A dazed German soldier, probably wounded, stumbled out. He staggered over the stone wall, heading toward the murky figures he could see under a copse of trees. His last words before being shot by a dozen riflemen were “Herr Lieutenant!”16
By now the Germans in Brolo were wide-awake and scrambling. Within seconds an enemy machine gun started firing, sending a stream of red tracers over the attackers’ heads and into the Tyrrhenian. The Americans began clambering up Monte Cipolla, until an enemy gunner spat at them from farther up the slope. “We pressed against the cliffside as bullets whined over our heads,” Bigart wrote. “A spate of rifle fire silenced the gun. We heard no further shooting until dawn.”
Sweating buckets in the oppressive heat, the raiders continued to climb, often reduced to all fours, hoisting themselves up the hill by grabbing shoots of grass and bushes.17 They could hear trucks being unloaded on the beach instead of at the base of the mountain and instinctively knew something was wrong. The railroad underpass had proved too narrow; a precious half hour had been squandered while Lieutenant Wagner and his engineers rigged a ramp.
It seemed to take forever to the out-of-shape correspondents, but finally they crested the summit. To their astonishment they discovered eight slumbering Germans sharing the same blanket, oblivious to the bedlam seven hundred feet below. They tied up the Germans and spent the predawn hours digging foxholes and trenches, then tried to catch some rest under a grove of olive trees.18 At daybreak they spotted forty to fifty enemy troops in the valley making a beeline toward Brolo, but a U.S. machine gunner forced them back into the woods. The Germans soon retaliated by killing fifteen GIs bravely stringing phone wire uphill. Grenadiers also slaughtered twenty-two of the twenty-four mules the Army had requisitioned to haul ammunition and food up the mountain.
Whitehead happened to overhear Bernard mutter something about the “absolute confusion” that plagues amphibious landings.19 No doubt Bernard peppered his remarks with a few well-chosen “horseshits,” which Whitehead kept out of his journal.
Around 0800 Bigart heard Bernard predict that before long German artillery and tanks would begin zeroing in. “I’m going to ask the Navy for point-blank fire on the town.” What Bernard didn’t know was that the Philadelphia and its escorts, worried about daylight attacks from the Luftwaffe, had already vacated the beachhead. It took two and a half hours before the worried Truscott, who’d just learned that his inland troops had been stymied in their advance toward Cape Orlando and Monte Cipolla, prevailed on the Philadelphia to get back into range to fire at enemy entrenchments.
The cruiser’s guns kept the Germans at bay for a while. But again the ship turned back toward Palermo Harbor. By late morning the raiders’ luck had run out. At 11:40, Bigart spotted a big enemy gun being mounted in an orchard east of town. Seventy minutes later, the reporters could see German soldiers hustling at the foot of the mountain, reconnoitering to counterattack. Mortar fire began plastering the hill.
“From a jutting crag atop the mountain we saw two Tiger tanks creep down the single street of Brolo,” Bigart wrote the next day. “Almost simultaneously a Tiger and a Mark IV tank crawled out from behind a bend in the coastal road west of our position. They looked like harmless little bugs as they scurried for the cover of a closer bend.
“Lying snug in a tuft of red-top hay, we felt no fear. We were 700 feet above the road, and height gives a deceptive feeling of confidence. We had yet to learn that the Germans could lift a storm of shrapnel to our ledge, ripping some of us to shreds before the day was gone.”20
Stuffing his last tobacco into a pipe, Bernard again radioed Truscott for help. The Third Division head ordered the Philadelphia to resume its barrage; for forty brief minutes it did, but repeated Focke-Wulf attacks sent it hightailing west. “We’ll catch hell this afternoon,” Bernard solemnly predicted.21
They did. German mortar, artillery, and tank shells killed and wounded dozens, triggered fires that destroyed the hastily laid telephone wires, and cut off Bernard’s communications down below with both his troops and naval gunfire observers.
