Читать книгу Sicily '43 - James Holland - Страница 23

ON FRIDAY, 11 JUNE 1943, at around 4 p.m., an American C-47 transport touched down at Luqa airfield on Malta. On board were two colonels of the 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, as well as two battalion commanders of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the regiment’s commander, Colonel James M. Gavin. It had already been quite an eye-opening journey. The party had travelled from the 82nd Airborne Division’s training base at Oujda in French Morocco, first to Tunis, where wrecks of German aircraft were still scattered all around the city’s edge; from there they headed out low over Cap Bon, the site of the final Axis surrender on 13 May, and down the east coast to Monastir. There they met with their British counterparts, who seemed to possess an insouciance Gavin found both impressive and unnerving. ‘We are sweating, tense, trying hard at everything we attempt,’ he jotted in his diary.1 ‘They are relaxed, appearing indifferent at times, no pressure, and everything seems to be getting done in tip-top shape.’ Sleeping on their C-47 that night, they were up early the following morning to fly on to Tripoli, en route crossing over the Mareth Line, the scene of more fighting back in March. Briefings received and clearance given, they then headed on to Malta, via Pantelleria, which had fallen to the Allies that very same day.

On Malta they switched planes, boarding several Mosquitoes – the ‘wooden wonders’ of the RAF, multi-function aircraft capable of flying at over 400 mph. Since there was only room for two in a Mosquito, including the pilot, Gavin had to take on the role of navigator. Once dusk had fallen, off they went, hurtling over the sea towards Sicily, following the route his troops would take on 9 July, in four weeks’ time, and simulating the same night-time conditions by flying at just 600 feet off the deck. As temporary navigator, Gavin found the drop zones – DZs – easily enough; then they flew inland towards Niscemi, a town perched on a ridge looking down over the Gela Plain towards the sea, before turning back and speeding by Ponte Olivo airfield, one of the key Allied targets for D-Day on Sicily. Flying separately in different Mosquitoes, his two battalion commanders, Lieutenant-Colonels Krause and Keens, sped directly over Ponte Olivo and were both shot at by flak. ‘No one hit,’ noted Gavin.2 ‘We are all pleased with the results of our reconnaissance.’

Gavin and his men were to be the first American troops on Sicily, and had been given the mission of parachuting in ahead of the seaborne landings to capture and secure the Piano Lupo – the Plain of the Wolf – an upland area to the east of Gela – and both prevent the enemy from using it and also use it to their own advantage; it was always good to control the high ground. They were also to disrupt enemy lines of communication and then, on D-Day itself, help the attacking 1st Infantry Division in taking first Gela and then the Ponte Olivo airfield. The men, he knew, were well trained and physically fit and ready; but none of them had ever been in action before, and Gavin, outwardly confident, calm and collected, none the less worried privately. No person really knew how they would respond to being under fire until they faced this challenge for the first time. Doubts were inevitable. So too was fear. On 5 July, Gavin would find a man from the 2nd Battalion with a rifle across his knees and a bible in his hand, contemplating suicide. ‘Said he was going to be killed anyway,’ noted Gavin.3 ‘So it goes.’

Jim Gavin was thirty-six years old but looked younger. He had formed the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment from scratch, using training programmes he had devised, and applying tactics and operational techniques he had developed himself. Ambitious, extremely driven and a deep thinker about all aspects of modern warfare, he was a progressive officer hugely respected by his superiors, his peers and the men under his command. That he was a regimental commander at all was all the more remarkable because of his extremely humble beginnings. An orphan, he had been adopted at the age of two and brought up in the coal-mining town of Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania. It had not taken him long to realize a career as a miner was not for him, even though he had left school at just twelve years old and needed to get a job to help with the family coffers. At seventeen he had run away to New York, where he managed to blag his way into the army, even though he was under age. Posted to Panama, he read prodigiously and caught the eye of a senior NCO, who took the young man under his wing and encouraged him to apply to a local army school – an opportunity for Gavin to better himself, because from there the brightest and best students were encouraged to try for West Point. Catching up on his lost schooling in quick time, Gavin duly won a place at the army school in Corozal in the Canal Zone, and from there a place at West Point. In the land of opportunity, this orphan was grabbing it firmly with both hands.

