Brothers, Rivals, Victors

Brad could not believe his ears. His sole job—in fact, the only apparent reason for his corps being in Sicily—was to move north, toward Sicily’s coast, for moving there would put him in position to get in on the final kill for Messina, similar to his capture of Bizerte in the African campaign. He had counted on Highway 124 to keep Middleton’s division moving forward, and George had just told him he was losing his most precious piece of real estate.²

With look of gloom on his face, Brad drove back to his command post, furious with both Alexander and Patton. Later he would call Alexander’s order “the most arrogant, egotistical, selfish and dangerous move in the whole of combined operations in World War II.” He was especially flabbergasted to think that some British aristocrat named General Sir Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, K.C.B., G.C.B., D.S.O. and S.O.B., had faced down “Blood and Guts” Patton and shoved his American 45th Division to the side. How could George, of all people, have taken this kind of insult?⁵

When Brad arrived at his command post at Gela, Monk Dickson needed little of his considerable intelligence-gathering acumen to know that Brad was “as hot as Mount Etna” over the highway switch. Livid with Alexander for playing the same game he tried to play in Tunisia, Bradley also blamed Eisenhower for letting him get away with it. So did John Lucas, who flew to Algiers on George’s behalf to enlist Ike’s help.⁷

Eisenhower, wary of Montgomery’s hold over Alexander, was sympathetic, but he refused to intervene. Having gone to bat for George on other occasions, Ike refused to countermand Alexander’s tactical order. Ike tried to get Lucas to see things from the British point of view, pointing out that Alex had formed his first impression of the American soldier during the Kasserine Pass debacle, and, right or wrong, the awful repulse at Kasserine had shattered Alexander’s confidence in the American fighting man.⁸

Ike figured George’s steam-gauge needle was stuck well into the red by now and, under pressure from Marshall to defend American prerogatives, encouraged George to stand up to Alexander—though he’d have to do it without any overt support from AFHQ. In a voice bereft of conviction, Ike told Lucas “to see that Patton was made to realize that he must stand up to Alexander.” But he added, “He didn’t mean [Patton] was not to obey orders, of course.” This was mighty cold comfort, and a disgusted Lucas reported back to George at Gela, complaining later to his diary that criticizing the British to Ike was “like talking to a man about his wife.”⁹

Right or wrong, the whole exchange had become academic. By the time Ike offered his highly conditional support, the American engine had been shifted into reverse. Montgomery was pushing his Canadians up Highway 124, and Middleton was pulling his 45th Division back to the beachhead. Ike’s dicta affected nothing, and to Bradley’s dismay, George obeyed his orders with an uncharacteristic quiet.

The Seventh Army commander had been complaining to Army Group since April about his supply lines. It wasn’t that his army lacked the stockpiles, but Patton couldn’t roll nearly enough ammunition, food, and equipment over the rutted beaches at Gela; Licata was too small for his supply ships, and he hated being at the mercy of Monty’s logistics men, who decided what to forward him through Syracuse, some 140 miles to the east.

But to the west, just beyond his army’s boundary lines, lay the tempting little fishing village of Porto Empedocle, a small but adequate harbor town on the seaward side of the ancient city of Agrigento. To relieve the strain on his supply lines, George suggested, why couldn’t he try for Agrigento’s modest port, just a little farther west?¹⁰

Alexander, his mind fixed on matters closer to Messina, politely told George that if he could capture Agrigento with limited forces—say, in the nature of a reconnaissance in force—he had no objection to the proposal. George immediately drove over to 3rd Division headquarters and told Truscott to push like hell toward Agrigento and Porto Empedocle with whatever “reconnaissance in force” he needed to storm the place.¹¹

George understood that with a modest supply base in western Sicily, it would be a small matter to push up to Palermo. The itch to take Palermo, the island’s capital, was an almost unbearable obsession for him; as Truscott remembered it, “It was the glamour of capturing Palermo—the biggest city in Sicily—that attracted Georgie Patton.” To reach Palermo, he formed a provisional corps under his deputy, Geoff Keyes, and reared back to hurl it like a javelin at the ancient city. On July 14, the day after his visit from Alexander, the cagey general wrote in his diary. “When the present line of the combined armies is secured, which will probably be around the 19th, it will be feasible to advance rapidly with the 3d Division and 2d Armor and take Palermo. I will bring this question up to General Alexander when the time is ripe.”¹²

Truscott, reliable and aggressive, took his orders to heart. Driving his soldiers forward on a five-mile-per-hour march pace—the “Truscott Trot,” his soldiers called it—he captured Porto Empedocle by July 16 and reported to Patton that Agrigento, enveloped from all sides, was about to fall. The time to speak with Alexander was ripe.¹³

As he stared at the grid-lined operations map, a jittery General Alexander saw an Italian menace lurking to the west. He fretted over the need to keep Montgomery’s left flank anchored as the British and Canadians enveloped the Etna Line, and his mind kept coming back to what would happen if General Guzzoni made a hard drive from Palermo through the thinly spread Americans into Eighth Army’s rear. So late on the sixteenth Alexander ordered Seventh Army to resume its watch over Montgomery’s perimeter.¹⁴

