The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Hewitt knew that despite their shallow draft, the LSTs could be snagged on the sandbars protecting much of Sicily’s south coast. The Army had proposed shoving tanks and vehicles overboard, dragging them with heavy chains through the runnel to shore, and then drying them on the beach. Navy engineers, aghast, countered with Project GOLDRUSH: a floating pontoon that could be towed or carried in sections on the LSTs, then bolted together to form an articulated bridge across the water gap from sandbar to beach. Tests in Narragansett Bay had proved the bridge could bear a Sherman tank. But as with so much of HUSKY, the scheme had yet to be tested in combat.

  Among Hewitt’s disagreements with the Army, none had been more heated than whether to soften the beach defenses with naval gunfire before the landings. To catch the enemy by surprise, Patton insisted that the guns not open up until the assault boats were fifteen minutes from shore. He wanted, one naval officer reported, “to take his chances on his own fighting.” Hewitt considered surprise “illusory.” He listed eleven reasons why the enemy would likely be alert, including the frequent Allied photo-reconnaissance flights over the island and the sad fact that of fourteen officers clandestinely dispatched from submarines to survey Sicilian beaches that spring, all fourteen had been lost, along with a number of enlisted scouts. Patton waved away Hewitt’s arguments. The guns would remain silent.

  In his own cabin, Patton read, paced, napped, and paced some more. “I have the usual shortness of breath I always have before a polo game,” he noted in his diary on July 8, then added an epigram from Napoleon: “Attack and then look.” He simply no longer worried about the enemy defenders. “Hell, they’ve been there for four years,” he told one of Hewitt’s officers. “They can’t keep alert all the time. We’re going to land and all of a sudden we’ll be on their necks.” In a letter to his brother-in-law he wrote, “The horses of the sun have always been celebrated. Whoop ho! for a kill in the open!”

  In Field Order No. 1, Patton had advised his commanders, “Attack both by day and night to the limit of human endurance and then continue to attack.” For the troops he composed a gassy exhortation that now was read from quarterdecks across the fleet:

  When we land we will meet German and Italian soldiers whom it is our honor and privilege to attack and destroy…. The glory of American arms, the honor of our country, the future of the whole world rests in your individual hands. See to it that you are worthy of this great trust. God is with us. We shall win.

  As he paced Patton brooded about his last meeting with Eisenhower, in Algiers on July 5. “You are a great leader,” the commander-in-chief told him, “but a poor planner.” Brood he might, but Patton had displayed a cavalier disdain for logistical niceties. To General Sir Harold Alexander, who would command all Allied ground forces on Sicily, he clicked his heels and said, “General, I don’t plan—I only obey orders.” To his civil affairs chief, who would be responsible for feeding and governing four million Sicilians, Patton asked simply, “Do you kill?” To Eisenhower himself he had once proposed the fatuous motto, “You name them, I’ll shoot them.” He was and would remain, as one old friend noted, “colorful, incorrigible, unexplainable.”

  In his slashing hand he scribbled Bea a letter, to be mailed only after the invasion had begun: “I doubt that I will be killed or even wounded, but one can never tell. It is all a question of destiny…. I love you.”

  Ernie Pyle was with them again, of course. He had shipped from Bizerte aboard the U.S.S. Biscayne, flagship for the nearly three hundred vessels carrying the 3rd Infantry Division. Each morning, as a favor to the skipper, he rose at three A.M. from his cot on the weather deck to edit the ship’s mimeographed newspaper. Later he scratched away in pencil at his own copy for the Scripps-Howard papers, or read Joseph Conrad and marveled at the old sea dog’s prose: “On fine days the sun strikes sparks upon the blue.”

  Pyle was forty-two now, but looked and felt “older and a little apart.” He was drinking too much, and fretting about his alcoholic wife whom he had divorced, committed to a sanatorium, and then remarried. He quickly became a familiar figure on the Biscayne, a Mae West draped over his narrow shoulders, the fringe of hair like a graying halo around his triangular head. He rolled his own cigarettes and asked countless questions in a flat Hoosier twang. Pyle “only weighs about 100 pounds with a family Bible in his lap,” another reporter noted; the artist George Biddle found him “ascetic, gentle, whimsical, shy…. His expression is fundamentally sad.”

