Twelve Desperate Miles (9 page)

After briefing Patton on the Torch plans as they existed, Truscott left the general in the hands of Eisenhower, who invited “Georgie” to a drink and a dinner of dehydrated chicken soup at Eisenhower’s apartment. With the two generals was Eisenhower’s aide, Captain Harry Butcher, attached to the general from the U.S. Navy, who made a record of the meeting.

Despite the possibility of acrimony between them—Patton, the more combat-experienced and older officer, had been passed over as chief
of staff in the European Theater in favor of Eisenhower, while Eisenhower like everyone else, had to forgive Patton’s brusque nature and impulsivity—the two genuinely liked each other and recognized that each had probably been appropriately cast for his respective role in this operation. Eisenhower was the perfect headquarters man and Patton the perfect field general. From the outset of their get-together, they spoke like old, forthright friends, discussing a few personnel decisions, including the switch of Truscott to Patton’s command. Patton worried aloud to Eisenhower about intelligence estimates of French strength on the Moroccan coast, as well as the difficulties of finding suitable landing places in ocean swells that ran upward of fifty feet at times.

The two generals talked of army personalities and their likes and dislikes in officers. Eisenhower had trouble with “
officers who feel they have fulfilled their responsibility when they simply report a problem to a superior and do not bring the proposed solution with them.” In contrast, Patton said he didn’t necessarily want a smart staff but a loyal one. Butcher, who had never met Georgie Patton, liked him and felt the get-together went well. “Patton is a good fellow,” he wrote, “curses like a trooper, and boasts that while he is stupid in many particulars there is one quality he knows he has—the ability to exercise mass hypnotism. ‘In a week’s time,’ [Patton] said, ‘I can spur any outfit to a high state of morale.’ ”

To his diary, Patton was more cryptic about the meeting. “
Had supper with Ike and talked until 1:00 a.m. We both feel that the operation [i.e., Torch] is mostly political. However, we are told to do it and intend to succeed or die in the attempt. If the worst we can see occurs, it is an impossible show, but, with a little luck, it can be done at a high price and it might be a cinch.”

Patton wound up walking back to Claridge’s from Eisenhower’s apartment because he couldn’t find a taxi at that late hour in blackout London, almost getting lost in the process. He mentioned the fact to his wife, Bea, in a letter two days later: “
There were no taxies [
sic
] so I walked and would have been walking yet had I not run into a policeman who, by scent apparently, took me [to Claridge’s].”

Patton’s humor was not improved two days later when the U.S. Navy was brought into discussions on Operation Torch. Captain Frank Thomas, representing the commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Royal Ingersoll, had much to say about the difficulties of the attack, particularly on the western front. He claimed that to get the necessary forces to Morocco would require the greatest armada in history, a fleet of between two hundred and four hundred transports and two hundred accompanying warships. The resources of the navy were already stretched beyond thin by the needs of waging a war in the Pacific and opening supply lines in the North Atlantic to Great Britain. Now it would have to send an immense armada to North Africa, land troops on its shores, maintain another cross-Atlantic supply line, and provide protection for all of the forces coming and going from this theater. There were simply not enough transports, not enough landing craft, not enough warships on the ocean to provide for all of the needs of an invasion force.

Steam was pouring from Patton’s ears by the time the captain had finished offering the navy’s reservations about the plans. Whether the animosity he would exhibit for the next couple of months toward this branch of the service was born in this meeting hardly matters; Patton was a soldier who, once committed to an assignment, found ways of doing it, and he could not abide those who hemmed and hawed about the matter. He was getting ready to fight in North Africa come hell or high water, and it seemed to him that the navy “
was certainly not on their toes.” In the meeting Patton challenged some of Thomas’s assertions, and voices were raised.

Eisenhower steered them all toward a bottom line when he reminded everyone present that Torch was an order from the president of the United States and, whether it was liked or not, would be carried out. And pointedly, Eisenhower told the assembled naval officers that whether or not there was a single warship to guard the invasion, he was going to be a part of it “
if I have to go alone in a rowboat.”

