An Army at Dawn (83 page)

“We became ruthless with the Arab,” a 1st Division soldier wrote. “If we found them where they were not to be, they were open game, much as rabbits in the States during hunting season.” Another soldier explained: “Here Arabs live all over. Some we shoot on sight, some we search, and some we make a deal with to buy eggs and chickens.” Soldiers boasted of using natives for marksmanship practice, daring one another to shoot an Arab coming over a hill like a target in an arcade. Others fired at camels to see the riders bucked off, or shot at the feet of Arab children “to watch them dance in fear,” as one 34th Division soldier recounted.

At a training camp in Algeria, sentries were told they could fire on anyone “dressed in white and not promptly responding to the password.” Natives suspected of espionage or sabotage were usually turned over to the French for summary justice, but not always. “We made them dig their graves,” one 1st Division soldier reported. “We lined them up and shot them.” British commandos near Green Hill in the north burned woggeries whose inhabitants were suspected of aiding the Germans. “It is not pleasant to stand round blazing huts while women and children scream outside,” one witness acknowledged.

After Kasserine, during a move from Sbiba toward Fondouk, “I saw men from another outfit shoot Arabs just to watch them jump and fall,” Edward Boehm later recounted. Boehm was a lieutenant from Montana, with Battery C of the 185th Field Artillery. “I could hear them yell and laugh each time and there was nothing I could do about it…. I saw them do it, like you’re shooting gophers. I could hear them: ‘Wow, I got one!’ Those guys were murderers.”

Such atrocities were committed by a very small percentage of American troops, but provost marshal and judge advocate files reflected a disturbing indiscipline. When a truck convoy bound for II Corps with replacement troops stopped for lunch in Affreville, Algeria, some soldiers got drunk on local wine and started firing at Arabs along Highway 4. One private shot dead a man on his donkey, wounded a second, and then killed another before boasting that he “got three out of five Arabs.” Given a dishonorable discharge, he was sentenced to twenty years at hard labor.

But other crimes went unavenged. On March 31, Giraud sent Eisenhower a letter citing incidents “in which U.S. and British troops have molested, assaulted, and killed natives.” Several weeks later, a secret AFHQ memorandum reported that Giraud’s chief of staff “again called our attention to a situation which has come up repeatedly in the past month. This is the continuing cases of rape in the forward areas…against Arab women.” Another internal AFHQ memo regarding “crimes committed by American troops in the forward areas” reported that an additional military police battalion had been dispatched to keep order.

Some of the most appalling incidents involved depredations in the northern Algerian village of Le Tarf, seven miles from the Tunisian border. In mid-April, drunken troops from an American engineering company reportedly terrorized Le Tarf for two days. Witness statements in a French investigative document sent to AFHQ recounted gang rapes of six Arab women, all of them named, including a thirty-year-old suffering from typhus, a forty-five-year-old widow, a fifty-year-old, and a fifty-five-year-old and her daughter-in-law. A fifteen-year-old and a forty-year-old widowed mother reported escaping after a chase by predatory soldiers. Several Arab men alleged being beaten with rifle butts and fists.

“The people of the district, European as well as native, are now living in fear of the daily occurrences caused by the troops,” a local official wrote. A French investigator reported visiting the American company, which had bivouacked two miles up the road; he was assured that the unit in question was not involved. If American authorities examined the French allegations—and AFHQ files indicate that at least a preliminary investigation was launched—their findings have vanished. During World War II, 140 U.S. soldiers were executed for murder and rape, but if justice was meted out for the ravaging of Le Tarf, the records remain silent.

“I Had a Plan…Now I Have None”

T
ED
Roosevelt was among the first to sense the enemy’s withdrawal. “It has a soft feel up and down the front this morning,” he wrote on Tuesday, April 6. At Wadi Akarit, fifty miles east of the 1st and 9th Division front, Eighth Army had attacked the new Axis line with a tank advantage of 462 to 25. The “apocalyptic hurricane of steel and fire,” as General Messe described the British assault, took more than 5,000 Italian prisoners, so many as to constitute a nuisance; they were used as foot-stools by Tommies scrambling out of the antitank ditches. Messe told Arnim he could hold until Wednesday night, but only by flinging “the last man into the furnace.” Instead, most of the surviving troops—including nearly every German—slipped away to the north after dark on Tuesday, while those facing the Americans also fell back before their escape route was severed.
Non è stata una bella battaglia,
Messe lamented: this was not a good battle.

