In late summer 1943, famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle sat above a newly constructed port in Sicily ‒ the island near Italy’s toe that Anglo-American forces had invaded in early July – taking in the scene below. Pyle had sailed with Allied troops across the Mediterranean from North Africa. Before D-day in Normandy 11 months later, the Sicily campaign – Operation Husky – was the largest seaborne invasion in history, involving an astonishing armada of nearly 3,000 ships. “There is no way of conveying the enormous size of that fleet,” wrote Pyle. “On the horizon it resembled a distant city. It covered half the skyline.… Even to be part of it was frightening.”2