Brothers, Rivals, Victors

Under a black canopy of space, Patton wedged himself onto the ship’s crowded bridge. He stood alongside Admiral Hewitt, Johnny Lucas, Hap Gay, and a cluster of khaki-clad officers, watching his men ride those bouncing puppies to Gela’s foam-flecked shore. High above them flashed a thatched roof of fire arcing from the guns of Monrovia and her sisters, their strawlike fingers snuffing out enemy searchlights and probing the coast for anything that resembled a bunker or dugout. Wherever the light beams lit, the land soon burst open in short, beautiful blossoms of white and yellow, followed several seconds later by a soft, concussive boom that was swallowed up by the next salvo.²

Into this light show went Darby’s Rangers; in went Allen’s assault teams. In they went, weathering fire that glittered along beaches festively designated Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Red 2, and Green 2.³

The invaders, threading their way through dancing lights of fire, moved rapidly through Gela and pushed out the city’s defenders. The beaches were not yet quiet when engineering teams began staking out wire-mesh paths over the dunes and posting colored beach markers, while armbanded shore police directed troops and supply vehicles inland.⁴

As the clock ticked off the minutes, Patton received his first reports. Truscott, commanding his division from the flagship Biscayne, radioed that the landings at Licata were a “magnificent” success; before lunchtime, the town would be in American hands. Terry Allen was also making good progress at Gela, except around that damned Yellow Beach; his landing craft were also hitting thickets of mines around Blue and Red 2, and enemy panzers had been spotted rolling toward town. No word yet from the paratroopers, and Bradley was overseeing Middleton’s Thunderbird Division off Scoglitti.⁵

With so many pieces in wild states of flux, Patton’s first order of business was to get everyone into a solid line and deploy his reserves, something he could best do from his command center on Monrovia. With more than a hint of embarrassment, he confessed to his diary that night, “Things were so complicated here that I did not go ashore. [I] feel like a cur, but I probably did better here.” ⁶

One of George’s complications was the knotty problem of getting the second wave of Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne onto Sicily safely. The airborne commanders, Ridgway and Colonel Reuben H. Tucker of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, worried about friendly fire from jittery antiaircraft crews, and their fears grew acute when Troop Carrier Command took until late in the game—July 5—to get its final flight path to Seventh Army. Five days before the landings, Patton had sent a signal to Bradley, Middleton, Allen, Gaffey, and Truscott warning them to expect flights of friendly troops around midnight during one of the first six nights of the operation, and Hap Gay reiterated the orders with Seventh Army units.⁷

Brad spent the early morning hours of July 10 curled up in his bunk, hurting like he had never hurt in his life. During the rolling voyage through the Mediterranean gale, amid cramped quarters and thick Navy chow, he had come down with a piercing case of hemorrhoids that was as excruciating as it was untimely.⁹

With D-Day drawing near and the pain becoming insufferable, Brad made the command decision to go under the surgeon’s knife, which put him out of commission during HUSKY’s opening hours. A sympathetic Chet Hansen jotted in his diary that day, “The general is ill in his room, confined there by an inopportune local operation. Compelled to lie in bed, he soon became quite ill in the pitching sea. Chafed because he has been confined to his quarters and is unable to view the start of the campaign.”¹⁰

The naval bombardment proved devastating, and as fragmentary reports chirped into the Ancon’s command center, Brad breathed a sigh of relief: The enemy had made no real effort to stop him on the beaches. Despite a few delays and some missed landing zones by Middleton’s Thunderbirds, a queasy Omar Bradley was pleased to signal Patton’s command ship that six battalions were firmly ashore, and the rest of the 45th Division was on the way. By two in the afternoon Middleton’s men, most of them dumped onto the wrong beaches, broke into Scoglitti and began pressing the enemy toward Comiso airfield. The landings weren’t pretty, but they were wholly successful.¹¹

The same could not be said for the 1st Division’s Gela landings. Shortly after the city fell, panzers from the Hermann Göring Division came clacking over the hills to the north and began firing into Allen’s men before they had unloaded their antitank guns. In the confines of his small bunk, a doubled-up Bradley frowned at reports passed to him describing touchy resistance along the high ground behind the town. His quarry was evidently turning on him, fangs bared and ready to lunge. Taking Gela, Brad realized, was the easy part; holding the high ground just behind it would be the real test.¹²

By the time Allen’s men had wrested a foothold on Gela’s beaches, Bradley had recovered just enough to hobble up the steps to the bridge, suck in a mouthful of fresh air, and survey the chaos through his binoculars. He said a silent prayer of thanks, then got down to business.¹³

Like Patton, General Bradley spent the rest of a chaotic D-Day coordinating movements by radio, accounting for his jumbled battalions, and trying to make out where the enemy would strike next. With 15th Panzergrenadier and Hermann Göring out there, Bradley was looking for any sign of the gathering blow.