In June 1929 he graduated as a second lieutenant in the US Army, continuing his studies as his fledgling career got under way. Stints in the infantry at home and then out in the Philippines were followed by a posting back to West Point and specifically to the Tactics faculty. He was still there when war broke out in Europe and, studying German operations in great detail, quickly became an advocate of airborne warfare. When the US Army decided to form its own parachute school at Fort Benning in June 1940, Gavin was among the early volunteers, eventually released from West Point in February the following year and soon making a name for himself. He was asked to write the airborne field manual, FM 31-30: Tactics and Techniques of Air-Borne Troops, which not only gathered together lessons from his studies of German – and also Soviet – airborne forces, but also drew on his own tactical studies and included information about how such troops should be structured and organized, and how and when they should be deployed. Far from a carbon copy of German doctrine, Gavin’s vision was very much his own.

A stint at the US Army Command and General Staff College marked Gavin out for higher command and sure enough, in August 1942, he was made the first commander of the newly activated 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR). By April 1943, he reckoned he had licked his men into pretty good shape: they were physically and mentally tough, able to think on their feet, experienced at jumping out of aircraft and at a more advanced state of training than any other regiment – which was why they were sent to North Africa to join Major-General Matthew Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne Division. Ridgway had it in mind that Gavin’s 505th would spearhead the US airborne operations for HUSKY.

Gavin and his men had landed at Casablanca on 10 May and from there been posted to Oujda for further training. It had been accepted from an early stage of the HUSKY planning that airborne troops would play a key role in the invasion as a whole, not just the American sector. Both paratroopers and glider-borne troops were, however, new elements in Allied planning. It’s fair to say that both American and British war leaders had been somewhat dazzled by the cut, dash and sheer chutzpah of German airborne operations. Germany’s glider troops had captured a seemingly impregnable Belgium fort, Eben Emael, back in May 1940, while their paratroopers had taken key bridges; later, German paratroopers had helped to capture Crete in May 1941. These airborne formations were regarded within the Wehrmacht and by their opponents with a certain amount of awe as highly trained special forces – an elite of shock troops that offered tactical flexibility in attack.

While the Allies quickly latched on to the successes of the German airborne forces, less analysis was given to their shortcomings. On 10 May 1940, at the start of the attack on France and the Low Countries, the Luftwaffe had lost a staggering 353 aircraft, most of which were delivering the airborne spearhead; this was the worst single day of losses for the Luftwaffe in the entire war to date, but was never much considered by Allied planners. Nor was the fact that a battalion of paratroopers was destroyed at Dombas in Norway in April 1940 by the Norwegian army, who were not widely recognized as being especially well equipped or well trained at the time. Nor was much attention paid to the fact that, for the most part, German airborne operations had been against low-quality troops, or that half the force of paratroopers sent to the assault on Crete had been lost over the island, despite the Germans’ subsequent victory there.

The British, with Churchill as one of the loudest advocates, had quickly put plans together to create an airborne brigade of five thousand men; that had soon swollen to double the size. In October 1941, the 1st Airborne Division had been created and more recently, in April 1943, a second division, the 6th, was also formed. In the United States, the first airborne formation had been the 501st Parachute Infantry Unit; in March 1942 the 82nd Airborne Division had been formed, followed in August the same year by the 101st, and in May 1943 by two more airborne divisions. Both the British and American armies were also developing glider-borne and parachute units concurrently. A huge amount of time, effort, money and training had gone into creating forces that so far had not really been tested in battle. Airborne troops had been dropped as part of the Allied invasion of north-west Africa, but that had been a total fiasco, while a British paratrooper operation to capture an enemy airfield in Tunisia had also achieved absolutely nothing except the loss of a few good men and a very long and risky walk back to friendly lines. In terms of glider operations, there had been just one, by the British, into Norway in November 1942. All the men aboard had been killed, or captured and subsequently executed.

Much discussion had taken place over exactly how these rapidly growing airborne forces should be used for HUSKY. In the early plans, the British and Americans were to land one after the other, which had meant all transport aircraft would be available to lift airborne troops for both. That all changed once the final plan had been accepted, at which point a certain amount of frantic jockeying for position had taken place. General Ridgway, concerned his airborne forces might have to play second fiddle to the British because of a shortage of transport aircraft, went straight to Patton, who, as he had hoped, demanded and was given a paratroop jump ahead of the seaborne assault.

