The Day of Battle (21 page)

“The Dark World Is Not Far from Us”

T
HEY
pressed inland on their hundred-mile front, past Sicilians shouting “Viva, Babe Ruth!” or “Hoorah, King George!” and waving homemade U.S. flags with too many stripes and too few stars. The July heat came
on, and they knotted bandanas across their noses, marching invisible from the waist down because of the dust that beat up as if they were scuffing through flour. “After the first mile we were so worn out we barely had enough breath to bitch,” a mortarman recalled, “but we managed.” Salt stained their shirts, and their boots squished, and they denounced their steel helmets as “brain furnaces.” They nibbled on grapes and green tomatoes and Benzedrine, or bartered one cigarette for eight oranges. By midday, the journalist Alan Moorehead wrote, “everything had turned into strident color—red rocks, green vineyards, a blaring cobalt blue in the sky.” The troops were less vivid: sweat and dust blended to coat them with a gray paste. Occasional shells fell about, and they dove for a ditch or at least a dimple in the sun-hammered earth. “I put my face in the dirt,” one soldier said, “and tried to dig deeper with my knees.”

Jeeps returned from the front with dead soldiers trussed to the hood, threading a path through the columns heaving forward. “Right of way!” the drivers bellowed. “Right of way.” The living moved aside, looking away as if they were Sicilians avoiding the evil eye. Many troops carried amulets, perhaps a St. Christopher medal or a smooth stone to rub whenever the tracers whizzed past. One soldier held a tiny carved wooden pig, murmuring as the shells thickened, “Pig, this one is not for us,” or, “Pig, you know that the one that gets me, gets you.” The novelist John Steinbeck, who had joined the press corps for the invasion, noted a belief that “the magic must not be called on too often. The virtue of the piece is not inexhaustible.” This atavism, Steinbeck concluded, reflected a reasonable conviction in the ranks that “the dark world is not far from us.”

They tramped through a land as exotic as North Africa, a land of village witches and exorcists, where the sick swallowed powdered amber or drank the dust of St. Rita’s bones. Big-wheeled carts clattered on iron rims over the cobblestones; the scenes painted on their sides showed the martyrdom of Christ or cinema stars from the 1920s. Dray horses with blinkers “depicting the life and death of a saint, right and left respectively,” clopped past women combing nits from their children’s hair and old men pouring drinks from five-cornered canvas wine flasks splotched with purple stains.

Walls and public buildings were upholstered with Fascist slogans—“Few words, many deeds” or “Mussolini is always right”—which “after a while even ceased to be ridiculous,” Moorehead wrote. A few had been freshly whitewashed, or overwritten with new scrawl, including “Finito, Benito.” Military policemen hunted Fascist officials by scrutinizing the locals for store-bought shoes or unfrayed trousers; denunciation and betrayal soon became cottage industries. Blue butterflies and hoopoes and bee-eaters flew about, and the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine mingled
with the stink of manure and human offal to produce the precise odor of poverty. “A carton of cigarettes would buy you a whole province here,” an American officer reported, “and a suit of clothes would get you the whole island.”

Dead enemy soldiers lay by the roads with their arms flung out as if making snow angels. They were hastily buried in graves marked “E.D.”—enemy dead. Dead civilians lay about too, some next to painted carts flipped on their sides with disemboweled donkeys still in the traces to form a death tableau at a 90-degree angle from life. A grave-diggers’ strike in some provinces complicated sanitation, as did a shortage of wood for coffins, which were necessarily reused. “Bury the dead and feed the living,” a 1st Division civil affairs officer advised. That too was complicated. Food riots soon erupted, including one in Canicattì quelled by MPs who fired over the rioters’ heads to no effect. “When they lowered their fire,” an AMGOT report added, “the mob lay down in the streets and continued to scream.” General Truscott ordered looters executed; when civilians stealing soap from a warehouse tried to flee, an officer “shot at some of the men in the crowd and the infantry rounded up others and shot them. Six men were killed.” Also shot were seven alleged saboteurs accused of filching military signal wire.

Sometimes the living simply needed to be comforted. Seaman First Class Francis Carpenter, a former Broadway actor pressed into service as a beachhead scout because he had twice vacationed in Sicily, came upon eight terrified peasants hiding in a cornfield. Carpenter, whose credits included the 1938 revival by Orson Welles of
The Shoemaker’s Holiday,
handed around his pack of cigarettes, then cleared his throat and sang “La donna è mobile,” a winsome aria from
Rigoletto
.

