An Army at Dawn (86 page)

North they pounded for 150 miles, another vehicle roaring by every thirty-seven seconds around the clock, precisely as planned, 30,000 vehicles all told, on highways that had carried Carthaginian elephants, Roman chariots, and Byzantine chargers. The desert fell behind. Once again, they were back in the northern hills where many had fought in November and December. The mid-April wheat was thigh high. Rock roses and ladies’ fingers bloomed along the roads, and poppies spread like flame on the slopes in “hilarious, shouting bands of color.” Gorgeous banks of blue convolvulus resembled wood smoke in the middle distance, or, to the jaded eye, a foaming mortar barrage. Hawthorne budded. Apples blossomed. The songs of cuckoos spilled from the thickets.

God’s bounty meant nothing to these men. Beneath the vernal landscape every soldier now saw topography, just as a pathologist can see the skull beneath a scalp. A streambed was not a streambed but defilade; pastures were not pastures but exposed fields of fire. Laurel thickets became ambush sites, and every grove of cork trees might hide a German 88. No soldier could look at this corrupted terrain without feeling that it had become sinister and deeply personal.

Not even a Tunisian spring could hide the battle scars. Refugees trudged on the road shoulders, floured by the dust of the passing trucks. Only rubble remained where for centuries there had been towns with names like Sidi bou Zid and Sbeïtla and Medjez-el-Bab. Once-pretty Béja, with its rambling walls and hilltop Byzantine towers, was posted with yellow signs warning all pilgrims of typhus.

To Béja they were headed, or near it, as part of the grand scheme for the coup de grâce devised by Eisenhower and Alexander. The plan went like this: More than 300,000 Allied troops in some twenty divisions, with 1,400 tanks and as many artillery tubes, would attack in three main groups along a 140-mile arc that extended from Enfidaville south of Tunis to the Mediterranean coast west of Bizerte. Montgomery’s Eighth Army would strike from the south with six divisions, angling for the capital while also preventing the Axis from converting Cap Bon—a large, stony peninsula east of Tunis—into an African Bataan that could hold out for months. From the southwest, roughly parallel to the Medjerda River valley, Anderson’s First Army would attack toward Tunis with six British and three French divisions. And on the far left flank of the Allied line, the Americans would drive on Bizerte from the west with four U.S. divisions and three French battalions known collectively as the Corps Franc d’Afrique. “We have got them just where we want them,” Alexander told his men, “with their backs to the wall.”

Getting the Allied divisions where
they
were wanted had required settling several fraternal squabbles. Influenced by Crocker, Alexander had intended to banish the U.S. 34th Division from the line for extensive retraining even as he acceded to Eisenhower’s request that II Corps participate in the kill. He also was reluctant to commit all of the 1st Armored Division, “owning to its present low state of morale and training.” Also, Allen’s 1st Infantry Division was to withdraw to prepare for
HUSKY
, the invasion of Sicily.

Patton howled. The Americans now had 467,000 troops in northwest Africa, more than 60 percent of the Anglo-American army. Most were earmarked for
HUSKY
or were part of the immense Yankee logistical apparatus. But Alexander proposed taking the Tunisian laurels with a force almost wholly British. “Frankly, I am not happy,” Patton wrote Alexander on April 11. If the U.S. Army appeared to be “acting in a minor role, the repercussions might be unfortunate.” A day later he wrote again, proposing that the 34th Division be kept with II Corps to “restore its soul” and warning that because it was a National Guard unit “its activities assume local interest of great political significance.” In other words: congressmen from Iowa and Minnesota would react poorly to any humiliation of their boys by British officers. At Patton’s request, Bradley carried this second letter to Alexander’s headquarters in Haïdra. “Give me the division,” Bradley told the field marshal, “and I’ll promise you they’ll take and hold their very first objective.”

