The Day of Battle (32 page)

“Risks Must Be Calculated”

A gentle breeze barely riffled the sea, and a clement sun climbed through the early hours of Friday, September 3, 1943. Sicilian mongers peddled lemons and gladioli to British soldiers in battle kit queued up along the beaches. Three hundred DUKWs and other vessels swarmed between island and mainland “like so many gnats on a pond,” a witness reported, and this first invasion of continental Europe—an all-British operation code-named
BAYTOWN
—had proved so placid that Tommies soon called it the Messina Strait Regatta. Only massed artillery broke the tranquillity: more than five hundred guns stood barking wheel-to-wheel on the slopes above Messina. Royal Navy ships, now steaming with impunity through the straits, added another hundred tubes to the cannonade. Rockets arced toward the Calabrian shore like “a kind of upward flowing yellow waterfall,” wrote Alan Moorehead. “The noise was monstrous.”

Just eight thousand Germans still occupied the entire foot of the Italian boot, and orders had long ago been issued to abandon Calabria—although again without notifying the Italians. Allied intelligence since August 30 had detected ample signs that Axis troops would retire northward rather than fight for the toe, but the ponderous invasion preparations continued, including a creeping barrage reminiscent of the Somme. British guns would fire 29,000 rounds on this Friday morning; the enemy in reply fired none.

General Montgomery sipped his morning tea in a seaside olive orchard and scanned the first reports from Eighth Army’s vanguard, now poking through the battered streets of Reggio di Calabria on the opposite shore. German troops had melted into the hills. Montgomery lingered at a sound truck parked by the Messina beach to offer his thoughts to the BBC and to record a suitably lionhearted proclamation for Eighth Army. “I think that’s all right, don’t you?” he asked, listening to himself. “Good recording. Good recording.” Then he called for his boat, “much as one would set out for a picnic on the Thames,” and sang in his reedy voice, “Now, let’s go to Italy.”

To Italy he went, standing erect and khaki-clad in the DUKW’s bow, his sharp chin lifted like a ship’s figurehead. Several hundred cartons of cheap Woodbine cigarettes had been stacked along the hull. His batman would bring Montgomery’s twittering aviary of parakeets and canaries, kept in cages outside his trailer; he hoped to find a pair of lovebirds for sale, although another feathered camp follower—a handsome peacock—had appeared at last night’s dinner table on a platter, roasted and garnished. Several hundred yards from shore, the DUKW nuzzled up to a Royal Navy corvette. Scrambling aboard, Montgomery descended to the cramped wardroom, where he drank three cups of coffee and nibbled on cookies while telling reporters how he planned to wage war in Italy:

Returning topside, he waved to the hooting troops packed to the gunwales in a passing landing craft. The Italians would likely fold “within six weeks,” Montgomery predicted, but the Germans “will fight.” As for this invasion,
BAYTOWN
, “it’s a great satisfaction.” His black-and-red pennant snapped from the corvette’s mast.

In truth, he was peeved and disgruntled, and already had begun sulking in his trailer. Alexander had brushed aside his advice on how to fight the Italian campaign and Eighth Army was relegated to a supporting role;
BAYTOWN
had even shrunk to a mere four battalions until Montgomery’s protests restored his invasion force to two divisions, the British 5th and the Canadian 1st. No effort had been made to coordinate Eighth Army with Fifth Army, now scheduled to land three hundred tortuous road miles north at Salerno in less than a week. To beach an army in the toe made little sense, even as a diversion; Montgomery thought it “daft.” Alexander’s instructions on whether to simply open the Messina Strait or to begin tramping up the length of Italy had been vague; when pressed to name an objective, he simply urged Montgomery to do what he could. Mounting
BAYTOWN
meant that
AVALANCHE
, the Salerno invasion, would be smaller and would comprise mostly inexperienced units and commanders. Eisenhower had prodded Montgomery to jump the strait sooner, but Eighth Army “wanted everything fully prepared” before moving. Again Eisenhower did not insist.

Strategic guidance was no more enlightened. Roosevelt and Churchill had convened another conference in mid-August, this time in Quebec. They reaffirmed the
OVERLORD
invasion of western Europe for the following
spring, but the British still considered an extended campaign in Italy vital to that cross-Channel attack because it would siphon German reserves from the Atlantic Wall. The Americans disagreed, incessantly reciting Napoleon’s maxim that Italy, like a boot, should be entered only from the top. Eight hundred miles long, it was the most vertebrate of countries, with a mountainous spine and bony ribs. No consensus existed on what to do if the Germans fought for the entire peninsula, or whether this was a worthwhile battleground if Italy quit the war.

