Patton Unleashed: The Boundary Fight, Palermo and Mussolini’s Fall

A B-17 bombs Palermo harbor through flak, 1943 (date uncertain). U.S. Army Air Forces photograph.

Operation Husky · Chapter 5 of 9

Patton Unleashed: The Boundary Fight, Palermo and Mussolini’s Fall

Denied his road north, Patton turned west, took Palermo in seventy-two hours, and watched a dictator fall.

13–25 July 1943Highway 124 · Agrigento · Palermo · Trapani · Rome~27 min read

Just before midnight on 13 July 1943, a message from General Sir Harold Alexander’s 15th Army Group headquarters reached the U.S. Seventh Army. It was received at 2316 and logged in the army journal at 0145 the next morning. In a few lines of staff prose it took away the road the Americans had planned to use to drive north through the center of Sicily, gave it to Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army, and assigned George S. Patton’s army what Patton’s staff read as a supporting role on the flank.

Patton’s response to that order shaped the rest of the campaign. Within ten days his army had swung across western Sicily, taken Palermo, collected some 53,000 prisoners at a cost of 272 American casualties, and turned itself from a flank guard into a rival for Messina. In the same ten days, the Fascist regime in Rome collapsed. This chapter tells both stories, and how they were connected.

Highway 124: The Boundary Fight

The original Husky plan had divided Sicily between the two Allied armies along a line that ran north from the beaches. The Eighth Army would drive up the east coast through Syracuse and Catania toward Messina. The Seventh Army would protect its left flank, seize the airfields around Gela and Comiso, and push north into the center of the island. The key to that northward push was Highway 124, the road from Vizzini through Grammichele and Caltagirone to Piazza Armerina and Enna, the hub of the island’s road network.

By 12 July the Eighth Army had taken Syracuse and Augusta but was beginning to slow in front of Catania. Montgomery decided on his own that Highway 124 west of Vizzini belonged to him. He halted the 1st Canadian Division at Giarratana and directed Lieutenant General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps to drive on Caltagirone, Enna and Leonforte, ordering the move to start on the evening of 13 July before Alexander had approved it. His plan, in effect, gave the Eighth Army every road to Messina.

That morning Alexander had visited Patton. Patton asked permission to take Agrigento and its port, Porto Empedocle, which he considered essential to supply his army. Alexander agreed, on condition that reconnaissance troops did the job and that it did not cost “too much in manpower or material.” Nothing was said about changing the boundary. Then, late that night, the directive arrived.

The order hit the Americans in the middle of an advance. On 13 July the 45th Division’s 157th Infantry had taken Licodia Eubea and Monterosso Almo and stood less than three miles from Highway 124. Colonel Charles Ankcorn learned only that afternoon that the British were moving on Vizzini across his front.

On the morning of 14 July Patton called Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, commanding II Corps, to his headquarters and explained the new directive. The 45th Division would have to sideslip west, give up the highway and turn its advance from north to west. Bradley protested. “This will raise hell with us,” he said. “I had counted heavily on that road.” He asked at least to use Highway 124 to move the 45th Division. Patton refused. “Sorry, Brad, but the changeover takes place immediately. Monty wants the road right away.” Bradley handed back the directive, convinced, as he later wrote, that Montgomery meant to take Messina alone while the Americans were confined to the western half of the island.

Alexander’s reasoning was not simply favoritism. He wanted the Seventh Army to guard Montgomery’s left until the Eighth Army held a firm line from Catania to Enna, and he feared that an American dash across western Sicily might expose that flank to a counterattack from the center. But the official U.S. Army history is also candid that he doubted the fighting quality of American troops, an opinion formed at Kasserine Pass five months earlier and not yet revised. The CMH campaign history calls the boundary shift “one of the most important and controversial operational decisions of the campaign.” American officers who had just held the Gela beachhead against the Hermann Göring Division did not take it as a compliment. (The Tunisian background to that distrust is told in our Kasserine Pass collection.)

Agrigento and Porto Empedocle

Patton took Alexander’s permission to send “reconnaissance” toward Agrigento and interpreted it broadly. Major General Lucian K. Truscott’s 3rd Infantry Division had already probed toward the city on 13 July, and the 1st Battalion, 7th Infantry, reported heavy artillery defenses on its eastern side. Truscott, a former cavalryman who distrusted frontal attacks, chose instead to swing around through Favara on Highway 122.

