Assignment to Hell (33 page)

At four in the morning on July 10, Bigart joined more than a hundred “weary, sweating” American and British correspondents at Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers. PROs ushered them into a room that previously had displayed a panoramic chart of the Mediterranean. Now the atlas had been replaced by a single topographical map featuring Sicily—and Sicily
alone. The “more acute strategists,” Bigart needled, “were able to deduce that the invasion, in its initial stage, was more limited than we had been led to believe. All their notes on the flora and fauna and on hotel accommodations in Sardinia, Corsica, Crete, and southern Italy could be for future reference.”
⁴⁰

B
IGART MAY NOT HAVE BEEN
feeling much stress at that moment, but a hundred miles north, Boyle was engulfed by it. Boyle was positioned on the main deck of Admiral Hewitt’s flagship, the
Monrovia
, moored off the shore of Gela. Standing on the deck immediately beneath Boyle was Seventh Army head George Patton, intently watching the action through his field glasses.

It had already been a long and loud morning; H hour for the first wave of invaders had come at 0245. It was Boyle’s second amphibious landing, but unlike Morocco, this time he wouldn’t be going in early; he would climb into an assault craft only
after
the beachhead had been pacified. The men tasked with capturing Gela were ordered to begin getting ready at midnight. As Boyle saw it: “Sweating, straining, cursing men began to lower the Higgins assault boats from giant cranes, and to load them with weapons. Silent as statues the infantrymen whose job it was to seize a bridgehead waited in dark lines to clamber down a swinging rope and wooden ladders to the pitching assault boats.”

The attack craft circled around a rendezvous point until all the boats were ready to surge toward the beach. “Spray drenched the solders from head to foot as they knelt or stood with rifles clenched in hand,” Boyle wrote.
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Enemy searchlights had been futilely sweeping the water in front of the fleet for hours. Now, suddenly, the assault boats were caught “in a shaft of dazzling light,” Boyle wrote. The fifty-caliber guns on the attack vessels poured tracers at the searchlights but their bullets fell short. Then the big guns from the U.S. cruisers and destroyers opened up. Their shells went out in a great arc and “dropped seemingly as softly as a feather,” Boyle
wrote, but were deadly accurate. Within seconds, the sea “dissolved into darkness.”
⁴²

Boyle could still see flashes of infantrymen leaping into waist-high water, wading ashore with rifles held high. An abrupt series of blasts that sounded to Boyle like a string of firecrackers detonated along the shoreline, sending up huge geysers of water. But the Italians had miscalculated; their electrically controlled mines did little damage. A few moments later there was such a big explosion onshore that it shook the
Monrovia
. At daylight they learned that the Italians, knowing that they were about to be overrun, had blown up Gela’s only pier.

The men left on the
Monrovia
were anxiously leaning over the rails, ears cocked, as the first Higgins boat returned. “‘Everybody safe ashore and the wops are scared as hell!’ called the little navy coxswain. Then more cargo for the fighting troops was lowered, and he pulled away again,” Boyle wrote. All morning long dinghies and barges ferried men and matériel to the beach. “In each boat was a crew of drenched, sleepless shivering boys, most of them from 17 to 20 years old…. If they failed, the army would fail.”
⁴³

The Army didn’t fail. But getting GIs off Sicily’s beachheads proved daunting. Spearheading the assault at Gela was General Terry Allen’s Big Red One, backed by several units of Rangers whose mission was to seize the Ponte Olivio airfield a few miles inland. Lucian Truscott’s Third Division went ashore eighteen miles northwest of Gela at Licata. General Troy Middleton’s 45th Division, freshly arrived from the States, went in a dozen miles southeast at Scoglitti.

As invasion day wore on, encouraging news began to filter in, Boyle reported. Hewitt had one of his officers post status reports in blue pencil on a lower-deck situation map, not far from where Patton and his staff were standing. “Landings successful. Progress OK,” it indicated at dawn. An hour or so later word came in that the Brits on Sicily’s southeastern side had also creased enemy beaches. “
All
assault landings successful,” was scribbled in “jubilant” blue, Boyle noted.

Resistance was “light,” Boyle wrote, but that was not entirely accurate.
The only piece of the battle visible from the
Monrovia
that first day was the haze of smoke and dust being kicked up by artillery units of the Big Red One as it muscled inland.