In glancing over Alex’s order, George’s eyes lit on one particularly ugly sentence: “SEVENTH ARMY WILL PROTECT THE REAR OF EIGHTH ARMY.” In his diary, he spat, “General Alexander . . . directs that the Seventh Army protect the rear of Eighth Army, thus putting the Americans in a secondary role, which is a continuation of such roles for the whole campaign and may find the war Ending with us being overlooked.” It was intolerable to a man of Patton’s prejudices that the Americans should be chained to Monty’s backside, and he decided to remedy that grave injustice before Alex’s habit of handing the war to Montgomery on a silver platter turned into an unalterable pattern.¹⁵

“I am flying to Tunis to see General Alexander,” George wrote in his diary on the seventeenth. “I am sure that neither he nor any of his British staff has any conception of the power or mobility of the Seventh Army, nor are they aware of the political implications latent in such a course of action. I shall Explain to General Alexander on the basis that it would be inexpedient politically for the Seventh Army not to have Equal glory in the final stage of the campaign.”¹⁶

Watching events from distant Algiers, Butch noted the following day, “General Patton made a quick trip to La Marsa in a B-25 yesterday. He wanted to see General Alexander, to clarify the order to the Seventh Army. He was mad as a wet hen because the order said the Seventh Army would protect the rear and flank of the Eighth Army and left the American in an inferior position.”¹⁷

While he might sound off recklessly to his diary, or bitch in violent terms to close friends, when it came to high-level meetings George was always tactful, businesslike, and well prepared. He studied up on his tonnage requirements, enlisted a friendly War Department witness, Brigadier General Albert C. Wedemeyer, marked up his map, and hopped a medium bomber over to Tunisia.¹⁹

The Battle of La Marsa went better than George had expected. At Alexander’s headquarters, George lobbied the waxen general to let Bradley’s II Corps drive to the north coast, splitting Sicily in two and giving the Americans control over the island’s western half. With no real progress along Montgomery’s front, Alexander simply nodded his assent, with the stipulation that Patton’s men must cover the road net around Montgomery’s flank. That was easy enough, thought George. He would have his coveted Palermo.²⁰

Omar Badley gritted his false teeth and surrendered Highway 124 to the Canadians, just as Patton had ordered. He couldn’t understand how, without a word of protest from George, American forces had been cut out of the picture. With II Corps relegated to covering Monty’s western flank, the Missourian saw slim pickings for his men, mostly “the capture of hills, docile peasants and spiritless soldiers.” George, it seemed, was treating Brad’s corps with benign neglect, just like Eisenhower, and just like the British.²¹

Stomping back to his command tent, he directed an astonished Troy Middleton to break contact with the enemy and reverse course toward Gela. Troy was no happier about the move than Brad was, since he and Eighth Army were about to put the XIV Panzerkorps out of business, and he probably gave Bradley the same hot flak Bradley had given Patton. The Army chain worked that way, too. In the end, though, Middleton obediently withdrew his confused men southwest toward Gela, then sideslipped them around the rear of the 1st Division. Away from the fighting.

Before long Middleton, as capable a coach as either Brad or Ike, had his men pushing north again, leapfrogging regiments toward Sicily’s north coast. As GIs covered in sweat and dust pounded roads once trampled by Greek hoplites, the colors red and blue began to dominate a huge map of Sicily that Brad kept in his operations tent—blue representing territory captured by the Americans, red showing land captured by Monty’s men. The blue field dwarfed the red, a pointed reminder to visitors and himself which nation was winning the battle for Sicily.²²

As George and Brad picked their way through central Sicily, the Supreme Commander struggled to keep his head above the political entanglements that were part and parcel of his office. In late July, President Roosevelt sent Ike a rebuke in response to a groundless rumor that AFHQ had formally recognized De Gaulle’s French Committee of National Liberation, and to counteract De Gaulle’s influence, Roosevelt gave Ike an impossibly tall order to supply Giraud’s men liberally with war matériel. Secretary Stimson began pressuring Ike to make sure the Americans did not take a backseat to the British in Sicily—probably in response to complaint letters from Patton and other grumbling Anglophobes who had the secretary’s ear. To please his American bosses—Marshall, Arnold, King, and the rest—he had to make a record of complaint letters to Churchill and Brooke about the pro-British slant in BBC reports, which always seemed to overlook or even denigrate American contributions. Finally, whenever Ike had time, which was never, he had to straighten out a thousand administrative problems growing like weeds from his bloated headquarters: Judge Advocate, Military Police, Supply, Personnel, Transportation Corps, Civic Administration, and countless other departments where Ike alone had to make important calls, ranging from affirming death sentences to allocating supply tonnage.²³

In western Sicily, George drove Truscott’s men north toward Palermo, a move that aggrieved Bradley, since his 45th Division had been promised the honor of taking that city. But Patton had bigger things to worry about than Bradley’s ire; having finagled Alexander’s paper-thin acquiescence to operations in the west, George fretted that Fifteenth Army Group might cut him off again, before he could leave his mark on the campaign. He was certain that armored mobility and the hustle of the “Truscott Trot” would take him all the way to Messina if Alex weren’t so damned timid, and perhaps thinking of the swift “foot cavalry” of his hero, Stonewall Jackson, George grumbled, “Alex has no idea of either the power or speed of American armies. We can go twice as fast as the British and hit harder. . . .” ²⁴

George’s fears proved prescient, for a day after turning him loose, Alexander sent a cable to Seventh Army headquarters imposing debilitating constraints on Patton’s drive to Palermo. Directing him to devote most of his force to building a defensive perimeter from Agrigento in the south to Campofelice in the north, Alexander gave George a laundry list of objectives he must take before striking out for Palermo. In other words, Seventh Army would become Montgomery’s shield once again.²⁵