It was not especially good for the British, either. Eighth Army suffered 600 dead and 2,000 wounded, yet still failed to annihilate the enemy or prevent his flight. On Tuesday night, Alexander issued his sixth and final change of orders to the Americans: II Corps was to attack in the morning without regard to armor losses, in a last attempt to ram the Axis flank. On a paper scrap torn from a notebook, Patton scratched a message in his runic cursive for Colonel Benson: “Attack and destroy the enemy; act aggressively. GSP, Jr.”

They swung at air. As the enemy melted away, Hill 772 and Djebel Berda finally fell. So did Hill 369, after a ferocious U.S. artillery bombardment. Soon the desert along Highway 15 was covered with “American tanks, half-tracks, mobile guns, jeeps, [and] trucks, surging eastward in line abreast like a Spanish fleet, with pennants and flags flying.” A thousand prisoners were seized, bringing the total captured by II Corps at El Guettar to 4,700. But only one in ten was German, and the bulk of the enemy army was only a dusty pall on the northeast horizon. In his diary Patton wrote: “
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
.”

The Maknassy heights also fell, finally, and American pursuers had a bit more luck near Mezzouna and along Gumtree Road. Colonel Lang got away, but a half-dozen U.S. tanks raked a German rearguard convoy, and marauding Allied fighter-bombers tormented the retreating columns. Among those caught in the open was the 10th Panzer Division operations officer, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a tall, brilliant aristocrat who during duty in the Soviet Union was so alienated by German barbarism that after arriving in Africa in February he had quietly begun agitating for a military coup to oust Hitler. On Wednesday afternoon, fighters strafed Count Stauffenberg’s staff car with 20mm cannon fire. Gravely wounded, he was rushed to a field hospital in Sfax, where his right hand was amputated at the wrist and tossed into the garbage still wearing a ring; surgeons also removed his left eye and took two shattered fingers from his left hand. Evacuated to Italy, Stauffenberg was placed on a hospital train bound for Munich. His long recuperation gave him time to concoct the bomb plot that nearly killed Hitler on July 20, 1944.

Within an hour or two of Stauffenberg’s wounding, American scouts and British Eighth Army troops spied one another across the desert for the first time. “Hello, Limeys!” the Yanks shouted, notwithstanding that the troops so hallooed were Indian. No matter: the army of the west and the army of the east had joined, despite a five-month Axis campaign to keep them apart. As other British and American troops met, they seemed unlikely kinsmen. Two weeks at El Guettar had reduced the Americans’ uniforms to tatters and the men wearing them to scarecrows. Two years in Africa had made the bleached and bronzed British resemble “Ay-rabs in jeeps,” as the Yanks called them, garbed in a heterogeneous array of khaki shorts, short-sleeve blouses or bare backs, and headgear that ranged from berets to burnooses.

That first meeting produced handshakes and broad grins but few memorable utterances. “This is certainly a pleasant surprise,” a British sergeant said amiably. To which Private Perry Searcy of Kentucky replied, “Well, it’s good to see somebody besides a Nazi.”

The cousins were together, and no enemy would sunder them again.

Eisenhower was jubilant. “We are at last operating on a single battle line and have placed the enemy in a position that, to say the least, is highly embarrassing for him,” he wrote to his son, John. “I have been aiming for this for a long time and, frankly, I must say that I experience a definite feeling of happiness and delight.”

Success in Tunisia reinforced Eisenhower’s conviction in the righteousness of the Allied cause, a theme he articulated most ardently to his closest correspondents with robust, primitive patriotism. “My single passion is to do my full duty in helping to smash the disciples of Hitler,” he told John. Although his men fought—as all men at arms fight—primarily for one another, Eisenhower saw other, “priceless things for which we are fighting.”

It seems to me [he wrote in early April] that in no other war in history has the issue been so distinctly drawn between the forces of arbitrary oppression on the one side and, on the other, those conceptions of individual liberty, freedom, and dignity, under which we have been raised in our great Democracy…. I do have the feeling of a crusader in this war.

