The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  “You need have no fear of being left in the backwater of the war,” Eisenhower had told Patton, but that was before Patton slapped the two soldiers. For more than three months that secret had held, with at least sixty reporters in Algiers and Italy sitting on the story. But Sicily now felt like the ultimate backwater. Patton tramped around Gela and other Sicilian battlefields, reliving past glories while disparaging the commanders struggling on the Winter Line. “I wish something would happen to Clark,” he told his diary. Montgomery was simply “the little fart.” To Bea he wrote with his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar: “Send me some more pink medecin. This worry and inactivity has raised hell with my insides.”

  He took little interest in governing Sicily, which desperately needed a caring hand. Allied planners, drawing on irrelevant experiences from the U.S. Civil War and the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I, had assumed the Italian economy would “maintain itself at a minimum subsistence level,” particularly in agrarian Sicily. That proved dead wrong. By early winter, to forestall famine and bread riots, Allied commissaries were forced to provide flour for three-quarters of the Sicilian population. At feeding centers, starving women feigned pregnancy with pillows stuffed beneath their skirts to claim an extra ration. Black marketeering drove up the price of salt a hundredfold, to 350 lire per kilo.

  Shortages plagued the island, from coal and fertilizer to nails and lightbulbs. Typhoid appeared. Officers also reported “some recrudescence of Mafia activities,” including occasional murders with the lupara, a sawed-off shotgun that was the traditional weapon of choice for revenge killings. Power outages were chronic, and courts handed down criminal sentences by matchlight. Occupation authorities jailed sixteen hundred “politically dangerous” Sicilians for months and scissored Fascist cant from school textbooks, but the locals still greeted Allied soldiers with absentminded Black Shirt salutes. The liberators soon grew weary of the liberated. “The Sicilian has been found by experience to be utterly untrustworthy,” U.S. Army logisticians complained. “They adopt every possible ruse to cheat and generally outwit us.” OSS agents agreed. “Lying, stealing, and general dishonesty…can be considered a prevalent folk characteristic.”

  Whatever mild curiosity Patton evinced in these local affairs vanished after the slapping story broke at home in late November. The Quaker muckraker Drew Pearson, apparently tipped off by an OSS source, broadcast a garbled but uncensored version of the incidents during his weekly radio show. Beetle Smith in Algiers made matters worse by disingenuously insisting that Patton had not been reprimanded, distinguishing between an official censure and Eisenhower’s personal castigation in August.

  Politicians and the press were in full throat overnight. “Army regulations specifically forbid this sort of thing,” complained a former artilleryman from Missouri, Senator Harry S. Truman. Editorial opinion ranged from the condemnatory (the Raleigh News and Observer: “A man who cannot command himself lacks the supreme virtue”) to the indulgent (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer held that “allowances must be made for the feelings of a high-spirited man under the stress of battle”). By mid-December, the White House and War Department had received fifteen hundred letters, pro and con, though a Gallup poll indicated that by a four-to-one margin Americans opposed sacking Patton.

  “I am not so sure that my luck has held,” Patton told Bea on December 4, adding, “The only thing to do is do nothing and make no excuses.” In a conversation with Clark he contemplated retirement, then privately complained that the Fifth Army commander “treated me as an undertaker treats the family of the deceased.” As usual his contrition was inconstant, a blend of contumacy, repentance, and irony. Of Drew Pearson he wrote, “I will live to see him die.” He told Kay Summersby, “I always get in trouble with my goddam mouth. But if this sort of thing ever comes up, I’ll do it again.” When Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair wrote that “in all frankness your temper has long threatened to undo you,” Patton replied that in striking the soldiers “I was putting on an act.” Perhaps his most reflective moment came in a note to a friend in December: “Very few of us fail to make mistakes. This does not excuse mistakes, but it at least puts us in good company.”

  Eisenhower had kept faith with his old friend, even as he recognized that personal foibles limited his utility in high command. While privately recommending Patton for another army command, he told Marshall, “I doubt that I would ever consider Patton for an army group or any higher position.” In December, in the semiannual evaluations of his chief subordinates, Eisenhower rated Patton “superior” and ranked him fifth among the two dozen lieutenant generals he knew. Patton was “impulsive and flamboyant,” Eisenhower added, and “should always serve under a strong but understanding commander.”

