Down they raced through the hairpin turns at breakneck speed, an armored car and Patton’s command vehicle leading the cavalcade. “Doughboys were moving down the road towards the city,” noted Lucas, who had arrived with Patton’s entourage. “They were tired and incredibly dirty. Many could hardly walk.” A shell slammed into the hillside above the highway, wounding a colonel and several others in the third car of the procession. Patton sped on.
Messina was a poor prize. Sixty percent of the city lay in ruins, the cathedral roof had collapsed, and German troops had booby-trapped door handles, light switches, and toilet cisterns. Enemy fire whittled the buildings still standing. Shells dislodged caskets from their wall niches in one cemetery, scattering skeletons among the Rangers who had bivouacked there. American artillery now answered, and a 155mm gun named Draftee fired the first Allied shell onto the Italian mainland. Millions would follow.
Although three-quarters of Messina’s 200,000 citizens had fled the city, a throng lined the streets to greet Patton. Clapping solemnly, they tossed grapes and morning glories. At the city hall piazza, in a ragged ceremony expedited by howling shell fire, the mayor formally tendered Messina to the conquerors.
“By 10 A.M. this morning, August 17, 1943, the last German soldier was flung out of Sicily,” Alexander cabled Churchill, “and the whole island is now in our hands.”
A deflated Patton was more prosaic in his diary entry that Tuesday afternoon: “I feel let down.”
He soon would feel worse. At noon on the same day, as the Messina ceremony concluded, Eisenhower in Algiers was rereading a detailed account of the slapping affair that had been sent directly to the AFHQ surgeon general by a medical officer in Sicily. Corroboration soon came from several incensed reporters who had quickly pieced together the story and alerted Harry Butcher and Beetle Smith. “There are at least fifty thousand American soldiers who would shoot Patton if they had the slightest chance,” Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s advised Butcher. Ushered into the commander-in-chief’s office at the Hôtel St. Georges, Demaree Bess of the Saturday Evening Post told Eisenhower, “We’re Americans first and correspondents second.” But striking a subordinate was a court-martial offense. “Every mother would figure her son is next” to be slapped, Bess added. Sympathetic to Eisenhower’s dilemma over how to handle his most aggressive field commander, the reporters agreed to kill the story “for the sake of the American effort.” British hacks showed similar restraint; of the sixty Anglo-American reporters in Sicily and North Africa, not one wrote a word.
Eisenhower agonized through several sleepless nights. Patton was selfish, he declared while pacing in Butcher’s bedroom one evening, and willing to spend lives “if by so doing he can gain greater fame.” Still, he added, “in any army one-third of the soldiers are natural fighters and brave. Two-thirds inherently are cowards and skulkers. By making the two-thirds fear possible public upbraiding such as Patton gave during the campaign, the skulkers are forced to fight.”
Such dubious arithmetic hardly excused reprehensible behavior, and Eisenhower’s five-paragraph letter of censure, delivered to Patton by the AFHQ surgeon, was harsh:
I must so seriously question your good judgment and self-discipline as to raise serious doubts in my mind as to your future usefulness…. No letter that I have been called upon to write in my military career has caused me the mental anguish of this one.
On Eisenhower’s insistence, Patton was to apologize to the individuals he had offended; Lucas, who flew to Palermo on August 21 to hand Patton the Distinguished Service Cross won at Gela, also suggested that he publicly voice contrition for his “intemperate language.” No other punishment was meted out, for now. A secret inspector general’s report warned that the affair would likely leak and “result in embarrassment to the War Department.” But Eisenhower chose not to tell Marshall; he offered only a vague allusion to the army commander’s “habit of impulsive bawling out of subordinates.” Patton, he added, “has qualities that we cannot afford to lose unless he ruins himself.”
Patton groveled in his reply to Eisenhower, voicing “my chagrin and grief at having given you, a man to whom I owe everything and for whom I would gladly lay down my life, cause for displeasure with me.” Privately, he vacillated between penitence and defiance. “I admit freely that my method was wrong,” he told his diary. But to a friend he wrote, “If I had to do it over again, I would not make a single change.” Using his private nickname for Eisenhower, he wrote Bea on August 22: “I seem to have made Divine Destiny a little mad, but that will pass.”
