Brothers, Rivals, Victors

In the celebration over the Tunisian victory, though, George struggled with his disappointment over being left out—cut out, actually—from the campaign’s final act, a dissatisfaction that did not diminish when Ike invited George and Brad to the victory parade in Tunis. Contemplating the mental picture of Ike on a reviewing stand, surrounded by his smiling British generals, snubbing his American colleagues, George grumbled, “AFHQ is really a British headquarters with a neuter general, if he is not pro-British. It is a hell of a note.” ²

Patton’s mental picture of the victory celebration turned out to be just about right. Ike met George and Brad at the airfield, but he had little time for them because of the press of British and French officers, diplomats, and other applauding dignitaries jockeying about the Supreme Commander. The reviewing stand, flanked by two British Churchill tanks, wasn’t especially large, so Bradley and Patton were relegated to a lower dais, where they stood in the sweltering heat among African and French field grades—the “upper middle class frogs,” George called them. Ike, Giraud, Churchill’s representatives, British generals, and a company of nodding, smiling politicians stood proudly on the reviewing stand with Eisenhower as a 14,000-man British contingent dwarfed the much smaller U.S. and French contingents.³

But George, outraged though he was over the second-class status given to the Americans, held his tongue around Eisenhower. Ike had told him to lay off the British, and George knew Ike was dead serious. Besides, as George had told himself a few days before, “[Ike] needs a few loyal and unselfish men around him, even if he is too weak a character to be worthy of us.”⁵

For Eisenhower, the celebration in Tunisia was overshadowed by Sicily, an operation that would require him to best six second-rate Italian coastal divisions, four regular Italian infantry divisions, and two formidable German divisions. As usual, he was up to his neck in details, and he was beset on all sides by well-intentioned advice, some of which came perilously close to being orders. Marshall, for instance, advised him to rush Sicily before the Germans had a chance to recover from North Africa, and he heard rumors that Churchill had complained to President Roosevelt that he should have followed up Tunisia with a quick leap against the island. This armchair quarterbacking was fine in theory, Ike thought, but a “Notre Dame Shift” was an impossible play given the dearth of landing craft, the need to refit divisions in Tunisia, and the Luftwaffe stronghold at the nearby island of Pantelleria.⁷

In late January, to a man Ike’s subordinates believed a June landing was out of the question, and Ike had to break the unwelcome news to the Combined Chiefs. After his draft invasion plan was circulated on February 12, a wave of objections poured in, and Ike told Marshall in late March that changes were being made to the plan to satisfy Alexander and Montgomery. “I didn’t like it,” Ike said, “but it seemed to me there was no other course.”⁸

A wave of planners, liaisons, and politicos pressed upon Eisenhower from all sides that spring, cluttering his already-cluttered days with questions, comments, and respectful demands. Ike, looking for a sympathetic ear, complained to Mamie,

In my youthful days I used to read about commanders of armies and envied them what I supposed to be great freedom in action and decision. What a notion! The demands upon me that must be met make me a slave rather than a master. Even my daily life is circumscribed with guards, aides, etc, etc, until sometimes I want nothing so much as complete seclusion.⁹

Gazing up toward a cloud-cloaked summit of hard decisions, Ike sank into another bout with anxiety. He began waking at four in the morning, unable to sleep, his mind turning over one seemingly insoluble problem after another. “He scarcely ever has had a feeling of self-satisfaction,” observed Harry Butcher. “He becomes impatient and irritated because of the slowness with which the next phase can unfold. He makes himself quite unhappy.” He had once suggested to Butch that they both “get good and drunk when Tunisia is in the bag,” but now that Tunisia was in the bag, his crowded schedule prevented him from sharing even that traditional right of soldiers.¹⁰

Ike’s official family tried to keep their leader on an even keel, but the Kansan was prone to explode in a cloud of profanity and heat. One of his public relations specialists, the faithful Butcher, had to continually blue-pencil a pamphlet’s worth of “hells,” “godawfuls” and “damns” out of magazine articles profiling the Allied Commander in Chief, as he didn’t want the Allied leader’s vocabulary becoming too widespread a topic.¹¹ To complicate things further, Kay, whose fiancé was killed during a mine-clearing sweep after the fighting in Africa had ended, drew closer to Ike amid her grief. This, of course, stirred up fresh rumors about the Supreme Commander and the girl from Skibbereen.¹²

For Ike, the messy planning for HUSKY was little different from the messy planning for TORCH. Maybe a bit more refined, but still the same deranged muddle. The invasion was supposed to be phased in over five days, with nine divisions—five British and four American—landing on the island’s southern, eastern, and northwestern coasts. General Alexander and his Fifteenth Army Group would command the operation, while the I Armored Corps (Reinforced), under General Patton, would land on the island’s northwest corner near Palermo. The star of the show, Britain’s Eighth Army, would land on Sicily’s southeastern coast, near Syracuse, and the Eighth would be led by General Montgomery.¹³

Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, a master of tactics if not tact, was the one man upon whom George, Brad, and Ike could agree. A son of a bishop—though Ike privately called him a son of something else—Monty was the United Kingdom’s preeminent battle commander, a legend whose wounds at Ypres in 1914 had left scars as deep as his immovable beliefs in his own preeminence. A teetotaler who cited Scripture as unabashedly as did George, Monty’s abstinence from vice was more than offset by an acerbic temper, a towering ego, and an effortless, natural condescension. Standing five feet, seven inches and looking down his prominent nose at men physically taller than himself, the self-assured Ulsterman never seemed to notice that he became a lightning rod for everything he touched.¹⁴

Montgomery had performed brilliantly during the Eighth Army’s Libyan and Tunisian campaigns, and the British documentary Desert Victory, released in April 1943, made the victor of El Alamein an instant hero in the United States and Great Britain. But Monty’s irascible personality would also give his legion of critics no shortage of grounds, rightly and wrongly, for bitterness. Whether it was insisting on the correct course in the most offensive way, or simply sticking his beak into political questions best left to others, Montgomery’s answers, so often militarily correct, were prone to become lost in the bile he stirred up.¹⁵

Ike had taken a disliking to General Montgomery during their first meeting in the summer of ’42, when the haughty Briton dressed down the Kansan for smoking in his presence. After this inauspicious start, Kay wrote, “the relationship between the two men never got any better; in fact, as the war progressed, Monty’s self-righteousness and rigidity often had the General gasping in anger.” As Ike wrote in a secret letter to Marshall, “[Montgomery] is so proud of his successes to date that he will never willingly make a single move until he is absolutely certain of success—in other words, until he has concentrated enough resources so that anybody could practically guarantee the outcome.”¹⁶

Ike’s colleagues at AFHQ—particularly Air Marshals Tedder and Coningham and Admiral Cunningham—loathed Montgomery so much that he generally avoided meetings at AFHQ, and would frequently send a surrogate in his place—a tacit acknowledgment that his personal presence would be counterproductive. Monty’s refusal to leave his “home field” was invariably taken as aloofness in the other camps, and it only deepened the resentment felt by Eisenhower’s other generals.¹⁷

Monty, for his part, had little use for America’s smiling chairman of the board. He sneered to Brooke that Ike’s “high-pitched accent and loud talking would drive me mad,” and he commented that while Ike was “probably quite good on the political side . . . he knows nothing whatever about how to make war or fight battles; he should be kept away from all that business if we want to win this war.”¹⁸

Besides, as Supreme Commander, Eisenhower necessarily focused on supplies, air cover, landing craft, politics, and Italy, not the specifics of what division went where. It would therefore be Patton—or rather, Patton, Alexander, Tedder, Cunningham, Beetle, among others—who would have to bear the cross of El Alamein.

Since their meeting in February, Patton and Montgomery had begun a cordial relationship that would evolve into cordial loathing, mostly because, in a perverse sort of way, they were two of a kind. Both were nationalistic bigots, incapable of seeing the larger picture, and each was intensely convinced his own army could win any campaign without help. Both generals were cursed with high-pitched voices, a fetish for headwear, and a grandiose sense of self. Montgomery’s edge over Patton was his wider experience in fighting the Germans, while Patton’s, incredibly, was his tact. When word reached Montgomery that Patton had been little impressed by one of his post-Tunisian seminars, Monty is said to have replied, “The next time I see Georgie Patton, I’ll have just three things to say to him: Get out of my way, take your troops back and train them, and leave me your petrol.”¹⁹ But through their formal disdain for each other emerged a kind of grudging respect. Knowing a talented prima donna when he saw one, George remarked privately, “Monty is a forceful, selfish man, but still a man. I think he is a far better leader than Alexander and will do just what he pleases, as Alex is afraid of him.” His suspicions of the Montgomery-Alexander dynamic were confirmed at a later meeting, when Patton complained to Montgomery about an order from Alexander’s headquarters. “George,” a bemused Monty replied, “let me give you some advice. If you get an order from Army Group that you don’t like, just ignore it. That’s what I do.”²⁰

Patton was perfectly willing to keep his men in Palermo, on the opposite side of the island from Montgomery, and he bluntly told General McNair, “Allies must fight in separate theaters or they hate each other more than they do the enemy.” But George’s splendid isolation shattered as the HUSKY plan was overhauled with round after round of staff analysis and high-level amendments. The original plan had called for landings on the east, near the open land around Catania, and in the northwest, near Palermo. But under pressure from the air services, the Combined Chiefs also required the British Army to land on Sicily’s southern coast and seize the airfields at the towns of Gela and Licata. Landings there would stretch Montgomery’s Eighth Army around Sicily’s southeastern corner, and Montgomery hated being stretched.²¹

It was hard enough for Ike, a natural balancer, to reconcile these irreconcilable interests on a purely military basis. But throw in the sharp personalities of Air Marshal Tedder, Admiral Cunningham, Patton, Alexander, and Montgomery, and the tug-of-war became a blood feud. Tedder demanded the southern airfields on D-plus-1 to dominate the skies over the battlefield. Cunningham sided with Tedder, not relishing the idea of Stukas taking off from those same fields and screaming down on his warships. Alexander tried to bring the two sides together, but he had little luck. The battle for landing sites on the ten-thousand-square-mile island was reminiscent of the transatlantic old arguments over Bône, Philippeville, Casablanca, and Tunis. Another geographic card game.

