Patton’s cigar was fairly won. Two Axis divisions had been repulsed and were now skulking off into the Sicilian hinterland. “I had the bitter experience to watch scenes during these last days that are not worthy of a German soldier,” Conrath fulminated in a July 12 field order that threatened summary executions for cowardice and rumor-mongering. On the Seventh Army left, Truscott’s 3rd Division was pushing inland; on the right, paratrooper Gavin repulsed a sizable armor and infantry force at Biazza Ridge. As for casualties, Andrus counted 43 enemy tanks destroyed, including 6 by bazooka, a figure similar to a tally by the Hermann Göring Division. Conrath reported 630 men killed or wounded in the first three days of HUSKY; 10 of 17 Tigers had been knocked out. American casualties in the Sunday counterattack totaled 331. After two days of fighting, Seventh Army reported 175 dead, 665 wounded, and nearly 2,600 missing, most of whom were in fact lost. Nearly 9,000 prisoners had been bagged, almost exclusively Italians. Once again horse carts hauled dead civilians to a mass grave outside Gela.
Patton prowled the beach, waiting for his barge. Spying several soldiers digging foxholes amid stacks of five-hundred-pound bombs, he advised them that “if they wanted to save Graves Registration burials that was a fine thing to do, but otherwise they better dig somewhere else.” At that moment German planes strafed the beach and the men plunged back into their lairs; Patton strutted and clucked until he had shamed them from the holes. By the time he regained Monrovia, the sun was sinking in the western Mediterranean and he was drenched with sea spray. “This is the first day in this camapign that I think I earned my pay,” he told his diary. “I am well satisfied with my command today.”
“Tonight Wear White Pajamas”
KENT Hewitt had spent his Sunday fighting the naval war, a few thousand yards seaward of Patton’s terrestrial battle. Pillars of black smoke and a faint clamor carrying from the beach implied the tumult ashore, but Hewitt had been far too busy to do more than cast an occasional glance inland.
His own losses were modest if worrisome: Axis air attacks kept intensifying as enemy pilots evaded Allied radar by sneaking through valleys notched across the coastal plain. The battleship H.M.S. Nelson had been attacked three times on July 10 but fourteen times today. A bomb detonated under the Barnett—Ted Roosevelt’s ship—ripping a hole in hold number 1 and killing seven men. The hospital ship Talamba, illuminated and bedizened with huge red crosses, was sunk five miles offshore. “With a cracking, hissing sound her stern went under, her bows reared up and she began to slide under,” a British lieutenant reported. “People were jumping off her sides.” The loss of LST 313 and twenty-two souls at Gela on Saturday had been equally grim. An Me-109 attacked out of the late afternoon sun so stealthily that not a defensive shot was fired until bombs were falling. Trucks loaded with mines and ammunition blew up, catapaulting men from the main deck a hundred feet into the air; flaming axles and fenders rained across the beach. Fires raged, flash-burned men lay on the bow ramp reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and all engines were stopped so that those who had leaped overboard might not be sucked into the propellers. LST 313 settled on the bottom with a final, delphic distress call: “This goddamn thing isn’t working.”
At noon on Sunday, Hewitt boarded the minesweeper U.S.S. Steady and steamed west to inspect Truscott’s landings. No sooner had the admiral arrived off Licata than ten dive-bombers hit the quays and beaches, straddling half a dozen LSTs with bombs and setting fire to another. By three P.M., when Steady came about to return to Gela, Hewitt had witnessed five more attacks.
Each successive raid vexed him more. Nearly five thousand Allied planes had been amassed for HUSKY, but Hewitt had little idea where they were or what they were doing. For months he and Patton had hectored the U.S. Army Air Forces for what the admiral decried as an “almost complete lack of participation in battle planning” and for drafting an air plan “unrelated to the military attack plan and naval attack plan.” Neither he nor Patton knew which Sicilian targets would be bombed, or “what, when, or where fighter cover would be provided.”
Air Force commanders, wary of “parceling out” their aircraft or giving “personal control over the air units” to their Army and Navy brethren, countered that to neutralize Axis airpower they must concentrate Allied planes on targets—such as enemy airfields and supply lines—often invisible from the battlefront. Because the Navy insisted on deploying all aircraft carriers to the Pacific, not enough fighters were available in the Mediterranean to protect the beachheads during sixteen hours of daylight. Firing from Allied ships on friendly planes had become so promiscuous that air patrols originally planned for altitudes of five thousand feet had been forced up to ten thousand.