As ordered, he apologized to Private Kuhl, who subsequently posited that Patton “was suffering a little battle fatigue himself.” After a similar session with Private Bennett on August 21, Patton hosted a dinner in the royal palace for the entertainer Bob Hope and his troupe, who “sang and carried on until after midnight.” When the singer Frances Langford finished crooning “Embraceable You,” Patton cornered Hope and threw an arm around his neck. “You can do a lot for me,” Patton said. “I want you to go on radio when you get back. I want the people to know that I love my men.”
His oblique public confessions, delivered to five divisions over a week beginning on August 24, used a script of nineteen paragraphs, punctuated with much extemporaneous cussing. “I have been guilty on too many occasions, perhaps, of criticizing and of loud talking,” he said, speaking from a makeshift stage. “I am sorry for this.” Some units rejected even such a mild self-reproach. “No, General, no!” troops in Truscott’s 60th Infantry shouted. Exuberantly tossing their helmets, they thundered “Georg-ie! Georg-ie!” with such passion that Patton could not make himself heard. “The hell with it,” he said, then drove off in his command car, standing and saluting as tears streamed down his cheeks.
Others were less indulgent. Before noon on Friday, August 27, a day “hotter than the hinges of Hades,” the entire 1st Division marched into a natural amphitheater along the Palma River. “Arms will not be carried,” a division directive advised, and officers added, “There will be no booing.” Massed regimental bands played martial airs as Patton’s car pulled to the stage, siren wailing, through a sea of olive-drab wool. After speaking for twenty minutes, he concluded with an accolade—“Your fame shall never die”—then saluted the colors and sped away.
Fifteen thousand men sat in stony silence. “That has got to be the weirdest speech ever made by an American general,” a 26th Infantry captain muttered. Patton “used so much profanity that it wasn’t clear to me what he was talking about,” one soldier said, while another complained, “That fucking fucker of a general swears too fucking much.” Some wondered whether he was apologizing for sacking Allen and Roosevelt. Most did not care. They were silent “to express our rejection of his presence here,” explained an artillery sergeant, who added, “We despise him.”
Patton returned to the palace. His exile had begun, and he could only hope that it would end before the war did. “I shall be very glad to get out of this infernal island,” he wrote a friend. “It is certainly the most desolate and dreary place that I have ever been in.” To Beatrice he mused, “I have been a passenger floating on the river of destiny. At the moment I can’t see around the next bend, but I guess it will be all right.”
The thirty-eight-day campaign had ended, and another ten thousand square miles of Axis-held territory shifted to the Allied ledger. Patton deemed HUSKY “a damn near perfect example of how to wage war,” and without doubt clear benefits obtained. Mussolini’s downfall had been hastened. Mediterranean sea-lanes were further secured, along with southern supply lines to the Soviet Union and southern Asia via the Suez Canal. Allied air bases sprouted on Sicily as quickly as engineers could build them. German pressure had eased on the Russian front, where Hitler in July canceled a major offensive at Kursk after only a week, in part to divert forces to Italy and the Balkans.
American confidence, so badly battered at Kasserine Pass, was fully restored; four more Army divisions had become combat veter
ans, joining the four annealed in Tunisia. Cooperation between naval and ground forces had improved, and the many lessons learned, in mountain warfare and sniping tactics, in the arts of camouflage and combat loading, would be useful in Italy and beyond. The experience of launching a vast amphibious invasion against a hostile shore would be invaluable for the invasions yet to come, notably at Normandy. “We know we can do it again,” said Brigadier General Ray McLain, artillery commander of the 45th Division, “because we have succeeded.”
The butcher’s bill was dear for both sides. American battle casualties totaled 8,800, including 2,237 killed in action, plus another 13,000 hospitalized for illness. The British battle tally of 12,800 included 2,721 killed. Axis dead and wounded approached 29,000—an Italian count found 4,300 German and 4,700 Italian graves on Sicily. But it was the 140,000 Axis soldiers captured, nearly all of them Italian, who severely tilted the final casualty totals.
