Twelve Desperate Miles (36 page)

The battalion itself had not yet been discovered by the French; it drew no fire all that first day. Toffey sent out foot patrols to the north and east toward Port Lyautey—the battalion’s second destination after the airport. Late in the afternoon, the unit spied a French steamer, heading downriver from Port Lyautey toward the sea, slowing near the bend directly north of the city. They watched as it was run intentionally into the north bank of the Sebou. Two men were seen leaving the ship, which began to slowly keel over onto its side. Toffey ordered a patrol to check on them and the vessel, but to no avail: the two French sailors had obviously scuttled the ship at the most difficult bend in the river to bollix any and all American ship traffic to come. Worse, in the morning, there would be a second steamer scuttled on the south bank of the river at the same bend. René Malevergne’s job had just become much more difficult.

Out on the ocean, positioned just beyond the transport group, the
Contessa
awaited word of when she would make her run up the river. Like everyone else involved in the action near Mehdia, Captain John and Lieutenant Leslie were aware that the invasion had been pushed off schedule; and since their ship’s moment in the drama was predicated on the ascent upriver of the
Dallas
and the taking of the airfield, they could do nothing but await further events and orders. They waited further.

Meanwhile, on the
Dallas
itself, those events actually seemed to be progressing. An announcement came over the ship’s loudspeaker that the Kasbah had been taken, and almost simultaneously, a dimming of fire came from the French 75 mm battery just beyond Mehdia.

But the ship had received no definitive word about the boom crossing the entrance to the Sebou. A specially trained navy squad was supposed to have gone in and cut this cable early in the morning of the invasion. If they were successful, a red star was to have been fired over the mouth of the river and a radio code—“Steve Brodie”—was supposed to have been transmitted.

The
Dallas
had seen a red star shoot out over the Sebou earlier in the morning but had not yet received the “Steve Brodie” message. Yet to the surprise and dismay of René Malevergne, they soon heard over the ship’s radio an order for the
Dallas
to prepare to storm the estuary. Captain Brodie looked to the river pilot for a response. Malevergne was frank: “
I answered that it was possible three hours earlier, but now with low tide, it was no longer possible.” He told Brodie, very simply, that the ship would run aground if it made the attempt; nonetheless, he would follow orders and take the ship up the river if asked.

At noon, the
Dallas
headed toward Mehdia. To test whether the battery near the Kasbah was or was not active, Brodie and Malevergne decided to run the ship through its field of fire “
before indicating our intention to cross the bar.” They took the
Dallas
forward in a sweeping semicircle, coming from the south and running on a line parallel to the bar. Malevergne’s intention was to turn abruptly forty-five degrees to port and enter the estuary at full speed. Splashes of gunfire could be seen landing to the south of the ship, but not directly at it. So the
Dallas
arced toward the jetties.

In preparation for its assault, the communication officer on board the
Dallas
packed up all confidential documents on board the ship and tossed them overboard in a weighted sack to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Just as they neared the jetties, however, word arrived on board that the Kasbah was not taken. Almost simultaneously, the
batteries near the fort opened fire directly at the
Dallas
. Nor, it would turn out, had the boom been cut.

The
Dallas
quickly turned and left the scene at flank speed and in the haze of a smoke screen. She opened her own three-inch batteries as she went back to the deep waters of the ocean. There would be no ascending the Sebou on this day for either her or the
Contessa
.

Lucian Truscott had taken off for Blue Beach from the
Allen
at about 1230 with Conway and others and spent most of the afternoon sorting through a series of confusing reports about the progress and status of his three battalions. Chaos reigned on the beaches around him. The sand was much softer than anyone had anticipated, meaning that scores of vehicles were stuck there, unable to get off the beach. Cargo that was supposed to be moved inland began to pile up on the beaches. Wire netting and burlap roadways were proving an inadequate means for getting traffic moving. A number of landing craft were likewise stuck in the sand, and their crews wandered aimlessly about or, as Truscott later reported, “
tinkered ineffectively with stranded craft.” There was such a mess at the landing sites that Harry Semmes, who arrived on shore at roughly the same time as Truscott, was able to get only seven of his fifty-four tanks onto Green Beach.

Communication was extremely difficult as well. The shells coming from shore batteries that had prompted the transports to head farther out into the ocean forced them outside the range of radios on shore. Messages were being sent by hand via the landing craft, but of course many of the landing craft were still stuck on shore.

A single radio at Blue Beach headquarters tried to sort through information coming from inland, but Truscott had heard nothing from Toffey’s Third Battalion, and what he’d heard from the First and Second was contradictory and confused. There were rumors that the Kasbah had been taken when it hadn’t. They could hear heavy gunfire coming from the hills to the north but didn’t know who was involved. Truscott heard
of the fighting along the Rabat road earlier in the day but didn’t know its extent and worried about what was to come. He had heard nothing from Craw and Hamilton, either.

