Young Jack Toffey, who had sold bottle caps in Ohio during the Depression, had proved worthy of his military lineage. Called to federal service from the National Guard in 1940, he landed with Truscott’s force in Morocco during TORCH, then commanded a battalion through the Tunisian campaign until shot in the knee at Maknassy in late March. “Missed all bones,” he wrote his wife, Helen. “Don’t worry about a thing.” After two months’ recuperation, he limped back to duty as executive officer of the 39th Infantry, just in time for Sicily. Toffey’s eventful fortnight on the island had already included a one-week stint commanding the regiment after his superior was injured in an air attack, and the capture of at least seven thousand prisoners.
Nine months at war had also aged him beyond his years. Both battle-wise and battle-weary, he was emblematic of the field-grade officers—major through colonel—who had learned much through hard combat and whose influence on a hundred European battlefields would be both decisive and disproportionate to their numbers in the U.S. Army. It was Toffey and his breed who would have to fix the tactical shortcomings the Army had revealed in Tunisia, such as the failure to seize high ground or to anticipate the German penchant for immediate counterattack; the defects in patrolling and map reading that got entire battalions ambushed or lost; and the inability to coordinate infantry, armor, and the other combat arms.
He now made war without illusions and certainly without pleasure. “War is as Sherman says and has no similarity with cinema or storybook versions,” Toffey had written in North Africa. He tried simultaneously to care for his family, to care for his men, and to study the military art even as he practiced it: sending money orders and war bonds to Helen, who waited for him in Columbus with their two children; procuring thirteen hundred steaks for a holiday dinner in the unit mess; subscribing to Infantry Journal; reading War and Peace. “Every day is that much nearer the end,” he wrote. “I still miss you terribly—a condition which will not improve.” The wound in Tunisia sharpened his senses of irony and mortality. Three generations of Toffeys in uniform was enough, he told Helen; he hoped that John IV, age twelve, “will be a doctor or lawyer and stay the hell out of the army & if he does go in the army let him stay out of the infantry.” To be near to a battle is not so nice, his grandfather had written, and I never want to be near one again. Jack Toffey understood that perfectly, though for now he had a job to do. “Been feeling a little rocky lately—but the knee is okay and feels better tonite,” he wrote before Troina. “Short on sleep and tired but today was a good day for us.”
The next six days, however, would be bad for all of them. The 39th Infantry’s right wing edged to within a mile of Troina on Sunday, August 1. But lacerating mortar and machine-gun fire greeted the regimental left, and by midnight counterattacking grenadiers had shoved much of the regiment back to the high ground near Cerami, even whittling one battalion to three hundred men. “There is a hell of a lot of stuff there,” a 1st Division officer warned. “We’ll be moving right into the teeth of the enemy.” Allen seemed to concur, and directed two additional regiments to loop north and south in a double envelopment. But then, perhaps hoping to avoid those “unnecessary casualties” he had prayed over, Allen rescinded his order and chose to let the 39th Infantry again try to take Troina alone.
The regiment’s new commander—Jack Toffey’s superior—was a wizened, dish-faced, Vermont-born legend, Colonel Harry A. “Paddy” Flint, whom Patton deemed the “bravest goddam soldier in the whole goddam Seventh Army.” At fifty-five, Flint had survived innumerable polo injuries and, in 1940, an apparent stroke; as his men tried to winkle the Germans from their strongpoints, he stood on a prominent rock, stripped to the waist, with a black bandana knotted around his neck, rolling a Bull Durham cigarette with one hand and bellowing, “Hell’s bells. Lookit them lousy Krauts. Couldn’t shoot in the last war. Can’t shoot in this one.” Later in the battle, a young artillery commander, Lieutenant Colonel William C. Westmoreland, found Flint and Ted Roosevelt playing mumbletypeg with a jackknife. Advised that half of Westmoreland’s ancient howitzers had broken recoil systems, “so you can expect half the firepower you’ve received before,” Flint replied, “It don’t make no difference. Just fire them twice as fast.” Not to be outdone, Roosevelt upon being told that the division had fired a million dollars’ worth of ammunition, ordered, “Spend another million.”
Bravado would not win the day, or the next day, or the day after that. Allen finally recognized the need for a full-throated attack, ordering his 26th Infantry to loop north, the 18th Infantry to drive from the south, and the 16th Infantry to slice straight toward Troina with the weary 39th. “Troina’s going to be tougher than we thought,” he told Bradley by phone. “This will mean we can turn over to the 9th Division a tight zone. If it’s all right with you, we can do this.”
