The Day of Battle (15 page)

“The beach was a scene of the greatest confusion,” Lucas noted in his diary after an early-morning trip ashore. “Trucks bogged down in the sand. The surf filled with overturned boats and debris of all kinds.” Beachmasters bellowed into the din to small effect; few had been armed with bullhorns. Troops loitered in the dunes, or traded potshots with flitting Italian gunmen. Some LSTs steamed away to anchorages offshore without unloading an ounce of cargo—much less tanks—and the Navy would inadvertently return to North Africa with much of the signal equipment for the Gela assault still crated in the holds. Shore parties searching for fuel and ammo instead found boxes packed with athletic equipment and clerical records.

Dawn also brought the first enemy air attacks. Sixteen miles offshore, the U.S.S.
Maddox
was screening troop transports from enemy submarines when, for reasons unclear, she wandered away from the main destroyer pack. German pilots had learned to hunt stragglers by tracking the ship wakes, then gliding out of the rising sun with their engines cut. An officer on the
Maddox
’s bridge realized he was under attack only when he heard the whistle of falling bombs. The first detonated twenty-five yards astern; a
second hit beneath the propeller guard, detonating depth charges aligned on the aft deck.

Fire and steam boiled from the starboard main deck and the number 2 stack. The blast ripped open the aft deckhouse and catapaulted a 5-inch gun over the side.
Maddox
settled by the stern, with power gone and the engine room annunciators dead. As she lost steering and headway, the ship listed slightly to port, then righted herself for an instant before capsizing to starboard and sinking to the perpendicular. She paused momentarily, as if for a last look around, her forward gun pointing vertically from the sea. Bulkheads collapsed with a groan. Then the powder magazine detonated.

“A great blob of light bleached and reddened the sky,” reported a lieutenant, miles away aboard
Ancon.
“It was followed by a blast more sullen and deafening than any we have so far heard.” More prosaically, a sailor on
Ancon
’s bridge added, “Look, they got one!” Two minutes after she was hit,
Maddox
vanished. In three hundred fathoms the ship sank, dragging down 212 men, their captain among them. A nearby tug rescued 74 survivors.

Past the charred DUKWs and discarded mine detectors, two regiments from the 1st Division bulled through the dunes east of Gela. Succeeding waves followed the spoor of abandoned gas masks, blankets, life belts, snarled signal wire, and artillery shells packed in black cardboard clover-leafs. Gray stone houses with tile roofs stood beside the parched fields beyond the beach. Wheat and barley sheaves lay on threshing floors in the side yards, where beanstalks had been stacked for winter fuel. Grapevines snaked between olive groves, and peach trees were heavy with fruit that hung “like red-and-yellow lamps.” The tintinnabulation of sheep bells sounded above the
pock-pock-pock
of rifle fire.

Force X—two of Bill Darby’s Ranger battalions—pushed into Gela town. Darby, a rugged thirty-two-year-old West Pointer from Arkansas, had proved his worth and that of his 1st Ranger Battalion in Algeria and Tunisia—they were the “best damned combat soldiers in Africa,” according to Patton—and in consequence the force that spring had tripled in size. Posters recruited volunteers who had “no record of trial by court-martial” and who were “white; at least five feet, six inches in height; of normal weight; in excellent physical condition; and not over thirty-five years old.” Recruiters also swaggered into Algerian bars, tendered a few insults, and signed up soldiers pugnacious enough to pick a fight. Already eclectic, the Rangers now included a jazz trumpeter, a professional gambler, steelworkers, a hotel detective, coal miners, a church deacon, and a recruit named
Sampson P. Oneskunk. El Darbo, as the men called him, would twice reject promotion to full colonel in order to stay with his Rangers. They returned his devotion with a jody call: “We’ll fight an army on a dare, we’ll follow Darby anywhere, Darby’s Rangers…Fightin’ Rangers.”

The Fightin’ Rangers now fought their way through Gela. Naval gunfire had shattered houses along the corniche and “ranged through the town, tearing roofs off or blowing in whole streets,” a 1st Division soldier recorded. Blue-uniformed Italians from the Livorno Division made a stand at the cathedral. Gunfire echoed through the nave and up the winding tower steps, punctuated by the burst of grenades in the sacristy. Soon bloody bodies carpeted the altar and the front steps, where Sicilian women in black keened over their dead. Two other redoubts fell quickly: a naval battery on the northwest edge of town, which surrendered after thunderous salvos from the cruiser
Savannah,
and a barricaded schoolhouse from which fifty-two Italians surrendered after a brief firefight. A blue column of Livorno prisoners tramped toward the beach, where without evident dismay they wolfed down C rations and awaited the LST that would carry them away from the war.