  Deliverance came from Franklin Roosevelt, a strong but understanding commander-in-chief. On Wednesday, December 8, en route to Washington after the conferences in Cairo and Teheran, the president landed at Malta for a quick inspection of the dockyard and then flew on to Sicily. Escorted by a dozen P-38 fighters, the aircraft touched down at two P.M. at Castelvetrano, fifty miles southwest of Palermo. Patton and Clark, who had flown in from the Winter Line, braced at attention at the foot of the ramp.

  With the brim of his hat tipped up to catch a few final minutes of Mediterranean sun, Roosevelt took a jeep tour of the airfield before presenting the Distinguished Service Cross to Clark and several others for their heroics at Salerno. A receiving line formed, and as Patton shuffled past, a beaming Roosevelt grabbed his hand and held it for a long moment. According to Clark’s later recollection, the president murmured, “General Patton, you will have an army command in the great Normandy operation.”

  He had been reprieved. In a secluded corner away from the president’s entourage, Patton glanced about to be certain that he was alone and then burst into sobs. For a full minute he wept, tears of relief, of regret, of gratitude, and surely of defiance coursing down his cheeks. Wiping his eyes, he gathered himself and strutted back to the jeep to join the president for cocktails at the officers’ club.

  Official redemption would arrive several weeks later, in a message ordering him to the United Kingdom to take command of the new U.S. Third Army. His country needed him, and the forces of righteousness also required him. Had Patton known that he had but two years to live, he hardly would have cared. He had already heard the summons of the trumpet.

  “My destiny is sure,” he would tell his diary on Christmas Day, “and I am a fool and a coward ever to have doubted it.”

  A Gangster’s Battle

  THE forces of righteousness also required Bernard Montgomery, but for the moment they required him in Italy, on the Adriatic front.

  While Clark’s Fifth Army struggled up the west coast, Eighth Army since invading Calabria had traced the ancient Crusaders’ Coast for four hundred miles. Five divisions—Brits, Kiwis, Indians, and Canadians—armed with nearly seven hundred guns and two hundred tanks had pushed back four German divisions on a forty-mile front. With Fifth Army threatening Rome from the south, Montgomery intended to seize the seaside resort of Pescara, halfway up the boot, before swinging west on Highway 5 across the mountains through Avezzano to approach the capital from the east. Alexander hoped that if attacked on a broad front, from sea to sea, “the enemy would be sufficiently stretched to prevent him massing for the defense of Cassino.”

  That strategy still seemed plausible on November 20, when Eighth Army attacked the Sangro River, establishing a bridgehead on the far shore and nearly obliterating the German 65th Division, whose commander forfeited his right arm during an air attack. By early December, with thousands of Allied planes providing support and British tanks deftly maneuvering through snowdrifts, the Sangro defenses had been unhinged. New Zealand troops pushed into the crossroads town of Orsogna before panzers pushed them out again. “The Germans are, in fact, in the very condition in which we want them,” Montgomery declared. “We will now hit them a colossal crack.” He publicly announced,
“The road to Rome is open.”

  Alas, no. The Bernhardt Line defenses extended nine miles deep north of the Sangro, in what Alexander came to call “ridge and furrow country.” Montgomery discovered, as Clark had, that superior Allied air, artillery, and armor could be checked by poor weather, hellish terrain, and a stubborn Feldwebel with an antitank gun. A British analysis warned that for Sherman tank crews, “the average range of vision was about 50 yards, and the average range at which tanks were knocked out about 80 yards…. To hesitate spells death.” In one especially trying stretch, German axes felled a half mile avenue of poplars, which had to be cleared from the road with bulldozers and chains at a rate of an hour per tree.

