The Day of Battle (11 page)

What Eisenhower did not know was how vigorously the Italians would fight for their homeland, or whether the Germans—who were believed capable of shipping an additional division of reinforcements to Sicily every three days—would fight to the death for an arid island a thousand miles from the Fatherland. Even Ultra could not see that deeply into the enemy’s soul.

The Combined Chiefs had approved the detailed
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plan on May 12. Yet a feeling lingered in Washington and London that the scheme lacked bravura and that the Allies were missing a chance to exploit their triumph in North Africa. For his troubles, Eisenhower received another rebuke. “Your planners and mine may be too conservative,” George Marshall told him; they lacked the audacity that “won great victories for Nelson and Grant and Lee.”

Marshall was right.
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would be the largest amphibious operation of World War II—the seven divisions in the assault wave were two more than would land at Normandy eleven months later—but it lacked imaginative dash. Preoccupied with Tunisia, commanders lost sight of the larger objective: to seal the Strait of Messina, preventing Axis reinforcement of Sicily and forestalling an Axis escape to the Italian mainland. Amphibious doctrine stressed the capture of ports and airfields to the exclusion of the battle beyond the dunes, and the final
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plan petered out twenty miles past the landing beaches.

A “terrible inflexibility” characterized all big amphibious enterprises, in Beetle Smith’s phrase. Fitting the pieces together, getting from here to there, synchronizing the attack—these tasks absorbed enormous concentration and effort, leaving little time to consider the battle beyond the shingle.
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also included the first sizable Allied airborne attack of the war. And Montgomery’s revised plan meant that the Americans, lacking a port, would have to sustain a combat army over the beaches in ways never before attempted.

The die was cast, audacious or otherwise. In mid-June, Eisenhower gave reporters off-the-record details of the impending invasion in order to quell speculation about future operations. He asked them to keep the secret, and they did. “Don’t
ever
do that to us again,” one correspondent pleaded.

Feints and deceptions continued apace. An Anglo-American fleet of warships and cargo vessels steamed from Britain toward Norway to suggest a northern invasion. A British Mediterranean armada—four battleships, six cruisers, and eighteen destroyers—sailed toward Greece before reversing course in the dead of night to cover the sea-lanes near Malta. But in the clutter of prevarication could be found an occasional truth. Eight million leaflets fell on Sicily in early July. One message warned, “Germany will fight to the last Italian.” Another contained a map showing the vulnerability of Italian cities to Allied bombers flying from North Africa. The caption read: “Mussolini asked for it.”

A lustrous canopy of stars arched over Valletta as Eisenhower left the tunnel on the night of July 8. The briny scent of the midsummer Mediterranean was intoxicating after the Lascaris underworld. The blacked-out town gleamed in the blue starlight with a beauty denied the daylight ruins.

For all its size, the enormous bedchamber at Verdala Palace was furnished with the economy of a monastic cell: water pitcher, wash basin, soap dish, thunder mug, bathtub. Several small battle maps had been tacked up. Eisenhower at times lamented the countless details that required his attention—“folderol,” he called it. “I used to read about commanders of armies and envied them what I supposed to be a great freedom in action and decision,” he had written in a letter home on May 27. “What a notion! The demands made upon me that must be met make me a slave rather than a master.”

Translators, for example. Two hundred Italian-speaking soldiers were to be sent to North Africa with the 45th Division and 82nd Airborne, but none had arrived with the 82nd. Where were they? Or prisoners: “We may have 200,000 prisoners of war from
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,” he had informed Marshall on June 28, but of the 8,000 guards required less than half that number could be combed from U.S. units. Did the Geneva Conventions permit using British or French guards in American camps? Or donkeys: an urgent plea to the War Department for pack saddles and bridles had drawn a query from Marshall: “How many hands high are these donkeys and what average weight?” On further investigation, Eisenhower told him, “Donkeys not now considered suitable. Limited number of native mules available, 14 to 16 hands high, average weight 850 pounds…. These mules accustomed to packs but very vicious.”

And then there was AMGOT, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, an organization preparing to establish postinvasion civil rule in Sicily. Wags claimed the acronym stood for “Aged Military Gentlemen on Tour,” but Washington informed Eisenhower that AMGOT had an “ugly German sound” and also approximated a crude, explicit Turkish term for genitalia. “To change the name of AMGOT at this stage,” the exasperated commander-in-chief told the War Department on June 1, “would cause great delay and confusion.”

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”

T
HE
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
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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
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, 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.