The Day of Battle (48 page)

“We musn’t kid ourselves,” Truscott said, gesturing vaguely toward German lines to the north. “There’s still a lot of fight left in the old son of a bitch.”

But Lucas provided the apposite epitaph for the first Allied assault on the Winter Line. “The weather is cold as hell and the wind is blowing,” he wrote in his diary. “Wars should be fought in better country than this.”

“The Entire World Was Burning”

A
T
8:30
A.M
. on Saturday, November 20, Six to the Maximum Power—otherwise known as Dwight D. Eisenhower—stood smoking a cigarette on the docks at Mers el-Kébir, the great French naval base six miles west of Oran. Snow crowned the majestic Atlas Mountains to the south and a chill breeze swept the dockyard, where sailors in peacoats and dungarees bustled about the piers and warehouses. A brilliant winter sun gleamed from the African heavens, and the Mediterranean sparkled like buffed lapis. In the sheltered anchorage, the newly arrived battleship U.S.S.
Iowa
swung on her chains after a transatlantic passage, and Eisenhower watched through field glasses as a whaleboat descended from her port davits. He had come to welcome the dreadnought’s distinguished passengers, including a particular eminence code-named
CARGO;
in a few minutes, even Six to the Maximum Power would be substantially outranked.

He welcomed the diversion. Autumn at AFHQ had been an anxious season. Sanguine predictions of a promenade to Rome proved fanciful, and the Winter Line battle now teetered toward debacle. “We are very much disturbed…about the campaign in Italy,” the British chiefs had cabled on November 4, even suggesting that a stalemate there might require postponement of
OVERLORD
. Tart messages from Marshall, faulting Eisenhower for not “cracking the whip” and for misusing Allied airpower, made him “burn the air” in frustration, Harry Butcher reported. His explications to Washington and London now had an occasional odor of martyrdom. By drawing the wrath of Kesselring’s armies onto his own, he advised the Combined Chiefs, “it then makes little difference what happens to us if
OVERLORD
is a success.” Fifth and Eighth Armies, segregated by the Apennines, continued to fight disjointed wars, but Eisenhower seemed powerless to contrive a better scheme. “I have sought in every possible way to avoid a mere slugging match along a wide front,” he told Alexander on November 9. Since the
TORCH
invasions a year earlier, Allied casualties in the Mediterranean had eclipsed 100,000. In exhortations to his troops, who would have disagreed that “it makes little difference what happens to us,” Eisenhower had been reduced to invoking prepositional deities: “The God of Justice fights on our side.”

Politics and folderol beset him still: whether Capri should be an exclusive preserve of the Air Force (“contrary to my policies”); whether he disliked the photographer Margaret Bourke-White (“absolutely untrue”); why a professed man of faith would sometimes cuss (“Damn it, I
am
a religious man”); whether he would run for president (“I ain’t and won’t”). Some requests left him scratching his head, including an offer of £10,000 from a South African impresario “if you arrange for Mussolini’s personal appearance on the stages of our Cape Town theaters. Three weeks’ engagement.” Beetle Smith proposed creating a special AFHQ staff “whose job would be solely to keep the home front frightened,” since the Pentagon and Whitehall seemed more responsive when catastrophe threatened.

It all wore him down, although at age fifty-three he still radiated vigor. “He usually blew his top if anyone so much as intimated that he looked tired,” Kay Summersby recalled. Most nettlesome in recent weeks was the rampant speculation over who would command
OVERLORD
, and suggestions that he and Marshall were rivals for the post. The topic made him “acutely uncomfortable,” John Eisenhower later wrote. Eisenhower denounced the rumors as “false and malicious gossip,” the quintessence of folderol.

The whaleboat drew close to the dock. Eisenhower picked out Marshall, King, Harry Hopkins, and General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, the Army Air
Forces chief, standing at the rail. A grinning, sea-tanned figure in a gray fedora gestured with his cigarette holder at the bright sunshine and yelled from his wheelchair, “Roosevelt weather!”

Handshakes and a blur of salutes greeted the president and his chiefs—“all the heavy maleness of the war,” in Summersby’s phrase. En route from Washington to strategy conferences in Cairo and Teheran, they planned to fly to Tunisia and spend the night before pressing on to Egypt. Secret Service agents lifted Roosevelt into an armored limousine, where he was joined by Eisenhower and two of the president’s sons, Elliott and Frank, Jr., who were serving in the Mediterranean.

