Twelve Desperate Miles (21 page)

Added to these difficulties was the fact that planning for the invasion
was being conducted in cross-Atlantic fashion, with Eisenhower, Mark Clark, and the European high command settled in London; Patton and his Western Task Force staff, including Lucian Truscott and company, now back in Washington; Doolittle and the Twelfth Army Air Force split between Washington and England; and Admiral Hewitt and the U.S. Navy Western Task Force command stationed at the Nansemond Hotel in Norfolk, Virginia. Meanwhile, the OSS and other intelligence operatives were working out of North Africa, Washington, and London; army transportation and supply commands were stationed in Washington, New York, and Norfolk (with separate divisions based in England organizing the “inside” invasion within the Mediterranean); and the War Shipping Administration, which controlled and understood where Allied transport and cargo shipping was at any given moment in port or on the high seas, was in Washington. Oh, yes, and the U.S. Navy as a whole was trying to wage war against Japan in the Pacific, just as the demands for its men and supplies were now escalating in Europe.

It wasn’t until early September that the organization, assembly, and equipage of the two task forces of Operation Torch began in earnest and haste. Quickly it became apparent that there would be a battle for resources between the force sailing from England and Patton’s force sailing from the United States.
The task force from Great Britain got the jump on the western forces by sending to Washington on September 8 a massive request for 344,000 tons of matériel. Not only would this requisition from one wing of the invasion alone strain the limits of available convoy shipping, available army troops, and available supplies, but it would seriously tax the navy’s ability to supply escorts for the shipping. Furthermore, closer examination of the request revealed that much of the matériel was duplicated in shipments that had already been sent to England. It turned out that many of the supplies sent earlier in the year were buried so deeply in British warehouses that it was more practical to ship the same items to the UK a second time than to find them in storage and repack them for the invasion of North Africa.

Under the circumstances, Patton and the Western Task Force needed
to hustle to finalize plans for the invasion, so that they could raise their hands and shout, “Us, too!” as the goods and transport were being divvied up. All of their requests needed to be coordinated with the U.S. Navy and the Mediterranean task force within the fluid context of a larger strategy that had only just been agreed to. In other words, the invasion of Morocco was now a certainty; all Patton and company had to do was make it happen in two months’ time.

Personnel and training were also crucial factors influenced by the loud tick of the invasion clock. Because the operation in Morocco was an amphibious assault, it would have been logical that marine units, who were the American troops most highly trained in just such a style of combat, should have been called upon to serve; but the Corps was tied up in the Pacific, where the battle for Guadalcanal had just been undertaken, so the inexperienced U.S. Army would be landing in the surf of Morocco.

Nor were the three thousand navy and coast guard personnel needed for landing the troops in the Western Task Force particularly well versed in the exercise. As Samuel Eliot Morison put it, “
It would have been desirable to select young men, who were used to lobstering, fishing, and other small craft work.” The problem was, they weren’t there. “So as frequently in this war, the Navy had to make boat sailors out of raw recruits who had never seen salt water.”

That wasn’t all:
In a progress report to Eisenhower in early October, General James Doolittle estimated that 75 percent of the Twelfth Air Force was either untrained or partially trained. Adding to these difficulties for the air force was the fact that the one nearby airfield controlled by Allied forces prior to the invasion—the British base at Gibraltar—would be used by the Royal Air Force to supply support for the “inside” invasion force in the Mediterranean, which meant that air support for Patton’s Western Task Force would have to be provided by carrier-based planes within the convoy.

Unfortunately, in the fall of 1942, the U.S. Navy was hardly brimming with aircraft carriers. The Japanese had sunk the
Lexington
,
Hornet
,
Wasp
, and
Yorktown
and wreaked havoc on the
Saratoga
and
Enterprise
,
which meant that there was only one large carrier in the Atlantic fleet, the
Ranger
. As a consequence, four tankers had been converted into a new class of carrier for use in the European theater and the Western Task Force. Altogether these five carriers and quasicarriers could haul about 250 bombers and fighters to the theater. But again, training was an issue.
The pilots were so inexperienced that the Navy decided not to have them practice carrier landings on the voyage across the ocean for fear of losing lives and aircraft.

For all of these difficulties, lack of shipping remained the single biggest hurdle for Operation Torch preparations. There simply weren’t enough vessels to carry cargo, transport soldiers, and provide escort to both the Western Task Force and a portion of the Mediterranean. This was in addition to shipping supplies to England for the “inside” assault. Particulars like the number of combat and service support troops were still in flux, but getting hard figures was essential to determine the type of shipping required for the operation. How many troop carriers were needed? How many cargo ships? How many landing craft? How many escorts and carriers? All depended on numbers that were still being figured out, still being totaled. And because ships of all kinds were in such demand, time was needed to occasionally transform vessels from what they were into what was needed.
For instance, twelve ships had to be converted into combat loaders to help carry infantry for the Western Task Force. This involved providing troop space on the ship as well as more quarters for navy personnel sailing the vessel; installing davits for the landing boats that would be attached to the transport; adding armaments; and increasing the capacity of the ships’ booms for loading cargo.

