CHAPTER THREE
SICILY
(LEFT) Captured Italian troops under guard, Sicily, July 1943. [National Archives] (RIGHT) Seventh Army commander George Patton (pointing) in Gela, Sicily, July 11, 1943. [National Archives]
NEAR HIS HEADQUARTERS IN MALTA, fifty-three-year-old General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied forces in the Mediterranean, stood rubbing several lucky coins together and chain-smoking as he counted planes carrying paratroopers bound for Sicily. He had never led a more vital mission. He knew only too well that the next few hours would decide his fate and place in history. Nothing so vast, entailing so many troops, had been attempted before. Italy had in fact never been invaded successfully from the south. As Napoleon had quipped, given that the country was shaped like a boot, the best way to occupy it was not to enter by its toe.
Operation Husky was an ambitious plan indeed. In Eisenhower’s war room at his Lascaris HQ in Malta later that evening, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder commented: “Hannibal had the sense to come in with his elephants over the Alps.” And even if the landings succeeded, colossal challenges remained. Could the Allies prevail in Italy and then push on to the very heart of the Third Reich? Could the young citizen soldiers, drawn from “the ways of peace,” as President Roosevelt put it, defeat the superbly armed and fanatical forces of fascism?
At ten that night, Eisenhower found time to write a few lines to his wife back in the States: “Men do anything to keep from going slightly mad. Walk, talk, try to work, smoke (all the time)—anything to push the minutes along.… Everything we could think of to do has been done; the troops are fit; everybody is doing his best. The answer is in the lap of the gods.”
In Rome, Eisenhower’s opposite number, fifty-eight-year-old Albert Kesselring, overall German commander in the Mediterranean, also spent that evening in his headquarters. He had not fallen for an ingenious counterintelligence operation, code-named Mincemeat, aimed at convincing the Germans that the Allies were going to land elsewhere. He had not chosen to place his faith in any divine intervention. Instead, he was now putting final touches to carefully laid plans to destroy Eisenhower’s armies once they were ashore.
Unlike Eisenhower, Kesselring was an undisputed master of war and had already achieved near-perfect coordination between the nationalities and forces under his command. Highly popular with his men, who had nicknamed him Uncle Albert (the Allies called him Smiling Albert because he always seemed to be grinning with confidence in photos), he had served on the Eastern and Western fronts in World War I before setting up the Luftwaffe, serving as its chief of staff until 1938. He had then led the Luftwaffe with great success during the invasions of Poland, France, and Russia.
Kesselring had for some time expected the Allies to invade Sicily, figuring they would chose to do so because they could enjoy fighter cover from air bases in Tunisia and Malta. So he had strengthened the four mobile and the six coast-based Italian divisions on the island with two German ones, the Fifteenth Panzergrenadier and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division. He knew these forces could not stop a large-scale landing, but by careful deployment of his formidable Panzer tanks he intended to roll over the Allies as soon as they tried to break out of their beachhead.
ABOARD THE USS Monrovia, fifty-seven-year-old General George Patton, commander of the U.S. Seventh Army, watched the swelling waters, unable to quell his anxiety. A full gale was blowing. The invasion appeared cursed by the Boreas, the north wind so prevalent in Greek myth, and now so very real as it whistled south from the Alps, turning the Mediterranean into a menace every bit as unforgiving as Hitler’s best troops.
“George, this shows every sign of becoming more intense,” said fifty-seven-year-old Admiral Hewitt, commander of the invasion fleet. “I think I’ll signal [Eisenhower] to delay the landings.”
“Wait a minute, Henry,” said Patton. “Have you spoken to Steere?”
Steere was a meteorologist who had proved comfortingly accurate in his predictions in the past.
“Yes.”
“Did he say how long this goddamn storm will last?”
“He thinks it will calm down by D-day.”
Steere was soon standing in front of Patton, who had nicknamed him “Houdini.”
“This is a mistral, sir, violent but abrupt. I would say it will moderate by twenty-two hundred, and the weather will be fine by H-hour, General.”
“It had better.”
ABOARD A blacked-out ship a few miles across the storm-whipped waters, Felix Sparks also waited for H-hour to arrive. The winds were still high. Thunderbirds struggled to stand upright as the ship rocked up and down in the bucking waves. An inch of vomit covered some decks. The convoy nearing Sicily comprised hundreds of boats, yet so strict was the blackout that he could not see a single speck of light in any direction.
