An Army at Dawn (10 page)

Shortly before seven
A.M.
, the
Joseph T. Dickman
slipped her lines and moved into the stream, joined by the
Thomas Jefferson,
the
Leonard Wood,
and a stately procession of other transports. Destroyers darted ahead into the seaward mists—the lead ship in the position known as Dead Man’s Corner—as the transports threaded the antisubmarine nets protecting Hampton Roads. With radio silence imposed, course adjustments swept across the fleet in an ecstasy of signal lamps and semaphore flags. Patrol planes and two silver blimps scouted the swept channel that angled eastward between Cape Henry and Cape Charles. Building to fourteen knots, the transports steamed out the drowned mouth of the James River, across Thimble Shoals and Tail of the Horseshoe. Soldiers cinched their life jackets and lined the weather-deck rails, staring in silence at Old Point Comfort.

The dawn was bright and blowing. Angels perched unseen on the shrouds and crosstrees. Young men, fated to survive and become old men dying abed half a century hence, would forever remember this hour, when an army at dawn made for the open sea in a cause none could yet comprehend. Ashore, as the great fleet glided past, dreams of them stepped, like men alive, into the rooms where their loved ones lay sleeping.

Rendezvous at Cherchel

E
VEN
before the fleet weighed anchor in Virginia, a small invasion vanguard had arrived off the African coast. This party comprised fewer than a dozen men; their mission—both courageous and daft—would become one of the most celebrated clandestine operations of the war.

It began with a single light. Major General Mark W. Clark stood on the bridge of the submarine H.M.S.
Seraph
at ten
P.M.
on October 21, peering through his binoculars at a bright beacon on the Algerian coast. Braced to absorb the submarine’s roll, he raked the lenses across the white line of surf two miles away. After several days of creeping submerged across the Mediterranean from Gibraltar at four knots, Clark was desperate to get ashore. Though
Seraph
surfaced every night to recharge her batteries, the fetid air inside grew so stale each day that a struck match would not light. Clark and the four other American officers had passed the time playing countless rubbers of bridge or, after lessons from the British commandos aboard, hands of cribbage. Small bruises covered Clark’s head; at six foot three inches tall, he found it impossible to dodge the sub’s innumerable pipes and knobs.

“There’s the sugar-loaf hill to the left. I can see its outline against the sky,” Clark told
Seraph
’s commander, Lieutenant Norman L. A. Jewell. A pale glow to the east marked the fishing port of Cherchel, said to have been founded by Selene, daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Algiers lay another sixty miles up the coast. Clark focused again on the light burning in the seaward gable of an isolated farmhouse. “There’s a beach below the house. A black splotch behind the beach—that’s the grove of trees,” Clark said. “Yessir, this is the place we’re looking for.”

Jewell ordered the diesel engines started.
Seraph
edged forward to within 400 yards of the breakers and hove to. A rising moon silvered the deck and dark sea. The commandos deftly assembled the folbots—two-man kayaks made with hickory frames and canvas skins. Clark and the other Americans rechecked their inventory, including money belts stuffed with greenbacks and $1,000 in Canadian gold pieces, which had been obtained with difficulty from the Bank of England vault in central London on Sunday afternoon. Every man wore his military uniform; six German saboteurs, captured in civilian clothes after being put ashore by U-boat in New York and Florida, had died in the District of Columbia electric chair two months earlier. No one on this mission wanted to be executed as a spy.

The first three pairs of men successfully grabbed the folbot rails and eased themselves into the waist holes. But as Clark was about to step from the submarine, the heavy lop flipped his boat and the commando already in it, Captain Godfrey B. Courtney. “I’ve got to get off!” Clark shouted. “I’ve got to go
now
.” Another folbot was recalled and one of the Americans surrendered his seat to Clark. The submarine crew righted the capsized craft and fished Courtney from the sea. Ready at last, the men feathered away from
Seraph
with their double-scoop paddles, then turned in a V formation toward the beckoning light above the beach.

Mark Clark—Wayne, to his friends—was an odd choice to lead a clandestine mission behind enemy lines. As Eisenhower’s deputy and chief planner, he knew more about Operation
TORCH
than any man alive. He also was among the few Americans privy to Ultra, the intelligence gathered through British decipherment of coded German radio messages—a secret so profound it was jokingly known as BBR, “burn before reading.” Should Vichy forces capture Clark and surrender him to the Gestapo, the consequences would be incalculable, for both
TORCH
and the Allied cause.

