An Army at Dawn (11 page)

Clark carefully sifted through Mast’s proposals. He pledged immediate delivery of 2,000 automatic weapons to North Africa, a promise that would not be kept. In a rare show of candor, he admitted that simultaneous invasions of North Africa and metropolitan France exceeded Allied means. But he assured Mast that any assault would be more than a hit-and-run raid like that at Dieppe in August. An African invasion force would involve half a million men with 2,000 aircraft. This was a fivefold exaggeration.

“Where are these five hundred thousand men to come from?” Mast asked. “Where are they?”

“In the U.S. and U.K.,” Clark replied.

“Rather far, isn’t it?”

“No.”

Perhaps lies and misunderstandings were inevitable: Clark could hardly disclose the imminence of
TORCH
, even if Mast’s good faith seemed genuine. But by mid-morning tiny seeds of confusion and distrust had been sown over the timing of the invasion, the political realities of Vichy North Africa, the extent to which each side could aid the other, and, most important, who would command whom. At eleven, Mast stood and announced that he must return to Algiers before his absence aroused suspicions. Before walking to his car, he warned Clark, “The French navy is not with us. The army and the air force are.”

Mast also repeated his earlier assertion that General Giraud intended to command all forces in North Africa, including any Allied troops. Clark was noncommittal, and Mast left in a flurry of salutes. He drove slowly past the café card players and old men bowling on the public square in Cherchel, taking with him the pleasant delusion that he had weeks or even months to properly prepare for an Allied invasion.

After twelve hours of hosting this cabal, M. Teissier had become visibly anxious. Nevertheless, he served the conspirators a fortifying lunch of peppery chicken with red wine and oranges. Several of General Mast’s staff officers had remained at the farmhouse for further talks. They handed over maps and charts pinpointing gasoline and ammunition caches, airfields, troop strengths, and other military secrets. Clark swapped uniform blouses with one of the Frenchmen and took a stroll in the courtyard for some fresh air.

The happy colloquy ended abruptly with the jangling of the telephone early that evening. Teissier answered, then slammed down the receiver with a shriek. “The police will be here in five minutes!” This news, Clark later observed, had the effect of “fifty dead skunks thrown on the table.” One French officer bolted out the door with his satchel. Others leaped through the windows and vanished into the brush. Gold pieces clattered across the floor as the Americans flung francs, Canadian dollars, and greenbacks at Murphy to use for possible bribes. Clark rousted the British commandos and sent one packing toward the beach with a walkie-talkie to alert the
Seraph.
With six others, he then scrambled into a dank wine cellar beneath the patio. “I don’t want you to lock me up,” he called. Teissier slammed the trapdoor anyway. The men crouched in darkness, clutching their rifles and musette bags full of documents.

Murphy and Teissier agreed to feign an inebriated revel, with much slurred singing and clinking of wine bottles. At 9:30
P.M.
, a coast guard cadet loyal to Teissier arrived at the green gate to explain his earlier telephone warning: an off-duty servant had reported odd activity at the farmhouse, and the police, suspecting smugglers, were organizing a raid. Murphy urged the cadet to stall the authorities as long as possible. “We had a little party down here. We had some girls, a little liquor, and food,” Murphy said. “Everybody’s left now, but I can assure you that no harm was done.”

Clark and the others soon emerged from the cellar. “Get the hell down to the beach as fast as you can,” Murphy urged. Collecting the folbots, the men clattered down the bluff. The brisk clacking of a nearby windmill signaled a freshening sea breeze, and to Clark’s dismay waves five to seven feet high now crashed onto the shore. He stripped to his under-shorts, tucking the money belt and his rolled-up trousers in the boat’s waisthole. After a short sprint into the surf, he and one of the commandos leaped aboard, paddling furiously. An immense comber lifted the nose of the kayak until the craft was nearly vertical, then pitched it backward into the foaming sea. “To hell with the pants,” someone yelled from shore, “save the paddles.”

Cold, drenched, and trouserless, Clark requisitioned an underling’s pants and hiked to the villa, where he was confronted by a horrified Teissier. “Please, for God’s sake,” the Frenchman begged, “get out of the house.” Clark snapped, “I don’t like to be hurried.” Wrapped in a silk tablecloth, he hobbled barefoot back to the beach with a loaf of bread, two borrowed sweaters, and several bottles of wine. To keep warm, Clark bobbed up and down in a frenzy of deep-knee bends; meanwhile, the men reviewed their options. Should they storm Cherchel to steal a fishing boat? Perhaps they could buy one instead; Murphy suggested offering 200,000 francs. A French officer pointed out that either gambit would likely bring the police if not the army. The Americans agreed that if any Arab blundered onto the beach, they would lasso and strangle him.