  War made him sad. Pyle considered it “an unalleviated misfortune,” and aspired to be the last combat correspondent. He had come to view soldiers—“the guys that wars can’t be won without”—as “little boys again, lost in the dark.” He was a bit lost himself, and it helped him to write—sometimes brilliantly—about other lost souls. “The years are dealing heavily with me,” he wrote a friend on the eve of HUSKY. “No wine, no women, no song, no play—soon nothing will be left to me but my shovel and a slight case of athlete’s foot.” He wondered how anyone who survived war could “ever be cruel to anything, ever again.”

  His material—those guys that wars couldn’t be won without—was all around him. War Department standards required that each berth on a transport have at least twenty-three inches of vertical clearance from other berths, with ventilation in the troop holds of thirty cubic feet of forced-draft fresh air per man per minute. Pyle knew better, and so did Private Paul W. Brown, sailing with the 1st Division. “No baths for over a week,” Brown wrote in a letter home. “Dirty socks. Dirty underwear. Damned little ventilation. No portholes.” Army inspectors also documented vermin in the food, pilferage, rampant black marketeering, filthy toilets, and a shortfall of vomit buckets. Little wonder that many soldiers already felt nostalgic for the tangerines and pomegranates of North Africa, to say nothing of “its vastness and its mystery.”

  They made do, with boxing and tug-of-war and, on one British ship, a mustache contest, judged after tea by a Royal Marine armed with a brush, a comb, and a magnifying glass. Officers gave lectures on Sicily, using mimeographed notes, which began, “Sicily has been conquered many times before and her history is largely one of successful invasions”; they also cautioned that the Sicilian murder rate was “seven times as high as that in other parts of Italy.” Each man received “The Soldier’s Guide to Sicily,” which described the heat, filth, and disease in such detail that the 26th Infantry’s regimental log concluded the island must be “a hellhole inhabited by folks who were too poor to leave or too ignorant to know that there were better places.” Troops in the 45th Division practiced their Italian, producing, among other things, mangled conversational fantasies in which “Bona sera, senorina” was answered with “Duo cento lira.”

  They packed and unpacked and repacked their kit, trying to get the gas mask and the first aid kit and the sand-fly headnet into the 2.524 cubic feet prescribed for an Army assault pack. Each rifleman was supposed to carry 82.02 pounds, allocated ounce by ounce, from 10.2 pounds for a loaded M-1 rifle and .2 pounds for a towel, to .01 pounds for a spoon and .5 pounds for a Bible with a metal cover. Some lightened their load by nibbling away at the four ounces of “D rations,” which were supposed to be saved for emergencies. Most of the soldiers had been in uniform long enough to be immune to surprise and would not have raised an eyebrow at the fact that the chocolate bar in the D rations had been developed after two years of Army quartermaster testing with three hundred recipes and flavors, including soy flour, potato, tapioca, pulverized coffee, and even a splash of kerosene.

  “It’s interesting to see the officers and men,” Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., son of the former president and assistant commander of the 1st Division, wrote to his wife. Eleanor. In a letter written aboard the U.S.S. Barnett, he added, “They’re not young anymore. They’re not the fresh, smooth-cheeked boys you saw at a dance more than two years ago…. They’ve got a hard-bitten look.” A few hours later he wrote, “The sea is mill-pond still…. Everything is battened down, port
holds closed, lights-doused, no smoking on deck. It becomes roasting. It’s worst of course for the men. There’s a sort of dead hush over the ship now. No one is moving on deck.”

  On the night of July 8, Roosevelt wrote Eleanor again, in the precise, level hand that displayed just enough ornamentation to imply a poetic sensibility:

  We’ve had a grand life and I hope there’ll be more. Should it chance that there’s not, at least we can say that in our years together we’ve packed enough for ten ordinary lives. We’ve known triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow, all that goes to fill the pattern of human existence…. We have no reason to be other than thankful come what may.

  Since leaving Algiers, Hewitt’s chief aerologist had been sketching weather maps and taking the wind’s pulse with his anemometer. Lieutenant Commander Richard C. Steere was a 1931 Naval Academy graduate who had fenced on the U.S. foil team that won the gold medal in the 1932 Olympics by beating a storied French squad. Steere loved fencing, which he considered a “complex puzzle”; he loved weather for the same reason, and had earned his master’s degree in meteorology at MIT in 1940. During Operation TORCH, when a ferocious Atlantic storm flung waves eighteen feet high onto the Moroccan coast, Steere’s accurate prediction that the tempest would abruptly subside had convinced Hewitt to proceed with the landings. Patton had nicknamed the aerologist “Commander Houdini.”

