The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  At about the time that Hewitt’s fleet neared Malta, Gavin and his men had clambered aboard 226 C-47 Dakotas near Kairouan. Faces blackened with burnt cork, each soldier wore a U.S. flag on the right sleeve and a white cloth knotted on the left as a nighttime recognition signal. Days earlier an 82nd Airborne platoon had circulated through the 1st Division to familiarize ground soldiers with the baggy trousers and loose smock worn by paratroopers. Parachutes occupied the C-47S’ seats; the sixteen troopers in each stick sat on the fuselage floor, practicing the invasion challenge and password: GEORGE / MARSHALL. Dysentery tormented the regiment, and men struggled with their gear and Mae Wests to squat over honeypots placed around the aircraft bays. Medics distributed Benzedrine to the officers, morphine syrettes to everyone.

  As the first planes began to taxi—churning up dust clouds so thick that some pilots had to take off by instrument—a weatherman appeared at Gavin’s aircraft to affirm Commander Steere’s prediction of lingering high winds aloft. “Colonel Gavin, is Colonel Gavin here? I was told to tell you that the wind is going to be thirty-five miles an hour, west to east,” he said. “They thought you’d want to know.” Fifteen was considered the maximum velocity for safe jumping. Another messenger staggered up with an enormous barracks bag stuffed with prisoner-of-war tags. “You’re supposed to put one on every prisoner you capture,” he told Gavin. An hour after takeoff, a staff officer heaved the bag into the sea.

  The slivered moon cast little light, and at five hundred feet salt spray on the cockpit windows further cut visibility. Men dozed in the blacked-out planes during the three-hour flight, unaware that the gale had quickly deranged the formations. Some pilots found the critical turn at Malta, where Eisenhower stood craning his neck. Most did not. Soon the central Mediterranean was swarming with lost aircraft as crews tried to dead reckon their way north.

  Nearly all found Sicily, or at least some corner of it. Pilot Willis Mitchell spied Malta and turned accordingly, only to approach the drop zone north of Gela without thirty of the thirty-nine planes that were supposed to be behind him. Leveling off at eight hundred feet, Mitchell flipped on the green jump light. More than a hundred paratroopers from the bobtailed formation landed within two miles of the DZ, but badly scattered and hobbled with jump injuries. Others—aware only that they were somewhere over land—jumped from fifteen hundred feet at two hundred miles per hour, rather than from the preferred six hundred feet at one hundred miles per hour. Smoke and dust from earlier bombing obscured key landmarks and further befuddled the navigators. Some mistook Syracuse for Gela, fifty miles to the west. Machine-gun and antiaircraft fire ripped through the formations and the descending paratroopers, killing some before they hit the ground. Plane number 42-32922 collided with its flight leader above the beach; with his right elevator gone, the pilot, George Mertz, wobbled back out to sea and ditched five hundred yards off Scoglitti. “I hit the master switch to cut off both engines, and we glided in,” Mertz recounted. “One paratrooper came crashing through to the cockpit. The airplane settled, slightly nose low.” Crewmen and soldiers lashed their life rafts together and paddled ashore to hide in the dunes.

  Jim Gavin’s Dakota also tacked north after missing Malta, eventually crossing an unidentified coast on an unidentified landmass shortly after midnight. A red light flashed in the bay. “Stand up and hook up,” Gavin ordered. Braced in the open doorway, he recognized nothing in the dark terrain below. A pearly stream of machine-gun tracers drifted up. The green light flashed, and Gavin leaped into the slipstream. After landing hard and slipping off his harness, he managed to round up five comrades. For hours they stumbled through the darkness, whispering “George!” and straining for “Marshall,” until the distant grumble of naval gunfire just before dawn confirmed that they were at least on the proper island.

  “No one knew where they were, including themselves,” the tart General Lucas noted aboard Monrovia. Gavin eventually discerned that he was south of Vittoria, thirty miles from Gela. Although Troop Carrier Command claimed that 80 percent of the paratroopers had jumped onto the proper drop zones, even the Army Air Forces disputed that as “a prodigious overestimate.” In fact, fewer than one in six had landed anywhere close to where they were supposed to land. Only one of Gavin’s four battalions was intact, and it was twenty-five miles east of the correct DZ. More than 3,400 paratroopers were scattered across southeastern Sicily, as much as sixty-five miles off target. Some had jumped into the British sector, where—because no one had thought to impose identical passwords on the entire invasion force—they were greeted with gunfire. Eight planes were lost, none apparently to enemy fire, and the regiment’s three-day casualty tally would reach 350, a literal decimation.