Before the end of April, Eisenhower was fielding complaints from three different continents, and he still had to manage the last phase of the shooting war in Tunisia. With his generals deadlocked, Ike called a meeting on the second of May with Montgomery, Tedder, Cunningham, and a few other interested parties in Algiers to decide what to do. Bad weather kept Alexander from attending the meeting, and before the conference began Montgomery accosted Bedell Smith in the men’s room of the St. Georges. There, standing among toilet stalls and sinks, he pitched his plan to Beetle. Breathing on the lavatory mirror, he drew a crude map of Sicily, and he outlined in simple terms his proposal to land the British in the east and the Americans in the south.²²

Beetle, blind to nationality when it came to military operations, knew the plan made sense. Though he also knew it would spark a firestorm among Ike’s anti-Montgomery clique, he took it to Ike with his endorsement. Eisenhower agreed, and that evening Beetle was on the phone to Patton explaining that AFHQ would be making some big changes to the invasion plan. He invited Patton to come to Algiers the following day to hear Monty out and voice any concerns, and George promised he’d be there.

Next morning, George attempted to fly in for the meeting, but heavy spring rains grounded his plane. He packed Colonel Muller and his aide, Captain Stiller, into a car and set out for Algiers over washed-out roads and crooked highways jammed with supply trucks. He showed up at Ike’s headquarters at five thirty that evening, worn out and frustrated, and apologized for missing the meeting. Ike assured him, “Oh, that’s alright, I knew you would do what you were ordered without question.”²³

Ike called in Alexander, Hughes, and Beetle to bring George up to speed. Palermo, he said, had been scrubbed. Instead of landing on the northwest corner, Patton’s force would hit the southern shore, capturing Gela, Scoglitti, and Licata, as well as three airfields on the outskirts of those towns. Monty would land in the east, capturing the ports of Syracuse and Augusta; then he would move north against Catania, and from there to Messina.²⁴

The American force, Beetle said, would be supplied through Syracuse. The problem, as Beetle acknowledged, was that Syracuse was large enough to service the British forces, but not big enough to supply all of Patton’s force in addition. Patton’s men would have to make do as best they could with supplies dumped onto the beaches around Gela.

That didn’t look promising, but George put on a brave front and refused to jump openly into the anti-Montgomery fray. When Kent Hewitt approached him about protesting to his old friend Eisenhower, Patton puffed up and replied, “No, goddammit. I’ve been in this Army thirty years and when my superior gives me an order I say, ‘Yes, sir!’ and then do my goddamndest to carry it out.” And he intended to.²⁵

But that night, Patton again raised the “British issue” privately with his old friend. After a late-evening dinner with Ike and Kay, he and Ike talked until half past one in the morning. “He is beginning to see the light but is too full of himself,” George remarked afterward. “I was quite frank with him about the British and he took it.” To George, it was a mote of progress, though only a mote. Perhaps what Ike lacked was moral courage. “I think D sees the light a little but fears for his head if he stands on his feet,” he wrote.²⁶

Shortly afterward, Ike called Patton at Mostaganem to officially notify him that I Armored Corps (Reinforced) would become the Seventh U.S. Army on D-Day. George was elated. The promotion—and in George’s eyes, that was exactly what the redesignation was—put him on equal terms with both Montgomery and Clark, a fact that delighted him to no end. As he told Beatrice: “It seems probable that I will not have the I Armored Corps much longer, but as our British friends say, ‘I am happy about it.’ You can guess the rest. W will be very mad indeed, but I am not taking over his number. As a matter of fact, we get on fine. He is much chasened.”²⁸

Throughout the late spring, George tried to stay out of trouble, but he couldn’t help drawing attention to himself. He had a gift for capturing the fickle spotlight, which made him a hero when he was engaged in battle. Waging a fast, hard-fighting campaign, his exploits would stand out among those of the thousand other general officers on the Army’s rolls.