Intrigued, Alexander brushed off his staff’s objections and told Bradley, “Take them, they’re yours.” After further negotiation, all four American divisions in II Corps were to be included in the attack: American logisticians had demonstrated that they could supply U.S. troops without disrupting the British lines to Anderson’s army, in part by using 5,000 trucks to stock dumps near Béja and by hiring
balancelles
—fishing smacks—to ship ammunition from Bône. Patton had also objected to again subsuming II Corps into Anderson’s command after it had been reporting directly to Alexander for more than a month. Anderson did little to woo back the estranged Yanks when, upon reviewing their plans for capturing Bizerte, he flicked his swagger stick at the map and said, “Just a childish fancy, just a childish fancy.” (“I’ll make that son of a bitch eat those words,” Ernie Harmon later vowed; Patton informed his diary, “I would rather be commanded by an Arab.”) Again Alexander acquiesced, authorizing the II Corps commander to appeal any disagreeable order from Anderson directly to Alexander. Running counter to the usual rigidity of combat etiquette, this arrangement was not merely unorthodox but even improper.

So the Yanks were coming, lots of them, although British troops still constituted nearly two-thirds of Alexander’s army group. If in his quest to transcend chauvinism Eisenhower remained aloof from issues of national honor, Marshall did not. Citing a “marked fall in prestige of American troops,” he warned Eisenhower on April 14, “Please watch this very closely.” The need to prove that U.S. troops were the battlefield equals of any—a compulsion dating to World War I—remained a powerful force in the American military psyche.

The actors had taken their positions. Now the curtain was set to rise for the last time in Africa. Two brawny Allied armies would attack two eviscerated Axis armies, with the British angling from the south and southwest, and the Americans driving from the west.

On April 18, II Corps officially relieved British troops around Béja. But when the U.S. command post went up in tents on a farm two miles northwest of town, one man was conspicuously absent: G. S. Patton, Jr. As Eisenhower had long intended, Patton had quietly surrendered the corps command in order to complete preparations for Sicily, now less than three months away. In forty-three days he had become a national hero, fought the best German tank forces to a draw, and gone far toward building a reputation as “our greatest fighting general,” in Franklin Roosevelt’s phrase. Yet—as perhaps even he realized—his tenure had been checkered at best. For all Patton’s melodramatics, his influence on the esprit and discipline of II Corps was marginal. Even when allowances are made for the restrictions imposed by Alexander, he had demonstrated little tactical flair at El Guettar, Maknassy, or the first Fondouk. Sweeping envelopments by rampaging tanks, he was discovering, were nearly as rare in this war as they had been in the last.

Despite Eisenhower’s praise for “the outstanding example of leadership you have given us all,” Patton would leave Tunisia with his thirst for glory unslaked. His frustration can be seen in his orders to inflate the estimates of damage inflicted on Axis forces by II Corps: padding the body count, this would be called in a later war. According to three accounts left by senior staff officers, Patton disputed the initial assessments of enemy losses. “It wasn’t ‘colorful’ enough—didn’t make the operation look big enough,” Lieutenant Colonel Russell F. Akers, Jr., the corps assistant operations officer, privately told Bradley’s aide after the war. “Result: we doubled figures on equipment damaged, destroyed, or captured intact.” Patton’s chief intelligence officer, Monk Dickson, recorded the following conversation in mid-April:

Patton: Your estimates of enemy killed and wounded are absurd. We handed them ten times that many casualties.

Dickson: Sir, we counted all their graves that we could find, interrogated both medical and combat people, and checked their rolls…. Experienced soldiers are hard to kill.

Patton: Add another cipher to both totals.

Dickson: Sir, I can not conscientiously do it.

The II Corps after-action report sent to Algiers asserted that 800 German graves had been counted on the road from Gafsa to Gabès. Enemy equipment that II Corps claimed was destroyed on the ground and from the air between March 15 and April 10 included 128 tanks, 850 other vehicles, and 300 artillery tubes and machine guns—numbers that are certainly inflated, whether or not at Patton’s behest. Because the final report was still in preparation when Patton left, Akers added, the departing commander “gave me his signature on a piece of paper, which I traced onto the stencil when it had been cut.”