Hills were won and lost, won again and lost again. By now the Germans had dug in so deep that even the observers droning overhead could not spot the smokeless powder from their artillery and antitank guns. To break the stalemate, Allen ordered a renewed assault in the early minutes of August 3, with the attack weighted in the south. At daybreak, the 16th Infantry was pinned down by gashing German fire; when the enemy counterattacked with panzers and infantry, only deft shooting by Clift Andrus’s division artillery kept the regiment from being overrun. By late afternoon, attackers and defenders had become so intermingled in the gullies southwest of Troina that American guns fell silent for fear of hitting friendly troops. When grenadiers infiltrated within a stone’s throw, riflemen called out the day’s challenge—“Chocolate”—and listened for the authorized parole: “Bon-bon.”
Progress was no better in the north. Troops from the 26th Infantry fought with grenades, pistols, and rifle butts up and down a bitter knoll known as Hill 1035. The sharp pops of detonating mines were often followed by the howl that signified another severed foot or leg. Not until full dark, at eleven P.M., could the wounded be evacuated. Brush fires made the scorching days hotter still, and putrid German bodies polluted a creek trickling through a ravine. “Something is burning out front,” a 16th Infantry battalion radioed. “We are running low on ammunition.” Mule trains brought some supplies, but bundles dropped from aircraft fell mostly into enemy hands, and men chewed wheat straw to quell their hunger. Repeated air strikes by AAF planes beginning late Wednesday afternoon, August 4, cheered every GI except those bombed by mistake. A sergeant whose troops came under attack ordered his men to peel off their undershirts and spread them along a ditch embankment. “For some reason, the pilots were supposed to recognize the shirts as those of friendly troops,” wrote Don Whitehead, who was among those stripping. “By the laundry mark, I suppose.”
At dusk on Thursday, rifle companies throughout the 1st Division had been reduced by two-thirds, to sixty or seventy men; Company I of the 26th Infantry reported seventeen fit for combat. The commander of Company F in the same regiment lay with a radio a mile north of Troina as his unit was overrun, calling in barrages within fifty yards of his foxhole. “Perhaps,” he wrote his father, “my luck won’t hold up forever.” Recovered from battlefield fever, Ernie Pyle showed up in Cerami to begin working on another bout. “Through our glasses the old city seemed to fly apart,” he wrote after watching Troina bombarded. “Great clouds of dust and black smoke rose into the sky until the whole horizon was leaded and fogged.” Dressed in his “usual collapsible style,” Pyle was caught in an air attack without his helmet and covered his head with a shovel. He regretted “the terrible weariness that gradually comes over everybody…. You just get damned sick of it all.”
Terry Allen was damned sick of Troina, and he meticulously planned a final assault for Friday, August 6, to outflank the town and obliterate any remaining Germans. Only when the first patrols crept into the outskirts after dawn did it become clear that the enemy had pulled back, fearful of encirclement. In launching two dozen counterattacks during the past week, the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division had lost more than sixteen hun
dred men. As the grenadiers scuttled down Highway 120 toward Cesarò and Randazzo, leaving the prints of their hobnailed boots in the dust, Kesselring also authorized Hermann Göring troops to pull out of Catania, on the coast. The Etna Line had snapped, to be replaced by a succession of defensive bulwarks across the Messina Peninsula.
“Town clear of enemy,” a patrol reported shortly before ten A.M. Only misery remained. Troina was “found to be in a greatly destroyed condition,” an Army after-action report noted. Reporters creeping into town were more explicit. They found “a town of horror, alive with weeping, hysterical men, women and children,” wrote Herbert Matthews of The New York Times; he described a scene that would recur all the way to Bologna: on “torn streets, heaps of rubble that had been houses, grief, horror and pain.” Dead soldiers, German and American, were “covered with a carpet of maggots that made it look as though the corpses were alive and twitching,” a 16th Infantry officer reported. “You couldn’t get the smell of the dead out of your hair, and all you could do with your clothes was burn them.” A 26th Infantry captain, Donald V. Helgeson, stared at a charred German mortar crew. “This ain’t very good for the troops’ morale,” Helgeson said. His first sergeant disagreed. “It’s great for morale. They’re German, aren’t they?” A GI sliced the Wehrmacht belt buckle from a dead grenadier and declared that “Gott mit Uns changed sides.”
