An Army at Dawn (96 page)

It was also a place where many things that flowered later in the war first germinated. Some were soul-stirring, such as the return of France to the confederation of democracies. Some were distressing: the anglophobia of Bradley, Patton, and others; Alexander’s contempt for American martial skills; and various feuds, tiffs, and spats. More profound was a subtle shift in the balance of power within the Anglo-American alliance; the United States was dominant now, by virtue of power and heft, with consequences that would extend not only beyond the war but beyond the century.

It was the discovery of those “gifts for combat and command” that remains most beguiling sixty years later. “There are three things that make a man fight,” Ryder observed. “One is pride in himself, another is pride in his organization, and the third is hate. The 34th has all of them.” A terrible beauty, then, born in Africa. Most Yanks had arrived in Morocco and Algeria convinced that they were fighting someone else’s war; now they were fully vested, with a stake of their own. Drew Middleton noted that after Tunisia “the war has become a grudge fight, a personal matter.”

Many felt a new clarity about the war and about themselves. “There’s nothing over here to fog your vision of right and wrong,” an Iowa boy wrote his parents. A corporal in the 13th Armored Regiment, formerly a haberdasher in New York, told his girlfriend: “In years to come, after it is all a distant memory, I’ll be able to hold my head as high as the next man’s and my eyes level.” And they were incorrigibly optimistic. “We didn’t know how to think about losing,” wrote one soldier, a former shoe salesman. “We didn’t have the temper of mind which encompassed the loss of the war.” A British major who had accompanied the Yanks since their first landings in Morocco concluded that the Americans “are unlike anyone else in the speed with which they put things right, if and when they are ordered, persuaded, or led to do so.”

Africa provided affirmations of duty, of camaraderie, and of survival, even if articulated in the sarcastic idiom of the dogface. “I am not willing to die,” a sergeant wrote his sister. “Dead, I would be of no further use to the government.” Yet sometimes the cynicism sloughed away, revealing what every man was really fighting for: the right to go home. One soldier wrote: “We all feel we’ve got something to fight for and something to live for, and we go along every day with the hope and the prayer on our lips that we can soon be on our journey home.”

Africa was the first step on that long journey. “There was, for the first time in the war, a real lifting of spirits,” Churchill later wrote. Less than a year earlier, the Axis had been advancing inexorably on all fronts; Rommel’s drive into Egypt had filled the Cairo rail stations with refugees while panicky British diplomats burned documents in their gardens. Now only in the U-boat campaign did the Axis retain anything like a sustained offensive, and that was waning: the first Allied convoy to complete passage of the Mediterranean since 1941 left Gibraltar on May 17 and reached Alexandria without loss nine days later.

Hitler had lost the strategic initiative, forever. Even Kesselring sensed an insuperable momentum in the Allied camp. “It was in Tunisia,” he later observed, “that the superiority of your air force first became evident.” A Swiss newspaper reported that in Berlin people were “walking around as though hit in the head.” The blow was more painful in Italy, which had lost its colonies and its self-delusions. As Allied bombing intensified, the Fascists seemed increasingly impotent. A German general in Rome reported in May that “in Europe there is at present only one Italian armored battalion, equipped with totally obsolete French tanks, ready for action in Sicily…. If the enemy has an initial success, the fatalism so prevalent at present will lead to the most disquieting results.” Mussolini was said to be so unnerved that he could eat only milk and rice.

Yet Tunis—like Stalingrad, El Alamein, Midway, and Guadalcanal—lay on the outer rim of the Axis empire. In the winter of 1942–43, the Germans had transferred seventeen divisions from western Europe to the Eastern Front, an act suggesting that the campaign in North Africa had done little to influence the titanic struggle waged by the Russians (although the Mediterranean action proved a serious drain on the German air force). Hitler would assert in early July that the battle in Tunisia had “succeeded in postponing the invasion of Europe by six months,” while also keeping Italy in the Axis camp and forestalling a sudden Allied thrust over the Alps through the Brenner Pass.

As the historian Michael Howard has noted, the Führer overestimated Allied capabilities: not even Patton dreamed of driving the length of Italy to abruptly appear in Munich. But the campaign
had
bought the Axis some time by keeping the Mediterranean closed an extra half year; by straining Allied shipping and constraining strategic planning; by sucking Allied troops and supplies into the Mediterranean and away from any cross-Channel expedition; and, most ominously, by giving Kesselring months to begin reinforcing the Reich’s southern flank.