He called it a reconnaissance in force. It was a regimental attack: the 7th Infantry with the 10th Field Artillery Battalion, a battalion of the 77th Field Artillery Regiment, and the 3rd Ranger Battalion under Major Herman Dammer attached. The cruisers USS Birmingham and Brooklyn had been firing in support since 12 July; the British monitor HMS Abercrombie joined on the night of the 14th, and USS Philadelphia on the 15th.

Before daylight on 15 July two infantry battalions occupied their first objectives without trouble. That night the Rangers left Favara for Montaperto, a hilltop village behind the Agrigento defenses. About half an hour after midnight on 16 July they ran into an Italian roadblock east of the junction of Highways 122 and 118; within an hour 165 Italians had surrendered. At dawn they ambushed a column of ten motorcycles and two truckloads of Italian troops and took 40 more. From Montaperto they looked down on four Italian artillery batteries, dropped 60mm mortar rounds among them and captured most of the gunners. Then they went on and took Porto Empedocle.

On the main axis the 7th Infantry’s battalions worked forward through the morning of 16 July. Once the 3rd Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel John Heintges, came down onto Highway 115 shortly after 1400, the 1st and 3rd Battalions broke into Agrigento together. Colonel de Laurentiis, the Italian commander, surrendered the city, his staff and his troops to Colonel Roy E. Moore. Agrigento, its Greek temples largely intact, and its port were in American hands. The CMH campaign pamphlet gives 15 July for the city’s capture; the official history’s narrative places the surrender on the 16th.

Waybur at the broken bridge

The next night produced the first Medal of Honor action of the western drive. On the night of 17 July, near Agrigento, First Lieutenant David C. Waybur of the 3rd Reconnaissance Troop led a three-vehicle patrol out to find a Ranger unit that had been cut off. At a destroyed bridge the patrol was trapped by four Italian tanks. Waybur’s machine guns ran out of ammunition, and he was badly wounded. According to his citation, he stood in the open and killed the crew of the leading tank with a Thompson submachine gun, then held his men in position against the remaining tanks until help arrived the next morning.

Patton Goes to Tunis: The Provisional Corps

On 16 July Alexander issued a new directive, received at Seventh Army headquarters at 2355 that night. It reflected the Eighth Army’s failure to take Catania quickly. Montgomery was to hold a “firm line” from Catania to Enna and drive into the Messina peninsula on three axes. Messina was a British objective. The Seventh Army’s “only task” was to protect the Eighth Army’s rear by securing the Enna loop and advancing to the north coast on the British left. Agrigento and Porto Empedocle were authorized. Palermo was not mentioned.

Patton had anticipated the moment. On 15 July his own army directive had already formed a Provisional Corps under his deputy, Major General Geoffrey Keyes, to take over the army’s left sector west of II Corps. It contained the 3rd Infantry Division, the 82nd Airborne Division, elements of the 9th Infantry Division and the artillery that had supported the 3rd Division, with the 2nd Armored Division in army reserve, ready to exploit toward the north coast. The boundary between the corps ran on past Enna to the north coast west of Santo Stefano di Camastra.

On 17 July Patton flew to La Marsa, outside Tunis, to see Alexander in person. He was, by his own description, “mad as a wet hen.” He laid out an alternative: an enveloping attack on Palermo through Castelvetrano, 68 miles west of Agrigento, and Corleone, 58 miles northwest. Aggressive action, he argued, was the best way to protect Montgomery’s flank. Alexander, reluctantly, agreed. His written approval of 18 July carried conditions: Seventh Army was first to capture Petralia and then reach Campofelice on the north coast. Garland and Smyth note that Patton’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Hobart Gay, apparently kept those conditions from Patton, though that rests on one later account and is not confirmed in the army’s journal.

The “Truscott Trot”

The infantry that made the drive possible had been training for it since North Africa. Truscott had pushed the 3rd Division through brutal marching exercises in the Tunisian heat, insisting on a pace well above the Army standard of about two and a half miles an hour. His biographers describe the standard he set as five miles an hour for the first mile and four miles an hour thereafter. The men called it the “Truscott Trot,” and they did not always say it fondly.

In western Sicily it paid off. The 3rd Division moved on foot through rough country in the high summer heat, its riflemen carrying weapons, ammunition and water up and down switchback roads, often outpacing the trucks that were supposed to carry them. Garland and Smyth describe three days of “grueling” marching to the Belice River, against only spotty resistance, which put the division in position to assault Palermo by 22 July.

