The Day of Battle (24 page)

Belisarius in
A.D.
535 had captured the city from the Goths by hoisting archers to the mastheads of his fleet with ropes and pulleys so they could shoot over the harbor ramparts. Such tactics were hardly needed now. Palermo was defenseless, ripe for plucking. Comando Supremo a few hours earlier had ordered port demolitions to begin, and Truscott could
hear the echo of explosions along the quays. Two infantry regiments stood poised above the city, but Patton forbade further advance until tanks arrived to spearhead the procession. “Everything was arranged so that Georgie could make a grandstand entry with tanks and what-not,” Truscott wrote Sarah.

Hours passed. Italian envoys in shabby suits came and went under flags of truce, pleading for someone to accept the city’s surrender. At six
P.M
., Seventh Army authorized reconnaissance patrols to enter the city and secure the docks. Truscott sent two battalions.

Into the city they clattered, into a cadaverous and ruined city, dismembered by months of Allied bombing. “Street after street of crumbled houses,” one officer wrote in his diary.

More than sixty churches had been damaged. At the National Library, “stacks full of rare books lay open like a sliced pomegranate.” Drifts of rubble stood so deep near the waterfront that streets could no longer be recognized as streets, though a marble plaque still affixed to one battered house noted that Goethe had lived there in 1787. Forty-four ships had been sunk along masonry quays smashed to powder. The explosion of an ammunition freighter had raised a wave powerful enough to toss two other vessels onto the moles. Wreckage from hundreds of smaller craft cluttered the port. Salvage teams soon would find tons of unexploded land mines and other ordnance washed by tidal currents along the muddy harbor floor. In the Piazza Vigliena, a small army of bedraggled Italian soldiers stood in ranks, waiting to surrender. Priests in black soutanes genuflected and urchins on the Via Maqueda offered to sing Verdi arias for candy. American troops seized two large trucks, one full of new typewriters and the other full of sweet Sicilian nougat. In the coming days, they would find half a million tons of naval stores at Palermo, including crated matériel addressed to Herr Rommel in Alexandria, Egypt, his destination until Alamein had reversed his course.

Major General Geoff Keyes, Patton’s deputy, arrived in Palermo’s western outskirts at 7:15
P.M
. He found an Italian general, Giuseppe Molinero, blotting his damp brow after fruitless hours of trying to capitulate. Searching for a translator, Keyes fastened on a Hungarian-born news photographer named Endre Friedmann, better known as Robert Capa. That Capa spoke no Italian hindered the negotiations—“Stop that jabbering, soldier!”
Keyes demanded at one point, “I want unconditional surrender and I want it immediately!”—but the gist soon emerged. “General Molinero says he is through and will fight no more.” Sadly, the general lacked the power to surrender all forces in Palermo. Keyes bundled Molinero into his scout car; a white pillowcase requisitioned from a Sicilian housewife and tied to the radio antenna hung too limply, so an aide held a bedsheet lashed to a fishing pole as they drove to the Royal Palace on Via Vittorio Emanuele. Italian soldiers cheered and civilians tossed flowers and lemons. The proper general could not be found—Truscott’s efficient men had arrested him earlier—so the weary Molinero agreed to exceed his authority. Palermo fell at last, formally and finally. Keyes checked into the Hotel Excelsior Palace, took a bath, and went to bed.

Patton woke him at ten
P.M
., flask in hand, giddy at his own flowers-and-lemons entry. “It is a great thrill to be driving into a captured city in the dark,” he jotted in his diary. Patton moved into the king’s apartment in the Royal Palace, dining on captured German champagne and K rations served on House of Savoy china. Built by Saracens and enlarged by the Normans in the twelfth century, the palace was a fit if dusty abode for a conquering hero. “All sorts of retainers live in holes about the place and all give the Fascist salute,” Patton noted.

“The occupation of western Sicily must be considered as complete,” Kesselring sourly advised Berlin on July 24. From the assault at Agrigento through the capture of the Trapani naval commander—who surrendered his sword and field glasses—American casualties totaled less than 300; some 2,300 Axis troops had been killed or wounded, and another 53,000 captured, nearly all of them Italian. Yet it was a slender triumph, strategically insignificant, and Patton’s gaze soon swiveled east, where the real fight for Sicily must occur. Over highballs in the palace on July 26, he confided to Truscott that he would “certainly like to beat Montgomery into Messina.”

