CHAPTER FOUR
THE RACE FOR MESSINA
Thunderbirds march into Cefalu, Sicily, July 1943. [National Archives]
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.
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 now 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.”
IF HE WANTED, he could wander through the ripening lemon groves nearby or pick grapes lining the roads on the verdant north 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.
“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.
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?
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.