by Alex Kershaw
H-hour had arrived. The liberation of Europe had begun.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE RACE FOR MESSINA
Thunderbirds march into Cefalu, Sicily, July 1943. [National Archives]
SAN CROCE CAMERINA, SICILY, JULY 10, 1943
THERE WAS NO BUZZING of MG-42 machine gun bullets or the ear-splitting thunder from German guns. Ramps dropped and the Thunderbirds began staggering ashore. More men were lost in the regiment that morning in accidents, as landing craft were blown off course, than were killed by enemy fire. Over half the landing craft were damaged or sunk in the heavy surf. Two boats collided and were driven into a cove and broken apart on sharp rocks, with one boat overturning. Twenty-seven men from F Company were drowned.
The regiment was soon over the dunes on Bailey’s Beach and crossing through the olive orchards farther inland. A dead young 82nd Airborne paratrooper, who had made his first and only combat jump just a few hours earlier, dangled from a parachute caught up in one of the trees. Cowboys in the regiment, from ranches across Colorado and Oklahoma, cut swathes from the young American’s billowing silk chute and used them as neckerchiefs.
With the crucial support of the 158th Artillery, the regiment seized ground above San Croce Camerina by early afternoon. “Hits on buildings near the village public square were very effective,” recalled Colonel Ankcorn, “and had a marked effect on the garrison commander’s attitude.”
When Sparks arrived in the village, he was greeted by dozens of white flags fluttering from windows. Five hundred Italian soldiers had given up without the loss of a single American life. “Those goddamn Italians came right out with their hands up,” Sparks recalled, “with their bags packed, ready to go to the States.” He pressed on that afternoon under a fierce sun, following a trail of unnecessary equipment and clothing men had discarded.
Spirits were high. “We had gone over the side of ships that morning as boys,” recalled one man. “Now we were men.” There had been no bloodbath when they broke out from the beach, as had been predicted. Elsewhere along the southern coast of Sicily the Allies had met only limited resistance and now advanced rapidly on key cities and towns. The regiment’s next objective was Comiso Airport, around ten miles inland. By late on the afternoon of July 11, it had been seized along with over 450 prisoners, 200,000 gallons of aviation fuel, and a nickel-plated bicycle, which the regiment’s chaplain, Leland L. Loy, quickly put to use. Men would soon call out “Hi yo Chappie” whenever they saw him pedaling their way. The fight for the airport was the last time the regiment encountered an Italian foe in Sicily. From now on, the men firing back at them would be German, few of whom would be eager to give up without a fight.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Chaplain Loy visited the regimental command post that Sparks had set up at the airport. He looked upset. “Colonel,” he told Ankcorn, “we have bodies lying all over the beach down there, and nobody’s burying them or picking them up or anything.”
Ankcorn frowned, thought for a few moments, and then turned to his adjutant.
“Sparks,” said Ankcorn. “I don’t care how you do it, but I rely on you to see that they are buried with honor.”
It was his first challenge of the war. But how was he to do it? The only men at hand were members of the regimental band near his command post. He gathered them together on a truck, then headed back to Bailey’s Beach. Dozens of landing craft wallowed in the surf, their engines having burned out as they tried to cross sandbanks. Everywhere there was debris, the flotsam and jetsam of a chaotic invasion crowding the high-water line: smashed boxes of K rations, abandoned bazookas and bangalore torpedoes, packs, and washed-up life belts. More disturbing were the bloated and disfigured corpses, most of them men from F Company who had drowned when their craft broke up on the rocks.
For several hours, Sparks went from one dead American to another, looking for their dog tags. It was gruesome work. The drowned men had been washed back and forth by the tide. Some had been stripped bare, parts of their bodies blue and purple, as if covered in bruises, the whites of their bulging eyes gone gray. He also found the remains of an Air Corps lieutenant named Goldberg, from Utica, New York, in the cockpit of a crashed plane on the beach. He could not find dog tags on five of the corpses, so he took the men’s fingerprints with a kit the army supplied to every regimental adjutant. Wondering how to shroud the fast-decomposing corpses, he searched the beach and discovered abandoned survival kits that contained blankets. Knowing how important it was to Ankcorn that the men receive a decent burial, he found a field where he and his burial party of musicians then dug three-foot-deep graves in the rocky soil. Finally, they gathered wood from a nearby village and made each man a cross, from which Sparks hung a dog tag.