The other elements of the corps moved by every means available. Colonel Reuben Tucker’s 504th Parachute Infantry, the regiment shot down by friendly fire over Gela a week earlier (see Chapter 3), passed through the 39th Infantry two hours ahead of schedule on the morning of 19 July. It crossed the Platani River, 17 miles from the start, six hours later. Engineers bypassed a demolished bridge. By nightfall the paratroopers had gained 25 miles.

Western Sicily Falls

The drive opened at 0500 on 19 July, as Keyes had announced the night before. Palermo lay more than 100 miles away. The route ran through about 50 miles of rough mountains, then 40 miles of rolling plateau, then the rugged highlands south and west of the city. Naval gunfire, so decisive at Gela, was never needed.

On 20 July the 82nd Airborne took Sciacca and its abandoned airfield and pushed another 20 miles. The most serious fight of the day came at the Verdura River, where an Italian antitank gun in a pillbox hit a half-track before American fire forced 70 Italians to surrender. The next day Darby’s Task Force X, built around the Ranger battalions, moved out from Menfi. The Italians had blown the Belice bridges; a Ranger battalion forded the river, about 100 feet wide and four feet deep, found the pillboxes on the far bank abandoned, and held a bridgehead while engineers built a crossing. A reconnaissance platoon went on to Castelvetrano, where about 400 Italians surrendered without a fight. At Alcamo, the 39th Infantry took 800 more and found a large stock of gasoline. In a single day Task Force X and the infantry collected almost 4,000 prisoners.

Major General Hugh Gaffey’s 2nd Armored Division, spread over 25 miles between Ribera and Agrigento, waited for its moment. When it came, Colonel Maurice Rose’s Combat Command A crossed the Belice and drove fast; one of its patrols pushed into Palermo unopposed late on 22 July. Colonel I. D. White’s Combat Command B took the north-coast ports east of the Belice line.

At the western tip of the island, Major General Matthew Ridgway shifted the 82nd Airborne on 23 July to seize Trapani. Colonel James Gavin’s 505th Parachute Infantry, the victors of Biazzo Ridge, moved by truck through Santa Ninfa and Salemi. Local people greeted the column with fruit, bread and chocolate. At about 1600 the lead vehicles hit a defended roadblock and minefields outside Trapani, and Italian artillery fired for two or three hours before the 376th Parachute Field Artillery and the 34th Field Artillery Battalions answered. The roadblock was cleared, the hill positions were enveloped, and Rear Admiral Giuseppe Manfredi, commanding the Trapani naval district, surrendered the city. Garland and Smyth record that he gave up the fight, the city, and his sword and field glasses. The 504th reached Alcamo by noon on 24 July and Castellammare by 1730.

22 July: Palermo

By the afternoon of 22 July, Palermo, Sicily’s capital and largest city, was surrounded on the landward side and had nowhere to turn. Allied bombers had pounded its harbor for months; the waterfront was a field of wreckage and sunken ships. General Marciani, the Italian defense commander, had already been captured by the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion. Civilians had tried to surrender the city to Brigadier General William Eagles of the 3rd Division, who declined because he had been told General Keyes would accept it.

The formal offer came from Generale di Brigata Giuseppe Molinero, commander of Port Defense “N.” He offered to surrender the city to Keyes. Shortly after 1900, at the royal palace, the Palazzo dei Normanni, the American officers accepted. Keyes and Gaffey drove into the city with Molinero. At 2000 the 3rd Division and the 2nd Armored Division marched in from the east and the west. Patton arrived about an hour later, guided by Colonel Perry. As Garland and Smyth put it, Palermo was his.

The crowds that met the Americans were large and, by most accounts, welcoming, though the scenes were also carefully photographed for publicity at home. Patton took up residence in the royal palace. Within days Palermo became the Seventh Army’s main supply base. The first supply ships docked on 28 July. Wrecked vessels in the harbor held the port to about 30 percent of its capacity, but Army engineers and Navy salvage crews began clearing it at once. Railroads were restored, and the first eastbound train left Palermo on 29 July.

The Italians Who Stopped Fighting

The numbers of the Palermo drive are almost absurd. Fifty-three thousand prisoners, more than the population of many Sicilian towns, came in over six days, often in columns that marched themselves to the rear. Garland and Smyth describe surrender en masse as the typical encounter of the drive.

Why? The Italian units in western Sicily were mostly coastal divisions and garrison troops, many of them older reservists, many of them Sicilians whose families lived in the towns the Americans were entering. The Germans had moved almost all their combat units east to hold the line in front of Catania and the mountains. The Italian soldiers left behind had poor equipment, little transport and no air cover, and they had watched the Allied armada arrive. Their war, for many of them, was already over.

