Twelve Desperate Miles (12 page)

T
he plans for Torch had changed before George Patton put a boot down again in Washington. Upon hearing of the outline for an attack focused solely within the Mediterranean, George Marshall and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff became almost instantly jittery about the possibility of Spain or Germany closing the Strait of Gibraltar and trapping Allied forces within. A port on the Atlantic side of North Africa offered an immediate link to the continent. A line of communication from Casablanca on the Atlantic to Oran on the Mediterranean, despite the distance between the cities, was preferable to no Atlantic base at all. And though Eisenhower had come to side with the British, now arguing that striking with the American force so far to the west in Africa would slow the army’s ability to take Tunisia before the Germans, he and they were overridden. At least for the time being. Back on the table again for Patton were plans to lead the Western Task Force, whose central goal would be the taking of Casablanca, rather than leading his task force into Oran on the Mediterranean.

For the next two weeks, the U.S. and British chiefs of staff, as well as FDR and Winston Churchill, engaged in what Eisenhower’s aide, Captain Harry Butcher, called “the transatlantic essay contest,” trying to decide, once and for all, how exactly to invade North Africa. As the back-and-forth continued in London and Washington, Eisenhower sent a note to Patton saying, “
I feel like the lady in the circus that has to ride three horses with no very good idea of exactly where any one of the three is going.”

If London appeared half dead to George Patton, Washington was like Grand Central Station in a constant state of rush hour. Uniformed men
and women swarmed through the city. When you could find a cab, it usually overflowed with ride-share companions. The War Department had just announced the hiring of
three hundred thousand women to civilian positions that ranged from tens of thousands of clerical jobs to driving trucks and riveting airplane wings in factories all over the country. It seemed like half of the new employees had arrived in D.C. over the weekend. There were
lines to buy newspapers, lines to get a shave, lines to get breakfast in the morning, lines to get shoes shined.

Parts of the gigantic new pentagonal Department of War building, being constructed between Arlington National Cemetery and Memorial Bridge, were already occupied by some War Department staff, but several months of furious work needed to be done to complete it.

Patton steered clear of both the new construction and offices near his troops’ point of departure in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Upon returning from London, he and his staff reoccupied a third-floor loft in the War Department’s Main Navy and Munitions Buildings—sixteen identical rectangular buildings that stretched like two octaves of piano keys down the Capitol Mall on the site of what is now the Vietnam War Memorial. They were divided by military branch, with the army occupying the Munitions buildings, and the Navy, the remaining structures.

His naval counterpart, Rear Admiral Kent Hewitt, commander of the Western Naval Task Force, which was to transport Patton and his army to Africa, occupied rooms in the Nansemond Hotel in Norfolk, next door to Hampton Roads in Virginia. The two met for the first time in Washington on August 24, a few days after Patton’s return from England. Unfortunately, their immediate feelings toward each other were a far cry from mutual admiration. Patton was brusque and unsympathetic toward the navy’s troubles and, as usual, was loud and profane in expressing his opinion. He complained, as he had in London, about the negativity and the pessimism of the navy officers.

A gentlemanly man of fifty-five with prominent ears, hair going quickly from gray to white, and a slight wattle beneath his chin,
Hewitt had served in the navy for almost forty years in a career that stretched
back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. He’d won a Navy Cross for heroism while serving as captain of a destroyer during World War I and spent much of the time between the wars as head of the Department of Mathematics at the Naval Academy. He had, according to accounts, a low-key manner that was like a placid lake to Patton’s pounding surf. Hewitt was not, however, a man to be bowled over by bluster and rage. Though he stifled his own anger at Patton’s peremptory behavior, it was there in spades and, by the end of the meeting, deep enough to send Hewitt directly to his superior, Admiral King, to say that it was his opinion that unless Patton were removed from command of the Western Task Force, the navy should bow out of the operation. King went immediately to George Marshall to tell him of the contretemps and to back in his own man in the interservice squabble. While Marshall was able to cool matters between Patton and the navy sufficiently for them to carry on their missions without dismissing either Patton or Hewitt, it was not an auspicious way to begin planning for a monumental invasion.

Meanwhile, in London, the back-and-forth on Torch continued in the wake of the disastrous Dieppe raid of August 19. Planned and executed by British forces under Lucian Truscott’s mentor, Lord Mountbatten, Dieppe was designed as a test amphibious assault against German forces on the coast of France to see how the Luftwaffe and German army would respond to attack. Unfortunately, Operation Jubilee, as it was called, was quickly and brutally repulsed. More than half the six thousand troops sent ashore, most of whom were Canadian, wound up killed, captured, or wounded. The raid served no greater military purpose than to prove to all those who might still have doubts that the Wehrmacht was indeed deeply rooted in French soil and that extricating it would take far more mules and chains than had been dispatched to Dieppe.

