The Day of Battle (9 page)

To a dilatory officer outside Bizerte, Patton shouted, “You son of a bitch. When I tell you to come I want you to run.” “Sir,” the soldier said, “I resent
being called a son of a bitch. I think you owe me an apology.” Patton apologized and drove off. Such apologies were rare. “Chew them out and they’ll remember it,” he said. But if chastened soldiers remembered, so did his superiors. In late May, during a profane tirade against a squad of 1st Division infantrymen at Arzew, all within earshot of Eisenhower and the visiting George Marshall, one general whispered, “That temper of his is going to finish him yet.”

But the caricature of a raging martinet failed to capture Patton’s nuances. Few officers had studied the art of war with greater care. If he had virtually memorized G.F.R. Henderson’s biography of Stonewall Jackson, that it was to answer the inner interrogatory “What would Jackson do?” Patton had earned his pilot’s license to better understand air attacks, and he had mastered enough navigation to sail to Hawaii for a better comprehension of movement on the open sea, which resembled the open desert.

He also was a loving if sometimes wayward husband, and as H-hour drew near his thoughts were with his wife, Beatrice, whom he had known since they were sixteen. In many ways she was more than his equal, the sort of woman to whom he could write in early May: “Read up on Cromwell and send me some ideas.” Intelligent and wealthy, she was an accomplished sailor and a successful novelist who gulped down a raw egg from a shot glass for breakfast before riding to hounds. He had proposed marriage, in the summer of 1909, by riding his own horse up the stairs and onto the terrace of her house; when her father objected to such a suitor, she feigned a hunger strike, deepening her pallor with rice powder until he relented. Of Georgie she had later written in her journal, “What a man. He is very great—[has] all the flash, and drama, and personality, and everything to back it up.”

“I have no premonitions and hope to live forever,” Patton had written Bea just before
Monrovia
sailed. In fact, he had intimations of the immortality that only glory could bring a battle captain. It awaited him, he sensed, in Sicily. “I believe in my fate,” he told his diary, “and, to fulfill it, this show must be a success.”

Patton had designed the last cavalry saber adopted by the Army, a straight, double-edged weapon of thrust. The blade embodied the man. “If you charge hard enough at death,” he claimed, “it will get out of your way.” Shortly before boarding the
Monrovia,
he summoned his generals to a final conference. At the end, with tears streaming down his cheeks, he dismissed them with a slash of his swagger stick. “I never want to see you bastards again,” he roared, “unless it’s at your post on the shores of Sicily.”

From east and west the convoys converged, gaining mass and momentum: here was Hewitt’s “most gigantic fleet.” Red and green navigation lights gleamed from horizon to horizon, reflected in the phosphorescence churned in a thousand wakes. The bright pellets of “flying elephants”—barrage balloons—floated overhead, and twin-tail P-38 escorts flew higher still.

At last the troops learned their destination, and shipboard betting pools paid off the clairvoyant winners. “We are sailing to Sicily,” the commander of the Oran convoy announced aboard U.S.S.
Ancon.
“We have bad news to deliver, but we are saving it this trip for Benito Mussolini.” Men gathered on the weather deck to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. 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. Classicists tried to remember their Thucydides: few took comfort from his account of an Athenian expedition to Sicily twenty-five centuries earlier, in which the victors earned “the most brilliant of successes, the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats.”

The
Monrovia
steamed past Bizerte harbor early on the morning of July 8. Now she zigzagged at 12
¹
/2 knots, under sailing plan number 10, making for Cap Bon and the sea-lanes to Sicily. A squadron of British destroyers screened the seaward flank. Other ships sortied from the harbor to join the fleet threading the swept Tunisian War Channel. Atop Bizerte’s battered custom house, an honor guard of American bluejackets and British tars stood at attention as the ships slid past. Sailors on the foredecks returned the salutes, then waved farewell. “Looking astern,” one officer recorded, “there was another convoy even greater than ours, spread so far back it had the appearance of columns of marching ants, dots blurred by distance.

