In July 1943, on a road in central Sicily, a single German machine gun position had brought an American advance to a halt for six hours. The gun sat on top of a rocky cliff about 70 meters above the road. Every approach to the cliff base was covered. Every attempt to move up the road drew immediate fire from above.
The position was too high for direct fire and too well fortified for a frontal assault. Any such attack would have meant catastrophic casualties. From a forward position roughly 300 meters back, General George S. Patton watched the stalemate through his binoculars.
Then Private Thomas Brennan walked up to his lieutenant. He told him he could get up there. The lieutenant pointed out that it was a 70-meter cliff. Brennan said he knew. He had grown up in Colorado, and he had been studying the face for an hour.
He pointed to the right side of the cliff. There was a line up the right edge, he said, with cracks and ledges. It was climbable.
The lieutenant warned that the Germans would see him. Brennan replied that they would not, not if they were busy watching the road. He asked for a distraction at the base and said he would be at the top before anyone thought to look right.
The lieutenant reminded him it was a 70-meter cliff under fire. Brennan said, "Yes, sir." The lieutenant looked at him for a long time, then got on the radio.
Patton was still watching through his binoculars when he saw a single figure move to the right side of the cliff base and start climbing.
To understand why Brennan was the man who could make that climb, it helps to know where he came from. He was 23 years old, from a small town outside Boulder, Colorado. His father had been a geological surveyor and his mother a school teacher.
He grew up in a house where maps covered the kitchen table, and weekends meant going into the mountains. Not hiking. Climbing. He started following his father up rock faces when he was 8 years old.
This was not recreational climbing or organized sport climbing. It was the practical climbing of a man who needed to reach a certain point on a certain piece of rock to take a measurement. You find the line, you read the rock, you go.
By the time Brennan was 16, he was leading routes his father followed. By 18, he had climbed most of the significant faces in the Boulder area. He joined the army in 1942.
Through training, deployment, and the landing in Sicily in July 1943, he had not thought much about his climbing. It was not something he mentioned. It never came up. He was a rifleman, and he did what riflemen did.
On July 14, with the machine gun still killing the advance after six hours, he looked at the cliff the way his father had taught him to look at rock faces. Not as an obstacle, but as a problem. Read the rock. Find the line.
He had been looking for about 45 minutes when he saw it. The right edge of the face had a series of cracks running diagonally upward. Not a staircase or a path, but a line. Moves connected to moves.
The sequence ran from the base to a ledge at about 40 meters, then right to a chimney that continued the rest of the way. It was doable, but not easy and not safe. Under normal conditions, it was a serious technical climb.
Under fire, with German soldiers 20 meters above the top watching the road below, it was something else entirely.
When Brennan went to his lieutenant, the officer looked at him the way you look at someone when what they are saying cannot possibly be true, but they are completely serious. Then he got on the radio.
Two minutes later, the distraction at the base of the cliff began. Fire, movement, and sound pulled the German position's attention toward the road. Brennan moved to the right edge of the cliff base. He looked up at the line, then started climbing.
Patton spotted him through his binoculars at about 40 meters. A single figure on a vertical cliff face in the Sicilian heat, moving upward steadily. Not scrambling, not panicking. Moving the way you move when you know what you are doing and you are doing it.
Patton lowered his binoculars, then raised them again. He did not say anything. His aide was beside him and later said that in all his time with Patton, he had never seen him watch something the way he watched that cliff. Like he could not look away. Like looking away would change something.
The first 20 meters were the most dangerous. The distraction was working, and the German position was focused on the road, but if anyone turned and looked right, they would see him immediately.
He moved fast on the lower section. The rock was good, solid limestone, and the cracks were where he expected them. He made the first 20 meters in about three minutes.
Then he hit the traverse, a section moving right across the face with no upward progress. Pure horizontal movement on small ledges with exposure below, and the German position 20 meters directly above him.
He slowed down, not from fear but from technique. At that point, a single dislodged stone would fall straight down and make a sound that would draw attention. He moved with the specific care of someone who has spent years learning that rushing on rock is how you die on rock.
Each foot placement was tested. Each handhold was confirmed. His body weight transferred slowly.
Patton's aide described watching through binoculars: "I could see him on the rock face, just him, this single figure." He paused. He looked impossibly small against that cliff.
Patton had the binoculars up the entire time. His aide said, "I didn't know what to do with my hands. I kept thinking I should be doing something." But there was nothing to do.
He looked at Patton. Patton looked like he knew that and had accepted it. Like he had decided the only thing he could do was watch. And so he was watching with everything he had.