LICODIA, SICILY, JULY 14, 1943
CAKED IN A dust that seemed to coat every soldier, building, and vehicle a ghoulish gray, Sparks arrived in a small mountain town called Licodia, thirty miles to the east of Bailey’s Beach. Thankfully, the locals welcomed him and his fellow Thunderbirds as liberators, even though Italy was still at war with the United States. After enduring millennia of invasion, Sicilians clearly knew when to resist and when to shower well-fed and well-supplied young Americans with flowers. “When we take a town,” Sparks soon wrote his parents, “the whole town turns out with flags, flowers, and much shouting. The natives are very friendly and amazed by our generosity. They have been in pretty bad shape and hate the Germans.”
The regiment pushed farther into the sunbaked heart of Sicily. German snipers hid in olive trees and even fired at medics. Furious Thunderbirds replied with chemical mortars, showering the marksmen’s lairs with white phosphorous, which burned through their uniforms and flesh to the bone. Abandoned vehicles littered the roadsides looking like bizarre skeletons after the locals had scavenged their metal to forge into tools and plows. The Thunderbirds marched on, past buildings with red stucco walls that belonged to the Cantonieri, the Italian Fascists, who had scrawled messages on walls all across Sicily: “Credere, Obediere, Combattere”—“Believe, Obey, Fight”—instructions few locals carried out.
As he sped north in a jeep, planning where next to set up the regimental command post, Sparks encountered his most senior commander in Sicily, General George Patton himself. Patton was being driven in a jeep. Just days before, the silver-haired Seventh Army commander had admitted to a fellow general that the two things he loved most in life were “fucking and fighting.”
Patton got out of the jeep and approached Sparks, who quickly saluted.
“Where’s your commander?” asked Patton, three stars clearly visible on his helmet.
“He’s up ahead,” said Sparks. “We’ve got a hard fight up there.”
The following day, July 15, the regiment reached the vital Vizzini-Caltagirone Road, which led to Mount Etna. But then the regiment was suddenly ordered to halt. Eighth Army’s General Montgomery wanted to use the crucial road, so the entire 45th Division, much to Patton’s fury, was forced to give way and march back the way it had come, toward the landing beaches. “My God,” US II Corps commander Omar Bradley exclaimed to Patton, “you can’t allow him to do that.” As far as Bradley was concerned, Montgomery’s theft of the road was “the most arrogant, egotistical, selfish and dangerous move in the whole of combined operations in World War II.”
Patton allowed Montgomery to take the road, not wanting to provoke Eisenhower, who had recently criticized him unfairly for poor planning. But in private he exploded. “Tell Montgomery to stay out of my way or I’ll drive those Krauts right up his ass,” he raged at his deputy, Major General Geoffrey Keyes, who diplomatically neglected to do so. It was a humiliating reversal but quickly forgotten by the hot and sweaty infantrymen, if not their peeved officers, as the Thunderbirds pulled back and then swung northwest toward Palermo, trailing a seemingly endless dust cloud behind them.
Montgomery had stolen Patton’s road cutting through the central mountains toward Messina, the closest port to mainland Italy. But he n
ow failed to exploit it and was soon stalled west of Mount Etna, held up by determined Panzer units. The ancient home of the Cyclops and the Mafia, the Roman Empire’s first province was no longer a “soft underbelly” as Churchill had promised. Kesselring had decided during a flying visit to Sicily three days before, on July 12, to abandon the island. But he was determined to slow the Allied advance and buy time for a full evacuation. It was crucial to defend key routes east toward Messina, from where thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles were being ferried to mainland Italy each day.
