If amphibious warfare was inherently difficult, the Allies seemed determined to make it harder. The Combined Chiefs had ordered Eisenhower to begin planning HUSKY on January 23; initial schemes focused on seizing Sicilian ports and airfields, with the intent of putting ten divisions ashore within a week of the first assault. Yet he and his lieutenants remained distracted by the Tunisian campaign; their various headquarters were so far-flung—from Cairo to Rabat—that couriers shuttled more than two thousand miles every day, delivering documents, maps, and messages. The main planning cell occupied the unheated école normale outside Algiers, where officers typed with their gloves on.
Eisenhower in March and again in April warned that HUSKY would fail if the landing forces encountered “well-armed and fully organized German forces,” which he defined as “more than two divisions.” The British chiefs in London accused him of “grossly exaggerating” enemy strength, and Churchill sputtered with indignation at “these pusillanimous and defeatist doctrines…. What Stalin would think of this, when he has 185 German divisions on his front I cannot imagine.” Duly chastened, Eisenhower forwarded a plan under which British troops invaded Sicily’s southeast coast to seize the ports at Augusta and Syracuse, while the Americans landed in the west to take Palermo.
This drew unexpected fire from Eisenhower’s flank. The Eighth Army commander, Bernard Montgomery, had resisted involvement in HUSKY planning while he was occupied with the Tunisian campaign: “Let’s finish this show first,” he snapped. When he eventually turned his attention to Sicily, Montgomery spread a large map of the island on the floor of his bedroom and mused aloud, “Well, now let’s see how it would suit us for this battle to go?”
The existing plan suited him not at all, and he promptly shoved a spanner in the works. “It has no hope of success and should be completely recast,” Montgomery declared. Falsely claiming that AFHQ planners had assumed that “opposition will be slight”—in fact, they presumed stiff resistance—Montgomery condemned all such “wooly thinking” and warned, “Never was there a greater error.” By late April, he was in full throat, forecasting “a first-class military disaster…. I am prepared to carry the war into HORRIFIED with the Eighth Army but must do so in my own way.” To his superiors, he proposed sliding Patton’s Seventh Army under his command; to his diary he was even blunter: “I should run HUSKY.”
Rather than divide the force, Montgomery argued, the attack should consolidate on the southeast coast, where American and British divisions could lend mutual support. With the invasion only two months away and the Combined Chiefs about to meet at the TRIDENT conference in Washington, Eisenhower convened another planning conference in Algiers on May 2. Over a lobster lunch—the lobsters cost AFHQ a thousand francs each—Montgomery pressed his point, then followed Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter B. “Beetle” Smith, into the men’s latrine to continue the argument, first from an adjacent urinal and then with arrows sketched on a steamed mirror. “The Americans,” a senior British staff officer, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Gairdner, told his diary, “are beginning to feel that the British Empire is being run by Monty.”
A day later, Eisenhower broke the deadlock and accepted the Montgomery plan, shrugging off protests from Admiral Cunningham and others who preferred naval dispersion and the seizure of more airfields. Patton rebuffed Kent Hewitt’s plea that he also contest the revised plan since American forces would no longer have the quick use of Palermo’s port. “No, goddammit,” Patton replied. “I’ve been in this Army thirty years and when my superior gives me an order I say, ‘Yes, sir!’ and then do my god-damnedest to carry it out.”
To his diary, General Gairdner confessed, “I can’t understand how democracies wage war.” HUSKY now called for seven divisions—four British and three American—landing abreast across a hundred-mile span of southeastern Sicily. The seaborne force would also be preceded by portions of two airborne divisions, a wrinkle that required attacking in the second quarter of the July moon when it would be light enough for paratroopers to see but dark enough to cloak the approaching armada. Thirteen Allied divisions ultimately would be committed to the invasion.
