by Oliver North
We knew very little about the enemy situation and had never been told that there was a German armored division parked on the spot that had been picked for our drop zone. If the higher command knew German Panzers were where we were going to jump, that word never got to us.
Shortly after daylight, we moved into an enemy trench line that one of my squads had captured. Then, German tanks started heading our way. Thankfully, the 1st Infantry Division had given me an artillery forward observer. So I told him, “Let’s get some fire out there. They’re going to overrun us here in this trench. It’s better for us to be hit with our own stuff, than for them to crush us with those tanks.”
He got on the radio and very quickly a 155 mm artillery battery down on the beach opened up. A “one-five-five” round hit the lead tank and it caught fire. You could hear the screams of that German crew from inside that tank a half-mile away. And then the tank exploded in front of us. That kind of dismayed the rest of the Panzers.
Gavin had ordered us, “If you land somewhere and don’t know where you are, just find the nearest enemy and attack.” Well, inasmuch as they were shooting at us when we exited the plane, and after we got on the ground, we didn’t have any trouble finding them.
We moved a few hundred yards and were taken under fire by a machine gun. After crawling forward a bit, I could see that it wasn’t just a machine gun, but a whole series of concrete pillboxes. We needed more firepower.
I got on the radio and told my platoon leaders, “I’ll fire three shots close together, and everybody assemble on me.” We got together and checked what we had: carbines, M1s, two light machine guns, and plenty of ammunition. But we needed a bazooka—an anti-armor rocket launcher. I called a bazooka man over and I told him, “I want you to take your bazooka and crawl underneath that culvert, and put a round into that pillbox. And if any German tanks come up, you get out and shoot it in the rear.”
And he said, “That’s a real good plan, Captain. Only one problem—I haven’t seen my ammunition man since we jumped.” So of course he didn’t have any ammunition for his bazooka.
I set up my mortars and machine guns to deliver supporting and suppression fires and the rest of us crawled up until we were right below the row of pillboxes. Then, we all lobbed grenades and assaulted the emplacements. It worked and we took out a whole row of fortifications.
We had killed a number of the enemy and captured ten Germans and about forty Italians. We told the Germans to pick up our stretchers and carry our wounded, but they clicked their heels together like good Germans and said, “Nein.” But my paratroopers convinced them that they really should pick up those stretchers. They did, and we started moving down the plateau to link up with the 1st Division.
Mainly because of the weather and wind, 80 percent of the British and American paratroopers dropped during D-Day on Sicily landed miles from their intended drop zones. Scores of British soldiers in the 1st Air Landing Brigade drowned when their Waco gliders were cut loose too soon from their tow-planes and the powerless craft crashed into the sea. Colonel Jim Gavin, commanding the 505th PIR, landed sixty kilometers from his intended drop zone.
But all the Allied paratroopers had been thoroughly trained and briefed on what to do if they found themselves on the ground, away from where they were supposed to be: find a fellow paratrooper and start making trouble for the enemy. And that’s just what they did.
Allied soldiers wade ashore on Sicily.
Within hours of the drop, little groups of paratroopers were ambushing couriers and recon vehicles, cutting telephone lines, and picking fights with any enemy units that they could find. One of them was a Brooklyn native, Sergeant Timothy Dyas.
SERGEANT TIMOTHY DYAS
505th Parachute Infantry Regiment
8 Kilometers Northwest of Gela, Sicily
13 July 1943
We left America in June of ’43—about a month before the invasion of Sicily. When we arrived in North Africa we immediately started practicing parachute jumps. On the night of July 9, we climbed aboard C-47s and just after midnight on the morning of the tenth, we jumped into Sicily, just like we had been trained.
I was carrying my Tommy gun, some grenades, and a knife, along with my reserve chute, helmet, equipment-pack with supplies, lot of ammo, and canteens. I probably weighed close to 200 pounds with all the equipment.
