Assignment to Hell (18 page)

After seven weeks of being in a war zone, Boyle celebrated a “canned” Christmas at an airdrome along the Tunisian front. “We are having canned steak, canned peas, canned tomatoes, canned sweet potatoes, canned apricots, canned beets, canned biscuits, canned milk, and canned corn,” a technical sergeant from Dallas said with a grin to Boyle.

Nineteen forty-two was over. As they ate their holiday rations, American soldiers were thinking they had endured some nasty moments. But North Africa’s lipless kiss was just beginning.

E
arly one morning in mid-January 1943, A. J. Liebling was trading barbs with ground crew grunts over breakfast alfresco at a hellhole of an airdrome near Thélepte in the southern Tunisia desert. The men were balancing plates of eggs on empty gasoline canisters when they heard the menacing buzz of approaching aircraft. Abruptly leaving breakfast behind, they sprinted for cover behind a knoll, with the porky Liebling leading the pack.

“They always faced eastward while they ate in the morning so that they could see the Messerschmitts come over the mountains in the sunrise,” Liebling recalled. “This morning there were nine Messerschmitts. By the time I hit the ground on the lee side of the mound, slender airplanes were twisting above us in a sky crisscrossed by tracer bullets—a whole planetarium of angry worlds and meteors.”
¹

The North African campaign in the first half of 1943 was full of angry projectiles. Liebling spent several weeks at Thélepte with a P-40 fighter squadron and A-20 bomber crews attached to the 47th Bombardment Group. The base got strafed so often at sunup, then again at sundown, that
Liebling and fellow correspondents, among them AP’s estimable Noland “Boots” Norgaard, got used to dining in installments.

An Army Air Force major from northwestern Pennsylvania named Philip Cochran was so eerily prescient at predicting when raids would occur that it was as if he was “sensing when to hop on or off a guy who is shooting craps,” the major told Liebling. It turned out that Cochran was already something of a known commodity before Liebling profiled him. Comic artist Milton Caniff had used Cochran as the inspiration behind his balls-to-the-wall aviator “Flip Corkin” in Caniff’s popular strip
Terry and the Pirates
.
²

Cochran was a favorite Liebling archetype: the bare-knuckled Irishman. A few weeks earlier, Cochran had defied orders and transferred his squadron to Thélepte, conducting what amounted, Liebling claimed, to a rogue war. North Africa was so chaotic that hell-raisers like Cochran were desperately needed—or so Liebling argued. “The situation [in North Africa] called for officers who were good at guessing, bluffing and guerrilla tactics,” Liebling wrote, “and Cochran found himself in the spot he had dreamed of all his military life.”
³

Another controversial rogue warrior, Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen, the commander of Liebling’s First Division darlings, also got the full A.J. treatment. As a young man, Allen had managed to get himself tossed out of West Point, the sort of puerile behavior that bad boy Liebling always viewed as strength of character. Liebling also liked the fact that the young Allen had boxed professionally, sometimes under an assumed name. The onetime pugilist possessed “shrewdness and dash … not acquired from textbooks,” Liebling enthused.

It was true that the pugnacious Allen was beloved by many GIs. But it was also true that Allen was sloppy, undisciplined, and constantly at loggerheads with superiors—little of which was addressed in Liebling’s fawning portrayal. A few months later in Sicily, Allen’s handling of the assault at Troina was so cavalier that Omar Bradley felt compelled to relieve him.
⁴

Liebling, the lefty subversive, loved to tweak right-wingers. In mid-March, outside the central Tunisia oasis of Djebel Berda, while the First Division’s brass planned its next maneuver, Liebling was standing near
Allen’s deputy, Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., as Army public relations magnate Lieutenant (later Captain) Ralph Ingersoll happened to wander by in the company of several engineering officers. Ingersoll, a good friend of Liebling’s, was a onetime
New Yorker
editor and founder of the left-wing newspaper
PM
, the bane of Wall Street. Despite their political differences, Liebling had grown to admire General Roosevelt, whose political leanings were considerably more conservative than those of TR Senior—and miles removed from TR junior’s distant cousin in the White House.

Ingersoll greeted Liebling, had a pleasant exchange with Roosevelt, and walked off. Once Ingersoll’s entourage was out of earshot, Liebling couldn’t resist.

“That was Ralph Ingersoll, the
PM
editor,” Liebling informed Roosevelt.

“The general likes to descant on the thesis that all the prominent interventionists stayed safe at home while he, a hard-shell America Firster, went to war,” Liebling wrote. “He stopped sharply. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘I always thought that man was a sonofabitch.’”
⁵

One of the reasons Liebling the gourmand was taken with Roosevelt was that the general always went out of his way to cultivate the mess sergeant in every outfit. “He asks the sergeant, for instance, if the company has enough baking powder. The sergeant invariably says no, and Roosevelt leaves him with the impression that if he, Roosevelt, were Secretary of War, there would be enough baking powder.”
⁶

Liebling hooked up with Teddy, Jr., and the Big Red One in February of ’43 and stayed with them through much of the ultimately victorious Tunisian campaign. The
New Yorker
writer called North Africa’s scruffy terrain the Foamy Fields. Liebling saw a fair amount of action when the Fighting First finally began pushing east. Yet his only close brush with death came while still encamped at Thélepte, a few days after the Me 109 breakfast strafing.