“The sun beat mercilessly on our summit bivouac,” Bigart wrote. “Dripping perspiration, we hacked slit trenches in the rocky soil beneath the almond trees.”22 They soon began running out of water, food, and ammunition. The reporters were so parched, they stood in line to stick their canteens in a slimy ditch “alive with wrigglers,” Treanor reported.23 But German artillery soon zeroed in on the spring, eliminating the raiders’ only water source.24
At around four o’clock a cheer went up and down the mountain as seven American A-36 fighter-bombers zoomed over. But poorly directed pilots bombed Bernard’s command post by accident, scattering GIs into their slit trenches and inflicting nineteen horrific casualties. Then, compounding their woes, the friendly planes bombed the commandoes’ position farther down the hill, immobilizing their last four howitzers. A medic whose arm had been mangled in the air attack tried to amputate it with a pocketknife. The Germans began moving snipers and machine gunners up the slope; it looked like the enemy would storm the crest at any instant.25
His hands tied, Truscott ordered a reprise attack from the Philadelphia, which this time had to fight off a swarm of Focke-Wulfs as it fired a thousand shells in a fifteen-minute fusillade. Once the shelling stopped, Bernard sent word for the few survivors down below to join the men at the summit for what he felt sure would be their last stand. A few of Bernard’s valley charges chose a different route, jumping into the Tyrrhenian and thrashing toward Palermo.
Enemy sharpshooters got close enough to knock out Bernard’s only functioning radio; now the men of the Second Battalion were completely cut off and surrounded. Resigned to their fate, they dug deeper trenches, with Bigart, Treanor, and Whitehead furiously scraping, too. Bernard fortified his position by collapsing his rear and flank guards into a tiny perimeter. Most men by then were out of bullets. In toto, they had fewer than two dozen mortar shells.
Into the night and early morning, they braced themselves for the attack that would obliterate them. It never came.26
At first light they were startled to see American trucks and jeeps heading up the coast road. A few minutes later, an Army runner who’d pounded up the mountain informed Bernard, between pants, that the enemy had abandoned Brolo and was retreating toward Messina. Sure enough: Bernard trained his binoculars west and could see forward elements of the 30th Division coming to relieve him. Miraculously, the Second Battalion had again beaten the odds.
So had Bigart and the other correspondents, all of whom were lucky to be alive. “Well, we took a licking,” Bernard told Bigart as they started down the hill. “We put the cork in the bottle but we couldn’t hold it in.”27
At about 0800, Bernard, his exhausted men, and the reporters gingerly worked their way “past the torn bodies of American and German dead,” Bigart wrote. They reached the valley in time to see Patton’s command jeep, its three silver-starred pennants streaming, shriek to a halt in front of a Messina road sign. With Patton was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Republican whose bristly prewar isolationism had made him a darling of the America First movement.
Patton’s public relations officers, the same execs who, at their boss’ insistence, had arranged for the reporters to go on the Brolo raid, now contrived a photo opportunity. Without deigning to leave his vehicle, the general posed for pictures with Bernard. Patton stood in the back of the jeep, imperiously staring down at his valiant lieutenant colonel, while the telltale arrow in the backdrop pointed toward Messina. The picture ran in the Herald Tribune and scores—probably hundreds—of other newspapers back home.
With photographers, reporters, and a U.S. senator present, Patton felt obliged to make a little speech. “Only American soldiers can climb mountains like those,” he effused, dramatically gesturing toward Cipolla with his swagger stick. Patton was full of it, of course. The Germans had been all over the mountain for months and could easily have recaptured it.
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sp; Patton’s insistence on l’audace had triggered nearly 180 casualties—with little to show for them. Don Whitehead, like Bigart, was standing a few feet away from the general; he later wrote in his diary, “The whole tableau sickened me.”28
Whitehead wasn’t alone. Omar Bradley, a commander not prone to hyperbole, called Brolo a “complete fiasco.”29 The Germans suffered losses comparable to those of the Americans, but their line was never breached. Nor was the enemy escape route blocked or even impeded, although the raid may have accelerated their retreat. But the Germans weren’t that harried; a few miles east of Brolo, they dynamited a hunk of the coastal road, making it tougher for Patton’s men to pursue them.30
Bigart’s lede, batted out in Brolo on no sleep, with Seventh Army tanks and trucks grinding past, was a thing of beauty, vivid and crisp without being maudlin.
