An Army at Dawn (50 page)

Operation
SATIN
envisioned a quick lunge across southern Tunisia to the coastal town of Gabès, 260 miles south of Tunis. A rear guard laying minefields would then block any counterattack by Rommel’s army driving from Libya into Tunisia, while the main force pushed eighty miles up the coast to capture Sfax, a small port now defended by 2,700 Axis troops with fifteen tanks. The attack was intended to prevent Rommel’s army from joining Arnim’s; it also would lure the defenders of Tunis from their breastworks and give Anderson’s mired First Army another chance to spring forward.
SATIN
was to be an American production, undertaken by the U.S. II Corps, which now included the 1st Armored Division, one of Terry Allen’s infantry regiments, and various other units.
SATIN
was bold but also perilous, and it constituted an abrupt change in theater strategy. No longer was the immediate Allied objective the capture of Tunis and Bizerte, but rather the destruction of Rommel’s army by Montgomery’s hammer bashing the enemy against the
SATIN
anvil. Although 437,000 soldiers and 42,000 vehicles had been landed in North Africa since November 8, Anglo-American forces in Tunisia remained thin and undersupplied. To lengthen the Tunisian battlefield would stretch Axis troops—still flowing into the bridgehead at a rate of 1,000 a day—but also the Allies. “The Allied forces now appear to be extended over a very wide front, with practically no depth to their position,” the combined chiefs observed in early January with undisguised anxiety. “This situation is fraught with danger.” A
SATIN
spearhead to the coast might sever Rommel from Arnim, or it might be crushed between those two German grindstones. “It looks as if the II Corps is to be bait, a sheep tied to a post,” an American staff officer wrote in early January.

Eisenhower and his staff concocted
SATIN
, then paid it little attention as the impending Casablanca conference and other diversions intruded. In the first two weeks of January, the proposed
SATIN
force grew from 20,000 men to 38,000; that meant pushing forward not 450 tons of provisions daily, but 800 tons, a task beyond the frail Allied supply system. The plan had grown “logistically out of hand,” a senior supply officer warned. Bickering persisted over the operation’s ultimate objective, and whether swinging as far south as Gabès made sense. But Eisenhower was adamant that “it was fatal to do nothing.” The attack was scheduled for the fourth week of January.

Eisenhower made several moves intended to exert tighter command over the newly configured front, none satisfactory and one ultimately disastrous. In a former Constantine orphanage, he established a forward command post from which he assumed “personal command of the battle area” despite remaining 200 miles from any fighting. As his proxy in Constantine when he was back in Algiers, which was almost always, Eisenhower summoned Lucian Truscott, the conqueror of Port Lyautey and a new major general. Because Truscott lacked the commander-in-chief’s rank and stature, his influence over the British, French, and even American contingents was largely limited to passing messages to and from AFHQ headquarters.

Mark Clark was a candidate to command American forces in southern Tunisia, but in early January he received a post “for which he has begged and pleaded for a long time,” in Eisenhower’s tart phrase: the new U.S. Fifth Army, comprising all those underemployed troops in Morocco and Algeria. George Marshall, still obsessed with the nonexistent threat from Spain, insisted the new army remain on guard against Spanish treachery, leaving the Tunisian campaign to others. “Ike doesn’t think Clark is disappointed—in fact thinks he is rather relieved as he hadn’t wanted the [Tunisian command] particularly,” Harry Butcher wrote in his diary. Some believed that Clark was indeed happy not to risk his reputation in actual combat; the British, who despised him—“very ambitious and unscrupulous,” Alan Brooke wrote privately—were happy to see him leave AFHQ headquarters.

No sooner had he taken Fifth Army—“his own manure pile,” Eisenhower called it—than Clark began fretting over his future and whether the Mediterranean war would end before he had proven himself in a battle command. At the same time, his relentless self-aggrandizement again discomfited his superiors. Eisenhower this winter had twice privately warned his old friend about the hazards of overweening ambition, and Marshall—as furrow-browed as any prophet—lectured him against self-promotion. “Clark admitted he had perhaps been overly ambitious, and would knuckle down and do the job assigned to him like the good soldier he is,” Butcher told his diary.

But who would command II Corps? Eisenhower had just the man, and in him the makings of a disaster.

