The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Shortly before five P.M., the Duce’s three-car convoy sped up the Via Salaria in northern Rome to the great eighteenth-century hunting estate at Villa Savoia. Here the king now lived in a handsome yellow palace set among pines and holm oaks. Mussolini climbed from his Alfa Romeo sedan and gestured to his bodyguards to wait outside the gate. He failed to notice several dozen carabinieri hiding behind hedges near the palace.

  A millennium of royal inbreeding had disserved Victor Emmanuel III. Barely five feet tall, with malformed legs and a stunted intellect, he was said to be “taciturn and diffident,” “as indifferent as marble under a flow of running water.” Mussolini, his partner for more than two decades, privately called him “the little sardine.” Now seventy-three, he preferred to talk of hunting ibex in the Alps, or how he once shot twenty-eight woodcock on the estate of the king of Naples. But on this Sunday afternoon the discussion must necessarily turn to politics; Victor Emmanuel ushered the Duce into his corner study, where an aide stood with an ear pressed to the outer door.

  After a few rambling sentences, interspersed with phrases in Piedmontese dialect, the king came to the point. Mussolini must resign. He would be replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a former chief of the armed forces. “Dear Duce, the situation is beyond remedy. At this moment you are the most hated man in Italy. You have not a single friend left, except for me,” the king said, then shrugged. “I am sorry, but the solution could not be otherwise.”

  Even at five feet, seven inches, Mussolini towered over his monarch. “You are making an extremely serious decision…. The blow to army morale will be great.” Before turning on his heel he added, “I am perfectly aware that the people hate me.” In the entry foyer, the king shook Mussolini’s hand and shut the door, looking more shriveled than ever. “That,” Queen Helena observed, “was not at all nice.”

  Mussolini strode across the courtyard toward his car only to be intercepted by a captain of the carabinieri. “Duce, I have been ordered by the king to protect your person.” An ambulance backed up from the foot of the drive, its rear door yawning. The officer took Mussolini’s arm. “You must get into this.” Soon the vehicle careered down the Via Salaria and through the streets of central Rome. Across the Tiber they sped to a police barracks in Trastavere, where guards stood with bayonets fixed. Mussolini emerged to stand with arms akimbo, fists on his hips, staring at the slogan painted on a courtyard wall: “Credere, Obbedire, Combattere.”

  A few minutes later, he was bundled back into the ambulance and driven to another barracks, in Via Legnano. Escorted to a small room, he refused dinner and complained of stomach pains. “My physical person interests me no longer,” Mussolini told a physician summoned to examine him, “only my moral personality.” At eleven P.M., he switched off the lamp but could still see a light burning in the adjacent room where a sentry kept watch. A nearby telephone rang and rang. No one answered.

  A radio bulletin at eleven P.M. sent delirious Romans spilling through the blacked-out streets in their pajamas and nightgowns. “Citizens, wake up!” they yelled in the Via del Tritone. “Mussolini is finished!” Strangers embraced and danced in the cobblestone piazzi. Tricolors flapped from passing trucks, soldiers sang political songs not heard for twenty years, and a mob—“shouting all the invectives in the Roman vocabulary”—kicked and punched the darkened Palazzo Venezia as if the building itself had caused their misery. Torch beams played across the now vacant balcony where the declaiming peacock had struck so many poses. Bonfires crackled with furniture ransacked from the Fascist party headquarters. “Viva l’Italia!” they roared, and a few German soldiers, assuming that the war was over, joined the celebration.

  “One did not see a single person in Rome wearing the Fascist badge,” wrote Marshal Badoglio, who succeeded Mussolini as head of state. “Fascism fell, as was fitting, like a rotten pear.” Even Mussolini’s own newspaper on Monday morning replaced the usual front-page photograph of the Duce with one of Badoglio.

  The new regime quickly assured Berlin that the Pact of Steel endured, and that Italy would prosecute the war against the Anglo-Americans with vigor. Few believed it. “The Duce will enter history as the last Roman, but behind his massive figure a gypsy people has gone to rot,” Joseph Goebbels told his diary. “The only thing certain in this war is that Italy will lose it.”

  But in Rome a young woman spoke for a nation when she confided to her own diary on July 26: “Italy has had enough of heroes.”

