Not least, he worried about his wife. With John at West Point, Mamie lived alone in Washington. She suffered from a heart condition and was often bedridden. Her weight had dropped to 112 pounds, and she described herself as someone who “lived after sorts, read mystery thrillers through the night—and waited.” Eisenhower wrote her frequently, by hand rather than employing his usual dictationist, with salutations of “my sweetheart” or “darling.” Lately he had taken special pains to reassure her of his constancy, because lately she had asked pointedly about Kay Summersby.
The rumors had intensified. Kathleen Helen Summersby, born in County Cork, had served as Eisenhower’s driver in London and then in North Africa before being put in charge of his correspondence; she was adept at forging his signature on letters as well as on autographed photos. A model and film studio extra before the war, she was beautiful, athletic, and lively, often serving as her boss’s bridge partner or riding companion. Eisenhower, twenty years her senior, struck her “as a man who had had very little comforting in his life.” She had needed comforting herself in the past month: on June 6, her fiancé, a young U.S. Army colonel, had been killed by a mine in Tunisia. Grief and strain shattered her emotionally, and Eisenhower offered to send her home to London. Instead, she asked to remain in Algiers. No convincing evidence would ever prove a carnal relationship between the two, but the gossips gossiped anyway, including some who should have known better.
“Just please remember that no matter how short my notes I love you—I could never be in love with anyone else,” Eisenhower had written Mamie on June 11. “You never seem quite to comprehend how deeply I depend upon you and need you.”
Translators and donkeys, Mamie and Kay, Germans and Italians. And now one more trouble had appeared on the horizon. It was fortunate that Eisenhower never counted on God for good weather, as his son had observed. Earlier in the evening the meteorologists in the Lascaris Bastion had issued a disheartening forecast: a storm was brewing in the west.
“The Horses of the Sun”
THE convoys from Algeria and Tunisia hugged the African coast on July 8, joined by additional task forces from Sousse and Sfax. Ships stretched for sixty miles in a mile-wide corridor, strung on white wakes “like the buttons of an abacus.” Smaller vessels made straight for Point X-Ray, the rendezvous east of Malta. To mislead German reconnaissance planes, the main fleet steamed close to Tripoli, then at eight P.M. wheeled north at thirteen knots.
Ships wallowed like treasure-laden galleons on the Spanish Main. The American convoys alone carried more than 100,000 tons of supplies: 5,000 tons of crated airplanes, 7,000 tons of coal, 19,000 tons of signal equipment. The expedition manifest was Homeric in scale and variety: 6.6 million rations, 27 miles of quarter-inch steel cable, rat traps, chewing gum, 162 tons of occupation scrip, and even 144,000 condoms, also known as “the soldier’s friend.” A ten-page glossary translated British terminology into proper American: “windscreen” to “windshield,” “wing” to “fender,” “regiment” to “battalion,” “brigade” to “regiment.”
Half the tonnage comprised munitions: the capture of Sicily was expected to take less than two months, but requisitions for ammunition and ordnance had overwhelmed the War Department without anyone knowing quite how to sort them out. Huge depots in Oran and Casablanca held a nine-month supply of munitions, triple the authorized stocks, because no one could say precisely what types of bullets and bombs had already been received: the inventory cards were kept by Algerian and Moroccan clerks who often spoke poor English.
The Army, one admiral concluded, invariably “doubled what they thought they needed, just in case.” An emergency plea to Washington in June requested an extra 732 radios, plus 140,000 radio batteries. The Signal Corps complied, after a fashion, but for communications redundancy also shipped 5,000 carrier pigeons, a platoon of pigeoneers, and more than 7,000 VHF radio crystals. Intelligence units carried hydrographic charts; maps from the Library of Congress pinpointing Sicilian caverns; copies of the Italian Touring Club Guide for Sicily; coastal pilot studies; town plats; and shoreline silhouettes drawn with the help of a former New England rumrunner. Couriers from Washington and New York had brought several dozen heavy wooden crates, each stamped BIGOT HUSKY and containing plaster of paris relief models of the Sicilian topography. But a handsome map detailing Sicilian historical monuments and art treasures, printed in New York and temporarily mislaid in Algiers, never reached Allied troops: a motorcycle courier belatedly hurrying it to the front would be captured in Sicily by the Germans.
Much had been learned through hard experience in Tunisia about caring for casualties, and the fleet was provisioned on the assumption that the assault force would suffer 15 percent wounded and sick in the first week. A chart distributed to medics helped assess what proportion of a man’s body surface had been burned—4.5 percent if both hands were burned, 13.5 percent for both arms, and so forth; 500 cc of blood plasma would be administered for each 10 percent. For those beyond such ministrations, the convoys carried six tons of grave markers, as well as stamp pads to fingerprint the dead. A thirteen-page “graves registration directive” showed how to build a cemetery—“care should be taken so that graves are in line with one another, both laterally and longitudinally.” A memo on the disposition of a dead soldier’s effects advised, “Removal should be made of any article that would prove embarrassing to his family.”
Not least important, because invading armies under international law bore responsibility for the welfare of civilians, were the vast stocks meant for the Sicilians: 14,000 tons of flour, evaporated milk, and sugar to feed half a million people for a month; 94 tons of soap; 750,000 cc of tetanus, typhus, and smallpox vaccines. Civil affairs authorities calculated that if Italy were to capitulate, the Allies would have another 19 million mouths to feed and bodies to warm south of Rome, requiring 38,000 tons of food and 160,000 tons of coal each month, a huge burden on Allied shipping. “Italy could not be expected to be self-supporting,” one study concluded, “at any time during Allied occupancy.”
Kent Hewitt spent the passage on the flag bridge or in his cabin, reading and working crossword puzzles. Monrovia’s operations room was small, stifling, and as overcrowded as the rest of the ship. To accommodate the extra staffs aboard, the signal bridge had been doubled in size, and the ship’s carpenters had cobbled together three code rooms while expanding the radio rooms. But with radio silence imposed, Hewitt had nothing to say that could not be said by semaphore. He felt sanguine, convinced that his armada was giving battle against evil and that “God couldn’t be very hard on a man or a country doing that.”
When topside, Hewitt often trained his field glasses on the amphibious vessels, an eccentric fleet within the fleet. The 150-foot LCT carried five Sherman tanks and still drew barely three feet, earning the nickname “sea-going bedpan.” (Vulnerable smaller landing craft were known generically as “ensign eliminators.”) The bigger LSTs, originally designed by the British, had caught the fancy of U.S. military logisticians who had seen flatbottoms used to good effect by rumrunners along the Gulf of Mexico in the 1920s. Eleven hundred LSTs would be built during the war, mostly in river yards across the American Midwest. The square bow, with fourteen-foot hinged doors, made the vessel slow and ungainly, and the lack of a keel caused it to roll even in drydock—or so the sailors claimed. But each one could haul twenty tanks.
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, portholds 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 rea
son 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.
The Day of Battle Page 9