This time George ignored Alexander’s order, possibly because he never received it, or possibly because he let it be known around Seventh Army headquarters that he didn’t want any such orders to reach him. George’s loyal chief of staff, Hap Gay, interpreted the order as a confirmation of Alexander’s oral directive, the order’s peremptory language notwithstanding.²⁶

Geoff Keyes, commanding Truscott, the airborne, the Rangers, and Hugh Gaffey’s 2nd Armored Division, began the race for Palermo on July 19, and Patton finally saw events moving in the right direction. “Now I am trying to get Gaffey loose,” he exulted to Beatrice the following day. “If I succeed, Attila will have to take a back seat.” On July 21, while Monty was still struggling at Catania, Gaffey reported that the 2nd Armored would be in Palermo by the following morning. EXPEDITE REPLY URGENT. CAN WE MAKE TOUCHDOWN ON OUR OWN INTITIATIVE? Keyes wired Patton.

The next day, Shermans of George’s beloved Hell on Wheels Division clattered down the wrecked streets of Palermo to the cheers, stares, peace offerings, and quizzical looks of the city’s four hundred thousand inhabitants. The battle for Sicily’s capital had cost George’s army a grand total of 272 casualties, and his men had killed some 2,900 enemy soldiers and captured another 53,000. He gleefully dashed off a note to Beatrice just ahead of the official press release, joking, “By the time the censor sees this the name of the town will be in all the papers so he can fill it in here ________.” ²⁸

George arrived in Palermo deliberately late on the evening of July 22. In a rare instance of public modesty, he wanted to avoid overshadowing Geoff Keyes, whom he decreed would have the honor of taking the city’s official surrender. Casting his blue-gray eyes over the crumbling stone buildings dotted with white sheets, American flags, and vandalized fascist banners, George beamed with delight. American men, under his leadership, had liberated an ancient enemy capital!²⁹

The momentarily satisfied Top Dog installed his new headquarters in the opulent palace of the King of Sicily, a beautiful, dilapidated mongrel building that, like Italy’s tottering government, was as regal in ornamentation as it was decrepit at its foundations. Ignoring fascist salutes from palace servants, which were obviously a matter of habit, George set up his office in a cavernous state apartment adorned with crystal chandeliers, heavy upholstered chairs, classical oil paintings, and a giant rosewood desk. From here, under a ceiling frescoed with rococo cherubs, he would plan the conquest of the rest of Trinacria. It was an altogether fitting venue for a man with George Patton’s deep sense of history.³¹

To his immense delight, George soon learned that events around Mount Etna were bringing Bradley’s troops back into the show. With Montgomery locked in battle at the Etna Line, Generals Eisenhower and Alexander reached the conclusion that Middleton’s Thunderbirds might help Monty crash through the enemy’s front. On July 20, Montgomery sent General Oliver Leese to work out road rights, and General Clarence R. Huebner, Eisenhower’s unofficial eyes and ears, came to George on his own initiative, and he strongly advised George to insist to Alexander that Seventh Army get both north coast roads for the drive to Messina. Alexander, believing the Americans could be of real help to Montgomery, readily confirmed that Seventh Army would make a cautious, exploratory probe toward Messina, and on the twenty-third, Alexander’s new orders appeared to put George’s army on an even footing with Montgomery’s.³²

It was an oddly informal meeting, one of the few times Patton and Montgomery would meet as equals. Monty drove out to the airstrip at the appointed hour, his slightly baggy British trousers set off by a rumpled, unmarked shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his bony elbows. The only hint of Montgomery’s military occupation was his trademark Royal Tank Corps beret, and he fit Chet Hansen’s description of him as “a poorly tailored bohemian painter.” George, for his part, stepped off the plane wearing a plain khaki uniform, his trademark steel helmet replaced by a simple garrison cap. No pistols, no campaign ribbons, no riding crop. Just old George, his deputy G-3, and his aide Charlie Codman. He hurried to meet Montgomery, who reciprocated by stepping up his pace to shake hands with his fellow army commander.³⁵

With Alexander running late for the meeting, Monty spread a huge map of Sicily over the hood of his tan staff car and the two men negotiated their own boundaries. As Monty smoothed out the worn contour map, there was little of the usual leaning forward and pointing to features, or running fingers along roads and lines of communication while squinting at tiny place names. This day it was much simpler. There were four roads leading toward Messina—two to the northwest, in George’s area, and two to the southeast, in Monty’s. Seventh Army, they agreed, would get Highway 113, the north coastal road, and Highway 120, the parallel route. Monty got the two southern roads.³⁶

On the flight to Syracuse, George had steeled himself for some hard bargaining. But Montgomery, faced with a bloody, uphill struggle, was glad to let Patton take Messina if that was the fastest way to wrap up an all-too-sanguine campaign, though it was understood by both men that Monty would try to get there first. “He agreed so readily that I felt something was wrong, but I have not found it yet,” George mused afterward, but this time his suspicions were off the mark. Monty, like George, may have been personally vain, but he was intellectually honest enough to recognize that pressure from Seventh Army would, in the end, save Allied lives.³⁷