But as the thin blue curtain of dusk rose from the east on the tenth of July, his beaches held. A limp, miserable Omar Bradley prepared to leave the Ancon for Mussolini’s island.¹⁴

At eight o’clock on the morning of July 11, a nervous General Patton ordered Ridgway to jump his 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment onto the 1st Division beachhead that night. To avoid the prospect of friendly fire, he sent Monrovia’s overburdened communications room a top-priority order warning subordinates—especially antiaircraft commanders—that the 82nd was coming. He paced the flagship’s decks, fretting over his tenuous grip on the beaches, and he listened to ominous reports of Italian and German tanks converging on Gela. By nine, the fidgeting man decided he couldn’t stay aboard ship any longer, and he loaded up Gay, Stiller, and a few aides into the admiral’s barge for the ride ashore. Wading the last few yards in knee-deep surf, Patton hit the gritty beach by ten.¹⁵

Unlike his landing at Casablanca, this time George came ashore dressed for history. His star-studded helmet, oversize binoculars, and ivory-gripped revolver were set off by soaked jodhpurs, tall cavalry boots, and a riding crop that he pointed in the general direction of Gela, delighting a troupe of Signal Corpsmen who snapped pictures and rolled camera footage of the Seventh Army commander in his element. While a beach crew scrambled to de-waterproof his jeep and adorn it with a bold three-starred banner, George puffed away on a long presidente cigar, strolled the beach, and conspicuously ignored the sound of enemy shells.¹⁶

Also unlike Casablanca, for this round Patton did not have time to play three-star beachmaster. Mounting his jeep, he spent the day dashing around Sicily’s southern coast looking for Lieutenant Colonel Darby and General Allen. He raised hell and pushed his men forward, called in naval gunfire, deployed his armored reserves, and shoved every tank-busting contraption he could find up to Allen’s hard-pressed perimeter. He bypassed Bradley and ordered Terry Allen to send a regiment inland to make contact with Truscott’s division to the left, which would give Seventh Army a solid, coherent line. And he tried to make his presence felt among his smaller units. The way a general ought to.¹⁷

For reasons having more to do with Seventh Army’s spirited defense than with Patton’s personal presence, by two in the afternoon the Hermann Göring’s commander called off the counterattack. While Patton could not take much personal credit for the outcome of Gela, his hands-on leadership had certainly helped; John Lucas, whom Ike had attached to Patton’s command, later quipped, “I am convinced that his presence had much to do with restoring the situation.”¹⁸

George returned to Hewitt’s flagship that evening, wet, tired, but pleased with the day’s fighting. His army had lost more than 2,400 men in the counterattack, but he had taken more than 4,400 prisoners and gained an unbreakable grip on Sicily’s lower coast. With a measure of self-satisfaction, he sat down at his cabin desk and wrote, “This is the first day in this campaign that I think I earned my pay. I am well satisfied with my command today. God certainly watched over me today.” ¹⁹

As George dried out from the rolling surf, his biggest worry remained those damned paratrooper runs. The more he thought about them, the more apprehensive he grew, and by eight that evening he made up his mind to scrub the operation.

