War Stories III (18 page)

“Little ships” of the U.S. Navy like Ed Stafford's sub-chaser were indeed crucial to Patton beating Montgomery to Messina—by
one
day. The lead elements of both the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division and 45th Division reached the outskirts of the port on 15 August, and Montgomery's paratroopers arrived the next day. On 17 August, by prior arrangement, the Americans and the British made a triumphal entry into the devastated city. But they were too late to catch their wily Wehrmacht opponents—the Germans had escaped.

During the hours of darkness between 11 August and the night of the sixteenth, German generals Hans Hube and Frido Etterlin had safely barged more than 100,000 German and Italian troops and nearly 10,000 tanks, armored vehicles, and trucks across the narrow Straits of Messina to the Italian mainland.

Though Eisenhower was personally chagrined at the enemy's escape, Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting with the combined British-American chiefs of staff in Quebec at the “Quadrant Conference,” were quick to reassure their chosen commander. But they were less forgiving of their most successful armor leader—George Patton.

During the protracted battles in central Sicily, Patton had visited a field hospital where severely—and recently—wounded soldiers were being treated. When the exhausted and emotionally drained general saw two soldiers with no visible injuries waiting to be seen by a medical officer, he confronted them, accused them of cowardice, and slapped them. The doctors and nurses who saw the incidents were appalled and the story quickly spread. As it turned out, one of the soldiers was a casualty of battlefield stress and the other had a temperature of 102 degrees—likely from the malaria prevalent in Sicily's central plain.

When the incidents were reported in the press, senior officers in Washington demanded that Patton be cashiered. Only Eisenhower's direct and personal intervention in the matter saved the tank warfare expert from professional extinction. But the two events—the Germans' escape and the general's slaps—were to have immediate consequences.

Though more than 5,000 Allied soldiers had been killed and another 17,000 wounded in the thirty-eight-day battle for Sicily, FDR and Churchill agreed at Quadrant that the momentum against Hitler required an immediate invasion of the Italian mainland. Thus, the Germans who escaped Sicily in August would face the Allies again at Salerno in September. And this time when the Americans went ashore, “Old Blood and Guts” wouldn't be leading them. As punishment for the slapping incidents, Patton was called back to England to help Eisenhower prepare for Overlord. The crusty Patton was given “command” of the First United States Army Group—which was the wholly invented army for Operation Quicksilver—to spread disinformation about the size of the American forces in England. In that role, he'd be muzzled from making his familiar outrageous remarks, and Eisenhower could quietly prepare him for the role he had planned for him in Overlord.

CHAPTER 7

BATTLE FOR THE BOOT 1943–1945

M
ussolini was overthrown on 26 July 1943, in the midst of the battle for Sicily. The new government in Rome, headed by the aging Marshal Pietro Badaglio, assured Hitler that they were still allies in the Axis. But secretly, Badaglio—at the direction of the Italian monarch, King Victor Emmanuel—immediately began negotiating for Italy's surrender to the Allies.

Italian reluctance to continue in the disastrous alliance Mussolini had forged with Hitler was understandable. By mid-July 1943, nearly a quarter of a million young Italians had died in the foreign adventures undertaken by Il Duce. The Allies were holding more than a half-million Italian soldiers as prisoners of war. Although the 350,000 Italian POWs held by the Americans and British would eventually be freed, most of those who disappeared in the Balkans—and very few of those captured at Stalingrad—would ever be heard from again.

Clandestine meetings between Badaglio's representatives and Allied officials took place on Sicily and Portugal. Eisenhower even secretly dispatched Brigadier General Maxwell Taylor to Rome—at great personal risk—to confer with Italian authorities.

When the negotiations bogged down, Allied bombers were unleashed on the industrial cities of northern Italy. Then, before dawn on 3 September, Montgomery's 8th Army surreptitiously crossed the Straits of Messina, landing on the “toe” of the Italian boot—the first Allied soldiers to occupy Axis home territory since the start of the war. Badaglio agreed to Eisenhower's surrender terms that afternoon.

From the start of the negotiations, both Badaglio and Eisenhower had anticipated that once the Italian surrender became public, Hitler would react quickly and violently. Therefore, provisions for Italy withdrawing from the war included an understanding that the Allies would rapidly “intervene” on the Italian mainland to prevent German reprisals against the new government. Accordingly, as the final battles of Husky were still being fought on Sicily, Eisenhower's staff was frantically poring over maps, nautical charts, aerial photographs, and intelligence reports to determine the best points of entry on the Italian coast. The goal was to get to Rome as fast as possible.