At four
A.M.
, someone noticed a sheltered spot where the surf seemed a bit calmer. Clark and a comrade mounted their kayak. Four others carried the boat to shoulder depth and shoved it seaward. Again the craft nosed up nearly perpendicular to the shore, but this time it crested the wave. Aboard
Seraph
, Lieutenant Jewell eased the submarine so close to shore that her keel shivered from proximity to the sea floor. The other boats, after capsizing at least once each, finally cleared the surf and made for the silhouetted conning tower. Murphy capered along the beach, kissing the French officers in glee as they collected the commandos’ abandoned tommy guns and raked all footprints from the sand.

Clark’s men spread their sopping documents in the engine room to dry. Fortified with a double tot of Nelson’s blood from
Seraph
’s rum cask, Clark composed a message for London:

Eisenhower eyes only…All questions were settled satisfactorily except for the time the French would assume supreme command…. Anticipate that the bulk of the French army and air forces will offer little resistance…. Initial resistance by French navy and coastal defenses indicated by naval information which also indicates that this resistance will fall off rapidly as our forces land.

Jewell swung the submarine due west, toward Gibraltar, and sounded the dive klaxon.

On the Knees of the Gods

A
S
Hewitt’s Task Force 34 zigged and zagged toward Morocco with Patton’s legions aboard, more than 300 other ships bound for Algeria steamed from anchorages on the Clyde and along England’s west coast. For all these vessels to shoot the Strait of Gibraltar in sequence and arrive punctually at various Barbary coast beaches, the two-week voyage must, in Churchill’s phrase, “fit together like a jewelled bracelet.” The challenge had roused the Royal Navy to its keenest pitch of seamanship, and the convoys held such perfect alignment that “only the boiling white foam thrown up by the screws betrayed that the ships were moving.”

Eight distinct deception plans had been adopted by the Allies to suggest that this armada was bound for Scandinavia, or France, or the Middle East. The ploys included noisy searches for Norwegian currency; public lectures on frostbite; the conspicuous loading of cold-weather clothing; bulk purchases of French dictionaries; and instruction for army cooks on how to prepare rice dishes. A platoon of reporters was shunted to northern Scotland for ski and snowshoe training. Whatever their effect on Axis intelligence, these clues so confounded American troops that many simply concluded they were sailing for home, especially when the fleet first veered far west to evade U-boat wolfpacks before looping southeast toward the Mediterranean.

Like Hewitt’s ships, those loaded in Britain carried tens of thousands of tons of war supplies. The cargo manifests also included $500,000 worth of tea, hand tools for 5,000 North African natives, 390,000 pairs of socks, and $5 million in gold, packed in thirty small safes at a Bank of England vault in Threadneedle Street. Complementing all those French lexicons, a special glossary translated British into American, noting, for example, that an “accumulator” is a battery, that “indent” means requisition, and that a “dixie” is a bucket for brewing tea.

The loading at British ports made even the Hampton Roads ordeal seem a model of logistical simplicity. On September 8, Eisenhower had sent Washington a fifteen-page cable confessing that his quartermasters in Britain were profoundly confused. Roughly 260,000 tons of supplies, ammunition, and weapons—enough to fight for a month and a half—had been misplaced after arriving in the United Kingdom. Would the War Department consider sending a duplicate shipment? The cable explained that the American system for marking and dispatching the cargo was poor—one U.S. Army regiment and its kit arrived in England on fifty-five different ships—and British warehouse procedures worse. Pilferage topped 20 percent, and many crates were buried beyond retrieval in a thousand dockside sheds. Eisenhower, not as embarrassed as perhaps he should have been, also asked that, as long as Army logisticians were rummaging about, would they please send various additional items, including barber chairs and a “bullet-proof, seven-passenger automobile of normal appearance.”

The cable stirred grave doubts about Eisenhower’s management acumen among the few senior officers permitted to see it. Both he and Patton seemed to be improvising to an alarming extent. A tart message from the War Department to London in October noted, “It appears that we have shipped all items at least twice and most items three times.” But with
TORCH
on the tightest of schedules, logisticians had little recourse. By October 16, another 186,000 tons had been shipped across the Atlantic—and 11 million rounds of ammunition were borrowed from the British. Much of this cargo was now Africa-bound.

