An Army at Dawn (15 page)

The plan was British. Concocted in August and code-named
RESERVIST
, the attack—similar to a successful British operation six months earlier against Vichy forces in Madagascar—was designed to forestall the sabotage of Oran’s port. British intelligence estimated that French sailors would need only three hours to scuttle all merchant ships at their quays, and another twelve to sink the huge floating dock across from the harbor entrance. To encourage a friendly reception from Anglophobic defenders, the British also proposed using mostly American troops aboard two Great Lakes cutters. Once used to chase rum-runners, the boats had been deeded to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease and renamed H.M.S.
Walney
and H.M.S.
Hartland
. How French gunners would recognize the American complexion of the assault in utter darkness was never clarified, notwithstanding Churchill’s warning that “in the night, all cats are grey.” Each cutter—250 feet long and built to withstand North Atlantic storms but not shell fire—was fitted with iron plating around the wheelhouse and lower bridge. Code words drawn from an exotic palette were assigned to various docks, barracks, and other objectives to be seized: Magenta, Lemon, Claret, Fawn, Heliotrope, and Scarlet.

To command
RESERVIST
, the British chose a voluble fifty-three-year-old salt named Frederick Thornton Peters. Thin lipped, with arching half-moon eyebrows, Captain Peters had returned to the Royal Navy in 1939 following a twenty-year hiatus. After commanding a destroyer flotilla on convoy duty, he headed a training school for intelligence agents in Hertford; his students included Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, who would be notorious soon enough as British traitors. Peters razored his jowls so vigorously that they had a blood sheen. He favored slender black cheroots, preferably lit by a toady with a ready match. “Rain, darkness, and secrecy followed him,” one acquaintance wrote. Now glory was his goal. Peters meant not only to prevent sabotage of the port but also to capture the fortifications and accept Oran’s surrender. “This,” he confided, “is the opportunity I have been waiting for.”

Peters worried the Americans, and so did his plan. Even Churchill acknowledged that the catastrophe at Dieppe in August had “showed how a frontal assault on a defended port was doomed to failure.” Naval wisdom since Admiral Horatio Nelson’s day held that “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort.” At a minimum, one British theorist argued, “defenders must be drenched with fire and reduced to a state of gibbering.” No drenching bombardment would precede
RESERVIST
, and no defenders would gibber. An intelligence report warned, “The number of naval vessels in the Oran harbor varies daily, and [they] are capable of delivering heavy, long range fire.” The timing of the attack caused particular consternation. Originally,
RESERVIST
was to coincide with the first beach landings east and west of Oran. But now the cutters were to enter the harbor two hours after the landings had started, allowing time to cancel the mission if the French appeared either particularly inflamed or conveniently supine. The Royal Navy insisted
RESERVIST
was “more a Trojan horse operation than an assault.”

Convinced that Peters planned to attack regardless of conditions ashore, the senior U.S. Navy officer in the Oran task force, Rear Admiral Andrew C. Bennett, protested to Eisenhower. “If determined resistance is met from the French navy, which seems to be the general opinion, it is believed that this small force will be wiped out,” Bennett wrote on October 17. “If resistance is determined, then I am convinced that five times the number of troops would be insufficient.”
RESERVIST
was “suicidal and absolutely unsound.”

Another American admiral working in London, Bernhard H. Bieri, also protested. But Eisenhower felt obliged in the interests of Allied harmony to heed the British, particularly the four-star admiral Bertram H. Ramsay. “I can’t take your advice on this thing,” Eisenhower told Bieri. “I have to get my advice from Ramsay.” Bieri then approached Ramsay, who replied, “If it doesn’t do anything else, it’s good for the spirit of the people to carry out one of these operations. If successful, it’s a wonderful boost for morale.” Further objection from Major General Orlando Ward, whose 1st Armored Division was to provide the troops for
RESERVIST
, brought only a rebuke from Mark Clark, who had become an enthusiast. “If these craft are fired on by coast defenses, they are to retire,” Clark assured Eisenhower on October 13. Ward’s misgivings persisted, but, he wrote a subordinate, “My conscience is clear in this matter.”