But by then it was too late. In the midst of the invasion, communications from ship to shore to airfield were too jumbled to allow even the Seventh Army commander to stop the mission. As he told his diary, “Went to office at 2000 to see if we could stop the 82nd Airborne lift, as enemy air attacks were heavy and inaccurate and army and navy anti-air was jumpy. Found we could not get contact by radio. Am terribly worried.” ²⁰

He had good reason to be worried. That night, some 2,000 men of the 504th flew overhead in their slow, twin-engine transport planes. As fate would have it, they arrived on the heels of the largest Axis bombing raid of the battle. The lumbering transports had just crossed the beach line when a single gun shattered the night, sending every AA cannon on ship and shore into wild spasms of reactive fire. Yellow-orange rays split the night and tracer fire perforated wings and hulls. The lumbering transports broke formation at once and scattered like frightened geese.²¹

By the time the staccato bursts died down, twenty-three American planes had been shot out of the sky, six of which came down before their troopers had time to jump. Another thirty-seven limped back to Africa in various states of mutilation. The brief, violent fratricide took the lives of 141 men. Another 177 were sent the field hospitals to dress wounds and splint limbs.²²

As he turned in for the night, knowing nothing of the fate of the paratroopers, George felt pleased with what his men had done. On the right, Middleton’s 45th had taken Comiso and wedged itself against Montgomery’s Eighth Army. In the center, Allen’s 1st Division and Darby’s Rangers had taken Gela, then fought off a vicious counterattack by Hitler’s best panzer division. On the left, Truscott’s 3rd Division was holding an easy line at Licata, while the Hell on Wheels Division was rolling off the boats to give the Americans some heavy long-arm punch. By the end of the first day, Patton’s men had taken some four thousand prisoners, and George was sure plenty more would be counted by the time the day’s action was sorted out. He had done a damned fine job.²³

Unfortunately for Patton, that’s not the way Ike saw it. The Supreme Commander had spent several anxious, coin-rubbing days in the “Wake,” the naval headquarters section on Malta where messages would first arrive. With the initial stress of the operation breaking like a fever, the Eisenhower temper percolated up to the surface and began seeking out an object of wrath.²⁴

Several days of enforced radio silence had been absolutely necessary, but the silence had worked Ike into a high state of uneasiness. Now that the shooting had started, he was receiving neat progress reports almost hourly from Eighth Army. Patton’s reports, by contrast, were sparse, infrequent, almost nonexistent. Why? he wondered. Didn’t George want air support? Did he plan to overrun Sicily all by himself? How was the Supreme Commander supposed to report back to the Combined Chiefs if his Army commander kept him in the dark? As Harry Butcher noted midmorning on D-Day, “We had no news from the U.S. forces, and it is important that the good old USA do well . . . but cripes we were eager for information.”²⁵

News arrived soon. Signals from the Monrovia told Ike that Patton’s men had landed at Gela. They had faced shore opposition but, thankfully, no mines, no enemy surface ships, no hostile aircraft. Butcher, working his Navy connections, learned Allen’s 1st Division had taken Gela and its aerodrome, news that gave Ike a real lift.²⁶ But the report raised other questions in Ike’s mind: What about Truscott? What about Middleton? How were their divisions holding up? Were Darby’s Rangers—the glue holding Patton’s front—standing firm? Where were the paratroopers? Ike hadn’t a clue.²⁷

Ike knew Monrovia had been specially fitted with enlarged communication and coding facilities, unlike Patton’s command ship at Casablanca. So this time, the problem clearly did not lie with the Navy. Restless and uptight, Ike knew it had to be George’s fault. So after pacing around the Wake for a day and a half, Ike decided to pay a visit to the Seventh Army commander.²⁸

In the deep, dark hours of July 12, Ike boarded a Royal Navy destroyer, the H.M.S. Petard, and took the four-hour trip to rendezvous with Monrovia . He brought along Harry Butcher, several British officers, some aides, and a couple of journalists, and the Petard shoved off around two o’clock in search of the elusive Seventh Army commander.²⁹

At six, the Petard steamed alongside Hewitt’s flagship. Under gunmetal skies, Eisenhower and his retinue were piped aboard with stiff salutes from Admiral Hewitt and General Patton. Ike conferred with Hewitt over a short breakfast; then he marched off to George Patton’s war room for a status report.³⁰

George, blissfully unaware of the friendly fire on his paratroopers, was beaming as he showed Ike maps of his army’s progress while his chief of staff, Hap Gay, looked on. Truscott and Middleton, he explained, had exceeded their objectives and were moving up the island’s center. The Comiso airfields, with 125 planes, had fallen to the Americans. Allen’s 1st Division was having a tough time around Gela, having been jumped by Italy’s Livorno Division and the Hermann Göring panzers, but they were pushing back the Eyeties and the Huns. They had every reason to be pleased.³¹

