PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY by Alan Axelrod

Author:Alan Axelrod
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Conqueror of Sicily

As originally drawn up in Washington and London, far from the scene of the proposed action, the plan for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, was admirably straightforward. The British Eighth Army (designated the Eastern Task Force), under Bernard Law Montgomery, would land around Catania on the eastern shore of Sicily, and the I Armored Corps (the Western Task Force), commanded by Patton, would land near Palermo on the northern shore. The two task forces were to secure these major port cities, which would enable an orderly buildup of additional troops as the task forces drove along the eastern and northern coastal roads to link up at Messina on the northeastern tip of the island. In this way, not only would Sicily be conquered, but the Allied armies would end up in an ideal position from which to launch an invasion of the Italian mainland.

The broad, slashing strokes of this unadorned plan greatly appealed to Patton. Montgomery, however, saw it very differently. To him, it was as an egregious example of “penny-packet” warfare because the plan divided the assault forces, spreading them out over some 600 miles of Sicilian coastline. Montgomery feared that Husky would suffer the fate of the early assaults in Tunisia, which General Sir Claude Auchinleck had conducted in similarly piecemeal fashion. The plan was, he pronounced, “a dog’s breakfast,” and his criticism led to three months of tortured wrangling among the British themselves and between the British and the Americans. Patton, who must have recognized that the others regarded him as a fighter, a field commander and tactician, not a strategist, mostly stayed out of the debate, which reached a three-hour anticlimax in a meeting of April 29, 1943. Tempers flared and, as Patton wrote to Beatrice afterward, “It ended in stalemate. It was one hell of a performance. War by committee.”1

Then, three days later, it was all suddenly resolved.

On May 2, Montgomery strode into Allied headquarters, Algiers, asked for Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith—universally called Beetle or Beadle—and was told he was in the lavatory. Montgomery walked into the lavatory, cornered Beadle Smith, and took him to a mirror hanging over the sink. He breathed on the mirror and, with his finger, outlined the inverted triangle of Sicily. He then traced a plan in which his Eighth Army landed at two locations on the northeast corner of Sicily on either side of Messina while Patton’s I Armored Corps (to be redesignated the Seventh U.S. Army once it landed) would make three landings below Montgomery along the eastern coast at Gela, Scoglitti, and Licata for the sole purpose of supporting Montgomery’s assault.

In an Algerian men’s room, Montgomery succeeded in doing what three months of conference-room debate had failed to do: formulate an acceptable plan for the invasion of Sicily. Patton hardly relished being cast in the shadow of Montgomery, and wrote in his diary, “The U.S. is getting gypped,” then he reminded himself that “the thing I must do is retain my SELF-CONFIDENCE.

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