The honor of storming Oran port went to Ward’s 3rd Battalion of the 6th Armored Infantry Regiment. First organized in 1789, the 6th Infantry carried battle streamers from Chapultepec and Chancellorsville, San Juan Hill and Saint-Mihiel. The regimental rolls had included Jefferson Davis, Zachary Taylor, and a particularly gallant commander mortally wounded while fighting the Seminoles in a Florida swamp on Christmas Day 1837. “Keep steady, men,” he advised before expiring. “Charge the hummock.” The current 3rd Battalion commander was a thirty-one-year-old Floridian named George F. Marshall. A West Pointer whose domed forehead crowned a long face and a strong jaw, Marshall had served in the Philippine Scouts and married the daughter of an Army doctor. He had jumped from captain to lieutenant colonel in recent months. If he had doubts about
RESERVIST
, he kept them private: the mission, he told a division staff officer, was “the finest assignment” possible. He would charge the hummock.

After a few days’ training in Britain with grappling hooks and boarding ladders, Marshall and 392 of his men—all that the cutters could carry—sailed to Gibraltar on a Royal Navy cruiser. Arriving on November 5, in time to witness the landing of Eisenhower and his staff aboard the B-17s, the men were ferried to the
Walney
and
Hartland,
which had sailed separately from Northern Ireland. They joined antisabotage specialists, including twenty-six U.S. Navy officers and seamen, six U.S. Marines, fifty-two Royal Navy officers and ratings, and the cutters’ British crews. At noon on November 7, the enlisted men and junior officers learned their destination.

The overloaded cutters wallowed so badly during the short trip across the Mediterranean that soup sloshed from the mess bowls. Neither Peters nor Marshall knew that in Oran a coup organized by Robert Murphy’s Twelve Apostles and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the American spy agency—was collapsing. Although a plucky cabal of royalists, Jews, Freemasons, and Communists remained eager to seize the port and other installations, a key conspirator in the army high command had lost his nerve. A coded alert sent to Gibraltar from a secret radio transmitter in Oran—“Expect resistance everywhere”—was not relayed to the Allied task force.

Each cutter flew an American flag the size of a tablecloth. Both boats also hoisted the White Ensign, emblem of the Royal Navy. The British crews had insisted on sailing under their own flag, deception be damned. Peters met his fellow officers for a final briefing in the
Walney
wardroom. “I think,” he said, “we’ve got a good chance of carrying out our mission without firing a shot.”

At one minute past midnight on November 8, the cutters’ crews took battle stations. Tars stacked extra ammunition in the quarterdeck lockers and the laundry, close to the guns. Scrambling nets were draped over the bows. On
Walney
’s darkened upper bridge, Lieutenant Paul E. A. Duncan of the Royal Navy stood in American battle dress with two pistols strapped low on his hips and a tommy gun clutched across his chest. He was Captain Peters’s linguist, and he practiced speaking French with an American accent, murmuring words he would soon bellow over the boat’s public address system.

With
Hartland
trailing 600 yards behind,
Walney
stalked the Algerian coast at six knots, carving a brilliant green furrow in the phosphorescent sea. Colonel Marshall’s men waited on the mess deck below, sipping coffee and listening to the water hiss along the hull. Physician’s assistants spread white sheets over makeshift operating tables. Among them was Marvin P. Clemons, a former coal mine brakeman from Eccles, West Virginia. The battalion surgeon, Captain Robert Fuller, had recently busted his rambunctious assistant from sergeant to private, and Clemons planned to desert after the first payday in Oran. He helped Fuller lay out the surgical instruments, while privately plotting his flight.

Peters, Duncan, and fifteen other men crowded the bridge. Their faces were so blackened with camouflage that close friends could not recognize one another. The amber lights of Oran spilled down the dark hills, then abruptly, at 2:45
A.M.
, began to wink out. The distant moan of air raid sirens carried across the water.
Walney
’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander P. C. Meyrick, read aloud an equivocal radio message from the task force command ship, H.M.S.
Largs
: “No shooting thus far. Landings unopposed. Don’t start a fight unless you have to.” The men on the bridge laughed. Their disembodied cackling died away as a flare soared lazily above the docks off the starboard bow. For the first time, Peters saw that a double boom stretched 200 yards across the harbor mouth.