Truscott headed out from the beach in a half-track looking for elements of the First Battalion. He found a company along the south side of the eastern edge of the lagoon and then headed north. Naval gunfire cracked over his head, and there was machine-gun fire ahead on the east side of the lagoon, where a skirmish was obviously in progress. Artillery shells were falling in the cork oak forest beyond. Finally, Truscott located Colonel McCarley of the First Battalion and ordered him to hook up with the Second Battalion in the morning to jointly attack the Kasbah.

As dark settled around the region, there were concrete reports that more French infantry, tanks, and armored vehicles were moving up the Rabat road and that French forces in Lyautey had been reinforced by Legionnaires from Meknes. The fight was going to get no less difficult in the morning.

Truscott headed back to headquarters at Blue Beach, but even there he was stymied. The half-track he was traveling in got stuck in the sand, and so the Goalpost commander finished his trip back on foot, arriving exhausted, as everyone else on the beach appeared to be. He sent Conway off in the hope of finding Semmes. He wanted his tank commander in position on the Rabat road first thing in the morning. But finding Semmes in the chaos would be no easy task.

Scores of men wandered aimlessly around the beach, either looking for their units or stranded from the landing craft. The password call and response, “George” and “Patton,” echoed in the darkness.

Truscott was chilled and in desperate need of a cigarette. He knew lighting up, the flare and glow of a smoke near enemy fire, was strictly forbidden by his own command. But as he looked out on the ocean and saw the signal lamps of the ships in the convoy, he rationalized that smoking a cigarette could be no more dangerous than those signal lights blinking in the distance. He snapped a smoke out of his pack and lit it. Soon other cigarettes began to glow on the beach.
Small comfort for
these boys
, Truscott thought. He wondered what they would think if they knew it was their commander who’d first violated the blackout?

General George Patton woke up on D-day at 0200, dressed, and immediately made his way to the deck of the
Augusta
, where he saw the lights of Fedala to the north and Casablanca to the south. The sea was calm with no swell, and he thought,
God is with us
.

As with Goalpost at Mehdia, the central sub–task force was set to jump off at 0400; and likewise it was delayed, not once but twice, by the same sort of confusion. Finding and loading landing craft in the transport area in the dark turned out to be a task too difficult for the inexperienced hands of both army and navy.

At 0530,
a searchlight appeared in the skies of Fedala, shining straight into the heavens. Since a sentence in Eisenhower’s address to the military of North Africa earlier that morning had suggested that defenders who wanted to lay down their arms without a hopeless battle indicate their willingness to do so by pointing their searchlights to the vertical, there was a temporary excitement on the
Augusta
. The French would not fight! That notion was quickly squashed, however. The same searchlight quickly angled down and began sweeping the two-mile-long beach that fronted the city and was even now receiving the first wave of landing craft from the American transports out at sea. Immediately, Hewitt’s destroyers opened up with whistling red tracers aimed directly at the searchlight. It was extinguished ten minutes later.

As the landings progressed at Fedala, Patton received word from Truscott shortly after 0700 that fighting had begun and was continuing at Mehdia. No word on whether or not the airport was under assault, but Patton assumed he would have been told if it were. There was far better news from General Ernest Harmon in Safi: The southern group had achieved complete surprise and had essentially taken that port already. Troops were under some sniper fire on the beach, but Harmon
would soon receive the surrender of the commander of a battalion of Foreign Legion there.

Meanwhile, on his own front, Patton was witnessing a tough little naval battle. Six enemy destroyers had been sent from Casablanca at about the same time that Truscott’s message arrived. They were greeted with withering fire from the assorted U.S. Navy vessels in the central group, including the
Augusta, Brooklyn
, and
Mississippi
, and soon retreated.

Patton decided to head for shore himself at 0800. His landing craft had been loaded with supplies and was on davits outside the ship, when again from Casablanca came a group of ships. This time the French sent more firepower, in the form of a light cruiser and a pair of large destroyers. The
Augusta
once again joined in the welcoming barrage, but now, when it opened fire, a blast from a rear turret shattered the very landing craft that Patton was planning to take to shore.
The only items saved from the vessel were Patton’s own ivory-handled revolvers.

Soon after the appearance of the destroyers, the French sent a group of bombers out over the ocean to attack the transports. The
Augusta
turned to protect them but was soon engaged again by the French ships from Casablanca.
A destroyer in the American group, the
Ludlow
, was hit and set on fire, and the
Brooklyn
was hit as well. Shells fell so near to the
Augusta
that Patton was splashed by a close hit. The salvos of the bigger guns came from nine cannons firing jointly at the rate of twice a minute. They were so painfully loud that everyone, including Patton, wore cotton in their ears. For three hours the battle continued, until finally the French again retreated to the harbor in Casablanca, where the battleship
Mississippi
continued to bombard them and, for good measure, the French battleship
Jean Bart
, which hadn’t yet ventured out into the melee.