For the Allies the campaign had been “a great success, but it was not complete,” as a German admiral put it. Barely fifty thousand Germans had overcome Allied air and sea supremacy, and the virtual collapse of their Italian confederates, to hold off an onslaught by nearly half a million Anglo-Americans for five weeks. Kesselring considered much of the American effort misspent on seizing “uninteresting territory” in western Sicily; he detected an aversion to risk in Allied commanders, and now believed that he had a clear sense of his foes for future battles. HUSKY also exposed lingering combat shortcomings and revealed a few new ones. Rugged terrain could annul the advantage of a highly mechanized but roadbound army. “Vertical envelopment,” whether by parachute or glider, had yet to prove its value; in 666 troop carrier sorties flown over Sicily, the Allies lost 42 planes and had another 118 badly damaged, many from friendly fire. The meshing of infantry, armor, artillery, air, and other combat arms into an integrated battle force—the essence of modern combat—remained ragged; at times it was unclear whether Allied air and ground forces were even fighting the same campaign. Eisenhower claimed that the “international and interservice spirit” was now “so firmly established…that it was scarcely necessary any longer to treat it as a problem.” This was sheer fantasy. Relations between flyboys and ground-pounders were almost as badly strained as those between Brits and Yanks. As the historian Douglas Porch later wrote, “Sicily demonstrated the many limitations of interservice and inter-Allied cooperation, ones that foreshadowed problems that the Allies would encounter in Italy.”
If hundreds of combat leaders at all ranks proved their mettle under fire, others failed to measure up. The sorting out of the capable from the incapable continued, and Truscott’s critique in relieving a regimental commander in August showed how ruthless that sifting could be: “You lack clear, calm judgment and mental stability under stress of battle, and you are unduly influenced by rumors and exaggerated reports.”
But it was at higher echelons that leaders had yet to prove themselves entirely worthy of the led. Montgomery showed signs of being “a superb leader but a mediocre manager of armies in battle,” as the historian Geoffrey Perret put it, “unable to tell a sufficiency from a superfluity.” Patton had retired to the royal palace with his demons. Alexander had been conservative, unimaginative, and easily bamboozled by subordinates; his generalship in Sicily was “feeble from beginning to end,” the British biographer Nigel Hamilton concluded. As for Eisenhower, notwithstanding his growth since TORCH ten months before, all too often he still failed to grip the reins of his command, day by day and hour by hour. He had yet to become a great commander because he had yet to demonstrate the preeminent quality of a great captain: the ability to impose his will on the battlefield.
Still, they owned the island. Rome was closer; Berlin was closer. An enemy who a year earlier had been ascendant was now in retreat, everywhere. Half a million German soldiers lay dead, with as many more captured or missing. After Sicily, a Luftwaffe commander wrote, few could doubt “that a turning point had come and that we were on the road to final defeat.”
The troops stood down. Many would soon decamp to prepare in Britain for OVERLORD, including Omar Bradley and the 1st, 9th, 2nd Armored, and, eventually, 82nd Airborne Divisions, as well as three British divisions. Others were consigned to the long Mediterranean campaigns ahead. Patton’s sense of deflation was a common malady. “Have been in the dumps,” Truscott wrote Sarah on August 25. “War would be OK if it was all fighting. It’s these interims that give one the heebie-jeebies.”
Perhaps the heebie-jeebies came from reflection, the rare chance to consider what they had been through and what they still faced. Audie Murphy, already describing himself as “a fugitive from the law of averages,” wrote, “I have seen war as it actually is, and I do not like it.” Paratrooper Jim Gavin lectured himself in his diary: “I have many more battles ahead of me…. Fight intensely, smartly, and tough. Take chances personally and in matters of decision.” In a note to his daughter, he dreamed of taking a postwar pastorate, “with nothing to do but care for the flowers and meditate on the wickedness of the world.”
Ernie Pyle found melancholy harder to shake than battlefield fever. “Yesterday is tomorrow,” he wrote, “and Troina is Randazzo and when will we ever stop and, God, I’m so tired.” Noting that “I couldn’t find the Four Freedoms among the dead men,” he wrote to his wife, Jerry, in New Mexico, “The war gets so complicated and confused in my mind; on especially sad days it’s almost impossible to believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery.” Zealous MPs ticketed Pyle three times in one day for not wearing his helmet and leggings. A provost marshal commuted the $40 fines when Pyle agreed to recite ten times: “I’m a good soldier and will try to conduct myself as such by wearing my helmet and leggings at all times.” After four hundred days overseas, he needed a long rest.
