MESSINA, Sicily — The American flag rose over this shattered port city at dawn on Aug. 17, 1943, and with it came a reckoning that would permanently reshape the balance of power inside the Allied coalition.
Elements of the U. S. 3rd Infantry Division, soldiers who had marched, fought and bled for thirty-eight consecutive days across some of the most punishing terrain in the Mediterranean theater, entered Messina hours ahead of Britain’s vaunted Eighth Army, seizing the ultimate prize of Operation Husky in defiance of their own orders.
The victory capped one of the most audacious and controversial campaigns of the Second World War, a campaign in which Lt. Gen. George S.
Patton Jr. deliberately ignored the directives of his British superiors, severed his own radio communications, and drove the U. S.
Seventh Army across the entire island of Sicily at a speed that left Allied headquarters scrambling to keep pace.
At the center of the 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 stands a single, extraordinary confrontation. When the lead British armored column finally rolled into the main piazza of Messina expecting to claim the city, its commander found the square packed with American troops, American jeeps and American flags — and Patton himself, immaculately uniformed, ivory-handled revolvers on his hips, waiting with a cigar.
The British brigadier reportedly saluted stiffly and offered, “It is a jolly thrilling thing to see you here, sir.” Patton’s reply has already passed into military legend: “General, I have been here all morning. What took you so long?”
The humiliation was total. Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery, the celebrated victor of El Alamein and the darling of the British press, had been handed the most prestigious assignment of the campaign by theater commander Gen.
Harold Alexander. His Eighth Army was to advance up the eastern coastal highway to Messina while Patton’s Seventh Army guarded the flank.
Instead, Patton’s forces captured Palermo and the entire western half of Sicily in a matter of days, then wheeled ninety degrees east and raced Montgomery along the northern coast, executing three separate night amphibious landings behind German lines to bypass demolished bridges and cliffside roadblocks.
The campaign’s roots lie in the deep, bitter tensions that divided the Allied high command. British generals, hardened by years of desert fighting, regarded the Americans as loud, undisciplined amateurs, a prejudice reinforced by the disastrous U. S.
defeat at Kasserine Pass in February 1943.
The original Husky plan reflected that contempt. Montgomery’s Eighth Army received the direct coastal route to Messina. Patton’s Seventh Army was assigned to land at Gela and Licata and serve as a static flank guard, explicitly forbidden from driving on the northern capital or Messina itself.
Patton’s response, according to officers who served under him, was volcanic. He viewed the plan as a calculated insult designed to prove British military superiority and reduce the United States to the role of industrial muscle.
When German armor counterattacked the American beachhead on July 10, Patton waded ashore under artillery and machine-gun fire, rallied pinned infantrymen in a sand ditch, and personally directed naval gunfire from the cruisers Savannah and Boise onto the advancing Hermann Göring Panzer Division. The beachhead held.
By July 17, Patton had begun his rebellion in earnest. He requested permission for a “reconnaissance in force” toward Agrigento. Alexander approved.
Patton sent an entire division. He then radioed a vague suggestion that he might push on to Palermo — and cut communications entirely under the pretense of mountain interference.
What followed became a study in mechanized warfare. Maj. Gen.
Hugh Gaffey’s 2nd Armored Division, nearly 400 Sherman tanks and thousands of vehicles, ground through limestone mountains in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, covering more than 100 miles in under four days.
Palermo fell on July 22. Tens of thousands of Italian soldiers surrendered. Crowds poured into the streets to cheer the Americans.
In London and at Allied headquarters in North Africa, the news landed like a thunderclap.
Alexander dispatched an urgent order demanding Patton halt his advance and return to protect Montgomery’s flank. Patton asked his chief of staff, Brig. Gen.
Hobart Gay, to request that the message be repeated because it was garbled. By the time it was resent, Palermo was already taken.
Military historians now assess the Sicilian campaign as a turning point not merely in the war, but in the internal politics of the alliance. Before Sicily, the British high command treated American forces as junior partners requiring supervision. After Sicily, that assumption was dead.
Patton’s doctrine — speed is armor, momentum is life, attack relentlessly and never allow the enemy to set a defensive line — had proven devastatingly effective against a cautious, methodical British approach that ground to a halt against German paratroopers on the slopes of Mount Etna.
The human cost of the American sprint was severe. Soldiers of the 3rd Division marched for thirty hours without sleep, their boots worn through, their feet bloodied. Engineers rebuilt blown bridges under mortar fire in hours.
The heat inside tank hulls exceeded 120 degrees.
Patton was everywhere along the advance, standing upright in an open command jeep fitted with an oversized siren, three silver stars gleaming on his helmet, shouting at drivers to close gaps and directing traffic at mountain intersections under sniper fire.
His orders to Maj. Gen. Lucian Truscott before the final push left no room for ambiguity.
Take Messina, he said, even if you must crawl on your hands and knees, even if you lose every man in the division — or be relieved of command.
Montgomery’s headquarters had sent a condescending message telling Patton to stand down and allow the British to enter Messina first. That message, more than any other single act, sealed the race’s outcome.
When Montgomery finally arrived later on Aug. 17, expecting a triumphal parade complete with Scottish pipers, he walked into an American city. The international press, primed to celebrate British genius, instead splashed Patton’s name across front pages on both sides of the Atlantic.
The strategic consequences extended far beyond personal rivalry. The German Tenth Army, under the one-armed Gen. Hans-Valentin Hube, had executed a disciplined evacuation across the Strait of Messina, but the speed of Patton’s advance had shattered its defensive timetable and forced a chaotic, costly withdrawal.
More importantly, the campaign settled a question that would define the rest of the war in Europe: who would set the terms of Allied strategy. After Sicily, the answer was unambiguous. The United States had become the dominant senior partner in the coalition.
Patton’s methods were not without controversy. His disregard for orders, his theatrical self-promotion and his willingness to expend his men’s endurance to the breaking point would later generate fierce debate, and his career would suffer setbacks in the months ahead.
But in the summer of 1943, on an island of dust, mountains and burning steel, the United States Army came of age. An army of inexperienced soldiers, initially assigned to stand in the rear and guard a flank, had instead cut Sicily in half and beaten the British Empire to its own finish line.
Standing in the ruins of Messina, cigar in hand, Patton had delivered his verdict on the old imperial order without a single word of diplomacy. The race was over. The message was permanent.