An Army at Dawn Read online

  Friday’s dawn brought the flat African light and full illumination of the catastrophe. Wounded sailors sprawled in the pews of the Catholic church and on classroom floors. Barges ferried the worst cases to shipboard sick bays, where some died and some lived and some loitered in the netherworld. An unidentified sailor taken to the Leonard Wood, clothed only in third-degree burns, regained consciousness long enough to spell out, mysteriously, K-E-N-S-T-K, then slid into a coma and died three days later, known only to God.

  Soldiers looking seaward were unsettled by the ships’ missing silhouettes, as if teeth had been knocked from a familiar smile. Hewitt soon ordered all surviving vessels away from the coast. A day later, five transports berthed in Casablanca harbor, where they finished unloading and took on a ballast of wounded men for the return trip to America. The approaching convoy was waved away; it steamed aimlessly and without incident here and there in the eastern Atlantic for five days until being summoned into Casablanca on November 18, the precise date Hewitt had proposed months earlier. U-130, which had sunk twenty-five Allied ships, escaped for four months. Then she was cornered off the Azores and destroyed with all hands.

  On November 17 Hewitt and Augusta sailed for Norfolk. He would return in triumph to Hampton Roads, as he had after the Great White Fleet’s circumnavigation thirty-three years earlier, more convinced than ever that the world was round but imperfectly so. Yet a certain melancholy attended, fed by the suspicion that 140 men had forfeited their lives because, among a dozen vital decisions, he made one that was simply wrong. Hewitt would be back—for Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, southern France—a large figure in a large war. But that November night off the coast of Casablanca remained, forever, a small and tender scar on his strong sailor’s heart.

  If the shooting between Anglo-Americans and Frenchmen had stopped, the political scuffling had not. The brief final act of Operation TORCH played out in Algiers, where the invasion ended as raggedly as it began.

  General Clark’s arrest of Darlan was rescinded on November 11 when the admiral pledged his conversion to the Allied cause—again—after learning that ten German and six Italian divisions had invaded Vichy France. With an Allied army in North Africa, Hitler could not risk an exposed flank on the French Mediterranean, so Operation ANTON gobbled up Vichy in hours. Darlan telephoned French commanders in Tunisia—while Clark eavesdropped—and ordered them to resist any Axis intrusion. He also cabled the commander of the Vichy fleet at Toulon, Admiral Jean Laborde, and invited him to weigh anchor for French North Africa. Laborde loathed Darlan as only one old salt can detest another, and he replied with scatological concision: “Merde!”

  However, Clark went to bed and enjoyed the deep slumber of self-approbation until five A.M. on November 12, when he was awakened and told that Darlan had reneged yet again. The order to Tunisian commanders had been suspended pending approval by General Noguès, whom the besieged Pétain had designated as his plenipotentiary in North Africa. A familiar scene followed in the St. Georges conference room: threats, table-thumping, bad French.

  “Not once have you shown me that you are working in our interests!” Clark shouted at Darlan. “I’m sick and tired of the way you have been conducting yourself. I think you are weak.”

  The admiral meticulously creased several strips of scrap paper, then folded them into pleasing shapes.

  “I want to fight the Germans,” General Juin declared. “I am with you.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  “I am with you,” Juin repeated. “I’m not being treated right. This puts me in a very difficult spot.”

  Darlan tore the paper into tiny pieces.

  “I know it, but I’m in a worse way,” Clark said. “I am not sure who my friends are. I can’t afford to make mistakes.”

  At noon on November 13, Eisenhower arrived from Gibraltar in hopes of breaking the impasse. Clark picked him up at Maison Blanche airfield in two commandeered French cars with tires so frayed the drivers were told not to exceed eight miles per hour. Even at that snail’s pace, Eisenhower was happy to escape, if only for a few hours, what he described as his “badly ventilated office six hundred feet underground.”

