An Army at Dawn (6 page)

The president had made the most profound American strategic decision of the European war in direct contravention of his generals and admirals. He had cast his lot with the British rather than with his countrymen. He had repudiated an American military tradition of annihilation, choosing to encircle the enemy and hack at his limbs rather than thrust directly at his heart. And he had based his fiat on instinct and a political calculation that the time was ripe.

In choosing Operation
TORCH
, as the North Africa invasion was now called, Roosevelt made several miscalculations. Despite Marshall’s warnings, he refused to believe that a diversion to North Africa in 1942 precluded a cross-Channel invasion in 1943. He failed to see that the Mediterranean strategy of encirclement precluded other strategies, or that more than a million American soldiers, and millions of tons of matériel, would be sucked into the Mediterranean in the next three years, utterly eviscerating the buildup in Britain. He continued to argue that “defeat of Germany means defeat of Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life.”

Yet the president’s decision was plausible, if not precisely wise. As Brooke had observed of the proposed cross-Channel attack: “The prospects of success are small and dependent on a mass of unknowns, whilst the chances of disaster are great.” American planners considered the British argument for
TORCH
“persuasive rather than rational,” but the American argument for
SLEDGEHAMMER
and
ROUNDUP
had been neither. Direct attack was premature; its adherents exemplified an amateurish quality in American strategic thinking that would ripen only as the war ripened.

The American military had been animated mostly by can-do zeal and a desire to win expeditiously; these traits eventually would help carry the day, but only when tempered with battle experience and strategic sensibility. One general later claimed that Army logisticians kept insisting they could support ten Allied divisions in Cherbourg although they were not certain where the French port was, much less what the condition of the docks might be or whence those divisions would come. Moving a single armored division required forty-five troopships and cargo ships, plus warship escorts, and moving the fifty divisions needed to sustain an invasion required far more ships than the Allies now possessed. Similarly, the critical issue of landing craft had been blithely ignored. “Who is responsible for building landing craft?” Eisenhower had asked in a May 1942 memo. With some planners estimating that an invasion of France required at least 7,000 landing craft, and others believing the number was really triple that, the hard truth was that by the fall of 1942 all the landing craft in Britain could carry only 20,000 men. Yet a U.S. War Department study had concluded that to draw significant numbers of German troops from the Russian front required at least 600,000 Allied soldiers in France. “One might think we were going across the Channel to play baccarat at Le Touquet, or to bathe at the Paris Plage!” Brooke fumed.

Roosevelt had saved his countrymen from their own ardor. His decision provoked dismay, even disgust, and would remain controversial for decades. “We failed to see,” Marshall later said of his fellow generals, “that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained.” Eisenhower believed the cancellation of
SLEDGEHAMMER
might be remembered as the “blackest day in history”—a silly hyperbole, given the blackness of other days. The alienation many senior American officers felt from their British cousins could be seen in a War Department message of late August, proposing that “the Middle East should be held if possible, but its loss might prove to be a blessing in disguise” by giving the British their comeuppance and bringing them to their senses.

But the decision was made. The “thrashing around in the dark,” as Eisenhower called it, was over; the dangerous impasse had been breached.

Much, much remained to be done. Problems ranging from the size and composition of the invasion force to the timing and location of the landings required solutions. In early August,
TORCH
planners moved into offices at Norfolk House on St. James’s Square in London under the supervision of Eisenhower, who had recently been sent from Washington to Britain as commanding general of the European Theater of Operations. As a gesture of reconciliation, and in anticipation of the eventual American preponderance, the British proposed that the Allied expedition be commanded by an American. Churchill nominated Marshall, but Roosevelt was reluctant to give up his indispensable Army chief. Eisenhower, already overseas, had demonstrated impressive diligence and energy, and on August 13 he was named commander-in-chief of
TORCH
.

As the days grew shorter and the summer of 1942 came to an end, few could feel buoyed by news from the front:

Wehrmacht troops had reached the Volga, and the first shots were exchanged in the battle for Stalingrad. German U-boats, traveling in predatory “wolfpacks,” were sinking ships faster than Allied yards could build them; a supply convoy to northern Russia lost thirteen of forty vessels, despite an escort of seventy-seven ships. The Chinese war effort against the Japanese had disintegrated. The fighting over the Solomon Islands had made Guadalcanal a shambles. The fall of Suez seemed imminent. Four of the seven aircraft carriers in the American fleet when the United States entered the war had been sunk. And antipathy between British and American confederates threatened to weaken the alliance even before the fight against their common enemy was joined.

Only seers or purblind optimists could guess that these portents foreshadowed victory. The Allies were not yet winning, but they were about to begin winning. Night would end, the tide would turn, and on that turning tide an army would wash ashore in Africa, ready to right a world gone wrong.

Part One

1. P
ASSAGE

A Meeting with the Dutchman

A
FEW
minutes past 10
A.M.
on Wednesday, October 21, 1942, a twin-engine Navy passenger plane broke through the low overcast blanketing Washington, D.C., then banked over the Potomac River for the final approach to Anacostia Field. As the white dome of the Capitol loomed into view, Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt allowed himself a small sigh of relief. Before dawn, Hewitt had decided to fly to Washington from his headquarters near Norfolk rather than endure the five-hour drive across Virginia. But thick weather abruptly closed in, and for an anxious hour the aircraft had circled the capital, probing for a break in the clouds. Usually a man of genial forbearance, Hewitt chafed with impatience at the delay. President Roosevelt himself had summoned him to the White House for this secret meeting, and although the session was likely to be little more than a courtesy call, it would never do for the man chosen to strike the first American blow in the liberation of Europe to keep his commander-in-chief waiting.

