Assignment to Hell (32 page)

Patton’s insistence on
l’audace
had triggered nearly 180 casualties—with little to show for them. Don Whitehead, like Bigart, was standing a few feet away from the general; he later wrote in his diary, “The whole tableau sickened me.”
²⁸

Whitehead wasn’t alone. Omar Bradley, a commander not prone to hyperbole, called Brolo a “complete fiasco.”
²⁹
The Germans suffered losses comparable to those of the Americans, but their line was never breached. Nor was the enemy escape route blocked or even impeded, although the raid may have accelerated their retreat. But the Germans weren’t
that
harried; a few miles east of Brolo, they dynamited a hunk of the coastal road, making it tougher for Patton’s men to pursue them.
³⁰

Bigart’s lede, batted out in Brolo on no sleep, with Seventh Army tanks and trucks grinding past, was a thing of beauty, vivid and crisp without being maudlin.

“A tough and gallant band of Americans was relieved at 8 o’clock this morning on the thorny summit of Monte Cipolla, where it had made a last-ditch stand against encirclement and annihilation by the 15th German Panzer Division.”
³¹

Square that with the curious piece filed from afar by Hal Boyle that same day. Boyle was in a pack of reporters struggling to keep up with Patton’s advance elements as they bulled their way up the coast. The story that Boyle got on the Brolo raid, undoubtedly spoon-fed by Patton’s PROs, bore little resemblance to the terrifying reality experienced by his friends Whitehead, Bigart, and Treanor. T
HREE
G
ERMAN
T
ANK
A
TTACKS
B
EATEN
O
FF
IN
Y
ANK
L
ANDING
was the way the
Stars and Stripes
chose to flag Boyle’s article. In Boyle’s telling, “the Allied air forces bombed the German positions in a well-coordinated effort with the navy to help [the raiders] in every way.”
³²
Whatever puny air cover the raiders had received was hardly “well coordinated,” especially since most of the ordnance fell on them, not the enemy. Bernard’s men, moreover, might not have been inclined to characterize the Navy’s role as helping them “in every way.”

A staff officer also had the temerity to tell Boyle that the August 7 Agata–San Fratello raid had sparked a “collapse” in the enemy line—a spurious account to which Lucian Truscott and Omar Bradley would have taken strong exception.

Boyle did, however, finish with an accurate statement: “For many of these men it was their third landing on enemy shores. They smashed ashore to establish African beachheads last November and repeated their success last month on the southern coast of Sicily.” But his piece ended with more unwitting fiction: “This second overnight sortie behind entrenched enemy positions illustrated anew the continuing close cooperation between the navy and army in reducing Germany’s last shrinking rampart in the mountainous northeast corner of this island.”
³³

H
OMER
B
IGART STAYED IN THE
shrinking rampart long enough to pick up another story of an American soldier cheating death. Two days after tempting fate on the summit of Monte Cipolla, Bigart filed a piece about the wild misadventures of Second Battalion Staff Sergeant Odell Tedrow of Rockport, Illinois.

Tedrow was a member of the battalion’s medical detachment, Bigart noted in an article that was picked up all over the country. The sergeant’s job upon hitting the beach in the early morning hours of August 10 was to help set up a field hospital near the railroad culvert. “At dawn, when the shooting began,” Bigart wrote, “[Tedrow] set out with a stretcher party in search of wounded men.”

Communications and picket lines were so slipshod that Tedrow and
five other stretcher-bearers were under the impression that Brolo was in friendly hands. It wasn’t. The six Americans stared, mouths agape, as they rounded a bend and came upon two swastika-bedecked German staff cars parked in front of a stone residence. Shots rang out; two of Tedrow’s cohorts were hit; the other three threw their hands up to surrender. Tedrow dove between the cars and jumped into the unoccupied house.

Bigart must have realized as he interviewed Tedrow that he had a spectacular story; Homer gave it a nimble simplicity that Hemingway might have admired.

“Tedrow found himself in the kitchen. A door leading to the interior part of the house was locked and he looked about frantically for some place to hide. There was only the big oven. Tedrow got down on his hands and knees and crawled into it.”

German soldiers barged into the house looking for him. Tedrow wedged himself deeper into the oven and held his breath. One German yelled, in English, “American swine!”