When Alexander finally arrived, he was visibly irritated at being left out of the discussion. “He looked a little mad and, for him, was quite brusque,” George quipped that evening. “He told Monty to Explain his plan. Monty said he and I had already decided what we were going to do, so Alex got madder. . . .” But the issue had been decided at that point; Montgomery told Alexander what he and George had agreed to—recommended, technically—and with a few face-saving modifications, Alex capitulated.³⁸

Brad’s map-lined truck rolled north over wagon-rutted hills, following the general lines of Terry Allen’s 1st Division on his right and Troy Middleton’s 45th on the left, and before long he set up a command post in a gaudy baroque palazzo in Caltanissetta. He was naturally unhappy at being squeezed out of the capture of Palermo in favor of the 2nd Armored Division—Patton favored his horses, whether iron or flesh—but he was pleased to learn that George was sending him additional artillery and a few more regiments. When George directed Brad to turn his corps ninety degrees and hit the enemy at Troina, a fortified mountain town on the middle road to Messina, a dutiful Bradley fired off fresh orders to both divisions. He sent Middleton east along the coastal road, and Allen in a roughly parallel direction toward Troina, between the craggy Caronie Mountains and the looming Mount Etna. Bradley’s G-2 forecast little German resistance at Troina, and Brad reasoned that a breakthrough there would open up his colored map of Sicily to a lot more blue shading.⁴⁰

For the better part of a week Allen’s regiments pushed and prodded at Troina’s well-prepared perimeter, looking for a way to cut off the defenders or cave in their flanks. But the Germans there were a desperate lot, and they counterattacked every time Allen’s veterans began to waver. It took eighteen battalions of howitzers, three squadrons of fighter-bombers, and many blood-soaked assaults to eject the defenders, who began to evacuate the city on August 6. Later that day, as the Stars and Stripes snapped over Troina’s central piazza, Bradley planned his next move. He also turned his attention to the problem of the 1st Division’s commanding general.⁴¹

Brad had been stewing over “Terrible Terry” for some time. The man was good, very good, but he was impossible to control: too foulmouthed, too boastful, and too aggressive to make a good team player. From under the rim of his lopsided helmet, Terry winked at violations of Army regulations that he didn’t deem critical to his division’s combat effectiveness. A guy who thought the 1st Division was the only division on the island, Allen seemed to think that because his men had seen more combat than anybody else, they were excused from the rules everyone else had to follow, and Terry’s personal example, especially his fondness for bourbon, would weaken the fabric of his division. On at least one occasion, the Army telephone operator overheard a greatly agitated Bradley saying, “Allen, let me remind you that I am your Corps commander,” to which Allen responded by hanging up.

Allen’s self-centered outlook was, Brad thought, a lot like George Patton’s, except that Brad had to put up with George, and he didn’t have to put up with Terry. Allen’s gregarious deputy commander, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., was also indifferent to discipline, which aggravated the problem. “The men worship Ted,” Bradley told Ike, “but he’s too soft-hearted to take a division—too much like one of the boys.”⁴²

When he took the reins of II Corps, Ike had warned Brad to be tough on his subordinates. Bradley, a disciple of Marshall, didn’t need that kind of advice from Ike, for he had a hair trigger when it came to inefficiency, real or perceived, and he could be as ruthless as Bedell Smith when he had to. So by the middle of July, Brad decided that Terry and Teddy had to go.⁴³

After clearing it with George, who formally cleared it with Ike, Brad’s adjutant prepared the orders relieving Terry and Teddy. But through a typical bureaucratic screwup, the orders relieving the division’s commanders were sent to Allen’s headquarters through the routine mail pouch and arrived while Allen was in the midst of the battle for Troina. He telephoned Bradley, who assured him the orders were premature, but on the sixth of August Brad called Allen and Roosevelt over to his command post at Nicosia, sat them around a camp table, and told them he was relieving them.⁴⁵

Their appeals fell on deaf ears. To Omar Bradley it was not about their track record, brilliant as it was. It was about playing on a team. In the campaign for Messina, and in larger battles in Italy or France, every division would have to play on a team; there could be no mavericks, because in war mavericks cost lives. Allen’s independent spirit made the Big Red One an exceptional division for a one-on-one match, which was why his men had broken out of the slugfest at Gela against the Hermann Göring panzers. But one-on-one matches don’t win wars—at least, not wars against the forty-odd Nazi divisions holding France. Men’s lives were at stake, and Bradley, a baseball player at heart, didn’t tolerate independence in his subordinates. So, for the good of the division, for the good of the corps, Allen and Roosevelt had to go.

While the decision to relieve the two generals originated with Brad, the move fit within a larger reorganization Patton was working into the Seventh Army. George, less dispassionate than Bradley, felt uncomfortable relieving an old friend who had fought a good fight—a brilliant fight by most accounts, even Bradley’s. He wrote a glowing commendation for Allen (toning it down a bit at Brad’s request), and gave the old horse soldier a pep talk at his headquarters before sending Terry down to Algiers until Ike could figure out what to do with him. When he learned that Roosevelt would be relieved with prejudice to his future command prospects, George told himself, “While I think General Roosevelt is not the best general in the world, particularly for organization and disciplinary purposes, he none the less, is a gallant soldier who has fought well. . . .” He decided to “talk to Ike about doing the right thing by Teddy R.,” and eventually got Roosevelt relieved on the same nonprejudicial terms as Allen.⁴⁶

