Twelve Desperate Miles (37 page)

Meanwhile, Patton took lunch, remarking later to this diary that “
naval war is nice and comfortable.” Afterward, he left for shore, arriving there at 1320. Patton found a beach in disarray similar to what Truscott encountered at Mehdia—there was serious overcrowding; units
were having trouble organizing; many landing craft were beached, and their personnel wandered aimlessly about—but here French resistance was at a minimum. In fact, as Patton toured the town after landing, he received salutes and smiles from a number of French soldiers whom he encountered. Only the French marines were diffident. To further boost his spirits, he learned that eight members of the German Armistice Commission had been captured.

That night, as Truscott huddled with his cigarette on the beach, Patton took a room in Fedala’s beachfront Hotel Miramar. It had been hit several times, knocking out its electricity and water pipes; nonetheless Patton was able to cadge a meal of fish and cheese, washed down with champagne.

It appeared at the end of D-day that the tough fighting remained around Port Lyautey and Casablanca, but all in all, as the general noted in his diary, “
God was very good to me today.”

T
he beach outside Patton’s hotel was no more ordered on the morning of the ninth than it had been the day before. He went there after sunrise and immediately got involved in trying to organize matters, ordering a launch to go out and steer incoming lighters toward the harbor, rather than continuing to clog the beaches for unloading.

A French plane swooped in, strafing and dropping bombs on the scene. Patton was unfazed by the assault and so enraged by the reaction of the troops on the beach that when he found a soldier cowering in a fetal position, he
booted him “with all [his] might” in the ass. “[The man] jump[ed] right up and went to work.”

Perhaps obviously, Patton was disappointed in the way his soldiers responded to the circumstances. Later that day he would write, “
The men were poor, the officers worse; no drive. It is very sad. I saw one lieutenant let his men hesitate to jump into the water. I gave him hell. I hit another man who was too lazy to push a boat. We also kicked a lot of Arabs.”

Of the nearly twenty thousand troops in Patton’s central force, roughly eight thousand had landed on the first day. Unfortunately, the percentage of supplies available to them was significantly less—in fact, it was about 10 percent of what they needed. Sorting through the mess on the beach would take much of the day. More than half of the landing craft and lighters used to bring troops, vehicles, and supplies to the Fedala beach were either sunk or stranded, and many lay scattered on the beach like wreckage.

Simply unloading what was there turned out to be complex as well. The priority of the inexperienced army troops was to defend themselves against the French forces they encountered as they came on shore; the priority of the inexperienced navy personnel was to get to the beach and
get out as quickly as possible. Few volunteered for the hazardous grunt work. While packing at Norfolk was supposed to have been done in combat-ready fashion, a number of the landing craft were loaded haphazardly, leaving vital supplies needed immediately, like medicine and radio equipment, buried at the bottom of loads. And as was the case at Mehdia, a shortage of vehicles arriving on the first day made transporting matériel from the beaches that much more difficult.

Unfortunately, the weather on the ninth was not as cooperative as it had been on D-day, either. The surf, which had been so kind the day before, was now at six feet and growing. Rain began to fall as well. The Moroccan shore was finally showing its feistiness.

Eyeing the weather in the wee hours of the morning, Harry Semmes quickly realized that he would have no more than the seven tanks that had come ashore on the eighth to hold the Rabat–Port Lyautey road from the anticipated assault by the French. There was simply no way the tank lighters could bring any more of his vehicles ashore that morning.

At the order of Lucian Truscott the night before, Semmes had taken his armored battalion and headed to the south edge of the lagoon. There he waited in the predawn hours to hear the creak of the French tanks signaling their advance. Semmes’s crews were experiencing their first night in Morocco, their first night in enemy territory, and the sheer foreignness of the experience was striking. Accustomed to training in the field in the southern United States, Semmes would later recall that he and his troops were used to the sweet and pungent smells of piney woods. But here “
the ground near this pestilential lagoon had a sour, acrid, penetrating smell entirely unfamiliar and foreign.” It was an aroma “compounded of 5,000 years of sheep and nomads living on the land.” Adding to the general sense of alienation was a “sepulchral croaking” noise that filled the midnight air around the lagoon and reminded Semmes of Edgar Allen Poe’s squawking raven. In fact, it turned out to be the mating call of the great African tree toad.

Semmes had other concerns aside from the eeriness of the setting. Not only did he have just seven tanks on hand against however many Renaults the French might throw toward Mehdia, but he was uncertain about the effectiveness of his vehicles. There had been no opportunity on the voyage to Morocco to sight them, which meant their fire could be wildly inaccurate. In addition, because of the communications blackout in the convoy, the tank radios hadn’t been tested. It turned out that they were completely inoperative, which meant that his crews would have no communication with one another.

Nonetheless, come dawn, Semmes’s Third Armored Landing Team moved away from the lagoon and into position. Led by crew members on foot because of the lack of radio communication, two tanks were guided to the east side of the Rabat road; the remaining five set up to the west. They came to a halt within a hundred yards of a farmhouse occupied by French infantry. No sooner had they arrived at their position than the French Renault tanks appeared as well. In all, there were fourteen of them, accompanied by a couple of battalions of Moroccan Tirailleurs. A moment of contemplation passed quickly. At that distance of a hundred yards, the combatants opened fire.

