View original historical documents
 The
Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
The
following files are scanned images of copies of the original documents, therefore the
images are not of the best quality.
The chapter numbers below indicate where, in The Day of Battle, the
document is relevant.
An Oct. 1943 memorandum from an Army
prosecutor to Maj. Gen. Troy Middleton, commander of the 45th Infantry Division,
recommending that a company commander, Capt. John T. Compton, be court-martialed
for murder in the massacre of thirty-six Italian prisoners outside Biscari,
Sicily, on July 14, 1943. This episode is recounted in Chapter 2.
An Oct. 1943 memo by Brig. Gen. John W. O'Daniel, who later commanded the 3rd
Infantry Division at Anzio, about the role of the 36th Infantry Division in the
amphibious assault at Salerno. This document, from the Citadel Archives and
Museum in Charleston, S.C., contains the handwritten notations of Lt. Gen. Mark
W. Clark, commander of Fifth Army, on the cover sheet. This is described in
Chapter 4.
A June 1944 memo to Maj. Gen. Lucian
Truscott, commander of the U.S. Army's VI Corps, describing the confusion in
getting the corps headquarters ashore during the invasion at Salerno in Sept.
1943, when the corps was commanded by Maj. Gen. Ernest Dawley. This episode is
recounted in Chapter 4.
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