“It seemed,” he added, “the whole world must be afloat.”

Calypso’s Island

O
VER
the millennia, a great deal had happened on the tiny island the Allies now code-named
FINANCE
. St. Paul had been shipwrecked on the north coast of Malta in
A.D.
60 while en route to stand trial in Rome for crimes against the state; he preached to the unconverted for three months, then continued on his fateful way. Successive waves of Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans swept behind him, felling forests for farms and herds; the topsoil washed away to expose a parched, rocky knob, eight miles by eighteen. Some scholars believed that Malta was the place
where the nymph Calypso had imprisoned wandering Odysseus as her love slave for seven years.

In 1530, Emperor Charles V garrisoned the island with the knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, a monastic order founded during the First Crusade and recently expelled from Rhodes by the Turks. After a siege, the Maltese knights spent years building complex battlements, with bastions and watchtowers and walls as much as thirty feet thick. Britain seized the fortress in 1800, taking also its fine harbor and the island’s handsome capital, Valletta, built with ocher stone from local quarries. Most of the quarter million Maltese were illiterate peasants who scratched a living from the thin fields and pastures.

The first of 3,340 Axis air raids struck the island at dawn on June 11, 1940. During the next three years it became the most bombed place on earth, as the enemy tried to blast the British from their only harbor between Gibraltar and Alexandria and to neutralize the Maltese airfields, which expedited attacks on Axis supply convoys to North Africa. Some sixteen thousand tons of bombs fell on the island in attacks of exemplary viciousness: German pilots even heaved hand grenades from their cockpits. Valletta was reduced to ocher rubble, then to ocher powder. “Beauty was slain,” wrote a Maltese poet, M. Mizzi, “and a great kingdom of terror was set up.” More than beauty died: the number of casualties reached fifteen thousand. (Precise figures were elusive because it was common for families to conceal a fatality in order to keep drawing the victim’s rations.) “Holy Mary,” the Maltese prayed, “let the bombs fall in the sea or in the fields.”

Those not killed or wounded simply suffered. Women prowled the wreckage after each raid in search of splintered furniture to burn as firewood. By July 1942, daily rations per person had been cut to four ounces of staples such as meat, fish, and cheese, and thirteen ounces of bread, often baked with sawdust filler. Newspapers printed articles on the virtues of “potato soup, potato puree, potato casserole.” Public kitchens served “veal loaf,” an odious confection of goat and horsemeat. The Maltese learned to live without soap, razor blades, toilet paper, shoelaces, or books. Contraceptives were fashioned from old inner tubes until people grew too exhausted for sex. To escape the bombs they used hand chisels to carve shelters from rock so obdurate that even experienced diggers rarely excavated more than eight inches a day. Maltese fishing boats called
dghajsa
s ferried food and kerosene from nearby islands, and on their return voyages carried off the dead for proper burial.

Thanks to the victory in North Africa, the first unopposed convoy since 1940 had reached the island on May 24, 1943. Food and other staples began to arrive, but Malta remained a gaunt, medieval wreck: sand flies swarmed
in the ruins and white dust rose from every footfall. “Children, too thin and listless even to play in the bright sunshine, hung about the shabby, pitted streets,” one visitor wrote. Valletta had not a single restaurant, and water flowed from the city’s taps for only two hours in the morning and half an hour at night. Life in the British garrison was hardly easier, with beer rationed to a weekly pint, issued with “fifty inexpressibly foul Indian cigarettes.” Axis bombers still pummeled the island; in the code used by Allied forces in early July, all
BULLDOGS
and
UMPIRES
(Americans and British) were advised to remain alert to
POSTMAN TULIP AUCTION
(German aircraft). Such jargon often drew the coded equivalent of a blank look:
ICEBERG
(signal not understood).

For all its woes,
FINANCE
had the virtue of lying only fifty-five miles due south of
HORRIFIED
—Sicily—and on the late afternoon of July 8, the island’s fortunes abruptly revived. “Everyone was on tiptoe with excitement,” one British officer said, for at five
P.M
. General Eisenhower arrived to make Malta his headquarters.