During the fifty-mile drive to La Sénia airfield, south of Oran, Roosevelt described with evident delight the near sinking of the
Iowa:
on Sunday afternoon, November 14, in fair weather and following seas off Bermuda, he had been on deck watching antiaircraft gunners take target practice at drifting weather balloons when the ship’s bridge announced, “Torpedo! Torpedo on the starboard beam.” A sailor bellowed, “This ain’t no drill.” Much excitement ensued: whistles; alarms; hoisted signal flags; a stampede to general quarters. Secret Service agents rushed about with drawn pistols.
Iowa
surged to flank speed and heeled sharply to port in evasion. “Take me over to the starboard rail,” Roosevelt told his valet. “I want to watch the torpedo.”

Streaking at forty-six knots, the torpedo hit
Iowa
’s turbulent wake several hundred feet astern and detonated with such violence that many aboard the battleship thought she had been struck. A mile away the culprit signaled apologies: the destroyer U.S.S.
William D. Porter,
part of
Iowa
’s escort, had accidentally fired tube number 3 during a simulated torpedo attack drill. Admiral King ordered the destroyer back to port with her entire company under arrest. “Tell me, Ernest,” Hap Arnold had asked, “does this happen often in your Navy?” Hopkins speculated that the
Porter
’s skipper was “some damned Republican.”

Roosevelt threw back his head in glee. The motorcade pulled onto the tarmac at La Sénia, where four C-54s waited to fly them to Tunis. There was much to discuss, including the imminent conferences with Churchill and Joseph Stalin, the looming campaign in western Europe, and the shape of the world after the Axis defeat. “The war, and the peace,” Roosevelt said. “Can you wait, Ike?”

Eisenhower nodded. “Just about, sir.”

The president had planned to fly to Cairo from Tunis at dawn on Sunday, but after a lively Saturday dinner overlooking the sea at La Marsa, he announced, over Secret Service objections, that he would linger an extra day to explore the Tunisian battlefields. On the Sabbath noon, Summersby
pulled the Cadillac in front of Guest Villa Number 1. Roosevelt settled into the backseat with Eisenhower. A Secret Service agent carrying a machine gun in a large case climbed up front with Telek, the general’s yapping terrier. Three truckloads of MPs, a radio car, and eight motorcycle outriders completed the convoy.

Past the bey’s palace and the Roman aqueduct they drove, then turned southwest to follow the lush Medjerda River valley. Eisenhower narrated with fluency and passion: how British and American troops exactly a year earlier had pushed across the Tunisian outback and down this valley to Djedeïda, where they could even see the minarets of Tunis; how Kesselring’s troops stiffened—
right here,
at Point 186—and drove the Allies back up the valley in pitched, heartbreaking winter battles at Tébourba and Medjez-el-Bab and Longstop Hill; how Rommel attacked in the south, lunging through Kasserine Pass and nearly reaching the vast supply depot at Tébessa; how the Allies gathered themselves in the spring to eventually encircle the Axis bridgehead at Tunis and Bizerte, where callow American troops redeemed themselves at Mateur and Hill 609,
right over there
.

They stopped for lunch in a eucalyptus brake on the north bank of the Medjerda. MPs formed a wide cordon, elbow to elbow, with their backs to the picnickers. Was it possible, Roosevelt wondered, that U.S. and German tanks had fought across the now lost battlefield at Zama, where Scipio Africanus smashed Hannibal to close the Second Punic War in 202
B.C.?
Eisenhower could not say with certainty, but near the picnic grove once stood ancient Utica; here in 46
B.C
., according to Plutarch, Cato the Younger revolted against Julius Caesar in defense of republican ideals, reading Plato’s “On the Soul” as Caesar’s troops closed in, then falling on his own sword to remain “the only free and undefeated man” in greater Rome. As the president finished his sandwich, Eisenhower wandered off to inspect a burnt-out tank. “Ike,” Roosevelt said when he returned, “if, one year ago, you had offered to bet that on this day the president of the United States would be having his lunch on a Tunisian roadside, what odds could you have demanded?”

