Finis and Prologue

Cautiously, under a butter-colored moon, U.S. 3rd Division patrols reconnoitered the last eight miles to Messina. The stony Sicilian landscape flashed now & then with snipers' fire. The road was edged with the menace of mines, booby traps and demolition chasms. But clearly the stubborn, skillful, beaten enemy had pulled out. At 5:30 a.m., Aug. 17, Lieutenants Jeff McNeely and Ralph Yates led patrols into Messina. The Battle of Sicily, 38 days after it had begun, was over.

By midmorning the U.S. Seventh and the British Eighth Armies had entered Messina in force. Then from the pine-covered hills on the Italian mainland, three and a half miles across the Strait, German big guns lobbed over their shells. Quickly the bulk of the Allied troops withdrew from the city.

Curtain. Cabled TIME Correspondent Jack Belden: "For the soldiers who had fought so bitterly a few days previously in the barren mountains to the west, the finale in Sicily seemed an anticlimax. In Messina the doughboy was lost; there was no one to fight. Private Hays Cathey stood in the street, hardly knowing what to do. 'That's all there is, there ain't no more,' he commented. Then, he sat on a debris-littered curbstone, opened a tin of cheese and disregarded everything.

"But for Messina's civilians the fall of the city was a relief. Two hundred of them came out in their rags and gave a feeble cheer. When the enemy guns started shelling from the mainland, they scurried out of town. It is unlikely that many will come back for a long time. There is nothing for them to come back to. Of all the wrecked cities of Sicily none is so thoroughly wrecked as Messina. From one end of the town to the other, I have not seen a building that has not been damaged.

"Hardest hit are the railroad and dock areas. In the harbor a sunken liner's funnels still stick out of the water. The remains of one or two ferries clutter the slipways. Concrete piers have been cut in two. Railway cars are smashed. The scene recalls the earthquake of 1908, when 91% of Messina's buildings were destroyed and 78,000 of its residents perished."

Curtain Speech. Sitting at his desk in North African Headquarters, surrounded by the press, "Ike" Eisenhower, a ready, salty speaker, groped hard for the right tribute to his men. There was so much to praise: the courage of the airborne troops; the skill of the pilots and sailors; the resourcefulness of the engineers who rebuilt roads and bridges; the endurance of the infantrymen who hiked the skin off their soles. For a good five minutes the General groped. When he found the words they were unquotable. But for quotation he said: "They did everything the finest armies in the world could have done."

This is what they did in the island that the Germans had called "one huge impregnable fortress":

>Defeated 300,000 enemy troops. Thereby they eliminated the Italian Sixth Army,* of which more than half deserted, most of the remainder being killed, wounded or captured. Of 75,000 Germans, perhaps 40,000, led by one-armed General Hans Valentine Hube, escaped to the Italian mainland. Estimated Allied casual ties: 22,000.

>Destroyed or captured, in the first 30 of the 38 days, 260 tanks, 502 guns, 1,691 planes. Allied losses: 103 tanks, 250 guns, 274 planes.

>Gained more than 20 airfields and at least four first-rate ports (Catania, Syracuse, Palermo, Trapani). Thereby they won firm control of the Mediterranean, held vital springboards for further assault on Europe.

>Gave battle experience to an invasion fleet of 3,267 ships, an invasion army of perhaps 300,000 men.

>Hastened Mussolini's downfall, cracked the Axis, gave fresh heart to subjugated Europe.

New Play. In a little vineyard hidden from German eyes across the Messina Strait, a U.S. battery commander, Lieut. William B. Dougherty, brought up "Draftee," one of the 155-mm. rifles that the Allies have dubbed "Long Tom" and the Germans "Whispering Death." A truck hauled the heavy gun into position. The crew wrote their names on the first shell. A red-haired Tennessee private was about to yank the lanyard when the colonel came up and said: "Do you mind, son?" The private answered: "That's all right, sir." The colonel yanked. Seconds later the shell crashed into the San Gio vanni rail and ferry terminal. It was the first artillery shot fired on Italy.

That blow was a single historic note in a thunderous Allied bombardment of southern Italy. From Naples across the shank of the boot and down into the heel and toe, U.S. and British planes sought out harbors and ships, rail junctions and trains, highways and trucks. More than 700 Flying Fortresses, Liberators and Wellingtons devastated Foggia (62,000 population), key to Italy's east-coast railways and roads.

In the Tyrrhenian Sea the U.S. Navy captured the storied Lipari (or Aeolian) Islands. A volcanic cluster where the Greeks housed their god of the winds and the Black. Shirts jailed their political enemies, the Lipari in Allied hands help assure Allied dominance of the waters triangulated by Sicily, Sardinia and lower Italy.

The objective of the air-and-sea assault seemed clear: 1) to harry the likely retreat of the Germans to a line in north ern Italy; 2) to soften the way for another and greater Allied invasion.

*The Italian First, Fifth and Tenth Armies were previously lost in Africa; the Eighth disintegrated in Russia.

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