A shout rose from the shingle just north of Reggio as the corvette drew close and troops ashore realized that Montgomery had come to join them. Clambering back into another DUKW, he rolled onto the continent at 10:30
A.M
., goggles around his neck and beret cocked just so, tossing cigarettes with a grin. Hundreds of Italian soldiers also rushed to the beach “with hands upraised, shouting, laughing,” eager to help unload enemy stores. Montgomery made straight for the local Fascist headquarters, where he purloined a sheaf of stationery on which he would scribble his correspondence for months. That evening he ate an early dinner and retired to bed with a novel. In a note to General Brooke in London before he drifted off, Montgomery wrote, “The only person who does not get tired is myself.”

The next days passed with little sense of urgency. German demolitionists had wrecked bridges and road culverts, but active resistance was mounted only by a puma and a frightened monkey, both fugitives from the Reggio zoo. Fuel and ammunition dumps swelled in size. Eighth Army scouts pushed from the toe to the instep, at times conducting reconnaissance from the passenger carriages of local trains. Wild orchids and golden gorse grew in the uplands where for centuries Greek and Roman ship-wrights had cut their timber. Women with scarlet petticoats beneath black skirts glided through the little villages, bundles of firewood balanced on their heads. The scent of crushed fennel sweetened the air, and nights grew chill as the soldiers tramped away from the Jasmine Coast and into the mountains. Canadian troops shivered in their khaki drill shorts, and some rifled through the abandoned uniform closets of the Blackshirt Legion for warmer garb.

Alexander advised London on September 6 that the Germans were resisting Eighth Army “more by demolition than by fire.” In fact, as Brooke acknowledged the same day, “no Germans troops have been met so far.” On the night of September 7, in a modest effort to flank the enemy, several battalions sailed from Messina with the intent of landing near Pizzo, on the Gulf of St. Eufemia, twenty-five miles northeast of the toe. “Everything went wrong,” a Royal Hampshire account conceded. The wrong battalions landed on the wrong beaches in the wrong sequence. “Our exact whereabouts was
not known to our naval friends,” the Dorsetshires reported. “It was a pitch black night with no moon.” Commando landing craft went astray; among the first Dorsets finally ashore was “an NCO with a bag of mail over his shoulder.” A light drizzle of German mortar shells turned into a deluge, with “many casualties suffered by those in the craft or trying to land.” The expedition accomplished little. A German war diary several days later noted that, in Calabria, “the enemy is not crowding after us.”

Montgomery meanwhile made himself comfortable. He offered visiting journalists glasses of spiked lemonade and tours of the new shower and tub in his personal trailer, “happy as a youngster with a new electric train.” The birds chirped in their cages. Was it true, he asked the reporter Quentin Reynolds, that fashionable girls in New York now wore Monty berets?

On Sunday, September 5, Eisenhower hosted a small bridge party at his seven-bedroom estate in Algiers, the Villa dar el Ouard: Villa of the Family. Often to relax he played Ping-Pong on the green table in his library, or sang old West Point songs at the grand piano in the music room. But cards remained his favorite pastime, and for this game he rounded up three skilled players: Harry Butcher, Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, and the chief of staff for Clark’s Fifth Army, Major General Alfred M. Gruenther. Tricks were taken, tricks were lost, and between hands there was little palaver. Clark seemed preoccupied and failed to count trump properly; he and Butcher lost the rubber to Eisenhower and the formidable Gruenther, who as a young lieutenant had supplemented his Army pay by refereeing professional bridge tournaments in New York.

Reluctantly, they threw in their cards. Summoning his limousine, Eisenhower bundled Clark and Gruenther in back and rode with them to the port, now alive with the usual embarkation frenzy of shouting stevedores and swinging booms. The commander-in-chief gripped Clark’s hand—they had been close friends for three decades, since the academy—and wished him godspeed, then watched the two officers stride up the gangplank to join Kent Hewitt on his new flagship, the U.S.S.
Ancon.
Antennae wrapped her superstructure like a spider’s web. Thirty staff officers of Fifth Army soon boarded, as well as a few commanders who had come to bid Clark good luck. Among the well-wishers was Truscott. “Hell, Lucian,” Clark told him. “You don’t have to worry about this operation. This will be a pursuit, not a battle.”