Aside from his pique at the navy, Patton left the gathering with a distinct sense that too deep a bow was being made to British sensibility and
guidance. He noted in his diary that evening, “
It is very noticeable that most of the American officers here are pro-British, even Ike.… I am not, repeat not, pro-British.”

Perhaps to open Patton’s mind to his host country’s charms, Truscott arranged for a dinner at Claridge’s to which Truscott invited the man whose work he’d been studying since arriving in England, Lord Mountbatten. Several other British officers were present, and Patton was indeed impressed with them, telling Truscott the next day that they were “
damn fine fighting men.” He even accepted an invitation from one of them to another dinner the next evening, at which he was guaranteed to meet a “
typical member of the English aristocracy.” Patton had expressed skepticism that such a cliché still existed in Britain.

Patton arrived at the appointed hour the next evening decked out in his finest, a pose that he could pull off like few others in the U.S. Army. “
With gleaming boots and spurs, riding breeches, shining buttons, rows of ribbons on his well cut blouse,” he was, in Truscott’s estimation, “a magnificent figure of a soldier.”

Soon he was met by his counterpart. “
A dowager of sixty-five or thereabouts with several chins seeking rest upon a more than ample bosom.” She entered the room with her hair stacked in a “towering coiffure [that] quivered with her every movement.” She wore furs, trailing skirts, and “strings and strings of pearls,” and her hands sparkled with rings. “A picture from a page in history,” said Truscott.

Seated next to her at the table, Patton charmed the guests with tales of army life, including his escapades with Pershing in Mexico and the notches on his gun from his days chasing Pancho Villa and his minions. His hostess registered just the right degree of “horror, astonishment, and doubt” at Patton’s stories, and Truscott felt the evening had been a genuine success. A colorful mixing of two disparate worlds.

Less successful for Patton were efforts to boost resources for his western assault. In fact, by the middle of August, U.S. Navy and British arguments in favor of an emphasis on the Mediterranean invasion had swayed planners to the extent that Patton’s assault on the Moroccan
coast had been canceled. The combined U.S. and British navies continued to claim that they didn’t have the resources to invade in three separate forces (two in the Mediterranean and one in Morocco); besides, the Moroccan surf was too pounding, too unpredictable to plan for an amphibious assault; and finally, by focusing on two points in the Mediterranean rather than the northwest coast of Africa, the Allies would be that much closer to the Germans in Tunisia. Patton would now lead forces against the city of Oran in northwestern Algeria as part of the Mediterranean attack. His force’s move into Morocco would come from the north rather than from the Atlantic in the west.

By this time, Patton was simply committed to whatever plan was decided upon. To Bea, he wrote of the changes, “
I think this is fortunate for me, so far as a longer life goes, but it is bad for the country—very dangerous in fact. Ike is not as rugged mentally as I thought; he vacillates and is not a realist.”

A grave sense of the risks and dangers of what the Allies were undertaking began to color sensibilities in both Washington and London. The fact that untried, untested, and barely trained U.S. Army forces would be thrust into the war on the beaches of North Africa was one thing; the fact that they were to be carried and escorted by inadequate naval forces after journeys of thousands of miles for those traveling from American shores and hundreds of miles for those brought by the Royal Navy from England was another. No one knew how French forces would react; no one knew if Hitler would induce Franco to send the Spanish army to Gibraltar or perhaps take it himself, cutting off Allied forces in the region. And finally, by agreement and order of FDR and Winston Churchill, along with the desperate wishes of Soviet Russia and the sentiments of the free world, all of this needed to be done in the fast-dwindling months of 1942.

To Eisenhower, the French response represented the key to success or failure. There were fourteen French divisions in North Africa. Five hundred French planes. If Vichy forces in North Africa were to offer united opposition to the invasion, Axis forces could have the time to rush
reinforcements to the region before major coastal objectives were taken. They might also have time to force an assault on Gibraltar.

In a gathering of the principal American military leaders of the assault—Eisenhower, Clark, Doolittle, and Patton—on the eve of Patton’s return to the United States, all but Patton agreed that the odds were against a successful invasion. Patton put them at fifty-two to forty-eight in favor. To his diary that night he wrote, “
I feel that we should fight, but for success we must have luck.… We must do something now. I feel that I am the only true gambler in the whole outfit.”

