The Day of Battle (16 page)

The first assault wave hit the wrong beach, and from that point the invasion deteriorated. The eleventh-hour transfer to the Pacific of coxswains who had trained on the Chesapeake with the 45th now haunted
the division. Their callow replacements, overmatched by rough surf, sandbars, and sporadic gunfire, veered this way and that along the coast, shouting across the water for directions to Blue Beach or Yellow Two. At Punta Braccetto, two boats in the second wave collided while sheering away from the rocks. Four sputtering GIs struggled to shore; thirty-eight others drowned, and 157th Infantry bandsmen pressed into service as grave-diggers swapped their instruments for picks and shovels. Companies landed far from their designated beaches, and soon battalions and then finally an entire regiment—the 180th Infantry—had been scattered across a twelve-mile swatch of Sicilian shingle. “This,” a regimental history conceded, “played havoc.”

Dozens of landing craft broached or flooded—“a most deplorable picture throughout D-day,” the official Army history observed—and soon two hundred boats stood stranded on beaches or offshore bars. The scattered vessels reminded one Navy lieutenant of “shoes in a dead man’s closet.” Landing and unloading operations were as inept as they had been in Morocco, where a sad standard for amphibious incompetence had been set eight months earlier. Among those coming ashore with the 180th Infantry was a puckish left-hander from New Mexico who had a knack for cartooning and whose impious characters Willie and Joe would soon become the unshaven, bleary-eyed icons of a million infantrymen. “My first practical lesson about war” came at Scoglitti, Sergeant Bill Mauldin later said. “Nobody really knows what he’s doing.”

“The beach was in total confusion,” reported the senior Army engineer on the scene. “There had been no real planning. The beachmaster was not in control.” Not least, pilferage of supplies and barracks bags by Army shore parties was common; their commanding colonel was subsequently court-martialed. Congestion grew so desperate that beaches Green 2 and Yellow 2 were closed below Scoglitti, and beaches Red, Green, and Yellow above the town would soon shut down, too. Later waves diverted to six new beaches where engineers blew exits through the dunes with bangalore torpedoes and laid steel-mesh matting for traction. As shore operations bogged down, the captains of some ships, fearing air attack, weighed anchor for North Africa without unloading. The 45th Division commander spent his first night on Sicily in a rude foxhole a mile inland, wrapped in a parachute. “To make it less comfortable,” Major General Troy H. Middleton reported, “the friendly Navy shelled the area.”

Still, as D-day drew to a close the Americans were ashore on their narrow littoral crescent. From Licata to Scoglitti more than fifty thousand U.S. troops and five thousand vehicles had landed, with more of each waiting
offshore for first light on Sunday. Casualties had been modest, and the enemy seemed befuddled. Italian coastal-defense units had surrendered in such numbers that Sicilian women lined the sidewalks, jeering as their men shuffled into captivity. Yet neither the prisoner columns nor the stacks of enemy dead awaiting mass burial included many men wearing German field gray, and every GI on Sicily expected that soon the invaders would encounter a more formidable foe.

That left the British. Except for the saving grace of calmer seas, all the confusion that bedeviled the Americans in the Gulf of Gela also plagued the Eighth Army landings thirty-five miles away on the island’s eastern flank. Commandos came ashore first, crossing the beach where some speculated that Odysseus, after leaving Calypso’s island, would have made landfall in Sicily, “the land of the high and mighty Cyclops.” The Canadian 1st Division anchored the army’s left wing on a ten-thousand-yard front of the Pachino Peninsula, while the British 51st, 50th, and 5th Divisions beat for the beaches east and north.

“Some confusion and lack of control,” the 50th Division acknowledged off Avola. “Many craft were temporarily lost and circled their parent ship more than once…. It was exceedingly dark. Most naval officers were uncertain as to their whereabouts.” Transports unwittingly anchored twelve miles off the coast rather than the expected seven, confounding runs to the beach and putting shore parties beyond radio range. Some landings “were in no way carried out to plan,” a British intelligence report noted. “Army officers had to take a hand in navigation, and had they not done so, many craft would have beached still further from the correct places.” A Canadian captain was more direct. “Get on, you silly bastards!” he roared at his men. “Get on with it!”