No, they didn’t, Ike snapped. Drawing himself up to full height, he unleashed a furious burst of Eisenhower temper on his bewildered friend. Seventh Army reports, he declared, had been far from satisfactory. The Eighth Army was sending in detailed, hourly reports, and Patton’s transmissions were sparse and pathetic by comparison. The Germans, as George well knew, had been expecting a landing; now that they knew exactly where Patton’s army was, they were rushing reinforcements to smash Truscott and the rest in the flank. How the hell was he supposed to order air interdiction if the Germans knew where George’s men were but he didn’t? And why, he demanded, had George left his command post to play squad leader on D-plus-1?³²

George, caught completely off guard, was mortified. But he didn’t argue with Eisenhower. Red faced, he snapped to attention and took the tongue-lashing like a plebe cadet. When Ike paused, George turned to General Gay and ordered his staff to provide AFHQ with three daily reports in addition to the regular 4:00 p.m. situation reports. But even this submissive response drew a dressing-down from an irate Supreme Commander, whose broadsides burst out anew. As George complained, “Ike also told me that I am too prompt in my replies and should hesitate more, the way he does, before replying.”³³

The mix of tension and collective embarrassment grew thicker when General Gay, sent to find his G-2, G-3, and G-4 chiefs to provide details, proved unable to track them down. Butcher, one of George’s best friends among Ike’s inner circle, commented afterward, “Gay seemed in a fog. I took a rather ‘poor view’ of his management ability and reluctantly took a similar view on General Patton’s bumptious but rather disorganized executive management.” The interview showcased George at his worst.³⁴

Ike spun on his heel and left the steel-walled room, leaving a shaken Patton to stiffen in the now-frigid air. For George, a man who craved the approval of his superiors, it was a terrible blow.

Ike’s outburst seemed to be reactive, coming without warning, and members of his staff privately thought he was being too tough on Patton. “Ike stepped on him hard,” Butcher acknowledged. “There was an air of tenseness. I had a feeling that Ike was disappointed. He had previously said that he would be happy if after about five days from D-Day General Bradley were to take over because of his calm and matter-of-fact direction.”³⁵

Butch’s sympathy for George grew when he learned from his Navy contacts that messages had been running as much as seven hours behind in Monrovia’s overburdened communications center, a department under Hewitt’s control, not Patton’s. Ike’s spy John Lucas missed the incident but witnessed the fallout, writing afterward in his diary,

I didn’t hear what he said but he must have given Patton hell, because George was much upset. Having just come from the beach where there had been terrific mortar fire, he might well have been upset anyhow. The British apparently keep Ike better informed than the Americans but our situation reports go through General Alexander and what happens to them I don’t know. Anyway I checked them myself and they seemed to me to be as complete as they could well be under the circumstances.³⁶

But what Lucas and Butcher and the rest of the staff thought meant nothing. Eisenhower was the boss, and the boss seemed to have it in for George. Not long afterward, Lucas wrote in his diary, “Saw Ike again. Smith was present part of the time. Both said that Bradley and Truscott have been the outstanding figures in this operation. Without disparaging either, I don’t see what this is based on. I think many people are jealous of Patton.” ³⁷

Why had Ike come down so hard on George? He didn’t say. Maybe it was to keep the old dog on a short leash. After all, Marshall had said that was the way to handle Patton. And in the end, a short tether might be a good thing for George, to keep him from digging under the fence and scaring the neighbors.

Or maybe it was because Ike knew that George Patton was one of the few people on earth who would let him blow off that much steam and still remain as loyal as a brother—a surly, vain, jealous brother perhaps, but a brother he could always count on when the dice were in midair.

Or it may have been Supreme Commander Eisenhower stretching his wings, showing everyone he was willing to push people, even old friends, to make sure his quarterbacks ran the plays as he called them. Whatever the reason, it didn’t sit well with George.

As he slunk back to the silence of his cabin, thinking about the bawling-out Eisenhower had just given him, thinking about where he stood in the eyes of his superiors, George must have looked wistfully upon those bucolic days that followed the War to End All Wars. The days when he could enthrall a young, smiling lieutenant colonel with stories of combat, of what it was like to hear the ping of Mauser bullets bouncing off the hull of a tank, of the roar and smoke of the Meuse-Argonne and St.-Mihiel. Or even those days a few short years ago, when a frustrated, deskbound Eisenhower was begging him for a colonelcy in the Armored Force.