Sparks watched as the 157th Infantry Regiment vessels broke away from the armada and began to steam toward their assigned positions off the southern shore of Sicily. It was 9:45 P.M. There were flashes of light on the horizon. The Allies were bombing targets on the Camerina plain, which stretched several miles inland from the Seventh Army’s landing beaches that lay north and south of the fishing village of Scoglitti. Yellow flames stabbed upward and faded in the night sky. At times, war could look unforgettably beautiful.
At 10:30 p.m., HMS Seraph, a British submarine acting as a beacon, began to signal the flotilla carrying Sparks’s regiment. It was time to take up a position seven miles from the coast. Seraph had played a crucial role in Operation Mincemeat, dropping off the Spanish coast that spring a corpse clothed in a Royal Marine uniform and bearing false intelligence. Now her captain stood on the bridge, looking in awe through his night glasses at the Allied armada. “The English language needs a new descriptive noun to replace the hackneyed word ‘armada,’ ” he would later reflect. “After all, the original Invincible Spanish Armada could boast only 129 sizable ships and a scattering of small fry.” The armada then gathering off the southern shores of Sicily had twenty times as many ships and was carrying almost two hundred thousand men.
NO BRITON UNDERSTOOD the enormity of events that evening better than Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had written lyrically about the Spanish Armada and every other critical juncture in his nation’s history. It was Churchill who had pushed longest and hardest for the imminent invasion as the best way to tie up German forces until the Second Front, impatiently demanded by Stalin, could be opened up in France.
At his country retreat, Chequers, in England the sixty-nine-year-old warlord could not sleep, so great was the strain. His immensely supportive wife, Clementine, was too tired to stay up through the night, so she had asked her daughter-in-law, Pamela, to keep the restless British wartime leader company. Pamela and Churchill passed the time playing bezique, one of Churchill’s favorite card games. But no matter how many times he cut and shuffled the pack, no matter how often he came up with the trump card, he could not keep his mind off the imminent landings.
“So many brave young men going to their death tonight,” said Churchill. “It is a grave responsibility.”
All through the night, Churchill received updates on the Allies’ progress. More than any Allied leader he had cause to be worried. His previous adventures in the Mediterranean—the “soft underbelly” of Nazi Europe, as he had recently labeled it—had been disastrous. In 1915, as first lord of the admiralty, he had urged a landing at Gallipoli, in Turkey, that had turned into a disaster, incurring fifty-five thousand casualties. It had not been forgotten or forgiven by many of the Australians, who had suffered disproportionately. Yet, despite his failures there, the region still held a spell over Churchill, just as the Russian steppes had with Hitler.
Churchill kept cutting and dealing, coming up trumps, asking for the latest news from the Mediterranean. “I’m sure,” recalled Pamela, “he was wondering if another fiasco could happen.” A supernaturally gifted politician and orator, her father-in-law was at best a mediocre military strategist, too prone to aggressive adventurism. He knew only too well that his grand scheme to defeat Hitler via the Mediterranean, which the Americans had only grudgingly supported, could very well end up as yet another bloody shambles. Indeed, would it prove just as ill-fated as Gallipoli?
AT HIS HEADQUARTERS in Poland, the “Wolf’s Lair,” fifty-four-year-old Adolf Hitler also awaited the Anglo-American onslaught. Unlike Kesselring, he had fallen for Operation Mincemeat and had assumed the invasion would come in Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. Nevertheless, Hitler was confident of victory wherever the Allies chose to land. The Luftwaffe would soon cut the Allied supply lines across the Mediterranean, and any force that did manage to secure a foothold in Europe would then be starved into submission. The question that troubled Hitler was whether or not the Italians could be counted on in Greece, Sardinia, or indeed anywhere they might be asked to fight.
“The Italians never lose a war,” he had once complained. “No matter what happens, they always end up on the winning side.”
CLOCKS STRUCK ONE minute after midnight. D-day had arrived. Thankfully, Patton’s favorite meteorologist, “Houdini,” had been right: The gale was fast abating as Patton and his staff gathered on the blacked-out bridge deck.
“Gentlemen,” said Patton. “I have the honor and the privilege to activate the Seventh United States Army. This is the first army in history to be activated after midnight and baptized in blood before daylight.”
Admiral Hewitt stood nearby. He watched as an honor guard marched onto the deck and presented a gift for Patton—a flag for his new army. The anti-Semitic, “A-rab”-hating, British-loathing southern aristocrat General George Smith Patton Jr., commander of the new Seventh Army, was deeply moved. According to one bystander, there were tears and a “fire of pride in his eyes.”