  Fevers of an Unknown Origin

  PATTON had settled comfortably into Palermo’s flat-roofed Royal Palace. Long tongues of scarlet carpet rolled through corridors lined with silk-upholstered chairs and gilt mirrors etched with the Savoy coat of arms. Half a dozen vaulted antechambers separated Patton’s bedroom from the immense state dining room, and heroic oils of Hercules’ labors decorated an assembly hall the size of a basketball court. During mass in the Palatine Chapel—the writer Guy de Maupasssant had likened walking through the chancel to entering a jewel—Patton knelt beneath the coffered wooden ceiling and prayed to Christ Pantocrator.

  He asked for strength—“I know I have been marked to do great things,” he wrote his brother-in-law—but his heart’s desire was Messina, 147 tortuous miles to the east. The coup in Rome, while a pleasant surprise, had little impact on the Sicilian battlefield: no Germans had been deposed, and it was mostly Germans who blocked the roads to Messina. On July 23, having recognized that Eighth Army needed help, Alexander authorized the Americans to attack eastward on two roughly parallel roads: Highway 113, which hugged the north coast, and Highway 120, an inland route. Patton mailed Franklin Roosevelt a tattered Corps of Engineers map of Sicily, with a thick green line showing that Seventh Army occupied more than half the island “as of July 26.” Above a tally of prisoners captured and guns seized, an arrow pointed to Messina with a blue crayon notation in Patton’s jagged hand: “We hope!” In his reply the president proposed “that after the war I…make you the Marquis of Mt. Etna.”

  With victory in western Sicily, the fame Patton so ardently craved was finally his. Both Time and Newsweek had featured him on their covers this month. “Monty hardly figures at all in the papers,” Bea told him on July 30. “Everyone wonders what he is doing and why he doesn’t go ahead.” Patton’s army now exceeded 200,000 men, but true glory required audacity. “I have a sixth sense in war as I used to have in fencing,” he told her. “Also I am willing to take chances.” If taking chances cost lives, c’est la guerre. He advised Bradley, whose II Corps had met stiffening German resistance in central Sicily, that if he could reach Messina a single day earlier “by losing additional men,” then he must “lose them.” To Middleton, the 45th Division commander, he added on July 28, “This is a horse race, in which the prestige of the U.S. Army is at stake. We must take Messina before the British.” When soldiers captured a fleet of Volkswagen staff cars, Patton offered to share them with Hewitt’s officers if the Navy helped him reach Messina first.

  Each morning his armored cavalcade bolted out of Palermo, trailing banners of dust across the Sicilian outback. On Highway 113 or Highway 120, Patton would hop from the command car with its radios and map boards, clasping his hands high like a prizefighter and urging his legions eastward. When enemy shells burst nearby he again timed his pulse, reproaching himself for the slightest upward tick. “You have killer eyes, just like I have,” he told a wounded artillery captain in a hospital ward near Palermo. “Get back up to the front as soon as you can.” At another ward, full of amputees, an orderly found him sobbing in the latrine. “It is hard to be an army commander and a hero at the same time,” he told Bea.

  Stress frayed him. Always irascible when his blood was up, he now seemed erratic and even abusive. Happening upon a narrow bridge where 2nd Armored Division tanks had been delayed by a peasant with a mule cart, Patton broke his swagger stick over the man’s head, ordered an aide to shoot the mule, then had carcass and cart shoved into the creek bed below. When a gun crew took cover in
a stand of trees during a German air attack, Patton reportedly charged them with his pistol drawn. “Get back on that gun, you yellow bastards,” he roared. “And if you leave it again, I’ll shoot you myself.” When a company commander in the 16th Infantry who had refused medical evacuation despite badly infected leg boils was fined by Patton for removing his chafing leggings, the story quickly spread through the vexed ranks. “You son of a bitch,” he yelled at one of Truscott’s best battalion commanders, “why the goddam hell aren’t you moving?” Unauthorized headgear particularly aggravated him. Men from the 12th Weather Squadron attempting to free the jammed bow door on an LST in Palermo harbor were nonplussed when Patton snatched the fatigue caps from their heads and flung them into the water. Spotting a 26th Infantry soldier wearing a watch cap beneath his helmet, Patton barked, “Take that goddam hat off and let my killers through.”