Landing craft ground ashore in the early light. Voices sang out: “Down door!” Then: “Sicily, everybody out!” Fire from shore batteries proved modest, except of course for those it actually struck. “The water had become a sea of blood and limbs, remains of once grand fighting men who would never be identified,” wrote Able Seaman K. G. Oakley, who saw a landing craft shattered in the 50th Division sector. From the surf Oakley pulled “a man whose arm was hanging on by a few bits of cloth and flesh. He cried, ‘My arm! Look, it’s hit me.’” Like tens of thousands of others on that Saturday morning, Oakley reflected, “So this is war.”

Ashore they swarmed, scrambling through the dunes and across the coastal highway. A Scots regiment entered Cassibile skirling, in defiance of orders that bagpipes remain on the ships. A pungent smell briefly triggered
gas alarms and fumbling for masks, until more sophisticated noses realized that the odor came from wild thyme churned by bombs. While some troops built makeshift jetties with stones salvaged from a beachfront vineyard, others darted between doorways, shouting the Eighth Army challenge—“Desert Rats!”—and listening for the proper parole: “Kill Italians.” A Sicilian peasant charged from his house and fired an ancient shotgun at approaching Commandos, who killed him with return fire. “Sorry we had to shoot that farmer,” a British soldier remarked. “He had the right spirit.”

Eighth Army had prepared for up to ten thousand casualties during the first week of combat on Sicily; in the event, they would sustain only 1,517. But even those who escaped without so much as a sunburn shared a Royal Engineer corporal’s view:

More than a third of Eighth Army’s casualties were sustained in one misadventure, code-named
LADBROOKE
, which was intended to complement Colonel Gavin’s jump but which bore the signature traits of so many airborne operations in the Second World War: poor judgment, dauntless valor, and a nonchalant disregard for men’s lives.
LADBROOKE
had a coherent purpose: 1,700 soldiers were to capture the Ponte Grande, a graceful highway bridge that arched above the river Anapo just south of Syracuse. After preventing demolition of the span, troops would push into the city, capture the docks, and give Eighth Army a vital port. Under General Montgomery’s plan, the assault was to be made late Friday night by 144 gliders.

There was the rub: the only pilots available to fly the tow planes had little experience at night navigation and even less at towing a seven-ton glider full of infantrymen on the end of a 350-foot nylon rope. Skilled glider crews were also in short supply, as were the gliders themselves. So rudimentary was the art of combat gliding that jeeps had been tried—unsuccessfully—to tow gliders into the air that spring. Not least, the landing zones near the Ponte Grande appeared to be seamed with stone walls and stippled with rocks. Protests by subordinate officers proved unavailing. Once made, the daring plan could not be unmade; naysayers risked the appearance of timidity and the threat of removal from command. Again, senior officers with little airborne experience and unrealistic expectations held sway.

Several dozen Horsa gliders arrived in Tunisia in late June after a harrowing 1,400-mile tow from England. The wood-frame craft had “huge flaps, like barn doors.” To supplement the Horsas, the Americans donated a fleet of smaller, metal-framed Wacos; each arrived in North Africa in five crates and required 250 man-hours to assemble. British airmen believed that every pilot needed at least 100 hours of flight training on the Waco for proficiency; in the event, they averaged less than 5 hours in the cockpit, including a single hour of night flying. Many had barely qualified for solo flights. Of 150 gliders used in training, more than half were destroyed, even though novices flew almost exclusively in daylight and a dead calm. Most of the tugs would be U.S. C-47 Dakotas, but not until mid-May were the tug pilots released from their duties flying freight in order to train with the gliders.

Pilots and passengers were doomed, of course. From six Tunisian airfields on that windswept Friday night, the gliders soared into the air, towed by 109 American Dakotas and 35 British Albemarles. Confronting “conditions for which we were completely unprepared,” as the glider force commander conceded, they headed for Malta at five hundred feet, fighting the gale, as well as lingering turbulence from the day’s thermal currents and the tow rope’s nauseating tendency to act as a pendulum. Many inexperienced navigators quickly grew confused; some had the wrong charts or none at all. Strain on the tow ropes snapped the communication wires between many tugs and gliders. A Horsa’s tow line parted north of Malta, and thirty men plummeted to their deaths; when a Waco’s line also broke, fifteen more followed. One glider cast off from its tug and landed smartly, only to have a soldier pull up in a jeep and announce, “We are sorry to inform you that you are not in Sicily, but on the main airstrip at Malta.” Another glider team, surprised to find Sicily so sandy, discovered that they had landed near Mareth, in southern Tunisia. Investigators later concluded: “Navigation generally was bad.”

