An Army at Dawn (95 page)

The parade straggled to a merciful finish with yet another refrain of “Glory of the Trumpets” and Sherman tanks clanking behind the British infantry. As the last gun tubes and limbers passed the reviewing stands, hoarse spectators shinnied down from the trees and emptied the balconies. Hundreds of Italian prisoners-of-war who had been paroled to watch the parade—cheering each new formation with manic enthusiasm—complained bitterly as guards herded them back behind barbed wire. Eisenhower and his lieutenants climbed into their cars for the short trip to the resident-general’s mansion, where Juin would host a luncheon for seventy people sitting at one long table; afterward, they would meet the new bey, uncle of the ousted collaborator, in a ceremony described by Harry Butcher as “complete with gold throne, eunuchs, and native Tunisian troops.” Patton and Bradley, still miffed at their exclusion from the main reviewing stand, headed back to Algeria to resume training for Sicily. The parade, Patton grumbled, had been “a goddamned waste of time.”

Even after two and a half hours in the molten sun Eisenhower showed no sign of wilting. A reporter described him as “lean, bronzed, and loose-limbed. He was happy as a schoolboy…taking the salutes as the units passed. When the parade drew to an end he smoked, laughed, and joked with the various leaders.”

In truth, he had been peevish and distracted, notwithstanding the gleeful announcement from his West Point classmates that they were renaming him Ikus Africanus. “All the shouting about the Tunisian campaign leaves me utterly cold,” he confided to Marshall. The concept of a victory parade appalled him, and he had tried without success to convert the event into a sober commemoration of the dead. He still slept badly. If he seemed jolly, jolliness was among the many masks the commander-in-chief had learned to wear.

No soldier in Africa had changed more—grown more—than Eisenhower. He continued to pose as a small-town Kansan, insisting that he was “too simple-minded to be an intriguer or [to] attempt to be clever,” and he retained the winning traits of authenticity, vigor, and integrity. He had displayed admirable grace and character under crushing strain. But he was hardly artless. Naïveté provided a convenient screen for a man who was complex, shrewd, and sometimes Machiavellian. The Darlan affair had taught him the need to obscure his own agency in certain events even as he shouldered responsibility for them. The failings of Fredendall and other deficient commanders had taught him to be tougher, even ruthless, with subordinates. And he had learned the hardest lesson of all: that for an army to win at war, young men must die.

“One of the fascinations of the war was to see how Americans developed their great men so quickly,” a British general later observed. None more than Eisenhower. In the fall of 1942, the general continued, he had been “a well-trained and loyal subordinate” to his more experienced British colleagues. Now he was a commander. His son, John, later wrote: “Before he left for Europe in 1942, I knew him as an aggressive, intelligent personality.” North Africa transformed him “from a mere person to a personage…full of authority, and truly in command.”

Even as victory was claimed and commemorated, a few loose ends remained to tie up.

The tiny Mediterranean island of La Galite was liberated by a battle flotilla sailing from Bône; a British naval officer reported that a shipboard ceremony with the islanders was repeatedly interrupted “by the need to salvage firstly the delegates’ hats, which they kept throwing into the air and the wind blew into the sea, and secondly the mayor, who fell overboard.” Allied salvage crews combed Tunisia for scrap and abandoned Axis matériel, but reported finding “not a great deal of value. Most of the weapons have been effectively rendered useless.” Mine-clearing occupied thousands of engineers, and mines would continue killing civilians and soldiers, including Colonel Richard R. Arnold, Kay Summersby’s fiancé. Arnold died in an explosion at Sedjenane on June 6. Sixty years later, Tunisian authorities were still digging up an average of fifty unexploded bombs, shells, and mines every month.

The French high command wasted no time embarking on what the OSS secretly described as “a ruthless campaign against Moslems and, to a lesser extent, Italians” in Tunisia. The six-month Axis occupation had won widespread Arab allegiance with effective propaganda, anti-Semitic edicts, and economic measures, including some land redistribution and a doubling of wages, paid with stolen Bank of France notes. In retribution for suspected Arab perfidy during the occupation, “a general reign of terror was instituted, in which arbitrary arrests and torture of Moslems became frequent occurrences,” the OSS disclosed. Detention camps on the island of Djerba allegedly held 3,000 Arabs, with beatings, killings, and mass executions reported; gendarmes and other rogue officials were “running amuck in the interior and…beating and imprisoning personal enemies.” Among other reparations, French officials demanded 25 million francs from Arabs in Sidi bou Zid to compensate French farmers whose land had been plundered. Such actions were contrary to united nations ideals, the OSS observed, and served “to discredit not only the French authorities but U.S. and British prestige as well.”

