©A STEP AT A TIME… In War and Peace

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

When on May 13, 1943, the Axis forces in Tunisia fell to the Allied forces, ending the North Africa Campaign of World War II, Ohio-native soldier Bob Gaffin and his fellow US Second Armored Division warriors knew what was coming. The scuttlebutt was that Sicily was next. It made perfect sense. Knock out Sicily; punch through Italy; kill Hitler’s cohort, the fascist Italian dictator Mussolini, and you’ve destroyed Hitler’s southern flank. The Mediterranean oil secured—an army could run for a long time on that oil, straight north to Nazi-occupied Europe, to Hitler’s bunker, and then to jam his Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or his lonely Tweedledee according to rumor, down his throat for his breakfast. And that would be just an appetizer! Bob and his “Hell on Wheels” boys had trained for the offensive: they were tough; they were gritty; they were ready. The hitch in the overall itinerary was the actual fact of Sicily’s being the obvious next target. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself is reputed to have said, “Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it’s Sicily.” The Allies needed a con to deflect Hitler’s attention away from Sicily.

The elaborate deception operation, concocted and supervised by two members of British Intelligence, hinged on a dead Welsh tramp dressed up as a marooned officer of the Royal Marines carrying credible British correspondence indicating an Allied invasion on Greece and Sardinia rather than on Sicily in early July. Transported from Scotland to the southern coast of Spain by submarine, the body was released close to shore, where it was pulled out of the water the next morning by a Spanish fisherman. “Abwehr,” the German Intelligence organization, which maintained a strong presence in the area, an area chosen for the drop by the British for that very reason, examined the documents, and then transmitted the information to Hitler. He fell for the ruse and shifted his reinforcements to Greece and Sardinia, as a result. Sicily received none.

A violent summer storm kicked up huge waves in the sea and many of the Allied troops holed up on the landing crafts of the armada underway from North Africa to Sicily were green with seasickness and lost the contents of their stomachs over the sides. Commanders circulated among them, boosting morale, reassuring the men that the mission was secure. Actually, the storm worked to the Allies’ advantage, for the enemy let its guard down based on an assumption that no commander would brave such wind and rain. But brave it they did. While Hitler’s larger force dug in for the onslaught at Greece and Sardinia, before the sun broke the horizon on July 10, 1943 the combined air and sea landing, which was comprised of 150,000 Allied troops, 3,000 ships, 4,000 aircraft, and 600 tanks landed and commenced to crush the remaining enemy positions on Sicily. Bob Gaffin was a half-track driver in that armored brigade.

Ten days into the offensive, Mount Etna was merely an imprint on Bob’s internal eye as he and his comrades bypassed it in their aggressive drive toward Palermo. The bulletproof windshield of his half-track was thick with the volcano’s ever-present ash kicked up by the vehicle’s powerful tires and treads from the coast road. A hard day of fighting lay ahead, a battle in which several of the twelve men he carried in his half-track personnel carrier would lose their lives.

Twenty-six years from that very day, on July 20, 1969, as he and his wife and some of their children gathered around their television set in their home located in a little town in southern Ohio, USA and watched a fellow Ohioan place man’s first footprint on the moon, Bob recalled a footprint of his own in another landscape in an earlier time. It was a place as alien to him then as was the moon’s surface to astronaut Neil Armstrong, a footprint in the ashy soil someplace in Sicily when Bob hopped down from his seat behind the steering wheel of the half-track he drove to take a quick breather.     

By mid-August, the Allies conquered Sicily, and the heel of Italy loomed large in that unfolding theater of war. Meanwhile, Mussolini was soiling his underwear, and Hitler was scratching his Tweedledee, nervously, no doubt!

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com.