Ridgway’s concerns had been understandable. The British, who had taken the top spots in command of all three services for HUSKY, had also, from early May, secured the senior airborne command too. This was given to Major-General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, dapper, dashing, and married to the best-selling novelist Daphne du Maurier. Browning had been commander of the British 1st Airborne Division, but had since been bumped up to become Airborne Advisor to Allied Forces Headquarters; for all Alexander’s incredible experience, airborne operations were entirely new to him and almost as new to Eisenhower too. Clearly, airborne forces were a growing element in Allied plans, and there was also an implicit understanding they would be used to spearhead the cross-Channel invasion the following year too, so Browning’s role was an important one.

The trouble was, no one had much idea about how airborne operations should best be used. Young, ambitious commanders were inevitably drawn to the new airborne forces precisely because they were new, at the cutting edge of war. There had also been an understanding from the outset that airborne troops were special – an elite force. All these men were volunteers, not conscripts thrown together. They trained harder, were physically fitter and, crucially, were highly motivated, which meant they were far more likely to be able to use their initiative, an essential attribute that particularly marked out the better troops from the rank and file. Unlike the vast majority of soldiers fighting in the Allied armies, who simply longed to keep their heads down and get through, airborne soldiers wanted to be fine soldiers. They wanted to be the best, and generally speaking thought of themselves in such terms. Their commanders understood this attitude, and the prestige and accolades that would potentially follow from it. Ambition was not a fault; but it did mean there was a level of competitiveness among the airborne forces that was, perhaps, more prominent than in other parts of the armed services, pitting one regiment against another, paratroopers against glider-borne troops, British versus American. Ridgway’s concern had been that with Browning, a Brit, as the new senior airborne advisor, it would be the British 1st Airborne, rather than the US 82nd Airborne, who would get first dibs at the precious C-47 fleet.

As it happened, however, he need not have worried, because Boy Browning’s replacement at 1st Airborne was the newly promoted Major-General George ‘Hoppy’ Hopkinson, a man of enormous charm and voracious ambition, but less for paratroopers than for glider-borne operations. Before taking command of 1st Airborne, Hopkinson had been commander of the 1st Airlanding Brigade, and to say he was messianic about glider operations would be an understatement. Hopkinson had always been a man in a hurry. Twice he had resigned from the army because of a lack of opportunity and because the rate of peacetime advancement had been too slow. He liked being in charge and leading new units – such as the specialist GHQ unit, codenamed ‘Phantom’, that was supposed to be the British Expeditionary Force commander Lord Gort’s eyes and ears on the ground back in 1940. After Dunkirk, Hopkinson lobbied hard to be allowed to develop Phantom into a permanent unit; he got his way and it became the GHQ Liaison Regiment, although after the invasion scare had evaporated, Hopkinson himself lost command. Then came another opportunity with the development of airborne forces and in particular, for him, of gliders. Relentless ambition and a gift of the gab unquestionably helped him move swiftly into the top job at 1st Airborne in early May 1943, and with this promotion he was determined to become the champion of glider-borne forces. The trouble was, so tunnel-visioned had he become in his enthusiasm that he had failed to realize his force was not remotely ready for deployment.

By this point, Britain had been at war long enough to have sorted much of the wheat from the chaff when it came to generalship. The Americans, too, after North Africa, were starting to work out who was good and who needed sending home. The airborne forces were still so new, however, and those making the decisions on fresh appointments had their eyes on so many other matters besides, that it was not hard for an individual like Hopkinson, who talked a fantastic game, to get a divisional command in an untested arm. The same factors explained why he was able to convince those who might have known better – had they really thought about it rationally – that it was a good idea to send very badly trained glider pilots across a huge expanse of sea, at night, in gliders they were not used to operating, to land very close to the sea on ground that was both rocky and contained a lot of stone walls.