Preoccupied with the imminent invasion of Sicily, Eisenhower and his lieutenants paid little attention, and most Allied troops could not have cared less. Recuperation before the next campaign absorbed every man, and the days were spent sleeping, fishing with hand grenades in Lake Bizerte, and, soon, training. Among some, a powerful nostalgia took root. Even discerning men like Spaatz and Tedder soon romanticized northwest Africa as war at its best: a facile, unencumbered campaign of human proportions fought by a doughty band of brothers.

Gimlet-eyed GIs and Tommies had no such illusions. Irony and cynicism infested the ranks. “I am Jesus’ little lamb,” soldiers told one another, “yes, by Jesus Christ I am.” Ernie Pyle had already seen enough misery to ask darkly, “When you figure how many boys are going to get killed, what’s the use anyway?” However realistic they were about war, the troops nurtured other fantasies, including the conviction that many units had done their bit and would now go home. “Dame Rumor with her thousand tongues is running wild through all the camps in Africa,” one soldier warned. The arrival of many new troops in Tunisia fed the belief that veterans would at least get home leave. Among the newcomers was the 3rd Infantry Division, now commanded by Lucian Truscott; the division’s ranks included a baby-faced farm boy from Texas with a fifth-grade education, an addiction to dice, and an affection for the Army because “they let you sleep until 5:30.” Private First Class Audie L. Murphy, not yet nineteen and weighing in at 110 pounds, would become the most decorated American combat soldier in history, but not even the appearance of his like would free most troops from compulsory service for the duration.

Charles Ryder was so alarmed at his men’s self-delusion that he assembled all officers and sergeants on a hill near Mateur in mid-May, and told them:

There are many rumors out there that the 34th Division [troops have] fought their battles, done their time, and are going back to the States. But, gentlemen, I am here to tell you today that the 34th Division will not go back until the war is over…. As this war goes on it will get progressively worse and there will be progressively harder objectives to take, and more casualties as the German lines tighten. We shall fight in Europe, and we shall find that in comparison, the Tunisian campaign was but a maneuver with live ammunition.

It was the truth, and the truth hurt enough for one soldier to quip, “Ol’ General Ryder’s so homely that probably his wife doesn’t care whether he gets back or not.”

Most of their leaders, too, would go on to the Italian campaigns, or northern France, or both. They included Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Clark, Alexander, and Montgomery; they would face, again, Kesselring and Rommel. For some, however, the end in Africa effectively ended their hour on the stage. Among them was Anderson, who graciously wrote Eisenhower on May 12: “It will ever remain one of the proudest memories of my life, whatever the future may hold in store, that I have been so intimately connected with the U.S. Army.” The future held little for Anderson. Vilified beyond redemption by Montgomery and others, he returned to a knighthood in England but was stripped of his army command before Normandy. He ended his career as a postwar governor of Gibraltar.

Among those who did go home was Robert Moore, hardly recognizable as the erstwhile Boy Captain since his wounding at Fondouk. Moore’s orders assigned him to training duty in Georgia. Of the men in Company F, whom he had led out of Villisca two years earlier, “there sure are not many of us left,” he wrote his family on May 12. “Not more than seven or eight of the original outfit. It will be a happy day when I see you all, won’t it?”

July 15, 1943, was happy indeed. Moore stepped from the Burlington No. 6 in Villisca at 9:30
A.M.
, clutching the camel-hide briefcase his men had given him as a farewell gift. Into his arms leaped his seven-year-old daughter, Nancy; a newspaper photographer captured the moment in a picture that would win the Pulitzer Prize. Fire bells rang to announce the homecoming and American flags lined Third Avenue in front of the family drugstore. Bob Moore was to serve honorably for the rest of the war and beyond, remaining in the Iowa National Guard until retiring as a brigadier general in 1964, a year before the drugstore closed. When he died in 1991, the mourners at his funeral sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and told stories about how young Bob had once led his battalion to safety through German lines during the battle of Kasserine Pass. The message board outside the Presbyterian church read simply: “Old soldiers never die.”

