The Day of Battle (13 page)

On
Monrovia,
Hewitt stared at the heaving sea and listened to the wind tear at the rigging. The whitecapped Mediterranean looked as if it were dusted in snow. He pondered whether to break radio silence and contact Admiral Cunningham on Malta to suggest a postponement. Some smaller craft had no radios, so spreading word of any delay through the fleet would take at least four hours. As he watched an LSI buck the waves, Hewitt observed that at least the wretched soldiers aboard would be “all the more willing to get ashore.” Bad as this was, the Atlantic before
TORCH
had been worse.

Late on Friday afternoon, he summoned Commander Houdini to the bridge. Steere that morning had predicted winds of twenty-seven knots; they now had reached thirty-seven, with twelve-foot seas. Though nervous, the aerologist stuck to his forecast. The “whole wind structure” would ease after nightfall, he explained, even if strong winds persisted aloft. Steere had scribbled his H-hour forecast in longhand, like a racetrack tout posting odds: “Northwest winds 10–15 knots decreasing, with inshore breakers 3–4 feet or less.”

Hewitt took the bet, nodding without a hint of emotion or even concern. They would continue toward Sicily unless ordered to the contrary.

“Always the vibration,” a British soldier wrote in his diary, “the heaving and rolling, the dim blue lights below deck, and the masses of bodies, in bunks, or moving blindly to the lavatories awash with urine.” Like many others, Captain Joseph T. Dawson of the 1st Division wrote a final letter to his family in Texas: “My heart is filled with unspeakable tenderness for you one and all…. We are trying to measure up. God grant that we may do our task.”

By six
P.M
. the sea had grown so nasty, one naval commander observed, that “even the destroyers were taking it green.” As daylight ebbed, the wind intensified. Officers of the deck throughout the fleet ordered smoking lamps extinguished. At 6:52
P.M
.,
Monrovia
’s log recorded the sighting of the tiny island of Gozo, nine miles off the starboard beam. Just beyond, through the gloom and flying spray, lookouts spied the sheer cliffs of Malta. The fleet beat on.

Seeking sanctuary from the folderol, Eisenhower had warned Marshall that during his stay on Malta “my communications with Washington and London will be almost nil…because of the need for reserving signal communications for operational matters.” The gambit failed; Washington and
London showed no reluctance to pepper the commander-in-chief with advice and queries, including a message from Marshall on Friday afternoon asking, “Is the attack on or off?” Eisenhower studied the cable and muttered, “I wish I knew.”

Wind and weather dominated the discussion in Admiral Cunningham’s office as the hours ticked by. Chagrined meteorologists appeared to report yet another increase in the Beaufort scale, which then was translated for Eisenhower from knots to miles per hour. Cunningham drove to a nearby airfield to see conditions with his own scarlet-lidded eyes; he reported that “all the winds of heaven” were “roaring and howling around the control tower.” In Grand Harbour, another flotilla of British landing craft cast off with a piper on the lead ship braced in the bow playing “The Road to the Isles.” Cunningham described the vessels “literally burying themselves, with the spray flying over them in solid sheets, as they plunged out to sea.” At six
P.M
. a bottle of gin appeared in the Lascaris Bastion and was soon drained.

Eisenhower reviewed his options, lighting one damp cigarette from another. Staff officers calculated that if the invasion were postponed, two to three weeks would be needed to remount it. No doubt by then the enemy would be alert, and perhaps was already: the fighter control room inside the bastion reported a German reconnaissance plane near the fleet at 4:30
P.M
. and another at 7:30. Like Lieutenant Commander Steere, forecasters on Malta believed the storm would soon pass. So too did Cunningham, who had sailed these waters for the better part of a half century, and who once cited “recklessness and callousness” as the most vital qualities of a commander.

Eisenhower was usually quick to make a decision, and he made one now. “The operation will proceed as scheduled,” he cabled Marshall, “in spite of an unfortunate westerly wind.” Cunningham sent his own signal to the Admiralty in London: “Weather not favourable. But operation proceeding.”

With “rather fearful hearts”—in Cunningham’s phrase—they broke for dinner. Driving to Verdala Palace, Eisenhower eyed the spinning windmills above Valletta; the man who preached the importance of believing in luck now wondered aloud whether his had run out. “To be perfectly honest,” another British sea dog, the lanky Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, told him over dinner, “it doesn’t look too good.”