It’s clear that from the moment Hopkinson was appointed commander of 1st Airborne he did all he could to avoid being in a room with Browning, because the latter, when still commanding the division, had strongly advocated using paratroopers on the night of the invasion to capture a key bridge south of Syracuse, the Ponte Grande, and then storm the city itself. Instead, rather as Ridgway had done with Patton, Hopkinson managed to secure a face-to-face audience with Montgomery and persuade him instead to use glider-borne troops both for this key objective and then to attack a second bridge further north, at Augusta, the following night. Paratroopers, he cautioned, would not be able to drop with the concentrated accuracy needed; what’s more, only with gliders could the invaders achieve the kind of tactical surprise needed to capture a bridge intact before the enemy realized what was happening and blew it up first. Paratroopers would be better used for a later objective, the Primosole Bridge, which led into the Plain of Catania – by which time the cat, of course, would be already out of the bag.

He might have had a point had there been plenty of the right gliders available, along with lots of highly skilled and trained pilots, and had he himself any experience of mounting such an operation. But not a single one of those criteria had been met. As it happened, the Glider Pilot Regiment had a new commander in Lieutenant-Colonel George Chatterton – the previous CO having been lost in the ill-fated Norway venture the previous November. Competent, intelligent and, above all, a realist, Chatterton had been tearing his hair out in frustration since being warned earlier in the year to get his men ready for overseas deployment. The unit was still new; and although the British had developed the Horsa glider, there had yet to be enough of them for his small force to train adequately. It was all well and good being sent overseas, but what about training? And what about the gliders that would be needed? His questions were met with obfuscation or, worse, silence.

On 3 April, Chatterton had finally been told the regiment were to be posted to North Africa. Still no one could tell him how many gliders might be available, and he boarded their ship with his men none the wiser. Most of his pilots had between six and twelve hours’ flying time logged over the previous six months; it was as though the British had returned to the bad old days of the last war when they’d sent young pilots up in their Sopwith Camels with just a handful of hours in their logbooks. They reached Oran in Algeria on 22 April after two weeks at sea. ‘I was full of foreboding,’ said Chatterton.4 ‘There was indeed a great gulf between those in authority and myself as to our proper role in battle.’ That was something of an understatement.

In Algeria, Chatterton discovered to his horror that there were still no gliders, which meant his 240 pilots had now not flown for at least three months. It was a ludicrous situation, and makes Hopkinson’s manic lobbying of Montgomery all the more bizarre, because by 7 May, when he had his audience with the Eighth Army commander, he would have been well aware of how deplorable the state of glider pilot training was and also of the total lack of any gliders with which to hurriedly lick themselves into shape. Neither factor was mentioned to Monty. As far as Montgomery was concerned, airborne forces were to be used, and here, in front of him, was the commander of the 1st Airborne Division advising him on how best they should be deployed. It did not occur to him that Hopkinson could be so woefully reckless as to promote something for which his men were ill-prepared and unequipped.

Within a day of his meeting with Montgomery, Hopkinson had briefed Chatterton and shown him photographs of the planned landing zones, with their rocks, walls and almost total lack of any kind of flat and open ground.

‘You know, sir,’ Chatterton interjected, ‘that the pilots have had no flying practice for at least three months and little or no experience of night flying at all?’

Hopkinson brushed aside his concerns. The Americans were going to provide both tugs and gliders.

‘American gliders?’ Chatterton asked.5

‘Yes, what difference will that make?’ Hopkinson replied.

‘Difference, sir?’ Chatterton answered, scarcely believing what he was hearing. ‘Why, they hardly know our own gliders, let alone American!’

Hopkinson then warned Chatterton that if he didn’t start playing ball, he would be sacked and sent home. After a short consideration, Chatterton decided, with a heavy heart, that it would be better to stand by the men, even though he thought Hopkinson’s plan insane.

When the American Waco gliders did eventually turn up, they were in crates spread over a number of different ports, and when they were unpacked, it was discovered many had suffered damage during the crossing. Key assembly tools were also lacking – as was any sense of urgency. At Blida, for example, assembling the gliders was sixth priority, and the task of putting together the twenty-five crated gliders delivered there was given to one officer and twenty GIs, none of whom had any previous glider assembly experience. By 25 May, a little over six weeks before HUSKY D-Day, only thirty gliders had been assembled. Eventually, as it was at last realized a crisis was looming, glider assembly was given greater priority, so that by 13 June some 346 gliders had been put together and delivered to the airfield at La Sénia. Many were then damaged by strong winds and so grounded for repairs, causing further training delays. By 30 June, most of the gliders had developed weaknesses in the tail wiring, and so all were grounded yet again for a further three days.