Kent Hewitt seemed an unlikely warrior. Now fifty-five, he had a high, bookish forehead and graying hair. Double chins formed a fleshy creel at his throat, and on a ship’s bridge, in his everyday uniform, he appeared “a fat, bedraggled figure in khaki,” as a British admiral once observed with more accuracy than kindness. Even the fine uniform he wore this morning fit like blue rummage, notwithstanding the flag officer’s gold braid that trimmed his cuffs. A native of Hackensack, New Jersey, Hewitt was the son of a mechanical engineer and the grandson of a former president of the Trenton Iron Works. One uncle had been mayor of New York, another the superintendent of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kent chose the Navy, but as a midshipman in the Annapolis sail loft he was said to have been so frightened of heights that he “squeezed the tar out of the rigging.” As a young swain he had enjoyed dancing the turkey trot; in recent decades, though, he was more likely to be fiddling with his slide rule or attending a meeting of his Masonic lodge.

Yet Hewitt had become a formidable sea dog. Aboard the battleship U.S.S.
Missouri,
he circled the globe for fifteen months with Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, displaying such a knack for navigation that the stars seemed to eat from his hand. As a destroyer captain in World War I, he had won the Navy Cross for heroism. Later he chaired the Naval Academy’s mathematics department, and for two years after the invasion of Poland he ran convoy escorts between Newfoundland and Iceland, ferrying war matériel across the North Atlantic.

In April 1942, Hewitt had been ordered to Hampton Roads to command the Atlantic Fleet’s new Amphibious Force; late that summer came Roosevelt’s decision to seize North Africa in Operation
TORCH
. Two great armadas would carry more than 100,000 troops to the invasion beaches. One fleet would sail 2,800 miles from Britain to Algeria, with mostly British ships ferrying mostly American soldiers. The other fleet, designated Task Force 34, was Hewitt’s. He was to sail 4,500 miles to Morocco from Hampton Roads and other U.S. ports with more than 100 American ships bearing 33,843 American soldiers. In a message on October 13, General Eisenhower, the
TORCH
commander, had reduced the mission to twenty-six words: “The object of the operations as a whole is to occupy French Morocco and Algeria with a view to the earliest possible subsequent occupation of Tunisia.” The Allies’ larger ambition in
TORCH
had been spelled out by Roosevelt and Churchill: “complete control of North Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.”

Through a tiny window over the plane’s wing, Hewitt could see the full glory of Indian summer in the nation’s capital. Great smears of color—crimson and orange, amber and dying green—extended from the elms around the Lincoln Memorial to the oaks and maples beyond the National Cathedral. Across the Potomac, the new Pentagon building filled Hell’s Bottom between Arlington Cemetery and the river. Jokes had already begun circulating about the immense five-sided maze, including the story of a Western Union boy who entered the Pentagon on a Friday and emerged on Monday as a lieutenant colonel. Though it now owned the world’s largest building, the Army was still leasing thirty-five other office complexes around the city, and cynics quipped that if the military were to seize enemy territory as quickly as it had conquered Washington, the war could end in a week.

The plane settled onto the runway and taxied to a hangar. Hewitt buttoned his jacket and hurried down the steps to the Navy staff car waiting on the tarmac. The car sped through the airfield gate and across the Anacostia River to Pennsylvania Avenue. Hewitt had enough time to swing by the Navy Department building downtown and check there for messages before heading to the White House.

“You do everything you can,” he liked to say, “then you hope for the best.” Since receiving the first top-secret orders for Task Force 34, he had done everything he could, to the verge of exhaustion. Every day brought new problems to solve, mistakes to fix, anxieties to quell. Rehearsals for the
TORCH
landings had been hurried and slipshod. With Axis predators sinking nearly 200 Allied vessels a month, including many along the American coast, all amphibious training had been moved inside the Chesapeake Bay, whose modest tides and gentle waves resembled not at all the ferocious surf typical of the Moroccan coast. During one exercise, only a single boat arrived on the designated beach, even though a lighthouse had provided a beacon on a clear night with a calm sea; the rest of the craft were scattered for miles along the Maryland shore. In another exercise, at Cove Point, ninety miles north of Norfolk, security broke down and the men stormed the beach to be greeted by an enterprising ice cream vendor. In Scotland, the training by troops bound for Algeria was going no better; sometimes it was conducted without the encumbrance of actual ships, because none were available. Troops moved on foot across an imaginary ocean toward an imaginary coast.

Would the eight Vichy French divisions in North Africa fight? No one knew. Allied intelligence estimated that if those troops resisted stoutly, it could take Eisenhower’s forces three months just to begin the advance toward Tunisia. If U-boats torpedoed a transport during the Atlantic passage, how many destroyers should be left behind to pick up survivors? Hewitt was not certain he could spare
any
without jeopardizing the task force, and the prospect of abandoning men in the water gnawed at him. Had word of the expedition leaked? Every day he received reports that someone, somewhere had been talking too much. For the first months after its creation, the Amphibious Force was so secret that it used a New York City post office box as its mailing address. Only a select few now knew Hewitt’s destination, but the existence of a large American fleet designed to seize a hostile shore could hardly be kept secret anymore. A few weeks earlier, Hewitt had received a letter from Walt Disney—written on stationery with the embossed letterhead “Bambi: A Great Love Story”—who offered to design a logo for the Amphibious Force. Ever the gentleman, Hewitt wrote back on October 7 with polite, noncommittal thanks.