After coffee, Cunningham rejoined them for a drive to Delimara Point, where an octagonal black-and-white-banded lighthouse crowned the island’s southeast corner. Half a dozen searchlight beams pointed straight up as a signal to the waves of transport planes—some towing gliders, others
full of paratroopers—that now began to appear overhead. Cunningham counted sixty-four aircraft, while Eisenhower, neck craned, rubbed his lucky coins and murmured a prayer for “safety and success.” Had he watched more closely, he might have seen that many planes bucking the winds missed the vital turn at Delimara, continuing east rather than swinging due north.

Back in the Lascaris war room, the great wall maps charted the armadas as they inched toward Sicily: American convoys mostly west of Malta, the British mostly east. Cots and blankets had been dragged into an air-conditioned room nearby, but anxiety kept the men edgy and awake. Eisenhower prattled on about writing a book, perhaps an anthology that would profile two dozen public figures; he would “paint each one’s character” and “tell some stories.” Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, the senior air commander in the Mediterranean, reflected on the Punic Wars and previous invasions. “Fancy invading Italy from the south,” Tedder said. “Even Hannibal had the sense to come in with his elephants over the Alps.” Farther down the tunnel an officer shaving with an electric razor provoked a shrill protest that “some unmentionable noise” was making it “quite impossible for any signals to be picked up.”

At ten
P.M
., Eisenhower scribbled a note to Mamie. “I’m again in a tunnel, as I was at the beginning of last November, waiting, as I was then, for news.

Death or Glory

P
ATTON
woke to a loud crash against his cabin porthole. He lurched from the bed, fully uniformed, momentarily convinced that a bomb had struck
Monrovia
. Cocking an ear topside to the clank of tackle being loosened, he soon realized that a broken davit had let a landing craft slip from its pulley and smack against the ship’s hull. One man had pitched overboard but soon was fished out. As the commotion subsided, two other sounds were conspicuous by their absence: the wind had died, and the flagship’s engines had stopped. An odd, portentous hush settled over
Monrovia.

Patton hitched up his whipcord breeches and straightened his blouse. He had dozed off after inviting the ship’s chaplain in for a final prayer. Strange dreams had troubled his sleep, of a black kitten and then of many cats, spitting at him. “We may feel anxious,” he scribbled in his diary, “but I trust the Italians are scared to death…. God has again helped me. I hope He keeps on.”

He found Hewitt on the bridge. The quarter moon had set shortly after midnight, but stars threw down spears of light and the fleet stood in black silhouette against the gray horizon. Commander Steere had been right, again: the wind had ebbed to below ten knots; there was good visibility and a moderate swell.
Monrovia
’s radar had detected the Sicilian coast at 22,000 yards—thirteen miles. Then several destroyers knifed forward until they spotted blue lights, flashing seaward from a scattered school of British submarines. With doughty, rule-Britannia names like
Unruffled
and
Unseen
and
Unrivalled,
the subs had been lurking off the coast for two days to serve as beacons guiding the invasion convoys to their proper beaches. The skipper of the submarine H.M.S.
Seraph
later recalled, “As far as my night glasses could carry, I saw hundreds of ships following in orderly fashion, each keeping its appointed station.”
Monrovia
and her sisters dropped anchor in fifty fathoms six miles from the coast, on station and on time. Hewitt also had been right, again.

He and Patton now raked the shore with their field glasses. Allied bombing earlier in the evening had set fire to the stubble in Sicilian wheat fields near the sea. Patton watched “a mass of flames” engulf a two-mile corridor directly inland. “All the beach seems to be burning,” a soldier noted. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., a matinee idol with more than sixty film credits who was serving as a Navy Reserve lieutenant on
Monrovia,
jotted in his diary, “Apparently the big ships have not yet been seen from the shore.”

The
HUSKY
commanders intended to land the equivalent of 67 assault battalions—each with approximately 800 men—on 26 beaches along 105 miles of coastline. The British beaches chosen for General Montgomery’s Eighth Army lay to the east, from Cape Passero on the island’s southeast tip up through the Gulf of Noto almost to Syracuse. Hewitt’s armada had split near Malta into three prongs, which would land the three assault divisions in Patton’s Seventh Army along a forty-mile crescent on the Gulf of Gela. Farthest west, the 3rd Division now lay off Licata; farthest east, and closest to the British, the 45th Division lay off Scoglitti; in the center, with
Monrovia,
the 1st Division prepared to seize Gela. The objective for each division was the Yellow Line, a notional demarcation ten to thirty miles inland that would push enemy artillery beyond range of captured coastal airfields. Patton estimated it would take five days for his army to reach the Yellow Line. Beyond that he had no orders.