It would be a mistake to read the west as the whole story. At Gela the Livorno Division’s infantry walked into naval gunfire until it ceased to exist as a division (see Chapter 4). Italian gunners at the Verdura and at Trapani fought. Italian artillery and units of the Aosta and Assietta divisions would fight beside the Germans at Troina and San Fratello. But in the west, in late July, the prevailing mood was exhaustion.

Bradley, whose II Corps was meanwhile pushing through the island’s center toward the north coast and Enna, resented the whole western affair. He wrote that there was “no glory in the capture of hills, docile peasants, and spiritless soldiers.”

The prisoners became a problem in their own right. Feeding, guarding and moving tens of thousands of men taxed an army whose supply lines still ran over the beaches. Many Sicilian prisoners were later paroled to their homes; the campaign’s full prisoner story, 122,204 men in all, is told in Chapter 8.

Rome Bombed, Feltre and the Grand Council

While the Americans marched on Palermo, the Fascist state that had sent Italy to war was coming apart. Three events in one week pushed it over.

On 19 July Mussolini met Hitler at a villa near Feltre in northern Italy. The Duce had been urged by his military chiefs, especially General Vittorio Ambrosio, chief of Comando Supremo, to tell Hitler that Italy could not go on. He did not. Garland and Smyth describe his behavior at Feltre as “abject.” Hitler promised reinforcements; Italy agreed to commit more divisions in the south. Ambrosio, who had hoped Mussolini would break with Germany face to face, offered his resignation, saying the opportunity of the spoken word had been lost. Mussolini refused it.

The same day, while the leaders talked, American bombers struck Rome for the first time. Their targets were the San Lorenzo and Littorio rail yards and the Ciampino airfields, but bombs also fell on the working-class San Lorenzo district, the Verano cemetery and the ancient basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. The death toll is uncertain: the 2003 memorial lists 1,674 named victims, and some Italian accounts give more than 3,000 dead. Pope Pius XII went to the ruins of San Lorenzo that afternoon. For Romans the raid destroyed the belief that the Eternal City would be spared.

On 20 July King Victor Emmanuel III, citing the bombing of Rome among other reasons, decided to act against Mussolini. Inside the Fascist Party, a group led by Dino Grandi, the former foreign minister and ambassador to London, had been preparing a motion for the Grand Council of Fascism, a body Mussolini had not convened since 1939.

The 28-member Grand Council met at 1700 on Saturday, 24 July, in the Palazzo Venezia. The debate on Grandi’s resolution, which asked the King to resume command of the armed forces, lasted almost nine hours. At about 0300 on 25 July, Mussolini agreed to a vote. Nineteen members voted with Grandi; accounts differ on whether seven or eight voted against, with one abstention. Some of those who signed thought they were only stripping Mussolini of military command. They were wrong.

25 July: Mussolini Arrested

On the afternoon of Sunday, 25 July, Mussolini went to the King’s residence at Villa Savoia expecting a routine audience. Victor Emmanuel told him he had to resign, and that Marshal Pietro Badoglio would take his place. Mussolini argued that the Grand Council vote did not require it; the King, in Garland and Smyth’s words, “would not listen.” Leaving the villa, Mussolini could not find his car. A carabinieri officer offered help and put him into an ambulance, which drove him away. He did not realize until later that he was under arrest.

At 1700 the King summoned Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia and Italy’s former chief of staff, named him head of government, and resumed supreme command of the armed forces himself. Badoglio issued two proclamations that evening. The first announced his appointment and contained the sentence that would echo through Allied capitals: “The war continues.” The second warned against demands for sweeping political change or an immediate peace. The Fascist Party was dissolved.

Rome erupted. People embraced in the streets, danced and paraded in gratitude to the King. Mobs attacked party offices and tore down Fascist symbols. Everyone expected peace at once. Garland and Smyth’s judgment is unsparing: “Never was a people’s faith in royalty destined to be more bitterly disappointed.”

The war continues.— Marshal Pietro Badoglio, first proclamation as head of government, 25 July 1943 (Garland & Smyth, ch. XV)

Held at a carabinieri barracks, Mussolini received a note from Badoglio describing his custody as protection against a plot. He replied that he would cooperate and wished Badoglio well in serving the King, “whose loyal servant I remain.” Seven weeks later, German paratroopers would free him from a mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso, and Hitler would install him as head of a puppet state in the north.

