"Under no circumstances will anyone pull back," were Colonel Taylor's orders.
Early one morning during a break in the action at Gela, Sicily, l posed with Sergeant Carpino.
There would be many more fierce battles to fight in Sicily before we could go skinny-dipping in August 1943, when I did this cartoon for my mother.
For a while, it looked hopeless. Then, at 1930 hours, just in the nick of time, Cannon Company landed and, under the command of the amazingly accurate Captain O'Brien, our big guns started getting in some licks. Within minutes, Cannon Company had knocked out fifteen tanks, methodically destroying the backbone of the attack. We picked off soldiers jumping out of the flaming Panzers. The Nazi counterattack was stopped in its tracks, the Gela plain pock-marked with burning tanks and dead Wehrmacht.
One of the many dogfaces killed during our victorious assault at Gela was the deserter who'd been caught masquerading as a prisoner of war. We often talked about him afterward. Had he waited a couple more days to make his getaway, maybe he'd have missed Husky altogether and survived. As it turned out, he was another corpse we leapt over on that Sicilian beach, losing his life like many other more courageous men. It didn't matter a good goddamn whether he'd been more or less scared than the others. He was just as dead as the heroes.
Just Stand There
14~
Go like hell!"
Those were General George S. Patton's orders to the division commanders of the Seventh Army after our successful landing in Sicily. Patton was our commanding officer, but in name only. He was a brilliant tactician though he seemed more interested in headlines than in the men on his front lines. Once he was visiting a field hospital and saw a soldier with nothing apparently wrong with him, except the man was trembling and crying. Patton accused the dogface of cowardice and slapped him hard. As it turned out, the man had malaria. The incident was covered up, but eventually got back to the front lines. It was symbolic of why I didn't care for the flamboyant general.
Our fervent allegiance, on and off the battlefield, was to the First Division's commanding officer, General Terry de la Mesa Allen. A modest man, General Allen was loved by his soldiers because he really cared about them. What a helluva guy! He didn't give a damn about playing politics or being famous. Even when they tried to make a hero out of him-his photo would appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek-Terry said, "I'm no hero. Dead men made me a general." After the war, Terry Allen visited me in Hollywood and stayed at my home. John Ford called me up to ask if he could come over and meet the famous general. The three of us had a memorable dinner on my terrace next to the pool, smoking cigars and telling stories into the night.
According to General Allen, the primary attribute of the Big Red One, contributing more than any other factor to its combat success, was its sense of teamwork. That teamwork kicked in during the Sicilian campaign. We moved up the center of Sicily fast, taking every village we came upon. Niscemi, Barafranca, Enna, Villarosa, Alimena, Bonpietro, Petralia. It was exhausting work, with little time to sleep. Our nerves were frazzled, but we had to keep moving forward. Our sergeant wouldn't even let us piss because it was too dangerous to stop. With his binoculars, he'd continually be checking for any sign of snipers up ahead. Without taking his eyes away from the glasses, he'd pause and say, "Anybody wanna piss, do it right now."
As we chased them north toward Messina, the Italians and Germans put up a dogged defense, setting up ambushes, minefields and Sps, self-propelled guns. Sicilian roads were narrow and primitive. To make the going even rougher, the retreating enemy troops destroyed bridges. Our engineers would have to throw up trestles to bring up heavy equipment.
Somewhere in those Sicilian hills on the march inland, a dogface in our company stepped on a land mine. There was an explosion. We all hit the dirt, ready to return fire. When we realized it was a mine, everyone jumped up except for the dogface who'd been hit. His groin was splashed in blood. He was moaning.
"They forgot to undig that one," said the sergeant.
"Oh, no! No! No!" cried the doggie, clutching his crotch.
The possible loss of his cock had snapped his mind. He stared like a madman at the sky.
"Back off, everybody!" ordered the sergeant, as he looked around the ground on the hillside where the mine was planted. There might be others. Then he picked up something small and bloody.
"Found it," announced the sergeant casually. "One of your balls."
The dogface began to shake with terrible tremors. He looked at the sergeant with those crazed eyes.
