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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
The Day of Battle:
The War in Sicily and Italy,
1943-1944
by Rick Atkinson
Henry Holt and Co. -
October 2007
Land
of the Cyclops
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 by Rick Atkinson. Published
with permission.
Rick
Atkinson was a staff writer and senior
editor at The Washington Post for
more than twenty years. He is the
bestselling author of An Army at Dawn,
The Long Gray Line, In the Company of
Soldiers, and Crusade. His many
awards include Pulitzer Prizes for
journalism and history. He lives in
Washington, D.C. www.thedayofbattle.com.
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