Backing Up Patton

SICILY-SALERNO-ANZIO (413 pp.)--Samuel Eliot Morison--Little, Brown ($6.75).

The morning he landed in Sicily in July 1943, General George Patton climbed a Rangers' observation post and watched a column of German tanks roll down on his invasion beachhead. A young naval ensign with a walkie-talkie said: "Can I help you, sir?" "Sure," roared the general, "if you can connect with your [profanity deleted] Navy, tell them for [profanity's] sake to drop some shellfire on that road." Somehow the ensign raised the cruiser Boise, which devastated the tanks with 38 rounds of 6-in. shells. "General Patton's conversion to the value of naval-gunfire support," observes Rear Admiral Samuel Morison in the latest volume of his classic history of U.S. naval operations in World War II, "dates from that moment." With Volume IX of his projected 14 volume history, Author Morison (Jonathan Trumbull professor of history at Harvard) swings back to action in the Mediterranean. Though Italy was hardly a navy show, and the British directed its naval phase, Morison makes a brave and lively drama of U.S. ships putting the Army on Italy's beaches and then teaching it to value the fleet's long-barreled line-backing skill.

As an old blue-water man, Morison dishes out most of his criticism to the other services. He pans Army brass for not pushing through plans to seize Rome by air after Mussolini's fall; had they done so, he says, the slogging campaign up southern Italy would not have been needed. Anzio, he thinks, was a blunder. But in general, says Morison, the Italian campaign was worth it all--unpopular like Grant's Wilderness campaign of 1864, but equally a campaign that had to be fought. Its bloody cost was more than repaid in Normandy's victories weeks later.

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