That Eisenhower had entrusted this mission to Clark despite the hazards was a sign of both his naïveté as the new Allied commander-in-chief and his faith in Clark, who had become his indispensable alter ego. Clark’s parents were an Army officer and the daughter of an immigrant Romanian Jew; as a West Point cadet, he had had himself baptized an Episcopalian, the creed considered most expedient for aspiring generals. At the academy he was known as Contraband for his guile in smuggling forbidden sweets into the barracks. More important, he fashioned a friendship with the company sergeant, an older cadet named Ike Eisenhower. Seriously wounded by shrapnel in 1918, Clark as a young captain between the world wars had been detailed to a Chautauqua tour, spreading the gospel of Army life with an ensemble of ventriloquists, road-company Macbeths, and Swiss bell ringers.

More recently, while serving as a War Department staff officer, he had been credited with designing the Army’s assembly-line techniques for mass-producing divisions. In June 1941, his superior officer described him as “a rare combination of a most attractive personality with a stout heart and fine tact and intelligence.” George Marshall had asked him, after Pearl Harbor, for a list of ten able brigadier generals from among whom to select a new war plans chief. “I’ll give you one name and nine dittos,” Clark replied. “Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Years later Eisenhower would tell Clark, “You are more responsible than anybody in this country for giving me my opportunity.”

The debt was repaid in August 1942, when Eisenhower made Clark his chief planner in London and the deputy
TORCH
commander. Soon the two Americans were favorites of Churchill, frequently summoned to No. 10 Downing Street or the prime minister’s country home at Chequers for midnight skull sessions. Clark vividly described Churchill, dressed in his baggy smock and carpet slippers, expounding on strategy while drinking brandy or devouring a late supper:

When the soup was put before him, he tackled it vigorously, his mouth about two inches from the liquid and his shoulders hunched over. He ate with a purring and slurping and the spoon went from mouth to plate so rapidly you could hardly see it until he was scraping the bottom of the bowl and bawling lustily, “More soup!” Turning to his guests, he’d say, “Fine soup, ain’t it?”

Like Eisenhower, Clark had vaulted over hundreds of more senior officers in the past two years, during his ascent from major to major general. Meticulous and shrewd, he was also given to a relentless self-promotion that vexed his friends and outraged his rivals. Among the latter was Patton, who confided to his diary in late September: “He seems to me more preoccupied with bettering his own future than in winning the war.” Another general called Clark the “evil genius” of the Allied force, but that epithet both diminished and caricatured his role. In truth, he was a gifted organizer—his daily memos to Eisenhower are tiny masterpieces of precision and efficiency—bedeviled by insecurities. “The more stars you have, the higher you climb the flagpole, the more of your ass is exposed,” he once asserted. “People are always watching for opportunities to misconstrue your actions.”

The voyage to Cherchel had been hastily organized at the secret request of General Charles Emmanuel Mast, a senior Vichy commander in Algiers. Mast had sent word that he wanted to confer with a high-ranking American about how the Allies might “gain entry practically without firing a shot.” Clark insisted on leading the mission, “happy as a boy with a new knife” at both the prospective adventure and the chance to consummate the greatest American diplomatic coup of the war.

In addition to collecting intelligence through Ultra, the Allies had managed—by seduction and burglary—to purloin various Italian, Vichy French, and Spanish diplomatic codes. Washington also had an espionage network in North Africa: a dozen American vice consuls, known as the Twelve Apostles, who technically served as “food control officers” under a trade agreement still in effect between Vichy and Washington. But the Apostles were hardly professional spies. One had been a Coca-Cola salesman in Mississippi, and another was described as “an ornament of Harry’s Bar in Paris.” A third later confessed, “I didn’t even know how to pry open a desk drawer.” The Apostle Kenneth Pendar, a former Harvard archaeologist, acknowledged, “We flew over…to drop like so many Alices into the African Wonderland.” A dismissive German agent reported to Berlin: “All their thoughts are centered on their social, sexual, and culinary interests.” Although the Apostles in fact collected useful information about ports, beaches, and coastal defenses, they could not answer the most fundamental question: Would the French fight? Clark intended to find out.