  “We have had many hours of strain,” he had written Walter Bedell (Beetle) Smith two days earlier, “and the events through which we have passed will be classed as quite important.” If the assessment seemed dispassionate, nonchalance verging on apathy would be characteristic of Eisenhower after later battlefield victories, too. In part, he was looking ahead, determined “to rush pell mell to the east.” He had written Marshall of his “burning ambition” to “make the Allied governments an early present of Tunis and the French fleet” at Toulon. In part, he may have been emotionally distancing himself from the casualties for which he was, as commander-in-chief, inescapably responsible. The losses, he had told Churchill in a letter, were “insignificant compared to the advantages we have so far won.” Few commanders in this war could function without arriving at a sensibility in which thousands of dead and wounded men could be waved away as “insignificant.”

  At the St. Georges, Clark and Robert Murphy recounted the latest developments: General Noguès had arrived from Morocco and promptly called General Giraud a coward and a liar; Noguès had then ceded his powers back to Darlan; orders to resist the Axis in Tunisia had been reinstated, but to uncertain effect; Clark had again threatened reprisals ranging from shackles to the scaffold. Yet, after hours of loud bickering among themselves, the French this morning had agreed to an arrangement that Clark believed might serve: Darlan would become high commissioner in French North Africa, with Giraud as chief of the French armed forces, Juin as army commander, and Noguès remaining as governor-general in Morocco.

  Eisenhower sighed. These political machinations perplexed and annoyed him. “Do these men want to become marshals of a greater and more glorious France or do they want to sink into miserable oblivion?” he had asked Clark. In a message to Marshall, he was even blunter: “If these stupid French would only realize what side their bread is buttered on, what a chance they now have to execute a master stroke. They seem completely inert.” Still, the new agreement looked like a path out of this “maze of political and personal intrigue.” Eisenhower had intended, he told Clark, to “lay down the law with a bit of table pounding,” but now that appeared unnecessary.

  In the hotel conference room, Darlan had exchanged his uniform for a three-piece civilian suit. He and the others stood when the Americans entered at two P.M. Eisenhower shook hands and after a few pleasantries uttered only eleven sentences, including: “What you propose is completely acceptable to me. From this day on, Admiral Darlan heads the French North African state. In this attitude I am supported by President Roosevelt…. We all must agree to put together all means to whip the Germans.” He shook hands again and marched from the room.

  Before boarding the B-17 at Maison Blanche, Eisenhower fished out a five-pointed star from his pocket and pinned it next to the other two on Clark’s shoulder, making him a lieutenant general. “When you are away and out of touch,” he had told Clark two days before, “I feel like I’ve lost my right arm.”

  Feeling expansive, Clark returned to the St. Georges and summoned reporters. “Now we can proceed in a business-like way,” he told them. “Things look good.”

  Sixty years after TORCH, a precise count of Allied casualties remains elusive. Official U.S. tallies, which clearly undercounted British losses, put the combined Anglo-American figure at 1,469, including 526 American dead. British figures, which include minor actions on November 12 and 13, calculate Allied losses at 2,225, including nearly 1,100 dead.

  The number of French killed and wounded probably approached 3,000. In three days, Vichy forces in North Africa also lost more than half their tanks, armored cars, and airplanes—matériel so sorely missed in the weeks ahead that Eisenhower considered eighteen French battalions equivalent in combat power to a single American battalion. Allied commanders initially suppressed news regarding the intensi
ty of the TORCH fighting so the French would not “remain embittered against us for having to fight them into submission.”

  TORCH had lured more Frenchmen—including many who had been morally deranged by invasion, occupation, and partition—back to the side of the angels. But the naïveté of Eisenhower and his lieutenants was such that none foresaw the consequence of embracing Darlan, whose purported villainy had been relentlessly denounced by Allied leaders for two years. “It’s not very pretty,” Charles de Gaulle wrote in mid-November. “I think that before long the retching will take place.” American military officers who had spent the past two decades perfecting cavalry charges on windswept posts in the middle of nowhere could be pardoned for having limited political acuity. The truth was that a callow, clumsy army had arrived in North Africa with little notion of how to act as a world power. The balance of the campaign—indeed, the balance of the war—would require learning not only how to fight but how to rule. Eisenhower sensed it; he wrote Beetle Smith, “We are just started on a great venture.”