Motorcyclists with numbers pinned to their backs guided the Allied commander’s aircraft and escort planes to blast shelters along the runway. Eisenhower had left Algiers on July 6 to spend two days at his Tunisian command post before flying to Malta. To screen his movements, a dummy Allied Forces Headquarters in Oran began broadcasting simulated radio traffic; the staff cars sent to pick him up at the Valletta airfield bore no rank insignia on their bumpers. During the final approach to the island, Eisenhower had seen the feverish preparations for
HUSKY
along Dockyard Creek and French Creek at Grand Harbour, as well as the ambulance parking lot built on the jetties at St. Paul’s Bay; Allied planners anticipated evacuating thirty thousand battle casualties from Sicily to North Africa, and Malta had been converted into a hospital port and medical way station. Eisenhower fingered the lucky coins—including a silver dollar, a French franc, and an English crown piece—that he always carried in a zippered purse when traveling.

The small convoy wound through ruined Valletta before climbing a hill outside town to the Verdala Palace, a square, moated castle with towers at each corner, built in 1586 as a summer home for the Maltese grand master. Escorted by his British hosts, Eisenhower wandered through the great hall and an immense banquet room, where biblical frescoes adorned the walls. Beneath the palace, hooks set into the walls of a dim oubliette still held rusting chains; the reporter John Gunther, who accompanied the commanding general, noted, “There are several rooms, dungeons, which the servants believe to be haunted, and which even today they will not enter.” Climbing a spiral marble staircase—the risers were only two inches high so that Maltese
priests could ride up the steps on mules shod with sandals—Eisenhower was shown to his bedroom, a magnificent chamber with a thirty-foot ceiling. A whitewashed back passage led to another dungeon. “I think it’ll do,” he said, with a flash of his now famous grin. “I’ll have room enough.”

Nine months earlier, Eisenhower had taken command in another British redoubt, at Gibraltar, on the eve of Operation
TORCH
, which he was chosen to command over 366 more senior U.S. officers. Since then, he had survived battlefield setbacks, political missteps, and his own inexperience to become the Allies’ indispensable man. The “only man who could have made things work was Ike,” Churchill’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hastings Ismay, said after the war. “No one else.”

Victory in North Africa had enhanced his stature and his self-confidence. Perhaps the lucky coins helped, but so too did hard work and a gift for square dealing. General Bernard L. Montgomery, who would command British forces in
HUSKY
, considered Eisenhower “the very incarnation of sincerity,” with “the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts bits of metal.” Another senior British general said, “He was utterly fair in his dealings, and I envied the clarity of his mind, and his power of accepting responsibility.” He listened well, and spoke well. “I am bound to say,” Churchill confided to a British colleague, “I have noticed that good generals do not usually have such good powers of expression as he has.” Few could resist that infectious smile, and his physical vigor proved a tonic to others. “Always on the move,” the reporter Drew Middleton noted. “Walking up and down, pacing patterns on the rug, his flat, harsh voice ejecting idea after idea like sparks flung from an emery wheel.”

“I’m a born optimist,” Eisenhower once said, “and I can’t change that.” He told his son, John, a cadet at West Point, that effective leadership could be learned by “studious reflection and practice…. You must be devoted to duty, sincere, fair, and cheerful.” At times he could nitpick, grousing that “not one officer in fifty knows how to use the English language,” and supposedly cashiering an aide for failing to master the distinction between “shall” and “will.” Still, he remained humble and balanced despite having served seven years under a paragon of pretension, General Douglas MacArthur, whose refusal to ever acknowledge error and whose persistent references to himself in the third person baffled Eisenhower. Told that George Marshall proposed to nominate him for the Congressional Medal of Honor after
TORCH
, Eisenhower warned, “I would refuse to accept it.” Just before leaving Algiers, he received a telegram from a publisher offering “at least $25,000” if he would allow any “nationally known writer” of his choosing to tell his story. “Too busy to be interested,” Eisenhower replied.