This time, the light was flicked on by one of his task force censors. In late May, Marshall learned of a letter sent home by Patton’s G-3, Colonel Kent Lambert. In his letter, Lambert told how a previous letter to his wife describing the TORCH operation was forwarded by censors to Patton because it violated security regulations. Lambert escaped punishment, he later claimed, because “my friend Patton said, ‘Nuts, file it.’ ” General Marshall, Ike learned, was in a rage over the high-level breach of security, and he wanted the matter investigated.²⁹

George, on the defensive, denied sweeping anything under the rug. He disputed Lambert’s version of events, pointing out to Ike that “ ‘nuts’ was about the only expletive I did not use.” He said both he and Hap Gay had taken Lambert to the woodshed over the incident—Gay formally, and George using his extensive library of expletives other than “nuts.”³¹

Eisenhower, who was coming down on his friend only because Marshall ordered him to, took no further action, and George left, more or less unindicted of the crime. Reviewing the matter with Hughes afterward, George came away with the impression that Ike was simply “doing a little face-saving at my expense.”³²

But with this shot across the bow, a first from Ike Eisenhower, George resolved to use better judgment, at least around the upper echelons. On June 2, Marshall, Clark, and a platoon of generals arrived at Patton’s headquarters to see how things were going. Before Clark left, George went out of his way to tell Marshall how helpful Clark had been. “I am getting tactful as hell,” he told his diary, “and in this case it is true. I think that if you treat a skunk nicely, he will not piss on you—as often.”³³

Patton’s thoughts, on war at least, had a beautiful clarity about them. They were as straight and unyielding as the saber he had designed for the cavalry. War began with discipline. Then violence. Then one side bled to death, or gave up. Nothing more complicated than that. Everything else—the weapons, the tactics, the logistics—were just means to an end. Things other men allowed to obscure their vision of war’s true essence.³⁴

Patton’s largest component, the VI Corps under Major General Ernest Dawley, fielded some good division commanders, including Major General Troy Middleton, an old Leavenworth classmate who had left the Army in the late thirties to help run Louisiana State University. A favorite of Marshall’s, Middleton had come out of retirement to command the 45th “Thunderbird” Division, a National Guard outfit training in the United States. Now in his mid-fifties, Middleton had the look of a big-city banker until he opened his mouth and a thick Mississippi Delta drawl sauntered out of his throat.³⁶

Major General Lucian Truscott, his polo-playing cavalier from Casablanca, was another crackerjack general of like mind with Patton. A hard driver of men, Truscott once told his son, “Wars aren’t won by gentlemen. They’re won by men who can be first class sonsofbitches when they have to be. It’s as simple as that. No sonofabitch, no commander.”³⁷

Truscott would command the overstrength 3rd Division, Fred Walker would lead the 36th Division, and Matt Ridgway, who succeeded Bradley when the 82nd Division went airborne, would round out his division commanders. At Patton’s headquarters swirled the usual crew—Keyes, Gay, Muller, Koch, and Stiller—as well as newcomers Colonel Halley G. Maddox, his operations head, and aide Charlie Codman, an old-line Bostonian, decorated World War I aviator, and former wine dealer, who took the place of the deceased Dick Jenson.³⁸

Patton was satisfied with his headquarters team, which he had trained in Morocco. He was also reasonably satisfied with his major generals and their divisions. But the more he thought about Bradley’s performance in Tunisia, the more he liked the idea of bringing Brad’s II Corps into the fight. He told himself that Ike “wanted to get Omar a chance as [Marshall] likes him,” but the truth was that Patton knew and respected Bradley. In Brad, Patton’s army would be getting a first-class corps commander who could bring his hardened veterans along for the ride.³⁹

Not that it would be an easy sell to either Ike or Brad. Dawley was a favorite of Marshall and McNair, and Brad’s II Corps was refitting from their long, hard struggle for Bizerte. Brad’s men were also busy herding thousands of Italian and German prisoners west, and his battalions would need time to rest, replace losses, and train for a new invasion. Their respite, from mid-May to early July, allowed them only seven weeks.⁴⁰

After two days of briefings by Alexander’s staff, Bradley flew to Mostaganem to set up his command post. Patton greeted him like a conquering hero, meeting him at the airport with an honor guard and throwing a luncheon for him, where he broke out two bottles of champagne to toast the “Conqueror of Bizerte.” It was a bit over-the-top, but it was genuinely felt. Patton, still somewhat hurt that Ike had never really congratulated him for the Battle of El Guettar, was determined to see that no man could lay the same charge against him. To George, a gentleman in spite of himself, it was the proper thing to do.⁴³

But George’s deference to the Conqueror of Bizerte vanished when Brad’s staff asked permission to set up II Corps command post near Patton’s seaside headquarters. Patton’s commandant nixed the request, and told them to set up shop sixty kilometers to the south at Relizane, a dust-streaked hamlet on the edge of the Sahara Desert.⁴⁴

What was the guy thinking? Brad wondered when he saw the place. It was late May, and the thermostat in North Africa hovered somewhere between “blistering” and “broiling.” His men were garbed in their woolens from the mountains of Tunisia, and to ship them next door to a desert, subjected to the relentless Sahara sun, was a recipe for mass heatstroke.