  At night he returned to his palace, to the Savoy china and the bloodred carpet, where he charmed staff officers at the long mess table with amusing tales of campaigns past. Then, abruptly drawing himself up, he said, “Let’s talk about tomorrow.” And after they had talked about tomorrow and drafted their battle plans, he would step onto the balcony behind the huge rosewood desk in his office. Below lay his fiefdom, the cruel city where for more than a century the Inquisition had its headquarters, where mafiosi had forced paupers to pay for the right to beg on the church steps, where for sport African immigrants had been doused in tubs of whitewash. Old men sat at green baize tables in the steamy night, playing cards and sipping ink-black wine.

  “Wars are not won by apparent virtue,” Patton observed, “else I would be in a hell of a fix.”

  Meticulous and even finicky in his warfighting, Patton was casual to the point of indifference about the more prosaic elements of running an army. Logistics snarled repeatedly in Sicily. In some sectors gunners ran desperately short of artillery shells, while mountains of small-arms ammunition accumulated. Lessons learned in North Africa were forgotten in Sicily, including the need for a disciplined air-raid warning system; at Palermo, a single gunshot caused a “wholesale exodus of dock workers” stampeding to shelters. Patton “never bothers his head about such things,” John Lucas noted in his diary.

  Nothing in Seventh Army was more SNAFUed, TARFUed, and FUMTUed than the vital issue of medical logistics. “It resembles a maniac driving a machine at high speed without pausing to oil or service the machine,” a senior AFHQ surgeon reported. A combat force exceeding 200,000 had only 3,300 hospital beds, a number so inadequate that many minor cases were evacuated to North Africa for treatment and the 23,000 soldiers admitted for hospitalization during HUSKY tended to be stacked atop one another. Medics had only half as many ambulances as they needed; blankets and splints were scarce. Breakage and misplacement of medical supplies were enormous.

  Sicily proved unforgiving. Many soldiers lost a pound per day to heat, dehydration, and intestinal miseries: Seventh Army appeared to be melting away. A chronic reluctance of cuts and bruises to heal was known simply as “Sicilian disease.” AFHQ adopted an elaborate code for the various afflictions for patients’ general condition: “RNS” meant “recovery not satisfactory”; “SR,” “sinking rapidly.” Soldiers evacuated to the United States were “Z.I.’ed,” for “Zone of Interior,” and government-issue insurance policies provoked much sardonic banter. “I’ll have to write the old lady tonight,” said one soldier after a close call, “and tell her she missed out on that $10,000 again.” Truscott’s troops learned to ink their names and serial numbers on their leggings, which proved more durable in explosions than dogtags. The lucky extolled their good fortune. “Perhaps it will relieve you right at the start to know that I am still in one complete piece and no parts missing,” a badly wounded soldier wrote his wife in late July.

  The unlucky relied on the heroic efforts of doctors and nurses working in dreadful conditions. Surgeons operated by flashlight, with white sheets hung in the operatory for more reflected light. After watching surgeons lop off limbs for an hour, Frank Gervasi, a reporter for Collier’s magazine, recalled Erasmus’s astringent epigram “Dulce bellum inexpertis”: Sweet is war to those who never experience it. “How am I doing, nurse?” a wounded eighteen-year-old in the 3rd Division asked. She kissed his forehead and replied, “You are doing just fine, soldier.” He smiled faintly. “I was just checking up,” he said, and then died. A physician described burn victims reduced to “cindery masses of burnt cloth and skin and hair.” One charred soldier told him, “I guess I’ve lost my sunburn.” For many, treatment consisted of a quarter-grain syrette of morphine and an “M” daubed on the forehead with iodine.

  Now “M” took on another, more sinister connotation. In 1740, the writer Horace Walpole noted “a horrid thing called mal’aria” that afflicted Italy every summer. Before the war, the Rockefeller Foundation had published a sixteen-volume study on where the disease, which killed three million people each year, was most prevalent; Italy, infested with the mosquito Anopheles maculipennis—soon shortened to “Ann” in GI slang—had the highest malaria rates in the Mediterranean. Quinine had been used for centuries to suppress malaria’s feverish symptoms, but U.S. supplies came almost exclusively from cinchona trees in the East Indies, now controlled by the Japanese. American scientists seeking a substitute examined fourteen thousand compounds, including dozens tested on jailhouse volunteers; the best replacement proved to be a substance originally synthesized by the German dye industry and given the trade name Atabrine.