Meyrick ordered the helmsman to swing beneath the shadow of the cliffs east of the port. Two small motor launches that had accompanied the cutters from Gibraltar prepared to lay down a smoke screen.
Walney
’s propellers wrenched at the water as Meyrick came about at fifteen knots for a run at the booms. At a nod from Peters—it was precisely three
A.M.
—Duncan gripped the microphone and in his faux American accent bawled into the dark:
“Ne tirez pas. Nous sommes vos amis. Ne tirez pas.”

Red tracers arced across the water and the stutter of a machine gun echoed from the Môle Ravin Blanc. Tongues of flame erupted from shore batteries at Fort Laumone above the harbor entrance. Violent splashes sounded from out on the dark water. “Lie flat for crash,” Meyrick ordered. “We are approaching boom.” With hardly a shudder,
Walney
sliced the first cable and then, “like a wire through cheese,” parted the string of coal barges that formed the second boom. She was in the harbor.

A splintering crash cut short all congratulatory banter. One of the motor launches, swerving to escape its own asphyxiating smoke, had collided with
Walney
. No one was injured, but the launch—her bow crushed—fled into the night. Smoke lay across the docks like the densest fog, billowing white beneath the many flares now burning over the length of the port. A searchlight beam swung wildly across the water. Small-arms fire crackled from the docks and jetties, muffled by the deeper roar of the Batterie de Gambetta. An explosion ripped through
Walney
’s bridge, and Lieutenant Duncan fell dead at the microphone, his plea for a cease-fire strangled in mid-sentence, his pistols unfired in their holsters.

Then, silence descended for a long minute as
Walney
crept past the Môle Ravin Blanc and the Môle Millerand toward her objectives at the harbor’s west end. French gunners swiveled their attention to
Hartland
, now five minutes behind and caught in the searchlight. On
Walney
’s mess deck, 200 American soldiers had listened to the battle strains above, first with enthusiasm, then with alarm as machine-gun bullets stippled the hull. Several men writhed in pain on the deck. Medics crouched over them and fumbled for morphine. Colonel Marshall darted among his troops, rallying them with stout words, then headed toward the forecastle. As planned, British tars lowered three canoes over the side. One had been holed; it sank immediately, spilling soldiers into the water. Antisabotage teams in the other two paddled furiously toward the docks in Basin Maroc.

As suddenly as it had descended, the lull lifted. Peering through the shattered windows of the bridge, Peters saw the French sloop
La Surprise
gathering speed dead ahead. He ordered Meyrick to swerve and ram the ship, but the French captain was quicker. The first salvo, at 300 yards, smashed the iron plate girdling
Walney
’s bridge, killing the helmsman and others around him. Blinded in the left eye, Peters shouted another rudder command, but he was issuing orders to dead men.
Walney
drifted past at four knots and French gunners raked her decks with another broadside from twenty-five yards, the terrible muzzles almost close enough to stroke.

Worse was to come. As the cutter passed Môle Jules Giraud, a shell detonated in the engine room, causing heavy casualties and wrecking the lubricating-oil tanks. The automatic stop valve closed, the engines seized, and
Walney
was adrift. More shells destroyed both boilers, scalding the crewmen. Two berthed submarines, a coastal battery above the harbor, and French snipers peppered the
Walney
fore and aft. Shells slammed into the wardroom flat, the captain’s cabin, the steering compartment. Topside, the dead were piled three deep. Below, the mess deck resembled a charnel house, scarlet with the blood of butchered infantrymen.

Drifting to the Môle Centre at the western end of the harbor,
Walney
came abeam of the moored destroyer
Epervier
. Survivors in a boarding party managed to fling a grappling hook between the destroyer’s funnels, but with no steam to turn the capstans the men could not winch the cutter close enough for boarding. Instead,
Epervier
swept
Walney
with her deck guns, killing Meyrick on the bridge, killing the surgeon Fuller in his sickbay, and killing Colonel Marshall, last seen on the forecastle with a dozen of his doomed men, flinging grenades at the French destroyer. Fire now licked the deck. Of the seventeen men who had stood on the bridge an hour earlier, a solitary survivor stepped among the dead in the red glare of the spreading flames. It was Peters.