Still, they savored the moment. “You will have guessed where I am and what I have been doing,” Truscott wrote Sarah. “It has been a grand experience and we have opened lots of eyes.” Patton summarized his sentiments in four words to Bea: “How I love wars.”

Snaring the Head Devil

A
FTER
months of procrastination and discord, the Allied high command had yet to agree on what to do with the million-man Anglo-American army in the Mediterranean once the campaign ended in Sicily.
At the
TRIDENT
conference in Washington, the Combined Chiefs—with the approval of Roosevelt and Churchill—had instructed Eisenhower to devise a plan “best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces.” The prime minister believed any such plan must include an invasion of mainland Italy. He hectored Eisenhower to that end, as he had hectored the president.

“No objective can compete with the capture of Rome,” Churchill insisted. In a whirlwind visit to Algiers after
TRIDENT
, and in countless messages since, he had argued that if Berlin were uncoupled from its staunchest ally, German troops would be forced to supplant several dozen Italian divisions occupying the Balkans and southern France; that, in turn, would weaken Hitler’s defenses in western Europe before the Allied cross-Channel attack, tentatively planned for the spring of 1944. If more Allied soldiers were needed for an Italian campaign, Churchill would strip British forces in the Middle East. If more ships were needed to transport and supply that invading army, he would snatch food from British tables by diverting cargo vessels. “It would be hard for me to ask the British people to cut their rations again, but I would gladly do so,” he vowed. When Eisenhower balked at such blandishments, Churchill lamented that the Allied commander was “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

As the prime minister’s rhetoric grew febrile, metaphors piled up. On July 13, urging bold action as far up the Italian boot as possible, Churchill declared, “Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest-bug from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee…. Tell the planners to throw their hat over the fence.” He privately acknowledged that “the Americans consider we have led them up the garden path in the Mediterranean—but a beautiful path it has proved to be. They have picked peaches here, nectarines there. How grateful they should be!”(“Many of the Italian peaches,” a U.S. Army commander later commented, “had gonorrhea.”)

Eisenhower in May had leaned toward carrying the fight to the Italian mainland. But George Marshall’s wariness, Churchill’s chronic fixation on the Balkans, and the imminent return to England of seven British and American divisions, as agreed at
TRIDENT
, gave him pause. So too did contradictory assessments from his staff. An intelligence study in late June concluded that the Italian “population is war weary and apathetic, sees little hope of victory…and is becoming increasingly hostile to the growing German control.” Bombing, amphibious landings, and a quick march toward Rome “might well cause a collapse in civilian will to resist”; if Italy collapsed, German forces “will withdraw and resistance met will be slight.” Yet Eisenhower’s intelligence chief warned on June 25 “that present indications are that Germany intends to reinforce Italy.” Three days later, his op
erations chief cautioned that “the terrain through which we shall then have to force our way north is very mountainous and difficult in the extreme.”

Success in Sicily tipped the scale. Having gained their first foothold in occupied Europe, sober men in Washington, London, and North Africa felt the euphoric impulse to roll the dice again. On July 17, shortly after Patton had left his meeting in Tunisia with Alexander, Eisenhower convened a conference of senior commanders at La Marsa. Without excessive deliberation, they agreed to advise the Combined Chiefs—Eisenhower called them the Charlie-Charlies—that “operations should be carried onto the mainland of Italy.” Eisenhower sent the recommendation a day later, and at the same time canceled a proposed invasion of Sardinia. On July 20, the Charlie-Charlies consented, and another die had been cast.

Vital issues remained unsettled, and much dickering followed. Where in Italy should the invading host land? Capture of the great port at Naples was paramount, but Naples Bay had been heavily fortified with fifty big guns and lay just beyond range of Spitfires flying from Sicily. Air cover for the invasion fleet was considered indispensable. Memos flew back and forth across the Atlantic, and to and from North Africa, bearing accusations of conservatism, orthodoxy, and tactical tomfoolery. Absent was a searching inquiry into the strategic calculus: What if the Germans fought for every Italian hill and dale? How far up the boot should the Allied armies go? What benefit would the capture of Rome bring, besides big headlines? Was it possible to defeat Germany by fighting in Italy? Could Italy become a strategic cul-de-sac?

