by Ray Lambert
So many men.
Just from the flow of casualties and the sound pounding in our ears, we knew the battle wasn’t going well. By 1635—4:35 P.M.—the battalion was pulled out of the fight. We were ordered to get ready to withdraw.
We’d made a dent, but that was all. The unit had been severely mauled. The attack would continue, but without us.
Terry Sacked
II Corps captured Troina on August 6, after what turned out to be one of the toughest battles of the war. It took the 1st Division, the 9th Division, a French Moroccan infantry battalion, over 150 artillery cannons, including massive 155s, and countless aircraft to finally dislodge the Germans.
The first guys in found over a hundred bodies on the streets.
The center of town looked like a rock quarry with all the rubble from the destroyed buildings. Flies buzzed over the dead; maggots covered the corpses.
The 1st Division had over five hundred casualties in that battle. Those of us who hadn’t been hit were exhausted.
We’d been going nonstop since landing almost a month before. For the medics, that meant snatching sleep at odd moments when we could, often for no more than an hour or two. A typical day might start when you woke from a nap a few hours before dawn. You’d mix up some coffee from the instant stuff with the C-rats. The first casualty would come in while you gulped cold pork and beans. You’d check the bandages and give the guy a blanket against the cold, hoping to stop his shivering.
You’d be shivering yourself in the cold mountain air. By noon, you’d be sweating. You wouldn’t hear the mortars anymore; they were just background music as the walking wounded flooded in. A man would be brought in and laid on the operating table; even before the doctor came over, you’d know the result wasn’t going to be good.
We’d work on him anyway, desperately.
Jeeps would roar off every so often, stacked with bodies fore and aft, racing to a place where the men could get further care, or maybe find a more peaceful corner to die. Night came, but you wouldn’t notice; the only way to keep track of time was by the ebb of wounded, the flood turning to a trickle even as the mortars kept pounding the hill above. When there was nothing left to do, you’d grab a nap, only to be woken again far too soon.
We needed a rest.
* * *
We were able to get some in the days that followed, as other units moved ahead to Troina and then beyond.
Having lost so many men, our morale was already sliding when we heard the news that Terry Allen and Ted Roosevelt had been fired.
Depression quickly turned to anger. How could they fire Fighting Terry Allen? Or mistreat Teddy Roosevelt, son of a president?
All sorts of theories have been hatched and different generals blamed, but we knew at the time it was Patton. He didn’t like being upstaged, and it was clear anytime he was around Terry Allen that Allen’s men liked him a hell of a lot more than they liked Patton. We might fight for Patton, but we’d go through hell and back ten times again for Terry. And then we’d fight.
Patton had never liked General Allen. There’s a famous story about one of their first meetings in Africa. Patton had recently taken over and was inspecting the division headquarters. He was shown some trenches near the command post and told that the officers would take cover there when the German planes attacked.
He asked General Allen which of the trenches was his. When Terry pointed it out, Patton went over and peed into it.
It’s not recorded whether the urine spelled out the word “coward,” but that was clearly implied.
There’s a line between a coward and a complete fool; standing unarmed and unprotected as planes are dropping bombs on you is way over the line into fool territory. Terry Allen was no fool, and certainly no coward. He led from the front, often exposing himself to fire, and the men loved him for that.
It wasn’t just courage that made him great. He was aggressive, yet the men felt that he cared about them as well. Terry could sit down next to you on the ground and just ask how you were. He didn’t make a big deal out of clothing regulations or other trivial baloney. He knew that guys needed to blow off steam, and he let them. He enjoyed a good drink, and he didn’t mind if his men did too. He wanted results, and he felt that to get them he had to give us a little leeway.
I’m not saying he was a perfect general, let alone a perfect man. But he was a great leader, and his firing wounded us deeply.
Generals aren’t actually fired in the army; they’re “reassigned.” But there’s no mistaking what happened here, especially since it happened right after a difficult battle.
Those sorts of reassignments were traditionally a prelude to retirement. Disgrace is implied, if not spoken aloud. But Terry Allen always made his own path in the army, and he was neither a quitter nor a man who would run from a challenge. After he returned to the States, Eisenhower appointed him commander of the 104th Infantry Division. His “Timberwolves” went to Europe the following year, joining in the final drive against the Nazis and winning praise from the men who had reassigned him in ’43.
Ted Roosevelt, the general who was Terry Allen’s deputy at 1st Division, became the assistant commander for the 4th Infantry Division. He, too, would be heard from again. Destiny was biding its time for him on Utah Beach in Normandy.
* * *
There are always odd stories you hear in combat, tales that are even stranger than wild rumors. Because in war, things happen that you could never make up.
One of those involved some paratroopers who were captured shortly after jumping the first night of Husky.
The wind took aim at their round canopies as they went out of the plane, pushing them all over the place, well off target and into some very rough landings. Several were hurt, and German patrols had no trouble rounding up a half dozen or so. They took the men to a villa in the mountains, presumably to await further orders.