More Italians counterattacked at 10:30. A column of thirty-two light Renault tanks with infantry pushed south from Niscemi, eight miles inland, only to be bushwacked by a hundred of Gavin’s paratroopers and further discouraged by screaming salvos from the cruiser
Boise.
Twenty tanks managed to wheel onto Highway 115 toward Gela, but a smoking broadside from the 16th Infantry stopped the advance and sent the survivors fleeing north into the Sicilian interior.

On Highway 117, two dozen more tanks from Ponte Olivo airfield clanked toward town through 5-inch fire from the destroyer
Shubrick.
Several burning hulks soon littered the road, but ten Renaults reached Gela. Rangers scampered behind stone walls and along rooftops, firing bazookas, flinging grenades, and dropping blocks of TNT from the ramparts. With a .30-caliber machine gun mounted on his jeep, Darby hammered away as his driver darted through narrow alleys around the piazza. Seeing his slugs bounce like marbles off the armor plates, Darby raced to the beach, commandeered a 37mm antitank gun, split open a box of ammo with an ax, then hurried back into town. His second shot halted a Renault, and he flushed the surviving crew with a thermite grenade laid atop the hatch. “Soon the metal was red hot,” the journalist Don Whitehead reported, “and the crew scrambled out screaming in surrender.” As the remaining Italian tanks retreated, Italian infantrymen arrived in parade-ground formation west of Gela. Bracketed with mortar fire, they were cut to ribbons. Survivors “fled in disorder.” Hewitt summoned the jut-jawed monitor
H.M.S.
Abercrombie
to harass other enemy forces sheltering in Niscemi; a shift of ballast cocked the ship’s guns higher to obtain the requisite range, and 15-inch shells the width of tree trunks soon rained down.

By late morning, Gela, the town of Aeschylus and Saracen olives, had fallen. Darby pulled an American flag from his pack and tacked it to the front wall of the Fascist party headquarters. A sergeant from the Bronx strolled the streets, quoting Thomas Paine in Italian. An angry crone cursed from her balcony, but other townfolk—perhaps sensing the strategic direction of the young campaign—huzzahed the invaders with “
Viva, America.
” Civil affairs officers eventually counted thirteen hundred demolished houses, of Gela’s fourteen thousand. They also counted 170 corpses. Geloans refused to touch the bodies, and prisoners were press-ganged to haul the dead on donkey carts to the cemetery. By noon on July 10, U.S. patrols were four miles inland, well toward the Yellow Line objective. Still, the ranks felt unsettled: the assault, they agreed, had been too easy. The real enemy, those with panzers and coal-scuttle helmets, had not yet been met.

Fifteen miles west, it was easier still. The 3rd Infantry Division, bolstered by another Ranger battalion and tanks from the 2nd Armored Division, had appeared in the early morning off the coast at Licata, where the stink of sulfur, asphalt, and fish implied the local delicacies. As the flagship
Biscayne
dropped anchor just four miles off the town’s breakwater, five searchlights from shore swept the sea, quickly fixing the vessel in their beams. “All five of them,” wrote Ernie Pyle, who stood on deck, “pinioned us in their white shafts as we sat there.” Then one by one the lights blinked out until a single beam still burned, lingering for a moment like the ghost light in a theater until it, too, was extinguished. “Not a shot had been fired.”

No one was more relieved than the craggy officer standing near Pyle aboard
Biscayne
. He wore a russet leather jacket, cavalry breeches, high brown boots, a lacquered two-star helmet, and an expression that married a squint with a scowl. His front incisors were gapped and tobacco stained; one admirer wrote that his heavy-boned face had been “hewn directly out of hard rock. The large protruding eyes are the outstanding feature.” Around his neck he had knotted a paratrooper’s white silk escape map of Sicily, which soon would become his much-mimicked trademark. He had a blacksmith’s hands, and the iron shoulders of a man with a four-goal polo handicap. His “rock-crusher voice” derived, so it was said, from swallowing carbolic acid as a child; for the past month he had been painting his vocal cords, inflamed from smoking, with silver nitrate. Many considered him the finest combat commander in the U.S. Army.