Some 150 bodies lay in the streets and inside a feudal tower. A nauseating stench seeped from Troina’s cellars. Broken water mains bubbled, and an unexploded bomb blocked a church aisle. At city hall, wounded civilians sprawled “naked on shutters or stretchers. Their skin was gray,” George Biddle reported. An infant found in the ruins clutched his dead mother’s hair so desperately that rescuers had to snip away a few locks. Whitehead pushed through a massive oak door leading into the fetid cathedral crypt. In the feeble light he found hundreds of refugees living in their own filth. “Men, women and children crouched like animals over their little hoards of food and piles of belongings,” he wrote. A young girl told him in English, “We’ve been miserable but now everything is changed.”
“Troina was the toughest battle Americans have fought since World War I,” General Lucas concluded, “and there were very few in that war which were its equal.” The 1st Division had suffered more than five hundred casualties, with scores more in the 39th Infantry. “Really could use a bit of an ocean voyage to your shores about now,” Jack Toffey wrote Helen after the shooting stopped on August 6. He wondered, with that ironic sensibility that grew tauter with each battle, whether New York would choose to stage the city’s postwar victory parade up Fifth Avenue, or down. But in a note to his young son, Toffey showed that hope still lined his heart: “The Krauts must now know they are licked and their days numbered…. Just pray me home & we’ll be all set.”
Two more casualties could now be added to the 1st Division tally. As gunfire ebbed at Troina, three telegrams arrived at the division headquarters. The first relieved Terry Allen as commanding general. The second relieved Ted Roosevelt as assistant commander. The third announced Allen’s successor, Major General Clarence R. Huebner, a highly decorated Kansan who had commanded a regiment in World War I before the age of thirty. “Terry read the thing, said nothing for a while, and then burst into tears like a high-strung school girl,” Clift Andrus recalled. “It came as a terrible shock.”
Ever the ardent hunter, Omar Bradley had long held Allen in his sights before squeezing the trigger. He later claimed that “the hardest thing in war was to relieve people I knew,” but Bradley seemed unruffled by the dismissal of Allen, whom he considered “temperamental, disdainful,” and “too full of self-pity and pride.” In a handwritten note to Eisenhower on July 25, Bradley described the 1st Division as “battle weary. I suspect that it is more Terry and Ted than it is the division as a whole.” At Bradley’s urging, Patton three days later formally requested the change in a message carried by Lucas to Algiers. In his diary, Patton described both men as “suffering from battle fatigue,” a malady whose existence he himself denied.
Neither Bradley nor Patton ever offered a fuller explanation for the dismissals; at heart, the action reflected the corps commander’s personal animus toward Allen. But prevarications soon followed. Patton and Bradley both claimed they were following a War Department policy of rotating senior commanders. Patton hinted that Allen would return home to command a corps. Bradley later claimed that he “personally took over the tactical planning” after Allen “flubbed badly” at Troina. But Allen’s efficiency report for April 16 through August 5, 1943, written and signed by Bradley, asserted that “the division plans of attack” for Nicosia and Troina “were well planned, [well] executed and obtained decisive results.” Bradley made no mention of the faulty intelligence from his headquarters, or of his own belief that the Germans would retreat through Troina to Cesarò, or of his endorsement of the initial single-regiment attack.
As the orders became public once Troina had fallen on August 6, anger and disbelief roiled the division. “Even shaggy old Regular Army sergeants weep unashamedly,” an 18th Infantry soldier reported. By cruel coincidence, Allen appeared on the August 9 cover of Time; the article detected in him “a special mark of war and history.” In a note to Marshall, he thanked the chief for the chance to command the 1st Division for fifteen months; to Eisenhower, he conceded that he “may have appeared over solicitious, regarding the needs of the infantry.” In truth he was exhausted, his denials notwithstanding: in a letter to his young son, he wrote not only the wrong date but the wrong month. “It is a wrench to leave the division,” he told Mary Fran, “but such is the luck of the service.” Later he would grow angry over rumors that he had suffered a breakdown, and he wondered if anti-Catholicism or his lack of a West Point commission played a role; back in Texas, he fled a welcome-home party in tears. But soon enough he bucked up, perhaps sensing that neither the Army nor the war was finished with him. As he prepared to leave the division near Troina, he sat for a sketch by George Biddle, a pen-and-ink that captured the boxer’s nose, the ropy neck muscles, the wide-set eyes, and the sparse hair neatly combed across his crown; he even wore a slight smile. Glancing at his watch, Allen called to his driver, “Tell them to phone down to General Bradley that I’ll be fifteen minutes late.”