Ninety percent of the aircraft made the Sicilian landfall at Cape Passero, to be greeted moments later along the Gulf of Noto by flak, flares, searchlights, and dust clouds, which rattled the pilots and obscured their vision. “I guess that’s Sicily,” said one squinting captain. Formations disintegrated, and soon tugs and gliders were “milling in a blind swarm.” Some tug pilots, shying from antiaircraft fire that seemed closer than it actually was, released their gliders too early. Plans called for all gliders to be cut free within two miles off the coast, but an optical illusion, magnified by the pilots’ inexperience, made the shoreline appear to be directly below when the planes were thousands of yards out to sea. From altitudes of 2,000 to 4,000 feet, the scattered Horsas and Wacos cast off along a thirty-mile front and
immediately found that gliding west into a thirty-knot wind was “unsound,” as one account concluded.

“As we lost height it seemed as if a great wall of blackness was rising up to meet us,” an officer wrote. For many, that blackness was the Mediterranean. A cry went up: “Prepare for ditching!” Dozens of gliders careered across the water like skipping stones. Some splintered and sank quickly; others would float for hours. Frantic passengers kicked at the fabric walls or hacked away with hatchets. “We went under almost instantly,” Flight Officer Ruby H. Dees recalled. “When I reached the surface the rest of the fellows were hanging on the wreckage.” An officer clinging to another fractured wing murmured to a British major, “All is not well, Bill.” At least sixty gliders crashed into the sea, and ten more vanished—somewhere—with all hands lost. Men flailed and struggled and then struggled no more. In some instances Italian machine-gun fire raked survivors clinging to the flotsam.

Fifty-four gliders made land, often with equally fatal results. “Heavy tracer, left wing hit, flew over landing zone and landed sixteen miles southwest of Syracuse, hitting a six-foot wall,” a survivor reported. “Left wing burning, also seventy-seven grenades ignited inside glider. Two pilots and twelve other ranks killed, seven wounded.” Horsa number 132—among the dozen gliders that found the Ponte Grande—crashed into a canal bank four hundred yards from the bridge, killing all aboard but one. Another Horsa hit a treetop and flipped; a jeep was later found inside with the driver behind the wheel, dead.

Rather than five hundred or more British soldiers holding Ponte Grande, a mere platoon seized the bridge, ripping out demolition charges from the abutments. By Saturday dawn the force had grown to eighty-seven, with only two Bren machine guns among them, and little ammunition. Italian mortar fire and infantry counterattacks whittled the little band, killing troops on the span and in the muddy river below. By midafternoon the bridgehead was held by just fifteen unwounded Tommies, and Italian machine-gunners had closed to forty yards. At four
P.M
. the survivors surrendered. They were marched away toward Syracuse by “a pompous little man with a coil of hangman’s rope around his shoulders,” only to be promptly freed by a Northamptonshire patrol that had landed with the 5th Division. At the same time, Royal Scots Fusiliers bulled through from the south and easily recaptured the bridge.

The British high command would proclaim
LADBROOKE
a success because the Ponte Grande had been spared. But rarely has a victory been more pyrrhic. Casualties exceeded six hundred, of whom more than half drowned. Bodies would wash ashore on various Mediterranean beaches
for weeks. If the courage of those flying to Sicily that night is unquestionable, the same cannot be said for the judgment of their superiors in concocting and approving such a witless plan. Anger and sorrow seeped through the ranks; British fury at American tow pilots grew so toxic that surviving Tommies who arrived back in Tunisia were confined to camp to forestall a fraternal bloodletting. A memo to George Marshall concluded, “The combat efficiency for night glider operations was practically zero.” But the most trenchant summary of
LADBROOKE
appeared in a British Army assessment: “Alarm, confusion and dismay.”

The Loss of Irrecoverable Hours

I
F
much had gone wrong for the Allies during
HUSKY
’s first twelve hours, almost nothing had gone right for the Axis defenders. Miscalculation and mischance, those handmaidens of military misfortune, dominated the initial response to the invasion and “irrecoverable hours were thus lost,” as a German commander later acknowledged. The Anglo-Americans had a toehold, which soon became a foothold, and dislodging them from the island became more difficult with the arrival of every DUKW and LST. Among the alarums sounded that Saturday, in fact, was a report by an incredulous Italian officer of “amphibious contrivances” capable of beaching and then advancing inland “under their own power.”