“I bless the day you urged Fredendall upon me, and cheerfully acknowledge that my earlier doubts of him were completely unfounded,” Eisenhower had cabled Marshall in November. This unctuous poppycock soon would yield to resurgent doubt and then bitter regret, but for now Major General Lloyd R. Fredendall remained in good odor, not least because he was perceived to be “a Marshall man,” and of all the officers in all the world
he
had been chosen by the U.S. Army to lead its inaugural corps in combat against the Third Reich.

At fifty-nine, with periwinkle-blue eyes and hair the color of gunmetal, he was second oldest of the thirty-four men who would be entrusted with American corps command in World War II. Short, stocky, and opinionated, Fredendall had earned a reputation in the prewar Army as a capable trainer and a skilled handler of troops. Reporters liked him for his hail-fellow accessibility and imperturbable air—he liked to sit cross-legged on the floor at two
A.M.
playing solitaire, like Grant’s whittling during the Wilderness carnage. His father had been a pioneer in Wyoming Territory, eventually serving as the sheriff of Laramie and a scourge of cattle rustlers before accepting an Army commission in the Spanish-American War. Young Lloyd went off to West Point in 1901, only to flunk mathematics and depart after six months. Reappointed by a Wyoming senator, he again lasted just a semester. “A very soldierly little fellow, but extremely goaty at mathematics,” his academy roommate observed. After earning a degree, improbably, at MIT, Fredendall took an infantry commission in 1907.

Thirty-five years later he arrived in Oran during
TORCH
with a peaked cap perched at his trademark rakish angle, and a conviction that neither Eisenhower nor Clark wanted him in Africa since he outranked both in pre-war, permanent grade. As de facto military governor in Oran, Fredendall showed exceptional tolerance for Vichy thuggery; a prominent French Fascist received the American contract for airport reconstruction despite pronouncing himself against “the Jews, the Negroes, and the British.” When an American diplomat protested, Fredendall threatened him with arrest, thundering, “Lay off that stuff! What the hell do you know about it?” Orders issued from his headquarters in Oran’s Grand Hotel were headed, “II Corps—In the field,” which provoked hoots from those living in tents and slit trenches.

Unencumbered with charisma, Fredendall substituted bristling obstinacy. Truscott found him “outspoken in his opinions and critical of superiors and subordinates alike.” On the telephone, Fredendall employed a baffling code, which he often abandoned in mid-conversation whenever he and his auditor had become sufficiently confused. During a mid-January conversation with Truscott—whose stenographer eavesdropped on an extension—Fredendall reported:

I do not have enough
MENUS
…. Relative to the force at Ousseltia, it has been passed from the head
ASH TRAY
to a second
ASH TRAY
…. Everything
DAGWOOD
of
GARDEN
has been withdrawn or collapsed. I cannot spare any
CLOUDS
.

Translation: He was short of infantry. A unit that had been serving under a French commander was now under a different Frenchman. Forces north of Pichon had been routed. Fredendall had no extra battalions.

Fredendall also harbored the Anglophobia so common in senior American officers; II Corps became a hotbed of anti-British sentiment to the point of mocking English accents and perpetuating the calumny that “Ike is the best commander the British have.” As the corps staff checked out of the Grand Hotel for the front—the real front—a ditty circulated among them:

When the British First got stuck in the mud

And settled down for tea,

They up and beckoned for the Fighting Second

To help in Tunisee.

Lloyd Fredendall’s chosen avenue for Operation
SATIN
started on the eastern border of Algeria in ancient Tébessa, the walled city of Solomon the Eunuch and headquarters of Rome’s Third Legion. Nine miles southeast of Tébessa, in a sunless gulch accessible only by a serpentine gravel road, II Corps planted its flag and began staging for the grand march to the sea that would cleave the Axis armies in half. Soon Fredendall and sixty-eight staff officers had established residence in the ravine, officially called Speedy Valley but also known as “Lloyd’s Very Last Resort” and “Shangri-La, a million miles from nowhere.” Inexperienced and unusually young, the II Corps staff was dubbed “Fredendall’s kindergarten” their commander had thrown up his hands in mock horror, exclaiming, “My God, I am going to war surrounded by children!” Three thousand support soldiers—signalers, anti-aircraft gunners, engineers—infested the fir copses around Speedy Valley. “The woods are stiff with troops, and it sounds like the Battle of the Marne though no enemy is within many miles,” a lieutenant wrote. Combat units mustered farther east, toward Bou Chebka and Kasserine.

