Meanwhile, Patton pushed his personal competition with Montgomery to comical new heights. On July 25 he flew across the island to Syracuse for a meeting with Alexander and Montgomery. On seeing his erstwhile British rival, Patton noted, ‘I made the error of hurrying to meet him. He hurried a little too, but I started it.’ At the end of the conference, during which, Patton noted, he didn’t receive lunch, ‘Monty gave me a 5¢ cigar lighter. Some one must have sent him a box of them.’ When Montgomery visited Palermo a few days later, Patton sent an escort to meet him at the airport and greeted him at his headquarters with a full band. ‘I hope Monty realized that I did this to show him up for doing nothing for me on the 25th,’ Patton wrote. At Syracuse, Montgomery surprised Patton by suggesting that Seventh Army capture Messina. While Keyes and Bradley had raced across Sicily, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had become completely bogged down in the east. Dug-in German troops continued to hold Montgomery at Catania, while his circling movement west around Etna proceeded slowly. With Seventh Army now poised, cat-like, ready to strike east, Montgomery realized that Patton was best positioned to take the city. Besides, by attacking east Patton would relieve the pressure on Eighth Army and allow him to finally punch past Catania.

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Patton doubted Montgomery’s motives, but he needed no further urging. ‘This is a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake,’ he wrote to 45th Infantry Division Commander Major General Troy Middleton. ‘We must take Messina before the British. Please use your best efforts to facilitate the success of our race.’ Montgomery made little of this ‘race,’ but to Patton it became a personal crusade to win acclaim and respect for his much-maligned troops. British soldiers and officers undoubtedly wanted to beat the Americans into Messina. But Patton definitely hyped the contest.

On July 25, 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III, supported by leading Italian political figures, deposed dictator Benito Mussolini, and Italy began to negotiate peace terms with the Allies. (Italy would pull out of the Axis in September.) As German commanders planned to evacuate Sicily, Patton and Montgomery began squeezing Axis defenders into the island’s northeast corner. Eighth Army continued to probe German defenses at Catania while Canadian and British troops drove in a ‘left hook’ around Etna’s western slope. To the north, the 1st and newly arrived 9th American Divisions advanced east from the island’s rugged center, while the 3rd Division attacked down the north coast road. ‘The mountains are the worst I have ever seen,’ Patton wrote on August 1. ‘It is a miracle that our men can get through them but we must keep up our steady pressure. The enemy simply can’t stand it, besides we must beat the Eighth Army to Messina.’

On August 3, Patton stopped by an army hospital outside Nicosia and chatted with several injured soldiers; ‘All were brave and cheerful,’ he noted. Then he encountered a 1st Division infantryman who seemed unhurt. Patton asked him what was wrong. ‘I guess I can’t take it,’ the soldier replied. Patton erupted. Cursing the soldier as a coward, he slapped him with his gloves and pushed him out of the tent. Such men, Patton wrote,’should be tried for cowardice and shot.’ A week later at another hospital Patton came across another ‘alleged nervous patient,’ a private in the 13th Field Artillery Brigade whose case was diagnosed as severe shell shock. Again Patton’s anger overcame him; again he slapped and cursed the soldier. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said, ‘but it makes my blood boil to think of a yellow bastard being babied.’ Patton didn’t realize the seriousness of what he had done, but the incidents would soon change his life and career.

Patton’s relentless push for Messina also took its toll on his relationship with Bradley, a straight-laced subordinate who deplored Patton’s use of profanity and flamboyant style of command. ‘He traveled in an entourage of command cars followed by a string of nattily uniformed staff officers,’ Bradley wrote. ‘His own vehicle was gaily decked with oversize stars and the insignia of his command. These exhibitions did not awe the troops as perhaps Patton believed. Instead, they offended the men as they trudged through the clouds of dust left in the wake of that procession.’ Where Patton was eager to outshine Montgomery, Bradley failed to see the point in capturing Palermo. ‘Certainly there was no glory in the capture of hills, docile peasants, and spiritless soldiers,’ he wrote. To Bradley, racing Montgomery to Messina was equally unnecessary, for ‘However rapidly we pushed into that city, we could not cut the enemy’s escape route across to Italy.’

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