As he left Gafsa, Patton picked a bouquet of nasturtiums and laid them on Dick Jenson’s grave. Nearly 800 other American boys were buried there with the young captain. He wept at the sight, never bad behavior in a general. His final diary entry before he left Tunisia was vintage Patton:

As I gain in experience I do not think more of myself but less of others. Men, even so-called great men, are wonderfully weak and timid. They are too damned polite. War is very simple, direct, and ruthless. It takes a simple, direct, and ruthless man to wage war.

On Thursday morning, April 22, Patton’s successor arrived by jeep on the crest of a leafy hill outside Béja. He was a bespectacled six-footer, with a high, convex forehead and thin hair that had been graying since his cadet days. Now he was fifty, just. The jut of his jaw was often mistaken for a sign of pugnacity; in fact, a boyhood skating accident had shattered his teeth and left him with a lifelong reluctance to smile for photographers lest they make, as he put it, a “permanent record of that jumbled mess.” He wore a tatty field jacket and canvas leggings, making him “the least dressed-up commander of an American army in the field since Zachary Taylor, who wore a straw hat,” one witness observed. Unscrolling the map of northern Tunisia that he carried under his arm, he clipped it to an easel, then turned to the small band of correspondents who had come to take his measure and hear his plan.

Omar Nelson Bradley had moved to center stage; there he would remain for the duration and beyond. He descended from hardscrabble Missouri farmers and one itinerant schoolteacher, his father. Eisenhower had contributed a generous accolade for his classmate’s yearbook entry at West Point: “True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.” Like Patton, Bradley could be simple, direct, and ruthless, but the similarities ended there. Profanity offended him and he had never even tasted alcohol until the age of thirty-three; his teetotaling wife, Mary, flew into a rage at the spectacle of intoxication—hardly rare on Army posts. His cultivated image of homespun humility—he was “the G.I. General”—was not so much wrong as incomplete; he also possessed an intolerant rectitude and a capacity for dissimulation that in lesser men might devolve into deceit. Hunting was his great passion—when he was stationed at Fort Benning he often tramped into the Georgia swamp before breakfast to shoot the heads off water moccasins; in Tunisia he settled for rocks tossed into the air by his aides. He had a born infantryman’s feel for terrain, with a detailed mental map of every significant swale and ridge from Béja to Bizerte. Of the fifty-nine members of the West Point class of 1915 who became generals—’15 was “the class that stars fell on”—Bradley had been first to win the rank. Arabs, assuming that “Omar” was a Muslim name, were pleased that one of their own had achieved such stature in the American Army. Patton wryly complained that Bradley was simply “too damned sound.”

With map unfurled on the easel and pointer in hand, Bradley quickly explained the impending campaign in his flat, sodbuster twang. “He laid down his schedule with no more panache than a teacher outlining the curriculum for the new semester,” recalled A.J. Liebling, among those squatting at his feet. Mateur was the key to Bizerte. The 9th Division would take the far left flank along the sea—skirting Green and Bald Hills, where the British had found so much trouble. The other two U.S. infantry divisions—the 1st and 34th—would attack farther south, through Sidi Nsir and the hill country below it. The 1st Armored Division would exploit any breakthrough onto the coastal plain leading to Bizerte.

Bradley neglected to mention that his first act as corps commander—even before he repealed Patton’s necktie directive—had been to disobey a direct order from Eisenhower. In a patronizing “Dear Brad” message on April 16, the commander-in-chief noted that “the southern portion of your sector appears to be reasonably suited for tank employment and it is in that area that you will be expected to make your main effort.” This proposed route, through the narrow Tine River valley, was such an obvious German ambush site that II Corps had dubbed it the Mousetrap. Certain that such an attack invited disaster, Bradley simply ignored the proposal and ordered his commanders to avoid the Mousetrap. He likened the job ahead to “hunting wild goats.” By hugging the high ground—“djebel hopping,” he called it—troops were to avoid the vulnerable bottlenecks that had cost so many lives in the past five months. The attack would take time; there were many djebels to hop and many goats to hunt. Axis sappers had spent months fortifying the hills with pneumatic drills, concrete, countless mines, and six artillery battalions. In the II Corps sector, the enemy now mustered an estimated 12,000 infantry troops, and that number would more than triple in the next two weeks.