A modest man, Terry Allen never was comfortable with the spotlight, though he got plenty of it.
"It's mine!" he said. "Give it back to me!"
The sergeant flung it over the side of the hill.
"You son of a bitch!" screamed the dogface.
"You think you're going to walk around with it wrapped up like a piece of dried sausage?" said the sergeant. "It's just one ball. God gave you two. You can still have kids."
"Are you sure!?"
"Feel."
The dogface groped his bloody crotch. Relief came over his face. He laughed hysterically. His eyes lost their mad glaze.
"I still got it!" he yelled. "I still got my cock!"
In one of those Sicilian villages, maybe Sperlinga, we were confronted by an enemy nest holed up in a monastery. We didn't know how many there were, how much ammunition they had, or if they were Germans, Italians, or both. I was part of the advance team sent in to check out the situation. They started firing at us as we zigzagged up to the monastery. There were a total of twenty-one SS, Wehrmacht, and Italians in the place. We caught them in a crossfire, killing about ten. The others surrendered quickly, aware that our invasion forces were about to sweep the area. Though they seemed to go on forever, skirmishes like that one lasted no more than five minutes. I was leading the line of prisoners back to our camp to be interrogated. My sergeant and a lieutenant brought up the rear. There was a gigantic German soldier marching right behind me, his big boots tramping on the back of mine. I stopped the entire procession and turned around to look up into that big Nazi's blue eyes.
"Listen, you sonofabitch!" I said. "Next time you step on my heels, I'll blow your goddamned head off! Understand?"
The big German didn't have the slightest reaction to my threat. No doubt my barking up into the big Nazi's blank face was more comical than menacing. The sergeant and lieutenant began laughing. We started off again, me taking bigger steps and the Nazi taking smaller ones. Our prisoners had no intention of escaping. Why die for the Fi hrer or the Duce when you could be a prisoner of war?
All around us were vineyards, orchards, farms, the sweet smell of alfalfa, wheat, and jasmine in the air. We ate our fill of almonds, grapes, apricots, and figs. Sicily was a magnificently fertile island. "What a fool man is!" I kept thinking to myself, unable to reconcile the death and destruction with all that beauty and abundance.
Our prisoners were guys like us, except they were fighting on the other side. They thought they were doing the right thing, too. The difference was they weren't united. The SS were snobs who looked with contempt upon the Wehrmacht. None of the Germans would even sit next to the Italians, their Axis allies. What a sad joke their alliance was!
After Mussolini drafted all the fighting-age Sicilians, the island was left to the care of old men, women, and children.
Once we captured an enemy soldier, we routinely went through his backpack. Among one of the Germans' personal items, I found letters from his mother. She'd asked him to send her shoelaces from Italy. We turned over anything like that to guys from Intelligence. Even the slightest bit of information could be useful. If machines that manufactured shoelaces weren't operating in Germany, it meant that other machinery wasn't working, maybe even entire industrial sectors.
The Sperlinga combat, with three dogfaces taking twenty-one of the enemy, looked pretty good on paper. A quick ceremony was organized, and Colonel Taylor awarded me and the others the Purple
Heart for the action. I was feeling rascally that day. While Taylor was pinning the goddamned medal on my dirty uniform, I told him, out of earshot of the outfit, "I don't want any medals, Colonel. We should give it to one of those Italians who was such a crack shot at Gela."
"They're dead. Shut up and take it," said Taylor, through smiling lips. "Or I'll pin it on your ass."
Psychology is an essential weapon in wartime. That's why we had trouble fighting against Italians. We didn't have the same venom for them as we did for Nazis. We hated Nazis. But in every outfit, there were Ameri cans of Italian descent. A few could even speak the language. We had one dogface from San Francisco who was intent on locating his Sicilian grandmother in a village near Caltinessetta. And, for Chrissakes, he did!
The Sicilians usually welcomed us. After an assault, when all enemy soldiers had been killed or driven away, the villagers-mostly women, children, and old men-brought out wine, pasta, fruit, and flowers. All the young men had been called up to fight for the fascists. Many were never coming back. It was hard to feel contempt for civilians, even though we knew that they'd been saluting Mussolini a few days before our invasion. Again, it was a question of survival.
