The Day of Battle (18 page)

Now the hour for pirates and freebooters had come round. Just after dawn on Sunday, July 11, Roosevelt drove in his jeep,
Rough Rider,
from the division command post in a lemon grove beyond Beach Green 2 to the 26th
Infantry sector east of Gela. The mild Sabbath morning kissed the vineyards and orchards of the plain, which stretched north for eight miles to a crown of low hills beyond Ponte Olivo airfield. The division since first light had been making for those hills on a six-mile front: the 26th Infantry up Highway 117 on the left, and the 16th Infantry on the right up Highway 115 and the gravel road to Niscemi.

Roosevelt hopped out of the jeep and hurried to the regimental radios clustered beneath a camouflage net. Reports from the lead battalions were fragmented and unnerving: advancing U.S. infantrymen had smacked into advancing Axis tanks. German panzers were driving south from Ponte Olivo, southwest from Niscemi, and west from Biscari. Italian troops from the Livorno Division had massed farther west for an attack on Gela. At 6:40
A.M
., at least a dozen German tanks swept past the pinned-down 3rd Battalion of the 26th Infantry on Highway 117, midway between Gela and Ponte Olivo. Swerving southeast across the wheat fields, the panzers were rolling toward the landing beaches.

Through his field glasses, Roosevelt squinted at the amber dust boiling on the northern horizon. A pair of Mk IV tanks with gray camouflage
splotches bolted cross-country at top speed in an attempt to draw fire; to one officer they resembled “setters trying to flush quail.” Other panzers worked the subtle folds and creases in the plain. Muzzle flashes stabbed the dust. Soon the morning air thickened with shouts and cackling machine guns and the scarlet gash of tank fire.

Shortly before seven
A.M
., Roosevelt rang the 1st Division command post on the field phone. “The 26th on our left has had a tank attack. Don’t know how bad as yet,” he told a staff officer. “Let me speak to General Allen.” Upon hearing Allen’s voice, Roosevelt wasted no time. “Terry, look. The situation is not very comfortable out here. The 3rd Battalion has been attacked by tanks and has been penetrated. The 2nd Battalion is in support, but that is not enough. No anti-tank protection. If we could get that company of medium tanks it sure would help.”

Each battle report seemed more dire than the last. Panzers had infiltrated the rear of the 3rd Battalion, firing into foxholes and trenches. Low on bazooka and mortar rounds, the American rifle platoons leapfrogged south, pulling back three miles to the outskirts of Gela. “The 26th here is catching hell,” Roosevelt told a division staff officer shortly after eight
A.M
. “What about a company of medium tanks? Not unloaded yet? Goddamn it, I’ll come and pull those tanks out myself. We don’t want them tomorrow.” An hour later he told Allen, “Situation not so good.”

Between phone calls he stumped about with his gamecock gait, brandishing his cane to rally the riflemen in their holes. “These guys can’t hit me! They’ve been trying through two world wars. And if they can’t hit an old grandfather like me, they surely can’t hurt you,” he barked. “Do you know who those bastards are? The Hermann Göring Division. We beat their asses in North Africa and we’re going to do it again.” Later he would tell Eleanor: “The old man still can fight.”

In the lemon grove near Green 2, the 1st Division command post was identifiable only by a small sign—“Danger Forward”—and the radio antennas poking out from behind a stone wall. Here another old soldier also had his blood up. He was saddle-nosed and leathery, and deep pleats framed his brown eyes. Gray flecked the blue-black hair that bristled beneath his helmet rim, and he walked, one observer wrote, with “the slightly rolling gait of a man who has spent a great deal of time on horseback.” Like Ted Roosevelt, he had been annealed in the Great War: a bullet through the face in the Argonne had perforated both cheeks and at times still caused him to emit a curious, leaky-tire hiss. Like Ted Roosevelt he also cherished the Big Red One, with that unconditional loyalty unique to comrades; their rivalry for the division’s affections had contributed little to good order and discipline.

Yet neither order nor discipline had ever loomed large for Terry de la Mesa Allen. Before flunking out of West Point, he had amassed demerits for tardiness, bathing at midnight, yawning in class, yelling during a fire drill, and breaking ranks to pet a dog. As a young officer he “loved horses, women, dancing, and drinking,” and as a major he graduated at the bottom of the staff college class in which a certain Major Eisenhower finished at the very top. Yet he knew how to fight and he knew how to lead, and the Army valued both enough to make Allen the first among his former West Point classmates to wear a general’s stars. Now he wore a pair, the insignia of a major general.