To Ike, George’s success validated his judgment in sticking with the controversial tanker. Butcher’s diary noted: “Patton’s great progress gives Ike a warm glow, as there are many Army officers who could not see through Patton’s showmanship and boisterousness to discern his fine qualities of leadership, on which Ike banked so strongly.” In contrast to his mid-July cable to Marshall, where he sounded high praise for Brad but only grudgingly conceded that George was “doing well,” in early August a beaming Ike reported, “The Seventh Army has been performing magnificently. It has marched over long distances, supplies itself under most difficult circumstances, fought many sharp and successful engagements, and is now in a prominent place on the battle line hammering away to drive the enemy out of the island. It is really difficult to give it sufficient credit for its accomplishments to date.” He was glad to see George avoid another sitrep showdown over Alexander’s orders pushing Bradley aside, and he felt his friend had done a masterful job moving a provisional corps of infantry and tanks against Palermo. The capture of the ancient capital made headlines around the world, George’s scowling face appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek , and Secretary Stimson sent a cable to AFHQ crowing about how “his ex-aide Geo P jr” was “doing right well.” To Ike, George, Brad, and their division commanders had brought the American Army back from the stigma of Kasserine Pass. Perhaps that was their most important achievement of the war so far.⁴⁷

Despite Seventh Army’s performance in Sicily, Ike’s opinion of George’s management style did not change fundamentally. He knew George was the same old impulsive, socially reckless showboater, and the day after Palermo’s fall he told John Lucas to stay close to Seventh Army headquarters and keep an eye on how it functioned. But as the impact of George’s campaign set in, the tone at AFHQ toward the cavalryman made a subtle shift. Staffers smiled more when they spoke of Seventh Army, and Ike and Beetle began talking of awarding George another Distinguished Service Cross for his actions at Gela during the counterattack. Lucas, a reliable barometer of Ike’s mood, quipped, “Something has happened around here” in regards to Patton.⁴⁸

The political repercussions of Patton’s tear through western Sicily made life easier for Eisenhower. The day after Palermo’s capture, Rome’s Grand Council of Fascism ejected Mussolini and replaced him with Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who immediately dispatched secret peace feelers to the Allies. This was tremendously important, since Ike knew well that political results were much better understood in Washington and London than military results. It was a matter of personal pride to him that the Allied High Command could report, “Scratch one dictator.”⁴⁹

Notwithstanding Il Duce’s early retirement, the military picture in Sicily fell far short of Ike’s expectations. On the German side, Smiling Al Kesselring was fighting a delaying action to move troops and equipment off the island, and it was obvious to everyone that the better way to bag the defenders would have been to cork the bottleneck, Messina, rather than start at the bottle’s base and flush the Germans out the neck, where they would live to fight another day.⁵⁰

Beyond Sicily and its next logical step, Italy, the future held little joy for Ike. Word had begun trickling back that he would be swapped out for Marshall, who would lead the invasion of France, and his heart sank every time he heard the rumor. He had outwardly presumed that Marshall would command the invasion, but deep down the very thought of returning to a desk job, even one as prestigious as Army Chief of Staff, revolted him. After several visitors brought Ike the same repetitive prognostication, he privately blew his stack. “Goddammit,” he told Kay Summersby, “I’ve had a bellyful of every Tom, Dick and Harry coming here from Washington and telling me I’m about to be stuck behind a desk in the Pentagon.”⁵¹

By the end of July, George Patton, America’s great charging bull, was ready for his final drive on Messina some 150 miles to the east. He told Truscott over drinks that he “would certainly like to beat Montgomery into Messina,” and he sent President Roosevelt a well-thumbed engineering map of Sicily highlighting the territory under American control. At the map’s eastern tip, a blue-pencil arrow pointed to Messina underneath Patton’s handwritten inscription, “We hope!”⁵²

It was a race George desperately wanted to win. He was running for American honor, and he was running for long-denied recognition from Ike and his British entourage. “BBC just barely admits we exist,” he groused to Beatrice, and he felt just as neglected by the one man in the theater whose approval he craved most. He told Bea, “FDR sent me a signed picture of he and I, and the PM has wired congrats, but Divine Destiny [D. D. Eisenhower] is still mute,” he complained.⁵³

On July 31, as the race for Messina was getting under way, Ike flew to Palermo for lunch with the Seventh Army commander. Patton greeted him at the airport with an honor guard from the 15th Infantry Regiment—“the only unit he ever commanded,” George noted—as a polite nod to Eisenhower’s field experience. He and Ike climbed into a waiting staff car, and George gave the Supreme Commander a tour of the city, pointing out the progress his engineers were making in getting Palermo’s water and lights back on, and paying high tributes to Seventh Army’s fighting men and subordinate commanders.⁵⁴

Winding back through Palermo’s narrow streets, they motored back to the palace, where the two old soldiers shared a quiet lunch of fried Spam. As their forks clinked on china emblazoned with the Savoy coat of arms, Ike told George he was “anxious that there be no misunderstanding between Alexander and Patton as to plans for the attack.” George, he stressed, was to continue his methodical and steady advance, while Montgomery was to lay on all he had and try to break through the Etna Line on the east. It was hardly a rousing call to arms.⁵⁵

When Ike left, a slightly deflated George reported: “He was quite relaxed but did not compliment us. He did say that I had moderated, which he thought was a compliment, but which I regret. I tried to get him to stay all night so I could show him the truly appalling nature of the mountains, but he had to leave. . . .” ⁵⁶

