The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy Book 2)

by Rick Atkinson

Not that anyone glimpsing the famous triple stacks, the thousand-foot hull, or the familiar jut of her regal prow could doubt who she was. Gray paint had also been slathered over her name, but she remained, in war as in peace, the Queen Mary.

To save fifty million tons of wool annually, the government outlawed vests, cuffs, patch pockets, and wide lapels; hemlines rose, pleated skirts vanished, and an edict requiring a 10 percent reduction in the cloth used for women’s bathing suits led to the bikini.

elaborate charts informed Americans that 10 old pails held sufficient steel for a mortar, 10 old stoves equaled 1 scout car, and 252 lawn mowers would make an antiaircraft gun.

The Office of War Information reported that a recent plea for fine blond hair—used in weather instruments and optical equipment—had resulted in such a cascade of golden tresses that no further donations were needed.

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Thomas Jefferson

Aside from horseback riding, gardening was his sole civil diversion; “the pride of his heart,” according to his wife, remained the compost pile outside his Virginia home.

“Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that all those destined to carry [them] out don’t quarrel with each

other instead of the enemy.”

Churchill “picks his teeth all through dinner and uses snuff liberally. The sneezes which follow the latter practically rock the foundations of the house…. I admired his snuff box and found it was one that had once belonged to Lord Nelson.”

“Sand in your shoes,” they called to one another—the North African equivalent of “Good luck”—

A satire of censorship regulations read to one ship’s crew included rule number 4—“You cannot say where you were, where you are going, what you have been doing, or what you expect to do”—and rule number 8—“You cannot, you must not, be interesting.” The men could, under rule number 2, “say you have been born, if you don’t say where or why.” And rule number 9 advised: “You can mention the fact that you would not mind seeing a girl.” One airman tried to comply with the restrictions

by writing, “Three days ago we were at X. Now we are at Y.” But the prevailing sentiment was best captured by a soldier who told his diary, “We know we are headed for trouble.”

“The front-line soldier I knew,” wrote the correspondent Ernie Pyle, who trudged with them across Tunisia, “had lived for months like an animal, and was a veteran in the fierce world of death. Everything was abnormal and unstable in his life.”

The winning entry in a “Why I’m Fighting” essay contest declared, in its entirety: “I was drafted.”

And no one doubted that come the day of battle, they would fight to the death for the greatest cause: one another. “We did it because we could not bear the shame of being less than the man beside us,” John Muirhead wrote. “We fought because he fought; we died because he died.”

Two other regiments hailed from Oklahoma, and their ranks included nearly two thousand Indians from fifty-two tribes, including Cherokee, Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, and Navajo. On the night before the departure from Virginia, an artillery captain had organized a spirited war dance around a roaring council fire.

On other occasions, German propaganda flights showered Tunisian villages with leaflets: “The day has come to fight against the Anglo-Americans and the Jews…. Bring up your children to hate them.”

Seamen warned anxious landlubbers that jumping overboard during an air attack was pointless: the concussion from detonating bombs would rupture a swimmer’s lungs and spleen at three hundred yards.

“Holy Mary,” the Maltese prayed, “let the bombs fall in the sea or in the fields.”

His British political adviser, the future prime minister Harold Macmillan, considered Eisenhower “wholly uneducated in any normal sense of the word,” yet “compared with the wooden heads and desiccated hearts of many British soldiers I see here, he is a jewel of broadmindedness and wisdom.”

One message warned, “Germany will fight to the last Italian.”

Each man received “The Soldier’s Guide to Sicily,” which described the heat, filth, and disease in such detail that the 26th Infantry’s regimental log concluded the island must be “a hellhole inhabited by folks who were too poor to leave or too ignorant to know that there were better places.”

Each rifleman was supposed to carry 82.02 pounds, allocated ounce by ounce, from 10.2 pounds for a loaded M-1 rifle and .2 pounds for a towel, to .01 pounds for a spoon and .5 pounds for a Bible with a metal cover.

