An Army at Dawn (26 page)

Now it appeared the French intended not just to fight but to fight with passion. At first the defensive fire on the beaches had seemed sporadic, more symbolic than lethal. The captain of the cruiser U.S.S.
Brooklyn
had signaled Hewitt at 5:39
A.M.
: “Have noticed gunfire and am moving into position to take care of eventualities.” But the shells from El Hank and the
Jean Bart
were ship-killers; they opened what became one of the most intense naval battles of the Atlantic war.

Within ten minutes of the first salvos, the sky seemed to leak steel across Casablanca’s moles and harbor basins. American shells gouged great divots from the docks, spraying concrete shrapnel against hulls and across decks. Ten merchantmen lay defenseless at their moorings, and there they would sink, along with three French submarines. The last of 2,000 civilian refugees who had arrived from Dakar on three passenger ships the previous evening fled down piers soon pounded to rubble. Dozens of sailors, including several captains, died on the docks short of their gangplanks and the dignity of a seagoing death.

The
Jean Bart
—France’s newest dreadnought, with turrets heavy as a frigate—was still unfinished: she could not leave her slip. A sixteen-inch shell from
Massachusetts
burrowed through the battleship’s forward turret. Another hit the turret’s armored apron, immobilizing the guns. After firing just seven rounds,
Jean Bart
fell silent. Three other shells from
Massachusetts
punched through the armored decks, the side, and the keel, and
Jean Bart
settled on the bottom along the Môle du Commerce. Oddly, not one of the shells exploded; they, along with more than fifty other American duds—the consequence in part of fuzes dating to 1918—spared Casablanca worse destruction.

The commander of the French 2nd Light Squadron, Rear Admiral Gervais de Lafond, was as ignorant as his seamen of the enemy’s identity. Haze prevented him from making out the battle pennants on the enemy ships, and he had received no authoritative reports from his superiors or from the beaches. But Lafond clearly saw a disaster in the making. Only by putting to sea and slipping along the coastline under the blinding glare of the rising sun could his squadron escape obliteration.

Lafond failed to realize that his foes had radar. The admiral issued his orders, boarded the destroyer
Milan,
and headed for the harbor entrance at 8:15
A.M.
Attacking dive-bombers struck the commercial basin even as French submarine crews muscled a few final torpedoes aboard before casting off. A brave figure in a black cassock, the fleet chaplain, sprinted through the bombardment to the end of the pier, where he waved the sign of the cross at each warship as it sortied past. Along the corniche the wives and children of French sailors gathered on rooftops to cheer the sixteen ships into battle. They would have an unobstructed view as American fire whittled away the familiar silhouettes of the Casablanca fleet.

French shells were dye-loaded to help gunners see the fall of shot. Majestic geysers of green, purple, magenta, and yellow erupted around the American ships. On the presumption that no two enemy rounds would land in the same spot, helmsmen were ordered to “chase the splashes”—an especially difficult maneuver when gunfire straddled a ship. Cruisers, destroyers, and the
Massachusetts
swerved to and fro, battle ensigns snapping. The battleship was hit once, suffering little damage; another shell tore her colors to tatters. The concussion of their own big guns knocked out the radar range finders on
Tuscaloosa
and
Massachusetts,
so the gun teams had to aim crudely, by sight, wasting quantities of shells. Shock waves from
Augusta
’s number three turret jarred a radio receiver from its mountings. It smashed to the deck, thus producing one among many communications problems that by noon led to the sacking of several signal operators for incompetence.

Concussion from the flagship’s aft turret claimed another victim: the landing craft Patton intended to ride to the beach had its bottom blown out while hanging from davits over the port rail. His kit—except for the ivory-handled Colt Peacemaker and Smith & Wesson .357, which he had just strapped on—plunged into the Atlantic. In Norfolk Patton had vowed to land with the first wave and die at the head of his troops; now, immaculately dressed in his shiny two-star helmet and cavalry boots, he was trapped on
Augusta
. “Goddammit,” he barked at an aide. “I hope you have a spare toothbruth with you I can use to clean my foul mouth. I don’t have a thing left in the world, thanks to the United States Navy.”