Brad never forgave George for what he later called “this petty, demeaning and wholly unnecessary discomfort to my men.” But he had no choice. With an acrid taste in his mouth, he called his advance team and told them to go ahead with the relocation to Relizane. Brad and his inner circle lodged in a house owned by an elderly French couple. He, Chet Hansen, Lew Bridge, and the rest warded off the summer heat with the sole luxury of a swimming pool. His soldiers had none.⁴⁵

Poring over a huge topographical model of Sicily while their Coca-Cola bottles sweated in the heat, Brad, Monk Dickson, and the II Corps operations staff had a bad feeling about HUSKY. The difficulties of any amphibious operation were self-evident—enemy subs, beach obstacles, landing site mix-ups, air vulnerability, and a host of other problems to fret over in due course. But the Americans had to cover forty-seven of the sixty-nine miles of landing zones; Brad’s men would be spreading themselves dangerously thin and inviting a counterattack, most likely at the middle of his line. Of the two hundred thousand Axis troops in Sicily, Monk warned, two divisions were front-line German units, “strictly hot mustard.” The question was not whether those German divisions would attack, but where, when, and how hard.⁴⁶

During May and June, George and Brad spent their waking hours hammering the out details of the landing. On the right, the men of Middleton’s 45th Division would assault at the fishing village of Scoglitti, next door to Montgomery’s Canadian contingent. Their job would be to capture the Axis airfields at Comiso and Biscari. In the center, Allen’s 1st Division and two battalions of Rangers under Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby would hit Gela and the Ponte Olivo airfield. After taking the airfields, these men would move northwest toward Caltanissetta, a road juncture in the middle of the island that would allow Patton’s men to drive either east or west, as events dictated. On the left, Truscott’s 3rd Division, a combat command from the 2nd Armored, and a reinforced Ranger battalion, nearly 50,000 men together, would land at Licata, capture the airfield there, then push north. Bradley would command the right and center, while Patton would supervise Truscott’s division and the spare armor on the left. He would also keep an armored combat command and a regiment from the 1st Infantry Division in his back pocket as a floating reserve. Meanwhile, Manton Eddy’s 9th Division would hang back in North Africa, ready to add weight to the attack when the time was right.⁴⁷

While he smarted over his banishment to Relizane, Brad was not entirely unhappy with his Tunisian mentor. Professionally, the horseman and the infantryman understood each other well by now. Their instincts were, more or less, predictable and harmonious, like a pair of temperamental musicians working separate instruments to create a surprisingly good melody. Brad kept his feelings about George’s personal style to himself, and after one long talk, George remarked that Brad “grows on me as a very sound and extremely loyal soldier.”⁴⁹

The tough part of their invasion, both acknowledged, would be the long, tenuous supply line. Divisions require immense quantities of supplies—the 45th Division alone would carry almost a million pounds of equipment ashore—and the tonnage needed to keep the men shooting and scooting stretched Patton’s meager port facilities to their limits. Any fuel, food, ammunition, or equipment Patton or Bradley needed would have to come through Syracuse, Monty’s port, and those follow-up supplies would not arrive until D-plus-14. Even when Syracuse was open for business, a glance at the map told them the goods would have to be carted over 140 miles of notoriously bad roads to reach the American quartermasters and their customers.⁵⁰

For George, the problem of supplies, like the problem of preeminence in battle, came down to a lack of backbone on the part of one man: Eisenhower. “Under the present arrangement for Husky,” he groused, “we have a pro-British straw man at the top, a British chief admiral and senior vice admiral . . .”⁵¹

George was a devout Episcopalian, and his thoughts would turn toward a benevolent, omnipotent God when his spirits needed sustenance. But marring his smooth, theological tonic was the recurring presence of Ike and Clark, whom he could never fully trust. “In spite of the fact that Ike and Wayne have both cussed the other out to me,” he wrote in his diary, “there is still some sort of an unholy alliance between them. I should not worry as I seem to be doing nicely, but I do worry. I am a fool—those two cannot upset destiny. Besides I owe each of them quite a lot, but of course don’t know to what extent they have undercut me.” ⁵³

To keep tabs on Patton, in early June Ike detached his new deputy commander, Major General John P. Lucas, to act as his “eyes and ears” in Mostaganem. Lucas, a bald, kindly-looking man with a corncob pipe fixed in his smile, talked straight and enjoyed a high reputation among Ike, George, and Marshall. Though Lucas was another of those official spies, Patton saw no need to co-opt Lucas into his organization, as he had with Bradley; he frequently called on Lucas for advice, and he used Lucas as a filter to convey information to Ike, as he sometimes did with Ev Hughes or Harry Butcher. Lucas sympathized with George’s complaints about Eisenhower, or so George thought, and he told his diary, “Lucas too feels that Ike is just a staff officer and not a soldier. Too bad. When Lucas came over, General Marshall said to him, ‘The situation at AFHQ is not satisfactory, or I should say it is very dangerous.’ ”

