The Day of Battle (27 page)

A Great Grief

W
HILE
Patton fought his own demons, the battle for Sicily raged on, or rather up. “Christ!” a British officer exclaimed. “What a steep hill this is.” That complaint encompassed the entire Sicilian badlands of washboard inclines, limestone pinnacles, and volcanic scarps. “Someday I hope we shall be able to fight downhill for a change,” a captain in the 16th Infantry wrote his family on July 30. Cactus blanketed slopes seamed with ravines and razorback ridges. Highland grass fires—set with napalm flamethrowers to flush German infantry, on at least one occasion—tinted the sky red and perfumed the air with burning cork oaks.

Enemy demolitions made the bad terrain much worse. An estimated 160 bridge spans were blown up in the American sector alone, usually “the whole damned bridge, from abutment to abutment.” Ernie Pyle noted that “the Germans were also more prodigal with mines than they had been in Tunisia.” Iron ore in the volcanic soil around Mount Etna played hob with metal detectors, and German engineers displayed an ingenuity—placing Teller mines in road potholes, for instance, and covering them with asphalt—that grew ever more diabolical. True, Italian units fought with even less heart after Mussolini’s overthrow. “Troops are tired and
have lost faith,” an Italian general advised Rome on July 31. But the forty thousand Germans now on the island showed no sign of flagging. The chatter of pneumatic drills and jackhammers could be heard in the hills along the Etna Line, an arc of fortified strongpoints stretching from San Fratello on the north coast around the volcano’s southern flank to the Ionian Sea above Catania.

Allied air and naval superiority counted for little in the mountains. Rather, the mule became the upland equivalent of the indispensible DUKW. Troops scoured the countryside for forage, pack saddles, and scrawny Sicilian mounts; a single infantry battalion fighting a weeklong battle in the roadless outback might need several hundred mules to haul food, water, and ammunition. A British officer, praising the beasts’ “sharp hearing [and] their sagacity over the choice of ground,” grew weepy with admiration: “They shared men’s dangers and hardships unsustained by ideals and hopes, and without even a sex life as compensation.” Others remained wary: a U.S. Army manual advised that the mule is “restless and ugly,” and “would probably want to know what he is to die for.” Typical was a creature named Trouble, described by a 45th Division handler as “the orneriest piece of leather in Sicily.” Bill Darby’s personal mount, Rosebud, nipped him in the buttocks “every time I tried to mount him.” (Ranger pranksters fed a handful of Benzedrine tablets to a fleabag named Whitey, who subsequently was renamed War Admiral.) Gifted mule skinners soon were more prized than sharpshooters. “The way to make a mule behave,” one soldier urged, “is to bite his ears.” A former veterinarian in the 45th Division organized his mule train with serial numbers and identifying brands, and even rewarded “outstanding performance” by promoting worthy animals to corporal or sergeant. Still, an insuperable language barrier confounded many soldiers. “The mules couldn’t talk English,” a 180th Infantry officer complained. “We actually had to rustle up some Italian mule interpreters so we could manage the beasts.”

“Hills and then more hills, and dust, clouds of it,” Ted Roosevelt wrote Eleanor in late July. “At the moment it’s white and the men look like clowns at a circus.” Kesselring continued to shove new units onto the island, Roosevelt added.

With the British right flank still blocked at Catania, and Montgomery’s main force crawling up the Etna foothills southwest of the volcano, the American advance toward Messina followed the two parallel axes ordered by Alexander. On Seventh Army’s left, Truscott’s 3rd Division on July 31 relieved the 45th Division along coastal Highway 113. Farther south, Terry Allen’s 1st Division had taken Enna, which the Germans abandoned after Canadian forces threatened to outflank the town, and had advanced to Highway 120. There the division wheeled sharply to the east, capturing Gangi, Sperlinga, and Nicosia, where ax-wielding enemy troops vandalized shops and even churches before retreating. With a carbine across his lap, Roosevelt rode into Nicosia in
Rough Rider
to join his officers for wine and cheese in the mayor’s office. A mortar fragment had chipped two of his teeth, but, wrote George Biddle, he “mumbled and rumbled to himself snatches of song and bits of poetry in French, in Latin and in English,” while lamenting the lack of scholarship “in this hurried world.”

