The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy Book 2)
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“I feel like crying lots of times,” a soldier wrote his family, “but I don’t think it would help me much
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in a place like this.”
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Relations between flyboys and ground-pounders were almost as badly strained as those between Brits and Yanks. As the historian Douglas Porch later wrote, “Sicily demonstrated the many limitations of interservice and inter-Allied cooperation, ones that foreshadowed problems that the Allies would encounter in Italy.”
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Audie Murphy, already describing himself as “a fugitive from the law of averages,” wrote, “I have seen war as it actually is, and I do not like it.”
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“The war gets so complicated and confused in my mind; on especially sad days it’s almost impossible to believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery.”
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An estimated two thousand civilians and dozens of German staff officers died.
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John Steinbeck studied the pearly mists rising from the Mediterranean. “Each man, in this last night in the moonlight, looks strangely at the others and sees death there,” he wrote.
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“In the land of theory…there is none of war’s friction,” the official British military history of Salerno observed.
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Italian peasants mourning a child killed in the cross fire: “They cried over it with a nameless uncomprehending anguish, blaming no human agency, attributing everything to the implacable will of God…. This attunement to blind providence communicated itself to the soldiers.” Again, not all. When a German shell killed a lieutenant sleeping in his slit trench at Chiunzi, a comrade concluded, “I don’t think God has anything to do with this war.”
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A young major in the 179th Infantry told his men, “Tonight you’re not fighting for your country, you’re fighting for your ass. Because they’re behind us.”
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A visiting general complained that a Star of David among a row of Latin crosses “spoils the symmetry of the cemetery. Move it.” A 36th Division chaplain refused. His boys held title to that ground.
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A German battalion burst into the library of the Italian Royal Society, soaked the shelves with kerosene, and fired the place with grenades, shooting guards who resisted and keeping firemen at bay. The city archives and fifty thousand volumes at the University of Naples, where Thomas Aquinas once taught, got the same treatment, leaving the place “stinking of burned old leather and petrol.” Another eighty thousand precious books and manuscripts stored in Nola were reduced to ashes, along with paintings, ceramics, and ivories.
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On the rocky Greek island of Cephalonia, in the Ionian Sea, the 12,000-man Italian army garrison fought for five days at a cost of 1,250 combat deaths before surrendering on September 22. On orders from Berlin, more than 6,000 prisoners were promptly shot, including orderlies with Red Cross brassards, wounded men dragged to the wall from their hospital beds, and officers, executed in batches of eight and twelve. An Italian commander ripped off the Iron Cross given him by Hitler personally and flung it at his firing squad. The dead were ballasted on rafts and sunk at sea or burned in huge pyres ...more
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Whatever Mussolini’s shortcomings as a world-historical figure, he had kept the Nazi reaper at bay by refusing to allow the deportation of Jews. That moratorium had now ended. On September 16 the first consignment of two dozen Jews was shipped from a town in northern Italy to Auschwitz. Among them was a six-year-old child, who was gassed upon arrival.
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I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire. I wish they would think of them as cold, wet, hungry, homesick and frightened. I wish, when they think of them, they would
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be a little sick to their stomachs.
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“shells chase each other through the sky across the mountains ahead, making a sound like cold wind blowing on a winter night.” Pyle found “almost inconceivable misery,” as well as a bemused fortitude. When gunners calculated that it cost $25,000 in artillery shells for each enemy soldier killed, one GI asked, “Why wouldn’t it be better to just offer the Germans $25,000 to surrender?”
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Pyle described a soldier playing poker by candlelight who abruptly murmured, “War, my friends, is a silly business. War is the craziest thing I ever heard of.”
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Burial details sent out at night to retrieve the dead were known as the Ghouls. When a mobile shower unit arrived at one artillery battery, a quartet of naked gunners stood singing in barbershop formation for an hour. “It’s the loss of dirt,” one explained. “It leaves you dizzy.”
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“You can’t believe men will do to each other the things they do,” a forward observer wrote his sister. “I suppose I’m soft, but I’ve got to say, God forgive us all.”
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“The weather is cold as hell and the wind is blowing,” he wrote in his diary. “Wars should be fought in better country than this.”
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But the president as usual remained cheerful and opaque, offering only the cryptic
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observation that “it is dangerous to monkey with a winning team.” A
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few days later, Eisenhower wrote Mamie, “The eternal pound, pound, pound seems a burden, but when it once ceases it is possible that many of us will be nigh unto nervous wrecks, and wholly unfit for normal life.” As if adding a postscript to himself, he observed, “I know I’m a changed person. No one could b...
