Sicily '43. James Holland

the coast and the Matmata Hills, while the New Zealand Corps outflanked the position by making a 200-mile trek around the back of the mountains. By the beginning of April, Eighth Army had turned north; while they were briefly halted by the Italians at Wadi Akarit, II Corps and the rest of First Army advanced from the north and west against von Arnim’s 5. Panzerarmee. The Allies were closing in, the Axis bridgehead becoming ever smaller. The final offensive, in the Medjerda valley west of Tunis, was possibly the best-executed battle the Allies had yet launched, smashing the last resistance and ensuring that by 13 May victory had, at last, been secured in North Africa.

      While all this had been going on, the Allies were busy planning their next move: the invasion of Sicily and the first assault on Fortress Europe, an operation of mind-boggling complexity and one that presented what had first appeared to be insuperable challenges.

      CHAPTER 2

      A United Front

      BY LATE JUNE 1943 the Allies were almost ready, and in Algeria the US 9th Division was among the American units training for the forthcoming invasion. Since the end of the Tunisian campaign, they had been based in the middle of the rocky desert 30 miles south of Sidi bel Abbès, an ancient walled oasis town south of Oran. The 9th Division, like all those American ground units that had fought in Tunisia, had learned the hard way and learned fast; well aware by now there was no room for any kind of complacency, they had, since arriving back in Algeria, been training hard.

      Within the division, the 39th Infantry Regiment had been adopting a number of British tricks of the trade, thanks to 24-year-old Lieutenant Charlie Scheffel, who had spent time attached to a British brigade in England and then more recently, during the Tunisian campaign, at the battle schools set up under British instructors in Algeria. Since victory in Tunisia back in May, Scheffel had been promoted from platoon commander to first lieutenant, and was now 1st Battalion S-3 staff officer – plans and operations. After imparting the benefits of his fast-growing experience to the whole of the battalion, Scheffel had been asked to do the same for the other two battalions in the division. In the 39th, as elsewhere, there was a hunger to learn and get better; after all, it didn’t take a genius to realize that the better the soldier, the better the chances of survival. Combine that with dramatically increased amounts of supplies and there was every reason to think the US Seventh Army would soon be a formidable outfit. No one, though, could expect this to happen overnight. Apart from the fifty US Army Rangers who had taken part in the ill-fated Dieppe Raid the previous August, it was only since November that American troops had been in combat on the ground in the western theatre and, for the vast majority, only since the turn of the New Year that they’d been fighting the Germans and Italians. That wasn’t very long, yet very soon the Americans would be providing an entire army to help re-enter Europe and capture Sicily. It was a big ask, to put it mildly, in this still early phase of their part in the war against Germany and Italy.

      Raised in the small town of Enid in Oklahoma, Charlie Scheffel was the son of a German and a Swedish immigrant. His parents had reached America with little but had done well; after briefly serving in the US Army, his father had had first the insight to set up a filling station and then the entrepreneurial flair to start prospecting for oil. By the summer of 1929 he had a number of highly successful wells, plenty of money and a brand new Studebaker, in which the family drove to California for an unforgettable and wonderful holiday. Then, in October, everything had come tumbling down around them with the financial crash. First the oil business collapsed, and then Scheffel’s father, always so strong and vital, contracted pneumonia; three months after the Wall Street Crash he was dead, aged just fifty. ‘All of a sudden,’ noted Scheffel, ‘we were alone in a world that seemed increasingly uncertain.1 I was scared.’

      The Great Depression that hit the United States after the crash brought untold hardship to millions. It is extraordinary to think how many of the young men like Charlie Scheffel, now fighting in the war, had grown up deprived of one, if not both, parents. Undoubtedly it made them tougher and, generally speaking, better able to cope with the challenges and adversity flung at them now America was at war. The Scheffel family, cruelly shorn of a husband and father as well as their livelihood, had somehow to pull themselves together and play with the cards they had been dealt – a prospect made even tougher by the dwarfism suffered by Scheffel’s younger brother, Stanley, in an era when physical differences were a considerable handicap.

      Charlie himself grew up physically strong and athletic and won a sports scholarship to Oklahoma A&M University, where he played tennis, basketball and, especially, baseball. He also joined the college ROTC, which provided him with a useful few extra dollars. In the summer he played semi-pro baseball for a dollar a day; and back home in Enid he had a girlfriend, Ruth, with whom he was smitten, so life had been looking up. In the fall of 1940, the draft was introduced and the college ROTC began recruiting for the advanced course; signing up for this meant he would not be conscripted before completing his college degree, and also that later he could join the army directly as a second lieutenant.

      The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 changed everything. With the United States now irrevocably at war, Scheffel had returned to college expecting to be sent off to the army full time right away, but was given a reprieve to complete his degree the next May. With the future suddenly so uncertain, Scheffel asked Ruth to marry him; after their wedding at the end of March 1942, they spent their honeymoon in a dollar-a-night room above a garage. ‘We had no time to go anywhere else,’ Scheffel recalled.2 After graduating, he was offered a place in the Finance Corps, but spurned the chance of an easy war and instead joined the infantry. ‘A surge of patriotism made me want to get to the SOBs who had attacked us,’ he wrote.3 ‘I was also young and needed to prove myself as a man.’

      Sent to Britain as part of a replacement unit, he bade farewell to his mother, brother and new wife, and set sail across the Atlantic. He and the rest of his provisional company were initially attached to a British brigade, most of whom had already fought in France back in 1940. This was an early experiment to see whether British and American troops could operate and fight literally side-by-side, and although Scheffel soon realized there were a lot of cultural differences, he learned much from his new comrades. British officers, for example, had batmen – soldier-servants. This was not for the maintenance of some antiquated class division but rather because an officer needed a personal assistant, not least to dig a foxhole when first in the line. ‘If you’re an officer in command,’ he was told, ‘you’re going to be so damn busy figuring out how to get out of the mess you’re in, you’ll never have time to dig your own slit.’4 Scheffel also learned it was far better to dig a foxhole for two men than for one, as he’d been taught back home. Two men could support each other, watch backs, one staying awake while the other slept. They could provide more warmth, and emotional as well as physical support.

      He learned much more besides, and even went off to war on an all-British ship as part of Operation TORCH. Soon afterwards, though, the novelty of being with the more experienced British began to wear off. He and his fellow Americans, still part of a provisional company, seemed to be given all the worst tasks – endless night patrols and night duties – and Scheffel, for one, wanted to be back with his own kind. ‘I think we got the shit details because we were rookies,’ he noted, ‘and the Brits didn’t trust us much.’5 After a few days, he asked the brigadier if he and his men could rejoin the US Army – and the very same day, they were on their way: half, Scheffel among them, sent to join the 39th Infantry Regiment in the 9th Division, and the other half to join the Big Red One, the 1st Infantry Division.

      While the Big Red One had fought alongside the British in northern Tunisia, the rest of the US II Corps had suffered its bloody nose at Kasserine Pass. The perceived humiliation of being so badly overrun by Rommel’s Panzerarmee cut deep, but was none the less an important stepping stone in the development of the US Army. The British had suffered their fair share of setbacks too, having also begun the conflict with a tiny standing army. It was inevitable. Training was, of course, vital, but required battle experience to be truly valuable; route marches, map reading and rifle firing only took the raw recruit so far. The Americans were growing their army exponentially, mobilizing more men at greater speed than even the British, and for much of the time so far had had insufficient equipment with which to train and few instructors with any experience whatsoever.