Each town took a toll. The 1st Division had suffered nearly sixteen hundred casualties since
HUSKY
began three weeks earlier, about one soldier in ten. A 16th Infantry lieutenant who had lost most of his right elbow to a grenade walked all night until challenged by a sentry near an aid station; unable to recall the day’s password, the lieutenant “simply started swearing like an American trooper until I was recognized and taken in.” John Hersey, of
Time,
listened in Nicosia as a soldier whose shoulder had been shot away told a blinded comrade, “Let’s go back there and get those bastards.” The blind man hesitated. “Eyes,” he said, “are very delicate things.”

Wagging his cane as he stumped among the troops, Roosevelt noted “the sag of their clothes and their tired faces.” Reports spread of nineteen men killed in a German white-flag ruse; anger and bloodlust spread, as well as an odd rumor that B-17s would bomb Etna’s crater to bury the enemy in lava. Artillery boomed around the clock and muzzle flashes rippled like chain lightning along the gun lines. “Shelling these hills,” Hersey wrote, “was like shaking lice out of old clothes.” Every foot soldier approved of the lavish shooting. “I don’t care if I’m paying taxes the rest of my life,” one GI said, “just so they throw that stuff at them instead of throwing me at them.”

Bread trucks brought up nine hundred loaves from a bakery near Gela each morning, then hauled bodies back to the makeshift cemetery at Ponte Olivo. At night the troops huddled close for warmth under blanket tents fashioned to hide their cigarette embers from enemy patrols. “Here we live and fight and die together in a bond of fellowship unequalled anywhere,” Captain Joseph T. Dawson of the 16th Infantry wrote his family on July 31. But with camaraderie also came the solitude and self-doubt that haunted every battlefield. “I find myself jumping at any excuse that will keep me out
of the danger zone,” a quartermaster officer told his diary on July 27. “Hell, I’m disgusted with myself. If I knew how, I’d get myself transferred to a really dangerous job, just to see if I could take it.”

Man does what he can and bears what he must
. Patton believed an infantry division declined in efficiency after two weeks of sustained combat “due to the loss of riflemen and fatigue”; the 1st Division was entering its fourth week. “When this is over,” one soldier mused, “I won’t mind going back to Wisconsin and looking at cows the rest of my life.” Like so many, Ted Roosevelt also drew comfort from thoughts of a different place. “Has the Boston ivy covered the front of the house? How are the yews?” he asked Eleanor. “Do put in fruit trees. The old trees are bound to die soon.”

Sicilian towns “perched on hilltops like ragged caps stuck on the hoary heads of gray old men,” wrote Don Whitehead, of the Associated Press. No ragged cap perched higher than Troina, fourteen miles northeast of Nicosia on Highway 120 and the highest town in Sicily. Here the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division had halted after the retreat from western Sicily that began three weeks earlier. Torrential rain on July 29 swelled streams and flooded roads, slowing the American pursuit. Grenadier regiments used the respite to dig strongpoints and lay mines in the high ground north and south of Troina, which became a linchpin in the Etna Line. Four artillery batteries occupied gullies east of town, and spotters in field gray climbed the twin spires of the Norman church above the piazza for a panoramic view of Mount Etna. For an armed defender, the westward vista was even more breathtaking: any attacker from that direction would be canalized into a treeless, three-mile stretch of Highway 120. Troina’s twelve thousand citizens fled to the hills or barricaded themselves in their squat stone houses.

Five miles to the west, in the hilltop hamlet of Cerami on Saturday evening, July 31, Terry Allen followed that exposed stretch of highway with his field glasses until it vanished into the hazy, twin-spired redoubt on the next ridge. The sharp scents of eucalyptus and oleander wafted through the decrepit school that now served as a 1st Division command post. Fascist slogans covered classroom walls that shook from the concussive roar of the 155mm Long Tom battery nearby. Within goose eggs drawn on a tactical map, Allen scribbled the letter “E” wherever he thought the enemy had holed up. “This was about as stubborn as any resistance we’ve enountered so far,” he had told reporters. “The fall of Nicosia”—he rendered the name as Nicodemus—“probably means that the Germans will have to retire to their next road net, at Troina.”