Perhaps sensing that he had not done much to lift his friend’s spirits, two days after his lunch meeting, Ike sent George a letter that did the trick: “The Seventh Army has already made a name for itself that will live in American history,” he wrote. “Within the next few days it will add immeasurably to the luster of its fame. I personally assure you that if we speedily finish off the German in Sicily, you need have no fear of being left there in the backwater of the war.” ⁵⁷

Ike’s praise meant George was out from the shadow of his mid-July chewing out. George scribbled “whoopee!” under Ike’s signature and underlined it three times before dropping the letter into his “to file” box. Reviewing his Sicilian campaign with a self-satisfaction he rarely admitted, he channeled Ike’s words of support into a confidence—a hubris, in fact—that would soon bring him to personal grief.⁵⁸

By the last week of July 1943, Patton’s Seventh Army held the Messina road from San Stefano, the midpoint on Sicily’s north coast, and he controlled the highway leading from Troina. Now, George thought, was the time to put some fire under his generals, especially Bradley and Middleton, who might be getting a little “sticky” in their pace. George’s fervor to reach Messina intensified when, on August 5, he learned that Catania, the great roadblock to the east, had at last fallen to Montgomery’s troops. “This is a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake,” he told Middleton. “We must take Messina before the British. Please use your best efforts to facilitate the success of our race.”⁵⁹

Trouble was, Patton’s men were staring at the same problem Monty’s men had confronted for the last three weeks: To the east, the neck of the island narrowed so sharply that George’s two roads were squeezed together like spaghetti noodles in a funnel, which provided little or no room for the kind of mobile operations at which George excelled. The Germans, experts at interior defense lines, made the most of their cramped quarters, and they were determined to fight like Spartans at Thermopylae for every inch of the way back to Messina. So when Middleton’s men marched up to the seaside town of San Fratello, they hit an unyielding wall of fire and steel that filled the hospital tents with the wounded and the dying.

The solution, George thought, was an amphibious left hook. If he and Bradley could load a few tanks and enough troops on boats—say, a battalion or two—they could flank the Axis line and catch the defending 29th Panzergrenadier Division from behind. From his advance command post in an olive grove at San Stefano, near the front lines, George picked up the phone and called Bradley.⁶⁰

When Bradley and Patton had discussed the concept of an amphibious landing in late July, Brad convinced George to let him control the timing of any such movements. Bradley’s confidence in his own ability was growing, and even though he would be using Truscott’s 3rd Division veterans, whom George was bringing in to replace Middleton’s Thunderbirds, Brad worried that his high-strung commander might order a beach assault without first making sure everything was ready. Brad and Truscott discussed the matter at length, and once they agreed on the correct time and place for an amphibious end run, Bradley set to work leapfrogging the San Fratello Line with a passion. Like George, the Missourian was anxious to beat Monty to Messina, not least because his soldiers were still steaming over BBC reports trumpeting the heroic exploits of the British Eighth Army while claiming, erroneously, that the Americans had been “swimming” and “eating grapes” in western Sicily. San Fratello, Brad thought, was the perfect place to show the British what their resourceful cousins were capable of.⁶¹

Brad’s amphibious end run, launched on the night of August 7–8, was a solid local success. The gravel-voiced Truscott timed the landing to coincide with a big frontal push; the one-two punch forced the grenadiers back, and the operation took three Axis tanks and a respectable number of soldaten out of circulation. It was a beautiful local maneuver, Brad thought, a model for future West Pointers to learn from.⁶²

Though the landings did little in the larger scheme of things—the Germans were pulling out from the San Fratello Line anyway—George, elated by the operation’s success, wanted to try it again, and this time, he arranged to have the press cover his next tactical victory. As the attack hour approached, his impatience festered like a boil, since Montgomery, now beyond Catania, was sending cables announcing his swift progress toward Messina. Now beyond Etna, now through Randazzo, George absorbed every Eighth Army dispatch with an eye for where Montgomery was in relation to Messina—and in relation to him. Anxious to get moving, he fretted on the night of August 9, “We are trying to get out another landing operation for tonight, but I am afraid that the 3d Division has not progressed far Enough.” ⁶³

After a day’s delay courtesy of a Luftwaffe bombing hit to one of his precious LCTs, an impatient George waited for Truscott to launch another planned leapfrog up the road, around the Germans holding the little coastal town of Brolo. On the morning of August 10 he barked for Sergeant Mims and jumped into his car for a drive over to II Corps headquarters, where he had Brad issue orders to Lucian Truscott. From there he returned to his forward command post at San Stefano, stopping on the way to visit an evacuation hospital, where he dealt with an alleged case of battle fatigue in the simple, direct Patton style.⁶⁵

Although General Truscott supported the idea of an amphibious landing, he knew his main force was too far back to support the landing party when it came under fire; isolated on the rocky beaches, the beach team would be sitting ducks when the Germans responded to the threat. Truscott rang up Bradley, who agreed with him, and at seven fifty in the evening Truscott phoned George’s headquarters and told the army commander he and Brad wanted to delay the attack for a day. The delay was necessary, he explained, to give the infantry on the road time to prepare a big frontal assault, so the main force would be in position to link up with the beach team before things got too hot.⁶⁶