But things got heated. As the fighting escalated during that day, the German infantrymen also sustained casualties, who were also taken to the villa. By the time night fell, the villa was close to the American lines.
The lieutenant in charge of the German detail decided to offer his American counterpart a deal. If the GI, also a lieutenant, agreed to get care for the German wounded, he would let him and the rest of the paratroopers go.
It seemed like too good an offer to pass up, even if it was from a man whose job it was to kill him. The American lieutenant traveled down through the lines and arrived at the aid station run by my good friend 1st Battalion Staff Sergeant Larry Wills. After he explained the situation, several medics volunteered to go back with him in Jeeps to take out the wounded Americans. They’d also patch up the Germans before leaving.
I can imagine the tension they must have felt on that ride up. What I can’t quite picture is the look on their faces when they found the soldiers from both armies sharing wine from the cellar.
And, supposedly, singing.
The German officer apparently not only upheld his end of the bargain; he gave the Americans the password for their night patrol in the area. Everyone got out okay, including the Germans.
What happened the next day or the next, no one could say. But for that brief moment, the men on both sides were just men, not mortal enemies.
* * *
One other thing I remember about Sicily: Mount Etna. The volcano, which towered high above us, shaded the valley and surrounding slopes a strange red. It was as if the planet was having its own war below.
* * *
Major General Clarence R. Huebner took over for General Allen. We didn’t particularly like him. We thought maybe he came from a Girl Scout camp, the way he fussed over trivial things like the proper form for salutes and uniform regulations. Where Allen cared less about the b.s. of army life, Huebner was a stickler for it. When it came to discipline, he was practically Terry’s opposite—and you wouldn’t think of calling him Clarence, either, not even behind his back.
The fact that he was such a stick
ler was undoubtedly one of the reasons Omar Bradley wanted him; he felt the Big Red One had become undisciplined, and that was hamstringing our performance in combat. Bradley was the corps commander and would have had at least some say in the appointment, though Patton and Eisenhower would have had more clout, and ultimately George Marshall was the boss.
Discipline is good; no organization, no army, can succeed without it. But you can go overboard, and Huebner did. He was so much stricter that it bothered the guys, and he didn’t need to be that way. We’d been through two hellacious campaigns by the time he joined us, but in our eyes he treated us practically like newbies, wanting us to start from scratch. Even if he hadn’t replaced a beloved general, he would have had a tough time with us.
Give him his due, though. Huebner started in the army as a private and worked his way up the ranks. Only a handful of men have ever done that. And twice he won the Distinguished Service Cross. He was a 1st Division lieutenant colonel in May 1918, in the battle at Cantigny.
“For three days Lieutenant Colonel Huebner withstood German assaults under intense bombardment, heroically exposing himself to fire constantly in order to command his battalion effectively,” reads his DSC commendation, “and although his command lost half its officers and 30 per cent of its men, he held his position and prevented a break in the line at that point.”
Two months later, in mid-July 1918, after all of the battalion’s officers were killed or wounded, Huebner led his men and those from another battalion in an advance against the Germans. Though wounded, he managed to achieve his objective, and earned an oak cluster for his Distinguished Service Cross. (The cluster is pinned on the ribbon, and is the army’s way of saying the award was earned a second time.) He also won a Distinguished Service Medal and a Silver Star in the war.
Huebner did eventually earn the respect of the division’s soldiers, but it took a long time for the guys to come around to him. And he was never liked anywhere near as much as Terry.
Patton
As much as we all hated him for sacking Terry Allen, I have to admit that Patton was a brilliant man.
He had a certain way he liked to do things, and he talked a different way than other generals. But when he went into battle, he was very intent. He was good at war.
Of course you’ve heard all about George Patton, how he walked around with a swagger, had pearl-handled pistols, was all blood and guts. You may not have heard that he composed poetry in his journal, or that he was deeply in love with his wife. He couldn’t stand British general Bernard Montgomery, though that can be said for just about every American general, with the notable and important exception of Eisenhower and his staff.
Having seen Patton up close, I’d say his flamboyance came from feeling inferior growing up. I think he felt he had to constantly prove himself when he was a child, and never got past that.
There’s also the possibility that he was dropped on his head as a kid. He really did have his moments of being crazy.
His ego didn’t make him any less brilliant, but it did make him less well liked. And abrasive.
At the same time, it made him memorable. We don’t seem to value the quieter men anymore—people like Huebner, I suppose, or Bradley, who tended to go about their business much more quietly than Patton did on a bad day. There were a lot of those guys in the army back then. Unfortunately, a lot of what they did has been forgotten by history . . . but not by the men who served under them.
Who will remember them when we are gone?
* * *
Among the things you’ve heard about Patton, I’m sure, are the famous, or infamous, slapping incidents.
Two incidents took place while we were on Sicily. The bare outlines are these: Patton visited wounded troops in field hospitals at the beginning of August while touring our II Corps areas. At Nicosia, on Cyprus, he went to the 15th Evacuation Hospital. There he is said to have slapped a soldier who was not visibly wounded and told the doctors to send him back to the front. About a week later, he did something similar to another soldier at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital.