Boyle was by then a seasoned (and still generally sympathetic) observer of George S. Patton. The fiery general that morning “fretted like a firehorse to get to the beach. But he was chained to his communications on ship,” Boyle wrote. Patton planned to go ashore late in the afternoon, but adequate radio and telephone connections had not been established.

The Seventh Army leader may have been concerned about communications, but not enough to actually initiate any with his Supreme Commander. Ike was stewing in Algiers, furious that Patton was keeping him in the dark, just as his underling had in the Moroccan invasion and later in the Tunisian campaign. Two days later, Eisenhower would thoroughly chastise Patton. It was the first of several dressing-downs Patton would get over the next few weeks; compared to what was to come, it was mild.

At dusk on day one, Boyle was chatting with a member of Patton’s staff as they strained their eyes toward Gela’s beach. “The whole thing seems like an anticlimax,” the officer said. “We came here expecting a hell of a lot of trouble, and the Italians are folding up like an accordion. This doesn’t seem like an invasion at all. It isn’t even as exciting as some of our maneuvers have been.”
⁴⁴

The first eighteen hours of the Sicilian campaign may not have felt climactic, but the folded accordion turned out to have some wheeze left in it. At 0900 on day two, as Patton departed the
Monrovia
with a newsreel crew for the Gela beachhead, he didn’t know it, but he was stepping onto a beehive.

By then the Hermann Göring Panzer division and other Axis units in a ten-mile-wide swath had launched a surprisingly strong counterattack north of town, Boyle and his AP buddy Don Whitehead reported. The enemy move succeeded in pushing much of the Big Red One and elements of the 26th Division back toward the beach. First Division cooks, supply sergeants, and motor pool mechanics who had been organizing the beachhead found themselves pressed into a fight for their lives, staring down Nazi tanks.

A few miles northwest, the men of the 26th groveled for cover in lemon and olive groves south of the Ponte Olivio airfield. That airstrip, and several others in southern Sicily, changed hands in the next twenty-four hours before the Germans and Italians were overwhelmed by the new Allied troops landing by the hour.

The only thing that saved the Allied central front from collapsing on day two, Whitehead wrote, was the lack of coordination in the Axis’ three-pronged drive.
⁴⁵

A
LLIED PARATROOP UNITS HAD PLAYED
only a peripheral role in the North African campaign. Sicily, planners vowed, would be different; they were determined to fully engage British airborne units and the American 82nd. Indeed, Patton’s invasion strategy called for 3,400 paratroopers from the 82nd to jump a few hours ahead of seaborne troops, seize the high ground north of Gela, capture roads and bridges, and stifle any enemy counterattack.

But severe winds, poor visibility, erratic maps, and terrified Dakota transport pilots scattered men from the 82nd all over the island. Only about one in seven paratroopers landed anywhere near their drop zones.
⁴⁶

The Americans’ password challenge for Husky was “George!” to be followed by the response “Marshall!” Members of the 82nd spent hours hissing “George!” into the darkness, only to be met with silence. Worse, no one had thought to clue in the Brits on the U.S. password—an oversight that led to several tragedies in the coming nights as American paratroopers, still disoriented, traipsed through territory now occupied by Monty’s men.

But those accidental deaths paled in comparison to what transpired on the night of July 11, when twenty-three American paratroop planes were accidentally shot down by friendly fire because of slipshod communications. The official death count was 410, but that number was surely sugarcoated: the real toll was undoubtedly higher.
⁴⁷

But the most disquieting part of the entire episode is what happened the next day. Patton, who had witnessed the slaughter, must have believed that he could hide the unpleasant truth from Eisenhower—at least for a while. He chose not to brief Ike about it when they met face-to-face on
July 12. Even after Ike had skewered him for not keeping him abreast of critical developments, Patton stayed mum.