Major General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., led the 3rd Division and was charged with protecting Seventh Army’s far left flank. Now forty-eight, he was embarking on his second invasion, for he had also commanded Patton’s left flank in Morocco. Born into a country doctor’s family in Texas, Truscott for six years had taught in one-and two-room schoolhouses in Oklahoma and attended Cleveland Teachers Institute before enlisting in the cavalry. The schoolmaster never left him—“You use the passive voice too damn much,” he once chided a subordinate—and he wrote long, searching critiques of subordinates’ performances. Even in combat, he cherished cut flowers on his desk and enjoyed ontological inquiry: a staff meeting might begin with Truscott asking the division chaplain, “What is sin?” His kit bag included
War and Peace, Webster’s High School Dictionary,
and perhaps a liquor bottle; some subordinates thought he drank too much. A stern disciplinarian, he had imposed fifty-year sentences on soldiers who maimed themselves in North Africa to avoid combat; lesser miscreants got “an application of corncob and turpentine,” an aide said. Truscott had learned much in Morocco, about “the loneliness of the battlefield” and the need for physical vigor. Each 3rd Division battalion was required to master the “Truscott trot”: marching five miles in the first hour and four miles an hour thereafter, for as long as necessary.

Nothing revealed more of him than his letters home to Sarah Randolph Truscott, which began, invariably, “Beloved Wife.” Aboard
Biscayne
on July 7 he had written:

At Licata, his best was good enough. A few desultory Italian artillery shells greeted the invaders, who found the beaches unmined. Booby traps on the docks were still in their packing crates. Air attacks proved less intense here than elsewhere on the
HUSKY
front; only the star-crossed minesweeper U.S.S.
Sentinel
was lost. Hit four times by dive-bombers at five
A.M
., wrecked and abandoned, with sixty-one dead and wounded, she capsized and sank five hours later.

Infantrymen drowned or were gunned down without ever setting foot in Europe, but not many.
Biscayne
’s sisters poured shells into the town—
“scorched wadding came raining down on the deck,” Pyle reported—and destroyers screened the landing craft with heavy smoke. Ten battalions made shore in an hour, with tanks. They soon captured two thousand Italian soldiers—some insisted on leading their pet goats into captivity—while many others bolted for the hills in what the Italian high command called “self-demobilization.” Dry grass used to camouflage gun batteries caught fire, smoking out the gunners; others ran from German shepherds trained in Virginia to clear pillboxes and lunge for the throat. “Every time one of the poor Dagoes would wave a white flag over the edge, the tank gunner would shoot at it,” an armor captain wrote his wife, “so I finally stopped him and ran them out with my pistol…. They were the most scared men I have ever seen.”

Dawn revealed a U.S. flag flapping on a hill above Licata. Troops in olive drab scuttled through town, drawing only smiles from children who made “V for victory” signs with their upraised arms. At 9:18
A.M
. the fleet signaled, “Hold all gunfire. Objective taken.” Those seaworthy mules aboard
LST 386
flatly refused to cross the pontoon causeway to shore; exasperated sailors finally heaved them overboard and let them swim.

Truscott came ashore with greater dignity, by launch at noon. Fishing boats bobbed in the tiny harbor, their triangular lateen sails “white as sharks’ teeth,” one journalist wrote. Staff officers scurried about, settling a division command post in the Palazzo La Lumia and cleaning up a new bivouac. No amount of scrubbing could eradicate the reek of sulfur or the millennial grit. “Hell,” a soldier complained within Pyle’s earshot, “this is just as bad as Africa.” Truscott recorded his impressions in another letter to Sarah. “I find this country interesting but distasteful to me,” he wrote. “I certainly do not like the accumulated poverty and filth of the ages.”
Responsibilities are falling on me,
he had told her. Licata was but the beginning.

Across the Gulf of Gela, the third and final prong of Seventh Army’s invasion found the sea on Patton’s right flank a more ferocious adversary than enemy soldiers. Twelve-foot swells and six-foot surf still bedeviled the convoys bearing the 45th Division to Scoglitti, where westerly winds chewed at the exposed bight. The destroyers
Knight
and
Tillman
laid down white-phosphorus naval shells for the first time in combat; the blinding flashes and dense smoke terrified Italian defenders in their pillboxes and gun batteries. Big cruiser shells followed on a flatter trajectory, three at a time, and fires soon danced along the shoreline.