The demands of keeping the secrets of Operation Torch from the wide world were a mighty strain too. Only the highest Allied commanders and the planners of the invasion were supposed to know the destinations of the forces involved; but given the very nature of the operation—the long-anticipated entry of the United States into the war against the Axis—and the fact that there were a limited number of options for attack, it was not surprising that guesses about where the invasion might
occur occasionally hit the mark.
In the third week of September, for instance, Eisenhower and Marshall were made extremely nervous by an intercepted cable sent from United Press offices in London to United Press offices in Washington that advised its American counterparts to prepare to cover a story out of Casablanca, rather than Dakar. (A young reporter out of Houston, Texas, with a moon-shaped face punctuated by a mustache, Walter Cronkite, would soon get the assignment.)

The fact that the OSS was so heavily involved in planning operations didn’t inhibit other intelligence agencies, American and British, from continuing their work, which, perhaps not surprisingly, led to difficulties regarding where information was coming from and by whom it was being sent. More headaches for General Alfred Gruenther and many others.

Even de Gaulle and the Free French forces in England, notoriously loose lipped, were being kept in the dark about the exact nature of the attack. Again, maintaining this silence was not an easy proposition. Truscott recalled stopping by to see Eisenhower before flying home to the States on September 19.
While there, he witnessed de Gaulle’s chief of staff stopping by to deliver a message from de Gaulle to Eisenhower. “General De Gaulle understands that British and Americans are planning to invade French North Africa,” said the courier. “[The general] wishes to say that in such case he expects to be designated as Commander in Chief. Any invasion of French territory that is not under French command is bound to fail.” According to Truscott, Eisenhower merely thanked the officer, who saluted and walked briskly away.

Given the haste with which Torch was concocted, the lack of experience of its fighting forces, the sheer size of the enterprise, and the possibility that plans for the attack would be given away before the operation was begun, it was no wonder that knees began knocking in both London and D.C. as the run-up to invasion began. No wonder, either, that a strong hope remained that the French would offer little or no resistance to an invasion from their former Allies and potential “friends.” As Morison put it, the Western Task Force “
resembled a football team forced
to play a major game very early in
the season, before holding adequate practice or obtaining proper equipment.”

Even George Patton, in a note to Eisenhower in September, suggested “the picture” of invasion was “gloomy,” though he added, with typical brio: “
Rest assured that when we start for the beach we shall stay there either dead or alive, and if alive we will not surrender. When I have made everyone else share this opinion, as I shall certainly do before we start, I shall have complete confidence in the success of the operation.”

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Stalingrad was under murderous assault from the Luftwaffe, even as fierce door-to-door fighting was waged on the ground. Wave after wave of bombers swept over the city, dumping their payloads on targets against a tattered and withering Soviet air defense. Street fighting was more evenly matched but even more gruesome. The Russian army had turned every street, every block, even the sewers, into bloody, labyrinthine battlefields, exacting a steep price on the Wehrmacht for every inch of ground.

Internal pressures were also being brought to bear on Allied leaders. In early October, FDR’s 1940 presidential election opponent, Wendell Willkie, returned from a 33,000-mile global tour of battlefronts, including a stop in Moscow. His call for the quick opening of a second front received wide and extensive coverage. While he claimed that “
Germany will never conquer Russia” and that “the United Nations had the power and resources [to win the war],” the question that concerned Willkie was “How soon will we win and at what cost in human lives?”

The
Times of London
, the British Labour Party, and Stalin himself were likewise clamoring for the rapid opening of a second front; and while Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, and the British command knew the moment was on its way, a deep sense of anxiety pervaded headquarters in London as well as Washington. Eisenhower wrote to Marshall in an early-October report on Torch progress that was otherwise optimistic: “As you can well imagine, there have been times during the past few weeks when it has been a trifle difficult to keep up, in front of everybody, a proper attitude of confidence and optimism.”

The
Contessa
arriving in Havana Harbor in 1939 (Standard Fruit Company photo)

The Western Task Force en route to Morocco, late October 1942 (courtesy of the National Archives)

General George Patton (l) and Admiral Kent Hewitt (r), sharing a light moment on board the
Augusta
, en route to Morocco, late October 1942 (courtesy of the National Archives)

General Lucien Truscott (r) in North Africa (courtesy of the National Archives)

Entrance to the River Sebou (courtesy of the National Archives)

Casablanca harbor (courtesy of the National Archives)

First P-40s to take off from the USS
Chenango
, headed for the Port Lyautey airfield (courtesy of the National Archives)

Scuttled French trawlers at a crucial bend in the River Sebou (courtesy of the National Archives)

Aerial view of the bend in the Sebou and the Lyautey airfield (courtesy of the National Archives)

René Malevergne (white trousers) receives the U.S. Navy Cross (courtesy of the National Archives)

Malevergne receives the Silver Star from General Lucien Truscott (courtesy of the National Archives)

René Malevergne and family: wife Germaine and sons René and Claude (courtesy of the National Archives)