Exhausted from the long weeks of preparing his army, Clark soon retired to his cabin, where the bunk barely accommodated his six-foot-three-inch frame. Before flicking off the light, he opened a small volume called
The Daily Word.
“With Thee I am unafraid, for on Thee my mind is stayed,” read the entry for September 5. “Though a thousand foes surround, safe in Thee I shall be found.” Just in case, Clark had tucked several four-leaf clovers into his wallet.

“The best organizer, planner and trainer of troops that I have met,” Eisenhower had written of Clark to Marshall two weeks earlier. “In preparing the minute details…he has no equal in our Army.” It was precisely these attributes that had led Eisenhower to choose Clark for the immensely complex challenge of flinging an army onto a hostile shore, a task that would make him the senior American field commander in Italy. Long-limbed and angular, with a thick lower lip and prominent Adam’s apple, Clark had dark eyes that constantly swept the terrain before him. To a British general, he evoked “a film star who excels in Westerns.” When speaking, Clark often paused to purse or lick his lips; the ears flattened against his skull accentuated a long, aquiline nose that suggested a raptor’s beak. “A fine face, full of bones,” George Biddle observed. “An intelligent face and an expression of kindliness about the mouth.”

He had been born into the Army and grew into a frail, skinny officer’s son whose father let him attend “the college of your choice, providing it’s West Point.” As the youngest member of the entering class of 1917, Clark was promptly powdered, diapered, and put to bed early. Descended from immigrant Romanian Jews on his mother’s side, he had himself baptized as an Episcopalian in the academy chapel. At age twenty-two, soon after graduation, he was commanding a battalion in the Vosges Mountains when German shrapnel tore through his shoulder and ended his war. Promoted twice during his first four months of service, he thereafter remained a captain for sixteen years, battling both national indifference to the Army and poor health: he suffered from a heart murmur, ulcers, a diseased gallbladder, and various infections. In 1923, he met the widow of a West Point classmate who had committed suicide two years earlier. Four years older than Clark and a graduate of Northwestern University, Maurine Doran, known as Renie, was petite, lighthearted, and his equal in intelligence and ambition; they married a year later.

Now forty-seven and known to his friends as Wayne, Clark had skipped the rank of colonel altogether and was among the youngest three-star generals in the Army’s history. Still, he had last commanded troops in combat a quarter century earlier. If Biddle detected “kindliness about the mouth,” he missed a few other traits. “He thought of himself as destined to do something unusual in this war,” a Fifth Army staff officer said, “and so he carried himself with a dignity commensurate with that.” An Anglophobe, he hid his disdain from both Eisenhower and the British; only within his
inner circle would he rail against “these goddamned dumb British,” or recite the Napoleonic maxim “Don’t be an ally. Fight them.”

He professed to “want my headquarters to be a happy one,” but Clark was too short-tempered and aloof for easy felicity. One staff officer considered him “a goddamned study in arrogance,” while another saw “conceit wrapped around him like a halo.” Perhaps only in his correspondence with Renie did the sharp edges soften. He wrote of a yen to go fishing, of the rugs and silver dishes he was sending her, of his small needs from home, like vitamin pills and gold braid for his caps. From her apartment in Washington she cautioned him about flying too much, and complained of his infrequent letters, of difficulties with his mother, of how much she missed being kissed. She had sent him the clovers.

Clark’s compulsive self-promotion already had drawn sharp rebukes from Marshall and Eisenhower, but he still instructed photographers to snap his “facially best” left side. The correspondent Eric Sevareid considered him fixated on “personal publicity without which warmaking is a dull job, devoid of glamour and recompense.” Clark at times encouraged Renie to cooperate with the reporters in Washington who wrote profiles of him; at other times, he chastised her for extolling his virtues too vigorously. “From what I have told you about publicity,” he wrote, “you should begin to put two and two together and see the picture.” His public relations staff would grow to nearly fifty men, with each news release preferably carrying Clark’s name three times on the first page and at least once per page thereafter. Reporters were encouraged to adopt the commanding general’s preferred nomenclature: “Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark’s Fifth Army.”