Late that night the presidential party lifted off for Cairo from El Aouina airfield in Tunis. Scant mention had been made of Italy. “Eisenhower showed no signs of worry about the success of the Italian operation…for which many of us did not think he had sufficient force,” wrote Admiral William D. Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Even less was said about the
OVERLORD
command, although, after several glasses of sherry, King asserted that Marshall would get the job and that Eisenhower would return to Washington as Army chief of staff. Roosevelt seemed to regard Eisenhower as a more formidable figure than the
tentative young commander he had last met in Casablanca ten months earlier. But the president as usual remained cheerful and opaque, offering only the cryptic observation that “it is dangerous to monkey with a winning team.”

A few days later, Eisenhower wrote Mamie, “The eternal pound, pound, pound seems a burden, but when it once ceases it is possible that many of us will be nigh unto nervous wrecks, and wholly unfit for normal life.” As if adding a postscript to himself, he observed, “I know I’m a changed person. No one could be through what I’ve seen and not be different from what he was at the beginning.”

Evidently no discussion at La Marsa had been devoted to a curious development in the Italian campaign, in which both Roosevelt and Eisenhower had a hand and which now played out in the Adriatic seaport of Bari.

Few cities in Italy had escaped war’s havoc with greater panache than flat-roofed, white-walled Bari. Once an embarkation point for Crusaders headed east, it had been destroyed by William the Bad, restored by William the Good, and enhanced by the arrival of the bones of St. Nicholas—Father Christmas—which were stolen in Asia Minor by Bari seamen in the eleventh century. It was said that St. Francis’s devotion to chastity had been tested in Bari by a comely temptress whose advances were repelled when the holy man heaved a brazier of hot coals at her. Horace called the town “fish-famous,” and stalls of clams, sea urchins, cuttlefish, and oysters still lined the breakwater, where fisherman smacked dead octopuses on the rocks to tenderize them. Peddlers wheeled their barrows through Bari’s serpentine alleys, selling amulets against the evil eye, while toothless pilgrims at the basilica sought Nicholas’s intercession.
Netturbini
with handcarts swept the gutters of garbage heaved overnight from upper windows. Unlike that of Naples, Bari’s “agile and ingenious criminal class consisted chiefly of small boys,” wrote a British officer and novelist named Evelyn Waugh. Bari’s newest landmark was the Bambino Sports Stadium, built by Mussolini as a reward for producing more male babies than any comparable city in Italy.

Liberating Tommies had been greeted with flowers and speeches, although a British major reported that by the time Montgomery arrived in an open jeep few of the city’s quarter million souls “came to see him for by then the novelty had worn off.” Shops still offered silk stockings for four shillings, and Allied soldiers, when not gawking at the sculpted fauns and nymphs at the opera house, prowled through a PX stocked with Palmolive soap and Hershey bars. The large port, enclosed by a mole of cyclopean
blocks weighing 350 tons each, had been captured in good condition, and a thousand stevedores now labored around the clock.

They had much to unload. With Naples reviving slowly, Bari provided the main supply port for Eighth Army as well as for the Allied air forces now building four dozen fields at Foggia and elsewhere. To bring heavy bombers to Foggia required shipping comparable to that needed to move two Army divisions; keeping those planes flying would take a supply effort equal to the entire Eighth Army’s. To floor a single all-weather airstrip against mud, for example, took five thousand tons of perforated steel planking. On December 1, the newly created Fifteenth Air Force opened its headquarters in Bari. The commander, a former professional bantamweight boxer who also held both a doctorate in aeronautical engineering and the Medal of Honor, Major General James H. Doolittle, moved into a plush first-floor office on the waterfront, in the former headquarters of the Italian air force.

Doolittle’s job was to augment the bombing of strategic targets, such as German aircraft plants and oil facilities, now under way by British and American squadrons based in Britain. Doolittle had claimed that flying weather in Italy would be almost twice as good as that in the United Kingdom, a proposition sorely tested by the cancellation due to inclemency of roughly half his bombing missions in November. Still, Allied pilots now owned the Italian skies. German long-range bombers had flown only eight times in Italy since mid-October, including four attacks on Naples in November. Nearly three-quarters of all Luftwaffe fighters had retreated to Germany, and the Allied pummeling of enemy airfields had become so intense that the raids were known as Reich Party Days.

So cocky were Allied air commanders that on the afternoon of Thursday, December 2, Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham assured reporters, “I would regard it as a personal affront and insult if the Luftwaffe should attempt any significant action in this area.”