Of the 300,000 Axis troops defending Sicily, the bulk were in Italian units of doubtful pluck. One American intelligence officer described the two German divisions as “strictly hot mustard”; as for the Italians, “Stick them in the belly and sawdust will run out.” Thanks to Ultra, the extraordinary British ability to intercept and decipher coded German radio traffic, Eisenhower knew a great deal about his enemy’s strength and disposition. An Ultra team—those admitted to the great secret were said to be “bathed in the blood of the lamb”—was at his disposal on Malta, as well as in Algiers. Since first breaking a radio message encrypted with a German Enigma machine in 1940, Ultra cryptologists at Bletchley Park, north of London, had intercepted and broken thousands of messages to provide “a panoramic knowledge of the German forces.” By mid-1944 nearly fifty separate Enigma codes would be deciphered, including a new German army code called Albatross that had just been broken on June 2, and others named Hyena, Seahorse, Woodpecker, and Puffin.
Eisenhower also knew that the Italian navy—the only substantial Axis naval force in the Mediterranean, with six battleships and eleven cruisers—lacked radar, fuel, and aircraft carriers. The Italian air force had lost 2,200 planes in the past eight months and had little sense of the Allies’ whereabouts. “No one,” an Italian admiral complained, “can play chess blindfolded.” Not least, Eisenhower had a good sense of Italy’s social disintegration under the pressures of war and Allied bombing: coal and food shortages, labor strikes, rail disruptions, even a profound lack of lightbulbs.
What Eisenhower did not know was how vigorously the Italians would fight for their homeland, or whether the Germans—who were believed capable of shipping an additional division of reinforcements to Sicily every three days—would fight to the death for an arid island a thousand miles from the Fatherland. Even Ultra could not see that deeply into the enemy’s soul.
The Combined Chiefs had approved the detailed HUSKY plan on May 12. Yet a feeling lingered in Washington and London that the scheme lacked bravura and that the Allies were missing a chance to exploit their triumph in North Africa. For his troubles, Eisenhower received another rebuke. “Your planners and mine may be too conservative,” George Marshall told him; they lacked the audacity that “won great victories for Nelson and Grant and Lee.”
Marshall was right. HUSKY would be the largest amphibious operation of World War II—the seven divisions in the assault wave were two more than would land at Normandy eleven months later—but it lacked imaginative dash. Preoccupied with Tunisia, commanders lost sight of the larger objective: to seal the Strait of Messina, preventing Axis reinforcement of Sicily and forestalling an Axis escape to the Italian mainland. Amphibious doctrine stressed the capture of ports and airfields to the exclusion of the battle beyond the dunes, and the final HUSKY plan petered out twenty miles past the landing beaches.
A “terrible inflexibility” characterized all big amphibious enterprises, in Beetle Smith’s phrase. Fitting the pieces together, getting from here to there, synchronizing the attack—these tasks absorbed enormous concentration and effort, leaving little time to consider the battle beyond the shingle. HUSKY also included the first sizable Allied airborne attack of the war. And Montgomery’s revised plan meant that the Americans, lacking a port, would have to sustain a combat army over the beaches in ways never before attempted.
The die was cast, audacious or otherwise. In mid-June, Eisenhower gave reporters off-the-record details of the impending invasion in order to quell speculation about future operations. He asked them to keep the secret, and they did. “Don’t ever do that to us again,” one correspondent pleaded.
Feints and deceptions continued apace. An Anglo-American fleet of warships and cargo vessels steamed from Britain toward Norway to suggest a northern invasion. A British Mediterranean armada—four battleships
, six cruisers, and eighteen destroyers—sailed toward Greece before reversing course in the dead of night to cover the sea-lanes near Malta. But in the clutter of prevarication could be found an occasional truth. Eight million leaflets fell on Sicily in early July. One message warned, “Germany will fight to the last Italian.” Another contained a map showing the vulnerability of Italian cities to Allied bombers flying from North Africa. The caption read: “Mussolini asked for it.”
A lustrous canopy of stars arched over Valletta as Eisenhower left the tunnel on the night of July 8. The briny scent of the midsummer Mediterranean was intoxicating after the Lascaris underworld. The blacked-out town gleamed in the blue starlight with a beauty denied the daylight ruins.
For all its size, the enormous bedchamber at Verdala Palace was furnished with the economy of a monastic cell: water pitcher, wash basin, soap dish, thunder mug, bathtub. Several small battle maps had been tacked up. Eisenhower at times lamented the countless details that required his attention—“folderol,” he called it. “I used to read about commanders of armies and envied them what I supposed to be a great freedom in action and decision,” he had written in a letter home on May 27. “What a notion! The demands made upon me that must be met make me a slave rather than a master.”