As for Ted Roosevelt, the blow left him “hurt, despondent and mentally in a black cloud,” one officer said. In an open letter to the division he wrote, “I have been ordered away. It is a great grief to me.” In a personal farewell to the 26th Infantry, which he had commanded in the Great War, “he broke down and wept. And the men kept silent.” To Bradley he wrote, “Brad, we get along a helluva lot better with the Krauts up front than we do with your people back here in the rear.” Beetle Smith told him that he was not qualified to command a division; instead, he would move to the newly created Fifth Army as a liaison to French forces. “Of course I was heartbroken,” he told Eleanor, adding with a touch of self-pity, “Everyone loves me but our own high command.” Perhaps trading on her name, she privately wangled an audience at the Pentagon with Marshall, who bluntly told her that Ted “still behaved like a regimental commander” and “did not grasp the full scope of the responsibilities and duties as a brigadier general in an infantry division.”
But Roosevelt also sensed that a larger fate awaited him. Sharing a ride to Palermo with Robert Capa, he recited poetry with his usual fluency while his aide sang cowboy songs. Clues could be found in the dog-eared copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress carried in his kit bag: “I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am…. My marks and scars I carry with me.” To Eleanor he later wrote, “The longer I live the more I think of the quality of fortitude—men who fall, pick themselves up and stumble on, fall again, and are trying to get up when they die.”
“In a Place Like This”
RIDGE by ridge, road by road, town by town, the island fell to the advancing Allied armies. Montgomery’s right wing, stalled for more than
two weeks at Catania, finally lurched forward again, and Tommies sang, “We’re Shoving Right Off.” An Allied battlefront that had meandered for 170 miles inexorably contracted to 45 miles as 100,000 enemy soldiers retreated past Mount Etna into the long funnel of the Messina Peninsula. “I am enjoying this campaign,” Montgomery wrote in his neat black script on August 4. “The Boche is getting very stretched and he cannot possibly stand up to my thrusts.” Others were skeptical of Montgomery’s claim to have cornered the Germans “in queer street.” Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s air chief, wrote a colleague on August 7, “Napoleon insists on his usual frontal attack with no risks.”
But although they were moving in fits and starts—nine thousand yards one day, three thousand the next—moving they were, despite mines, despite booby traps, despite snipers with telescopic sights hiding in baroque hillside tombs. The mayor of Catania surrendered his town with a theatrical affixing of signatures. Of 100,000 houses, only one in five was habitable. Germans had looted everything from beds to dinner forks, blowing up the Bank of Sicily and the Hotel Corona for good measure; British soldiers and hungry Sicilians picked through the leavings. Refugees fought over packets of British biscuits, while old women in black squatted in their doorways as if “they knew that all life was evil,” wrote the reporter Christopher Buckley.
Often enough, the Allied air force solution for interdicting the retreating Germans was to obliterate Sicilian towns, which barely impeded Axis withdrawals but killed thousands of civilians and complicated the Anglo-American advance. Thirty unexploded bombs lay in the rubble at Adrano, on the southwest slope of Etna, a town so battered that combat engineers needed thirty-six hours to carve a single-lane path through the drifted wreckage. “Troops will refrain from shooting Italian carabinieri,” advised signs posted by British officers. “They are entitled to carry rifles.” Battalions leapfrogged one another through thistles and cornflowers, dodging the slap of enemy artillery. A local orchestra greeted Canadian troops in one town, alternately striking up “God Save the King” and “Deutschland über Alles.” In Bronte, on Etna’s northwest shoulder, welcoming civilians chanted “Lord Nelson! Lord Nelson!,” and General Alexander added his name below Kesselring’s in the visitors’ book at an eleventh-century Norman castle that had once belonged to the British naval hero. Across the Catania plain and down the volcano’s lower slopes, British graves dotted the landscape like small mastabas. Identity disks dangled from wooden crosses, and comrades manning the burial details scrubbed their hands with kerosene and collected the dead men’s helmets for reissue.
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