Free The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson Page A

purpose,” a state of affairs given voice by the drunken veterans who strode through their battalion encampments barking, “Fuck the bloody fuckers, we’re doing no more fucking fighting.”
    But fight they would, bardin. One armada gathered in the northern Gulf of Suez, with regiments such as the Dorsets and Devons and Hampshires aboard, respectively, the former liners Strathnaver, Keren, and Otranto. White-coated Indian waiters served four-course dinners and the men sang nostalgic Edwardian airs—“ Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do! ”—before cashing in their sterling for invasion currency. The fleet squeezed through the Suez Canal in early July, past sunken wrecks and the open-air cinemas at Ismailiya. At Port Said, one regimental history recorded, “a great bathing parade was ordered and all the troops were taken ashore to march through the town” to the beach, which soon was covered for miles with naked Tommies. The troops gathered “round a huge desert campfire, consuming as much beer as possible,” then marched back to their ships behind kilted pipers in white spats and full skirl.
    On July 5, the invasion armada assembled in the Mediterranean roads off the Egyptian coast. Some efforts to boost morale simply annoyed the men, for example the incessant playing of “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” over the loudspeakers of the ship carrying the 2nd Inniskillings. Padres offered eve-of-battle prayers, asking a “special intercession…for the recapture of Europe.” Signalmen in khaki shorts wigwagged their flags at departing ships from the quays at Tripoli and Alexandria. Sergeants hectored the men to take their antimalaria pills, prompting one soldier in the 1st Royal Tank Regiment to conclude, “Like fat cattle who are pampered to the very doors of the slaughterhouse, it was important that if and when we died we should be in good health.”
    Many regretted leaving Africa, where they had been “sleeping under great ripe stars.” Here Eighth Army had found as much glory as perhaps could be found in modern war. Here, too, they would leave thousands of comrades in African graves. “Yet we went with light hearts,” the tanker added, “for somewhere at the end of all this we could go home.”
     
    The Monrovia singled up her lines shortly after ten A.M . on Tuesday, July 6, heaved in the starboard anchor, and with the help of two tugs edged from the Basin de Vieux to the twelve-fathom line outside the Algiers port. To Kent Hewitt’s chagrin, as the French harbor pilot stepped over Monrovia ’s side to return to shore, he yelled, “Have a good trip to Sicily!” Counterintelligenceofficers ordered the pilot and his tug crews arrested and held incommunicado until the landings had begun.
    Despite elaborate security precautions, Hewitt remained uncertain whether HUSKY ’s secrets still held. Sealed maps of Sicily and other classified documents had been delivered throughout the fleet by armed couriers, to be stored before sailing under lock and key. Not until the last minute were Italian-speaking interpreters sent to their respective Army units. Yet breaches had occurred; there was loose talk on the wharves, while on some ships the premature distribution had occurred of “The Soldier’s Guide to Sicily,” which featured a large silhouette of the island on the cover. A British officer in Cairo had even sent his gabardine uniform to be dry-cleaned with a notebook containing the HUSKY battle plan left in the pocket; security agents raided the shop and found that the incriminating pages had been torn out and used as scratch paper to write customer invoices.
    As Hewitt paced Monrovia ’s flag bridge, listening to the commotion of eight hundred men practicing abandon-ship drills, he had a thousand other details to contemplate besides whether the Germans knew he was coming. The fleet included twenty LSTs carrying ten thousand gallons of water each. Was that enough? Seventeen hospital ships had