Translators, for example. Two hundred Italian-speaking soldiers were to be sent to North Africa with the 45th Division and 82nd Airborne, but none had arrived with the 82nd. Where were they? Or prisoners: “We may have 200,000 prisoners of war from HUSKY,” he had informed Marshall on June 28, but of the 8,000 guards required less than half that number could be combed from U.S. units. Did the Geneva Conventions permit using British or French guards in American camps? Or donkeys: an urgent plea to the War Department for pack saddles and bridles had drawn a query from Marshall: “How many hands high are these donkeys and what average weight?” On further investigation, Eisenhower told him, “Donkeys not now considered suitable. Limited number of native mules available, 14 to 16 hands high, average weight 850 pounds…. These mules accustomed to packs but very vicious.”
And then there was AMGOT, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, an organization preparing to establish postinvasion civil rule in Sicily. Wags claimed the acronym stood for “Aged Military Gentlemen on Tour,” but Washington informed Eisenhower that AMGOT had an “ugly German sound” and also approximated a crude, explicit Turkish term for genitalia. “To change the name of AMGOT at this stage,” the exasperated commander-in-chief told the War Department on June 1, “would cause great delay and confusion.”
Not least, he worried about his wife. With John at West Point, Mamie lived alone in Washington. She suffered from a heart condition and was often bedridden. Her weight had dropped to 112 pounds, and she described herself as someone who “lived after sorts, read mystery thrillers through the night—and waited.” Eisenhower wrote her frequently, by hand rather than employing his usual dictationist, with salutations of “my sweetheart” or “darling.” Lately he had taken special pains to reassure her of his constancy, because lately she had asked pointedly about Kay Summersby.
The rumors had intensified. Kathleen Helen Summersby, born in County Cork, had served as Eisenhower’s driver in London and then in North Africa before being put in charge of his correspondence; she was adept at forging his signature on letters as well as on autographed photos. A model and film studio extra before the war, she was beautiful, athletic, and lively, often serving as her boss’s bridge partner or riding companion. Eisenhower, twenty years her senior, struck her “as a man who had had very little comforting in his life.” She had needed comforting herself in the past month: on June 6, her fiancé, a young U.S. Army colonel, had been killed by a mine in Tunisia. Grief and strain shattered her emotionally, and Eisenhower offered to send her home to London. Instead, she asked to remain in Algiers. No convincing evidence would ever prove a carnal relationship between the two, but the gossips gossiped anyway, including some who should have known better.
“Just please remember that no matter how short my notes I love you—I could never be in love with anyone else,” Eisenhower had written Mamie on June 11. “You never seem quite to comprehend how deeply I depend upon you and need you.”
Translators and donkeys, Mamie and Kay, Germans and Italians. And now one more trouble had appeared on the horizon. It was fortunate that Eisenhower never counted on God for good weather, as his son had observed. Earlier in the evening the meteorologists in the Lascaris Bastion had issued a disheartening forecast: a storm was brewing in the west.
“The Horses of the Sun”
THE convoys from Algeria and Tunisia hugged the African coast on July 8, joined by additional task forces from Sousse and Sfax. Ships stretched for sixty miles in a mile-wide corridor, strung on white wakes “like the buttons of an abacus.” Smaller vessels made straight for Point X-Ray, the rendezvous east of Malta. To mislead German reconnaissance planes, the main fleet steamed close to Tripoli, then at eight P.M. wheeled north at thirteen knots.
Ships wallowed like treasure-laden galleons on the Spanish Main. The American convoys alone carried more than 100,000 tons of supplies: 5,000 tons of crated airplanes, 7,000 tons of coal, 19,000 tons of signal equipment. The expedition manifest was Homeric in scale and variety: 6.6 million rations, 27 miles of quarter-inch steel cable, rat traps, chewing gum, 162 tons of occupation scrip, and even 144,000 condoms, also known as “the soldier’s friend.” A ten-page glossary translated British terminology into proper American: “windscreen” to “windshield,” “wing” to “fender,” “regiment” to “battalion,” “brigade” to “regiment.”
