In the dispatch which follows, TIME Correspondent Jack Belden describes the last hours of the bitterest battle which American troops fought in the Sicilian campaign.
The Germans had halted their long retreat at the rocky hilltop town of Troina. Used to driving the enemy out of one position after another, Major General Terry Allen's 1st Division sent one combat team against the town. The Germans ate it up with machine-gun fire and drove it back. Reserves were thrown in; for the first time in Sicily, the whole 1st Division was engaged at once. Every night the Americans advanced, every morning the Germans counterattacked, driving the Americans back down the slopes before Troina. On the evening of the fifth day A.P.'s Donald Whitehead and I arrived on the scene.
Our planes had just dive-bombed the jutting rock of Troina where it stuck up like an island amid the circling mountain peaks. Black smoke curled upward in columns, merging into one big black cloud beneath which Troina disappeared like Camelot fading into the mists. We drove our jeep around a cliff to where an ambulance had halted beneath a ledge. Beyond that no car could advance, for the road was mined. By the ambulance lay a soldier who looked up at us with the tender, inquiring gaze the eyes of wounded men often seem to wear. A first-aid man gently scooped him up and deposited him in his butcher's wagon.
"The front's over there," he said, waving toward a hill, and drove off. We climbed through rocky fields. There was not a living thing to be seen. Except for the bang of hidden guns and the geysers of black smoke, we seemed to have the battlefield to ourselves.
We picked our way up the hill until we came out by a road culvert where Lieut. Colonel Hugh Matthews had set up his battalion headquarters. Weary, grey and pinched-looking, he was whittling nervously on a stick.
"I thought these bastards would fold before this," he said.
"I'm so beaten up, I'm just occupying evacuated positions." He led us to the edge of our hill.
"See that?" said Matthews. "One of my companies took the wrong road in the dark and attacked that slope right in the face of machine-gun fire. The company commander was wounded twice, but he pushed on and smashed that position. Now," he added, as we walked back toward the culvert, "there's only one officer left in that company." The officer in question was Lieut. Melvin Groves. We found him lying by the culvert with a black look on his face.
"Sometimes this is too goddam much for me," he said, spitting out a straw.
Another voice chimed in: "Everyone's getting battle-wacky. One private who never saw a mine in his life before went around picking fuses out of mines. He dug up 37 of them with his bayonet and then marked them with toilet paper. No normal guy would do that." "The radio two nights ago said Troina had been captured," a lieutenant said. "We must have taken Troina; our broadcasters never lie." By now it was dark and we prepared for our nightly attack on Troina. On the opposite side of the road at the other end of the culvert, Major Chuck Horner, whose battalion was to put in the attack, had set up his phones.