  Soldiers detested the stuff, which they dubbed “yellow gall.” It tasted bitter, upset the stomach, turned the skin yellow, and was rumored to cause impotence and even sterility. Many soldiers stopped taking it, prophylactic discipline grew lax, and proper dosage levels were misunderstood. Moreover, some malaria control experts failed to reach Sicily until weeks after the invasion. Soldiers also grew careless about covering exposed skin in the evening. Protective netting was in short supply, and insect repellent proved ineffective: troops agreed “the mosquitoes in Sicily enjoyed it very much.”

  More than a thousand soldiers afflicted with malaria in North Africa on the eve of HUSKY had been left behind when the fleets sailed. On July 23, doctors detected the first case contracted in Sicily. By early August thousands of feverish, lethargic soldiers had been struck down. Ten thousand cases would sweep through Seventh Army, and nearly twelve thousand more in Eighth Army. (The swampy Catania Plain was particularly noxious.) All told, the 15th Army Group sustained more malaria casualties than battle wounds in Sicily. A medical historian concluded that “the disease record of the Seventh Army on Sicily was one of the worst compiled by any American field army during World War II.” With soldiers also suffering from dengue, sandfly, and Malta fevers, distinguishing one malady from another became so difficult that many patients were diagnosed simply with “fever of unknown origin,” soon known to soldiers as “fuo.”

  Among the ailing at a 45th Division clearing station was “a frail little fellow in Army fatigue coveralls, carrying a bedroll.” Doctors originally diagnosed Ernie Pyle with malaria, then with dysentery, and finally settled on “battlefield fever,” which ostensibly resulted from “too much dust, bad eating, not enough sleep, exhaustion, and the unconscious nerve tension that comes to everybody in a front-line area.” Like so many others, Pyle had witnessed sights that gnawed at him, body and soul. Particularly grim was a field strewn with the bodies of two hundred Italian and German soldiers whose penises, swollen by rigor mortis, had “become hugely erect, some of them protruding through the buttons of their soiled trousers.”

  Nearly a week in a field hospital brought more awful visions. “Dying men were brought into our tent, men whose death rattle silenced the conversation and made all of us thoughtful,” Pyle wrote. A trench outside a surgical tent was “filled with bloody shirt sleeves and pant legs the surgeons had snipped off wounded men.” Pyle noted “how dirt and exhaustion reduce human faces to such a common denominator. Everybody they carried
in looked alike.” Among litter patients only “an extreme blond” seemed distinct, “like a flower in a row of weeds.” Doctors covered the faces of the moribund with thin white gauze. Pyle would long remember one patient in particular:

  The dying man was left utterly alone, just lying there on his litter on the ground, lying in an aisle, because the tent was full…. The aloneness of that man as he went through the last minutes of his life was what tormented me.

  Under such circumstances Patton arrived at the 15th Evacuation Hospital, near Nicosia, for a visit shortly past noon on Tuesday, August 3. His morning had begun well, with a message from Eisenhower that Patton would receive the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroics at Gela during the July 11 counterattack. Driving on Highway 113 from Palermo before turning inland to Nicosia, Patton observed that “the smell of the dead along the road is very noticeable.”

  A different smell wafted from the hospital receiving tent, an odor of disinfectant and blood and oozing wounds. Green light filtered through the canvas, and the sound of labored breathing filled the ward as if the tent walls themselves suspired. General Lucas, who accompanied Patton while visiting from AFHQ, noted the “brave, hurt, bewildered boys” on their cots, including one who “had lost his right arm at the shoulder. He was still suffering from shock and was in tears…. A general has to develop a thick skin if he can, but it is sometimes hard to do.”

  On a stool midway through the ward slouched a private from the 26th Infantry, Charles H. Kuhl. A carpet layer from Indiana in civil life, Kuhl had been a soldier for eight months and in the 1st Division since early June. Examined at a battalion aid station the previous day, he received sodium amytal—a barbiturate to induce sleep—before being moved back to the 15th Evac, where an initial diagnosis concluded: “Psychoneurosis anxiety state—moderate severe. Soldier has been twice before in hospital within ten days. He can’t take it at the front, evidently.” A more discerning evaluation would reveal that Kuhl had malaria, chronic diarrhea, and a fever of 102.2 degrees.