  Certainly they wreaked havoc: slashing telephone wires, ambushing couriers, and causing the panicky Italians to inflate their numbers. They improvised, as paratroopers must. Captain Edwin M. Sayer, a company commander, mustered forty-five men to attack pillboxes near Niscemi with mortar, bazooka, and rifle-grenade fire; fifty enemy soldiers were captured, along with twenty machine guns and half a million rounds of ammunition. The operation, in Gavin’s assessment, was “self-adjusting,” a SAFU, as well as a TARFU and a JAAFU.

  Still, only 425 paratroopers had landed in front of the 1st Division, and only 200 now occupied the vital high ground at Piano Lupo as a screen for the vulnerable units landing at Gela. The 82nd Airborne commander, Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, lamented the “miscarriage” that resulted from overweening ambition, deficient training, and bad luck. “At war’s end,” Ridgway later concluded, “we still could not have executed that first Sicily mission, as laid on, at night and under like conditions.”

  As paratroopers blundered hither and yon, the force they were intended to shield swept into the shallows off Gela. The 1st Division, bolstered by two Ranger battalions, closed on six beaches along a five-mile front shortly after three A.M. Their objective, beyond seizing the town, was the capture of Ponte Olivo airfield on Virgil’s Geloan plain. Calamity struck quickly. Hardly had the strains of “American Patrol” faded when a Ranger lieutenant and sixteen of his men vaulted from their landing craft as it ground with a gritty jolt onto a sandbar; unaware of the runnel and deadweighted with those 82.02 pounds of kit, they sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Other men from the 1st Division dropped their life preservers into the forward hold as instructed by an LCI skipper, who assured them the water was only hip deep; scurrying down the dropped ramp they, too, sank and drowned.

  The first Americans waded onto the beaches at 3:35 A.M. on Saturday, July 10, fifty minutes behind Patton’s schedule. With a vicious pop, a mine tore open the chest of a Ranger company commander. “I could see his heart beating,” said his first sergeant, Randall Harris. “He turned to me and said, ‘I’ve had it, Harry,’ then collapsed and died.” Harris dashed forward only to have another mine shred his abdomen and legs; after flicking grenades into a line of pillboxes, he sprinkled sulfa powder on his protruding intestines, cinched his web belt to keep the innards in, and wandered down to the beach to find a medic. Harris would win a battlefield commission and the Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry.

  If stunned by the Allied invasion, the defenders appeared unsurprised. With a great roar and a shower of masonry, Italian demolitionists blew up a long segment of the thousand-foot Gela pier. Italian gunners trained their fire on the 26th Infantry as the first wave closed to within a hundred yards of shore. “The water jumped and heaved” under the lashing bullets. Soldiers sheltered behind the LCT splinter plates and anchor winches, narrowing their shoulders and elbowing one another as rounds sang overhead or pinged off the hull. A barrage balloon torn free in the storm abruptly drifted overhead, weird and stately. “I’ve been wounded but there’s so much blood I can’t tell exactly where,” one soldier muttered. As another boat dropped its ramp, a 16th Infantry rifleman felt a weight slump against his leg. “Somebody left his pack,” he called out, then saw that the inert bundle was a sergeant who had be
en shot in the head.

  Shouts and curses swept the beaches, swallowed by gunfire. A shower of Italian grenades landed around a 16th Infantry lieutenant, who escaped from the encounter with sixty-six small holes in his uniform shirt, a ruptured eardrum, and a pierced upper lip. Sappers chopped at the barbed wire with long-handled snips, and soldiers fell flat as trip flares bathed the shingle in magnesium brilliance. Searchlights swept the waterline, only to draw salvo after salvo from destroyers racing parallel to the shore like angry dogs along a fence. An Italian soldier “crept from a pillbox on all fours and ran down the hill, screaming and sobbing.”