A few moments later, Tedrow heard car doors slam and glimpsed polished boots crossing the kitchen floor. It was an enemy colonel ordering the soldiers out of his headquarters.

Tedrow prayed that the colonel and his staff wouldn’t want to bake anything for breakfast. Instead of preparing food, they were debating the merits of the German counterattack in and around Brolo.

It was stifling hot in the oven; soon Tedrow had swallowed all the water in his canteen. “A sharp prong was digging into his back,” Bigart wrote. “He stood the agony as long as he could and finally, when the room emptied for a moment, he managed to squirm around and blunt the prong with his knife.”

As the
Philadelphia
blasted away at various points, Tedrow felt the reverberations. He also heard the American A-36s drop their bombs on Monte Cipolla. The dwelling was made of impenetrable stone that was vulnerable only to a direct hit, Bigart pointed out.

Tedrow heard the Germans chuckle about the Americans’ vulnerability. The Germans had driven the Americans out of the valley and were
again directly linked to their front units five miles ahead. Tedrow could sense they were licking their chops about the prospect of reclaiming Cipolla.

At ten o’clock that evening, though, a motorcycle courier roared up with bad news: The Germans’ inland line southwest of Brolo had been violated; a full-scale retreat to Messina was under way. Tedrow worried that the colonel would want to burn papers in the oven before heading east, but the sergeant’s luck held. Bigart’s close again had a Hemingwayesque feel: “The staff cars roared away. A sudden wave of fatigue overcame Tedrow and he slept until dawn. When he awoke American jeeps were passing the house. He emerged and walked stiffly to the road.

“In an orchard down the hill wounded men were moaning softly. They were his comrades, lying on cots beneath the trees.”
³⁴

S
ICILY CONSIGNED A LOT OF
men to cots. If North Africa was, as Hal Boyle called it, a lipless kiss, then Sicily was a joyless embrace, that moment when romantic illusion gives way to cold reality. The Brolo raid that came within a whisker of abject disaster was the Sicilian campaign in microcosm: so sloppily planned that it led to inevitable fratricide, but fought nonetheless with rousing valor.

When Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower visited Sicily three days into the invasion, he confidently informed his diary that the island would belong to the Allies inside two weeks. It ended up taking two and a half times that long for troops to go from Gela, Licata, Pachino, Cassibile, and other beaches in Sicily’s south to its northeast crook: an area about the length of Vermont. For almost the entire campaign, German and Italian troops fought with one eye trained on the rear: Their strategy was to effect a steady retreat to Messina, where ferryboats awaited to transport them across the strait. To be sure, Axis troops dug in and fought hard. But the truth is undeniable: Had the Allied offensive been better coordinated, enemy troops not only would have been vanquished sooner, but also captured en masse instead of 120,000 of them slipping across to the mainland.

Sicily is where the rivalry between Montgomery and Patton became so toxic that it began costing men their lives. Patton had disquieting moments throughout the war, but Sicily is where he fell apart, where his behavior became an embarrassing albatross to Eisenhower. Ironically, it was in Sicily where Patton suffered the sort of nervous collapse he was so quick to scorn in others. It cost him his command and nearly cost him the rest of the war.

T
HE LARGER QUESTION, OF COURSE
, is should Sicily have been invaded at all? Did Churchill and Roosevelt at Casablanca double down on a futile Mediterranean wager?

Just as he had in Operation Torch, George Marshall sought to rebut Churchill’s argument that the Mediterranean offensive should be expanded to include the conquest of Sicily, code-named Operation Husky. Roosevelt was again forced to intervene, correctly overruling Marshall to side with the Brits. FDR’s proviso, however, was to delay a go-ahead on the next Mediterranean push, a possible invasion of Italy’s mainland, until the Allies sized up the enemy response in Sicily. The holdup irked Churchill, who’d been eyeing a bold march against Rome since America entered the war.

Churchill’s hyperbole aside, there were compelling reasons for the Allies to control Sicily, chief among them the three dozen airstrips that the Germans had scattered throughout the island. Sicily also had a series of natural harbors that could be converted into naval bases, enabling the Royal and American navies to interdict enemy sea-lanes.