The two American tanks to the east side of the road cut a devastating swath through the French infantry by the farmhouse; but in general, and probably due to the fact that they hadn’t been sighted, the U.S. armored vehicles weren’t hitting their marks. The cold November rain was wreaking havoc with the breech mechanisms of the American guns, as well. Shells were not ejecting properly, and by the end of the day, all of the tank loaders would be missing fingernails from digging empty cartridges from their barrels. The American light tanks were also proving vulnerable to roundhouse punches from the French; the sides of the U.S. tanks were less heavily armored than their fronts. To compensate, Semmes ordered his crews to move their vehicles forward and backward, so that they always faced in the direction of their attackers. This stiff but effective two-step allowed the vehicles to present only their thicker fronts to the French and prevented the armor-piercing shells
employed by the Vichy from doing as much damage as they otherwise might have.

Despite all of this, the U.S. armored team held their own and more, actually knocking out four of the French tanks by 0830. The tanks of the Third Armored remained outmanned, however, and Semmes felt his situation was growing desperate, when suddenly, over the landscape on the French side of the battlefield, shells began pouring in from the U.S. Navy. A spotter plane had pinpointed the location of the French tanks for the cruiser
Savannah
, and her eight-inch shells were suddenly raining down with terrifying accuracy on the Vichy, gouging tank-size craters in the countryside.

By 0900, the French had withdrawn to the south toward Rabat. Though they would re-form and attack later in the day, once again the
Savannah
would help send them scurrying. “
We will always have a warm spot in our hearts for the
Savannah
and her crew,” Semmes would later write.

To Semmes’s rear, the First Battalion moved inland over the high ground to the south of the airport in preparation for assault on the field. There, at midmorning, they got hung up by a combination of stiff French infantry resistance and bombardment of two sorts: the U.S. Navy, aiming at the batteries surrounding the airport and Port Lyautey, joined with French planes, focused on bombing and strafing the American positions to make advance on the field a hazardous proposition. The First dug in and remained trenchbound for the day.

At the same time, the Second Battalion faced a strongly reinforced Kasbah. French Legionnaires from Meknes had arrived in the night to fortify the fort. At the same time, the American battalion remained badly disorganized from its chaotic arrival and advance the day before, with each company able to account for only thirty to fifty of its men. Several ineffective attempts were made at taking the Kasbah, but each was rebuffed. The French counterattacked, trying to push the Second back
toward the beaches, but they too were unsuccessful. U.S. forces were able to clear the trenches to the south of the Kasbah, but the thick-walled old Portuguese bastion remained in French hands through the course of the day.

To the north of the Sebou, Toffey’s Third Battalion began the day on its hill overlooking the airport. It was still waiting for the rubber boats that would provide it transportation across the Sebou, but these didn’t arrive at its position until 1400. Even then, it was no easy thing to get them inflated and operational. A single hand pump was employed in the task, and the process caught the attention of the French, who sprayed fire in the direction of the battalion. The Third remained relatively safe in foxholes that they’d previously dug after drawing some accurate French battery fire from near a barn southwest of the airport.

Toffey sent a patrol to the strongly defended bridge north of Port Lyautey. Nonetheless, the Third’s efforts were dictated by two basic assignments: get across the Sebou to aid in the assault of the airfield; and take that bridge. After meeting with company commanders at 1430, Toffey ordered that both should happen by the end of the day.

Just after dark, at 1900, the Third Battalion’s I Company baptized its rubber boats in the Sebou, near the bend in the river where the French had scuttled the two steamers. Once again, a lack of preparation confounded the exercise. The rubber boats turned out to be barely navigable, and it wound up taking seven trips to get the whole company across. Once they were on the airport side of the river, the members of I Company found themselves wallowing in a muddy bottom. The weight of equipment on their own backs made any movement a plodding chore. They also managed to mire themselves deeper in the muck by heading south, parallel to the river, toward the heart of the swamp. Finally, they turned west, but they now were moving parallel to the airport, rather than toward it. They also were discovered, and got hit by enemy artillery coming at their backs from the east. It was then that they decided to retrace their steps to the point at which they’d originally crossed. Here, they dug in as best they could and awaited the sunrise.

The attack on the bridge was similarly slowed by heavy equipment. But on the north side of the Sebou, it was that weight carried in sandy terrain that bogged the movements of K and M Companies. Both vehicles and infantry found negotiating the dunes a laborious task. It took four hours to get the two companies in position for attack. Toffey, who was leading the assault, ordered his C Battery to open fire on the west side of the bridge at 1830. Out at sea, a destroyer leveled supporting fire on the airport.

As K Company came within 1,200 yards of the bridge, it was hit with machine-gun fire from solid positions in ditches on either side of the road. Two infantrymen were killed in the initial blast. Toffey sent out a patrol to knock out the enemy nests, but grenades couldn’t dislodge them. Several mortar rounds were more successful and wiped out one of the machine guns. A second gun, however, wreaked more havoc on the Americans until a patrol from M Company, using a combination of bazooka, grenades, and machine guns, was finally able to chase it off.