In addition, thirty-six Horsa gliders, which were quite different and with which the British pilots were familiar, were being flown out from England twelve at a time by A Flight, 295 Squadron, using ageing Halifax bombers. From the outset, the operation was beset with problems. First, 295 Squadron did not fly Halifaxes and so the pilots and crews had to convert in quick order. Three pilots didn’t cut the mustard in time and a fourth crashed in bad weather. Towing the Horsas all the way from England to North Africa took around seventy-seven hours for each Halifax and crew, an amount of flying time that meant the Halifaxes required a huge amount of servicing; but the stores for this, although sent ahead, had not arrived in North Africa when the Halifaxes turned up with their Horsas. Then there was the added problem of extreme turbulence while flying over the Atlas mountains, which did nothing to improve the state of either the Halifaxes or the gliders they were towing.

In all, one Halifax and Horsa were shot down en route, another pairing disappeared entirely, one Halifax crashed, one Horsa became detached and fell into the sea, another was brought back and another had to be written off on arrival. One pilot suffered six engine failures during the six weeks of ferrying flights, others experienced several – and almost all were due to oil leaks. As one of the ferrying pilots, Flight Lieutenant Tommy Grant, noted, ‘An oil leak may easily force the Halifax to jettison his glider, and two oil leaks on a long sea journey may cause complete loss of the Halifax.’6 One of the Horsa pilots – Chatterton’s adjutant, Captain Alistair Cooper – had been attacked over the Bay of Biscay by Focke-Wulf Condors, released himself from the tug and ditched in the Atlantic, been picked up, sailed back to England, collected another Horsa and ferried it out to North Africa. By the time he walked into Chatterton’s Nissen hut, it was almost time to fly to Sicily. Although an extremely competent pilot, he had zero hours’ night-flying experience.

The net result was that by the beginning of July only nineteen out of the thirty-six Horsas had been delivered, and there was almost no time at all for training in flying them loaded even by day, let alone by night. Nor had there been much training on the Wacos. Chatterton had first flown one on 14 May, and on the basis of this a rough training syllabus was prepared. His men flew as much as they could, but that was not saying very much. By 9 July, Chatterton’s glider pilots each had an average of 1.2 hours of night flying and just four and a half hours of flying time in Wacos. It was nowhere near enough. But the die had been cast.

A further operation was being planned for the early hours of 10 July, and that was to take out an Italian coastal defence battery on Capo Murro di Porco – the Cape of the Snout of the Pig – which lay on a peninsula that stretched out into the sea directly south of Syracuse. This battery, which contained four guns of what appeared from aerial photographs to be at least 150mm calibre, posed a serious threat both to the invasion beaches immediately to the south and to an assault on Syracuse. It was essential they were destroyed, and in quick order, before the landings occurred.

The men given this task were some of what had been 1 SAS – the Special Air Service – who had caused havoc against the enemy the previous year in Libya. Operating independently and deep behind enemy lines, they had made a series of daring raids on enemy landing grounds, supply columns and other targets. However, since their maverick commander, Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling, had been captured in January in Tunisia, an environment not so well suited to such hit-and-run tactics, the men of the SAS had been at something of a loose end, sent back to their training camp at Kabrit in Egypt, their future uncertain.

Among those wondering whether he would ever see any action was 21-year-old Lieutenant Peter Davis. He had been posted to the Middle East straight from officer training back in England the previous autumn, and after being sent to the vast Infantry Base Depot next to the Suez Canal at Geneifa had volunteered to join C Squadron, 1st Special Service Regiment, which despite its name had in fact been at the time the only squadron in this still embryonic unit. Set up the previous summer, initially to help develop guerrilla warfare on the Syrian border with Turkey in case Rommel’s forces should reach the Suez Canal, it too had been at a loose end and so had eventually been merged into 1 SAS. By March 1943, however, rumours were flying around that the SAS would be broken up entirely. Stirling was a prisoner of war, while his right-hand man, Major Paddy Mayne, had gone on a drunken spree in Cairo, had had one too many fights and bust up one too many bars, and had ended up in a cell.