  Dawn sluiced the eastern sky before five A.M., but daylight only enhanced the chaos. The heavy swell jammed several LST bow ramps, breaking ramp chains and flooding the tank decks. Seamen struggled against the current to assemble the cumbersome pontoon bridges, and a 16th Infantry battalion—stranded aboard several LCIs that had been snagged on sandbars thirty yards from shore—began to ferry men and weapons to the beach in rubber boats. Nothing in the arsenal of democracy now proved more providential than another new amphibian, a two-and-a-half-ton truck with flotation tanks and twin propellers. Built by General Motors and awkwardly called the DUKW—pronounced “duck”—it was difficult to load, slow in the water, and susceptible to brake damage from salt and sand. But it could carry a rifle platoon or a howitzer and its gun crew from ship to shore, and then make fifty miles per hour on roads. The War Department had been persuaded of the DUKW’s merit the previous winter when a prototype rescued a foundering Coast Guard crew during a Cape Cod nor’easter. Eisenhower had been issued eleven hundred DUKWs for HUSKY; they scuttled through the Gela surf like a flotilla of horseshoe crabs.

  Mines proved more galling than enemy guns. Rather than miles of good beach frontage, as intelligence reports had suggested, only a few hundred yards proved suitable, and exits through the dunes were sown with Teller mines planted a yard apart. DUKWs blew up, trucks blew up, five Navy bulldozers blew up. With no firefighting equipment at hand, they burned to the axles and blocked the beach exits. Many mine detectors remained buried in cargo holds; salt spray quickly shorted out those that made it to shore. “Everything on them goes bad,” a signal officer complained. Drivers ignored the engineer tape laid to mark cleared lanes: more vehicles blew up. Some crews left their DUKWs at water’s edge to collect souvenirs, or they were diverted by the Army for work elsewhere. Mines closed Yellow and Green Beaches in front of Gela, but boats diverted a bit south to Beach Red 2 found appalling congestion—“gasoline, ammunition, water, food, and assorted equipment were strewn about in a hopeless mass,” Hewitt later wrote. Shellfire soon closed that beach, too.

  “The beach was a scene of the greatest confusion,” Lucas noted in his diary after an early-morning trip ashore. “Trucks bogged down in the sand. The surf filled with overturned boats and debris of all kinds.” Beachmasters bellowed into the din to small effect; few had been armed with bullhorns. Troops loitered in the dunes, or traded potshots with flitting Italian gunmen. Some LSTs steamed away to anchorages offshore without unloading an ounce of cargo—much less tanks—and the Navy would inadvertently return to North Africa with much of the signal equipment for the Gela assault still crated in the holds. Shore parties searching for fuel and ammo instead found boxes packed with athletic equipment and clerical records.

  Dawn also brought the first enemy air attacks. Sixteen miles offshore, the U.S.S. Maddox was screening troop transports from enemy submarines when, for reasons unclear, she wandered away from the main destroyer pack. German pilots had learned to hunt stragglers by tracking the ship wakes, then gliding out of the rising sun with their engines cut. An officer on the Maddox’s bridge realized he was under attack only when he heard the whistle of falling bombs. The first detonated twenty-five yards astern; a second hit beneath the propeller guard, detonating depth charges aligned on the aft deck.

  Fire and steam boiled from the starboard main deck and the number 2 stack. The blast ripped open the aft deckhouse and catapaulted a 5-inch gun over the side. Maddox settled by the stern, with power gone and the engine room annunciators dead. As she lost steering and headway, the ship listed slightly to port, then righted herself for an instant before capsizing to starboard and sinking to the perpendicular. She paused momentarily, as if for a last look around, her forward gun pointing vertically from the sea. Bulkheads collapsed with a groan. Then the powder magazine detonated.

  “A great blob of light bleached and reddened the sky,” reported a lieutenant, miles away aboard Ancon. “It was followed by a blast more sullen and deafening than any we have so far heard.” More prosaically, a sailor on Ancon’s bridge added, “Look, they got one!” Two minutes after she was hit, Maddox vanished. In three hundred fathoms the ship sank, dragging down 212 men, their captain among them. A nearby tug rescued 74 survivors.

  Past the charred DUKWs and discarded mine detectors, two regiments from the 1st Division bulled through the dunes east of Gela. Succeeding waves followed the spoor of abandoned gas masks, blankets, life belts, snarled signal wire, and artillery shells packed in black cardboard cloverleafs. Gray stone houses with tile roofs stood beside the parched fields beyond the beach. Wheat and barley sheaves lay on threshing floors in the side yards, where beanstalks had been stacked for winter fuel. Grapevines snaked between olive groves, and peach trees were heavy with fruit that hung “like red-and-yellow lamps.” The tintinnabulation of sheep bells sounded above the pock-pock-pock of rifle fire.