  The war’s momentum was shifting to the Allies, but in mid-November 1942, few men could see how irrevocable, how tectonic that shift was. Churchill, who a month earlier had warned, “If TORCH fails then I’m done for,” assessed the moment most elegantly: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

  As for combat, TORCH revealed profound shortcomings in leadership, tactics, equipment, martial élan, and common sense. Certain features of the invasion, such as amphibious assaults and attacks on an enemy’s flanks, would be polished by harsh experience and provide a template for Allied offensives throughout the war. But the U.S. Army was simply inept at combined arms—the essence of modern warfare, which requires skillful choreography of infantry, armor, artillery, airpower, and other combat forces. Most soldiers also remained wedged in the twilight between the “habits of peace and [the] ruthlessness of war.”

  Worse yet, few realized it. Tens of thousands of American soldiers had heard the bullets sing, and any number believed, in George Washington’s fatuous phrase, that there was something charming in the sound. That was only because they had not heard many. Those who had seen American tank shells punch through the French Renaults swaggered through their bivouacs with helmets full of Algerian wine, crowing “Bring on the panzers!” Such confidence was so infectious that the British and American chiefs of staff suggested paring down the TORCH forces in order to undertake other Mediterranean adventures, such as an invasion of Sardinia. “For God’s sake,” Eisenhower replied, “let’s get one job done at a time.” But even the cautious commander felt a little cocky: the White House was told to expect the occupation of Tunis and Bizerte in December and the fall of Tripoli in late January.

  They believed they had been blooded. They believed that overpowering the feeble French meant something. They believed in the righteousness of their cause, the inevitability of their victory, and the immortality of their young souls. And as they wheeled around to the east and pulled out their Michelin maps of Tunisia, they believed they had actually been to war.

  Part Two

  4. PUSHING EAST

  “We Live in Tragic Hours”

  AT two A.M. on November 8, the American consul-general in Tunis, Hooker A. Doolittle, had rapped on the front gate of the governor’s palace, demanding to see the Vichy resident-general. Vice Admiral Jean-Pierre Estéva soon appeared, immaculate if unorthodox in full naval uniform and bedroom slippers. An elfin bachelor with a square-cut white beard, Estéva was known as the Monk for his ascetic habits, which included rising before dawn each morning to attend mass, and eating nothing before noon except dry toast and an orange. The son of a cork merchant from Reims, Estéva at the age of sixty-two was looking toward retirement so he could devote himself to his greatest passion: the magnificent Cathédrale Notre-Dame in his native town, where twenty-six French kings had been crowned. Doolittle’s breathless annunciation of the Allied assault seemed unlikely to smooth Estéva’s path to old age.

  The admiral listened as Doolittle, whom one acquaintance described as “an Esquire fashion plate gone seedy,” predicted the imminent arrival in Tunisia of Allied legions so vast they would darken the sky with aircraft. “They had better hurry up, because the others will be here within forty-eight hours,” Estéva said dryly, and escorted his guest to the door.

  Posing as a French farmer on his way home, Doolittle soon fled Tunis in a borrowed car with his Spanish maids and Pekingese dogs. Upon reaching the Allied lines he told anyone who would listen: “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”

  There was no need for Admiral Estéva to specify who “the others” were, and he had actually underestimated German agility. Tunisia was only “a panther’s leap” from Axis bases in Italy, as the deputy Führer, Hermann Göring, had observed. At 10:55 A.M. on November 9, the first Luftwaffe fighters touched down at the El Aouina airfield northeast of Tunis. Dive-bombers and transport planes soon followed, after making a low, intimidating pass over the city. Hastily mustered German troops—many of them only marginally fit for combat—stumbled down the ramps.

  French troops ringed the field, and French armored cars on the runway greeted each landing plane with guns trained at the cockpit. This impasse lasted several hours until a Luftwaffe security force set up machine guns behind a hangar and laid mines around the French vehicles. Choosing to heed directives from Vichy rather than the confused gabble coming out of Algiers, Estéva ordered the cordon removed. By dusk, ninety planes had landed. German troops marched from the tarmac to bivouacs along the narrow Carthage road, singing “Lili Marlene” as they dug their revetments.

