by Alex Kershaw
“What’s your problem?” asked Sparks.
“We don’t like our commanding officer,” said one man. “We don’t think he’s competent.”
“You have a new one now and I assure you I’m competent. We’re going to go through this test again and we’re going to pass or some of you are going to be privates.”
The sergeants knew Sparks was not one to make idle threats. Before leaving the States, he had been placed in charge of a special J Company (J for “Jailbird”) comprising men who had gone AWOL. Through his “gentle persuasion” and with the help of several tough sergeants, including a former prizefighter, he had quickly prepared them for combat, earning a fearsome reputation in the regiment in the process. “If anyone gave me a problem,” he recalled, “I had a sergeant beat up on them. I don’t think that was legal, but that’s the way we did it.”
A reinvigorated E Company passed the test with high marks, and Sparks found himself officially assigned as the commander of E Company. He had not wanted war, but neither had he wanted to sit on the sidelines. Since his days as a teenager at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, he had worked hard to become an infantry officer. Combat was what he had been trained for. There was no doubt he would now experience it.
From the day he took control of E Company, Sparks was in his element. He loved being a rifle company commander. He had a keen memory and quickly learned the name of every soldier in his company, all 192. He did not make windy speeches or give lectures like some officers. Instead, he got to know his men by asking them direct questions and quizzing them about their families and where they were from. There was Jack Turner, a popular medic from Lamar, Colorado, one of the original members of E Company when it had been a National Guard unit based in his hometown. Other stalwarts included the twenty-four-year-old Montana-born journalist Jack Hallowell, who belonged to one of Sparks’s three mortar squads. With these men and the rest of his company, Sparks quickly enjoyed what he would later describe as a wonderful relationship.
He now had three rifle platoons of forty men each under his command, most of them battle-tested, plus a heavy-weapons platoon that contained two machine-gun squads and three 60mm mortar squads that could fire shells three times the weight of hand grenades more than a mile. He knew that in combat he would have to deploy the machine guns in pairs so their fields of fire covered as much of his front as possible. Two rifle platoons would be engaged at any one time, while the third rotated in reserve, hence the term “two up and one back” used to describe a company’s basic triangle organization and that of battalions, regiments, divisions, and corps.
With his new responsibilities came new worries. The life expectancy of company commanders in the infantry was almost as short as that of the fresh-faced lieutenants who led his three rifle platoons—ninety days, if he was lucky.
BAGHERIA, SICILY, AUGUST 25, 1943
THE SUN BLAZED with the kind of intensity Sparks had experienced during summers spent wandering the Arizona desert, shotgun under his arm, alert for rattlesnakes and prey. In an olive grove, he stood with hundreds of other young officers in the shade of gnarled trees. The men around him smiled, laughed, and clapped wildly as they listened to General George Patton.
Before the invasion, Patton had worried about the green National Guard Thunderbirds. Were they up for the fight? Would they cut and run when the first Panzers started to clank their way? Now he could not have been more pleased with the men, drawn mostly from Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado, and their incisive, hard-charging division commander, Troy Middleton. They had confounded all his fears. They had fought like wily veterans from day one.
“The Forty-fifth Infantry Division is one of the best,” said Patton, “if not the best division that the American Army has ever produced.”
Patton stressed that the Thunderbirds still confronted a skilled and determined enemy.
“But you, as Americans,” added Patton, “are his superior. When you meet him, as you will some day on the plains of Europe, you may expect him to throw large masses of armor at you. He will seek to drive through your center with a point of armor but, by God, this point will not get through!”
Patton turned sentimental.
“I love every bone in your heads,” he declared, “but be very careful. Do not go to sleep, or someone’s liable to slip up behind you and hit you over the head with a sock full of shit, and that’s a hell of an embarrassing way in which to die!”