After hanging up on Truscott, George reflected on the reluctance of his two senior lieutenants. Orders were orders, and his directives would be obeyed, but to make sure the job was done right, the Seventh Army commander felt the situation required some Black Jack–style elbow grease. He drove over to Truscott’s headquarters, giving hell to everyone from the MPs to the chief of staff, and when the hard-bitten Texan again tried to talk Patton out of the operation, George’s anger got the better of him. “Goddammit, Lucian, what’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “Are you afraid to fight?” The mission had been delayed long enough. It was going forward. His men would hit the beaches on the morning of August 11, exactly as ordered. If Truscott didn’t want to pull off the landing, George would relieve him. Truscott politely dared him to do it. George told his diary that day: “[A]t 8: 00 Omar and Lucian both called to say it was too risky. I told them to do it and that if it failed I was responsible and that if it worked they got the credit. . . . I had to get pretty tough and ask how they would like to have stars turn out to be [colonel’s] eagles.” ⁶⁸

Brad slammed down the phone, ready to spit nails. This was ridiculous. George was being pigheaded, looking to do something flashy, even rash, when the situation demanded a more conservative approach. Didn’t he realize the geography, the enemy, the whole picture around Brolo was entirely different from at San Fratello? Geography dictated the tactics, not history, and damned sure not flashy publicity.

“I was more exasperated than I have ever been,” Brad wrote later. He had strongly suspected that George’s decisions since the capture of Palermo had more to do with self-aggrandizement and his childish race with Monty than with sound military judgment, and every one of Patton’s boneheaded orders since early August reinforced Brad’s suspicion. The man was creating Gold Star Mothers just to feed his vanity.⁶⁹

Just as Brad had predicted, the landing, though successful, proved costly. Shortly after a task force from Truscott’s 30th Infantry Regiment waded ashore, German defenders pounced on them. Self-propelled guns bogged down on the beaches, tanks were knocked out, and the enemy pounded the invaders from the high ground. Truscott’s men fought through the day and night under a hailstorm of shell and mortar fire, and it was not until the next morning that the 3rd Division managed to punch its way through to his struggling men. By then, 167 of the initial 650 soldiers were lying on the beachhead, dead or wounded. Nearly 30 percent casualties.⁷⁰

Bradley was getting fed up with George’s antics. The Seventh Army headquarters staff, following their commander’s lead, never seemed to think of what the GI on the front lines needed to survive. Artillery ammunition was in desperately short supply, while small-arms ammunition piled sky-high, but Seventh Army didn’t care. Seventh Army didn’t run its communications wires as they should have; Brad’s signalmen had to do it themselves. Seventh Army didn’t give the corps any procedure for summoning air support—or even for avoiding friendly fire from confused air support. Brad’s overworked men had to figure it out themselves or, more often, just do without.

For all the fine press Old Blood and Guts was getting, a lot of important stuff was falling through the cracks. Since George didn’t give a damn about these “details,” his staff didn’t, either. As Brad later fumed, “Patton was developing as an unpopular guy. He steamed about with great convoys of cars and great squads of cameramen. . . . To George, tactics was simply a process of bulling ahead. He never seemed to think out a campaign. Seldom made a careful estimate of the situation. I thought him a shallow commander.”⁷¹

George’s showboating also rubbed Brad the wrong way. His dashing around in a parade of star-spangled squad cars, MPs on motorcycles and jeeps. His clueless driver blowing that earsplitting siren as they roared past weary foot soldiers. “Canny a showman though George was,” Brad later concluded, “he failed to grasp the psychology of the combat soldier. He traveled in a platoon of command cars and surrounded himself with nattily uniformed yes-men. His own vehicle was decked with red flags and oversize stars and the insignia of his command. These exhibitions did not awe the troops as perhaps Patton believed. Instead, they offended them as they trudged through the clouds of dust left in the wake of that procession.” It just wasn’t Brad’s style, and never would be. To the Missourian with the Middle America twang, George’s pageantry was as foreign and disconcerting as the fascist pomp in Rome and Berlin they used to show on the old black-and-white newsreels before the war.⁷²

But his most unforgivable sin, Brad thought, was that George was more obsessed with getting to Messina ahead of the British than with saving men’s lives. Brad recalled running into Patton and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge on the coastal road the morning after the Brolo fiasco. As Bradley recalled, “[George] wanted me to get to Messina as quickly as possible, [said] that he was determined to get there ahead of the British. He told me that if I could get there one day earlier by losing additional men, I was to lose them. He said he had a bet with ‘Monty’ and wanted to win it.”⁷³

War, Brad believed, was not about preening like a fighting bantam. It was a sober, methodical exercise in which the goal was to accomplish an objective while expending the fewest possible lives. It required careful management and meticulous planning, not a flick of the riding crop or a profanity-laced speech inspired by William the Conqueror or Pompey the Great or some other fellow who had turned to dust a thousand years before they invented the gasoline engine, the M-1 rifle, and the wireless. This was one lesson Brad had learned through years of study, teaching, observation, apprenticeship, and combat experience. If George could not understand it by now, he and Brad weren’t speaking the same language.

But thirty-odd miles from the gilded prize, Patton was not about to let Monty get there first. To George, the quest for Messina was a race—a race far nobler than even his 1912 Olympic run. It was a race for the finest prize of them all: the capture of the last enemy stronghold. With the eyes of history looking down on him—as well as those of his celestial ancestors—George Patton would not allow any man, be he German, Italian, British, or American, to get in his way.