While Patton and Bradley mused over their landings, Eisenhower spent his long days settling squabbles among the vast network of headquarters spread out between Amilcar (Ike’s command post), Algiers (AFHQ), La Marsa (the air command center), Bizerte (the British land command post), Malta (the advanced naval center), Cairo (Montgomery’s headquarters), and Mostaganem (Patton’s headquarters). He waded into questions of logistics, air support, naval coordination, and weather conditions, leaving a trail of cigarette butts and swear words in his wake. “Every indication,” he wrote Marshall with growing pessimism, “is that HUSKY is going to be a difficult and hazardous operation. Progressively our daily planning reveals the seriousness of obstacles to be overcome. . . .”⁵⁵

One of those obstacles was HOBGOBLIN, the Allied code name for the island of Pantelleria, a rugged listening post off the Tunisian coast garrisoned by a 10,000-man Italian contingent. The craggy chunk of volcanic rock was occupied by the Italian Army in 1926, and since then the Axis had fortified the island with a U-boat refueling depot, airfields capable of servicing eighty Messerschmitts, and some one hundred gun emplacements. HOBGOBLIN would pose a reconnaissance, air, and naval threat to the HUSKY team, and Ike wanted this particular thorn clipped off before he flung George and Monty onto Sicily’s shores.⁵⁶

Talking matters over with his air chiefs, Ike proposed a novel approach to the island’s reduction: He would bomb the defenders senseless. Operation CORKSCREW, as the air campaign became known, would be “a sort of laboratory to determine the effect of concentrated heavy bombing on a defended coastline.” If the bombings were successful, he could send a brigade to wade through the wreckage and pick up any survivors. If not, then at a minimum the shore defenses should be thoroughly softened up.⁵⁷

This was Eisenhower at his optimistic best, and few of his advisers agreed with him. His pipe-smoking air chief, Marshal Tedder, and his naval commander, Admiral Cunningham, voiced skepticism over Ike’s proposal, while Alexander begged him not to throw men against the fortified beach. Against this advice, Ike had his way. CORKSCREW would go forward on June 8; the landings would proceed three days later.⁵⁸

On the appointed day, Ike joined Admiral Cunningham aboard his flagship, the cruiser H.M.S. Aurora, where the two men watched the bombardment. Seeing the island engulfed in a wall of fire loosed by sixty-four hundred tons of high explosives, Ike joked to Cunningham, “Andrew, why don’t you and I get into a boat together and row ashore on our own. I think we can capture the island without any of these soldiers.”⁵⁹

For all Ike’s bravado, he was terrified by staff predictions of horrendous casualties. Pounding the coastline with bombs and shells from air and sea was one thing; sending flesh-and-blood men onto beaches studded with mines, mortar emplacements, and machine gun nests was a different, much deadlier game. Just before the landings, Ike, Butch said, “has been going through the same type of jitters and worries which marked the days immediately preceding our landings in North Africa.” He got little sleep the night before his men hit the beaches.⁶⁰

On D-Day, June 11, Ike awoke early. The news from the front stunned him: The island’s garrison had surrendered en masse. Italian soldiers, pleading lack of water, began pouring into POW cages, and before long Ike would call on Churchill to collect a wager of one Italian cent for every prisoner over three thousand. When the final tally of eleven thousand prisoners was counted, Churchill was delighted to send Ike the $1.60 balance to satisfy his debt. Ike, breathing a sigh of relief, was happy to have guessed correctly.⁶¹

Pantelleria was one thing. Sicily was another prospect entirely. Most divisions manning Sicily’s coastline were weak units composed of local conscripts whose willingness to die for Il Duce was questionable. However, Hitler and Mussolini could ferry 40,000 men from the toe of Italy to Sicily in a day’s time, and there were several Axis units in Sicily that kept Ike awake at night. Allied code breakers in London’s Bletchley Park intercepted radio transmissions revealing that Marshal Kesselring’s commander on Sicily, Italian General Alfredo Guzzoni, had deployed the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the best Italian unit, the 4th Livorno Division, in the island’s southeastern sector. He also held the German 15th Panzergrenadier Division to the west, near Palermo. From their dispositions, it appeared that Kesselring and Guzzoni hoped the German units would put some iron into the five Sicilian coastal divisions and four regular Italian divisions that formed the bulk of his defenses. If they did, the Italians might put up a serious fight.⁶²

The final HUSKY plan called for an armada of three thousand ships from the United States, Great Britain, Malta, Algeria, and Tunisia to converge upon Sicily and disgorge their landing craft. Some 149,000 men would hit the beaches during the first wave, spreading out along an eighty-mile arc under cover of naval gunfire, tactical air cover, and paratroop drops behind enemy lines. General Montgomery would command four assault divisions, some armor, commandos, and glider troops who would land behind Syracuse. Patton’s men would land on the southern coast and drive north and west, protecting Montgomery’s flank until they reached the Yellow Line, their final HUSKY objective.⁶³

After that, the plan for Sicily became rather vague. Montgomery would presumably push through Catania along the east coast, keeping to the right of Mount Etna, and Patton would presumably move north, to meet Monty at or west of Messina. At least, those were the presumptions Alexander’s ground plan suggested. But as D-Day approached, none of these presumptions had been settled. Or really even discussed.