  The Wehrmacht’s entrenchment in Tunis set the stage for a confrontation between German and Anglo-American armies that was to scorch two continents over the next two and a half years and cost several million lives. Here began the struggle for possession of the earth itself, or at least the western earth, an unremitting series of titanic land battles that would sweep across Salerno and Anzio, Normandy and the Bulge, broken only by brief interludes to cart away the dead and revivify the living.

  Hitler had learned the full extent of the Allied invasion while stopped at a remote rail siding in Thuringia: he was on his way to Munich for a reunion of the old beer-hall Kämpfer. Within hours he recognized that if the Allies seized North Africa they could transform a peripheral expedition into a platform for the invasion of southern Europe. That would imperil Italy, his closest ally, and Axis possessions from France to Greece. “To give up Africa means to give up the Mediterranean,” he declared. It “would mean not only the ruin of our revolutions, but also the ruin of our peoples’ future,” Hitler subsequently wrote Mussolini. He signed the letter, “Yours in indissoluble unity.”

  Already 230 of Germany’s 260 divisions were on the defensive. Some German strategists sensed that their war’s arc had swung from expansion to contraction, but Hitler refused to accept that Germany had lost the strategic initiative. Tunisia was to be the “cornerstone of our conduct of the war on the southern flank of Europe.” If secondary to the eastern crusade against Bolshevism, it was vital nonetheless. At his most grandiose, Hitler conjured new African offensives—to the west, to drive the TORCH invaders from Algeria and Morocco, and to the east, to drive the British Eighth Army across the Suez Canal. By late November, the Führer’s strategic vision would be articulated in a one-sentence order: “North Africa, being the approach to Europe, must be held at all costs.” That sentence condemned a million men from both sides to seven months of torment.

  On Tuesday, November 10, Wehrmacht paratroopers arrived in numbers for the first time. A platoon from the 5th Parachute Regiment flew from Naples and immediately fortified the main road leading to Tunis from the west. Guns earmarked for Rommel’s army in Egypt were diverted to Tunisia and dragged forward, still wrapped in shipping paper. Fuel was so scarce that troops eventually used heating pellets made from grass and the residue from olive presses. Commanders hired French t
axis as staff cars. Messengers traveled by Tunis street tram—a young Gefreiter carrying dispatches reported with delight that no one had made him buy a ticket.

  Weak as the German vanguard was, the leaders of Vichy France’s 30,000 troops in North Africa were weaker. Ambivalence racked the French high command. On November 11, Hitler ordered German and Italian troops to occupy Vichy France; that same day, Admiral Louis Derrien, commander of the Vichy naval base at Bizerte, forty miles north of Tunis, told his subordinates, “I count on everyone to keep his calm, his sang-froid, and his dignity.” That night, after receiving new orders from Darlan in Algiers, Derrien decreed, “The enemy is the German and Italian…. Blaze away with all your heart against the foe of 1940. Wehave a revenge to take. Vive la France!” French officers drank champagne toasts, and all ranks sang the “Marseillaise” on the Bizerte docks.

  This jubilation lasted less than an hour. At midnight, forty minutes after Derrien had issued his battle cry, he annulled it by order of Vichy. “November 8, we fight everybody,” he wrote privately. “November 9, we fight the Germans. November 10, we fight nobody. November 10 (noon), we fight the Germans. November 11 (night), we fight nobody.” Perhaps no passage written during the war better captured the agony of France and the moral gyrations to which her sons were subject.

  On November 12, Derrien phoned Admiral Darlan, then still gripped by indecision, but received no clear direction. The increasingly listless Estéva was even more in thrall to Vichy. A German officer concluded that Estéva was capable “of only nodding his head. It seems that he is not quite equal to the tense situation.” Estéva agreed: “After forty years of obedience, I cannot begin to disobey orders now.” The first sea shipments of German troops and equipment—including seventeen tanks and forty tons of ammunition—arrived November 12. Derrien was scheduled to retire in a month, after forty-two years of service. Now, he predicted, “I shall be known as the admiral who delivered Bizerte to the Germans.”