Montgomery’s woe would be Patton’s gain. Determined to upstage the British, Patton decided to strike along Sicily’s northeastern shore and get to Messina first, ahead of his British archrival—“that little fart,” as he called Montgomery in his diary. “This is a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake,” Patton stressed in a note to the 45th’s Troy Middleton. “We must take Messina before the British. Please use your best efforts to facilitate the success of our race.”
The Thunderbirds now became the front runners in the race for American glory in Sicily. On July 27, the regiment attacked along the coastal highway toward Messina. Facing the 45th was the Ulrich Combat Group, made up of two well-armed and tenacious regiments of the 29th Panzergrenadier Division: men who would “say Heil Hitler with their dying breath,” as one Thunderbird officer put it. They had been ordered to stop the American advance, come what may, in order to shield tens of thousands of other Axis troops who were being evacuated.
The Germans had left mines along the coastal highway to slow the advance and had then retreated into the mountains, where they now began to zero in on the Americans with alarming accuracy. Mortar shells seemed to drop like hail as the Thunderbirds pushed toward San Stefano along the coast through booby-trapped groves of ripening olives and lemons, below a barren mountain that jutted to the ocean’s edge. The mountain had to be crossed if Patton was to seize Messina first. The natives called it San Rosso. It would be forever remembered by Thunderbirds as “Bloody Ridge.”
That first day of battle for the ridge, July 27, the regiment suffered 108 casualties, by far its highest one-day total so far. Exhausted and stunned by the ferocity of German counterattacks with tanks, that evening the regiment formed a circle defense with men positioned no more than three yards from one another, just as many of their forefathers had done in the Indian Wars. Mules carried up ammunition and food. So steep was the climb that some of the poor animals died from exhaustion. Men cussed as they picked up the supplies and carried them on their own backs.
The “Battle of Bloody Ridge” resumed the next day. Again the Germans countered the regiment’s every attempt to push forward. A machine-gun squad in Company A fought with great courage to hold off one such strike, the fiercest the regiment had yet encountered. The gunners were later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. None would be alive to receive it. Twenty-year-old Private First Class Bernie Kaczorowski, another machine gunner in A Company, saw friends sliced in half by German shells. Under heavy fire, he jumped in a foxhole, only to find himself beside a young man from Philadelphia with his head blown off. Kaczorowski quickly understood how frail the human body was and how easily it could be shredded and reduced to hamburger. Fighting on Bloody Ridge, he remembered, was just like being in a meat grinder. At the epicenter of the carnage, he found American flesh splattered everywhere: on the sturdy stock of his M1 rifle, in shallow foxholes, seemingly wherever he cowered for cover from the flying hot metal and machine-gun bullets that buzzed over his head.
The deeply religious, who had chaplains praying for their survival, appeared to be more forsaken than the sinners, who swore, whored, and drank themselves unconscious whenever they could scrounge cheap, sour-tasting wine from the locals. “They [used to] say God only takes the good,” a still-traumatized Kaczorowski would say more than sixty years later. “Maybe that’s why I’m still here—because I’m rotten.”
On July 31, the regiment finally arrived in San Stefano, a port midway along the northern coast. German corpses lay rotting, black with flies, in the streets. Here the Thunderbirds were relieved by the 3rd Division and trucked to a rest area near another port, called Termini Immerse, where men sat in the shade, stunned and utterly exhausted by their first real battle. When nearby watermelon patches had been cleared of mines, some men lay in the sun, juice running in bright lines down their throats, while others waded in cold streams where they washed off the infernal sand and dust.
At the regimental command post, Sparks received mail from his wife, Mary. He was now the proud father of a baby boy. Mary had sent a photo of his new son, Kirk, who had been born on May 20, just days before Sparks left America. He was delighted and relieved that Mary had fast recovered from a long and difficult birth. “I have been getting lots of letters from Mary in the past ten days,” he told his parents in a V-mail addressed simply from “Sicily.” “The baby seems to be doing fine,” he added, “which is good news to me. It’s reassuring to know that everyone is interested in him.” That August 2 was Sparks’s 26th birthday. “I wasn’t able to do any celebrating on my birthday,” he wrote his parents, “although there were plenty of fireworks. It’s plenty hot over here and very dusty.”