Given limitations on shipping and the realization that 60,000 Wehrmacht troops had escaped the trap set for them at Messina, the Allies decided that the Gulf of Salerno—160 miles south of Rome—was as far north as they dared go. Codenamed Avalanche, the operation was set to commence on 9 September—only twenty-three days after Sicily was declared secure, and just hours after the public announcement of Italy's surrender.

Eisenhower had hoped that Montgomery's 3 September landing at Regio Calabria on Italy's “toe” would draw Kesselring's Wehrmacht south from Naples—but the Germans didn't take the bait. Instead, anticipating the possibility of landings at Salerno, they moved additional forces south from Rome to complicate an Allied advance on Naples.

To command the hastily cobbled-together Allied force committed to Avalanche
,
Eisenhower chose General Mark Clark to lead the 5th Army's assault at Salerno. Clark was given the U.S. 36th and 45th Infantry Divisions and the British 46th and 56th Infantry and 7th Armored Divisions. He also had contingents of U.S. Army Rangers and Royal Marine Commandos.
Despite the paucity of resources and the relatively brief amount of time to plan the operation, things initially went as intended.

On the night of 8 September 1943, just a few hours after Eisenhower's headquarters announced the Italian surrender, heavy air attacks were carried out on known enemy positions, bridges, and highways around Salerno. As soon as the British and American bombers were through, a combined U.S. Navy/Royal Navy shore bombardment group moved in to soften up the beaches. The following morning, Clark's 5th Army came ashore—and early that afternoon, the 1st British Airborne Division, delivered by the Royal Navy—captured the Italian naval base at Taranto, in the “arch” of the boot.

Once established ashore, Clark's 5th Army was supposed to wheel to the left and move rapidly up Italy's west coast to seize the port of Naples—forty miles north of the Salerno beachhead. Montgomery's 8th Army—operating east of Italy's mountainous central spine—was to race north as well. The Brits were to seize the airbases in the Foggia plain. If all went well, the Allies might be in Rome by Christmas.

But things didn't go well. Both Clark and Montgomery tarried on their way north. Hitler, as Eisenhower's intelligence officers predicted, reacted immediately on news of Italy's surrender and the landings at Salerno. Late in the day on the ninth, the Luftwaffe began attacks on the Italian fleet as it sortied for Malta—as required in the armistice agreement. Hundreds of Italian sailors died when the battleship
Roma
went to the bottom—sunk by a guided bomb dropped by their former Axis ally.

By 10 September, fresh Wehrmacht divisions were pouring into Italy from southern France, Austria, and the Balkans. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Hitler's Southwest Army commander, promptly occupied Rome, redeployed the German units that had narrowly escaped from Sicily just twenty days before, and prepared to counter-attack.

On 12 September, while Allied intelligence was preoccupied plotting the whereabouts of German units moving into the Salerno area, a team of German SS commandos—led by Captain Otto Skorzeny—parachuted into the Gran Sasso prison and freed Benito Mussolini. Hitler installed the deposed
dictator as the leader of the “Salò Republic,” a fascist puppet state in Northern Italy.

The following day, Kesselring's counter-attack fell upon the 5th Army in their narrow beachhead at Salerno—and very nearly succeeded in throwing the Allies back into the sea. It was a terrifying precursor of what was to come in the long, bitter battle for the boot.

Van Barfoot was a farm boy from Carthage, Mississippi. In Italy, he found himself struggling to stay alive in some of the toughest fighting, worst weather, and most difficult terrain in the European theater. He quickly learned that the topography favored the defenders—and that the soldiers he was up against were some of the toughest and most experienced in the world.

The heavy Allied air and artillery attacks that helped save PFC Van Barfoot and his 45th Division comrades in the breakout from the Salerno beachhead finally had the desired effect on the Wehrmacht—forcing the Germans to fall back to previously prepared positions. But even after General Mark Clark's 5th Army linked up with Montgomery's 8th Army late on 16 September, Kesselring's 10th Army only grudgingly gave up ground as they withdrew to the north. Despite constant pounding by American and British aircraft—and naval gunfire delivered against both coasts—Naples didn't fall to the Allies until 1 October. When the Americans moved into the port city, they found it wrecked.