By July 20, the division had reached the outskirts of Palermo, and Murphy was sidelined briefly by illness. The campaign in Sicily continued through August, with Axis forces conducting a successful evacuation from Messina to the Italian mainland before the Allies could cut them off. The 3rd Division’s 7th Infantry Regiment secured the port of Messina on August 17, ending the Sicily campaign.
Sicily was Murphy’s first combat theater. The experience of actual fighting — different from training in every way that matters — began to shape the soldier he was becoming. The campaign was intense enough that the division had seen significant action by the time it prepared for the next phase of the Allied advance.
## Italy: Salerno to Anzio
The Allied landings at Salerno in September 1943, Operation Avalanche, brought the war to the Italian mainland. The 3rd Infantry Division was part of the Fifth Army’s assault, fighting its way up the peninsula against determined German resistance in terrain that repeatedly favored the defenders.
The Italian campaign was a grinding operation through mountains, river crossings, and fortified positions. The Wehrmacht had strong positions along a series of defensive lines — the Volturno Line, the Winter Line, the Gustav Line — that slowed the Allied advance and imposed heavy casualties. For Company B, 15th Infantry, the progression through Italy meant repeated cycles of assault, consolidation, and assault again.
At the Volturno River, Murphy and another soldier named Lattie Tipton — who would become his closest friend in the Army — were with a third soldier near a bridge when German machine-gun fire killed the third man. Murphy used a Thompson submachine gun and killed five Germans in the ensuing exchange. The loss of comrades in actions like this was accumulating through the Italian campaign in ways that the documentation records but cannot fully convey.