A few days later, Sparks was surprised to learn that Patton, who had given such a rousing performance in the olive grove, would no longer lead the Thunderbirds in combat. In fact, the entire Seventh Army was being broken up, the Thunderbirds were being transferred to the Fifth Army, and Patton himself was being demoted to the role of military governor of Sicily.
Patton had won the island. Now he could keep it, indefinitely, confined to a grand old villa, the Palermo Palace, where he would carry out administrative duties, like some disgraced Roman senator, for the foreseeable future. He had only himself to blame for his fall from grace. In two different hospitals that July, he had slapped and verbally abused shell-shocked casualties, to the outrage of medical staff. When Omar Bradley had read a report on the incidents, though “sickened and soured” by it, he had chosen not to forward the career-ending dossier to higher-ups. Others had not been so diplomatic, passing on information to several reporters who threatened to go public if Patton was not sacked.
“This would be a nasty story to get out,” reporter Quentin Reynolds from Collier’s warned Eisenhower. “Goebbels could do a lot with it. Every mother in America would think that her son was being subjected to this sort of treatment.”
“I know,” replied a weary Eisenhower. “I know.”
Patton was forced to make groveling apologies to both of his victims and his superiors. A deeply dismayed Eisenhower confided to an aide: “George is one of the best generals I have, but he’s like a time bomb. You can never be sure when he’s going to go off. All you can be sure of is that it will probably be at the wrong place at the wrong time.” To his credit, Eisenhower refused to fire the man who was, arguably, his finest general. There was still a long way to go before the Allies reached Berlin. One day he might need him.
A humiliated Patton sank quickly into depression and despair, appearing to one fellow general “very old and desiccated.” He was also increasingly paranoid, believing the envious British cousins had somehow been out to get him. “Sometimes I think there is a deliberate campaign to hurt me,” he wrote in his diary. A few days later, he added: “One British general said, ‘George is such a pushing fellow that if we don’t stop him he will have Monty surrounded.’ I know I can outfight the little fart anytime.”
Eisenhower had saved him from the shame of returning to the United States in disgrace. But would he ever give him the opportunity to outfight Montgomery with an army again?
TERMINI IMERESE, SICILY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1943
NEPTUNE WAS ANGRY. For several days a violent storm had buffeted the scores of ships in the harbor, hampering loading and causing much concern among senior officers gathered around map tables in the 45th Division’s headquarters. The high seas had abated somewhat but gale force winds persisted as Sparks waited to board a boat in Termini Imerese. A long column of waterproofed vehicles wound back and forth through the mountains, like a dusty snake, toward the port and its rows of landing craft. He and his men were bound for the port of Salerno, south of Naples. For the first time, he was heading into combat, not as an adjutant armed with a typewriter, but as a young leader of two hundred men.
CHAPTER FIVE
MOUNTAIN COUNTRY
Three Thunderbirds using a cave for protection from enemy shelling, December 27, 1943, near Venafro, Italy. [National Archives]
USS ANCON, OFF THE COAST OF ITALY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1943
GENERAL MARK CLARK SAT down behind a desk in the spacious stateroom. H-hour for planned landings in mainland Italy, Operation Avalanche, was just a few hours away. Forty-seven-ye
ar-old Clark could not hide his nerves. Indeed, he looked anxious, his handsome face gaunt. Before him were gathered several wily and skeptical correspondents whom he had just briefed on Avalanche. To his most generous critics, Clark was a tenacious and even capable commander. But to others, such as the legendary “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS, he was vain, superficial, and worst of all, ineffectual. Churchill affectionately called him his “American Eagle” because of the prominence of his aquiline nose, which Clark always insisted should be photographed from the most flattering angle. Among the press corps, because of such gross egotism, he was widely derided and in many cases truly loathed.
Known as Wayne to his friends, Clark had graduated almost bottom of his class at West Point and languished as a captain for sixteen years before his friendship with Eisenhower—they had shared a house in England—saw him become the youngest lieutenant general in U.S. Army history. Now Clark faced the greatest challenge of his career—securing a foothold on mainland Italy. Unlike in Sicily, the Germans would do everything in their power to throw the Allies back into the sea, and they stood every chance of doing so. Only three Allied divisions from Clark’s Fifth Army were scheduled to land at Salerno on D-day, due to shortages in landing craft.