Since landing at Cadiz in 1625, the British over the centuries had embarked on some forty overseas military campaigns, with fortunes ranging from glorious to catastrophic. The Americans were somewhat newer at the expeditionary game, but Yanks and Tommies concurred that, as a British official history warranted, “invasions from the sea were professionally recognized to be all-or-nothing affairs.” Death or glory was back in fashion.

Now those Yanks and Tommies made ready; so, too, the Canadians. “You will find the Mediterranean still choppy,” a lieutenant advised over the
Ancon
’s PA system, “but compared to what it was only a short time back, as quiet as if God had put his hand on it.” Lights below burned blue or red to enhance night vision. Indonesian waiters in white coats struck little gongs to call British troops to an early breakfast; on
Strathnaver
’s E-deck, the Dorsets shared mugs of tea and fancied they could smell Europe. GIs wrapped their dogtags in black friction tape to prevent rattling. Some prayed, or hurriedly scratched the letters they had meant to write earlier. “I could not, with a clear conscience, ask God to take me safely through this war,” Randall Harris wrote his family in Pocahontas, Iowa, “but I can ask Him for strength and courage to do my job.”

They had reached “the victim coast of Sicily,” a soldier in the 45th Division told his father. A naval officer transporting the same unit described “wild Indians still playing poker and sharpening knives, betting on who’ll get the first Italian.” 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.”

Ted Roosevelt took time aboard the
Barnett
to finish his eleven-page letter to Eleanor: “The ship is dark, the men are going to their assembly stations…. Soon the boats will be lowered away. Then we’ll be off.”

“Land the landing force!” The order echoed down the chains of command east and west. “Aye-aye. Land the landing force.” Soldiers in the British 50th Division shuffled single file, company by company, from the dim hold to the assembly deck on
Winchester Castle
. Sailors handed stiff tots of rum to the Dorsets on
Strathnaver
and pumped bilge oil over the side to calm the sea. “Do you hear there? Serial one! To your boat stations, move now,” an amplified voice called on
Derbyshire
. “Serial two! Stand by.” A soldier in the Canadian 1st Division, Farley Mowat, heard clattering steam winches lower the landing craft; on deck each man “gripped the web-belt of the man ahead…. The dim glow of blue-hooded flashlights gave a brief and charnel illumination.”

No oil could settle the swell in the American sector, which was more exposed to the westerly wind. Helmsmen maneuvered their ships to form a lee, lowering boats first on the sheltered side, then coming about to shelter
and lower the other side. Troughs swallowed the vessels anyway. “The rocking of the small landing craft was totally unlike anything we had experienced on the ship,” wrote the journalist Jack Belden, who had shipped aboard the
Barnett
. “It pitched, rolled, swayed, bucked, jerked from side to side, spanked up and down.” Confused coxswains, no less seasick then the soldiers, shouted to one another, “Are you the second wave?” Most craft lacked seats or thwarts, forcing troops to sit on metal decks awash in seawater and vomit. The rumble of landing-craft engines reminded one bosun’s mate of “a basso coughing into his handkerchief at church.”

“Seasickness and fear make an interesting combination,” a medic observed. “They vie for dominance.” Some boats were loaded at the rail and lowered by block and tackle; but many ships required that soldiers climb down braided nets, now slippery with sea spray and puke. Officers stood by to pry loose the fingers of those who froze on the ropes. “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus,” a soldier moaned after slumping to the bottom of a bobbing boat. “How I wish I was back in Chicago.” Many would have agreed with a 1st Division scout who declared, “We were not meant to be sailors.” Aboard
Joseph T. Dickman
attempts were made to inspirit the troops by piping Glenn Miller’s “American Patrol” over the PA system to the circling boats. “If casualties are high, it will not be a reflection on your leadership abilities,” the Ranger commander, Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby, told a young captain preparing to step over the side. “May God be with you.”