We landed inland of Gela, where our invasion forces were to come ashore after dawn. My stick must have jumped at an altitude of about 300 feet, because my chute barely opened before I hit. If we had jumped at 1,000 feet, the wind would have blown us even further off our DZ and the Germans would have picked us off as we came down. But because of the wind and the low altitude of the jump, a lot of our guys broke arms, legs, or their backs when they landed too hard.
I hit very hard and was unconscious for some time. When I came to it was very dark and there was all kind of firing going on and a lot of our transports overhead. One of our planes was hit right after dropping its stick of paratroopers and slammed into the side of a hill and burst into flames.
After I came to, I gathered about a dozen men around and tried to figure out where we were. There was no doubt that the inexperienced pilots—probably because of the high winds—had missed our drop zone by several miles.
We were supposed to set up a roadblock to keep enemy reinforcements from getting to the guys who would be coming across the beach at dawn, so we headed toward higher ground. But as we got to the top of this hill at just about dawn, a group of German tanks was coming up the other side. We didn’t anticipate having to take on tanks—we didn’t even know they were on the island—particularly German Panzers. It was a real shock.
We scrambled to get off to the side of the column of tanks and I got my bazooka team—Pat Sheridan and John Rubluski—and they took out the lead tank. Now it was the Germans’ turn to be shocked—they didn’t know we were there.
A German officer commanding the Panzer group opened up the hatch on the turret of his tank to see if he could spot us, and we fired again. The bazooka round hit right beneath him on the turret and killed him. And then another tank came along and my bazooka team destroyed the treads on that tank and brought it to a stop. I think the impact of killing the commander of the unit made a difference when the German tanks showed up. Without their leader they didn’t know what to do.
In the American Army every private was a general—meaning they could adapt. This wasn’t the case with the German army. When their chain of command was broken they were helpless and didn’t know what to do. It took them a good two or three hours to get a junior officer to organize them. They had a much larger force than our dozen men—and they were trying to move infantry up to where we were but every time they stood up to move, we would shoot them down.
They backed off a ways—out of bazooka range—and stated to hammer us with fire from their tanks. We had to pull back over the crest of the hill and pretty soon we were pinned down in a ditch with potato masher grenades raining down on us. They would throw grenades down into the ditch and we would throw them right back up at them. This continued for a long period of time until one of the tanks came around the side of the hill and turned its big gun on us.
We were trapped, outnumbered, and had a bunch of wounded. I was the senior man so I had to make the decision to surrender to save the lives of my men. That hurt—and it still does—because we were trained to be the best and never surrender. It was a terrible feeling but our consolation was in knowing that we knocked out their tanks and killed their commanding officer. That had bought a few hours for the guys on the beach. If nothing else, our little group had created confusion and delay among the Panzers. The tanks never did make it to the beach.
Sergeant Dyas and the surviving paratroopers of his little band became POWs. They were taken to an internment camp outside Naples, Italy, and then shipped in boxcars to Germany, where they remained for the next twenty-two months.
American troops walk through a damaged Sicilian city.
But for the paratroopers still fighting on Sicily, their ordeal wasn’t over yet. Early on 11 July, in a hand-to-hand battle on “Bloody Ridge” overlooking the Gela landing beaches, the American 1st Infantry Division and small groups of paratroopers repulsed a German armored counter-attack. But in so doing, they suffered more than 1,000 casualties.
Patton decided to commit some of his reserves—two battalions of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, waiting in North Africa. Since no airfields were yet available for landing in the U.S. zone of action on Sicily, it was decided that the 1,800 paratroopers would parachute inside American lines near Gela.
Tragically, the C-47 transports carrying the paratroopers passed over the invasion fleet just minutes after a German air raid had sunk an LST. Nervous U.S. Navy gunners opened fire on the American aircraft as they approached the drop zones, straight and level at 1,200 feet, downing twenty-three and damaging thirty-seven of the C-47s. Sixty pilots and crewmen, along with eighty-one paratroopers, were killed.