Considering that the Navy had been prepared to lose up to three hundred ships on July 9 and 10, actual sinkings by air attack through Saturday night—a dozen vessels—had been light indeed. That hardly appeased those under incessant bombardment on the beach and in the anchorage. Hewitt was angry, Patton was disgusted—“We can’t get the goddamn Air Force to do a goddamn thing”—and a young soldier, when told of the impenetrable air umbrella ostensibly provided by Allied fighters, rolled his eyes to the heavens and said, “Only the good people can see them.”
Back at the Gela roads aboard Steady, Hewitt was on the minesweeper’s bridge when the Liberty ship S.S. Rowan—stuffed with ammunition and gasoline—caught a pair of bombs in the number 2 hold and another next to a gun tub. After twenty minutes of futile firefighting she was abandoned and an hour later, as Hewitt watched, blew up with a roar seen and heard halfway to Africa. One eyewitness described “a flat sheet of crimson fire in a frame of black smoke…. Pieces of the twisted metal and flaming wood hissed into the water as far as a mile distant.” Broken in half, Rowan refused to sink despite 5-inch destroyer shells pumped point-blank below her waterline. She settled in just seven fathoms and would burn for two days as a beacon for enemy pilots. By twilight’s last gleaming on Sunday, German planes sprinkled magnesium parachute flares to make the roadstead even brighter. They drifted like tiny suns over the fleet, reminding every swab and soldier—and admiral—of his vulnerability.
Just across Highway 115, a few hundred yards east of Terry Allen’s command post, another major general stood on a makeshift landing strip and eyed the glowing night sky with trepidation. Matthew B. Ridgway was handsome, graceful, and charismatic. He was “hard as flint and full of intensity, almost grinding his teeth from intensity,” in James Gavin’s description, to the point that George Marshall had once counseled Ridgway to “cultivate the art of playing and loafing.” Vaulting from major to brigadier general in eighteen months, Ridgway as a two-star now commanded the 82nd Airborne. Soldiers later dubbed him “Old Iron Tits” for his affectation of attaching a hand grenade and a first-aid kit to his chest harness. “There’s a right way,” they said, “a wrong way, and a Ridgway.” He was “brave under fire to the point of being exhibitionistic,” Gavin recalled, and so despised the Germans that in battle “he’d stand in the middle of the road and urinate…. Even with his penis he was defiant.” God, he believed, would preserve him at least until the final defeat of the Third Reich.
He was less certain how the Almighty felt about the 82nd on this Sunday night. One of his regiments, under Gavin, was already scattered across half of Sicily, and another was now en route to the island. At 8:30 this morning, on orders personally issued by Patton, Ridgway had summoned the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment from Tunisia with a coded radio message: “Tonight wear white pajamas.” Twenty-three hundred men were to reinforce the Big Red One by jumping from 144 planes before midnight. Some planners had advocated a daylight drop, or, now that German troops had retreated, simply landing the C-47s near the beach to discharge the paratroopers. Yet, once again, plans had been made, orders had been issued, and a cruel inflexibility gripped both plans and orders. Patton before leaving Monrovia this morning had drafted a notification to his four divisions of the impending jump, adding, “It is essential that all subordinate
units be cautioned not to fire on these friendly planes.” Although Patton signed the order at 8:45 A.M., congestion in Monrovia’s signal room kept it from being coded and dispatched until 4:20 P.M. Ridgway this afternoon had traipsed among antiaircraft batteries along Green 2 asking whether the gunners knew that “aircraft bearing friendly parachute troops” would soon be overhead: five crews had in fact heard, while a sixth had not.
“There’s always some son-of-a-bitch who never gets the word,” a Navy axiom held. In this instance the word failed to reach thousands, at sea and on land. Smaller vessels in particular knew nothing of the jump. Hewitt—who was living on the same ship with Patton—later stated that he first learned the mission had been authorized at 5:47 P.M. on Sunday, too late to spread the warning and too late to protest. None of the three regiments in the 45th Division sector to the east, where the planes would first make landfall, received notification until after ten P.M.; signal officers struggled to decode the messages by moonlight.