Few of the 72,000 troops embarked in Britain knew or cared about these travails. Outnumbering their British comrades two to one, the Americans were mostly drawn from three divisions staging in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland: the 1st Infantry, the 1st Armored, and the 34th Infantry. After a few days at sea, convoy life took on a monotony only partly relieved by topside boxing matches in makeshift rings, where pugilists in sleeveless shirts pummeled one another into insensibility. An Army booklet, “What to Do Aboard a Transport,” contained sections on “seasickness, cold, and balance” and “malaria and other plagues.” An equally dispiriting essay, on “mental matters,” warned, “One of the deep-down urges that must be controlled is that of sex”—advice that failed to curb the troops’ endless reliving of amorous conquests, real and imagined. (Belfast’s Belgravia Hotel, dubbed the Belgravia Riding Academy, was a favorite fantasy site of the 34th Division.) The mandatory “short-arm inspections” for venereal disease gave many a Lothario his comeuppance.

Regimental bands organized afternoon concerts of college fight songs and Sousa marches, always ending with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “God Save the King,” and the “Marseillaise,” in rotating order. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders marched fore and aft aboard the
Cathay
, loudly accompanied by bagpipers; although all soldiers had been ordered to remove their unit insignia, it was widely agreed that any potential enemy should know that Highland troops were afoot. Yanks with guitars or harmonicas played “Marching Through Georgia” or a ribald ballad about the medically exempt called “4-F Charley.” For their part, Tommies sang, “There’ll be no promotion this side of the ocean / Fuck them all, fuck them all, fuck them all.” More refined entertainment was provided 34th Division troops on
Otranto
by a soldier-thespian who delivered soliloquies from
Hamlet
over the ship’s public address system.

For the officers, the voyage was weirdly languorous, as if they were going to war on a Cunard cruise. Stewards awakened them with cups of tea each morning. Waiters posted printed menus in the dining rooms before every meal. An American officer on the
Durban Castle
later recalled, “Blouses were worn for dinner, [with] coffee in the lounge afterwards.” Slender Indian cabin boys in black-and-white livery filled the tubs with hot seawater each evening and asked, “Bath, sahib?” On the
Monarch of Bermuda,
Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., assistant commander of the 1st Infantry Division, entertained his staff officers by reciting long passages of Kipling from memory after they challenged him with a succession of first lines. He further cheered the men by observing that the division’s headquarters ship, several hundred yards abaft, appeared to be rolling twice as much as the
Monarch.
“Cleared for strange ports—that’s what we are,” Roosevelt wrote to his wife on October 26. “Here I am off again on the great adventure.”

Below the waterline, in the troop holds known as Torpedo Heaven, the adventure seemed less thrilling. The stench of sweat, oil, and wool blankets filled the nostrils, while the ear heard an incessant clicking of dice and snoring so loud it was likened to the ripping of branches from a tree. Bunks on some tubs were stacked six high; a soldier in one top berth passed the time by penciling poetry on the steel overhead—a few inches above his nose—and sketching tourist maps of his native Philadelphia. To preserve the blackout, hatches had to be closed at night; the air grew so foul that some Coldstream Guards rigged a canvas airshaft, to little avail. Amid heavy seas mid-voyage, the large drums for the use of seasick soldiers slid across the deck with unpleasant splashings. Mess kits, washed in seawater, produced mass dysentery. Long queues formed at the sick bays and heads, and abject soldiers lined the rails.

Troops caught nibbling their emergency D-ration chocolate bars were dubbed Chocolate Soldiers and punished by forfeiting two meals. This was a happy penance. The galleys served so much fatty mutton that derisive bleating could be heard throughout the convoy and the 13th Armored Regiment proposed a new battle cry: “Baaa!” Crunchy raisins in the bread proved to be weevils; soldiers learned to hold up slices to the light, as if candling eggs. The 1st Infantry Division on
Reine de Pacifico
organized troop details to sift flour through mesh screens in a search for insects. Wormy meat aboard the
Keren
so provoked 34th Division soldiers that officers were dispatched to keep order in the mess hall. When soldiers aboard
Letitia
challenged the culinary honor of one French cook, he “became quite wild and threatened to jump overboard.”