Twelve Desperate Miles (23 page)

She would not be the last unlikely ship needed for Goalpost.

The man who was ultimately responsible for coordinating the supplies and transportation of the countless requests like Henriques’s was General Brehon Somervell, head of the army’s Services of Supply (SOS) branch. Somervell was a 1914 graduate of West Point who began his career in the Corps of Engineers. Like Patton, Somervell served in Mexico in the chase of Pancho Villa before World War I, but his bent was engineering and logistics, in which he quickly became a rising star in the army.

Between the wars, his talents won him a succession of important planning and engineering posts within the Army Corps of Engineers, culminating in his appointment by Franklin Roosevelt to head the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in New York in 1935. There he oversaw the construction of LaGuardia Airport and proved himself capable of coordinating vast projects with thousands of workers, millions of dollars, and scores of components.

His skills were put to further use in his next large work: the construction of the Pentagon, beginning in 1941; but that same year,
he made a political enemy of Senator Harry Truman, who was conducting hearings on War Department spending and felt that Somervell was typical of a certain type of army officer “who didn’t care anything about money.” Truman’s difficulties with Somervell did nothing to prevent the general’s rise in War Department esteem. His promotion to major general and head of SOS was carried out in early 1942 over the heads of several higher-ranking officers.

Somervell was made aware of Operation Torch soon after the combined chiefs of staff named North Africa as the destination for the U.S. entry into the war in late July. Though he and the SOS had been anticipating a cross-channel invasion of Europe, he wrote to Eisenhower that
he and his operation were growing so accustomed to “
changing horse in mid-stream” that “we are getting a bit used to it even if their tramping around does muddy up the water a good deal.” For more than a month afterward, he and SOS had to essentially improvise planning, as they lacked such rudimentary details as the location, timing, and size of the invasion. While the outlines of the operation became clearer after the September 5 decision to definitely include the Western Task Force, along with the Mediterranean invasion, nothing was simple about Torch.

The matter of finding troops and supplies, transporting them from locales across the country to ports, primarily in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, on the East Coast, and then making them ready for shipping to North Africa fell to Somervell and his people. His people included the head of the army’s Transportation Corps, Major General Charles Gross, a West Point classmate of Somervell’s whose principal job was to find the shipping to transport all those supplies and soldiers to the shores of North Africa.

As with Patton’s Casablanca operation and Truscott’s sub–task force, Somervell’s job was made immensely more complicated by the demands from England for duplicates of supplies that had already been shipped but were now lost in warehouses across that “sceptered isle.” In addition, the U.S. Navy was constrained by a lack of ships available to serve as escort for both the necessary supply convoys to England and the upcoming gigantic convoy to North Africa.

Despite the requests from England, the focus of Somervell’s U.S. command was the Western Task Force, and it was hardly less demanding. With commanders like Truscott and his staff changing requests and ordering equipment piecemeal, confusion and contradiction reigned within the supply chain. Not knowing, for instance, whether Truscott’s command would need paratroopers for its assault on the Port Lyautey airfield or Rangers wasn’t simply a tactical matter; each unit had different supply needs, and the supply needs affected cargo requirements; cargo requirements affected shipping needs; shipping needs affected navy
escort demands, as well as the capacity of ports in England and, soon, ports in North Africa, to handle the unloading of all the matériel streaming into their docks.

Since late August, arms, ships, and personnel had been streaming into the Norfolk/Hampton Roads area. The railroads, the piers, the cities, and the waterways of the region were teeming with cargo, machinery, and men, waiting for the signal to begin loading the ships; but it wasn’t until September 29 that that order arrived, and even when it did come, the confusion persisted. Troop commanders continued to order special equipment, and basic information about the task force, like schedules, cargo specifications for ships, unit assignments, and which items should accompany which units, remained hard to find during the loading process. There were troubles with freight coming from inland suppliers and manufacturers, as well. Some railcars were inadequately marked or mismarked.
And the simple swamp of matériel in the port made the assignment of supplies to individual ships an immensely complicated process even without the last-minute changes.

Regarding those abrupt changes, Somervell decreed to his staff what he considered the most expeditious manner of dealing with them:
if General Patton endorsed the request, SOS was to supply it.

All the while, the clock was ticking on the invasion plans, not only on operation levels, but political as well. September slipped into October, the first week of October slipped into the second, and while plans started to become somewhat clearer, there were still special needs that were emerging until the very end.

A
s of early October, just a month from D-day in North Africa, many of the army troops engaged in Operation Torch had yet to train in amphibious assault. Out in Chesapeake Bay at a recently opened facility called Solomons Island, a center had been established by the navy to provide just those sorts of exercises for the Marine Corps, which was training for island invasions in the South Pacific. These were the first such training grounds in the country, and they provided a lengthy stretch of beach for landing vehicles to practice maneuvers. Of course, none of those beaches presented the sort of crashing surf that was likely to be faced on the shores of Morocco; nonetheless, as soon as the first ships of the Western Task Force were loaded with men and supplies, they sailed off to this nearby training center, where they would disembark and get some sorely needed practice landings.