Berlin reacts

Berlin learned of the coup on 26 July. Hitler’s first impulse was to seize Rome with airborne and panzer troops, arrest the King and Badoglio and free Mussolini; Goebbels and Ribbentrop talked him out of also seizing the Vatican. The existing contingency plan for Italy, ALARICH, was adapted. German divisions began moving toward the Alpine passes and Nice; the 44th Infantry Division crossed the Brenner on 31 July and 1 August, and the 2nd Parachute Division began landing near Rome from 28 July. On 1 August a new plan, ACHSE, laid out how German forces would take over Italy by force on a code word if the Italians changed sides. When Badoglio’s government sent an envoy on 3 August asking for understanding, Hitler called it “the biggest impudence in history.”

For the Sicily campaign the effect was immediate. On 22 July Hitler had released the 29th Panzergrenadier Division for Sicily, and it would fight the Americans along the north coast. But after 25 July the German command began thinking seriously about getting its troops off the island rather than reinforcing it. That decision, and the evacuation that followed, is the story of Chapter 9.

1. 12 JulyMontgomery orders XXX Corps onto Highway 124 toward Caltagirone and Enna.
2. 13 July, 2316Alexander’s directive gives Highway 124 and Enna to Eighth Army.
3. 14 JulyPatton tells Bradley; the 45th Division sideslips west.
4. 15 JulyPatton forms the Provisional Corps under Keyes.
5. 16 JulyAgrigento surrenders to Col. Roy Moore; Rangers take Porto Empedocle.
6. 17 JulyPatton flies to Tunis; Alexander agrees to a drive on Palermo. That night, Waybur’s Medal of Honor action near Agrigento.
7. 19 July, 0500Provisional Corps jumps off; 504th gains 25 miles. Hitler and Mussolini meet near Feltre; U.S. bombers hit Rome.
8. 20 July82nd Airborne takes Sciacca.
9. 21 JulyTask Force X crosses the Belice; Castelvetrano and Alcamo surrender.
10. 22 July, after 1900Molinero surrenders Palermo at the royal palace; troops enter at 2000; Patton about 2100.
11. 23 JulyTrapani surrenders to the 82nd Airborne; Alexander orders Patton to turn east.
12. 24 July, 1700Grand Council of Fascism convenes.
13. 25 July, about 0300Grand Council votes 19 for Grandi’s motion.
14. 25 July, afternoonMussolini dismissed at Villa Savoia and taken into custody; Badoglio appointed at 1700.

Turn East: Ustica, the North Coast and the Race Ahead

On 23 July, the day after Palermo fell, Alexander ordered Patton to turn east toward Messina along the north coast road, Highway 113, and through the mountains on Highway 120. The Seventh Army had won its argument. It would no longer guard Montgomery’s flank; it would drive on Messina from the west while the Eighth Army pushed from the south. Patton, who had already ordered his divisions to prepare for exactly that, would soon tell Troy Middleton of the 45th Division that the drive was “a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake.”

The pieces moved quickly. The 45th Division, which had cut north across the island while the Provisional Corps swung west, was diverted east toward the coast near Termini Imerese, about 30 miles east of Palermo, and then along Highway 113. The 1st Division, which had taken Enna after the British bypassed it, pushed toward Nicosia and Troina in the mountains. The 3rd Division came out of Palermo to relieve the 45th on the coast road. (Those battles are told in Chapter 7.)

Even the small islands fell into line. Ustica, a small volcanic island some 30 miles off Palermo used by the Fascist regime as a place of internal exile, surrendered unconditionally to a party of British Army and U.S. Navy officers. A Navy photographer recorded its mayor standing beside them.

Palermo itself settled into a strange new life as the rear headquarters of an army. Montgomery flew in to confer with Patton; a photographer caught Patton seeing him off at the airport with a broad smile. The rivalry between them, and between their armies, was real, and both men played it up. But for the moment the Seventh Army had done what its commander wanted most. It had shown that it was the Eighth Army’s equal, and it had the port and the roads to prove it.

The Seventh Army’s turn toward Messina began from Palermo and Enna, and it would be a very different kind of war: mountain towns, blown bridges and German rearguards who did not surrender. But the hardest fighting of the second half of July had fallen on the British and Canadians. On the Catania plain and in the hill towns of the interior, Montgomery’s army met the toughest German defense of the campaign. That story is Chapter 6: The Hard Way North.