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To floor a single all-weather airstrip against mud, for example, took five thousand tons of perforated steel planking.
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A wounded private worked his way down the mountain praying aloud, “The Lord is my shepherd. He shepherds me hither, thither, and yon.”
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Men with fingers shot off were hastily bandaged and shoved back into the fight.
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Finally he put the hand down. He reached over and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone. The rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall.
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Pyle had written his most famous dispatch, perhaps the finest expository passage of World War II.
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repeatedly run over by military vehicles before someone finally noticed and a medic buried the remains. Graves registration men arrived with their leather gloves to police the battlefield, folding the hands of dead GIs across their chests before lifting them into white burial sacks. As the soldier-poet Keith Douglas wrote, “About them clung that impenetrable silence…by which I think the dead compel our reverence.” Those who had fought for the past ten days supposedly “slept where their bedding fell from the truck.” San Pietro had cost Fred Walker’s 36th Division twelve hundred battle ...more
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Texas boy asked for watermelon, a surgeon replied, “They’re not in season, son.” To Bourke-White he added, “They often ask for their favorite food when they’re near death.”
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“This is a heartbreaking business.”
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Henry’s mother had been troubled with premonitions, and when the family appeared to break the news she blurted out, “I was right, wasn’t I? Henry’s gone.”
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John Steinbeck and Marlene Dietrich, who thought Patton looked “like a tank too big for the village square.”
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“You tell Monty if he would get to hell up here and see the bloody mud he has stuck us in, he’d know damn well why we can’t move faster.”
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For here was fought the first large, pitched urban battle in the Mediterranean—not a skirmish against Italians as in Gela, or a village brawl as in San Pietro, but a room-to-room, house-to-house, block-to-block struggle that foretold iconic street fights with heavy weapons from Caen to Aachen, and from Nuremberg to Berlin.
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Ortona
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A Canadian combat artist who prowled the rubble with his sketch pad later summarized his aesthetic assessment: “The familiar world had disappeared.”
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“The Russians are perfectly friendly,” Roosevelt insisted. “They aren’t trying to gobble up all the rest of Europe or the world.”
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Not in 1943 or 44. Wait a bit.
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When Sarah read aloud to her father from Pride and Prejudice, he interjected, “What calm lives they had, those people!”
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“I prayed that there would be no more wars after this one,” a private from Denver wrote his family.
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From Algiers, he would take the template for an Allied headquarters and use it to build SHAEF—the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—and eventually NATO. He
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Churchill continued to underestimate the ability of a motorized defender, using roads and rails on interior lines, to concentrate forces overland faster than they could be consolidated over a beach.
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The excoriation of Old Luke had begun: for want of pluck, of audacity, of imagination. Long after the war ended, he would be pilloried as the modern incarnation of George B. McClellan, the timid Civil War general who was said to have “the slows.” Even those who applauded Lucas’s prudence regretted that he had not rushed to seize the road junctions at Campoleone and Cisterna, which would have complicated German encirclement of the beachhead. “Having gained surprise in the landing,” the judicious official historian Martin Blumenson concluded, Lucas “proceeded to disregard the advantage it gave ...more
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Alexander’s new chief of staff, the future field marshal John H. Harding, concluded that Lucas “probably saved the forces at Anzio from disaster.” Clark came to a similar conclusion. Major General G.W.R. Templer, who would soon command a British division at Anzio and who detested Lucas, believed that if the corps had galloped north, “within a week or fortnight there wouldn’t have been a single British soldier left in the bridgehead. They would all have been killed or wounded or prisoners.”
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Sometimes if I appear to be unreasonable, you must remember the burdens I bear are heavy. The time comes when I have to give orders that will result in the death of a large number of fine young men—and this is a responsibility that I cannot share with anybody. I must bear it by myself.
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On January 27 and 28, an obscure fighter unit, known formally as the 99th Fighter Squadron (Separate), made its first significant mark in combat with guns blazing, shooting down twelve German aircraft.
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“buffalo soldiers”
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the 92nd Infantry, which would arrive in Italy in late summer 1944 as the only African-American division to see combat in Europe.
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Training began at Tuskegee Army Air Field in July 1941; the first pilots received their wings the following spring, then waited a year before deploying to North Africa as the
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only black AAF unit in a combat zone.