Young ones do, and in North Africa they had died by the thousands. Allied casualties in
TORCH
and the subsequent Tunisian campaign exceeded 70,000; if laid head to toe they would have stretched eighty miles, from the Algerian border to Tunis. The toll included 38,000 British—two-thirds in First Army and one-third in Eighth Army—of whom more than 6,200 were killed in action and 10,600 were missing or captured. French casualties exceeded 19,400, half of whom were dead or missing. When French Algerian units returned to their hometowns beginning in mid-May, the troops lined the main streets for a roll call. Each man answered until the name of a dead comrade was called. Then, reporter John D’Arcy-Dawson wrote, a deep voice replied,
“Mort!”
The drums rolled, while the spectators removed their hats, and the women bowed and crossed themselves.

To more than a thousand American casualties in
TORCH
were added 18,221 more from mid-November to mid-May. These included 2,715 killed in action, nearly 9,000 wounded, and more than 6,500 missing. As always, infantrymen took the brunt. (Although infantry units accounted for 14 percent of the U.S. Army’s overseas strength in the war, they suffered 70 percent of the casualties.) The 34th Division alone sustained more than 4,000 dead, wounded, and missing—one-quarter of Ryder’s force—and Allen’s 1st Division suffered nearly as many.

Some units were simply shattered. The 1st Battalion of the 6th Armored Infantry, which arrived for
TORCH
with 734 men, incurred 455 casualties in the next six months, or 62 percent. The battalion’s A Company had four commanders in that half year, an indication of how the campaign devoured junior officers. Leadership losses also decimated British ranks: of six battalion commanders involved in the first dash to Tunis in November, the last still in command was killed by one of the final shells fired in May. Similarly, the 8th Argylls had suffered forty-nine officer casualties since landing at Bougie, 150 percent of the battalion’s officer allotment.

Axis casualties remain uncertain. Confusion on both sides of the line in the campaign’s final month resulted in contradictory tallies of prisoners captured, graves counted, and wounded soldiers treated. The German dead in Tunisia have been estimated at more than 8,500, with 3,700 Italians also killed. Combat wounded typically outnumber the dead by a factor of three or four, so an additional 40,000 to 50,000 Axis wounded can be surmised.

Ambiguity also shrouded the number of German and Italian prisoners of war. Allied records in late May listed 238,243 unwounded prisoners in custody, including nearly 102,000 Germans. Arnim thought the total prisoner count closer to 300,000—he, of course, among them—while Rommel’s former chief of staff put the German figure alone at roughly 166,000. A quarter million appears to be a reasonable estimate of those captured. Goebbels privately called the fall of North Africa a “second Stalingrad,” telling his diary, “Our losses there are enormous.” True enough, although half as many German divisions were destroyed as at Stalingrad, and prison camps in Tunisia bulged with rear-echelon dregs.

Yet for one side the campaign had ended in humiliation and disaster; for the other, in triumph and hosannahs. Whatever the precise tally of Axis casualties, the number of enemy armies obliterated was certain—two—and so was the number of enemy soldiers still fighting in North Africa: zero.

At a price of 70,000 casualties “one continent had been redeemed,” in Churchill’s phrase. But more than territory could be claimed. The gains were most profound for the Americans, in their first campaign against the Wehrmacht. Four U.S. divisions now had combat experience in five variants of Euro-Mediterranean warfare: expeditionary, amphibious, mountain, desert, and urban. Troops had learned the importance of terrain, of combined arms, of aggressive patrolling, of stealth, of massed armor. They now knew what it was like to be bombed, shelled, and machine-gunned, and to fight on. They provided Eisenhower with a blooded hundred thousand, “high-grade stock from which we must breed with the utmost rapidity,” as one general urged.

Still, they had far to go. Truscott worried at “too much satisfaction with a mediocre performance,” and a tendency by some commanders to gloss over deficiencies. Bradley believed the campaign “showed American soldiers unwilling to close with the enemy—that was his greatest worry,” reported Truscott, who added, “Why not at least be honest with ourselves?” Some lessons—such as the critical choreography between tankers and riflemen—were soon forgotten and would have to be relearned for the usual fee in blood. North Africa, the historian Eric Larrabee once noted, provided “a place to be lousy in, somewhere to let the gift for combat and command be discovered.”