The Monrovia steamed past Bizerte harbor early on the morning of July 8. Now she zigzagged at 121/2 knots, under sailing plan number 10, making for Cap Bon and the sea-lanes to Sicily. A squadron of British destroyers screened the seaward flank. Other ships sortied from the harbor to join the fleet threading the swept Tunisian War Channel. Atop Bizerte’s battered custom house, an honor guard of American bluejackets and British tars stood at attention as the ships slid past. Sailors on the foredecks returned the salutes, then waved farewell. “Looking astern,” one officer recorded, “there was another convoy even greater than ours, spread so far back it had the appearance of columns of marching ants, dots blurred by distance.
“It seemed,” he added, “the whole world must be afloat.”
Calypso’s Island
OVER the millennia, a great deal had happened on the tiny island the Allies now code-named FINANCE. St. Paul had been shipwrecked on the north coast of Malta in A.D. 60 while en route to stand trial in Rome for crimes against the state; he preached to the unconverted for three months, then continued on his fateful way. Successive waves of Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans swept behind him, felling forests for farms and herds; the topsoil washed away to expose a parched, rocky knob, eight miles by eighteen. Some scholars believed that Malta was the place where the nymph Calypso had imprisoned wandering Odysseus as her love slave for seven years.
In 1530, Emperor Charles V garrisoned the island with the knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, a monastic order founded during the First Crusade and recently expelled from Rhodes by the Turks. After a siege, the Maltese knights spent years building complex battlements, with bastions and watchtowers and walls as much as thirty feet thick. Britain seized the fortress in 1800, taking also its fine harbor and the island’s handsome capital, Valletta, built with ocher stone from local quarries. Most of the quarter million Maltese were illiterate peasants who scratched a living from the thin fields and pastures.
The first of 3,340 Axis air raids struck the island at dawn on June 11, 1940. During the next three years it became the most bombed place on earth, as the enemy tried to blast the British from their only harbor between Gibraltar and Alexandria and to neutralize the Maltese airfields, which expedited attacks on Axis supply convoys to North Africa. Some sixteen thousand tons of bombs fell on the island in attacks of exemplary viciousness: German pilots even heaved hand grenades from their cockpits. Valletta was reduced to ocher rubble, then to ocher powder. “Beauty was slain,” wrote a Maltese poet, M. Mizzi, “and a great kingdom of terror was set up.” More than beauty died: the number of casualties reached fifteen thousand. (Precise figures were elusive because it was common for families to conceal a fatality in order to keep drawing the victim’s rations.) “Holy Mary,” the Maltese prayed, “let the bombs fall in the sea or in the fields.”
Those not killed or wounded simply suffered. Women prowled the wreckage after each raid in search of splintered furniture to burn as firewood. By July 1942, daily rations per person had been cut to four ounces of staples such as meat, fish, and cheese, and thirteen ounces of bread, often baked with sawdust filler. Newspapers printed articles on the virtues of “potato soup, potato puree, potato casserole.” Public kitchens served “veal loaf,” an odious confection of goat and horsemeat. The Maltese learned to live without soap, razor blades, toilet paper, shoelaces, or books. Contraceptives were fashioned from old inner tubes until people grew too exhausted for sex. To escape the bombs they used hand chisels to carve shelters from rock so obdurate that even experienced diggers rarely excavated more than eight inches a day. Maltese fishing boats called dghajsas ferried food and kerosene from nearby islands, and on their return voyages carried off the dead for proper burial.
Thanks to the victory in North Africa, the first unopposed convoy since 1940 had reached the island on May 24, 1943. Food and other staples began to arrive, but Malta remained a gaunt, medieval wreck: sand flies swarmed in the ruins and white dust rose from every footfall. “Children, too thin and listless even to play in the bright sunshine, hung about the shabby, pitted streets,” one visitor wrote. Valletta had not a single restaurant, and water flowed from the city’s taps for only two hours in the morning and half an hour at night. Life in the British garrison was hardly easier, with beer rationed to a weekly pint, issued with “fifty inexpressibly foul Indian cigarettes.” Axis bombers still pummeled the island; in the code used by Allied forces in early July, all BULLDOGS and UMPIRES (Americans and British) were advised to remain alert to POSTMAN TULIP AUCTION (German aircraft). Such jargon often drew the coded equivalent of a blank look: ICEBERG (signal not understood).
