Assignment to Hell (14 page)

“‘When I get on shore,’ said an infantry captain from Utah, ‘I’m going to get a handful of dirt and eat it.’”

The story’s clinching sentence was pure Bigart. Instead of waxing poetic about England’s verdant landscape, he snapped, “The green fields looked like propaganda.”
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It was fine for Bigart to poke fun at himself, but his fears were hardly exaggerated. In truth, there were still substantial “gaps” between Nova Scotia and Iceland in air support coverage of seaborne convoys. Two months later, two separate convoys (SC 122 and HX 229) that originated from New York by way of Halifax—the same route Bigart’s group had taken—were attacked by three “rakes” of wolf packs. Twenty-two Allied ships and more than three hundred servicemen were lost.
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After that debacle, Allied planners demanded that the gaps be closed by carrier groups and long-range reconnaissance aircraft. As the war progressed, U-boats became less of a threat. Yet there had been plenty for Bigart to worry about beyond kippers and brussels sprouts.

I
t was still pitch-dark when AP’s Hal Boyle gingerly swung a leg over the side of the troopship and began inching down its boarding net. Boyle was heavily weighted: a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, without which he never went anywhere, strained an already-stuffed musette bag. The beloved portable typewriter he’d entrusted with an Army public relations officer would soon, to Boyle’s horror, sink to the bottom of Fedala Harbor.

Heaving fifty feet below was a landing craft. Boyle, then thirty-one, was operating at a distinct disadvantage. Unlike the young men clambering over the edge, the beefy AP reporter had not been through anything resembling boot camp. He was brand-new to the war beat and not exactly in tip-top physical condition—unless repeated cigar stub removal and twelve-ounce curls could be counted as exercise.

Moreover, besides a bulky backpack, Boyle carried on his shoulders the burden of posterity: He knew from briefings that he would be covering the largest amphibious action in history and the first joint U.S. Navy–U.S. Army operation since the Spanish-American War. Having spent the last
couple of weeks crossing the Atlantic with the guys now knifing down the net, Boyle didn’t want to embarrass himself. It must have amused Boyle, who never shied away from a good time, that his company’s objective was Pont Blondin, a prewar playground that boasted a seaside casino and racetrack. But croupiers and jockeys weren’t waiting for them—heavily armed soldiers were.

It was eerily quiet. The only noise came from nervous officers hissing at them to keep mum. A few minutes before, the first wave of attackers going in just north of Casablanca had surprised defenders and gotten to the beach virtually undetected. Boyle had heard only a few scattered shots. At that point, none of the ships in the U.S. flotilla had opened fire, nor had any of the “enemy” batteries along the four-mile-long beach. American forces, in fact, were under strict orders to fire only when fired upon. Allied planners had hoped that the U.S. could get troops ashore in French Morocco with a minimum of bloodshed, perhaps even a laying down of arms by halfhearted mercenaries.

But as Boyle’s landing craft joined others in motoring toward shore, “a bright searchlight stabbed the skies at Pont Blondin and then swept seaward, catching our assault wave. In a bright glare that dazzled the coxswain, we ducked to the bottom of the boat,” Boyle wrote in an article that took a week to reach the
New York Times
and other U.S. papers. Within seconds, machine gun fire from the beach raked Fedala Harbor. A Navy support ship on Boyle’s port side retaliated, snuffing the searchlight.

“Then came a grinding crash as our landing boat smashed at full speed into a coral reef that has helped to win this shore the name of Iron Coast,” Boyle wrote. “The craft climbed futilely, then fell back into the water.”

Boyle and his shipmates were plunged into armpit-deep water. They tried to struggle onto the reef, but waves kept pummeling them. Their sixty-pound knapsacks made it doubly difficult. Gasping for breath, Boyle grabbed at an outcropping. Another soldier beat him to it; the GI lay there, exhausted, half submerged in water, as Boyle flailed for help. “Twice the surf pulled me loose and twice it returned me,” Boyle wrote. “My strength was ebbing fast when another soldier pulled up the man before me and lent me a wet hand to safety.”

It took Boyle a few minutes before he felt strong enough to stand. He looked around and “saw about me scores of dripping soldiers, their legs weary and wide-braced.” His hands were so torn up by the spike-sharp coral that he couldn’t type for days.

Boyle and a sergeant decided to rid themselves of their bulky life vests. Together they crept across a patch of coral the length of a football field, then waded through waist-high water to the beach. Boyle and his buddy suddenly realized they weren’t alone.

“The way those soaked men, a few moments before so weary that they could barely stand, forgot their fatigue in seeing their objective is a never-to-be-forgotten example of soldierly fortitude,” Boyle told readers. “Forlorn on a hostile coast, with much of their heavy equipment under water, they quickly organized and turned toward their assigned tasks when we had crossed the beach and flung ourselves beneath a covering grove of pepper trees.”
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It didn’t take long for enemy artillery to find the pepper trees. “There isn’t much to tell about being under shellfire,” Boyle wrote his mother two weeks later, “except that 10 minutes under it, with the shells hitting close enough to shower you with dirt, teaches you more about war than you could learn in a lifetime any other way.”
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Boyle spent hours that morning crawling through muddy ditches. Seven artillery shells “hit close enough to have cut me down with splinters had I been standing.” By that afternoon Boyle’s landing party had dug foxholes. “We could lay there in comparative comfort and listen to the shells whistle by overhead,” he wrote. In the evening an enemy fighter plane strafed the beachhead as Boyle was interviewing infantrymen; he and the others dove for cover. After an uneasy night’s sleep, they were strafed twice more before breakfast.
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There was relatively little fighting around Pont Blondin on day two; Boyle was able to borrow a typewriter and dictate a couple of stories to a public relations officer since Boyle’s hands were still scabbed. That night, Boyle and other correspondents hitched a ride to Casablanca and checked into a hotel. The next day they were surprised to learn that an armistice had been signed in their lobby.
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French Morocco’s feckless little war was
over—at least in theory. The fighting farther east in French North Africa, however, would continue for seven more months.