  Force X—two of Bill Darby’s Ranger battalions—pushed into Gela town. Darby, a rugged thirty-two-year-old West Pointer from Arkansas, had proved his worth and that of his 1st Ranger Battalion in Algeria and Tunisia—they were the “best damned combat soldiers in Africa,” according to Patton—and in consequence the force that spring had tripled in size. Posters recruited volunteers who had “no record of trial by court-martial” and who were “white; at least five feet, six inches in height; of normal weight; in excellent physical condition; and not over thirty-five years old.” Recruiters also swaggered into Algerian bars, tendered a few insults, and signed up soldiers pugnacious enough to pick a fight. Already eclectic, the Rangers now included a jazz trumpeter, a professional gambler, steelworkers, a hotel detective, coal miners, a church deacon, and a recruit named Sampson P. Oneskunk. El Darbo, as the men called him, would twice reject promotion to full colonel in order to stay with his Rangers. They returned his devotion with a jody call: “We’ll fight an army on a dare, we’ll follow Darby anywhere, Darby’s Rangers…Fightin’ Rangers.”

  The Fightin’ Rangers now fought their way through Gela. Naval gunfire had shattered houses along the corniche and “ranged through the town, tearing roofs off or blowing in whole streets,” a 1st Division soldier recorded. Blue-uniformed Italians from the Livorno Division made a stand at the cathedral. Gunfire echoed through the nave and up the winding tower steps, punctuated by the burst of grenades in the sacristy. Soon bloody bodies carpeted the altar and the front steps, where Sicilian women in black keened over their dead. Two other redoubts fell quickly: a naval battery on the northwest edge of town, which surrendered after thunderous salvos from the cruiser Savannah, and a barricaded schoolhouse from which fifty-two Italians surrendered after a brief firefight. A blue column of Livorno prisoners tramped toward the beach, where without evident dismay they wolfed down C rations and awaited the LST that would carry them away from the war.

  More Italians counterattacked at 10:30. A column of thirty-two light Renault tanks with infantry pushed south from Niscemi, eight miles inland, only to be bushwacked by a hundred of Gavin’s paratroopers and further discouraged by screaming salvos from the cruiser Boise. Twenty tanks managed to wheel onto Highway 115 toward Gela, but a smoking broadside from the 16th Infantry stopped the advance and sent the survivors fleeing north into the Sicilian interior.

  On Highway 117, two dozen more tanks from Ponte Olivo airfield clanked toward town through 5-inch fire from the destroyer Shubrick. Several
burning hulks soon littered the road, but ten Renaults reached Gela. Rangers scampered behind stone walls and along rooftops, firing bazookas, flinging grenades, and dropping blocks of TNT from the ramparts. With a .30-caliber machine gun mounted on his jeep, Darby hammered away as his driver darted through narrow alleys around the piazza. Seeing his slugs bounce like marbles off the armor plates, Darby raced to the beach, commandeered a 37mm antitank gun, split open a box of ammo with an ax, then hurried back into town. His second shot halted a Renault, and he flushed the surviving crew with a thermite grenade laid atop the hatch. “Soon the metal was red hot,” the journalist Don Whitehead reported, “and the crew scrambled out screaming in surrender.” As the remaining Italian tanks retreated, Italian infantrymen arrived in parade-ground formation west of Gela. Bracketed with mortar fire, they were cut to ribbons. Survivors “fled in disorder.” Hewitt summoned the jut-jawed monitor H.M.S. Abercrombie to harass other enemy forces sheltering in Niscemi; a shift of ballast cocked the ship’s guns higher to obtain the requisite range, and 15-inch shells the width of tree trunks soon rained down.

  By late morning, Gela, the town of Aeschylus and Saracen olives, had fallen. Darby pulled an American flag from his pack and tacked it to the front wall of the Fascist party headquarters. A sergeant from the Bronx strolled the streets, quoting Thomas Paine in Italian. An angry crone cursed from her balcony, but other townfolk—perhaps sensing the strategic direction of the young campaign—huzzahed the invaders with “Viva, America.” Civil affairs officers eventually counted thirteen hundred demolished houses, of Gela’s fourteen thousand. They also counted 170 corpses. Geloans refused to touch the bodies, and prisoners were press-ganged to haul the dead on donkey carts to the cemetery. By noon on July 10, U.S. patrols were four miles inland, well toward the Yellow Line objective. Still, the ranks felt unsettled: the assault, they agreed, had been too easy. The real enemy, those with panzers and coal-scuttle helmets, had not yet been met.