Two days later, the first blood transfusion began: The regiment received its first batch of nervous replacements, 123 enlisted men and nine officers. They were pitiful neophytes in the ways of war, one officer noted, “not mentally, physically, and technically ready for combat.” The same officer recommended that in the future “every man must be drilled to withstand mental shock.”
The replacements had barely learned their fellow platoon members’ names when they were told to get ready to board landing craft. The aim was to perform an “end run” by leapfrogging points of German resistance on the northern coast of Sicily. Yet again, lives were lost as the Thunderbirds moved from ship to shore. A davit failure caused one assault boat to fall into the sea, killing most of the men aboard. But these were the only casualties during the operation: To their great relief, the Thunderbirds discovered that the 3rd Division had already managed to secure their assigned landing beaches with ease.
The Allied race to Messina ended on August 18, around 4 A.M. Men from Sparks’s regiment, a party from the First Battalion, marched into the city’s heavily bombed suburbs, beating the 3rd Division, the Rangers, and, notably, the entire British Eighth Army to the first great prize in the campaign to liberate Europe.
“Where you tourists been?” asked GIs when the British arrived just two hours later.
“Hello, you bloody bastards!” replied British tankers.
It was not much of a prize. Messina had endured earthquake, plague, and Carthaginian slaughter but nothing as calamitous as American Flying Fortresses.
Patton entered the shattered city later that day, a phalanx of press and photographers in his wake. A senior British officer greeted him with a snappy salute.
“It was a jolly good race,” said the gracious limey. “I congratulate you.”
Patton was elated. He was the American general of the hour. PATTON, not MONTY, would appear in the front-page headlines around the world.
The Battle for Sicily had lasted thirty-eight days and cost 25,000 Allied casualties. By contrast, the Germans had suffered fewer than 20,000. Almost 150,000 Italians had surrendered. Crucially, Axis forces were no longer able to control the Mediterranean.
Sparks would later consider Sicily to be something of a bitter victory, given that so many of the enemy had escaped unscathed. Kesselring’s divisions had performed superbly, stalling the Allies just long enough to pull out more than a hundred thousand troops and ten thousand vehicles to fight another day. “We should have murdered them,” one of Sparks’s fellow captains complained. “It would have saved us a hell of a lot of trouble later on.”
TRABIA, SICILY, LATE AUGUST 1943
IF HE WANTED, he could wander through the ripening lemon groves nearby or pick grapes lining the roads on the verdant n
orth shore of Sicily, where red geraniums formed hedges in the lee of the rugged mountains just inland. The sunsets were spectacular, vast swathes of yellow and red splashed across the Mediterranean, and at night the moon’s pale light seemed to make the olive leaves glow like polished silver.
Day after day, the Thunderbirds practiced war, advancing under live fire to test men’s nerves and their commanders’ competency. Sparks sat typing, organizing, reading reports, and readying maps while the booming of guns reminded him, like a nagging aunt, that he was a pen pusher, not a true soldier. He knew the division was going to move out soon. Long lines of vehicles blocked the coastal road to the nearby port of Termini Imerese, where they were to be waterproofed in preparation for another amphibious operation. Rumor had it Sardinia or the Balkans would be next.
Sparks wanted to lead men in combat, not follow behind and sit out battles in the safety of a command post, however essential his duties were as adjutant. He’d spent the whole summer in Sicily typing reports and arranging maps while men had been fighting and dying. So when he learned that a vacancy had opened up in the regiment for a company commander, he immediately approached Colonel Ankcorn.
“We’ve got a vacancy and I’d like to fill it.”
“No, you’re doing all right where you are.”
A few days later, Ankcorn stomped into the tented command post in an olive grove where Sparks was working. Ankcorn had watched with growing rage as E Company, from the regiment’s Second Battalion, had failed a live-fire test.
“All right, Sparks, you asked for it! You take over E Company. We’re going to run through those tests again tomorrow and they’d better pass.”
Sparks packed his personal belongings, quickly relieved E Company’s temporary commander, and then called the unit’s sergeants to an urgent meeting.