Recalling his pal’s near drowning, Boyle’s AP colleague Don Whitehead wrote that Hal “was no Johnny Weissmuller either in face or form, [and] had barely managed to avoid becoming the first newspaper casualty of the invasion, a distinction which held no attractions.”
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T
HE
N
ORTH
A
FRICAN CAMPAIGN, CODE-NAMED
Operation Torch, held few attractions for anyone. Over time, it became a testament to Allied resolve and what Boyle described as soldierly fortitude. But for much of its existence, the North African incursion was also a testament to ambivalent and absentee leadership, pedestrian planning, and slipshod communications and execution. Given how dysfunctional Torch was from its inception, it’s remarkable how well America’s fighting forces performed in French Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

The U.S. Army came of age in North Africa. The men who skulked across the reef off Pont Blondin and splashed ashore at eight other African beaches on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in November 1942 were, in the main, poorly prepared for combat. Most had not gotten anywhere close to the essential training they needed for amphibious and desert warfare. Yet a half year later those same tenderfoots helped trap more than a quarter million of Hitler’s finest troops, forever puncturing the myth of the Wehrmacht’s invincibility.

Torch became a testing ground not only for grunts in the field, but also for their commanders—Generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Lucian Truscott, Mark Clark, and Omar Bradley, among them—and for their commanders’ commanders, the great Anglo-American alliance led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, and Field Marshal Harold Alexander, as well as President Franklin Roosevelt and his top military advisor, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall.

North Africa is where Walter Cronkite burnished his reputation—but only by getting bum information and inadvertently leaving the field of
battle. It’s where Hal Boyle and Joe Liebling became lifelong friends—where Boyle, the Irish shanachie, established his signature column and where Liebling, the urbane stylist, encountered a corpse that became the genesis of his greatest war essay. It’s where Andy Rooney and Homer Bigart narrowly averted an international incident while meeting the King of England and where Bigart prepared for his first amphibious assault. Finally, it’s where Liebling, Boyle, Ernie Pyle, and a coterie of correspondents sipped black-market scotch on a seaside veranda, cheering on Allied warplanes as they attacked German fighters and bombers.

North Africa was undeniably a pivot point in American history.
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But as eyewitnesses Boyle, Cronkite, and Liebling could attest, it was hell getting there.

A
MERICA’S GROUND WAR AGAINST
A
DOLF
Hitler was launched in the most improbable of places. At the insistence of Churchill and Brooke, the U.S. slugged not at the guts of the Third Reich, but at its extremities. After Germany captured France in the summer of 1940, Hitler cut a loathsome deal with France’s Great War hero, Marshal Philippe Pétain. Pétain and other leaders of the Vichy puppet regime assured the Nazis that they would defend, with French troops, France’s old colonial empire along the Mediterranean. In exchange, Hitler agreed not to “occupy” the South of France, although the Gestapo would still exercise brutal control.

To extend Joe Liebling’s boxing metaphor, America’s opening jab was thrown not at crack
Panzer
troops, but at a peculiar adversary. The French were not just the U.S.’s traditional ally, but also its historic partner in the democratic revolution that upended repressive monarchies in both hemispheres.

It was a bizarre first round in what became the most transcendent fight in history. Stalin, under siege from 225 German divisions gunning toward the oil fields of the Caucasus, wanted what amounted to a main event—a full-bore second front in the European Theater that would compel Hitler to divert troops and resources. But in truth neither North Africa nor any
of the Allies’ subsequent thrusts in the Mediterranean ever rose beyond the level of an undercard—an ancillary bout that had relatively little to do with the fight’s outcome.

Ostensibly to avoid chaos in North Africa, the U.S. ended up making one deal after another with Fascist collaborationists—the very thugs that Roosevelt and Churchill had vowed to bring to justice. Watching the disquieting scene unfold from London, CBS Radio’s Edward R. Murrow fumed: “Are we fighting the Nazis or climbing into bed with them?” After a few days in Algeria, Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle somehow slipped this line past the censors: “We have left in office most of the small-fry officials put there by the Germans before we came…. Our fundamental policy still is one of soft-gloving snakes in our midst.”
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Moreover, the U.S. committed the weight of its prestige to a part of the world where Great Britain had long vied with Germany and France for colonial supremacy. Much of the rationale behind the U.S. invasion was to prevent Germany from concentrating its forces against the British Eighth Army in northeastern Africa. But Churchill had sent His Majesty’s finest to Egypt not to spread democratic freedoms, but to safeguard British dominion over the Suez Canal. Suez may have been a vital link to supplying Allied forces in the Pacific Theater, but it was also “Rule, Britannia’s” lifeline to its still-potent empire in the Middle East, Asia, and the subcontinent.

The initial stage of the North African campaign was, in sum, the kind of surrogate war that most Americans abhorred. Confused and morally ambiguous, it reeked of the old order, of imperial powers butting heads in a remote part of the world. Yet the U.S. had little choice but to go along with Britain. Churchill was correct: the Nazis and their Italian coconspirators had to be forcibly ejected from North Africa so that the Allies could gain control of the Mediterranean sea-lanes, establish airfields, and begin, slowly, inexorably, chipping away at the Reich.