  Now his skills would be tested again. On Monrovia’s bridge, Steere showed his calculations to Hewitt and Patton on Thursday afternoon, July 8. Normally few shores were more benign than those of southern Sicily in midsummer. But, as Eisenhower’s forecasters on Malta had also recognized, a polar maritime air mass flowing across western Europe from the northwest was merging with a secondary cold front stretching from Sardinia across Italy to a low over Yugoslavia. That had tightened the pressure gradient in the central Mediterranean. High northwesterly winds and steep seas, Steere said, could be expected by Friday afternoon. The landings were scheduled for early Saturday.

  Pressure gradients and barometric millibars interested Patton not at all. “How long will the storm last?” he demanded.

  Summer blows in the Med typically were short-lived, Steere replied, and the fleet would be sheltered in Sicily’s lee. “It will calm down,” he added, “by D-day.”

  “It better,” Patton said.

  By noon on Friday, as the fleet drew near Malta, the wind had freshened from the west, turning the sea a forbidding hue and sculpting crests from the wavelets. Soon the halyards and the railings moaned, the nasty lop grew heavy with foam, and the bedpan LCIs—landing craft, infantry, denounced by one soldier as “flat-bottomed delight[s] of Satan”—began taking seas over solid. Barrage-balloon cables stretched on the horizontal as sailors in slickers tried to reel them in, cursing what was now widely decried as a “Mussolini wind.” One by one the cables snapped, and soon two dozen balloons sailed up and east and out of sight. By late afternoon the wind reached a gale-force thirty knots—force 7 on the Beaufort scale—with green seas piled so high the smaller craft could no longer see one another and helmsmen struggled to avoid collisions. Gloomy, fearful soldiers clung to stanchions and ladders. “We could barely stand on deck,” Ernie Pyle wrote aboard Biscayne, “and our far-spread convoy was a wallowing, convulsive thing.”

  Never had the amphibious vessels been tested in such seas. The LCTs, reduced to three knots, danced like corks on the spindrift. “Huge chunks of green water cascaded back over the flat open decks,” one Navy lieutenant recorded. Many LCTs, he added, “had at least one engine out, so when they lost steerage way they had to fall off to leeward and come around 180 degrees to get back on course.” The square-bowed LSTs lurched up from the sea, then dropped into the next wave with a thud and a heavy shudder. An Army engineer colonel reported that his LST rolled “47 degrees each way as I watched the roll indicator…. The LST would be rolling, rolling, and rolling, the roll pendulum swinging so that we expected her to turn right over.” Destroyers weaved among the smaller craft, signaling orders to compensate for the wind by steering “nothing to the right of north all night,” rather than the planned course of 020 degrees. Several of the GOLDRUSH pontoons broke loose from their tow ships; two tugs lumbered through the gale to fetch them back. Twenty-ton landing craft swung on their davits like charms on a watch chain; aboard the transport Florence Nightingale, one boat broke free and smacked against the bridge and fantail with each roll of the ship until it too was lassoed.

  “You probably enjoy the slow rise and fall of the deck, or even its more violent heaving if you happen to be in a storm,” advised a paperback book for soldiers titled What to Do Aboard the Transport. Even “the sickest landlubber,” the book added, soon “laughs at some other fellow with a green look about the gills.”

  No one was laughing. “All of us are miserable, anxious, jam-packed, overloaded and wet,” a soldier in the 26th Infantry wrote. “No place to be sick except on one another. There are no heroes, just misery.” “First I am afraid that I shall die,” a soldier in the 18th Infantry noted, “then afraid that I won’t.” Soldiers had been issued a chemical concoction called Motion Sickness Preventative, but most still resorted to the items officially labeled “Bags, Vomit for the Use of,” or hung their heads over the side, “moaning softly as if it were a secret shame.” A private first class wrote his girlfriend in Brooklyn that these were “the most miserable moments ever spent in my life.”

