kiss your hand!” obeisant peasants yelled with such fervor that an annoyed major banned the phrase. White bed-sheets fluttered from every house in Prizzi, where Truscott bought a fine Italian saddle as a trophy for Patton. Italian troops from the Assietta and Aosta Divisions surrendered by the thousands, grousing at German betrayal. “One never seemed to be able to do enough to please them,” an Italian POW explained.

Emulating Stonewall Jackson’s foot cavalry, Truscott’s infantry covered thirty miles or more a day in blistering heat and through dust said to be “composed of a mixture of chalk and cattle dung.” “We are walking at the rate of 4.5 miles an hour,” a private in the 15th Infantry told his diary. “Boy are my dogs barking now.” The surging ranks reminded Truscott of “waves beating on an ocean beach.” Alexander made a halfhearted effort from La Marsa to moderate the advance, but Seventh Army staff officers ignored his message. “Mount up and continue,” Patton told his armor crews. “Don’t stop except for gas.” Omar Bradley conspicuously displayed in his II Corps headquarters a map of Sicily upon which the territory seized by U.S. troops was shaded in blue, sharply contrasting with the smaller, red-hued area held by the British.

From a roadcut in the ridge above Palermo, Truscott squinted through the midday haze at the ancient city on Thursday, July 22. Houses and apartment buildings spilled down the slope to the sea in a terra-cotta jumble redolent of blood oranges and smoke. Fires danced on the lowering hills as far as Monte Pellegrino, sparked by artillery or rearguard Italians burning munitions. Thousands of hungry refugees now camped in these highlands; judging by the desperate faces Truscott had seen while driving from his command post in Corleone, no cat in Palermo was safe from the carving knife.