With luck, Allen hoped, the enemy would counterattack before the attack began this evening, exposing himself to those Long Toms and other guns. But U.S. intelligence now believed the Germans would continue falling back through Troina toward Messina. “Germans are very tired, little ammo, many casualties, morale low,” the 1st Division G-2 concluded on July 29. II Corps today had reported, “Indications are Troina lightly held”; refugees also claimed that few German soldiers occupied the town. Allen had planned to envelop Troina with two infantry regiments supported by 165 artillery tubes, but these heartening reports and the easy seizure of Cerami caused him to pare back the attack to a single regiment, the 39th Infantry, which had been loaned to him from the 9th Division several days earlier. Air reconnaissance could have revealed the true extent of German fortifications, but the latest film had been flown to North Africa for processing, and printed photos had not yet returned to Sicily. “You give your orders and the division will execute them,” Allen told reporters. “The rest is chance.” A soft hiss escaped from his perforated cheeks.

With his saddle-hardened gait, Allen strode to a secluded olive grove a hundred yards from the command post. “This war is really a very disagreeable job,” he had written his wife, Mary Fran, two days before, “with long periods of tough going and the relaxation periods for the 1st Division are few and far between.” Still, a break was in sight. Bradley planned to supplant the Big Red One with the rest of the 9th Division, which had recently arrived from North Africa. Tempting as it might be to let the newcomers carry the fight immediately, Allen would remind his officers of “our moral obligation to capture Troina before being relieved.”

He sank to his knees beneath the gray-green boughs of an ancient olive. Asking God to spare the division “unnecessary casualties,” he prayed that “tonight no man’s life will be wasted.” Upon rejoining his troops, a grizzled sergeant told him, “Hell, Terry, stop worrying. We’ll take the goddam town for you.”

As the long summer twilight faded in the west, three thousand soldiers from the 39th Infantry shuffled across the broken ground on either side of Highway 120 below Cerami. Their fatigue pockets bulged with toilet paper, K ration cans, and extra ammunition. Don Whitehead watched the columns snake toward Troina, jaggedly silhouetted on the horizon. “Every time I have watched troops plod into battle,” he wrote, “I have choked back a desire to sob.”

Coordinating the attack from an orchard command post was a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel named John J. Toffey III. Sweat soaked his
wool shirt, and tiny dust devils boiled beneath his boots as he paced between the map boards and radio transmitter. “Can you put mortar fire in the vicinity of 492-140?” Toffey asked, clutching the handset. “I want to get every goddamned weapon you’ve got and put them on 492-140. Do you understand? Okay. Get going.”

He was a big man, six foot one and two hundred pounds, with such sporty good looks that he had once appeared in an amusing cover picture for
Collier’s
magazine outfitted in a bathing suit and polo helmet while carrying a baseball glove, tennis racket, fishing rod, and golf clubs. His educational pedigree included Phillips Exeter Academy and Cornell. His father had fought with Pershing in Mexico and eventually retired as a major general in command of the New Jersey National Guard. His grandfather had earned the Medal of Honor for valor at Missionary Ridge in 1863. “It is very nice to read of a battle,” John Toffey, Sr., had written, “but to be near to one is not so nice and I never want to be near one again.” On April 14, 1865, while recuperating from battle wounds in Washington, D.C., he had attended the play at Ford’s Theatre and witnessed Lincoln’s murder. According to family lore, Toffey testified at the conspirators’ trial—he had corraled a runaway horse possibly used in the crime—and watched them hang.

Young Jack Toffey, who had sold bottle caps in Ohio during the Depression, had proved worthy of his military lineage. Called to federal service from the National Guard in 1940, he landed with Truscott’s force in Morocco during
TORCH
, then commanded a battalion through the Tunisian campaign until shot in the knee at Maknassy in late March. “Missed all bones,” he wrote his wife, Helen. “Don’t worry about a thing.” After two months’ recuperation, he limped back to duty as executive officer of the 39th Infantry, just in time for Sicily. Toffey’s eventful fortnight on the island had already included a one-week stint commanding the regiment after his superior was injured in an air attack, and the capture of at least seven thousand prisoners.

Nine months at war had also aged him beyond his years. Both battle-wise and battle-weary, he was emblematic of the field-grade officers—major through colonel—who had learned much through hard combat and whose influence on a hundred European battlefields would be both decisive and disproportionate to their numbers in the U.S. Army. It was Toffey and his breed who would have to fix the tactical shortcomings the Army had revealed in Tunisia, such as the failure to seize high ground or to anticipate the German penchant for immediate counterattack; the defects in patrolling and map reading that got entire battalions ambushed or lost; and the inability to coordinate infantry, armor, and the other combat arms.