Though their losses were higher than any other units in Husky, the paratroopers had bought precious time for the troops on the beaches and kept them from being pushed back into the sea. For twenty-five-year-old Oklahoma native 2nd Lieutenant Ed Speairs of the 45th Infantry Division, the hours purchased by paratrooper blood made the difference on D-Day.
SECOND LIEUTENANT A. H. “ED” SPEAIRS, US ARMY
45th Infantry Division
Messina, Sicily
17 August 1943
The morning of July 10, 1943, is a day I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Right after dawn I went up on deck to watch the pre-H-hour bombardment. All you could see—from horizon to horizon—were gray ships. I didn’t even know we had so many ships!
I’d joined the National Guard in 1938 and when we were mobilized in 1940, I was promoted to sergeant. Two years later I was a master sergeant and by the time we landed on Sicily, I was a 2nd lieutenant. That morning it was my responsibility for loading thirty-three landing craft with 45th Division troops and then guiding them ashore.
We had left the States on 3 June, escorted by U.S. Navy destroyers and cruisers. When we got to Oran, Algeria, on 22 June, we started amphibious landing exercises. It was a good thing that we’d had the practice in decent weather—because D-Day on Sicily the weather was terrible.
As we headed into the beach the wind was howling and the waves looked like they were twenty feet high. Every time we would drop down in a swell, we would lose sight of the other boats around us. We took a lot of water in and for a while I thought we might sink before we got to the shore.
Somehow I got my boats to the designated beach, but there were rocks that we didn’t know about and it delayed some of the boats. Because of the wind and sea conditions it took longer than expected to start getting our tanks ashore. It’s a good thing that the German Panzers didn’t attack then, because riflemen are no match for armor.
For the next eighty-seven hours all I did was shuttle back and forth between the ships and the beach with my little group of boats. At the end of that time—because of all the damage—hitting rocks, bumping up against the big hulls and the like—I had just one working landing craft left, out of thirty-three. But by then, the ships were unloaded—and the 45th Division had gotten almost all its gear ashore intact.
On my last trip, I was told to stay ashore and catch up to my unit. They had moved inland about ten kilometers—and I was three and a half days behind them. When I got off on the beach on July 13, practically all I saw were Italian prisoners—thousands of ’em in long lines. They were all smiling, and saying, “I’ve got a cousin in Brooklyn.” For them, the war was over—but for us it was just beginning.
There were also bodies of American soldiers on the beach, wrapped in ponchos—waiting for the graves registration guys. And, there were mountains of ammo, food, fuel drums, you name it—all waiting to be trucked forward. I caught a ride up to my unit with one of the supply convoys.
We reached Caltanissetta—a town almost in the center of the island, on 17 or 18 July. This place had been a big supply depot for the Italian army and headquarters for the Fascist Party on Sicily and it had been just about leveled by air strikes and artillery fire. There was the smell of death everywhere, and as we came to discover, there were lots of bodies of German and Italian troops in the rubble.
Patton pushed everyone very hard to keep the enemy on the run. Palermo, the capital of Sicily, was captured on 22 July—but then it became obvious that the Germans had sent in reinforcements—and that slowed everything down.
The Germans also began to use lots of mines on the roads—and to blow up all the bridges and roadways they could to delay our advance. Later on, at Cefalù, on the northwest coast, the Germans used explosives to shear off the road that had been built on the edge of a cliff over the sea. The Germans just blasted it off.
But Patton wanted us to keep pressing ahead, so our engineers came up and used bridge sections to cross the gap so that we could keep going. And they did it all while under fire—it was an incredible feat. I’m glad I went all the way with Patton.
Lt. Ed Speairs’ observations about Patton’s pressure to keep driving forward—and the heroic acts that he inspired—were right on the mark. The 7th Army commander had come ashore on D-Day and shortly thereafter reported, “We have them on the run” and he wanted to keep them that way.