“The soldier’s greatest nightmare is to think he is being sent up to death foolishly,” an aide later wrote. “Men didn’t feel that way under Allen.” A devout Roman Catholic, he regretted missing mass on this eventful Sunday morning, but he had privately prayed, as he always prayed before battle, for the souls of his men. As for generalship, he believed that “tactics are nine-tenths audacity,” and his favorite military adages had a primitive simplicity: “Find ’em, fix ’em, and fight ’em,” for example, and “You win or die.” Allen’s political philosophy was no more sophisticated. “It’s crazy, this war,” he said with a shrug. In June he advised his men, “Do your job. We don’t want heroes—dead heroes. We’re not out for glory. We’re here to do a dirty, stinking job.” At the same time he wrote his young wife, Mary Fran, “I feel sure that my luck will continue to hold in the future.”

That luck had been sorely tested already this morning. “Couriers dashed in and out of the grove,” wrote the reporter Don Whitehead. “Field telephones rang and men shouted into radios. Shells whined over.” An agitated staff officer appeared and Allen said, “Don’t tell me. I can guess. They’ve attacked from the east and west.” The officer nodded. On the division’s right flank, the 16th Infantry was even more deeply embattled than the 26th Infantry on the left. The 16th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion held for two hours against forty panzers at Abbio Priolo on the Niscemi road before at least two companies broke, shoving past officers trying to stop them. “The men felt utterly frustrated because they had nothing with which to fight the tanks. Some of them were crying,” a captain reported. By late morning, the survivors had dug in under scorching fire along a ridge at Piano Lupo, where their advance had begun at midnight. “Hell, let’s not wait for them to attack us. Let’s attack them first,” a lieutenant said, then fell dead with a bullet in the head.

At 10:10
A.M
., the 3rd Battalion reported thirty panzers northeast of the Gela-Niscemi road junction, before adding: “We are in heavy conflict with tanks.” By now the regiment had lost six of nine antitank guns, and two battalion commanders had been badly wounded. Officers were reduced to
sniping at observation slits with their .45-caliber pistols. The few artillery tubes ashore had begun firing furiously at nine
A.M
. with powder charge 5 for a range of 6,000 yards; by 10:30, as retreating riflemen streamed past, the gunners had cut their powder to charge 1 for targets less than a mile away. “Situation critical. We are being overrrun by tanks,” the 16th Infantry commander told Allen. “We have no idea what is going on to the east of us.”

Allen climbed to the crest of a dune behind the command post, cheeks hissing, a map tucked under his arm. “The plain,” an artilleryman later wrote, “was a mass of bursting shells, burning tanks and confusion.” Behind Allen, the beach was hardly more orderly. Italian dive-bombers had struck the roadstead at dawn; since then, scarcely half an hour had passed without another Axis air attack. Of Allen’s ten requests for air support missions on Saturday and Sunday, only one was met: Allied fighters—flying from North Africa and Pantelleria Island—were too busy protecting the fleet. Patton had ordered his floating reserve ashore early that morning, but the four 18th Infantry battalions landed with little more than they could carry. Some heavy weapons mistakenly landed in the 45th Division zone to the southeast, forcing the gun crews to plod for miles up the shingle; antitank guns for the 26th Infantry were lost when
LST 313
took an Axis bomb in the tank deck and burned to the keel. Two 1st Division signal trucks had also been destroyed, including one carrying thirty miles of phone wire, and a third, full of radio equipment, lay in seven feet of water. The Gela beaches remained so crowded that several dozen landing craft circled offshore or returned to their mother ships, unable to penetrate the broached vessels and supply crates heaped along the water’s edge. Mortarmen borrowed fishing dinghies to row their ammunition ashore.

“I want tanks and I don’t give a damn where they come from,” Allen said. More than sixty M-4 Shermans would make land on July 11, but only a platoon—four tanks—made it beyond the dunes and into the battle on Sunday morning. Others were stopped by broken pontoons, congestion, and confusion, to say nothing of the complete dearth of functioning radios on armor vehicles ashore. Shermans crossing the beach found that the steel matting laid for traction snarled in their tracks and bogey wheels, requiring extensive pruning with large shears. Tanks that skirted the mats bogged down in the steep dunes, throwing one or both tracks.