Tébessa’s high plateau was “cold as a snake,” one officer reported, adding, a few days later, “Everyone is freezing.” Perpetual shade and frequent snow squalls made Speedy Valley particularly inhospitable. Officers lived and worked in “igloos”—frigid tents with crushed stone floors—wearing every stitch they owned, including wool watch caps that “made the place look like a lumber camp,” a reporter commented. Wearing a knit balaclava with an upturned visor, Fredendall slouched in his canvas chair near a potbelly stove and studied the map, played solitaire, or gabbed with passing correspondents like a cracker-barrel clerk in a country store. He had ordered a bulletproof Cadillac similar to Eisenhower’s, and periodically called Oran to find out why the car had not arrived.

Day and night, Speedy Valley was a bedlam of pneumatic drills and jackhammers. In a most perplexing decision, Fredendall had commanded the 19th Engineer Regiment to shelter his headquarters by boring a pair of immense, double-shafted tunnels in the ravine wall. The project was like “the digging of the New York subway,” Fredendall’s aide reported. Working from a blueprint labeled “II Corps Tunnel Job,” engineers began excavating two complexes fifty yards apart, each with parallel shafts six and a half feet high, five feet wide, and braced every four feet with timbers ten inches thick. Walls and ceilings were lined with planks milled in the nearby forest and overlapped like shingles. Each complex was to be U-shaped, running 160 feet into the hillside with the parallel shafts joined at the rear by ample galleries designed for offices and a magazine. Fredendall supervised the construction with pharaonic intensity, and the gloomy ravine soon assumed a Valley of the Kings ambience. The work occupied a valuable engineering company for weeks.

Some officers believed the tunnels a prudent precaution against enemy air attack. Others—noting that Speedy Valley was seventy miles from the front, well concealed, and protected by an anti-aircraft battalion—considered the project a ludicrous embarrassment. Some questioned Fredendall’s courage. Breaking off a chat with visiting reporters at the sound of airplanes overhead, he would roll his eyes heavenward and mumble, “Some of ours, I hope.” Fredendall’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Colonel William A. Carter, later recalled, “We had no proper explosives to use for tunneling, and our men had no experience in tunneling…. But I could not convince him that it would take a long time to do what he wanted.

“To make the digging as unpopular as possible in an effort to have it stopped, I made sure the blasting was done at night to keep everyone awake,” Carter added. “But that did not stop it.”

As the Tunisian front lengthened from north to south, Allied and Axis troops jostled each other in a fringe of a fire that extended 200 miles from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. In the far south, Colonel Raff’s task force recaptured the oasis town of Gafsa, gateway to the great desert. Suspected Tunisian collaborators and looters, who sometimes could be identified by the stolen light fixtures hanging from their burnooses, were rounded up outside the pink-walled kasbah and remanded to French troops.

“Of the thirty-nine Arabs slated to be shot, only one escaped,” Raff reported. “One of them didn’t die immediately so a member of the firing squad pulled out his pistol and pumped four bullets into the man’s head at close range…. They lay in the Tunisian sunlight on view for the whole town to see.”

In the muddy north, Allied troops of different nationalities were mingled even more as Eisenhower tried piecemeal reinforcement of desperately weak French segments of the line below the Medjerda valley. Confusion was the result. Ted Roosevelt, who had been peeled away from the 1st Division on temporary duty to help the French, initially was charmed by the Byronic landscape of ancient ruins on a wind-swept tell. “You and I could have a lovely time here were it the piping days of peace,” he wrote Eleanor on January 16. But this romanticism soon clouded over. In the course of a single month, the Fighting First’s 26th Infantry had thirty-three other units attached to it, while the regiment’s 3rd Battalion noted in the daily log, “We have served under everything but the Rising Sun and the swastika.” Roosevelt wrote:

The units are all mixed—French, English, American. That makes command and coordination a major problem. To mix and fragment units is a military crime of the gravest sort…. I have done all that lies in my power. Man does what he can and bears what he must.