Davis had first met Mayne soon after he’d been released and had returned to Kabrit. Already, Mayne was something of a legend – a former rugby international for both Ireland and the British Lions, he was known for his utter fearlessness, stamina, and imperturbability in the face of extreme danger. Davis had been struck first by Mayne’s sheer size. ‘His form seemed to fill the whole tent,’ he noted.7 ‘Standing well over six feet, every part of his body was built on a proportionately generous scale: his wrists were twice the size of those of a normal man, while his fists seemed to be as large as a polo ball.’ At the time, he had been wearing a reddish beard and had looked at Davis with keen, piercing blue eyes – but then had spoken in a soft voice, with a hint of an Irish brogue, that was totally at odds with his immense physicality. Davis thought he seemed rather shy, albeit perfectly courteous and charming.

As it happened, Davis was about to see a lot more of him because 1 SAS was then split into two, 250 of them – including himself – joining the newly created Special Raiding Squadron under Mayne’s command, and the remaining 150 making up the new Special Boat Squadron under Major George Jellicoe, another desert stalwart and son of the First World War admiral. Both units were to take part in HUSKY: the SBS to launch diversionary raids on Sardinia, the SRS to attack the battery at Capo Murro di Porco – not that any of them knew that then. The idea was for the SRS to parachute into battle, and the SBS to get there by sea.

The SRS was, from the outset, Mayne’s unit, although on paper they were answerable to a colonel commanding HQ Raiding Forces, who arrived at Kabrit and gave a speech that impressed no one very much. ‘It hardly mattered,’ noted Davis, ‘as we hardly saw anything of him.8 To all intents and purposes Paddy was the boss and took no orders from anyone.’ Mayne’s mission was to shape this new unit and train it as he saw fit, so long as the training involved stifling heat, endurance, scaling cliffs, close-quarters fighting and firing mortars. He decided to divide his men into three troops of three sections each, which were divided down again into half-sections and then three-man teams. Davis was put in No. 2 Troop under Captain Harry Poat, whom he liked and respected immediately. In fact, he liked all his new fellows.

On 20 March, Mayne had briefed his men in a soft, faltering voice that could barely be heard. They were, he told them, in for a very intense period of training – for what, no one knew, not even he; but it was going to be important. Within a week, after one last drunken party, they set off for Palestine, where they began training with a 45-mile march in oven-like heat. Over the next two months, there was no let-up; at the beginning of June, by now physically honed, they boarded the converted Irish Sea ferry HMS Ulster Monarch to begin a month of intensive training in seaborne assault, involving getting ashore in LCAs – landing craft, assault – climbing cliffs and carrying out night-time research assaults; plans for a parachute assault had been quietly dropped. That this was the kind of operation for which Jellicoe’s SBS had been established was never mentioned. At the end of June came further endurance marches and experiments with Benzedrine, an amphetamine – ‘speed’ – that was trialled on No. 3 Troop. Mayne had been quite impressed with its effect: the men had been dragging their heels, but after taking the drug perked up enormously, picking up their feet, swinging their arms and singing merrily. Finally came their last training exercise: a mock assault on a British anti-aircraft battery 2 miles or so from where the Ulster Monarch was docked. ‘The attack’, noted Peter Davis, ‘was an outstanding success in every way.9 I do not think it any exaggeration to say that those gunners were completely at a loss.’

By early June, then, the Allies had a decent number of supremely well-trained and highly motivated troops. There were also British Commandos, created and designed for raiding operations. Really, these men were among the very best soldiers anywhere in the world at this time. It was in the delivery of these troops where differences emerged, for while the SRS and Commandos were in pretty safe hands with the navy, the same could not be said for Allied paratroopers, whether those under Gavin’s command or the British training for later operations on the Primosole Bridge; for while the state of glider training was absolutely deplorable, training for the troop carrier commands was hardly sufficient either. In part this was because delivering paratroopers into combat was just one of their many roles; transports were constantly busy, especially given that the Allies were preparing for HUSKY from bases stretched as far apart as Palestine, Malta and French Morocco.

