DEFINING NECESSITY DOWNWARDS:

The Day of Battle:" | Courage, carnage and obsession: a review of The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson (Thomas Peelem, Contra Costa Times)

Patton's ego seems tame compared to that of Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the American Fifth Army in Italy. Atkinson paints Clark as so obsessed with capturing Rome himself that he pondered turning his own guns on the British if he thought they would enter the city ahead of him.

At the heart of "The Day of Battle," though, is the foot soldier, the men pinned down at Anzio, the troops sent relentlessly into fortified German lines. The Italian campaign was the battlefront that most resembled the battles of World War I, armies flinging themselves at each other again and again over the same ground.

Atkinson juxtaposes the fighting for inches with the grave realities of Allied war-making politics and how much blood was spilled because of clashing egos. He also explores many of the war's darkest secrets, from its largest incident of fratricide (Allied gunners in Sicily opening up on their own planes and paratroopers), to the disastrous results when a ship containing a cargo of mustard gas is bombed in an Italian harbor, to the atrocities committed on both sides.

His deeper exploration is whether the war in Italy needed to be fought at all. It was, history proved, of little strategic importance. But it was, Atkinson concludes, necessary for Stalin's appeasement and diverting German resources from the preparation of defenses for the invasion of France.

Or what? Stalin would have let Hitler take the USSR just to teach us a lesson? Tragic how appeasement is always an excuse for itself.

The book though is terrific, not just for what it reveals about the "Good War" but for what that reveals about our current "Bad War." Let us set aside, for now, the fundamental mistake of appeasing Stalin and trying to help the Soviets win and assume for the moment that this phase of the war was entirely justified and truly necessary. Consider that just in the initial hours and days of the invasion of Sicily you get not only that friendly fire incident--with an official count of 410 killed but an additional 1400 paratroopers unaccounted for--and several intentional massacres of prisoners, which were covered up not just to prevent Allied embarrassment but in order to possibly protect our own men from reprisals should they be captured. Add the general incompetence in areas from strategy to logistics and the rivalry between commanders of different nations as well as between services and between peers within each service and you begin to see how comparatively flawless the Iraq campaign has been, as well as how much more seriously the government and the press took winning said war, rather than exposing every mistake to be picked over in public and seized upon by the enemy. Note: I'm not actually suggesting that no mistakes have been made in the Iraq War, but that we lack all historical perspective either when we consider them in their worst light and look back at WWII in an absurdly glowing, near sacred, light.

Like all the best histories, Mr. Atkinson's book tells us as much about our own times as it does about the past and what it tells us is pretty unflattering about both.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Day of Battle
-REVIEW: of Day of Battle (Robert Killebrew, Washington Post)
-EXCERPT: Land of the Cyclops (Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle, Thanks to FSB Associates)

Few Sicilian towns claimed greater antiquity than Gela, where the center of the American assault was to fall. Founded on a limestone hillock by Greek colonists from Rhodes and Crete in 688 b.c., Gela had since endured the usual Mediterranean calamities, including betrayal, pillage, and, in 311 b.c., the butchery of five thousand citizens by a rival warlord. The ruins of sanctuaries and shrines dotted the modern town of 32,000, along with tombs ranging in vintage from Bronze Age to Hellenistic and Byzantine. The fecund “Geloan fields,” as Virgil called them in The Aeneid, grew oleanders, palms, and Saracen olives. Aeschylus, the father of Attic drama, had spent his last years in Gela writing about fate, revenge, and love gone bad in the Oresteia; legend held that the playwright had been killed here when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald skull.

Patton planned a different sort of airborne attack by his invasion vanguard. On the night of July 9–10, more than three thousand paratroopers in four battalions were to parachute onto several vital road junctions outside Gela to forestall Axis counterattacks against the 1st Division landing beaches. Leading this assault was the dashing Colonel James Maurice Gavin, who at thirty-six was on his way to becoming the Army’s youngest major general since the Civil War. Born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants and orphaned as a child, Gavin had been raised hardscrabble by foster parents in the Pennsylvania coalfields. Leaving school after the eighth grade, he worked as a barber’s helper, shoe clerk, and filling station manager before joining the Army at seventeen. He wangled an appointment to West Point, where his cadetship was undistinguished. As a young officer he washed out of flight school; a superior’s evaluation as recently as 1941 concluded, “This officer does not seem peculiarly fitted to be a paratrooper.” Ascetic and fearless, with a “magnetism for attractive women,” Jim Gavin was in fact born to go to the sound of the guns. “He could jump higher, shout louder, spit farther, and fight harder than any man I ever saw,” one subordinate said.

His 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, had staged in central Tunisia. Gavin harbored private misgivings about the Sicilian mission -- “many lives will be lost in a few hours,” he wrote -- and with good reason. The 82nd had received only roughly a third as much training time as some other U.S. divisions. The amateurish Allied parachute operations in North Africa had been marred by misfortune and miscalculation. No large-scale night combat jump had ever been attempted, and so many injuries had plagued the division in Tunisia -- including fifty-three broken legs and ankles during a single daylight jump in early June -- that training was curtailed. Much of the husky planning had been done by officers who had no airborne expertise and whose notions were suffused with fantasy. Transport pilots had little experience at night navigation, but to avoid flying over trigger-happy gunners in the Allied fleets, the planes, staying low to evade Axis radar, would have to make three dogleg turns over open water in the dark. Airborne units had yet to figure out how to drop a load heavier than three hundred pounds, much less a howitzer or a jeep. An experimental “para-mule” broke three legs; after putting the creature out of its misery, paratroopers used the carcass for bayonet practice. Still, the ranks “generally agreed that training proficiency had reached the stage where the mission was ‘in the bag,’” wrote one AAF officer, who later acknowledged “possible overoptimism.”

At about the time that Hewitt’s fleet neared Malta, 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. Parachutes occupied the C-47s’ seats; the sixteen troopers in each stick sat on the fuselage floor, practicing the invasion challenge and password: george/marshall. Dysentery tormented the regiment, and men struggled with their gear and Mae Wests to squat over honeypots placed around the aircraft bays. Medics distributed Benzedrine to the officers, morphine syrettes to everyone.

As the first planes began to taxi -- churning up dust clouds so thick that some pilots had to take off by instrument -- a weatherman appeared at Gavin’s aircraft to affirm Commander Steere’s prediction of lingering high winds aloft. “Colonel Gavin, is Colonel Gavin here? I was told to tell you that the wind is going to be thirty-five miles an hour, west to east,” he said. “They thought you’d want to know.” Fifteen was considered the maximum velocity for safe jumping. Another messenger staggered up with an enormous barracks bag stuffed with prisoner-of-war tags. “You’re supposed to put one on every prisoner you capture,” he told Gavin. An hour after takeoff, a staff officer heaved the bag into the sea.

Copyright © 2007 Rick Atkinson from the book The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson Published by Henry Holt and Company; October 2007;$35.00US; 978-0-8050-6289-2

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 20, 2007 10:10 AM