Several hundred thousand soldiers found at least a brief respite in the benign late-summer Mediterranean. Jack Toffey wrote Helen in mock complaint that he had “gotten fat and lazy and bored during the past 10 days since the battle ended here.” His gimpy knee often stiffened; on August 31 he would turn thirty-six. Although much fighting remained, “we are certain now we can lick this guy,” he told her, “and lick him we intend to”—but he permitted himself a postwar reverie, pondering whether “our new car should be a Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, or what?” Someday, peace would return. “I’ll get all cleaned up and never get disheveled again,” he wrote. “What a dude I intend to be.”
Battalions set up wineshops and charged ten cents for a canteen cup of “Dago red.” “Migrant women” plied their trade in fleabag bordellos; some, for privacy, carried their own doors from room to room. The rates of venereal disease soared and the 82nd Airborne opened a medically certified brothel in Trapani under a supervising officer soon known as the Madam; Gavin noted in his diary, “Rates at 25 lire per piece.” Troops stocked up on souvenirs, including overpriced hankies with “Sicilia” embroidered in the corner. At night they watched movies on bedsheet screens, visible from both sides, and sang new camp ditties, including “Luscious Lena from Messina” and “Filthy Fannie from Trapani.” “I haven’t seen a spigot since I left the United States,” a 1st Division soldier commented. “It’s a little thing, but it means a great deal.” Snippets of Italian entered the soldier patois, including “Prego, Dago” and “Grazie, Nazi.”
On Sunday morning, August 29, Eisenhower flew from Algiers to Catania, escorted on the final leg by four Spitfires. In the resort town of Taormina, he joined Montgomery for a sumptuous lunch. The table was set with linen, silver, and bone china in the dining room of an elegant Fascist villa from which the Eighth Army commander hiked down to the sea for a daily swim. Later in the afternoon, the two generals drove north to Messina and stood on the corniche, scrutinizing the Calabrian shore with their glasses. The spoor of the departed enemy littered the beach. On a sunny veranda nearby, a British artillery chief invited his guests to select targets on a map brought with their afternoon cocktails; pushpins marked the
chosen aim points and a few minutes later, as the gin drained from their tumblers, a salvo of several hundred shells arched across the strait toward the Italian toe. “It was most spectacular,” one guest exulted.
Soon the idyll would end. As Gavin subsequently wrote his daughter, “We in our hearts know of the hunger, heartaches, and graves yet ahead of us.” Also scanning the Calabrian coast, the reporter Alan Moorehead mused:
One was hardly prepared for its nearness…. When one looked across at that other shore, the mainland of Europe, the vineyards and village houses were utterly quiet and all the coast seemed to be gripped in a sense of dread at what inevitably was going to happen.
Part Two
4. SALERNO
“Risks Must Be Calculated”
A gentle breeze barely riffled the sea, and a clement sun climbed through the early hours of Friday, September 3, 1943. Sicilian mongers peddled lemons and gladioli to British soldiers in battle kit queued up along the beaches. Three hundred DUKWs and other vessels swarmed between island and mainland “like so many gnats on a pond,” a witness reported, and this first invasion of continental Europe—an all-British operation code-named BAYTOWN—had proved so placid that Tommies soon called it the Messina Strait Regatta. Only massed artillery broke the tranquillity: more than five hundred guns stood barking wheel-to-wheel on the slopes above Messina. Royal Navy ships, now steaming with impunity through the straits, added another hundred tubes to the cannonade. Rockets arced toward the Calabrian shore like “a kind of upward flowing yellow waterfall,” wrote Alan Moorehead. “The noise was monstrous.”
Just eight thousand Germans still occupied the entire foot of the Italian boot, and orders had long ago been issued to abandon Calabria—although again without notifying the Italians. Allied intelligence since August 30 had detected ample signs that Axis troops would retire northward rather than fight for the toe, but the ponderous invasion preparations continued, including a creeping barrage reminiscent of the Somme. British guns would fire 29,000 rounds on this Friday morning; the enemy in reply fired none.
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