It meant, though, that troop carrier aircrew simply had not had the same levels of combined training as had those being delivered into battle by the navy. This amounted to a grave flaw in the development of the airborne arm: that while so much thought had been given to training the elite troops themselves, the same concentration had not been applied to those charged with delivering them to the battle zone. The British had not developed a troop transport, and while the Americans had successfully developed the DC-3 into the C-47 – called the Dakota by the British – some important adaptations had not been made, such as providing the military aircraft with self-sealing fuel tanks, which helped prevent the fatal spread of fire should one of them get hit. Furthermore, the cream of the crop among pilots and navigators tended to fly fighters or bombers, not transport aircraft. This led to the paradoxical situation where some of the very best troops were being delivered into combat by among the least trained and least skilled pilots. There were, of course, exceptions; but 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, who would be delivering the 505th Parachute Combat Team into Sicily, had conducted only two night-time parachute drop exercises. Of these, one had become badly dispersed while the second went rather better; it was hard to know what could be gleaned from these results, but even an optimist could only conclude they now had a fifty–fifty chance of getting it right on the night. A better option would be to have the troops dropped in daylight, but that simply wasn’t possible. The invasion fleet needed to approach the coast under cover of darkness because of the threat of enemy aircraft and coastal batteries, which meant the invasion had to be launched at very first light. The whole point of the airborne operations was to take out strongpoints and secure ground before the landings. And that meant dropping in darkness.

Colonel Jim Gavin had wavered continually during this training and waiting period. Jump exercises on to the hard, stony desert near their training base in Morocco had led to one too many injuries, which was frustrating. His men were in fine fettle; but despite this, one moment he felt confident, the next dark doubts crept into his mind. ‘I feel quite certain that I will also get an opportunity for advancement if I survive,’ he confided to his diary.10 ‘I may not. I am going to keep the parachute tradition in mind. Chances will be taken, risks run, and everything ventured. If I survive, well and good. If I am killed at least I have been true to myself, my convictions … At the moment, I haven’t the slightest fear.’

He worried, too, about his subordinate commanders. One in particular, Major Gray of the 2nd Battalion, troubled him. Gavin just didn’t feel he was cutting it. Despite these concerns, he’d not thought to relieve him before the assault; but then Gray had gone AWOL for a few days. As it happened, he had been on a legitimate fact-finding operation – but for Gavin it was enough to wield the axe. ‘More bad judgement than AWOL,’ Gavin had conceded.11 ‘I should have replaced him in the States.’ Gray had been one of just three battalion commanders in the 505th, and Gavin had to feel totally confident in all of them. Major Mark Alexander, the highly competent battalion XO – deputy – took over the command on 21 June. Despite Gavin’s doubts, Gray had been popular with the men, making Alexander’s task, just a couple of weeks before the jump into action, an invidious one. ‘It really put pressure on me,’ said Alexander, ‘as I had a lot to do to get on top of things.12 There were a lot of good men in the battalion, but some of them were still Gray’s men and I had to fight that issue because they didn’t understand why he was being relieved.’

None the less, Alexander, at thirty-one, was older than most, tall and athletic, and had a natural aura of authority; he was also, like Gavin, the kind of man who would never dream of asking any of his men to do something he would not do himself. Gavin gave him a very able West Pointer, Captain Jack Norton, as his new XO, and together the two men swiftly got the battalion back on an even keel. Even so, Alexander had not been too happy with how the night exercises had gone, and so had spoken to the commander of the troop carrier group that would be taking them to Sicily. No matter where they were dropped, Alexander emphasized, he wanted to make sure the battalion was dropped together. That way, they would at least have the opportunity to organize themselves and fight as a battalion. It was hardly a resounding vote of confidence in the Troop Carrier Wing.

Then there was the time it took to move everyone and all their equipment up to Tunisia. The move from Oujda in western Algeria had begun on 16 June, by which time Gavin had once again been racked by doubts. It was too late for any more practice jumps, however, as the move was not expected to be completed until 3 July. By that time they were bivouacked about 20 miles north of the ancient city of Kairouan and 10 miles south of Enfidaville, where just a couple of months earlier there had been fierce fighting. Battle debris was still strewn all over the place. ‘The loneliest sight in the world,’ Gavin jotted in his diary, ‘is to come across a lone grave in the desert marked only with a simple wooden cross and a rusty helmet.’13 He was keenly aware that one day very soon, that could easily be him.