Only a howling dog and the murmuring surf broke the stillness as Clark and Captain Courtney waited 200 yards offshore. It was now shortly after midnight on October 22. Moonlight and that naked bulb dangling in the dormer revealed that the farmhouse on the bluff had a red tile mansard roof and stucco walls draped with vines. From the beach came the all-clear signal: the dash-dot-dash of a Morse “k.” Leaning into their paddles, the two men skimmed neatly across the breakers and joined the others, who were already dragging their boats across the sand.

From an olive grove at the edge of the bluff stepped a tall, stooped man wearing a turtleneck sweater, sneakers, and a baseball cap. Robert Murphy was the top American diplomat in Algiers, as well as the Apostles’ spymaster. “Welcome to North Africa,” he said, with the insouciance of an experienced host greeting dinner guests. Clark abandoned the grand speech he had prepared in French and replied simply, “I’m damned glad we made it.” The men shouldered the folbots and followed Murphy up the hill and through a large green gate. Entering a courtyard lined with palm trees, they passed the villa’s owner, a French patriot named Henri Teissier, who stood watching nervously from the shadows. Eyeing Clark with his carbine, another Frenchman muttered, “A general with a rifle! What sort of army is this?” After hiding the boats in a kitchen storeroom, they settled into a small, untidy room in the farmhouse, toasting their good fortune with glasses of whiskey before stretching out for a nap.

Murphy was too excited to sleep. This rendezvous was his doing, and he believed that if it succeeded he could deliver North Africa into the Allied camp without bloodshed. Now forty-seven, with pale Irish skin and “a gaiety that brought out gaiety in others,” he had grown up in Milwaukee. A foot crushed in an elevator accident had kept him out of the military in World War I; instead, he studied law before joining the diplomatic corps. Fluent in German and French, genial and cultured, he spent a decade in Paris; when the Germans marched in, he followed the rump government to Vichy on orders from Washington. He had helped arrange the secret shipment of nearly 2,000 tons of gold from the Bank of France to Dakar on an American cruiser, and Roosevelt, who always appreciated a charming operator, appointed Murphy his personal representative to French Africa with the admonition “Don’t bother going through State Department channels.” For months Murphy had shuttled between Washington and London, occasionally disguised as a lieutenant colonel because, as General Marshall noted, “nobody ever pays any attention to a lieutenant colonel.” On frequent trips to North Africa, he smuggled radio transmitters in his diplomatic pouches.

By nature drawn to the conservative status quo, Murphy was distrusted by the Free French of Charles de Gaulle, who dismissed him as “inclined to believe that France consisted of the people he dined with in town.” The British diplomat Harold Macmillan concluded that Murphy “has an incurable habit of seeing every kind of person and agreeing with them all in turn.” Bob Murphy shrugged off such derision with an impish smile, secure in the conviction that he was doing Roosevelt’s bidding.

At six
A.M.
, General Mast arrived by car from Algiers with five staff officers. Murphy roused Clark and the others for introductions, followed by a breakfast of coffee and sardines in the living room. Short, burly, and fluent in English, Mast had been captured by the Germans in 1940 and repatriated after months in Saxony’s notorious Königstein prison. His post as deputy commander of the Vichy army’s XIX Corps notwithstanding, he had the heart of an insurrectionist. If the Americans were to invade North Africa, Mast told Clark, they should consider doing it in the spring, when rebel officers would be fully ready to help. Clark had strict orders not to disclose that
TORCH
was actually under way; he replied vaguely that it was “best to do something soon. We have the army and the means.”

For more than four hours, the two generals exchanged mendacities. Mast urged the Americans to align themselves with his patron, Henri Giraud, a senior general whose bold recent escape from Königstein had galvanized French resistance. If you bring Giraud to Algiers from his hiding place in southern France, Mast promised, all North Africa will “flame into revolt” and rally around him as a symbol of French resurgence. With sufficient weapons—Mast nearly wept, describing the bedraggled Vichy troops—North Africa could field an army of 300,000 in common cause with the Allies, all under Giraud’s inspiring generalship. He also urged a simultaneous invasion of southern France to prevent the Germans from seizing the fragment of the country controlled by Vichy.