For now, analysis went begging. As to where the attack should fall, Eisenhower focused on a broad bay 30 miles southeast of Naples and precisely 178 miles from northeast Sicily: a Spitfire outfitted with an extra gas tank had a range of 180 miles, which permitted ten minutes’ combat time before the pilot was forced to return to base for refueling. “If it is decided to undertake such operations,” the AFHQ staff recommended on July 24, “the assault should be made in the Gulf of Salerno.” Two days later the Charlie-Charlies concurred, authorizing an invasion at Salerno “at the earliest possible date” after the conquest of Sicily.

Churchill was delighted. “I am with you heart and soul,” he cabled Marshall. But the prime minister had his eye on a bigger prize than Salerno or Naples. “Rome,” he advised Eisenhower, “is the bull’s-eye.”

The man in the middle of that bull’s-eye was a specter of the once mighty Duce, to whom even Hitler had displayed deference and affection. His ashy pallor and sunken cheeks made Benito A. A. Mussolini look older than his fifty-nine years and hardly the “head devil” that Roosevelt now
called him. He still shaved his head, but more to hide his gray than in a display of Fascist virility. Because of his vain refusal to wear eyeglasses, Mussolini’s speeches were prepared on a special typewriter with an enormous font. Duodenal ulcers—some claimed they were “of syphilitic origin”—had plagued him for nearly two decades, and his diet now consisted mostly of stewed fruit and three liters of milk a day. A German officer in Rome reported, “Often in conversation his face was wrenched with pain and he would grab his stomach.” Once he had demonstrated vigor to photographers by scything wheat or by rubbing snow on his bare chest. Now, wary of assassins, he lolled about the Palazzo Venezia, in a back room with tinted windows and the signs of the zodiac painted on the ceiling. Sometimes he lolled with his mistress, Clara Petacci, the buxom, green-eyed daughter of the pope’s physician, whose wardrobe was filled with negligees and goose-feather boas personally selected by Mussolini.

He had risen far since his modest boyhood as a blacksmith’s son in the lower Po Valley, and he would fall even farther before his strutting hour on the stage ended. As a young vagabond he had been an avowed socialist, stalking the streets with brass knuckles in his pocket and reciting long passages from Dante. His politics devolved to ultranationalism and the Fasci di Combattimento, which he founded in Milan in 1919 and which was the precursor to the Fascist party he rode to power in 1922. By the late 1920s, he had extirpated Italian parliamentary government to become an absolute tyrant—
il Duce,
the Leader—cleverly accommodating both the Vatican and the popular monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel III. With an autodidact’s quick mind and bombastic oratory, he raised national confidence, stabilized the lira, built a modern military, and boosted farm production by reclaiming vast tracts of swampland. The trains, famously, ran on time. His invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 helped destroy the League of Nations; he empowered Hitler by showing how easily Western democracies could be cowed and by condoning Germany’s
Anschluss
with Austria. The Führer’s gratitude led to the Pact of Steel in May 1939. “Believe, Obey, Fight,” the Fascist motto advised, and hundreds of thousands of Italian women surrendered their wedding rings to be melted down for Mussolini’s war effort. In Italian cinemas, moviegoers rose as one when the Duce strode across the screen in newsreels; he also required Italians to stand during radio broadcasts of armed forces communiqués, often delivered at one
P.M
. to ensure a captive audience in restaurants.

Lately the country was getting to its feet mostly for bad news. Italy’s colonial adventures in Eritrea, Somaliland, Abyssinia, and North Africa had been ruinous. Without informing Berlin, Mussolini also had invaded Greece, only to require German help to stave off catastrophe. Rome declared war on
supine France in 1940, but thirty-two Italian divisions failed to overwhelm three French divisions on the Alpine front. The Italian air force had been gutted in Libya; two-thirds of the Italian army fighting in Russia had been destroyed; 40 percent of Italian soldiers on Crete reportedly lacked boots; and three-quarters of the merchant fleet had been sunk in the lost-cause effort to resupply North Africa. Raw materials, from cotton to rubber, were now dispensed by the Germans, who even provided the fuel that allowed Italian warships to leave port. About 1.2 million Italian soldiers served on various foreign fronts, along with 800,000 in Italy; but few had the stomach to defend the homeland, much less fight a world war. A German high command assessment on June 30 concluded, “The kernel of the Italian army has been destroyed in Greece, Russia, and Africa…. The combat value of Italian units is slight.”