Half the tonnage comprised munitions: the capture of Sicily was expected to take less than two months, but requisitions for ammunition and ordnance had overwhelmed the War Department without anyone knowing quite how to sort them out. Huge depots in Oran and Casablanca held a nine-month supply of munitions, triple the authorized stocks, because no one could say precisely what types of bullets and bombs had already been received: the inventory cards were kept by Algerian and Moroccan clerks who often spoke poor English.
The Army, one admiral concluded, invariably “doubled what they thought they needed, just in case.” An emergency plea to Washington in June requested an extra 732 radios, plus 140,000 radio batteries. The Signal Corps complied, after a fashion, but for communications redundancy also shipped 5,000 carrier pigeons, a platoon of pigeoneers, and more than 7,000 VHF radio crystals. Intelligence units carried hydrographic charts; maps from the Library of Congress pinpointing Sicilian caverns; copies of the Italian Touring Club Guide for Sicily; coastal pilot studies; town plats; and shoreline silhouettes drawn with the help of a former New England rumrunner. Couriers from Washington and New York had brought several dozen heavy wooden crates, each stamped BIGOT HUSKY and containing plaster of paris relief models of the Sicilian topography. But a handsome map detailing Sicilian historical monuments and art treasures, printed in New York and temporarily mislaid in Algiers, never reached Allied troops: a motorcycle courier belatedly hurrying it to the front would be captured in Sicily by the Germans.
Much had been learned through hard experience in Tunisia about caring for casualties, and the fleet was provisioned on the assumption that the assault force would suffer 15 percent wounded and sick in the first week. A chart distributed to medics helped assess what proportion of a man’s body surface had been burned—4.5 percent if both hands were burned, 13.5 percent for both arms, and so forth; 500 cc of blood plasma would be administered for each 10 percent. For those beyond such ministrations, the convoys carried six tons of grave markers, as well as stamp pads to fingerprint the dead. A thirteen-page “graves registration directive” showed how to build a cemetery—“care should be taken so that graves are in line with one another, both laterally and longitudinally.” A memo on the disposition of a dead soldier’s effects advised, “Removal should be made of any article that would prove embarrassing to his family.”
Not least importa
nt, because invading armies under international law bore responsibility for the welfare of civilians, were the vast stocks meant for the Sicilians: 14,000 tons of flour, evaporated milk, and sugar to feed half a million people for a month; 94 tons of soap; 750,000 cc of tetanus, typhus, and smallpox vaccines. Civil affairs authorities calculated that if Italy were to capitulate, the Allies would have another 19 million mouths to feed and bodies to warm south of Rome, requiring 38,000 tons of food and 160,000 tons of coal each month, a huge burden on Allied shipping. “Italy could not be expected to be self-supporting,” one study concluded, “at any time during Allied occupancy.”
Kent Hewitt spent the passage on the flag bridge or in his cabin, reading and working crossword puzzles. Monrovia’s operations room was small, stifling, and as overcrowded as the rest of the ship. To accommodate the extra staffs aboard, the signal bridge had been doubled in size, and the ship’s carpenters had cobbled together three code rooms while expanding the radio rooms. But with radio silence imposed, Hewitt had nothing to say that could not be said by semaphore. He felt sanguine, convinced that his armada was giving battle against evil and that “God couldn’t be very hard on a man or a country doing that.”
When topside, Hewitt often trained his field glasses on the amphibious vessels, an eccentric fleet within the fleet. The 150-foot LCT carried five Sherman tanks and still drew barely three feet, earning the nickname “sea-going bedpan.” (Vulnerable smaller landing craft were known generically as “ensign eliminators.”) The bigger LSTs, originally designed by the British, had caught the fancy of U.S. military logisticians who had seen flatbottoms used to good effect by rumrunners along the Gulf of Mexico in the 1920s. Eleven hundred LSTs would be built during the war, mostly in river yards across the American Midwest. The square bow, with fourteen-foot hinged doors, made the vessel slow and ungainly, and the lack of a keel caused it to roll even in drydock—or so the sailors claimed. But each one could haul twenty tanks.
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