The incident aboard Hewitt’s flagship was one of those jarring moments when an intimate relationship becomes merely a close one, the kind of transformative moment when a man promoted to supervisor or shift foreman has to drop the hammer on an old chum. A time when, once and for all, the bond of friendship gives way to the chain of command.

Well, what the hell, thought George. He had work to do. He told his aides to gather his personal gear for the short trip to his headquarters at Gela. The boat was readied, and he climbed down Monrovia’s rope ladder for the last time.³⁸

When Eisenhower arrived back at Alex’s command post, his fury at George, which had subsided during his return trip, came roaring back with news of the airborne fiasco. Twenty-three transports shot down over American lines? What the hell was wrong with Seventh Army? Why hadn’t George gotten the word out to his AA units? And why didn’t George tell him about the disaster that morning aboard the Monrovia? His bare brow tightening and muttered curse words forming on his lips, Ike bellowed for an aide and dictated an immediate dispatch to the Seventh Army’s commander.³⁹

A glum George Patton told his diary he “received a wire from Ike, cussing me out” for the airborne fiasco, a tragedy he hadn’t known about until shortly after Ike had left the ship. Ike’s cable warned, “If the cited report is true, the incident could have been occasioned only by inexcusable carelessness and negligence on the part of someone.” Ike wanted someone’s head, not a whitewash, and to keep Patton from burying his order in some adjutant general’s paper-shuffle game he added, “I want a statement of the disciplinary action taken by you.”⁴⁰

Patton, having issued repeated orders warning ground and naval units that friendly transports would be overhead, felt there was no point in trying to nominate a scapegoat. He quietly refused to do anything more than initiate a pro forma inquiry and allow Ike’s investigator to nose around harmlessly. His conscience, he decided, was clear on this point: “As far as I can see, if anyone is blamable, it must be myself, but personally I feel immune to censure,” he wrote. “Perhaps Ike is looking for an excuse to relieve me. I am having a full report made but will not try anyone. If they want a goat, I am it. ”

His bitterness smoldering, he added, “Men who have been bombed all day get itchy fingers. Ike has never been subjected to air attack or any other form of death. However, he is such a straw man that his future is secure. The British will never let him go.” ⁴¹

Omar Bradley set foot on Sicilian soil on the morning of July 11, grimacing with every bump of the boat that carried him in. He was in agony from his hemorrhoidectomy, and he spent the next few days sitting awkwardly on an inflatable life jacket, shifting his weight every few minutes to dull the pulsing knife thrusts that shot through his rectum as a surprisingly large congregation of nerve endings stitched.⁴²

But if one overlooked his custom seating and saw only his plain jacket, leggings, and pot helmet, the bespectacled man with the homely, weather-beaten face looked like any other middle-aged officer on a sprawling headquarters staff. He posed for no pictures; he waited for no three-starred jeep. His aides simply flagged down a passing Duck, and he hitched a painful, bone-shaking ride into Scoglitti, where busy staffers were setting up his new command post.⁴³

As he settled into an old, dilapidated carabinieri headquarters that would become his new office, he heard an insistent, rhythmic rumble of howitzers booming from Terry Allen’s direction. When he learned from frantic Signals men that his waterlogged radio set would not be sending or receiving that day, he reluctantly saddled up for another painful trip. He headed for Gela.⁴⁴

As his jeep bounced toward Gela’s outskirts, Brad saw the Big Red One fighting for its life. Panzers were pressing against the division’s eggshell perimeter at the village of Piano Lupo, and Brad ordered his driver to burn rubber to Allen’s headquarters.

