The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (World War II Liberation Trilogy #2)

The German submariner casualty rate during the war, 75 percent, would exceed that of every other service arm in every other nation.

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” Pound finished in a strong voice: Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

A grenadier shot by a 16th Infantry rifleman tumbled beneath the tracks of tank; later, upon inspecting the body, the rifleman “took hold of his hair to pull his face around but he was melted right into the ground.

Major General John P. Lucas, dispatched by Eisenhower as an observer of HUSKY, watched the spectacle from Monrovia’s bridge with Hewitt and Patton, then confided a small, filthy secret to his diary: “War, with all its terror and dirt and destruction, is at times the most beautiful phenomenon in the world.”

And no one doubted that come the day of battle, they would fight to the death for the greatest cause: one another. “We did it because we could not bear the shame of being less than the man beside us,” John Muirhead wrote. “We fought because he fought; we died because he died.”

“God gave us memory so that we could have roses in December.”

“A man can die but once. We owe God a death,” he recited, quoting Feeble in Henry IV, Part 2. “He that dies this year is quit for the next.”

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” became a consumer mantra. Plastic buttons replaced brass; zinc pennies supplanted copper. To save fifty million tons of wool annually, the government outlawed vests, cuffs, patch pockets, and wide lapels; hemlines rose, pleated skirts vanished, and an edict requiring a 10 percent reduction in the cloth used for women’s bathing suits led to the bikini.

The conference sputtered to an end without the wistful sense of brotherhood that had characterized Casablanca. Mutual confidence remained a sometime thing; the ideal of an epoch when good men dared to trust one another was still imperfectly realized. They were tired of arguing, tired of shouldering the burdens they shouldered, tired of the whole catastrophe. They knew the hard time had come, and that it would require hard men.

Despite the petty bickering and intellectual fencing, a fraternity bound them on the basis of who they were, what they believed, and why they fought. It could be glimpsed, like one of Brooke’s beautiful birds, in Churchill’s gentle draping of a blanket on Roosevelt’s shoulders; and in their grim determination to wage war without liking it.

The 150-foot LCT carried five Sherman tanks and still drew barely three feet, earning the nickname “sea-going bedpan.

Those who fought and suffered in Italy—that “tough old gut,” as Ernie Pyle called it—were left to extract from the bad time what redemption they could. “Few of us can ever conjure up any truly fond memories of the Italian campaign,” Pyle wrote in Brave Men in late 1944. “The enemy had been hard, and so had the elements…. There was little solace for those who had suffered, and none at all for those who had died, in trying to rationalize about why things had happened as they did.” He continued: I looked at it this way—if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives that winter we would save a half million lives in Europe—if those things were true, then it was best as it was. I wasn’t sure they were true. I only knew I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all. Faith and imagination were required to elevate the Italian campaign, to see as the poet Richard Wilbur, a veteran of Cassino and Anzio, saw: “the dreamt land / Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.” Even Pyle, who knew better than most that “war isn’t romantic to the people in it,” sensed the sublime in moments “of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our fate.” George Biddle had found that in “misery, destruction, frustration, and death,” certain annealed qualities seemed “to give war its justification, meaning, romance, and beauty. The qualities of valor, sacrifice, discipline, a sense of duty.” Even Mauldin, that flinty-eyed skeptic, would concede, “I stopped regarding the war as a show to help my career. I felt a seriousness of purpose, and I felt it in my bones.” A medic who had landed at Salerno later wrote his wife, “This is something that is born deep inside us, when we come to know why we are here, when we have learned how very important it was that we did leave you and all we love.” Somewhere north of Rome, Glenn Gray wrote in his diary: “I watched a full moon sail through a cloudy sky…. I felt again the aching beauty of this incomparable land. I remembered everything that I had ever been and was. It was painful and glorious.” Another day passed, and another night. The circling stars glided on their courses. The poets and the dreamers again struck their tents and shouldered their rifles to begin that long, last march.

“Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that all those destined to carry [them] out don’t quarrel with each other instead of the enemy.”

A single crude acronym that captured the soldier’s lowered expectations—SNAFU, for “situation normal, all fucked up”—had expanded into a vocabulary of GI cynicism: SUSFU (situation unchanged, still fucked up); SAFU (self-adjusting fuck-up); TARFU (things are really fucked up); FUMTU (fucked up more than usual); JANFU (joint Army-Navy fuck-up); JAAFU (joint Anglo-American fuck-up); FUAFUP (fucked up and fucked up proper); and FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition).

By singleness of purpose, by steadfastness of conduct, by tenacity and endurance—such as we have so far displayed—by this and only by this can we discharge our duty to the future of the world and to the destiny of man.

Clark still cherished one bit of arcana memorized by every West Point plebe: “A calculated risk is a known risk for the sake of a real gain. A risk for the sake of a risk is a fool’s choice.”

Along with the money and the ninety tons of maps, stevedores had loaded two hundred Silver Stars, six thousand Purple Hearts, and four thousand other decorations for valor; in the coming months those medals proved but a down payment on the courage required of the 45th.

“We little people,” Revelle told her, “must solve these catastrophes by mutual slaughter, and force the world back to reason.”

In truth, he lacked a great battle captain’s endowments: to see the field both spatially and temporally; to intuit an opponent’s intent; to subordinate all resistance to an iron will.