  Drenching winter rains abruptly widened the Sangro from one hundred feet to four hundred and more, sweeping away so many bridges that an official history damned “this malignant river, rising to flood and fury.” A half dozen ambulances returning to an aid station were halted so long by a washed-out bridge that the medics ran out of morphine. “I could hear the wounded men inside moaning dreadfully and shrieking,” a Canadian officer wrote. Battle casualties, as well as sickness and injury, gnawed at Eighth Army; losses in the 78th Division would total ten thousand in the second half of 1943.

  The Adriatic, in fact, was “an unprofitable sector” with “no real strategic objective,” as an astute New Zealand brigadier, Howard K. Kippenberger, recognized. Montgomery lacked the combat power and reserves to reach Pescara, much less Avezzano or Rome. A giddy AFHQ intelligence summary on December 4 declared, “The enemy has lost the initiative…. The Winter Line has been breached and overrun in the Adriatic sector.” Perhaps it seemed so in Algiers, but on the actual battlefield a strategy of maneuver had quickly devolved into a strategy of attrition and mutual bloodletting. An Eighth Army pause in early December let Kesselring’s troops regroup; two more attacks on Orsona failed, leaving the New Zealanders stymied.

  For those whose blood was let, the Winter Line in the east rivaled that in the west for vexation. In early December, a Canadian soldier described “a landscape that seemed almost lunar in its desolation,” where “men lived and died in many unremembered ways.” Each ridge seemed to conceal a constellation of enemy bunkers; every snow-dusted furrow might hold a mine, or a sniper all but invisible in a white snowsuit. In preparing for a patrol in the no-man’s-land along the Winter Line, one soldier recounted how he “lay rigid, biting my hand and totally convinced beyond all doubt that waiting Germans were watching us…. I hated it; I hated the cold and the dark; above all I hated the loneliness.”

  “To preserve sanity,” another Tommy told his diary, “the limits of imagination must stop at one’s own miseries.” Gun crews traded the heavy barrages known as “murder.” As the season deepened and darkened, a Royal Fusilier observed that troops had revived a survival concept from the Great War known as “the better hole”: the search for a burrow of relative security and comfort. His staccato summary of infantry life along the Sangro had universal merit: “Move forward. Stop. Dig in. Wait. What is happening? Who knows? Not us. Move on.”

  Montgomery kept his swank, at first. With his menagerie of canaries, lovebirds, hens, dogs, and the odd lamb or piglet, he waged war as he had with Eighth Army for sixteen months: from “Main 35,” a compact and nomadic tactical camp of rickety trucks and caravans, well hidden by brush and camouflage netting, and calibrated to the commander’s early-to-bed battle rhythm. To commemorate the first anniversary of El Alamein, Montgomery threw a party near Lucera, with staff officers assigned to provide wine, fresh meat, and a grand piano, which was somehow coaxed into an olive grove. Italian musicians, billed as the Lucera Swingers and featuring a pianist who claimed to have played New York, banged out “Lili Marlene” and “La Vie en Rose.” For a few sweet hours, the greatest British victory since Waterloo seemed nearer than the muddy misery of central Italy.

  Montgomery remained peremptory as ever, with subordinate and superior alike. A staff officer sent to fetch a brigadier told him, “The army commander wants to see you in exactly four minutes and thirty-five seconds. Thirty-four. Thirty-three…” When Alexander stood in a conference to explain his thoughts on shifting Eighth Army divisions to support Fifth Army, Montgomery impatiently snapped, “Sit down. I’ll show you how to do it.” He lamented what he saw as the lack of “a firm plan for waging the campaign. At present it is haphazard and go-as-you-please…. We each do what we like, when we like.” A parody of Montgomery in conversation with God made the rounds, with the general advising the Almighty in a final heroic couplet:

  And after the war when I’ve nothing to do,

  I’ll come up to heaven and run things for You.