As the American army’s newly christened chief expert on amphibious assault, Truscott accompanied the raid as an observer on board a British destroyer called the
Fernie
. He would later write that
“I am not
among those who consider the Dieppe Raid a failure,” but he saw and felt the evidence of its bloodiness and destruction. The
Fernie
took hits from shore batteries and brought aboard so many injured soldiers that the wardroom was “carpeted with the wounded.” Still, Truscott felt that “German defenses in the West were given something to consider.” And the raid “raised questions about just where the next Allied assault would come.” The Allies also learned valuable lessons about how to conduct large-scale amphibious attacks, an education that was bound to be helpful in the coming attack against North Africa. Truscott wrote that
“it was an essential though costly lesson in modern warfare.”

Back in London just the day after the raid, he resumed the role that had been assigned him before Patton’s return to Washington. Truscott was to be the Western Task Force’s eyes and ears on the continuing command discussions about Torch, which were once again topsy-turvy.

Winston Churchill had just returned from a meeting with Stalin in Moscow and called Eisenhower and Mark Clark to have dinner with him at Chequers to discuss the operation. It was Churchill’s strongly held opinion that it was a waste of time and resources to attack Casablanca, leaving Patton’s army on the western edge of North Africa hundreds of miles from Rommel. Churchill wasn’t worried at all about Spain or Germany attacking Gibraltar and thought that the French in North Africa would mount little or no defense. Churchill felt that the essence of Torch ought to be an attempt to secure Tunisia, between Algeria and Rommel’s forces in Libya, before Germany could send forces to the area and establish a beachhead.

Eisenhower tended to agree with Churchill, but another powerful opinion suddenly injected itself into the essay contest at the end of August. From Washington, FDR put forward a plan that would remove British land forces entirely from Torch operations. American troops would land in Oran and Casablanca, transported primarily by the U.S. Navy with some assistance from the British fleet.

FDR’s thinking was colored by an American sense that the British presence in the invasion would serve as a provocation to the French and
might prompt a resistance that might otherwise not be there. This notion stemmed from the fact that soon after the French surrender to Nazi Germany in June 1940 and the subsequent creation of the Vichy regime, the British had attacked the French fleet in North Africa, sinking or badly damaging five French warships and killing more than a thousand sailors. The bad taste and hard feelings left by this lambasting remained, particularly in the French navy, and Roosevelt assumed that the French in Africa would be more likely to offer stiff resistance if the campaign against France were jointly waged by American and British forces, rather than by Americans alone. Reports coming from a recently installed American intelligence agency in North Africa, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), tended to reinforce these opinions.

According to Harry Butcher, Eisenhower felt that the “
quite desperate nature” of the operation was beginning to sink in. To his mind, the psychological component of the action—trying to guess what the French would do—detracted from areas of expertise he knew and was comfortable dealing with, namely professional preparation and military decision making. If the Allies guessed right, “we may gain a tremendous advantage in this war; if the guess is wrong, it will be almost certain that we will gain nothing and lose a lot. The unfavorable potentialities are vast, including not only the chance of a bloody repulse, but of inciting into the ranks of our active enemies both France and Spain,” Butcher wrote. There remained possibilities, of course: “
If we can take into North Africa such a strong land, sea, and air force that resistance rapidly can be crushed, TORCH unquestionably would be a good operation.” But Eisenhower’s general feelings toward the plans were not cheery.

Marshall, too, had begun to worry deeply about the perilous nature of the American invasion. Gone was all sense that the Allies were ready for a direct, cross-channel attack against Germany in 1942. An inexperienced and untested army making an unprecedented amphibious attack on North African beaches would be trouble enough if France staunchly defended her protectorates within the Mediterranean. And defeat in this first American engagement of the war in Europe would be disastrous
in profound ways to the nation’s spirit and will to fight. Still, it was far better to engage the French in Morocco in this first test, went Marshall’s thinking, than to raise the possibility of tangling with the Wehrmacht in Tunisia or possibly even Spain.

Out of these disparate ideas came a compromise put forward by Marshall and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. On September 2, they proposed a plan that called for simultaneous landings of Allied forces in Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. Eisenhower named Major General Mark Clark deputy commander in chief of the North African theater with overall command of Operation Torch. Major General Lloyd Fredendall was named commander of the Oran assault, and British Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson was tapped to lead the invasion of Algiers.

For the Western Task Force under Patton’s command and aimed at Casablanca, 34,000 U.S. troops would be deployed for assault, with an additional 24,000 to follow once French Morocco was taken. Oran would see 25,000 American troops landed by naval assault transport, with 20,000 to follow in port. A mix of British and U.S. forces (about 10,000 Americans and the same number of British soldiers) were assigned to the landings in Algiers.

The Western Task Force would sail from U.S. ports aboard U.S. Navy vessels, as originally planned. The Mediterranean forces would sail from Great Britain in a combined British and American convoy. The invasion would take place a month later than had been scheduled, early in November, rather than October, with the departure date of the Western Task Force estimated to be in the third or fourth week of October.

The details of the invasion remained mountainous, but its essence had finally been agreed to and would proceed. Despite the difficulties that lay ahead, it felt good for Patton and his staff to be focused on creating a certain plan for the invasion of Morocco. They could concentrate on the enormous task of putting together an invasion force of some 35,000, expected to be ready to sail across three thousand miles of ocean to attack North Africa in less than two months’ time.