Eisenhower didn’t learn of the Gela catastrophe until he arrived back at his command post a few hours later. Ike proceeded to tear off a biting message to Patton that attributed the incident to “inexcusable carelessness and negligence” and all but laid the whole matter at Patton’s doorstep.
⁴⁸

Boyle likely didn’t witness the disaster; by that point, at least according to his Associated Press colleague Joseph Morton,
⁴⁹
Boyle was with Truscott’s men north of Licata, as they battled to protect the Big Red One’s left flank. But word about the tragedy spread through the island; it would not have taken long to reach someone with Boyle’s antennae. The news may have been slower to reach Bigart, who was still in Algiers, itching to get on the northern side of the Mediterranean. Censors forbade any mention of the 82nd’s heartbreak, of course, so it wasn’t until after the war that the American public found out about it.

B
IGART AND
B
OYLE SAW A
lot of each other in Sicily. It varied from day to day, but they were essentially shadowing the same troops: the 45th Division most often, with occasional forays among the First, Third, 26th, Second Armored, and 82nd Airborne, all of which were advancing north by northwest along a front that mushroomed some thirty to forty miles. Most of the time Bigart and Boyle traveled by jeep or hitched rides on trucks or tanks. But like a lot of men and matériel in Sicily, they spent considerable time on the backs of barnyard animals.

The Allies had requisitioned thousands of mules and horses to help them transport supplies over the rugged Sicilian terrain. As troops pushed deeper into the hills, reporters would occasionally jump onto mules—a colorful happenstance that inevitably made its way into their accounts.
⁵⁰

Hal the Hitchhiker must have sprained his thumb in Sicily. On July 14 he was hustling north of Licata with the Third Division. Within a day he was east of Gela along Highway 115, keeping a watchful eye out for German fighter planes “who would find it a perfect avenue for strafing.” Soon he encountered an Allied field hospital, jumped out of the jeep, and marveled
at the preternatural calm of its workers. Army nurses, “pretty in their blue uniforms,” were sitting on some grass near the tents. The nurses had landed in Sicily a few hours after the soldiers, Boyle explained, “without an outward sign of worry. They work harder than any other group in the Army and relax now only because casualties have been surprisingly light.”
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Later that day Boyle bumped into hundreds of paratroopers from the 82nd. They were marching down the road in parallel rows toward a new bivouac area. “These troops, dropped by the thousands a few hours before arrival of the ground troops,
fell slightly short of their target
” (emphasis added). Despite the chaos, the paratroopers had rallied to knock out pillboxes and enemy strongholds, Boyle reported. The long, marching columns were headed by full colonels and other senior officers. Some of the paratroopers were pedaling bicycles that they had acquired along the way; others were riding bareback on horses that they had confiscated from Italian artillery batteries. Many troopers had stuffed green vines into their helmet rigging to make them harder to spot in the woods.

Farther up the road Boyle’s jeep stopped to pick up a lone trooper, Private Mervin Golden of Tallassee, Alabama, who had somehow gotten separated from his squad. Golden worked in a cotton mill back home, Boyle wrote, and “was still a bit dazed by the great adventure.” As he and other troopers had attacked a pillbox, a bullet grazed the rim of Golden’s helmet.

“‘From the time I took off from Africa that night everything seems like a dream,’ [Golden] said in his soft southern voice. ‘It still doesn’t seem real. A few days ago all of us were playing in Africa. Now some of the boys are gone and some are wounded. But we did good and I enjoyed it. Yes, I enjoyed it. I’d like to make another jump.’”
⁵²

Not long after, Boyle managed to get himself a few miles farther southeast to witness the 45th’s capture of Vittoria. Vittoria was the first sizable village that Boyle had come upon since Gela. He was impressed by the town’s towering church spires and the classical statuary that adorned certain buildings.

The 45th had stationed a military policeman from Gilbert, Minnesota, to guard the town bank. On the afternoon of their second day in Vittoria,
Boyle asked the MP how long he’d been on duty. “Twenty-one straight hours without a break,” he replied.

“Little children run out, hold their fingers up to their lips as if smoking and cry shrilly ‘Cigaretti! Cigaretti!’ Children seem to start smoking as soon as they quit nursing,” Boyle noticed. “To the left of the road is a pillbox cleverly concealed as a cottage. The Italians have been very adept at camouflaging their coastal defenses.”

They had also been adept at painting Mussolini’s stirring slogans on the walls of buildings. One read: MANY ENEMIES, MUCH HONOR. Another declared: OUR DESTINY IS ON THE SEAS, now a cruel joke.