One day, I was on another advance patrol when we passed a little farm behind a stone wall. The entire family was outside the place, mama, grandma, grandpa, and bambinos, chanting: "Mussolini, no good ... Mussolini, no good...."
We were paranoid, suspicious of everyone and everything, so we stopped to check out the farm, searching the house for weapons. There was nothing irregular. However, when we went through the barn behind the farmhouse, we found a young woman, about eighteen, hiding in one of the donkey stalls. She was small and shapely, with a pretty face, dark eyes, and black hair. She wore a salmon-pink blouse, a dusty skirt, and sandals. Her legs were unshaven. We dragged her outside kicking and screaming. One of our Italian-American dogfaces told her she had nothing to fear. She started yelling profanities at him.
"What's her problem?" I asked.
The dogface explained that she wanted us to kill every fascist in Sicily and burn Mussolini alive when we got to Rome.
"I think it's all bullshit," said our bilingual doggie.
The girl understood his drift and exploded with more epithets of hate. Suddenly she stopped and opened her blouse. Instead of a bra, she had soiled medical bandages covering her breasts.
"Was she hit in the chest?" asked the sergeant.
"No. She says a fascist raped her and bit off her nipples."
All of us froze, sickened at her plight.
"She's lying," said our translator.
"Why don't you buy her story?"
"I know these ass-kissers. When Mussolini was riding high, they were crazy about the bastard. Now that they figure he's licked, everybody hates him. We're supposed to believe that fascism never caught on in Sicily. The hell it didn't! She's a liar."
He ripped off one of her bandages. The girl screamed. We stared at the teeth marks on her mutilated breast. In place of a nipple, there was an ugly black-and-blue wound. We paled and stepped back from her. Our sergeant gently took the girl back to her family and gave her fresh bandages and antiseptics. We stood speechless.
"Okay," growled the disbelieving, shocked soldier, "so I was wrong." Ashamed of himself, he walked up to the girl in front of her family. "Signorina, per favore. Sono motto desolato, motto, motto. "
Messina had to be captured to stop the Germans from retreating to the Italian mainland. That port city, located on the northeast corner of Sicily, was also the golden fleece in a secret Anglo-American contest between Montgomery and Patton. Each wanted his army to take Messina first. We had no idea that we were players in this absurd game of death.
There were three ways into Messina: the first, along the northern coastal road from Palermo, a second, from Syracuse along the eastern coast of the island, and a third, inland by way of Randazzo on the slopes of Mount Etna. The Sixteenth drew the inland route, fighting alongside the Eighteenth, the Twenty-sixth, and the Thirty-ninth Infantry. First, we had to take Nicosia and Cerami, then finally Troina, a mountain village where the Nazis had held Montgomery's troops in check for a couple of weeks. We advanced through the Catanian plain, which we called "Panz- erland" because it was so well suited to tank movements. As we marched through its pastures and wheatfields, a Nazi biplane with a black cross on its tail suddenly swooped down over our heads. It flew so close to the ground that we could clearly see the pilot's face.
A lieutenant who'd just joined our outfit, anxious to kill any German he laid eyes on, raised his rifle and aimed at the pilot as the biplane swooped down for another look at us. Our sergeant threw himself on the lieutenant to stop him from firing. The biplane made a couple more passes over us, then flew off. The lieutenant was mad as hell. Why the hell couldn't he shoot the sonofabitch Nazi? Because if he had, explained the sergeant to the greenhorn, our troops would have been blown to smithereens by enough heavy artillery to make it look like the Fourth of July and Bastille Day all in one. The biplane was looking for tanks and artillery, not foot soldiers. We couldn't shoot it down because the pilot was in constant contact with their command post, his radio emitting tracking signals. If the plane went down, enemy artillery would target the last coordinates they'd received and-BA-BOOM-we'd go up in fire and smoke.