“So what do you think of my plan, gentlemen?” Clark asked.
“Daring,” replied forty-one-year-old Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s.
“My God, it is, isn’t it!” exclaimed Clark. “I guess it’s the most daring plan of the war. We’re spitting into the lion’s mouth and we know it.”
Another correspondent asked: “Is it perhaps too daring, sir?”
“You’ve got to remember we’ve been working on invasion plans for months,” replied Clark. “I can assure you the Fifth Army is ready.”
“So you hope to achieve surprise, sir, by the sheer daring of the plan?”
“With a few breaks we’ll pull it off.”
“Have you any serious reservations, sir?”
“None.”
The same could not be said of other senior generals, namely Bernard Montgomery, who decried the lack of a carefully crafted master plan for the invasion of mainland Italy and believed the gamble of landing just three divisions at Salerno was ill-advised. As far as he was concerned, little had been learned from Sicily, where infighting among the Allies (much of which he had caused) and the failure to cut off the Germans in retreat had left some senior strategists wondering if the battle for the island had cost more than it gained.
Montgomery also believed Clark’s invasion plans depended too much on the naïve belief that a secretly negotiated surrender by the Italians would act in the Allies’ favor. The Germans had long suspected that the Italians would throw in the towel, he maintained, and had made elaborate plans to quickly seize control of the country. He was right. The news of the Italian capitulation on September 8, the day of Clark’s press conference, did nothing to impair the Germans’ ability to defend Italy. For several weeks, Erwin Rommel had gathered eight German divisions and quickly disarmed Italian troops. Meanwhile, the commander of German troops in southern Italy, Kesselring, seized key defenses along the western coast and promptly instructed six experienced divisions, including Panzer forces, to prepare for an invasion in the Salerno area.
Mark Clark had also told correspondents that the invasion beaches would be lightly defended. He had decided not to precede the landings with bombardment, in order to maintain the element of surprise. But when the first wave of troops from the green 36th Infantry Division, a Texas National Guard unit, approached Salerno early on September 9, the day after Clark’s press conference, they were stunned to find heavily armed Germans waiting in force.
In propaganda leaflets dropped on the Allies before the invasion, the Germans had warned that Salerno would be a death trap, and so it proved that morning. The air was soon thick with machine-gun bullets stitching their way across soft sands toward hastily beached boats. Men vainly tried to dig foxholes in the shallows, others froze in the face of the intense fire, none had a safe place to run back to, just the bullet-spattered sea. More than two hundred men from the 36th Division were killed as they came ashore, many mown down before they got off their landing craft. Two British divisions, the 46th and the 56th, also met fierce resistance on their assigned beaches farther north. The Germans were lying in wait, so well-informed by intelligence sources that they had marked the Fifth Army’s Green, Red, and Yellow landing beaches on their maps. Forced to concentrate their forces, the British were unable to link up with the traumatized Texans to the south. Kesselring sent a message to his commanders: “The invading enemy … must be completely annihilated and, in addition, thrown into the sea.… British and Americans must realize that they are hopelessly lost against the concentrated German might.”
By sundown on D-day, more than fifty thousand Allies were ashore and had pushed inland as much as eight miles, but a ten-mile gap lay open between the British and the Americans, who were both badly in need of reinforcement. Only continuous supporting fire from naval batteries and great courage saved the 36th Division from being wiped out on its first day in battle. In the Temple of Neptune near Paestum, built by the Greeks in 470 B.C., beneath thirty-six ornate Doric columns that had survived the Allied shelling, medics rushed from litter to litter, desperately trying to keep at least some of their fellow Texans alive.