No one was more eager to get inland than the lieutenant general who commanded most of the American troops now in Sicily. Omar Nelson Bradley, who as the II Corps commander ranked just under Patton, had battled adversity and affliction throughout his fifty years: the early death of his father; the extraction of his teeth after a skating accident; a near fatal bout of flu; the loss of a stillborn son. For the first thirty-six hours of the
HUSKY
invasion, Bradley’s personal trials persisted. “Feeling worse than I have ever felt in my life,” he had been confined to the U.S.S.
Ancon
after emergency surgery for hemorrhoids, known in the Army as cavalry tonsils. Still in agony, and seasick to boot, he eventually came ashore in his command car, cushioned on a life preserver and feeling slightly ridiculous. On Monday morning, July 12, he set up his headquarters in a sultry grove three miles north of Scoglitti.

Graying since his cadet days, Bradley wore an unadorned field jacket and “might have passed as an elderly rifleman” lugging his favorite 1903 Springfield rifle. Round, steel-frame GI spectacles magnified “his rural manner,” wrote the historian Martin Blumenson, “and his hayseed expression gave him a homespun look.” Nearly anonymous in Tunisia, although he had commanded U.S. forces during the triumphant coup de grâce, Bradley had recently been discovered by journalists and the public. They found his demeanor compelling—“as unruffled as an Ozark lake on a dead-calm day,”
Life
gushed—and his personal story irresistible: the Missouri sodbuster boyhood without running water; the widowed mother, a seamstress, cooking game killed by young Omar—squirrels, quail, rabbit, and big green frogs; the .383 batting average and deadly throwing arm on the West Point baseball squad; the sharpshooter who could hit a pheasant on the fly with a .22 rifle and who eyed German planes overhead as if he were “shooting at the number 8 post at skeet.” At Eisenhower’s urging, Ernie Pyle would spend several days with Bradley in Sicily, writing a hagiographic six-part profile that forever sanctified him as the GI General. “He is so damn normal,” Pyle wrote. “He has no idiosyncrasies, no superstitions, no hobbies.”

Perhaps. But he also had depths beyond even Pyle’s plumbing. “Underneath the mask was a cold and ruthless mind,” Martin Blumenson concluded. He was “calculative”—the adjective appeared in his high school yearbook—and often intolerant. His distaste for the piratical Terry Allen, who considered Bradley “a phony Abraham Lincoln,” had grown so toxic that he was looking for a chance to sack the 1st Division commander. He also was increasingly disaffected with Patton’s flamboyance, his bullheaded tactics, and his penchant for issuing orders directly to the divisions, rather than through Bradley. “He’s impetuous,” Bradley later wrote. “I disliked the way he worked…. Thought him a rather shallow commander.”

Among the most pressing problems facing II Corps was the floodtide of Italian prisoners: on Sicily, more enemy soldiers were captured in a week than were bagged by the U.S. Army in all of World War I. They came in skipping pairs from the villages, or in stolen trucks, or in long, chattering columns out of the hills, nervously glancing over their shoulders for muzzle flashes from disapproving Hermann Göring grenadiers. Wearing long-billed caps and the coarse-cloth uniforms the Germans called asbestos, they surrendered “in a mood of fiesta…their personal possessions slung about them, filling the air with laughter and song,” as one soldier wrote. Some U.S. units were so overwhelmed that they posted signs in Italian—“No prisoners taken here”—or advised enemy troops to come back another day. “You can’t work up a good hate against soldiers who are
surrendering to you so fast you have to take them by appointment,” Bill Mauldin observed.

Off they went in the LSTs, herded like livestock but singing as though caged in an aviary. An OSS officer who interrogated a captured Italian machine-gun crew reported that Axis officers had spread atrocity tales in a vain effort to halt the defections.

“When are you going to start?” one prisoner had asked.

“Start what?”

The prisoner cringed. “Cutting off our balls.”

Told that they would not be harmed, the men sobbed in relief.

“A queer race these Italians,” a lieutenant wrote his mother. “You’d think we were their deliverers instead of their captors.”

Yet the dark world was not far removed. And now it intruded.