For all its woes, FINANCE had the virtue of lying only fifty-five miles due south of HORRIFIED—Sicily—and on the late afternoon of July 8, the island’s fortunes abruptly revived. “Everyone was on tiptoe with excitement,” one British officer said, for at five P.M. General Eisenhower arrived to make Malta his headquarters.
Motorcyclists with numbers pinned to their backs guided the Allied commander’s aircraft and escort planes to blast shelters along the runway. Eisenhower had left Algiers on July 6 to spend two days at his Tunisian command post before flying to Malta. To screen his movements, a dummy Allied Forces Headquarters in Oran began broadcasting simulated radio traffic; the staff cars sent to pick him up at the Valletta airfield bore no rank insignia on their bumpers. During the final approach to the island, Eisenhower had seen the feverish preparations for HUSKY along Dockyard Creek and French Creek at Grand Harbour, as well as the ambulance parking lot built on the jetties at St. Paul’s Bay; Allied planners anticipated evacuating thirty thousand battle casualties from Sicily to North Africa, and Malta had been converted into a hospital port and medical way station. Eisenhower fingered the lucky coins—including a silver dollar, a French franc, and an English crown piece—that he always carried in a zippered purse when traveling.
The small convoy wound through ruined Valletta before climbing a hill outside town to the Verdala Palace, a square, moated castle with towers at each corner, built in 1586 as a summer home for the Maltese grand master. Escorted by his British hosts, Eisenhower wandered through the great hall and an immense banquet room, where biblical frescoes adorned the walls. Beneath the palace, hooks set into the walls of a dim oubliette still held rusting chains; the reporter John Gunther, who accompanied the commanding general, noted, “There are several rooms, dungeons, which the servants believe to be haunted, and which even today they will not enter.” Climbing a spiral marble staircase—the risers were only two inches high so that Maltese priests could ride up the steps on mules shod with sandals—Eisenhower was shown to his bedroom, a magnificent chamber with a thirty-foot ceiling. A whitewashed back passage led to another dungeon. “I think it’ll do,” he said, with a flash of his now famous grin. “I’ll have room enough.”
Nine months earlier, Eisenhower had taken command in another British redoubt, at Gibraltar, on the eve of Operation TORCH, which he was chosen to command over 366 more senior U.S. officers. Since then, he had survived battlefield setbacks, political missteps, and his own inexperience to become the Allies’ indispensable man. The “only man who could have made things work was Ike,” Churchill’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hastings Ismay, said after the war. “No one else.”
Victory in North Africa had enhanced his stature and his self-confidence. Perhaps the lucky coins helped, but so too did hard work and a gift for square dealing. General Bernard L. Montgomery, who would command British forces in HUSKY, considered Eisenhower “the very incarnation of sincerity,” with “the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts bits of metal.” Another senior British general said, “He was utterly fair in his dealings, and I envied the clarity of his mind, and his power of accepting responsibility.” He listened well, and spoke well. “I am bound to say,” Churchill confided to a British colleague, “I have noticed that good generals do not usually have such good powers of expression as he has.” Few could r
esist that infectious smile, and his physical vigor proved a tonic to others. “Always on the move,” the reporter Drew Middleton noted. “Walking up and down, pacing patterns on the rug, his flat, harsh voice ejecting idea after idea like sparks flung from an emery wheel.”
