PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (14 page)

Nevertheless, Patton’s initial euphoria quickly ebbed, not because of the plan, but because of the personalities responsible for its execution. He was disappointed—and jealous—that Eisenhower chose Mark Clark, a major general with eight years less experience than Patton, as his deputy commander for the operation. Patton feared Clark might get in his way and be “too intrusive.” But he also began to doubt Eisenhower himself: “Ike is not as rugged mentally as I thought; he vacillates and is not a realist.” Moreover, he was disturbed by what he saw as the undue deference the American officers paid to their British counterparts. “It is very noticeable,” he recorded in his diary on August 11, “that most of the American officers here are pro-British, even Ike ... I am not, repeat not, pro-British.”
³

Outside the pages of his diary, however, Patton did not complain, but worked hard and cooperatively with Eisenhower and Clark to plan the operation. The deeper they got into it, the more dubious the project seemed. Both Eisenhower and Clark worried that the odds were stacked too high against success, and Patton went so far as to quantify the matter, calculating that the actual odds were “52 to 48 against us.” In contrast to the other men, however, he favored going on. “I feel,” he noted in his diary, “that we should fight... I feel that I am the only true gambler in the whole outfit.” Always, Patton’s controlling imperative was action, however imperfect: “We must do something now,” he wrote.
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After three weeks of meeting and planning in London, Patton returned to Washington. There he hammered out with the navy the details of the landings. The pessimism of the naval officers greatly aggravated Patton, who frequently exploded in fits of frustration. Despite this, by September 24, Patton had completed his portion of the plan and confided to his diary that he now felt “very calm and contented.” Even though the operation could be “a very desperate venture ... I have a feeling we will win.”
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Operation Torch would consist of three major landings. The Eastern and Central Task Forces, which would sail from Britain, would land at Algiers and Oran, respectively; the Western Task Force, under Patton, would sail from the States and land near Casablanca. Patton subdivided the Western Task Force into three task groups. His trusted friend Lucian Truscott would land near Mehdia and take Port Lyautey. The other two groups, commanded by Jonathan W. Anderson and Ernest N. Harmon, would land at Fedala and Safi, then converge on the city of Casablanca, which they would capture.

On October 20, Patton wrote a series of sentimental valedictory letters, directing that they be posted only after the invasion had begun. He wrote to his childhood nurse, Mary Scally, who now lived with his sister Nita: “When Nita gives you this letter, I will either be dead or not. If I am, please put on a good Irish wake.” To Mrs. Francis C. Marshall, the widow of his first company commander at Fort Sheridan, he wrote to express his conviction “that whatever success I have attained, I owe largely to the influence of you and the General.” To Andre W. Brewster, a fellow member of Pershing’s World War I staff, he wrote: “Before starting on the Second World War I wish to bid goodbye to one of the men who in the First War did so much for me.” To James G. Harbord, who had been Pershing’s chief of staff, he wrote that he had “been one of the chief inspirations of my military life.” To his brother-in-law Frederick Ayer, Patton expressed gratitude and admiration. He explained that his task would be “about as desperate a venture as has ever been undertaken by any force in the world’s history,” and he enclosed a sealed letter for Beatrice, to be given to her only “if I am definitely reported dead.” He allowed that this “all sounds very gloomy, but it is not really so bad. All my life I have wanted to lead a lot of men in a desperate battle; I am going to do it.”
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On October 24 at 8:10 A.M., Patton sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, with 24,000 men in 100 ships. He passed the long voyage in exercising, writing in his diary, and reading the Koran, which he found both “good” and “interesting.” The quickest way to prepare himself for combat in the Islamic world was to discover something of its very soul. Patton also spent time “giving everyone a simplified directive of war. Use steamroller strategy; that is, make up your mind on course and direction of action, and stick to it. But in tactics, do not steamroller. Attack weakness. Hold them by the nose and kick them in the pants.”
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In the days leading up to the landings, the weather along the North African coast was miserable, but, on the morning of November 8, it cleared as if by a miracle. Patton took this as a providential sign and an indication that he was to be permitted to fulfill his destiny by fighting this battle. The landings were resisted by Vichy French forces, but the beachheads were quickly secured. Algiers fell to the Americans on the first day, and the fighting there stopped. Fresh Allied units, mostly British, followed the first wave at Algiers and advanced on Bizerte and Tunis in Tunisia. From his headquarters within the Gibraltar rock, Eisenhower dispatched Mark Clark to negotiate a wide-ranging North African armistice with Vichy admiral Jean Darlan. In the meantime, fighting was sharp at Oran and lasted two days. As for Patton’s sector in Morocco, the French offered stiff resistance, but the landings proceeded briskly nevertheless. Ernest Harmon’s task group pinned down the garrison at Marrakech while Truscott’s group took the vital Port Lyautey airfield. The principal landing was at Fedala, which fell to Anderson’s troops by 8 A.M. At that point, Patton was supposed to disembark from the
Augusta.
His personal gear had been stowed in a landing craft, and he was about to board it, when he paused to ask his orderly, Sergeant George Meeks, to first retrieve from the craft his trademark ivory-handled revolver. Meeks did so, and Patton took a moment to strap it on just as seven French cruisers opened fire on the landing fleet.
Augusta’s
guns replied. The fierce muzzle blast from the great cruiser’s rear turret blew the landing craft off its davits and to bits. By pausing to get his favorite revolver and strap it on, Patton had saved his life.