Operation
HUSKY
had exacted a particularly grievous toll from the 180th Infantry Regiment, the pride of Oklahoma and one of three National Guard infantry regiments in the 45th Division. During the 45th’s brief interlude in Oran, en route from Norfolk to Sicily, Patton had lavished his attention on the unit, urging officers to “kill devastatingly,” to be wary of white-flag ruses, and, if enemy soldiers surrendered only when nearly overrun, to “kill the sons of bitches.” The 45th should be known as the “Killer Division,” Patton told them, because “killers are immortal.”

Despite these admonitions, not much had gone right for the killers in the 180th. On D-day the regimental commander, Colonel Forrest E. Cookson, was dumped by a confused coxswain on a 1st Division beach and failed to rejoin his men for thirty hours. Evincing “anxiety and indecision”—he tended to shake his head and mutter, “Not good”—Cookson seemed so overmatched that Patton had offered his command to Bill Darby, who opted to stay with his Rangers. With no suitable replacement in sight, Cookson kept his job for the moment but soon lost his most aggressive battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Schaefer. A former West Point football player known as King Kong, Schaefer was “the ugliest looking man in the U.S. Army, maybe the Navy and Marines as well,” one lieutenant said. He had repeatedly lectured his 1st Battalion officers against risking capture because “a captive can’t fight.” Several hours into the landings, Schaefer had been cornered by German grenadiers, who took him prisoner in a vineyard. “Dear General,” he wrote the division commander, Troy Middleton, on a scrap of brown paper, “I’m sorry I got captured.”

The 180th’s chance for redemption came at remote, impoverished Biscari, which the regiment had attacked late Sunday afternoon, July 11. Hermann Göring troops fell back behind the high yellow walls of the town
cemetery, sheltering among the cedars and marble tombs set into a hill. American mortar rounds rooted them out, brown smoke foaming over the mausoleums and machine-gun slugs chipping the seraphim. Again the Germans fell back, skulking north across the Acate River toward an airfield five miles north of Biscari town. In broken country the gunfight continued through Tuesday, July 13.

By early Wednesday morning, the airfield was at last in American hands. Bodies lay like bloody throw rugs on a runway gouged by more than two hundred bomb craters. The charred cruciforms of ruined warplanes smoldered near the hangars; enemy snipers had hidden in the cockpits, taking potshots until a platoon of Sherman tanks exterminated them, fuselage by fuselage. Flames crackled in the grain fields east and west of the airfield. Through the billowing smoke U.S. soldiers could be seen like wraiths in olive drab, dragging wounded comrades to safe ground or snatching first-aid kits and ammunition from abandoned packs.

Sniper fire still winked from the shadows along the packed-dirt Biscari road. Companies A and C of the 180th’s 1st Battalion had landed five days earlier with nearly 200 men each and now counted 150 between them; the battalion casualties included King Kong’s replacement, wounded, and the Company A commander, captured. “We had the killing spirit,” one sergeant later observed. Another rifleman wrote his father that the summer dust “tasted like powdered blood,” then added, “Now I know why soldiers get old quick.”

By midmorning on Wednesday, the 1st Battalion had pushed through the smoke and dancing flames, flushing German and Italian laggards from caves along the thready Ficuzza River. Soon Company A had rounded up forty-six prisoners, among them three Germans. Frightened and exhausted, the captives sat naked but for their trousers on a parched slope above the Ficuzza, all shirts and shoes having been confiscated to discourage escape. A major separated nine prisoners for interrogation—the youngsters were considered most likely to talk—then turned both them and the other captives over to Sergeant Horace T. West with a small security detachment for removal to the rear.

West proved a poor choice. Born in Barron Fork, Oklahoma, he had joined the Army in 1929, then switched to the National Guard, training on weekends and working as a cook in his antebellum civilian life. Now thirty-three, he had two young children, earned $101 a month, and had gained a reputation, one superior said, as the “most thorough non-com I ever saw in the Army.” But the past few days had badly frayed Sergeant West. “It was something sitting on me,” he later said, “just to kill and destroy and watch them bleed to death.”

In two shuffling columns, the prisoners marched four hundred yards down the road toward a stand of olive trees above the creek. West halted his charges—without being told, they executed a ragged left-face—and separated out the smaller group designated for interrogation. Turning to the company first sergeant, Haskell Brown, he asked to borrow his Thompson submachine gun “to shoot the sons of bitches.” Brown handed him the weapon with an extra clip. “Turn around if you don’t want to see,” West advised, and opened fire.