The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [215]
The landings in Sicily also had the effect of overthrowing Mussolini, whose Fascist Grand Council passed a vote of no confidence in him by nineteen votes to seven a fortnight later. (His own son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Ciano, voted with the majority, and along with four of the others was to pay for it with his life later on.) It seems somewhat unFascist of the Council even to call a vote, and even more unFascist of Mussolini to take any note of its democratic will, but when he visited the King to report what had happened, he was arrested. His replacement, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, publicly committed Italy to fighting on against the Allied invader, in order to reassure Hitler, while secretly entering into peace negotiations with Eisenhower. Even before the Sicilian campaign was over, Hitler sent Rommel, commander of a new Army Group B, to contest the peninsula with eight and a half divisions. (After Rommel left for France on 6 November 1943, this army group was reconstituted as the Fourteenth Army.)
The Sicilian campaign saw the equally egocentric Generals Patton and Montgomery fighting together in the same campaign. Their rivalry was as pathetic as it was probably unavoidable, and when later the egos of Generals Mark Clark and Omar Bradley were added to the ever combustible mix, it did the Allied war effort no good. While much is made of Montgomery’s and Patton’s vanity and ceaseless self-promotion, however, it is often forgotten how Clark, in the words of one history:
became obsessed with public relations and soon had fifty men working to ensure that his efforts, and those of his Army (and particularly the American part of it), were given maximum publicity. Ensuring this he ordered a ‘three to one rule’. Every press release was to mention Clark three times on the front page and at least once on all other pages – and the General also demanded that photographs be only taken of him from his left side. His public relations team even came up with a Fifth Army song: ‘Stand up, stand up for General Clark, let’s sing the praises of General Clark…’ He was very fond of that song.5
Patton’s ambitions for a major command in Italy were ended prematurely after he slapped two hospitalized, shell-shocked soldiers. In two separate incidents, he called Private Charles H. Kuhl an ‘arrant coward’ and a week later Private Paul G. Bennett a ‘yellow bastard’, adding, ‘I won’t have those cowardly bastards hanging around our hospitals. We’ll probably have to shoot them some time anyway, or we’ll raise a breed of morons.’6 Although on Eisenhower’s insistence Patton had to apologize to his troops – most of whom vocally supported him – Patton felt no genuine repentance, except insofar as the incidents had damaged his hitherto meteoric career. (In both the German and Russian armies, needless to say, the two privates would have been shot.) Eisenhower’s relegation of his old friend Patton led to Omar Bradley leapfrogging him, and becoming commander of the US First Army in the invasion of France. When Bradley paid a final courtesy call on Patton on 7 September 1943, at his palace in Palermo, he found him ‘in a near-suicidal state… This great proud warrior, my former boss, had been brought to his knees.’
To counter the general impression of George Patton it is worth considering the testimony given many years after the war to the US Army’s Senior Officer Oral History Program by General John ‘Ed’ Hull, one of George Marshall’s right-hand men at the Pentagon, who knew Patton well and worked with him closely in the planning stages of three campaigns. ‘General Patton was in a way a two-faced individual,’ Hull stated.
At heart he was very gentle, he was modest, very friendly, not at all superior in his attitude towards you, but very kindly, very considerate. But he put on the other face – well, we’ve had a lot of generals