Sent Cod over to sweet-talk the Frogs. He knows all the fancy French, plus all the plain French needed to get mules, French generals, and other stubborn types moving. Drafted a message for the French, pointing out that they will have the honor of being the first French North African troops into actionand the honor of liberating the first French soil. (Foreign Legion has a battalion with the British at Taranto, I've heard, but I've also heard that the Germans are hauling ass out of the Italian heel as fast as they can.)
Message from Forward HQ, Fifth Army, Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley, Acting CG, to HQ, Seventh Army, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, CG, September 18, 1943:
HEAVY LUFTWAFFE ATTACKS HAVE SUNK COMMAND SHIPANCON WITH HEAVY CASUALTIES INCLUDING GEN. CLARK, TWO TRANSPORTS, ONE DESTROYER, NUMEROUS LANDING CRAFT. CASUALTIES ON SHORE PRINCIPALLY FROM SNIPERS, BOOBYTRAPS, AND ARTILLERY. WILL ATTACK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE TO EXPAND PERIMETER TO PERMIT LANDING OF FIRST ARMORED DIVISION AS SOON AS AIR SITUATION ALLOWS. ITALIAN CIVILIAN SENTIMENT STRONGLY ANTI-GERMAN.
COPIES TO: CG EIGHTH ARMY
CG FIFTEENTH ARMY
GROUP HQ MTO
From Charles Codman, Audacity (Boston, 1961):
"Not standard form, is it?" General Patton asked.
I had now been with Patton long enough to know a rhetorical question when I heard it. "It conveys all the necessary information to everybody who needs it," seemed a neutral and accurate reply.
"So it does. But I remember a Brad who would rather be court-martialed than send an irregular message." He frowned. "But then, he's in irregular circumstances. At least for him."
I thought that was also neutral and accurate. Bradley's message certainly didn't sound like a cry for help. Of course, he would know that we could reinforce him faster than the Germans could reinforce their Rome garrison, once we regained complete command of the air, and that was a job for somebody else.
"Cod," the general said, "I'm going to hitch a ride over to Civitavecchia and get Brad's shopping list. As far as I'm concerned, supporting him is now Seventh Army's top priority. I'm taking Al Stiller and a couple of enlisted bodyguards."
I must have looked disappointed. "Cod," he said, "if the Luftwaffe starts hitting here, you'll have your hands full. Even if they don't, once the French move out Lucian will need a French-speaking liaison officer. You have just been volunteered for that post. While you're at it, see if you can trade a couple of jeeps for some good brandy. I've never known any French outfit larger than a platoon to go to war without a few bottles in reserve."
I gave him a particularly crisp salute. Neither of us wanted to admit the possibility that he might not come back from this particular excursion.
Getting over to the mainland was along hundred miles.
No way to fly, because nothing fast enough to avoid the German flyboys could land on the one emergency strip they had in the Civitavecchia perimeter. The maps showed a couple of fighter fields, but I guessed they'd be too cratered and too close to German artillery to be safe.
So I rode a PT boat, one of four with a destroyer escort carrying medical personnel. They were going to have to go ashore in DUKWs or even rafts, but that didn't seem to be bothering them.
Don't know if we were escorting the DE or it was escorting us. The skipper said that the Germans were trying to either reinforce or evacuate Corsica by night, while our air is all tied up supporting the landings. They escorted the convoys with E-boats, and sometimes the E-boats swung south to take a crack at our routes to Civitavecchia.
I told him that I was too old to enjoy midnight swims and that I'd already been in one naval battle, off Casablanca, so if the E-boats stayed home I wasn't going to complain to Admiral Doenitz. The skipper said he wasn't going to complain to Doenitz either, but he would have a beef with Marshal Kesselring if the Germans hauled out before his squadron could get in at least one good fight.
He also said that he was a Catholic, but he still wished the Pope would piss or get off the pot as far as Rome being declared an open city. I said that we'd probably confused both Pius and Kesselring, practically landing in their bedrooms, and neither of them had been dropped on their heads as babies, from what I'd heard. Neither of them would want to go down in history as the man who got Rome burned down for the first time since somewhere around 1500, so they'd probably do the right thing.
The skipper agreed, as long as they damned well did it soon!
I asked him if he couldn't move along faster. He said he didn't want to outrun the DE, and anyway, over twenty-five knots the boats gizzled fuel and made a big white wake that the Luftwaffe could pick out even at night. And our own flyboys weren't much better at target recognition…
From Richard Tregaskis, "Campaigning in the Campagna," Baltimore Sun, September 20, 1943:
The tourist guides say that Civitavecchia, the main port of Rome, is on the Tyrrhenian Sea, and is the major ferry port for Sardinia. By the time they allowed reporters into the beachhead, most of the city wasin the Tyrrhenian Sea-or the harbor, or the rivers and canals that fed the port. What our air force and the bombardment supporting the landings hadn't wrecked, the German artillery was finishing off. No ferries were running to Sardinia either, partly because it was in Allied hands and partly because most of them were sitting on the bottom of the harbor.
General Bradley had made his headquarters in the basement of a half-wrecked warehouse. The rubble was just as good a hiding place for our machine guns as it was for the Germans, and we had smoke pots, booby traps, and a few strings of barbed wire laid out. The basement also had several entrances, so that if the Germans decided to come in one, we could leave through one of the others-and, as the general said:
"If there aren't too many of them, we can slip around behind them and-ah, dispose of them, then get back to work. This isn't the Old West. Nobody will complain about us shooting them in the back."
Bradley looked ready to help that project along. He carried an issue.45 and a couple of spare magazines for it, and he had a carbine and another pile of spare magazines on one corner of the Italian worktable he was using for a desk. He also looked more like a company commander than an army commander, and even a little like a militarized and clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln. He didn't have Old Abe's wit, but he certainly had a knack for making everyone around him feel that it would be insubordinate to get excited when the general was so calm.
The only time I saw him upset during those three days was when General Patton visited. I don't know if it was wondering if Patton had come to relieve or at least criticize him, or worrying about keeping Patton alive. The German snipers kept trying to infiltrate, we had lost battalion commanders and hospital personnel, and Patton wore all his ribbons, three stars everyplace they would fit, a polished helmet and boots, and a riding crop and two ivory-handled pistols. It was all a little messy from his PT boat ride, but it still made him a target visible three hundred yards away in the light of the fires and flare bursts.
Patton grinned. "Brad, you owe the Relief Fund about a hundred dollars in fines. Boots dirty, no tie, no helmet, and when did you last shave?"
"When I went down to the evacuation hospital yesterday. My own razor didn't make it ashore. Most of the rest went in a shell burst. If the shell had been five yards closer, you'd be talking to Troy Middleton."