The collective nervousness in the run-up to HUSKY deepened the cracks in the Eisenhower-Patton-Bradley partnership. In mid-June, Ike prepared a secret memo in which he analyzed his subordinate commanders. Of Patton, he commented: “A shrewd soldier who believes in showmanship to such an extent that he is almost flamboyant. He talks too much and too quickly and sometimes creates a very bad impression. Moreover, I fear that he is not always a good example to subordinates, who may be guided by only his surface actions without understanding the deep sense of duty, courage and service that make up his real personality. He has done well as a combat corps commander, and I expect him to do well in all future operations.” ⁶⁴

For Bradley, Ike’s case was much simpler: “About the best rounded, well balanced senior officer that we have in the service. His judgments are always sound. . . . I have not a single word of criticism of his actions to date and do not expect to have any in the future. I feel that there is no position in the Army that he could not fill with success.”⁶⁵

Patton tended to stay out of Ike’s way, communicating with his commander through Hughes, Lucas, Hewitt, and others when he could. But on July 5, the two men argued over whether Allen’s 1st Division was up to the task of landing on Sicily’s defended beaches. Ike, having listened to many complaints about the division from Bradley and Lucas, declared that the Big Red One was so undisciplined that its combat effectiveness had necessarily become impaired. Patton, privately wondering about Allen’s fitness himself, disagreed. He told Ike in no uncertain terms he was wrong about Allen and the Fighting First. “Anyhow,” Patton argued, “no one whips a dog just before putting him into a fight.”⁶⁶

The two men discussed air cover and a few other neutral subjects. Then Ike turned to Patton’s role in Sicily. As George remembered the conversation:

I told him that I was very appreciative of being selected. He said, “You are a great leader but a poor planner.” I replied that, except for Torch, which I had planned and which was a high success, I had never been given a chance to plan. He said that if “Husky” turned into a slugging match, he might recall me to get ready for the next operation, and let Bradley finish Husky. I protested that I would like to finish one show. I can’t make out whether he thinks Bradley is a better close fighter than I am or whether he wants to keep in with General Marshall, who likes Bradley. I know that Bradley is completely loyal to me.⁶⁸

Ike spent his last days before the invasion visiting troops, checking weather, and worrying about enemy dispositions. But there was surprisingly little else for him to do. He wrote a rambling letter to Mamie, telling her, “In circumstances such as these men do almost anything to keep from going slightly mad. Walk, talk, try to work, smoke (all the time)—anything to push the minutes along to find out a result that one’s own actions can no longer affect in the slightest degree. I stand it better than most, but there is no use denying that I feel the strain.” ⁶⁹

On July 6, his lucky coins tugging at his pocket, Ike boarded a B-17 and flew to the island fortress of Malta, where Alexander had set up the advance headquarters of the Fifteenth Army Group. Ike’s office, a fourteen-by-ten-foot room, was little better furnished than his cadet barracks at West Point, and Malta’s thick, salty moisture assaulted his lungs almost as savagely as did his damp Camel cigarettes. As the warm Mediterranean sun baked the island’s surface, Ike and his subterranean companions wore overcoats in the cold, dripping tunnels, one of which led from Ike’s bedroom to a medieval dungeon. The scene would remind Ike of his anxious days at another British island fortress. It was only eight months ago, yet it was barely visible through the haze of memory.⁷⁰

In the palace that was once home to the Knights of Malta, Eisenhower and his lieutenants spent the night of the invasion tuning in to distressing reports of a gale sweeping the Mediterranean. As darkness enveloped the ancient fortress, the man from Kansas motored to the southern end of the island, where he hoped to catch a glimpse of the transport planes carrying paratroops and pulling gliders.⁷¹

Omar Bradley learned of his promotion to lieutenant general on June 10, and the following day Ike awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal for his work in Tunisia. But apart from a brief party thrown by his harried staff, he had no time to savor either honor. The weeks leading up to HUSKY were jammed with training exercises, conferences with division commanders, and fretting over small but crucial details, most of which involved the Navy’s most cherished acronyms: LST (Landing Ship, Tank), LCI (Landing Craft, Infantry), LCT (Landing Craft, Tank), LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle or Personnel, the “Higgins boat”), and DUKW (an amphibious truck whose acronym GIs naturally shortened to “Duck”). Brad was pulled in 151 separate directions as he played umpire to the shrill demands of each II Corps unit on his extremely limited shipping space: Artillery chiefs wanted more guns ashore, and were willing to cut out the engineers to get their tubes on the first wave. Engineers wanted more bridging and corduroy materials, even if that meant cutting back on antiaircraft guns. The AA bosses demanded more batteries and more ammunition—cut out the quartermaster, why don’t we? And on it went. There was only one premise on which every commanding officer agreed: If each didn’t get his way, the invasion would be in grave danger.⁷³

A typical dustup began when Air Support Command, the men who would repair the airfields that provided tactical air cover, demanded room on the first wave for 660 vehicles, bulldozers, heavy trucks, and the like. Brad’s entire force was permitted only 4,500 “vehicles,” including towed antiaircraft and antitank guns, so the request was preposterous.