He was just as fervent in championing Allied unity, which he considered the keystone of imminent victory in Tunisia and the eventual larger victory beyond. “We are establishing a pattern for complete unity in Allied effort—ground, air, navy—that will stand the Allied nations in good stead throughout the remainder of this war,” he wrote to General A.D. Surles at the War Department. Again and again he reiterated “my policy of refusing to permit any criticism couched along nationalistic lines.”

Enforcing this policy was not easy. Proximity to the British had only deepened the latent Anglophobia of many American generals—Patton, Clark, and Bradley among them. If the British were more circumspect in their disdain, the Yanks suspected with good cause that they were being patronized. “The only way in which we can get things really tidied up,” Air Marshal Tedder wrote on March 26, “is by showing the Americans the right way to do things and letting them see where they are wrong.” Alexander concurred, telling Montgomery three days later: “I have taken infinite trouble with them—and mind you one has to deal very carefully with them because they are not one of us…. I have grave doubts that these soldiers are really doing their duty as we understand it.”

Even Eisenhower had to swallow hard. On March 30 he flew to the Eighth Army command post south of Gabès to confer with Montgomery. Both men followed their public display of conviviality with private binges of character assassination. “His high-pitched accent and loud talking would drive me mad,” Montgomery complained to Alexander. “I should say he was good probably on the political line; but he obviously knows nothing whatever about fighting.” For his part, Eisenhower warned Marshall that Montgomery “will never willingly make a single move until he is absolutely certain of success.” The hostility—and it had just begun—was aggravated by Montgomery’s juvenile demand that he be sent an American B-17 Flying Fortress for his personal use: he had occupied Sfax ahead of schedule and thus won a gentleman’s wager with Beetle Smith. “Montgomery to Eisenhower. Entered Sfax 0830 this morning. Please send Fortress,” he cabled on April 10. The plane was sent (it would crash three months later), but the commander-in-chief seethed. “Goddam it, I can deal with anybody except that son of a bitch,” he complained. Montgomery was “a thorn in my side, a thorn in my side.”

As if to compensate for such forbidden sentiments, Eisenhower proselytized like a man possessed by the true faith. “Every subordinate throughout the hierarchy of command will execute the orders he receives without even pausing to consider whether that order emanated from a British or American source,” he decreed. In a conference with Alexander and Patton, he confided that he did not think of himself “as an American but as an ally.” Patton told his diary, “Ike is more British than the British.”

Yet in his ecumenical zeal, Eisenhower neglected the role his countrymen were to play in the last act of the Tunisian drama. II Corps officers had long speculated that the British intended to have Anderson’s First Army capture Bizerte and Montgomery’s Eighth Army capture Tunis. Those suspicions were confirmed when Alexander’s staff unveiled a plan for the endgame that excluded II Corps except for the 9th Division, on the assumption that it would be too hard to supply British and American forces simultaneously around the shrinking Axis bridgehead. “Both Patton and I were speechless with rage,” Bradley later wrote. “But since we were under strict orders from Ike to do what Alexander told us to do, we raised no objections.”

Incapable of holding his tongue for long, Patton sent Bradley to Algiers in late March for a private talk with his old West Point classmate. Eisenhower seemed unaware of the British plan and, in Bradley’s view, not terribly interested. Bradley offered several arguments: that leaving three experienced American divisions on the sidelines was tactically foolish; that seconding the 9th Division meant returning to the bad habit of mixing national units; that the United States and its army had earned the right to be in on the kill.

“This war’s going to last a long time, Ike. There’ll be a lot more Americans in it before we’re through,” Bradley added. “Until you give us the chance to show what we can do in a sector of our own, with an objective of our own, under our own command, you’ll never know how good or bad we really are.”

Eisenhower nodded and studied the wall map in his St. Georges office. That afternoon he cabled Alexander, urging “a real effort to use the II U.S. Corps right up to the bitter end of the campaign.” Over the next two weeks a new plan evolved in which part of the American force—but not the 1st Division, and only half of 1st Armored—would capture Bizerte. Demonstrating his skills as a staff courtier, Eisenhower deftly took credit for the revision. Alexander’s original plan “seemed to me a bit on the slow, methodical side,” he wrote Marshall, “and, in addition, appeared to contemplate the eventual pinching out of the U.S. II Corps…. Alexander sees eye to eye with me.”