Certain that the Germans had been surprised by the Allied landings, Patton unrelentingly pressed his troops forward—before their enemy could reinforce or escape across the narrow Strait of Messina. And he almost succeeded.
Hitler had been totally surprised by Husky. He not only believed the inaccurate intelligence he’d received about the Allies heading for the Balkans or Sardinia, but the Führer was also distracted by giving so much of his attention to Operation Citadel—the offensive he had launched in the Crimea near Kursk. But once Hitler realized what was really happening on Sicily, he moved swiftly.
On 13 July, Hitler ordered the Kursk offensive halted—it was already a disaster for the Wehrmacht—so that reserves headed for the Eastern Front could instead be sent to Italy. At his “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters in East Prussia on 17 July, the Führer told his general staff, “Barbaric measures are needed to save Italy. Only by terrifying the Italian population into blind obedience, can we stiffen Italian resistance.” Acting on that premise, he flew to Feltre, north of Venice, to meet with Mussolini on 19 July. The next day he ordered the 29th Panzergrenadier and the 1st Parachute Division to Sicily.
Hitler’s last-minute intervention wasn’t enough to save his fellow Fascist. On 23 July, Patton marched triumphantly into Palermo, Sicily’s capital. And three days later, Mussolini was imprisoned.
General Patton on his way to Messina.
Patton’s capture of Palermo may have precipitated the fall of the dictator, but it didn’t end the fighting on the island. German reinforcements halted Montgomery’s push to Messina dead in its tracks at Mount Etna. By 31 July, Patton’s advance through central Sicily and along the island’s northern coast had been slowed as well.
Undeterred, and adamant that he’d reach Messina before Montgomery, the U.S. Army’s most famous armor tactician showed that he also had a firm grasp of amphibious warfare. Starting on 8 August, with the help of the U.S. Navy, Patton launched a series of short “amphibious hooks” along Sicily’s north coast, leapfrogging his battalions beyond German strong points on the approach to Messina. Small vessels like Sub-chaser-692, commanded by twenty-four-year-old Lt. (JG) Edward Stafford, were essential to the success of these operations.
LIEUTENANT (JG) EDWARD STAFFORD, USN
Sub-Chaser SCE-692
18 August 1943
I joined the Navy because my grandfather had served in the Navy. I spent every summer with him on the coast of Maine, learning how to handle small boats and about tides and currents. I got my commission on 16 September 1941, just before Pearl Harbor and took command of SCE-692, a sub-chaser, i
n January of ’43.
On D-Day in Sicily the weather was terrible—and the surf on the landing beaches was worse. I was nervous—this was my first experience in combat—and every one of us aboard that little ship were Navy reservists. The first class boson’s mate—the senior enlisted man—was a big help, and an “old salt.” He must have been thirty-three. We were the smallest class of ship to make the transatlantic crossing in a huge convoy. There were a lot of these small ships brought over for the Sicily operation—even though we were designed for anti-submarine patrols off the U.S. coasts.
On D-Day our job was to meet a wave of landing craft—five or six loaded LCVPs, Higgins boats near the transports, escort them to the line of departure, two miles off shore, and get them all on line and properly positioned for their run into the beach. Once the wave of boats started in, we’d head back out to the transport ships and pick up another wave and repeat the whole process.
But on the morning of 10 July, there was this horrible sea with ten-and fifteen-foot waves and this howling wind—and packed into each of these little landing craft are twenty to thirty soldiers all loaded up with all their weapons and equipment. I thought that someone would surely cancel the landing until the wind and sea quieted some—but I guess if we had done that we would have lost the element of surprise. That’s a hell of a choice to make—and I’m glad I didn’t have to decide it.
Somehow, we managed to get all our boat waves safely onto the beach but a few hours into the landing, German aircraft—Stukas and fighters—attacked us. They hit one of the 1st Division’s LSTs on the beach, and she caught fire. We could see the smoke coming up from her. Surprisingly, there were very few casualties getting people ashore.