He stopped fuming long enough to scribble a letter to Bea—“It is flat calm. God was with us”—and record the morning events in his diary:

I was on the main deck just back of number two turret, leaning on the rail, when one [French shell] hit so close that it splashed water all over me. When I was on the bridge later, one hit closer but I was too high to get wet. It was hazy and the enemy used smoke well. I could just see them and make out our splashes. We had the [
Massachusetts
], the
Brooklyn,
the
Augusta
and some others all firing and going like hell in big zig-zags…. You have to put cotton in your ears. Some of the people got white but it did not seem very dangerous to me—sort of impersonal.

Hewitt was too busy to fret over Patton’s impatience or his snippy assessment of naval combat. This sea battle would certainly dispel any doubts Patton still held about the Navy’s desire to fight. So engrossed was the Navy in the duel with
Jean Bart
and the shore batteries that the warships soon found themselves nearly thirty miles south of Fedala—with Admiral Lafond’s squadron angling straight for the vulnerable American transports. A report from a spotter plane alerted Hewitt to the French sortie from the harbor, and shortly before 8:30
A.M.
he ordered
Augusta, Brooklyn,
and two destroyers to intercept the French at flank speed. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison, aboard
Brooklyn
as a naval reserve officer, reported that “the four ships went tearing into action like a pack of dogs unleashed.”

It was a near-run thing. The rising sun, the glare, and the sporadically malfunctioning Navy radar reduced the French ships to black dots dancing on the horizon. Visibility was further cut by the pall from oil tanks blazing ashore and by the French squadron’s smoke generators. Shooting at the agile Vichy destroyers was likened to “trying to hit a grasshopper with a rock.” Shells from a shore battery holed the destroyer U.S.S.
Palmer
—one blew through a galley trash can without scratching the two sailors carrying it—and severed the mainmast; she fled west at twenty-seven knots. The destroyer U.S.S.
Ludlow,
firing so furiously that her deck guns appeared to be squirting a solid stream of tracers, hit Lafond’s flagship,
Milan,
and set her ablaze, only to be answered with a six-inch shell that wrecked the wardrooms and ventilated the port bow. Every swatch of unchipped paint seemed to burn like tar paper.
Ludlow
also fled. Those French submarines that escaped the carnage of the harbor nearly took their revenge:
Massachusetts
threaded a four-torpedo spread, with number four missing the starboard paravane by fifteen feet. Several minutes later
Tuscaloosa
avoided another four torpedoes, from
Méduse,
and
Brooklyn
dodged five others, fired by the
Amazone
.

Four miles from the transports, French luck ran out for good at eleven
A.M.
The carrier
Ranger
and the escort carrier
Suwannee
had been plagued by light winds that complicated takeoffs and landings. Both ships tacked aggressively, searching for the riffled water that signaled stiffer breezes needed for sufficient lift. A squadron of Grumman Wildcats finally launched from the
Ranger
and tangled with Vichy fighters in a dogfight that cost four American and eight French aircraft. Fuselage and aileron fragments rained down on Casablanca’s minarets. Planes damaged beyond saving flipped belly-up so the pilots could more easily parachute out. The repair crews on
Ranger
mended so many bullet holes in the Wildcats that they ran short of adhesive tape and broadcast an appeal throughout the carrier for personal supplies of Scotch tape.

Patched and vengeful, the American planes swarmed out of the sun from 8,000 feet. Fighters do not fight, the French writer Antoine de St.-Exupéry once observed: they murder. Each Wildcat carried six .50-caliber guns, and each barrel fired 800 rounds per minute—some armor-piercing, some incendiary, and some tracer rounds. Working from fantail to forecastle, pilots strafed Lafond’s flotilla so savagely that the French ships glittered from all the bullets richocheting off their superstructures. “The first pass was, I believe, devastating,” one flier reported. Flying bridges disintegrated, and the men on them were sliced to ribbons. A single strafing run against one destroyer killed every sailor on deck, except for the gunners crouched in the armored turrets. Their gun ports smudged with carbon, the planes returned to the carrier decks to reload and launch again.