  Each night he prayed for fair skies, and each morning was peeved when his appeal went unheeded. “I must have fine weather,” he insisted in November. “If it rains continuously, I am done.” Rain fell continuously. When the Sangro spate washed out his bridges, he summoned a senior engineer, served a convivial cup of tea, then rounded on the poor fellow. “You are useless, quite useless,” Montgomery charged. “I have a little geography book about Italy. It says it isn’t unusual at this season for the rivers in Italy to rise even twenty feet in one night. Get out. You are fired.” More to his liking was an Australian pilot, who was shot down, rescued, and brought to Montgomery’s mess on the Sangro for lunch. When the army commander asked his opinion on “the greatest principle of war,” the Aussie replied, “I should say it’s: ‘Stop frigging about.’”

  But frigging about had become the order of the day in Italy. Whether any mortal commander could have flanked Rome across the Apennines in midwinter is problematic, but Montgomery’s particular skills seemed ill matched to the task. He “had the unusual gift of persuasively combining very bold speech and very cautious action,” as C.J.C. Molony would observe in the official British history of the Italian campaign. A methodical orthodoxy now defined his generalship, much as the beret and eccentric encampment expressed his persona. Again and again he chose limited objectives, which were attacked only after a painstaking accretion of men and matériel in such quantities that he could “scarcely fail, given time, to take that objective,” as Molony wrote. Then the cycle began again, with the selection of another limited objective, and another slow buildup.

  “He was in fact a very good First World War general, and he did not regard his troops as capable of any higher performance,” concluded Michael Howard.

  Years of calamity—in France, Norway, Crete, Singapore, and the Western Desert—had demonstrated the limits of this huge conscript army, including the capacity of staff officers and junior commanders to handle the immensely complex requirements of modern war. For Montgomery, simplicity was paramount, initiative to be discouraged. His battlefield was linear and sequential, meticulous and unimaginably violent.

  This vision, which had made him Britain’s most successful and celebrated field general, was unlikely to carry the day above the Sangro, and Montgomery knew it. In late November, even before Eighth Army stalled along the Bernhardt Line, his frustration boiled over in a private five-page screed, “Reflections on the Campaigns in Italy, 1943.” He tattooed the cousins, of course: “The Americans do not understand how to fight the Germans…. They do not understand the great principles of surprise and concentration.” But most of his fire fell on Alexander. “He has very little idea as to how to operate armies in the field. When he has a conference of commanders, which is very seldom, it is a lamentable spectacle…. No one gets any orders, and we all do what we like.” He worried that “we may be led into further troubles in 1944 and will not finish off the war cleanly.”

  In short, Montgomery concluded, the war in Italy had become a detestable thing, “untidy and ad hoc.”

  Montgomery’s last best hope to avoid a stalemate fell on the Canadian 1st Division, which in early December was ordered to force the narrow coastal plain in a final effort to at least reach Pescara and Highway 5, the lateral road to Rome.

  Canada’s hour had finally
come. The country had entered the war in 1939 with fewer than five thousand professional soldiers and a callow militia of under fifty thousand. Within three years, the force grew to half a million, but Canadian troops had seen little action except for nine murderous hours in the French coastal town of Dieppe, where in August 1942 a raid gone awry left more than nine hundred Canadians dead and nearly two thousand captured. Canadian troops had fought with distinction in Sicily, but some feared that the war would end without a chance to avenge Dieppe or to prove the national mettle.

  That chance would come fifteen miles south of Pescara, at Ortona, a port town built on its Adriatic promontory by Trojans fleeing their burning, high-walled city in the second millennium before Christ—or so it was said. Centuries of prosperity had ended in 1447, when Venetians fired Ortona’s fleet and arsenal. Now a decrepit sandstone castle beetled over the harbor and a few scraggly palm trees ringed the Piazza Municipale. But the more beguiling local landmarks included a domed twelfth-century cathedral that held the bones of St. Thomas the Apostle, and an even older church founded by Mary Magdalene—or so it was said. Most of Ortona’s ten thousand souls had fled to the mountains or toiled in German labor battalions; Wehrmacht sappers also blew holes in the harbor mole and sank two hundred boats to block the anchorage. The coastal road from the south, Highway 16, was easily severed by dropping a bridge below the town, leaving but a single approach road, which hugged a narrow ridge from the southwest. Still, the Germans were likely to fall back to more easily defended ridge-and-furrow country to the north—or so it was said.