“I’m a born optimist,” Eisenhower once said, “and I can’t change that.” He told his son, John, a cadet at West Point, that effective leadership could be learned by “studious reflection and practice…. You must be devoted to duty, sincere, fair, and cheerful.” At times he could nitpick, grousing that “not one officer in fifty knows how to use the English language,” and supposedly cashiering an aide for failing to master the distinction between “shall” and “will.” Still, he remained humble and balanced despite having served seven years under a paragon of pretension, General Douglas MacArthur, whose refusal to ever acknowledge error and whose persistent references to himself in the third person baffled Eisenhower. Told that George Marshall proposed to nominate him for the Congressional Medal of Honor after TORCH, Eisenhower warned, “I would refuse to accept it.” Just before leaving Algiers, he received a telegram from a publisher offering “at least $25,000” if he would allow any “nationally known writer” of his choosing to tell his story. “Too busy to be interested,” Eisenhower replied.
His cosmology was simple. “You are fighting for the right to live as you please, providing you don’t get in someone’s hair,” he told soldiers in Algiers on June 19. “We are fighting for liberty and the dignity of the human soul.” He promised, if given the chance, to have Mussolini shot. “I’m not one who finds it difficult to hate my enemies.” John Eisenhower, a shrewd observer of his father, noted that he pursued war with the same calculating intensity that made him an outstanding bridge and poker player, persuaded that “the Almighty would provide him with a decent set of cards…. He appeared not to share the metaphysical feeling that God-owed him anything specific, such as good weather on a given day.”
Yet as a field marshal he had built a spotty record in North Africa, and his aptitude remained unproven. “A coordinator rather than a commander,” one British general wrote. Another asserted that “he was not a soldier, he was just a compromiser.” Marshall believed he was so preoccupied with the politics of coalition warfare that “he had little or no opportunity to keep in touch with the troops.” In truth, he lacked a great battle captain’s endowments: to see the field both spatially and temporally; to intuit an opponent’s intent; to subordinate all resistance to an iron will.
He was indeed a compromiser, a coordinator, but that was precisely what this war—this total, global war—required. Eisenhower had long recognized that in such an existential struggle the most robust coalition would likely prevail; he also intuited that centrifugal forces, from national pride to personal vainglory, threatened every alliance. He was a master of the sensible compromise, convinced that an Allied commander must lead by considering disparate national viewpoints “to solve problems through reasoning rather than by merely issuing commands.” John Gunther had noted that “lots of Americans and British have an atavistic dislike of one another”; a senior British general warned General Brooke at the TRIDENT conference that “there is going to be grave risk of open quarrels unless someone can go round daily with a lubricating can.” Eisenhower carried that can, and nearly everyone trusted him to apply it judiciously. His British political adviser, the future prime minister Harold Macmillan, considered Eisenhower “wholly uneducated in any normal sense of the word,” yet “compared with the wooden heads and dessicated hearts of many British soldiers I see here, he is a jewel of broadmindedness and wisdom.”
The long summer twilight lingered in the west when Eisenhower finished a pot of tea and emerged from Verdala Palace for the short ride to his command post. His stomach, he confided to an aide, felt like “a clenched fist.” For two decades he had been plagued with intestinal ailments linked to stress, ever since the death of his elder son from scarlet fever in 1920. Before the war he had been hospitalized repeatedly for enteritis and intestinal obstructions. (A disabling injury to his left knee in the 1912 West Point–Tufts football game had led to seven other hospitalizations.) A respiratory infection picked up at dank Gibraltar in November had never completely resolved, and Eisenhower’s chain smoking—he was up to sixty or more Camels a day—was hardly salutary. Although he paid John $1.50 a week not to smoke at West Point, Eisenhower’s habit had become so compulsive that he sometimes lit up in flight even when the crew of his B-17 Flying Fortress warned of gas fumes.
Cigarette in hand, he was escorted to the beetling walls above Grand Harbour. Landing craft and warships packed the port and inlets to the harbor’s mouth at Fort St. Elmo. Tars scaled the superstructures on a pair of battleships—back at Malta for the first time in over two years—while Maltese waved from their precarious balconies above the docks; aboard H.M.S. Nelson, a band had been playing “Every Nice Girl Loves a Sailor.” Eisenhower and his aides marched into the Lascaris Bastion, a tunnel complex originally dug by the Knights of Malta and now converted into a Royal Navy command post. Condensation glistened through whitewash on the limestone walls. Lascaris was bombproof, convenient, and wretched. Uniforms grew moldy in a day, and many staff officers suffered from lung afflictions or pappataci fever, passed by the biting sand flies. Portions of the citadel remained insufferably hot, while other chambers were so chilly that Eisenhower called for his overcoat. Even Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, the British naval commander in the Mediterranean who welcomed Eisenhower, conceded the place was “extremely smelly.” Officers condemned to Lascaris fortified themselves at two o’clock each afternoon with gin and orange juice or banana cordials.