Brennan reached the ledge at 40 meters in about nine minutes. He pressed himself flat, rested for 30 seconds, and looked up at the chimney, a vertical crack in the rock wide enough to fit inside.
In the chimney, arms and legs press against both walls to move upward. It is not elegant and not fast, but it is protected. The chimney walls would hide him until he was near the top.
He entered the chimney and climbed. At 60 meters he could hear the Germans above him. Voices, the sound of the machine gun firing in controlled bursts, and the smell of spent cartridges drifting down. He kept climbing.
At 65 meters the chimney ended. He was two meters below the lip. Two meters of open rock with nothing between him and the German position but his speed.
He looked at the rock. One move. A reach left to a crack. Pull up. One foot on the lip. One move. He took a breath and did it.
He came over the top of the cliff moving, not standing up. Moving. He was at the German position in four seconds.
Below on the road, Patton watched through his binoculars as the machine gun stopped firing completely. Mid-burst. Just stopped.
His aide said, "When the gun stopped, I thought he was dead." He paused. "And I heard firing from up there. Different sounds. American sounds. And I realized what had happened."
The entire road went quiet. Six hours of that gun, and then silence. Patton lowered his binoculars just for a moment, then raised them again.
The position was taken. Brennan had gone over the top with his rifle and cleared it. Four German soldiers. He secured the position and signaled down. The advance on the road resumed within minutes.
Patton was at the base of the cliff when Brennan came down. He did not climb back down. There was a path on the other side, 20 minutes of walking versus 12 minutes of climbing and clearing.
He came around the edge of the cliff on foot and walked to where Patton was standing. He was dirty. His hands were cut from the limestone cracks, and his uniform had chalk dust from the rock.
Patton looked at him and asked how long he had been climbing. Brennan said, "Since I was eight, sir. My father was a surveyor."
Patton said, "In Colorado." Brennan looked at him. "How did you know, sir?"
Patton said, "The way you moved up that rock, somebody taught you to climb in the mountains. Not on a gym wall." He paused. "What did the face look like when you were on it?"
Brennan thought about it. He said, "About the same as any face, sir. You read the rock. You find the next move. You do it." He looked at the cliff. "You don't look at the whole 70 meters. You look at the next three feet."
Patton was quiet. Then he said, "That's the only way to climb anything." He looked at Brennan. "Or do anything else."
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Your hands."
Brennan looked at them. "It's fine, sir. Just limestone."
Patton said, "Get them cleaned up." He said it the way he always said practical things after the impractical thing was done. Matter-of-fact. On to the next thing.
He turned to his aide. "I want this man's name in the record." His aide wrote it down. Private Thomas Brennan, Boulder, Colorado, Fourth Infantry, Sicily.
Then Patton looked at the cliff one more time. His aide said later, "He stood there looking at that cliff for maybe 10 seconds. Then he walked back to his jeep. The advance continued."
He never mentioned it to anyone that day. Not in the command post, not in his diary that evening. The diary entry for July 14 covers the tactical situation, the advance, the positions, the road cleared. One line at the end: cliff position taken. One soldier climbed. That was it.
Thomas Brennan served through Sicily, then through Italy, and eventually through France and into Germany. He received the Silver Star. He went home to Colorado in 1945.
He went back to the mountains, not as a surveyor and not as a soldier. He started a small guiding business, taking people into the mountains around Boulder and teaching them to climb. He ran it for 37 years.
One of his students, a woman named Sarah Chen, became one of the most respected climbing instructors in Colorado. She described his teaching in an interview years later. He never talked about where to go overall. He said, "Just show me the next three feet."
She said, "Every single student who came through his program heard that. The next three feet." She smiled. "We thought it was just a climbing instruction. We didn't understand until much later that it was the only instruction he'd ever needed for anything."
She looked at the interviewer. Apparently, he learned it the hard way on a cliff in Sicily with people shooting at him.
He retired in 1982 and kept climbing recreationally into his 70s. He died in 1999, 79 years old, in Boulder.
At his memorial, one of his long-time climbing partners spoke. He said, "Tom had one rule on the rock. Never look at the whole thing. Only look at the next three feet."
He paused. He said it so many times that we stopped hearing it as climbing advice and started hearing it as something else. He paused again. "I don't know exactly what he meant by it beyond the rock. I know he meant something."
He looked at the people there. Seventy meters of Sicilian limestone under fire, with nothing but the next three feet and the move after that. He got to the top.