Doubtless gratified by so remarkable a manifestation of what he believed was his providential good fortune, Patton was nevertheless frustrated that he now could not leave the ship until after noon. In a foul mood as he finally came ashore about 1:30, he was appalled by the spectacle of soldiers digging foxholes. To dig a foxhole, Patton always said, was to dig a grave. The object was to
advance,
not to
dig in,
and he wasted no time in personally motivating his troops with curses, kicks, and encouragement. Very quickly they left off digging foxholes and went about the business of securing the beachhead and commencing the inland advance.

Although the combat troops now performed well, the unloading of supplies and equipment was sluggish. Early the next morning, Patton again took personal charge, and the logistical problems disappeared. With this matter settled, Patton returned to the
Augusta
to persuade Admiral Hewitt to move his transports closer to the shore, so that unloading and reinforcement could be handled even faster. Whether it was giving orders to enlisted G.I.’s or cajoling a senior admiral, Patton believed in the persuasive power of personal contact face-to-face.

From the
Augusta,
he returned to the scene of battle, sent his staff to set up headquarters at Fedala, and advanced on Casablanca with his combat troops. As the Americans approached, the French surrendered the city on November 11, Patton’s birthday. He met with the French officers at his headquarters in the Hotel Miramar at Fedala, having ordered his deputy commander, Geoffrey Keyes, to welcome the delegation with a guard of honor. The Frenchmen were ceremoniously escorted to the hotel’s smoking room, where Patton congratulated the officers on the gallantry of their troops. He well understood the importance of self-respect and honor among military men, and he also understood that even the Vichy French were hardly wholehearted in their commitment to the Axis. The enemy officers with whom he was dealing now were potential allies. His task, however, went beyond ceremony. He carried with him two versions of an armistice agreement, both prepared and authorized in Washington. One version assumed token French resistance and provided lenient terms. The other assumed fierce and stubborn resistance and called for the dissolution and disarming of all French forces. What had actually happened on the beaches fell somewhere between token and stubborn resistance. Moreover, General Auguste Nogues explained that disbanding the French forces would result in violent unrest among the Arabs, Jews, and Berbers, perhaps even civil insurrection. Assuming authority beyond his official instructions, Patton delayed concluding a formal armistice and instead proposed a gentlemen’s agreement by which the French vowed not to hinder the Americans in their contest against the Axis, prisoners of war would be immediately exchanged, and the French troops would retain their arms but remain, for the present, in barracks, pending final word from General Eisenhower. This settled, Patton offered everyone present champagne and proposed a toast to the “happy termination of a fratricidal strife” and “the resumption of the age-old friendship between France and America.”
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Patton’s invasion of Morocco was a triumph and elevated him to the status of national hero. Yet it was Mark Clark that the army immediately rewarded with the third star of a lieutenant general. Patton was intensely jealous of the dashing, handsome, and considerably younger man. He choked back his bitterness as he sent Clark his “sincere congratulations on your promotion and also on the magnificent work you have been doing in connection with the operation.”
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To add to his misery, having taken Morocco, Patton was now sidelined there. Longing to join the battle then under way in Tunisia, he was instead occupied with overseeing the conversion of Casablanca into a major American military base, hardening and training incoming troops, and serving as military administrator of a government putatively run by a sultan, French general Nogues, and French admiral Darlan. He trusted French officers to manage French troops guarding roads and bridges, manning antiaircraft installations, and generally serving to discourage invasion from Spanish Morocco. A stable Morocco meant that American troops would be free to devote their full attention to fighting the Axis.