These were troops from Patton’s central division of the task force. He was there at Solomons Island, along with Admiral Kent Hewitt, to observe the exercises on Hewitt’s flagship,
Augusta
. His squabbles with the navy had grown no less intense in the weeks following his first meeting with Hewitt. The most recent contretemps centered on how the ships ought to be loaded. Patton hated the notion that the navy was “
attempt[ing] to issue orders to me.” While the army was interested in packing its cargo so that matériel first needed on the beaches of Morocco would be last stored in the ships’ holds, the navy had its own way of doing things and wanted to load according to the best utilization of space. Patton’s mood was not improved by the performance of the navy during the amphibious assault exercises at Solomons Island. “The timing of the landing by the Navy was very bad,” he wrote bluntly, “over forty minutes late to start with, about all we can hope for is that they do better next time.”

As Patton’s force was being trained at Solomons, thirteen more ships, comprising what was labeled the “X” force of the Moroccan invasion (Truscott’s Sixtieth Infantry troops) and the “Z” force (commanded by General Ernest Harmon and headed toward Safi, the southernmost site in the Western Task Force attack), were readied for shipping. They would follow Patton’s troops to Solomons for the same sort of amphibious exercises.

At the same time, Truscott’s final plan for sub–task force Goalpost was due in Patton’s offices in Washington on October 14. Truscott presented it in person and found Patton in a far more sanguine mood than he’d been in just days earlier. To Patton, the gathering and approval of these final plans was an indication that the die was cast; all that was left now was to load the ships and sail into battle. As he wrote to a friend that same day, the fourteenth: “
I have now reached the situation which you and I have felt many times before—after the ponies have been shipped for an important match, one’s worries seem to disappear. I believe that we have done everything humanly possible and that this expedition contains the best trained troops of all arms this country can produce.”

Truscott can be forgiven for being less accepting about the state of affairs, since he and Harmon and their troops had yet to do their amphibious training. In fact, he had to hustle to get back to Norfolk in time to oversee their exercises at Solomons Island.

There he found an operation in full flourish. Ships were loaded by civilian stevedores, under Army Transport rules and supervision (
in a couple of instances, up in New York, the navy did the packing and got it wrong, and the ships had to be unpacked and reloaded, much to the chagrin of the Army Transport team at the Port of Hampton Roads), into vessels sailed by U.S. Navy personnel. The standard order of loading, as per Patton’s orders, involved packing combat vehicles and ammunition and supplies so that they could be gotten off the ships first. C, D, and K rations were also loaded into the vehicles. The troops carried other meal rations on their persons.

Combat vehicles needed to be prepared for the surf off of French
Morocco, so elaborate efforts at waterproofing vehicles were undertaken, including covering electrical equipment, raising exhaust systems beneath the vehicles, and creating sheet-metal housings on the backs of the tanks to prevent their engines from being disabled by submersion. All of this work needed to be done near the piers because the elaborate systems erected to protect the vehicles also caused them to quickly overheat and break down, which meant they couldn’t travel far to be unloaded.

As with every step in the process of organizing Operation Torch, there were hiccups along the way. Because the loading scheme linked weaponry to troops, it was thrown off every time one type of combat unit was substituted for another in the process, or if there was a shift of one unit from a particular ship in the convoy to another.

A new handheld rocket launcher that would eventually gain wide renown in World War II, the bazooka, was issued to troops just two days prior to launching. Ammunition was supplied and packed with the weapon,
but it was discovered only later that instructions on how to use the launcher had been crated separately.

The commanders of the various sub–task forces, including Truscott, established “war tents,” guarded by MPs, which held battle information and to which officers began reporting to be given their missions. It was here that at least two of Truscott’s two commanders, Colonel de Rohan and Colonel Semmes, were first told where Goalpost was headed. Beneath the tent were papier-mâché relief maps of the landing beaches surrounding Mehdia; there were silhouette photos of the hills surrounding the beaches, taken from the sea in gray light so that commanders could get a sense of what they might see as they were attempting to precisely land their Landing Craft Mechanized vehicles LCMs in the early-morning hours off the coast of Morocco.

Truscott’s X force finally got its opportunity to practice amphibious assaults in the next few days, but once again there was a problem. Colonel Demas T. Craw, who had been assigned to Truscott’s sub–task force as a commander from the Army Air Force, had been placed on a ship where the captain had refused to lower any nets or craft, claiming
that his crew had no training in the exercise and were simply incapable of doing it.

Craw was a no-nonsense tough guy who had been around the block already in the war. A veteran of World War I and the chase of Pancho Villa in Mexico, after the First World War Craw had gone off to West Point, where he excelled at athletics, most particularly boxing, but finished 271st in a class that barely broke 400.

He became an enthusiastic flyer after graduation and wound up transferring from the infantry to the Army Air Corps, where he served in rather ho-hum circumstances until the war in Europe began. In 1939 he was assigned as an observer to the Royal Air Force in Egypt, and much to his delight, he was able to fly twenty-two missions against the Axis before the war began.

Craw, who was of Greek descent, got assigned to Athens in 1941 and stayed there, trying to aid the British, after Axis forces occupied the land. There he became involved in an incident that made the newspapers back home: a fender bender with an Italian major, who took umbrage at the fact that Craw, who was in civilian clothes, was less than humble about the accident. The major ordered two privates accompanying him to hold Craw while he cuffed the American colonel. When Craw was released, he proceeded to deck the Italian major with a single punch.

The upshot of the incident came when the American minister in Athens demanded and received from the Italian legation an apology from the major to Colonel Craw, delivered before the assembled staff of the American consulate. It was said that the major was still sporting a black eye when he read his “I’m sorry.”