“A tough and gallant band of Americans was relieved at 8 o’clock this morning on the thorny summit of Monte Cipolla, where it had made a last-ditch stand against encirclement and annihilation by the 15th German Panzer Division.”31
Square that with the curious piece filed from afar by Hal Boyle that same day. Boyle was in a pack of reporters struggling to keep up with Patton’s advance elements as they bulled their way up the coast. The story that Boyle got on the Brolo raid, undoubtedly spoon-fed by Patton’s PROs, bore little resemblance to the terrifying reality experienced by his friends Whitehead, Bigart, and Treanor. THREE GERMAN TANK ATTACKS BEATEN OFF IN YANK LANDING was the way the Stars and Stripes chose to flag Boyle’s article. In Boyle’s telling, “the Allied air forces bombed the German positions in a well-coordinated effort with the navy to help [the raiders] in every way.”32 Whatever puny air cover the raiders had received was hardly “well coordinated,” especially since most of the ordnance fell on them, not the enemy. Bernard’s men, moreover, might not have been inclined to characterize the Navy’s role as helping them “in every way.”
A staff officer also had the temerity to tell Boyle that the August 7 Agata–San Fratello raid had sparked a “collapse” in the enemy line—a spurious account to which Lucian Truscott and Omar Bradley would have taken strong exception.
Boyle did, however, finish with an accurate statement: “For many of these men it was their third landing on enemy shores. They smashed ashore to establish African beachheads last November and repeated their success last month on the southern coast of Sicily.” But his piece ended with more unwitting fiction: “This second overnight sortie behind entrenched enemy positions illustrated anew the continuing close cooperation between the navy and army in reducing Germany’s last shrinking rampart in the mountainous northeast corner of this island.”33
HOMER BIGART STAYED IN THE shrinking rampart long enough to pick up another story of an American soldier cheating death. Two days after tempting fate on the summit of Monte Cipolla, Bigart filed a piece about the wild misadventures of Second Battalion Staff Sergeant Odell Tedrow of Rockport, Illinois.
Tedrow was a member of the battalion’s medical detachment, Bigart noted in an article that was picked up all over the country. The sergeant’s job upon hitting the beach in the early morning hours of August 10 was to help set up a field hospital near the railroad culvert. “At dawn, when the shooting began,” Bigart wrote, “[Tedrow] set out with a stretcher party in search of wounded men.”
Communications and picket lines were so slipshod that Tedrow and five other stretcher-bearers were under the impression that Brolo was in friendly hands. It wasn’t. The six Americans stared, mouths agape, as they rounded a bend and came upon two swastika-bedecked German staff cars parked in front of a stone residence. Shots rang out; two of Tedrow’s cohorts were hit; the other three threw their hands up to surrender. Tedrow dove between the cars and jumped into the unoccupied house.
Bigart must have realized as he interviewed Tedrow that he had a spectacular story; Homer gave it a nimble simplicity that Hemingway might have admired.
“Tedrow found himself in the kitchen. A door leading to the interior part of the house was locked and he looked about frantically for some place to hide. There was only the big oven. Tedrow got down on his hands and knees and crawled into it.”
German soldiers barged into the house looking for him. Tedrow wedged himself deeper into the oven and held his breath. One German yelled, in English, “American swine!”
A few moments later, Tedrow heard car doors slam and glimpsed polished boots crossing the kitchen floor. It was an enemy colonel ordering the soldiers out of his headquarters.
Tedrow prayed that the colonel and his staff wouldn’t want to bake anything for breakfast. Instead of preparing food, they were debating the merits of the German counterattack in and around Brolo.
It was stifling hot in the oven; soon Tedrow had swallowed all the water in his canteen. “A sharp prong was digging into his back,” Bigart wrote. “He stood the agony as long as he could and finally, when the room emptied for a moment, he managed to squirm around and blunt the prong with his knife.”
As the Philadelphia blasted away at various points, Tedrow felt the reverberations. He also heard the American A-36s drop their bombs on Monte Cipolla. The dwelling was made of impenetrable stone that was vulnerable only to a direct hit, Bigart pointed out.
Tedrow heard the Germans chuckle about the Americans’ vulnerability. The Germans had driven the Americans out of the valley and were again directly linked to their front units five miles ahead. Tedrow could sense they were licking their chops about the prospect of reclaiming Cipolla.