The air attacks and weight of American gunfire soon told, although none of the forty-one bombs dropped on El Hank scored a direct hit. Green- and red-dyed Navy shells rained down by the score, then by the hundreds.
Brooklyn
alone fired 2,600 rounds;
Massachusetts
used more than half her supply of sixteen-inch shells. One shattered French destroyer “heeled over as if she had been pushed by the smokestacks,” a pilot noted. The
Fougueux
sank by the bow even as her stern guns continued to fire.
Frondeur,
her engine room flooded, limped back to port and capsized;
Brestois,
too, returned to a jetty only to roll over and sink. The destroyer
Boulonnais,
hit eight times as she maneuvered to launch torpedoes, went down so quickly that a final green shell from
Massachusetts
simply marked the grave. With her bow crushed and all hands on the bridge wounded, including Lafond,
Milan
beached herself.
Albatros
was hit twice, then shelled and strafed while under tow back to Casablanca; she, too, was beached, with more than a hundred casualties. One by one, the green flecks vanished from American radar screens.

The most operatic death was left to the largest ship in the 2nd Light Squadron, the
Primauguet.
When the American attack began, all four of the cruiser’s gun turrets had been in various states of undress. By nine
A.M.
, three of the four had been reassembled, a crew of 553 men was aboard, and with help from two tugs
Primauguet
had sortied to join the mêlée. Building to twenty-one knots, she was soon in a running gunfight with
Massachusetts
and both American cruisers. Three shells hit
Primauguet
without exploding before a strong shock, then another, staggered the ship. Holed five times below the waterline, her boilers winking out, she hemorrhaged smoke and wallowed back toward Casablanca at four knots. Wildcats caught her off the beach at Roches Noires, killing the captain and twenty-eight other men on the bridge. A laconic distress call reported that fire had become “conspicuous.” Men plunged overboard to escape the flames. Terrified pigs broke loose from a pen in the hold and savaged the helpless wounded lying on deck. With more than half her crew dead or injured,
Primauguet
burned for more than a day.

Of the French ships that had sortied, only
Alcyon
returned to port unscathed, and it was left to her to search for survivors. She found little more than whiffs of cordite and brine. Sixteen other vessels—including eight submarines—had been sunk or crippled, with 490 men dead and 969 wounded. Four American ships had taken a single shell each, and
Ludlow
took two. Navy casualties totaled three killed in action and twenty-five wounded. Among the dead was a gunner on a dive-bomber who had rejected more than $200 from a comrade eager to buy a seat in the first wave; with his leg severed at the knee by anti-aircraft fire, the gunner died trying to knot his silk muffler into a tourniquet. He was buried at sea from
Ranger
’s hangar deck as the carrier made a sweeping, ceremonial turn to starboard. A few downed American pilots were captured. From their prison window in Casablanca, they cheered each successive bombing wave, then bathed in champagne purchased from their jailors in a desperate effort to rid themselves of the fleas infesting the cell.

Diehard French officers tried to form another battle fleet, but with only two sloops intact, the rally quickly petered out. Sailors hauled a sixteen-inch American dud from the port to Admiralty headquarters, where it was displayed near the entrance with a placard, in French: “We Come As Friends!” Surviving crewmen were rounded up, issued a rifle and five cartridges, and formed into infantry companies for the defense of Casablanca. Leaning on a cane, the wounded Admiral Lafond took the salutes of his sailors as they passed in review before heading to the front.

Patton finally reached Fedala’s Beach Red 1 by crash boat at 1:20
P.M.
Sunday afternoon. In better times, the fishing port of 16,000 residents catered to swells from nearby Casablanca who came to enjoy the racetrack and seafront casino. Now the town was almost deserted. Soaked to the waist and escorted by bodyguards cradling submachine guns, Patton scuffed across the sand to a cabana at the seawall. His leather jacket was stained with yellow dye from the French shell that had splashed him on
Augusta
that morning. At last, after so many years of preparing himself for war, he was in the fight. Large and unhasty, he took stock.