The Fighting First had indeed been given a helluva rough time. But Allen’s brawlers gave as good as they got, a fact not lost on Omar Bradley. Bradley, a man who had built his reputation by doing things by the book better than anyone else, disliked the unkempt general and his unruly division. Watching Allen’s men slug their way through a vicious panzer attack, he realized that Patton had been right to insist Terrible Terry lead the charge up the center. “In doing so he may have saved II Corps from a major disaster,” Brad later conceded. “Only the perverse Big Red One with its no less perverse commander was both hard and experienced enough to take that assault in stride.”⁴⁶

But Bradley’s respect for Patton’s foresight withered when he learned his boss had countermanded one of his orders to Allen. After Brad had ordered one of Allen’s regiments to sit tight until an adjacent enemy pocket had been cleaned out, an impatient Patton had ordered Terry to push the regiment forward. When the regiment was threatened with annihilation, Bradley had to beg George to send a part of the 2nd Armored Division reserve to the regiment’s relief. George had interfered with Bradley’s orders and placed men’s lives in danger.⁴⁷

An incensed Brad confronted George about his sin in breaking the Army’s sacred chain of command. George apologized, which at first smoothed Brad’s ruffled feathers, but Brad later found out that George had complained privately to Ike that his corps commander was “not aggressive enough” during the Axis counterattack.

This was a remark that cut Bradley to the bone. His personal courage should not be in question—he had taken up a carbine and gone hunting for a sniper holding up a sector he was passing through, a gutsy move for any man—and he felt he was professionally correct in firming up his line before pushing inland. But George’s thoughtless comment was calculated to damage Brad’s standing with their mutual boss. The remark, and Brad’s learning of it, was a jagged gouge in the smooth if unlikely partnership they had forged in the days of Tunisia.⁴⁸

As the ground campaign revved up to full speed, Brad took the reins of Patton’s eastern forces and drove them north. His surgical pain slowly subsiding, he moved into a converted Army truck that would become his home for the balance of the campaign. In the back, crosswise behind the cabin, sat a low bed covered with a wool West Point blanket stenciled U.S.M.A. Over the bed, Bradley had painted the beginning and ending dates for the North African campaign, and underneath them, D-Day for HUSKY. The Sicilian campaign’s end date was left blank, for the moment. One side of the truck was filled with a desk; its drawers were crammed with orders and reports, and it was flanked by a heavy black field telephone hanging in a leather case. The other side of his rolling apartment was fitted with a small closet and a washbasin, over which hung a large map of Sicily he would study alone at night.⁴⁹

On campaign, Brad and George worked well together, just as they had in Tunisia. Patton trusted Bradley enough to let him run most of his own show without too much topside interference, and that laissez-faire management allowed Seventh Army to get the most out of Bradley and his men. But before long their diverging styles began to rub both men the wrong way, just as they had rubbed each other the wrong way at times in Tunisia. In mid-July, for instance, Bradley stormed into George’s headquarters in a hot fury. Incensed, he relayed a report of a rogue American captain who had gunned down some fifty Axis prisoners “in cold blood.” To make matters worse, Brad said, the obedient prisoners had been lined up for march behind American lines when the captain massacred them.

George just shrugged. “I told Bradley that it was probably an exaggeration, but in any case to tell the officer to certify that the dead men were snipers or attempted to escape or something, as it would make a stink in the press and also would make the civilians mad,” he told his diary.⁵⁰

Another time, Brad asked Patton for a replacement colonel to command a regiment of Middleton’s 45th Division. The current CO was not up to snuff, Brad said, and he wanted the colonel tossed. He asked Patton to replace the man with Lieutenant Colonel Darby, the Ranger battalion commander who had fought like a lion around Gela.

George duly offered Darby a promotion to full bird colonel if he would take over Middleton’s regiment. Darby, fond of his Rangers, begged off. “Maybe I’d better stick with my boys,” he said, and George, privately impressed with any man who would turn down a promotion to stay in a fight, did not insist. Brad, however, was miffed that the famously tough George Patton had given Darby a choice in the matter. The perceived slight would rankle him for years.⁵¹

Other flashpoints cropped up over an old bugaboo, their logistical tail. Sicily was an unruly island, and under any circumstances moving ammunition, fuel, and food along rugged highways from Gela to the front would have been difficult. Lacking a major port in Patton’s territory, the problems multiplied. Patton’s staff, fixated on Gela’s beaches as its starting point, therefore assigned the II Corps supply mess to an engineer beach battalion, a unit well suited to getting goods ashore, but inept at pushing them forward to the frontline troops. The result was a black eye for the Ordnance Department.⁵²