Patton left for the States on August 19 to begin the process of organizing his invasion force. Truscott remained behind in England as Patton’s surrogate in the ongoing planning for Torch. Before he left, “Georgie” paid one final visit to Eisenhower. While there, he pulled from his pocket a document that he’d drafted that morning. It turned out to be a proposed demand of the French for the surrender of Casablanca, intended for that day when he arrived in the city. As much as it hurt him for two former Allies to be engaged in such fighting, the note read in part, unless Casablanca surrendered within the next ten minutes, Patton would order the navy to shoot the hell out of the city.

“
No wonder Ike’s so pleased to have him,” Butcher noted in his diary.

T
he Standard Fruit Company helped to popularize Caribbean cruise vacations in the 1920s and ’30s. Well-heeled passengers sailing from New York and New Orleans often made their first visits to Havana, Kingston, Veracruz, and Tampico, as well as Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua, on banana boats.

From time to time ships’ captains like William John had an opportunity to
rub elbows with the famous and near-famous on these cruises. Standard Fruit Company newsletters show photos of John greeting a Chicago opera star on board the
Contessa
, a pair of Hollywood producers, and the year’s Miss New Orleans. Actor William Bendix, who would soon play famed New York Yankee Babe Ruth in
The Babe Ruth Story
and star as Chester Riley in television’s
The Life of Riley
, met and became a close friend of Captain John on the
Contessa
. So, too, did the British actor Leo G. Carroll, who appeared in a whole slew of movies, among them
North by Northwest
,
The Desert Fox
, and
Strangers on a Train
. Like Bendix, he starred in his own 1950s television series,
Topper
.

Along with a touch of glamour, Standard Fruit liked to promote the possibility of using its steamers for honeymoon cruises and was happy to publicize the fact that Captain John’s own daughter, Peggy, the LSU belle, and her new husband, Louis Koerner, enjoyed the comforts of the
Contessa
immediately after their May 1940 marriage.
An article in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
tells of their twelve-day voyage to Havana, Cristobal, Puerto Cabezas, and La Ceiba. According to the story, “surprise shore parties arranged by Captain John” awaited the couple at each stop, and for the bride “the whole idea was perfect. She could think of no better way to start a happy marriage than under a tropical moon with her father steering the course.” The groom was said to be happy with the
circumstances too (in fact, John’s grandson, Louis Koerner, was
probably conceived on the cruise).

The
Contessa
had a sister ship in the Standard Fruit fleet, the
Cefalu
, which John had captained in 1931 during the Nicaraguan crisis. It was about the same size, was christened the same year (1930), and cost the same amount: $999,250. They became the pride of the Standard Fleet when they arrived in New Orleans that year and were nicknamed the “Million Dollar Twins” in company promotional materials. Each had two decks above, two decks below, and three storage decks for carrying bananas.

On the
Contessa
, there were ten staterooms on the promenade deck, along with a lounge on the foredeck and a smoking room and bar to the aft. The saloon deck, directly beneath, held an additional twenty cabins, along with the dining room. Passenger fares in the early thirties ranged from a minimum of $190 for a nine-day cruise to $580 for the two largest staterooms on the promenade.

Two masts, front and rear, rose from the deck, along with a forty-one-foot-long forecastle, 135-foot-long bridge decks, and thirty-six-foot-long poop decks. Bananas were loaded by the stem into four refrigerated holds. Upwards of fifty thousand stems could be contained in these insulated areas, refrigerated to forty-eight to fifty-two degrees by a carbon dioxide gas system, with blowers working constantly to circulate the air.
The holds were partitioned by portable walls that allowed the bananas to be loaded and hung.

The smell of fruit would waft up to passengers lounging in mahogany furniture on a highly polished wooden deck made of fir or splashing in the swimming pool, which, truth be told, was only about the size of a modern-day hotel whirlpool—about twelve by twelve and filled with seawater rather than fresh. But still very popular with vacationers. The
Contessa
usually carried a trio or quartet of musicians as well.