Launched during the second week of July 1943, Husky was an even more elaborate amphibious exercise than Torch had been nine months earlier. An armada of 2,600 U.S. and British navy ships left from ports in North Africa, England, and the U.S. Once more orchestrating the seaborne movements on the American side was Admiral Kent Hewitt, Walter Cronkite and Hal Boyle’s favorite from the Torch convoy. Again, Hewitt delivered a logistical marvel, helping to land 160,000 Allied troops after the
fiercest naval bombardment to that point in history on July 9 and 10. Hewitt was once more forced to host George Patton on his flagship, this time the USS
Monrovia
, a beefed-up troop transport.
³⁵

The Allies appointed Sir Harold Alexander, Churchill’s darling, as overall coordinator of Sicilian ground forces, working under Eisenhower. Alexander was less hostile to Americans than his subordinate Montgomery, but still disdainful of the GIs’ performance in Tunisia. Sir Harold ordered Montgomery and the Eighth to advance up rugged terrain on the eastern side of the island, which he knew from intelligence reports was defended by hardened
Panzer
units. Patton and the Seventh were assigned the “easier” path through Sicily’s central and western hills against predominantly Italian troops. As the Brits surged toward Messina, Patton’s primary job was to protect Montgomery’s left flank.

It didn’t exactly work out that way. Monty had a tougher go than he had anticipated. Plus he began to exhibit the maniacal cautiousness that would drive Eisenhower and Bradley to distraction.

S
ICILY GAVE
H
OMER
B
IGART HIS BAPTISM
in ground combat. Reporter Tex O’Reilly, Joe Liebling’s Citroën pal in the escape from Paris, had been the
Herald Tribune
’s featured frontline reporter during the Tunisian campaign. When it was clear in late spring ’43 that the Allies would expand their Mediterranean push, O’Reilly telegrammed his bosses for help.

Bigart, thrilled to be closer to ground action, arrived from London in time to file reports on the damage inflicted on Sicilian air bases by the Northwest African Air Forces. Homer reported that for five successive days leading up to the invasion, the Gerbini airfield and its four satellite strips near Mount Etna—all of which the enemy had cleverly camouflaged—took merciless poundings from B-26s, B-17s, and B-24s.
³⁶

O’Reilly went ashore with the Seventh Army in Gela while Bigart stayed in Algiers. They soon switched, with Bigart covering Patton’s thrust north and O’Reilly handling the official pronouncements from Allied headquarters.

Tex was blessed with a light and literate writing touch. It was O’Reilly,
Bigart’s friend Betsy Wade believes, who first used Shakespeare’s metaphor from
As You Like It
to define his risk-taking colleague. “Stay away from Homer,” O’Reilly told a
Saturday Evening Post
correspondent in the fall of ’43. “He’s always trying to build his reputation at the cannon’s mouth.”
³⁷

It was in Sicily where the legend of Homer Bigart, at the mouth of a cannon, on the back of a mule, and in the craw of a censor, began to grow.

B
IGART AND
H
AL
B
OYLE WOULD
spend the next nine months together, often cheek-to-jowl, chronicling some of the war’s bloodiest and most controversial fighting. After the Germans surrendered at Bizerte in May, Boyle stayed in North Africa, filing stories about how the Allies were gearing up for their next Mediterranean offensive.

Mimicking their pre-Torch subterfuge, Allied intelligence forced the German spy agency,
Abwehr
, to track down plenty of mis- and disinformation in the weeks before the Sicily landings. Boyle and other correspondents in Algiers were fed rumors that the Allies were heading toward other Mediterranean islands, Greece, or even Italy or France. Algerian Frenchmen were making bets on the invasion date, Boyle wrote on July Fourth. “Many were hopeful that Southern France instead of Sicily or Greece would be the target for landing operations.”
³⁸

A British MI6 agent named Ian Fleming helped cook up an exotic scheme: phony papers claiming that the Allies would invade Greece and Sardinia were planted on a suicide victim disguised as a British officer. A submarine dumped the corpse in full uniform off the coast of Spain, where a fisherman plucked him out of the water. Fleming and MI6 sat back and watched with satisfaction as Ultra intercepts demonstrated that
Abwehr
had taken the bait. Thousands of German troops were transferred to Greece and Sardinia to defend assaults that never happened.
³⁹