Alternate Generals II

"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 perso

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 ru

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 perso

Patton gri

"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."

Bradley was smiling, but there was also an edge in his voice. He probably was not in a mood for Patton's jokes. After sleeping maybe five hours in the last three days, my sense of humor wouldn't have been in particularly good shape either.

Patton blinked, then actually apologized. "Sorry, Brad. I didn't come to tell you how to do your job. I came to find out how we could help you do it better."

"Well, we did have a little list," Bradley said. "Let's pull it out and see what we still need."

The bodyguards chased all the reporters and juniors out, to let the two generals talk. I learned afterward that Bradley only asked that a bomb line be drawn far enough forward so that the heavy bombers could strike the German artillery, if necessary. Patton was concerned about civilian casualties, particularly since the Italians were begi

It was while we were trying to stay hidden from snipers and in jumping distance of a ditch or foxhole that we heard ragged cheering from down toward the waterfront. Then we heard the squeal and grumble of tanks, growing steadily louder, and the first of a line of Shermans nosed around the corner, knocking loose a shower of bricks from a stub of wall.

A sergeant scrambled down from the turret of the lead tank. "Company C, 3rdBattalion, 66thArmored Regiment reporting for-Oh, you're a civilian." He looked around. "Anyone I can report to?"

"You can report to me," came a high-pitched gravelly voice from the shadows. "It's good news to see you gentlemen. We hadn't expected you for another twenty-four hours."

A tank lieutenant stepped forward and saluted. "We decided that we might be safer-" Patton glared "-and more useful ashore, than bobbing around, getting salt in the transmissions and wondering when the Luftwaffe was going to get lucky."

"Get some hot food and a couple of hours' sleep," Patton said. "You'll have a busy day tomorrow, because we want to push out the perimeter far enough to get rid of the German artillery and bring in some air support."