The last sunset of Fascism was falling on Palermo, the capital and largest city of Sicily, and still the Americans had not arrived. Major General Giuseppe Molinero and his suite waited in their car, peering down a road.
At dusk the first patrols of the Seventh Army appeared. General Molinero tried to surrender to them. They declined the honor. At 7:24 a car appeared with a U.S. corps commander. Diffidently, without pride, General Molinero approached the car and spoke in Italian. An interpreter translated: General Molinero and his troops did not want to fight. But there was a difficulty. Within the city, in the royal palace, was one General Mario Arisio, an unpredictable fellow who also commanded troops. For this Arisio, General Molinero could not speak.
The corps commander borrowed a pillowcase from an Italian householder, had it fastened to the radio mast of his car and drove into the city. In the windless evening the pillowcase hung limp and inconspicuous. An Italian fisherman along the way had a white sheet on a pole. The U.S. general borrowed the sheet for a flag of truce, and drove on through the streets, pocked here & there by bomb marks. At the palace there was no sign of General Arisio. Palermo's chief of police quickly found him. General Arisio as quickly made his position clear: he would accept any terms of surrender.
In the early light of July 23 the U.S. flag rose over Palermo and its 400,000 pliant civilians (see p. 28). "The greatest blitz in history," exuberant General George S. Patton Jr., Commander of the Seventh Army, called the march on the city.
The Collapse. The campaign in western Sicily was all but over. Other ports fell: Marsala and Trapani, naval bases where there was no Italian Navy and no fight on land; Termini, Imerese and Cefalú, east of Palermo on the upper coastal route to Messina and Italy. In twelve days the Seventh Army had fought for its beachheads in southwestern Sicily, fought inland past Barrafranca (see p. 34}, fought for Caltanissetta and (with the Canadians) for Enna in central Sicily. After that, the Italian Army in western Sicily simply quit fighting. Two divisions, the 206th Coastal and 4th Livorno, had shown some spirit. Others, including the 26th and the 28th Infantry Divisions, fought little or not at all. Sicilian militia and thousands of regular soldiers quit the ranks, melted back into their fields and their towns. The British took General Giulio Cesare Gotti Porcinari, and the soldiers said:
"We have taken Julius Caesar."
The Americans had taken, by week's end, 50,000 Italians, and the prisoner traffic on the roads was a military problem.