Allen could hardly have dared to hope that comparable woes afflicted General Conrath at the Hermann Göring command post in Priolo, but they did. On the German left, grenadiers attacking from Biscari had blundered about in the dark, then lost their regimental commander, who left his post to explain himself to Conrath, only to be relieved and court-martialed. The leaderless troops panicked and pelted back toward Biscari
before officers finally brought them to heel on the north bank of the Acate River. This “deficient inner cohesion,” as a German staff officer put it, exposed the German left wing and forced the panzers to advance without enough infantry to chivvy the American riflemen from their knolls and gullies. Another German regimental commander was relieved for ineptitude, casualties mounted, the Tigers continued to break down—blocking roads and trails since they were too large to tow away—and Conrath had no inkling what the Italians were doing on his right. “The Italians practically are no longer cooperating,” his operations officer complained. “They have not cooperated from the start.” In fact, the Livorno Division had been ordered by the Italian high command to attack Gela “with utmost determination,” though no one thought to tell the Germans. The Axis front by midday stretched on an eighteen-mile arc, without coordination or coherence. No matter: Comando Supremo in Rome announced that Gela had been recaptured and that the Americans were “returning to their ships.”

From his sandy perch above the lemons and the panoramic chaos, Allen knew that to be untrue, but he also knew that it
could
be true if the tide did not turn soon. As he watched the panzers edge closer to the beach, a mob of 18th Infantry soldiers scampered back through the dunes. “They are carrying armloads of blankets, shovels, binoculars, and weapons in what seems like complete disorder,” an 18th Infantry lieutenant reported. A staff officer asked Allen whether other troops should also retreat. “Hell, no,” Allen replied. “We haven’t begun to fight. They haven’t overrrun our artillery yet.”

Patton came ashore on Whiskey Knoll near Gela at 9:30 on Sunday morning, wading the last few yards from Hewitt’s borrowed barge in thigh-deep water. Timing his own pulse, he was disgusted to find it slightly elevated. “You had better come now,” he had called to a reporter on
Monrovia,
“or my men will have killed all the bastards.” Slapping a leather swagger stick in his palm, he looked “beautiful and battle-fevered in boots and whipcords,” the reporter noted. Binoculars and a camera hung from his neck, and in place of his trademark pair of pistols, a single Colt Peacemaker .45 hugged his hip. Crossing the beach, Patton studied a pair of mine-wrecked DUKWs as several German shells exploded in the water thirty yards from shore. “Get your asses off this beach,” he yelled at loitering soldiers in his odd, high-pitched voice, “and go kill those Kraut bastards.”

Aides stripped the waterproofing from his scout car and unfurled a three-star flag on the bumper. Patton intended to drive three miles east on Highway 115, now known as Adolf’s Alley, to see Allen at Danger Forward, but the U.S. flag Darby had tacked onto the Fascist party headquarters in
Gela caught his eye and he swerved into town. Darby was off in the killing fields somewhere, but the rooftop offered Patton an Olympian view. Thirty hours into
HUSKY
, he had only a sketchy notion of how the invasion was progressing: the code rooms on
Monrovia
had been hopelessly swamped since H-hour, with many urgent messages from Seventh Army units backlogged for eight hours; more routine dispatches were backed up for two days. At least here, Patton could see for himself.

Dust and gray smoke smeared the landscape north and east of town. German tanks pushing past the 26th Infantry on the eastern edge of Highway 117 had crossed the shallow Gela River to menace Adolf’s Alley and Allen’s sanctuary. Italian tanks west of the highway had nosed within a mile of Gela. Patton shouted to a naval ensign with a walkie-talkie in the street below. “Hey, you with the radio! If you can connect with your goddam Navy, tell them for God’s sake to drop some shell fire on the road.” Minutes later thirty-eight shells from the cruiser
Boise
rushed over the rooftops. Explosions blossomed among the Italian tanks, and a syncopated thunder rolled across town. More blossoms opened, this time from white-phosphorus mortar shells falling among enemy infantrymen. The burning fragments, Patton noted, “seemed to make them quite crazy as they rushed out of the ravine, shrilling like dervishes with their hands over their heads.” A Ranger captain added that “enemy troops could be seen staggering around as if thoroughly dazed…. There were human bodies hanging from trees.” A column of prisoners snaked through the street below. “Make it double time,” Patton barked at the military police escorts. “Kick ’em in the ass.” Under Patton’s glare, the prisoners stumbled into a ragged trot.