SPARKS STOOD ON a deck of the 157th’s command ship, seven miles from the coast of Sicily, beside his tall regimental commander, Colonel Charles M. Ankcorn. He looked up as the sky filled with droning bombers, headed to batter defensive installations on the Sicilian coast. A few minutes later, huge explosions lit up the horizon, casting ships into stark silhouette. Italian shore batteries responded and shells thundered across the swelling waters, several exploding close to Sparks’s ship.
Before long, he noticed that the boat was moving back out to sea. Colonel Ankcorn was furious. Sparks followed him up a ladder to the bridge deck, where Ankcorn approached the flotilla’s commodore.
“Commodore, why are we heading back out to sea?” asked Ankcorn.
“We are coming under fire from the shore,” replied the commodore, “and I am taking the convoy out to a safer distance of eleven miles.”
Sparks saw Ankcorn pull out his pistol. Unbelievably, he then placed it to the commodore’s head.
“Commodore, our scheduled station is seven miles offshore. Now, you turn this convoy around and get back on proper station.”
The commodore didn’t say a word to Ankcorn but did give the order to turn around.
IT WAS 2:30 A.M. when the call came for the men to go to their boat stations. Among the nervous Thunderbirds was twenty-four-year-old Montanan Jack Hallowell, a witty former journalist whose father had fought with the British in the Boer War. He belonged to a mortar unit in the regiment’s E Company. “They had trained often with live ammunition,” he would write of his fellow Thunderbirds, “but this was the first time they could expect their fire to be answered by fire. It made a difference. It made one hell of a difference.”
The worst of the storm had passed, but the decks were still heaving, knocking frightened men into one another in the darkness. Whistles and loud-hailers sounded as some wished one another good luck. Tensions ran high. One private in the regiment’s I Company, a jumpy young machine gunner called Jackson “Cowboy” Wisecarver, bumped into another nervous Thunderbird by accident.
“Son of a …”
Wisecarver promptly hit the other infantryman so hard he almost knocked him out.
Men clambered down chain ladders to landing craft bobbing and pitching below. There were anguished cries as some lost their grip and fell from the ladders. Several were injured and one man drowned. The absence of experienced coxswains had cost the regiment its first life.
3:45 A.M. A loudspeaker sounded.
Landing craft pulled away from the mother ships, formed a long V, and made for the dark shore. Although the wind had dropped, the waves were more than nine feet as the craft bucked and bounced toward their assigned landing area, “Bailey’s Beach,” five miles south of the fishing village of Scoglitti. In bad weather, it was among the most treacherous places on the Sicilian coastline. The Sicilians believed it was in fact impregnable because of its rocky shoreline and many sandbanks, and they had not bothered to set up extensive beach defenses. All the same, stretches of rusted barbed wire and several gun emplacements would welcome the Thunderbirds to Sicily. A hundred yards from the waterline were sand dunes that stretched two hundred yards farther inland toward olive orchards.
The regiment was to land in several waves preceded by an intense naval bombardment. Once it had secured Bailey’s Beach, it was to push inland two miles due east to a small, dusty village called San Croce Camerina, the regiment’s first objective on D-day.
Two hundred and thirty thousand Italian troops were garrisoned Sicily. Would they resist the Allied invaders or would they capitulate as so many had in North Africa when the prospect of dying for their increasingly comical Il Duce—Benito Mussolini—suddenly became very real indeed? By contrast, there was no doubting the willpower or the potential for immense violence of the 60,000 Germans ready to counterattack if the Italians buckled when the first bullets and shells started to fly. These storm troopers were exceptionally well armed and led by one of the most brilliant and courageous of Hitler’s battlefield commanders, General of Panzer Troops Hans Valentin Hube, who in turn answered to Kesselring, the finest practitioner of defensive warfare in World War II.
It was 4 A.M.
“We’re going in!” a Thunderbird cried.
Men grabbed the handles of ammunition boxes. Others picked up bangalore torpedoes. Riflemen snapped clips into their M1 rifles.
It was 4:20 A.M. when the first craft approached Bailey’s Beach and began to bounce up and down ominously in the nine-foot-high surf. In the hands of inexperienced coxswains, many of the craft veered off course in the high seas. Others were swept toward jagged rocks by riptides. Some finally ground onto the sands.
H-hour had arrived. The liberation of Europe had begun.