The Allies were ashore but only just. On September 13, Mark Clark found himself trying desperately to claw his way out of the jaws of defeat. Relief was a long way off: Montgomery’s Eighth Army had landed a hundred miles farther south, at the toe of Italy, and would take several more days to link up. The Germans commanded all the high ground and were massing tanks and striking at weak points all along the Allied lines. Clark’s gamble had been daring indeed, but it had failed. There had been no element of surprise. “The Germans actually needed only a pair of average magnitude binoculars,” recalled one disgusted soldier, “to spot the approaching Allied convoys far out to sea.”
What Churchill feared most—another Galliopli—looked more and more probable. The man who had called loudest and longest for the invasion of Italy, much to American strategists’ dismay, spent that “Black Monday” of September 13 with President Roosevelt at his Hyde Park estate. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were understandably perturbed by early reports of the invasion. It was all chillingly similar to the Sulva Bay landing in the Gallipoli campaign, when troops landed successfully but then failed to advance inland.
At his headquarters, Mark Clark conferred with his corps and division commanders. The reports were dire: Everywhere, the push inland had ground to a halt. In some sectors, announced VI Corps commander General Ernest Dawley, the Germans had broken through. “What are you doing about it?” asked Clark. “What can you do?”
“Nothing,” replied Dawley. “I have no reserves. All I’ve got is a prayer.”
Kesselring had the upper hand. If he threw all his reserves at the Allies, he would prevail. Clark hastily tried to plug his lines, calling on every Allied soldier he could muster. When two-star general Troy Middleton, leading the Thunderbird Division, learned that withdrawal might be an option, he sent a curt message to his superiors: “Put food and ammunition behind the 45th. We are going to stay here.”
Across the beachhead, the Allies prepared defenses and waited for the Germans to attack. All through September 14, Kesselring’s forces did so. Crucially, Allied artillery was massed in critical areas, with gun crews firing as many as ten rounds per minute from hundreds of 105mm howitzers, timing the fire so that shells landed every couple of seconds where the Germans tried hardest to break through. This “fire on time” coordination proved devastatingly effective, so much so that Kesselring himself wondered whether the Americans had devised a repeat-loading artillery piece that fired shell after shell like a giant machine gun.
In the face of massive naval and land-based artillery fire, the German attacks broke down and by nightfall on September 14 had stalled. Kesselring had
failed to exploit his initial advantage, not realizing how weak the Fifth Army had been. A relieved Clark contacted Eisenhower. “We are in good shape now. We are here to stay.… We have made mistakes and we have learned the hard way, but we will improve every day and I am sure we will not disappoint you.”
On September 16, the American and British forces finally linked up. The critical gap was closed. Kesselring ordered his divisions to pull back to higher ground to fight another day. Everything Eighth Army commander Montgomery had predicted would go wrong had indeed done so. That same day, forward patrols of the Eighth Army made contact with the battered Fifth. A smug Montgomery told Collier’s reporter Quentin Reynolds: “We have landed on the enemy mainland. Now we are really at grips with him. It has just begun.”
PAESTUM, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1943
THEY LOOKED AT him for the first time as their leader, about to enter combat. Their destination was a beach four miles north of the seaside town of Paestum, some forty miles south of Naples. The regiment’s Second Battalion, including Sparks’s E Company, had been held back in floating reserve during the height of the fighting at Salerno. Now, on September 18, it was ordered to land and then press north toward Naples, the Allies’ next major objective.
“You know the drill,” said Sparks. “Now it’s up to us. See you on the beach.”
Once again, Sparks had missed the action. He had yet to lead men in battle and was understandably nervous as he headed toward the front for the first time as a company commander. But one of the many things he had learned from Colonel Ankcorn in Sicily was that he should always appear calm and collected. Indeed, good leaders were often good actors, able to convince their men if not themselves that they would somehow prevail. “The truth of the matter was I was scared shitless but my men didn’t know it,” Sparks later confessed. “Sometimes you just have to take care of business. Just do it, get through it. That’s all.”