We’ve had a grand life and I hope there’ll be more. Should it chance that there’s not, at least we can say that in our years together we’ve packed enough for ten ordinary lives. We’ve known triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow, all that goes to fill the pattern of human existence…. We have no reason to be other than thankful come what may.

Theodore Roosevelt’s son writing to his wife

a paperback book for soldiers titled What to Do Aboard the Transport.

“Bags, Vomit for the Use of,”

But most troops “swung in their hammocks, green and groaning,” a Canadian soldier wrote. “Everything that was not lashed down had come adrift: kitbags, weapons boxes, steel crates of ammunition, mess tins, tin helmets.”

“Some thought of the Spanish Armada,” another Canadian wrote, “and some asked the question, ‘Is God on our side or not?’”

The whitecapped Mediterranean looked as if it were dusted in snow.

Great simile

the dim blue lights below deck,

GIs wrapped their dogtags in black friction tape to prevent rattling.

One officer on the Biscayne’s weather deck later wrote, “The fellow standing next to me was breathing so hard I couldn’t hear the anchor go down. Then I realized there wasn’t anybody standing next to me.”

Gavin and his men had clambered aboard 226 C-47 Dakotas near Kairouan. Faces blackened with burnt cork, each soldier wore a U.S. flag on the right sleeve and a white cloth knotted on the left as a nighttime recognition signal. Days earlier an 82nd Airborne platoon had circulated through the 1st Division to familiarize ground soldiers with the baggy trousers and loose smock worn by paratroopers.

Others—aware only that they were somewhere over land—jumped from fifteen hundred feet at two hundred miles per hour, rather than from the preferred six hundred feet at one hundred miles per hour.

headquarters. A sergeant from the Bronx strolled the streets, quoting Thomas Paine in Italian.

Again, senior officers with little airborne experience and unrealistic expectations held sway.

😞

The hospital ship Talamba, illuminated and bedizened with huge red crosses, was sunk five miles offshore.

were or what they were doing. For months he and

THEY pressed inland on their hundred-mile front, past Sicilians shouting “Viva, Babe Ruth!”

Another rifleman wrote his father that the summer dust “tasted like powdered blood,” then added, “Now I know why soldiers get old quick.”

Bradley disagreed and, Patton told his diary, “feels that we should try the two men responsible for the shooting of the prisoners.” An investigation by the 45th Division inspector general found “no provocation on the part of the prisoners…. They had been slaughtered.” Patton relented: “Try the bastards.”

war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and that no heart would remain unstained.

Patton already believed that Eisenhower was “a pro-British straw man” and that “allies must fight in separate theaters or they will hate each other more than they do the enemy.” Now attitudes hardened, and mistrust threatened to mutate into enmity. “At great expense to ourselves we are saving the British empire,” Lucas complained, “and they aren’t even grateful.” Another American general suggested celebrating each July 4 “as our only defeat of the British. We haven’t had much luck since.”

Patton summarized his sentiments in four words to Bea: “How I love wars.”

Erasmus’s astringent epigram “Dulce bellum inexpertis”: Sweet is war to those who never experience it.

A reporter for the London Daily Mail who arrived at that moment heard Patton add, “There’s no such thing as shellshock. It’s an invention of the Jews.”

He now made war without illusions and certainly without pleasure. “War is as Sherman says and has no similarity with cinema or storybook versions,” Toffey had written in North Africa.

They found “a town of horror, alive with weeping, hysterical men, women and children,” wrote Herbert Matthews of The New York Times; he described a scene that would recur all the way to Bologna: on “torn streets, heaps of rubble that had been houses, grief, horror and pain.”

A GI sliced the Wehrmacht belt buckle from a dead grenadier and declared that “Gott mit Uns changed sides.”

To Eleanor he later wrote, “The longer I live the more I think of the quality of fortitude—men who fall, pick themselves up and stumble on, fall again, and are trying to get up when they die.”