The going was tough around Nicosia, where the rugged terrain and steep slopes made progress painfully slow. Mules were needed to haul supplies. A request for the animals brought this message: "Thirty burros can be picked up at the Gangi City Hall at 1500 hours." The animals were delivered to the regiment's CP but the war had to be momentarily forgot ten when a group of impatient Sicilian farmers showed up to insist on immediate payment for their mules.
By the end of July, after twenty days of continuous movement, either attacking or dodging artillery, mortars, and rockets, our outfit craved a break in the action. But none was forthcoming. An assault on Cerami was planned for the next morning. We got word that the Thirty-ninth would lead the assault, giving the Sixteenth a much needed respite. We were delighted to be out of the picture for a few hours. However, Colonel Taylor sent out this warning to every one of his doggies: ". . . It would be folly to let a few victories lull us into a sense of security. As long as Sicily is not ours, we have cause for worry every instant."
The next morning, the electrifying news came through that Cerami had fallen without opposition. Whenever there'd been a tough battle, the Sixteenth was predestined to be on the front line. Now when there was no resistance, we were taking it easy. The true story of what happened in Cerami was one of the most amusing incidents of the campaign. One of our scouts, Private Wheeler of the Sixteenth's I Platoon, had been stuck near Cerami all night long, watching the village get blitzed by American artillery. Wheeler saw the Jetties evacuating, then got himself fixed up with chow from some locals. Before sunrise, he entered the town alone and was accosted by a solitary armed German who got left behind by the retreating First Panzer Grenadier Regiment. Wheeler disarmed the enemy soldier, and, with time on his hands, decided to take a shave. When the Thirtyninth marched into town, they found that one of the Sixteenth's very own had taken it single-handedly and was having a shave in the middle of the main street.
There was nothing funny about the battle for Troina. It was the toughest of the entire Sicilian campaign. Its capture would open the road to Messina. Our attack began on August 1, 1943. The Nazis were dug in for a do-or-die stand in the hills and ravines outside Troina. There was fierce fighting for six long days and nights. As soon as we pushed the enemy back a little, they counterattacked. We lost many men, killed and wounded, but finally prevailed. At noon on August 6, Troina fell. The enemy had been defeated, but the lengthy battle had allowed thousands of German troops to escape to the mainland to fight another day, leaving the Italians holding the bag.
With the way now clear, our regiment moved back and allowed the Forty-seventh Infantry, Ninth Division, to pass through on their way to Messi
na, where Patton organized a victorious entrance thirty-seven days after the landing at Gela. Patton must have been satisfied with himself, because he'd won his goddamned race with Montgomery. We didn't give a damn about parades. After having taken eighteen towns and capturing six thousand prisoners, our outfit was exhausted. We were first moved to Randazzo, in the neighborhood of Mount Etna, which soared eleven thousand feet above us. We got our first complete night of sleep under the beautiful Sicilian night sky, the crimson light from Etna reflected in the clouds overhead, the red-hot lava lapping beneath its rim.
Then we were moved to a camp in Licata, not far from Gela, where the bloody battle with the Hermann Goring Panzers had taken place. There we got some R and R before the old grind of training resumed. Some of the NCOs thought providing us with prostitutes would be "regenerative." They rounded up some of the ugliest women in Sicily, who, for a special war-inflated fee in lira, were ready to take on anyone in a tent set up for the occasion behind our camp. Later, we'd visit Palermo, where the local pimps had gone to work. They'd stretch themselves out in a hammock with four or five girls hanging around, some of them sisters or cousins. Soldiers lined up like they were waiting for a bowl of grub in a chow line. It was horrible. Regenerative, my ass!
You'll rarely see women in my war films because I rarely saw women during the war. There were never any women around during the battles, except for the scared females scurrying from one building to the next to take cover during an assault. Women who suddenly appeared after a campaign-plying the world's oldest trade-were nothing to write home about. For cryin' out loud, after having seen bloody, mutilated bodies strewn everywhere, you were in no goddamned mood for sex. Everybody's nerves were shot, our brains fried with horrible images of devastation. Was it any surprise soldiers developed plenty of sexual problems that lived with them the rest of their days?
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 15