On November 30, when Clark telephoned with a request that he fly to Algiers, Patton had a flash of hope, but after supper with Eisenhower and Clark, a phone call came for Ike from Washington via Gibraltar. Eisenhower hung up the receiver and turned to Clark: “Well, Wayne, you get the Fifth Army.” To Beatrice, Patton wrote on December 2: “Some times I think that a nice clean death . . . would be the easiest way out.”
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As Patton stewed, his resentments simmered. He wrote in his diary that Clark was one of the “glamour boys [who] have no knowledge of men or war,” and he complained that Eisenhower was no longer really “commanding” because he always yielded to the British, in depressing contrast to World War I’s General Pershing, who had always put American interests first. The comparison between Eisenhower and Pershing became even more invidious when Patton was tapped to host the Casablanca Conference between FDR, Churchill, and their respective military advisers in January 1943. His dark mood notwithstanding, Patton was a gracious, entertaining, impressive, and efficient host, whose razor-sharp troops made a great impression on everyone. To each compliment, however, Patton gave the same response:
I’d rather be fighting.
Then he heard that the Casablanca conferees had decided to make the next attack in Tunisia primarily a British show, with the United States II Corps under British command. “Shades of J. J. Pershing,” he wrote in disgust. “We have sold our birthright.”
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One product of the Casablanca Conference did excite Patton. Churchill and Roosevelt definitively agreed to invade Sicily after Tunisia had been conquered. This came as a blow to Marshall and Eisenhower, who had hoped to turn directly to the cross-channel invasion after North Africa, but Patton was thrilled. Not only would this invasion certainly get him back into the fight, it appealed to his sense of history. To jump off from North Africa to the conquest of Sicily would be to follow in the footsteps of Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, and Belisarius, the great generals of the ancient world. Of course, what FDR, Churchill, and, for the moment, even Patton glided over was the fact that Tunisia had to be conquered first. In this, the American army was about to learn a very hard and very bitter lesson.

It was one thing to achieve victory against the Vichy French, quite another to prevail against the German forces of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. On February 14, 1943, the American 1st Armored Division under Orlando Ward was mauled and withdrew, along with Free French forces, 50 miles to the Western Dorsale, the mountains near the Tunisian-Algerian border. Like Patton himself, Rommel was a believer in relentless attack, and, seeing an opportunity to push the Allies out of Tunisia altogether, he attacked next at the Sbiba and Kasserine passes in an engagement known as the Battle of Kasserine Pass. Rommel very nearly broke through, but chronically beset by logistical problems, unable to maneuver adequately in the rough terrain, and menaced by a buildup of Allied reinforcements, he was forced to break off the offensive on February 22 and withdraw to his formidable redoubt known as the Mareth Line.

Yet Rommel had succeeded in doing plenty of damage. Lloyd Freden-dall, commanding the U.S. II Corps, had been woefully outgeneraled. More than 3,000 of his troops were killed or wounded, and another 3,700 were taken prisoner. Equipment losses were heavy, including 200 tanks. Bad as all this was, far worse was the effect on American morale. In this, the first direct American encounter with the Germans, the United States Army was not merely defeated, it was humiliated. A shiver of panic shot through the American home front. As for the British, alarm and disgust ran high. Tommies and officers alike began slyly referring to their American allies as “our Italians,” a cutting reference to the notoriously inept service Mussolini’s army rendered to the Germans.