Eisenhower strode through Pinto Tunnel with Cunningham, past a gallery of sheds used by officers whose staff functions were denoted by cabalistic symbols scratched on their door placards. His own office measured fourteen by ten feet; the furnishings included a wicker chair and an oil stove burning next to a single table draped with a gray blanket. A rug tossed on the clay floor barely mitigated “a chill that had been gathering for four hundred years.” Eisenhower found it hard to keep his cigarettes dry.
He shrugged off the discomfort and trailed Cunningham into a large war room with a forty-foot vaulted ceiling and enormous maps affixed to each wall. A twenty-by-thirteen-foot mosaic, compiled from five hundred photo reconnaissance missions, revealed all ten thousand square miles of Sicily. Gunther’s jaw dropped at the cartographic display, and he marveled in his notebook at the “infinitude of detail, their extreme up-to-dateness, and the wonderful draftsmanship and lithography they represent. Have the Germans as good maps as these really super-maps, I wonder?”
Cunningham, his red-veined face florid above the white collar of his uniform, pointed out the colored lines that plotted the steaming Allied flotillas, from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules. Collectively they represented 160,000 troops, 14,000 vehicles, and 1,800 guns aboard 3,000 vessels. Radio silence had been imposed across the fleets, the admiral added, so little was known about their progress except that three Canadian ships traveling from Scotland had been sunk by U-boats in the western Mediterranean; the Canadians had lost several dozen men, several dozen guns, five hundred trucks, and much of their communications gear. Under a relentless Allied air bombardment of Sicily—the detonations could be heard on Malta on quiet evenings—most surviving Axis planes had fled from the island to the Italian mainland. But precisely how alive the enemy was to the impending invasion was unknown. Cunningham cocked an eyebrow at the fancy maps, as if considering his favorite expression: “It’s too velvet-arsed and Rolls-Royce for me.” Son of an Edinburgh anatomy professor, Cunningham—who served as Eisenhower’s chief naval deputy—had first come under fire in the Boer War, at age seventeen; now sixty, he remained fearless, pugnacious, and convinced that the optimum range in any fight was point-blank. Gunther noted that the underlids of his sailor’s squint were “lined with bright red, like a bulldog’s.”
Eisenho
wer studied the central Mediterranean. Sicily, a triangular rock the size of Vermont, lay ninety miles north of Tunisia and only two miles off the toe of the Italian boot. Its eastern end was dominated by Mount Etna, an active volcano ten thousand feet high and twenty miles in diameter. “The coast is everywhere scalloped with wide, sweeping bights separated from each other by capes,” an Allied terrain study noted. AFHQ planners had contemplated every inch of that three-hundred-mile coastline, scrutinizing thirty-two beaches as potential landing sites. Sicily had been overrun by even more successive invaders than Malta had endured: Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Spaniards, Bourbons. And soon, the Anglo-Americans. “Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe and violence,” the American writer Henry Adams observed. “For a lesson in anarchy…Sicily stands alone and defies evolution.”
An amphibious landing on a hostile shore, Eisenhower knew, was the hardest operation in warfare: wading ashore under fire, building a secure lodgement beyond the beach, then breaking free to the interior. In the long history of combat, the amphibious art had been mastered by no one. For every successful landing—such as the American assault at Vera Cruz in 1847—there was an equivalent catastrophe, like the British debacle at Gallipoli in 1915. For every failure—as of the Spanish Armada, or the Mongols in Japan—there was a military leader too daunted even to try, including Napoleon and Hitler, both of whom declined to cross the English Channel.
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 101