At ten o’clock that evening, though, a motorcycle courier roared up with bad news: The Germans’ inland line southwest of Brolo had been violated; a full-scale retreat to Messina was under way. Tedrow worried that the colonel would want to burn papers in the oven before heading east, but the sergeant’s luck held. Bigart’s close again had a Hemingwayesque feel: “The staff cars roared away. A sudden wave of fatigue overcame Tedrow and he slept until dawn. When he awoke American jeeps were passing the house. He emerged and walked stiffly to the road.
“In an orchard down the hill wounded men were moaning softly. They were his comrades, lying on cots beneath the trees.”34
SICILY CONSIGNED A LOT OF men to cots. If North Africa was, as Hal Boyle called it, a lipless kiss, then Sicily was a joyless embrace, that moment when romantic illusion gives way to cold reality. The Brolo raid that came within a whisker of abject disaster was the Sicilian campaign in microcosm: so sloppily planned that it led to inevitable fratricide, but fought nonetheless with rousing valor.
When Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower visited Sicily three days into the invasion, he confidently informed his diary that the island would belong to the Allies inside two weeks. It ended up taking two and a half times that long for troops to go from Gela, Licata, Pachino, Cassibile, and other beaches in Sicily’s south to its northeast crook: an area about the length of Vermont. For almost the entire campaign, German and Italian troops fought with one eye trained on the rear: Their strategy was to effect a steady retreat to Messina, where ferryboats awaited to transport them across the strait. To be sure, Axis troops dug in and fought hard. But the truth is undeniable: Had the Allied offensive been better coordinated, enemy troops not only would have been vanquished sooner, but also captured en masse instead of 120,000 of them slipping across to the mainland.
Sicily is where the rivalry between Montgomery and Patton became so toxic that it began costing men their lives. Patton had disquieting moments throughout the war, but Sicily is where he fell apart, where his behavior became an embarrassing albatross to Eisenhower. Ironically, it was in Sicily where Patton suffered the sort of nervous collapse he was so quick to scorn in others. It cost him his command and nearly cost him the rest of the war.
THE LARGER QUESTION, OF COURSE, is should Sicily have been invaded at all? Did Churchill and Roosevelt at Casablanca double down on a futile Mediterranean wager?
Just as he had in Operation Torch, George Marshall sought to rebut Churchi
ll’s argument that the Mediterranean offensive should be expanded to include the conquest of Sicily, code-named Operation Husky. Roosevelt was again forced to intervene, correctly overruling Marshall to side with the Brits. FDR’s proviso, however, was to delay a go-ahead on the next Mediterranean push, a possible invasion of Italy’s mainland, until the Allies sized up the enemy response in Sicily. The holdup irked Churchill, who’d been eyeing a bold march against Rome since America entered the war.
Churchill’s hyperbole aside, there were compelling reasons for the Allies to control Sicily, chief among them the three dozen airstrips that the Germans had scattered throughout the island. Sicily also had a series of natural harbors that could be converted into naval bases, enabling the Royal and American navies to interdict enemy sea-lanes.
Launched during the second week of July 1943, Husky was an even more elaborate amphibious exercise than Torch had been nine months earlier. An armada of 2,600 U.S. and British navy ships left from ports in North Africa, England, and the U.S. Once more orchestrating the seaborne movements on the American side was Admiral Kent Hewitt, Walter Cronkite and Hal Boyle’s favorite from the Torch convoy. Again, Hewitt delivered a logistical marvel, helping to land 160,000 Allied troops after the fiercest naval bombardment to that point in history on July 9 and 10. Hewitt was once more forced to host George Patton on his flagship, this time the USS Monrovia, a beefed-up troop transport.35
The Allies appointed Sir Harold Alexander, Churchill’s darling, as overall coordinator of Sicilian ground forces, working under Eisenhower. Alexander was less hostile to Americans than his subordinate Montgomery, but still disdainful of the GIs’ performance in Tunisia. Sir Harold ordered Montgomery and the Eighth to advance up rugged terrain on the eastern side of the island, which he knew from intelligence reports was defended by hardened Panzer units. Patton and the Seventh were assigned the “easier” path through Sicily’s central and western hills against predominantly Italian troops. As the Brits surged toward Messina, Patton’s primary job was to protect Montgomery’s left flank.
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