Eisenhower eventually heard about the incidents, though apparently not through official channels. While he scolded Patton for them, he didn’t directly punish him. Those incidents are often blamed for Eisenhower’s decision to put Bradley rather than Patton in charge of the D-Day landings, but most historians say it’s likely that the decision had already been made for other reasons.
We heard about the Nicosia incident ourselves within a few days, if not hours, of it happening. That was the field hospital where we were sending our wounded, and we had plenty of communication with the guys there.
The more lines of communication you have, the more information you get—and sometimes that obscures rather than illuminates the truth. That may have happened in this case, where second- and third-hand accounts probably mixed with firsthand descriptions and personal prejudices. The version I believe is closest to the truth goes like this:
Patton was visiting the wounded recovering in a ward tent when a young soldier started shaking uncontrollably, unable to stop. The guy started laughing and crying and everything else and just went to pieces. Patton went to him and slapped him on the cheek and said, “Right! It’s time to come out of that now.” Then he told the GI to get back up to the line, there was nothing wrong with him.
In other words, the general was simply trying to snap the soldier out of a hysterical fit, telling him he was okay, and getting him back to where Patton thought he belonged, rather than sending him back to a hospital and what surely would have seemed disgrace to many at the time.
Now, we didn’t know that much about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at the time, but the man would seem to have had it. We called the condition battle fatigue, or used an older World War I term, “shell shock.” Or maybe “nervous breakdown.” Officially, the doctors classified it as psychoneurosis, a vaguely defined mental condition; anyone diagnosed with it was not considered a battle casualty, even if it was obvious to us that being in battle had caused it.
The most popular treatment for it, and one approved in the medical department, was to do roughly what Patton did, without the slap—tell the soldier to get hold of himself, let him have a brief rest of a day or two, and then send him back to duty.
I don’t like Patton, but I think he gets a bum deal on that.
* * *
As in North Africa, the aid station was a great place to meet generals and other VIPs; it was close to the front without being under direct fire.
Usually.
It also featured what passed for creature comforts in the field. Coffee, which came out of a C-Ration and was roughly equivalent to instant coffee today. And alcohol.
The alcohol was for sterilizing needles and instruments. But more than one GI used it to spike orange juice, which was available from time to time when the kitchen trucks came up, or occasionally at the officers’ mess. A man would save the drink, then add a little something when he came over to see how we were doing.
How many generals and VIPs drank the field version of a screwdriver?
Many.
I won’t name names, but you’d be surprised at a few.
Malaria, Trench Foot, and Other Diseases
The VIPs could be a welcome break or a nuisance, depending on the situation and the individual. The civilians we treated were usually stoic tragedies.
We didn’t get many because we were so close to the fighting; the Sicilians tended to flee well before battle and wait until an area had been secured for a few days before returning. But we did get some. I remember treating a man who came with his foot half blown off; he’d stepped on a mine planted by the Germans in a farm field.
Less dramatic were the malaria cases. Mosquitos infested every bit of water on the island, from puddles to deep wells. The females passed the parasite that caused malaria to humans whenever they fed. It could take two weeks for the symptoms to appear. In the early stages, victims might easily mistake them for a
mild flu, and continue to wear down their body as the parasites slowly blew up their red blood cells, causing anemia and liver ailments.
If malaria was a problem for the civilians, sapping their strength, it was far worse for the soldiers, and we had an epidemic well before we left the island. Guys fought on the front line with fevers, barely able to walk down to the aid station when the action lulled. They’d be shivering and dead on their feet after a hundred yards. The worst would have yellow faces, caused by jaundice and anemia, as the parasite destroyed red blood cells.
Making a diagnosis in those cases was easy. Treatment was a lot harder. We could give soldiers quinine, whether the real stuff or Atabrine, an effective but horrible-tasting synthetic drug substituted because of the war, but prescribing rest was impossible. And unfortunately, rest was what they needed most.
Trench foot was another huge problem, though this affected GIs, not civilians. A soldier’s feet would swell, turn purple or black, and become numb. In a very severe case, blood would be cut off to the toes. Without blood, eventually the entire toe would die—gangrene.
Trench foot was caused by the feet never getting a chance to dry after being soaked in water. It was common in World War I, where soldiers spent days and even weeks in water-filled trenches with leaky boots or shoes. In our case, the guys started off in Sicily by running through water. Their socks and boots never got a chance to dry out during the first thirty-six hours after landing. There was just so much action going on that there wasn’t a chance to take off their boots or shoes, air everything out, and switch to dry socks and, ideally, another pair of boots or shoes.
Pretty much no one had two pairs of shoes with them, nor was there time to let the ones they had dry out. Everyone had been issued two pairs of socks, with the idea that one pair would be washed and left to dry while the other was being worn. That was fantasy for most of us. Even when guys had a chance to wash their socks, there was little opportunity to let them dry.