  Some tried for a semblance of stability. Aboard H.M.S. Strathnaver, a dinner of clear soup and lamb cutlets was served to Welsh soldiers, who belted out “Land of My Fathers.” But most troops “swung in their hammocks, green and groaning,” a Canadian soldier wrote. “Everything that was not lashed down had come adrift: kitbags, weapons boxes, steel crates of ammunition, mess tins, tin helmets.” On LST 386, the only unfazed passengers had four hooves: thirty African donkeys had been boarded until Eisenhower found sturdier mules. “Ship rolled thirty degrees and pitched fifteen,” a naval officer recorded. “Donkeys were unconcerned, and seemed to enjoy their hay splashed with salt water.” A Ranger sergeant who found his miserably ill platoon hiding in a lifeboat reflected that at least their emptied stomachs would reduce the chance of peritonitis from gut wounds. “When I get off this boat,” one corporal vowed, “I’m going to walk and walk and walk.”

  “Some thought of the Spanish Armada,” another Canadian wrote, “and some asked the question, ‘Is God on our side or not?’” Those classical scholars who had tried recalling their Thucydides now remembered that Aeolus, the mythical Greek custodian of the winds, supposedly lived on a floating island near Sicily; they swapped stories of seafarers who had fallen foul of Mediterranean weather, beginning with the Spartan king Menelaus, whose homebound fleet had been blown from Troy to Egypt, and St. Paul.

  Others held more practical colloquies. “It’s goddam foolish, I tell you,” an officer on the Barnett declared. “What’s the use of going ahead with the invasion when your boats aren’t even going to reach shore?” An Army captain agreed. “It’s not fear. No, goddamit! It’s not fear. There’s just no sense in risking the whole invasion in this sea.” Aboard the Samuel Chase, Rear Admiral John L. Hall, whose charges included the 1st Division, considered signaling Hewitt to recommend a delay, then told his staff, “We’re not going to be the first to yelp.” The fleet beat on.

  On Monrovia, Hewitt stared at the heaving sea and listened to the wind tear at the rigging. The whitecapped Mediterranean looked as if it were dusted in snow. He pondered whether to break radio silence and contact Admiral Cunningham on Malta to suggest a postponement. Some smaller craft had no radios, so spreading word of any delay through the fleet would take at least four hours. As he watched an LSI buck the waves, Hewitt observed that at least the wretched soldiers aboard would be “all the more willing to get ashore.” Bad as this was, the Atlantic before TORCH had been worse.

  Late on Friday afternoon, he summoned Commander Houdini to the bridge. Steere that morning had predicted winds of tw
enty-seven knots; they now had reached thirty-seven, with twelve-foot seas. Though nervous, the aerologist stuck to his forecast. The “whole wind structure” would ease after nightfall, he explained, even if strong winds persisted aloft. Steere had scribbled his H-hour forecast in longhand, like a racetrack tout posting odds: “Northwest winds 10–15 knots decreasing, with inshore breakers 3–4 feet or less.”

  Hewitt took the bet, nodding without a hint of emotion or even concern. They would continue toward Sicily unless ordered to the contrary.

  “Always the vibration,” a British soldier wrote in his diary, “the heaving and rolling, the dim blue lights below deck, and the masses of bodies, in bunks, or moving blindly to the lavatories awash with urine.” Like many others, Captain Joseph T. Dawson of the 1st Division wrote a final letter to his family in Texas: “My heart is filled with unspeakable tenderness for you one and all…. We are trying to measure up. God grant that we may do our task.”

  By six P.M. the sea had grown so nasty, one naval commander observed, that “even the destroyers were taking it green.” As daylight ebbed, the wind intensified. Officers of the deck throughout the fleet ordered smoking lamps extinguished. At 6:52 P.M., Monrovia’s log recorded the sighting of the tiny island of Gozo, nine miles off the starboard beam. Just beyond, through the gloom and flying spray, lookouts spied the sheer cliffs of Malta. The fleet beat on.

  Seeking sanctuary from the folderol, Eisenhower had warned Marshall that during his stay on Malta “my communications with Washington and London will be almost nil…because of the need for reserving signal communications for operational matters.” The gambit failed; Washington and London showed no reluctance to pepper the commander-in-chief with advice and queries, including a message from Marshall on Friday afternoon asking, “Is the attack on or off?” Eisenhower studied the cable and muttered, “I wish I knew.”