The protracted campaign in Tunisia certainly delayed other European operations, beginning with
HUSKY
. There was nothing for it but to soldier on. “War is a burden to be carried on a steep and bloody road,” Marshall observed, “and only strong nerves and determined spirits can endure to the end.”

And what if Tunis had fallen in that first heady rush in November? The invasion of Sicily and then the Italian mainland would likely have been accelerated by months, perhaps allowing the capture of Rome in 1943. But Allied shipping and airpower limitations make it hard to conclude that D-day at Normandy could have been mounted much earlier than June 6, 1944—or rather, mounted successfully.

It remains far from clear that such an acceleration, even if possible, would have been prudent. If
TORCH
provided one benefit above others, it was to save Washington and London from a disastrously premature landing in northern Europe. Given the dozens of Wehrmacht divisions waiting behind the Atlantic Wall, France would have been a poor place to be lousy in.
TORCH
had been a great risk—“the purest gamble America and Britain undertook during the war,” the official U.S. Army Air Forces history concluded—but it deferred the even greater gamble of a cross-Channel invasion until the odds improved.

For now, the victors celebrated their victory. For the Anglo-Americans, Churchill wrote Eisenhower, the triumph was “an augury full of hope for the future of the world. Long may they march together, striking down the tyrants and oppressors of mankind.”

Many shared his sentiment. “Together we had all faced death on a number of occasions and this experience had created between us a bond which could never be taken away,” a British captain in the 78th Division wrote. “We had gone to the brink and come back.”

Among those who had not come back was a young American stretcher bearer, Caleb Milne, who was killed by a mortar round on May 11 while giving first aid to a wounded soldier. In a final, prescient letter to his mother, Milne described the Tunisian campaign as

a vivid, wonderful world so full of winter and spring, warm rain and cold snow, adventures and contentments, good things and bad. How often you will have me near you when wood smoke drifts across the wind, or the first tulips arrive, or the sky darkens in a summer storm…. Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you
this minute,
not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must not be lonely.

Kilroy had been here, and now he prepared to move on. Beyond Tunis harbor, just over the horizon, another continent waited.

NOTES

To provide an individual citation for every fact in this book would result in an extraordinarily cumbersome and pedantic ream of notes. I have instead grouped the sources relevant to particular passages of the text; the intent is to provide explicit attribution, as well as a guide for readers seeking additional source material. The bibliography also gives further information regarding the sources cited.

The following abbreviations appear in the endnotes and bibliography.

AAF
Army Air Forces

AAFinWWII
W.F. Craven and J.L. Cate, eds.,
The Army Air Forces in World War II,
vol. II

AAR
after action report

AD
armored division

AFHQ micro
Allied Forces Headquarters microfilm, NARA RG 331

AFHRA
Air Force Historical Research Agency

ag
adjutant general

AR
armored regiment

ASEQ
Army Service Experiences Questionnaire, MHI

Bde
brigade

Bn
battalion

CARL
Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

CBH
Chester B. Hansen diary, MHI

CCS
Combined Chiefs of Staff

CEOH
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Office of History

Chandler
Alfred Chandler, ed.,
The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years,
vol. II

CINCLANT
Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet

CMH
U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.

Co
company

Col U OHRO
Columbia University Oral History Research Office

corr
correspondence

CSI
Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

CT
combat team

DDE Lib
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library

Destruction
I.S.O. Playfair and C.J.C. Molony,
The Mediterranean and the Middle East,
vol. IV

diss
dissertation

Div
division

DSC
Distinguished Service Cross

E
entry

ETO
European Theater of Operations

FA
field artillery

FCP
Forrest C. Pogue, background material for
The Supreme Commander

FDR Lib
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

FMS
Foreign Military Studies, MHI

FRUS
Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943

GCM Lib
George C. Marshall Library, Lexington, Va.

GSP
George S. Patton, Jr., Papers

Hansen
draft of Omar Bradley’s
A Soldier’s Story,
C. B. Hansen, MHI

HKH
Henry Kent Hewitt Papers

ID
infantry division

inf
infantry

Intel
intelligence

Iowa GSM
Iowa Gold Star Museum, Fort Dodge, Iowa

IWM
Imperial War Museum, London

JAG
judge advocate general

JCS
Joint Chiefs of Staff

lib
library

LHC
Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London

LKT Jr.
Lucian K. Truscott, Jr.

LOC MS Div
Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Med
Mediterranean

MCC
Mina Curtiss Collection

MHI
U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.

MWC
Mark Wayne Clark

micro
microfilm

MP
military police

MRC FDM
McCormick Research Center, First Division Museum, Cantigny, Ill.

msg
message

mss
manuscript

MTOUSA
Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army