“I have at last joined the large legion of Hairsbreadth Harries who have narrow escape stories to bore people with,” Liebling wrote to an old New York friend. At noon on the day he was scheduled to leave Thélepte, Liebling had just loaded his gear and climbed into an idling jeep when cannon shells began exploding.

I leaped out of the jeep and lit running and somebody yelled “Down!” and I dived for the ground so hard I tore a lot of skin off my hands and knees and elbows and lay there wishing my ass didn’t stick so far up in the air while the Messerschmitts made their first pass…. All I could think of was “Joe Liebling has been a nice guy and it’s been a pleasure knowing him,” and I was awfully sorry that I would never know how Liebling’s life was going to come out.
⁷

As the enemy fighters reorganized to make a second run, Liebling raced across the runway and piled into a slit trench. He lay there, face buried, until the attack was over. Liebling was amazed that he hadn’t been hit: a series of shell craters “like the marks of a rake” were embedded just yards from the jeep.

T
HE FIRST DAY OR TWO
of Hitler’s reaction to the Allied landings in French Morocco and Algiers may have been sluggish, but he made up for it in a hurry. Nazi commandoes seized the Tunisian ports, while transport planes and ferries rushed tens of thousands of reinforcements across the Mediterranean from southern France, Sicily, and Italy.
⁸
Once the Vichy French capitulated, the Allies under Eisenhower (at least nominally: Ike never truly asserted control over the North African battle zone) began probing east toward Algeria’s border with Tunisia while the British Eighth Army under Montgomery pushed west through the Libyan desert from Egypt.

The German high command’s gambit meant that they now had the firepower to strengthen their grip on Tunisia and disrupt the Allies’ pincer movement. It also meant Germany’s onetime wunderkind, Erwin Rommel, whom Joe Liebling wrote had a “hypnotic influence” over Hitler, had time to reassemble his Afrika Korps in the remote mountains of Tunisia, plotting ways to bedevil the Allies.
⁹

In the midst of these Nazi machinations, Churchill and Roosevelt met in mid-January under extraordinary security several hundred miles west
in Casablanca. The photo opportunities were spectacular: Wire services ran shots of FDR visiting the Ninth Infantry, Churchill and FDR touring the countryside, and bitter French rivals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud exchanging a sickly handshake at the insistence of FDR, who approached byzantine geopolitics with the same cheekiness he employed to paper over differences among Democratic Party chieftains.

At Casablanca George Marshall revived his plea for a cross-Channel assault in 1943 but was again rebuffed by Churchill. An aggressive assault on Sicily, the British PM argued, might knock Italy out of the Axis and reroute German divisions away from Stalin’s front—and maybe away from northern France, too. Marshall dismissed Churchill’s strategy as “periphery-picking.”
¹⁰
But the Brits, FDR conceded—perhaps too happily—still had the upper hand. All parties agreed to invade Sicily once Axis troops were ejected from North Africa.

Churchill’s claim that a sustained Mediterranean offensive would inflict a deathblow on Hitler was exaggerated—and FDR and Marshall knew it. But like his decision to light Torch, FDR made the correct call in overruling his chief. Churchill’s analysis may have been off-base—and he had at least one eye focused on protecting Britain’s possessions in the Middle and Near East—but the PM’s conclusion was accurate: The Allies were nowhere near ready to launch a cross-Channel attack.

FDR, too, had a hyperbolic moment at Casablanca—and it was one that Allied field commanders would come to regret almost as much as Churchill’s prevarications. At the concluding press conference, FDR stunned everyone by announcing that the Allies would accept nothing short of “unconditional surrender.” Knowing it would play well with an American electorate still disgusted with the murky ending of World War I, FDR was consciously—and disingenuously—evoking General U. S. Grant’s famous demand to the Confederate commander at Fort Donelson during the early days of the Civil War.

Churchill, who later admitted he was caught unawares, deftly endorsed FDR’s pronouncement.
¹¹
Omar Bradley wasn’t the only Allied field commander who believed FDR’s impetuous declaration was a mistake, emboldening the enemy and perhaps prolonging the war.

A
FTER BEING CHASED THROUGH NORTHERN
Libya by Montgomery in the wake of El Alamein, Rommel was reinforced by General Jürgen von Arnim’s divisions across the sea. The combined Axis armies now more or less matched the Allied presence in North Africa. But Rommel and von Arnim knew that time favored the Allies. What they didn’t know was that British Intelligence, now privy to the codebooks that fueled the Germans’ compromised Enigma code, was reading their secret communiqués with Berlin.

Ultra machine intercepts told the Allies when enemy ships, oil tankers, and aircraft were heading toward Tunisia; German supply sources were blown up with such regularity that the enemy commanders understood they had to move quickly or be bled dry.

It helped Rommel and von Arnim that nasty weather and indecisive leadership undercut the Allied advance. A gloomy Eisenhower that winter wrote a friend that the Allied operations in North Africa “will be condemned, in their entirety, by all … War College classes for the next twenty-five years.”
¹²

In late January, the Germans struck, eventually capturing Faïd Pass and cordoning off eastern Tunisia. The big blow came on Valentine’s Day when, as foretold by Ultra, Rommel launched a blitzkrieg reminiscent of Western Europe in the spring of ’40: a vicious armored thrust toward the strategically critical Kasserine Pass in the Atlas Mountains, spearheaded by shrieking Stuka dive-bombers.