Ridgway for six weeks had warned of fratricide, and in late June he advocated scrubbing the proposed jump because the Navy refused to guarantee safe passage for the transport planes over the fleet. A flight corridor had at last been grudgingly promised; but final aircraft routes had not been apportioned by the high command until July 5, and disseminating knowledge of those routes through the invasion forces took several days. After two days of Axis attacks, all troops around the Gulf of Gela were jumpy, and few were skilled at distinguishing friend from foe, especially at night. “Every plane that came over us was fired upon because we could not identify it,” one corporal explained. A particularly vicious raid, the twenty-third of the day, hit the anchorage at 9:50 P.M., narrowly missing Boise and scattering ships to all points.
If Ridgway was anxious ashore, Patton aboard Monrovia was hard pressed to heed his own advice to eschew the counsel of his fears. His afternoon bravado melted away as he realized that he was sitting on a tinderbox. At eight P.M., he tried to abort the mission only to learn that the 504th was already airborne and beyond recall. In his cabin late that night, Patton confided to his diary, “Found we could not get contact by radio. Am terribly worried.”
No one ever knew who fired the first shot. The lead C-47 arrived at 10:40 P.M. in the preternatural calm that drifted over the beachhead following the departure of the last enemy raiders of the evening. Amber belly lights flashed the prescribed recognition signal from a thousand feet up. Crossing the coastline thirty miles east of Gela, the planes banked left and the first stick of sixteen paratroopers leaped from the open door onto the airstrip where Ridgway stood craning his neck. Then the rapping of a single machine gun broke the tranquillity, and a stream of the red tracers used by U.S. forces floated up, and up, and up.
The contagion spread in an instant. Fountains of red fire erupted from the beaches and the anchorage. “I looked back,” reported a captain in one of the lead planes, “and saw the whole coastline burst into flame.” Pilots dove to the deck or swerved back to sea, flinging paratroopers to the floor and tangling their static lines. Men fingered their rosary beads or vomited into their helmets. Bullets ripped through wings and fuselages, and the bay floors grew slick with blood. “The tracers going by our plane were so thick that I think I could have read a newspaper,” one lieutenant later reported.
Formations disintegrated. Some pilots flipped off their belly lights and tried to thread a path along the shore between fire from the ships and fire from the beach. Others fled for Africa, chased by tracers for thirty miles. Half a dozen planes were hit as paratroopers struggled to get out the door. “Planes tumbled out of the air like burning crosses,” recalled a soldier in the 1st Battalion. “Others stopped like a bird shot in flight.” A few pilots refused to drop their sticks, considering it tantamount to murder, although one crew chief told a 504th battalion commander, “It’s a hell of a lot safer out there than it is in here.” Nowhere was safe, of course. Men died in their planes, men died descending in their parachutes, and at least four were shot dead on the ground by comrades convinced they were Germans. Men also died for saying the wrong thing: the paratroopers had been given challenge and parole passwords—ULYSSES / GRANT—at odds with those in the 45th Division sector where the fire was heaviest: THINK / QUICKLY.
Those watching from the ground would be imprinted with a horror hardly matched through the rest of the war. “No! Stop, you bastards, stop!” the correspondent Jack Belden shrieked above the din. None stopped. Parachutes collapsed or failed to open, and men struck the earth with a sound like “large pumpkins being thrown down.” Others with chutes aflame candlesticked into the sea. Ridgway stared at the carnage in tears, aghast. But it was a young sergeant, Ralph G. Martin, who gave voice to all: “I feel sick in body and soul.”
Colonel Reuben H. Tucker, the thirty-two-year-old commander of the 504th, managed to jump onto the proper landing zone despite gunfire that killed his crew chief and put a thousand holes through his C-47. After rolling up his chute, Tucker stomped from tank to tank ordering the crews to stop shooting at his men with their .50-caliber machine guns. Too late. The final formation of two dozen planes was hit hardest, with half shot down. One pilot dropped his paratroopers, then took fire from eight ships as he banked back to sea; hit by more than thirty shells that left the cockpit instruments in his lap, he managed to ditch and escape in a rubber raft. The C-47 carrying Tucker’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Leslie G. Freeman, crashed five hundred yards from shore after being struck in the right engine by gunfire that also wounded three troopers. Marksmen on nearby ships sprayed the sinking wreckage with bullets. “Eleven more men were wounded or killed after we landed on the water,” Freeman reported, including a lieutenant shot in the face after swimming to the beach.