Brad, more than a little annoyed by now, gave the petulant colonel a hard look. “Very well, then,” he said testily. “You make the assault with your six hundred and sixty trucks. Clear the beach for us and we’ll come in on a later lift. It’s either you or the infantry. There’s not lift enough for both.” With that, he dismissed the man.

When Brad learned that General Marshall and his retinue would be flying in from Algiers, he staged a landing exercise by Allen’s 1st Division to show the brass what his men could do. The June 2 landing would lack live fire, and there would be no opposition, of course, but it would be a stressful exercise, for joining Bradley on the beach would be his boss, General Patton; his boss’s boss, General Eisenhower; and his boss’s boss’s boss, General Marshall. And each of these luminaries brought his own squires and attendants to watch the show. If Brad had been nervous about Ike’s “visiting firemen” looking over his shoulder in Tunisia, it was nothing compared to the pressure of this audience.

On the appointed day, the assault convoy steamed in. To the sound of rattling davits and the splash of Higgins boats—“puppies,” George called them—the first wave motored up to the beach. Down dropped the metal ramp doors, and out stumbled the infantrymen, who sloshed through the surf and onto the beach.⁷⁵

Ike stood in embarrassed silence as George lashed his men with colorful vivid obscenities. He might have thought the outburst was for Marshall’s benefit, except that it was so characteristically George. “Pink” Bull, standing nearby, nodded to Marshall, who looked at him but said nothing. Then Pink turned to Brad and whispered, “Well, there goes Georgie’s chance for a crack at higher command. That temper of his is going to finish him yet.”

On June 27, Bradley’s men broke down their headquarters and the senior team moved to Oran. After seven days attending to last-minute details, he drove over to the harbor of Mers-el-Kebir, where his ship awaited. At its moorings sat the U.S.S. Ancon, a converted passenger liner that would serve as Brad’s floating home and command post until he hit the beaches. On the Fourth of July, Rear Admiral Alan R. Kirk, commander of the ninety-six-ship Scoglitti strike force, had Bradley piped aboard Ancon in the Navy’s best traditional style, though Bradley, uninitiated in the ways of the Navy, was unsure whether he should salute the officers, shake hands, or wait for an invitation to his quarters. Eventually, he and his gear ended up in the right place, and he settled uncomfortably into his cabin to await orders to attack.⁷⁷

To the same traditional piping, General Patton thumped up the gangplank of the U.S.S. Monrovia, a transport ship that would serve as Western Task Force’s floating headquarters as well as his hotel at sea. It was his second time aboard a ship bound for a foreign beach, and he shared few of Bradley’s apprehensions about naval etiquette.⁷⁸

As the resident Army commander, George Patton had little enough to do while the task force was at sea. He argued with Admiral Hewitt over the timing of the naval bombardment, and he spread the word to antiaircraft units that a wave of Matt Ridgway’s paratroop transports would follow up sometime after D-Day. But by and large, he was a general without portfolio. Until he and his men were on solid ground again, he would simply be one of the hundreds of lubbers wandering about the Monrovia’s immaculately swabbed decks.⁷⁹

As Hewitt’s flotilla pulled away from Algiers at five in the afternoon on July 6, George stood on the Monrovia’s deck to watch the armada of transports, cruisers, destroyers, battleships, minesweepers, and supply vessels picking their way through the harbor’s channel. The late-summer dusk slowly engulfed the shoreline, throwing a purplish, peaceful hue over the city, while George gazed across to the far side of a continent he had first seen eight months earlier.

As the briny waves lapped at the steel bellies of the Allied fleet, the underemployed Patton grew anxious. His fate, and the lives of his men, were now in the hands of men he would never meet. “It is a moving sight,” he wrote of the armada, “but over all is the feeling that only God and the Navy can do anything until we hit the shore. I hope God and the Navy do their stuff.”⁸⁰

Three nights later, to the soothing rumble of the ship’s engines, George lay on his bunk, dressed for the next day’s battle like a stone effigy of a medieval knight. A nervous sort of quiet settled over him on the eve of battle, and he lay there clinging to the burdens of the morrow, yet trying to shed those cares for just a moment. The knight slowly drifted off to sleep, Monrovia’s hull rocking him into a dark, sweet slumber.