“On the several occasions I appealed to Patton for more supply support,” Brad wrote later. “He would respond as though I had come to chide him on a minor detail and he would brush my complaint aside. Although Patton ran his Army tactically with an iron hand, he remained almost completely indifferent to its logistical needs. In war as Patton knew it there was little time for logistics in the busy day of a field commander.” As Bradley recalled, George’s stock answer whenever he raised a supply question was, “Have your people take it up with my G-4. Now let’s get back to this scheme of attack. . . .” When he complained to Lucas about Seventh Army’s neglect of supplies, Lucas agreed with him, sympathetically remarking that George “never bothers his head about such things.”⁵³

While Patton and Bradley were moving off the beaches, General Montgomery was running into a figurative brick wall near the town of Catania. The figurative brick wall was, unfortunately, backed by a literal brick wall—or rather, a rock-and-lava cone named Mount Etna, the chief obstacle on the British coastal road to Messina. Soaring eleven thousand feet into the Mediterranean sky, Vulcan’s mythical forge anchored a defensive belt that commanded the highway running up the east coast. Tough German Fallschirmjäger troops, a panzer division from Italy, and a scratch collection of Italian brigades manned a strong, protective ring around the volcano’s base, and by mid-July Monty realized he was in for some impossibly hard fighting at the Etna Line.⁵⁴

Few of the G-2 wizards had foreseen stiff resistance here. Before D-Day, Eisenhower’s staff had predicted that fighting would be heaviest around Patton’s Seventh Army, since most of Guzzoni’s strongest units had been stationed on the island’s west and center. With the Germans bearing down on Seventh Army, Monty should have been shielded in his drive for Messina. Even Alexander conceded, “The American troops were being given the tougher and less spectacular task.”⁵⁵

But General Guzzoni’s few mobile troops had outmaneuvered Eighth Army, and before long Montgomery was scanning the map for a way around the Etna Line. Going west, the only way around Etna, would take him deep into Bradley’s territory, but Monty needed a route to outflank the volcano’s defenders, and the Americans held the only open highway, known as Highway 124. So early on July 13, Montgomery sent a corps toward Highway 124 near the crossroads town of Enna, then directed his nominal commander, General Alexander, to redraw the boundaries between the American and Commonwealth forces to give the coveted highway to Eighth Army.⁵⁶

Thirty hours after Ike “stepped on George hard,” the stepped-on general was jolted by a surprise visit from Alexander, who politely ordered him to surrender Highway 124. The boundary lines were being modified, he explained, and Eighth Army would go around both sides of the mountain to secure Messina. Bradley’s corps would have to move out to make room for the incoming 1st Canadian Division.⁵⁷

Before the invasion, George and Brad had assumed the two armies would move in tandem toward Messina to cut off the Axis retreat. That seemed to make good military sense, and it was consistent with the original plan to land George’s U.S. troops at Palermo and march them eastward along the north coast to Messina, converging there with the Commonwealth forces. Alexander never confirmed this supposition—incredibly, there was no firm plan beyond the initial HUSKY objectives—but the two American generals had assumed their men would be given an equal shot at the final kill.⁵⁸

So when Alexander directed the Americans to step aside to give the British an open shot at Messina, George had every reason to be furious. After all, Montgomery had supplies from Syracuse, he had the eastern road, and he had the Seventh Army watching his back. What more did he need? Was Alexander’s job to make sure Monty snatched every last laurel of victory for the British Empire?

Then again, George was in no position to argue. The Supreme Commander had just jacked him up over Seventh Army’s reports, and the friendly fire on Ridgway’s paratroopers had driven George deep into Ike’s doghouse. He worried, with some justification, that Ike was going to fire him. Ike had lectured him for months on the necessity of complete and seamless Allied harmony, and he had personally warned Patton that he would send home any general who failed to cooperate. Now, George fretted, Ike seemed to be looking for an excuse to fire him and replace him with someone more pliable. Someone like Omar Bradley.⁵⁹

It was no time for George to open his mouth, and he knew it. Seventh Army would comply fully with Army Group orders, he assured Alexander. If called to do so, the Americans would be Monty’s shield, and that was that. All a wounded George could do was sound off to his staff afterward and complain to his wife about Ike’s complicity in Montgomery’s devious games. He would confine his temper to his diary and confidants.⁶⁰