At last the shooting ebbed, the guns fell silent, and an awful epiphany seeped across the beachhead and through the fleet, that men-at-arms had done what men-at-arms most fear doing: they had killed their own. Twenty-three planes had been destroyed, and another thirty-seven were badly damaged. Investigators put the casualties at 410, although the actual number long remained in dispute. That the mission had been a fiasco—among the worst friendly fire episodes in modern warfare—was beyond haggling. “The safest place for us tonight while over Sicily,” one pilot said, “would have been over enemy territory.” As late as July 16, Ridgway would report that he could account for only 3,900 of the 5,300 paratroopers who had left North Africa for Sicily on the ninth and eleventh.
Those who survived that Sunday night would never forget, even as they looked for ways to forgive. As he was carried away on a stretcher with a bullet in his shoulder, one paratrooper told an officer, “I was glad to see that our fellows could shoot so good.”
Eisenhower arrived at the beachhead on Monday morning, July 12, ignorant of the previous night’s fratricide. No one during his daylong visit thought to enlighten him. For the past two days on Malta he had been both giddy at HUSKY’s apparent early success—“By golly,” he exclaimed, “to think we’ve gone it again!”—and splenetic at the absence of hard news, particularly from Patton. He studied Cunningham’s maps, rocked in a wicker chair in his Lascaris office, cadged dry cigarettes from reporters, and paced on the beach. “Ike had the fidgets,” his naval aide, Commander Harry C. Butcher, wrote in his diary. “Lay on sand awhile, then got up and dug holes in the sand with a stick.” To John Gunther he complained, “They treat me like a bird in a gilded cage.” To see the battle for himself, he had boarded H.M.S. Petard in Valletta harbor and at two A.M. Monday set sail for Sicily at twenty-six knots.
The destroyer made landfall at Licata just as a lovely Mediterranean dawn tinted the distant hills with orange and gold. Columns of greasy smoke spiraled above the beach, but from two miles out the prevailing impression was “complete serenity,” wrote a British officer aboard Petard. “More like a huge regatta than an operation of war.” Shortly after six A.M., the destroyer’s captain, dressed in a blue turtleneck and shabby white shorts, pointed to M
onrovia, anchored five miles off Gela. Eisenhower crossed to the flagship in a bouncing launch to be greeted by the usual bosun’s trill—“I never know what to do when they pipe me on,” the commander-in-chief had muttered—as well as a smiling, saluting Kent Hewitt and a smiling, saluting George Patton.
Patton led the way to his cabin, where blue and red battle lines had been neatly drawn on a large map of Sicily. The Allies now had eighty thousand troops ashore, with seven thousand vehicles, three hundred tanks, and nine hundred guns spread on a hundred-mile arc across an island the size of Vermont. The British Eighth Army had captured Syracuse, and Augusta would fall soon. A tumultuous welcome from Sicilian civilians cooled when it became clear that the Tommies had little extra food to share. But instead of the anticipated ten thousand British casualties in the first week, there would be only fifteen hundred. General Montgomery had begun to wheel toward Catania, only twenty miles north of Augusta and the last sizable city before Messina on the island’s northeast tip. Brash as ever, Montgomery confidently predicted he would reach Catania as soon as Tuesday night.
As for his own Seventh Army, Patton pointed to Truscott’s 3rd Division on the left—already across the Yellow Line and nearing Canicattì, fifteen miles inland—and Middleton’s 45th Division on the right, a bit scattered but pressing toward the upland town of Vizzini. Comiso airfield had fallen Sunday afternoon, and 125 enemy planes had been captured, 20 of them still flyable. American troops had seized Ragusa, which technically stood in the Canadian sector, and amused themselves there by answering phone calls from anxious Italian garrisons further up-country. In the center, Patton reported, the Hermann Göring Division counterattack had forestalled Allen’s 1st Division, but Ponte Olivo airfield would surely fall this morning. The enemy’s distress was apparent in a message found banded to a homing pigeon, which on Sunday had landed on a U.S. minesweeper instead of flying to the Italian XII Corps headquarters. From an Italian coastal division, it read, “Heroic infantry and artillery still doing their duty after fifteen hours of fighting against tremendous odds…. Send more pigeons.” A Royal Navy officer had advised: “Cross-examine in pigeon English, and release.”
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 109