Rising from his four-poster bed after three days of fighting a high fever, an irritable, much-fatigued Patton flew to Truscott’s command post on the afternoon of August 14 to order another amphibious movement. Meeting Bradley there, he assured his senior lieutenant that the leapfrog landing would be bigger than the last, so there was no need to worry about the safety of his men. This time, George promised, the Navy would give them enough boats to land an entire regiment, Middleton’s 157th Regiment, to be precise.⁷⁶

Brad simply shrugged. It didn’t matter, he told George. He had already spoken to Truscott, who had assured him they could get up the road faster by simply kicking in the rickety front door. “The Kraut’s got nothing out front to stop us,” Truscott had promised. In fact, Truscott was worried that his infantrymen, hearing voices in the dark, might fire on the invaders. They should continue pushing forward rather than waste time putting soldiers on and off landing boats.⁷⁷

Brad’s nuanced comment was another chip at their working relationship, one that didn’t bode well for either general or for the men who served them. It was the rub that had been building for half a year, the time when the Missouri teacher and the California polo player had to face the truth that they would never see eye-to-eye. They were born different, grew different, yet they were both lieutenant generals, both on the same team, both placed in a pressure cooker like meat and potatoes. The question for them was whether their sense of duty would hold them together long enough to complete their mission of liberating a big part of Europe, and that question would not be answered until the Third Reich had been destroyed.

On the night of August 15–16, Patton’s amphibious regiment landed at the tiny village of Falcone, thirty-two miles from Messina. In the darkness, infantrymen splashed ashore amid the rush of foaming surf. Their pathfinders spread out, and they crouched down, fingering their triggers at the sound of approaching men. They were soldiers wearing olive drab, carrying lanterns and calling to the invaders—in English. They were Lucian Truscott’s guides, waiting for them, just as Brad had promised.⁸¹

The next evening, Truscott’s reconnaissance patrols cautiously probed their way into Messina’s outskirts. Except for the occasional crack of a sniper’s rifle and the usual fusillade in reply, the air was quiet and the road was littered with the detritus of a retreating army: jerry cans, ammo crates, dead pack animals, burned-out vehicles, broken bicycles. A few bodies in charred gray uniforms.⁸²

Throughout the night and early morning, elements of the 3rd and 45th Divisions pushed through dust, rubble, and craters churned up by bombs and shells and converged on Messina’s bomb-scarred city hall. Civil authorities, thankful for an end to the devastation, came out to welcome Truscott, who, more or less, took the city’s surrender.⁸⁴

But the capitulation had to remain unofficial for the moment, as Truscott was under strict orders from the Seventh Army’s commanding general: There was to be no formal surrender until the commanding general arrived to lead the parade. As the morning air began soaking up the August heat, Truscott’s tired men waited for Patton.⁸⁵

“I’ll be damned. Now George wants to stage a parade into Messina.” Bradley shook his head in disbelief. George’s megalomania knew no bounds, Brad thought. “I disliked the way he worked, upset tactical plans, interfered in my orders,” he recalled. “His stubbornness on amphibious operations, parade plans into Messina sickened me and soured me on Patton. We learned how not to behave from Patton’s Seventh Army.”⁸⁶

Brad briefly considered driving to a street corner along George’s motorcade route, just to infuriate the old peacock, but he decided that any juvenile theatrics on his part would just be “playing Georgie’s game.” But he wouldn’t follow George on his victory parade, either, so he skipped the festivities.⁸⁷

Instead, Brad made a mental note to speak with his old West Point classmate about the problems he and his staff had endured, the supply and ordnance snafus—things General Eisenhower would no doubt find unsettling. The five weeks of hard fighting in Sicily had permanently ruptured Bradley and Patton’s relationship, and Brad’s dim view of the brash cavalry commander, a picture he had first glimpsed in Hawaii in the late 1920s, gave him plenty of ideas of how different things would be if he were in charge.⁸⁸

On cue, Sergeant Mims gunned the loud engine of the converted Dodge command car. Horn blasting, he led a procession down the crumbling streets as George, his best war scowl strapped on, surveyed his conquest. Like a Roman emperor for whom the Senate had voted a triumph, General Patton rolled past cheering civilians into the city’s central piazza, Truscott at his side, and there he accepted the surrender of Messina, Signal Corpsmen snapping photos all the way.⁹⁰

It was the greatest day in George’s long life, the zenith of a lifetime of work, study, and worship at the altar of Mars. It was a victory won despite the best efforts of the Germans, the Italians, the British, and the Supreme Command. To top everything off, the old Californian had the pleasure of greeting a small commando party Montgomery had sent scurrying ahead of his armor columns to stake the British claim to Messina. An exultant George recorded the moment in his ever-present diary that night:

[D]rove to . . . top of hill overlooking Messina. Bradley not there—must have failed to get the message. This is a great disappointment to me, as I had telephoned him, and he certainly deserved the pleasure of entering the town. We started into town about 1010. . . .

In the town of Messina we met three British tanks and a few men who had arrived at 10:00 under the command of a general. It was very evident that Montgomery sent these men for the purpose of stealing the show. . . . I think the general was quite sore that we had got here first, but since we had been in for 18 hours when he arrived, the race was clearly to us.⁹¹

It was George’s hour of triumph, the moment where his brilliance as a tactician shone for all to see. Like a messiah in khaki, in thirty-eight days George had scoured the island and cleansed it of its sin. He had captured an enemy capital and made a name for his army. This moment, he knew, would be the finest moment in his life, and one of the proudest in the annals of the United States Army.