Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (16 page)

The Allies did make one effort to obtain French cooperation. On the night of October 23, the same day the American invasion convoy left Norfolk, Eisenhower’s deputy commander, Mark Clark, arrived by prearrangement off the African coast near Algiers as a passenger on a British submarine. After some clandestine blinking of lights with a contact onshore, Clark climbed gingerly into a canvas kayak called a folbot and paddled to the beach with a handful of British commandos to meet a French major general named Charles Mast, who had indicated his readiness to use his influence to encourage French cooperation with an Allied invasion. It was a risky, perhaps even foolhardy undertaking since Clark was privy not only to all
the plans for Torch but also to what was called the Ultra secret: that the Allies had broken the German signal codes. Were Clark to be captured and tortured, all that would be in jeopardy. Moreover, the mission was of questionable value since Clark was not authorized to tell Mast anything specific about the pending invasion, including the date, which made it impossible for Mast to arrange for any meaningful cooperation.

The episode meeting was dramatic enough. At one point, news that the police were en route forced Clark and the others to hide in the cellar while policemen searched the house where they were meeting. Later, Clark and the commandos raced down to the beach, where Clark removed his trousers in order to swim out to a swamped folbot. He came back ashore unsuccessful and spent the rest of the night trouserless, hiding among the trees.
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In the end, Clark made it safely back to the waiting sub, though his clandestine mission resolved nothing, and when the Allied convoys approached the target beaches on the night of November 7, no one knew how the French would react. The Americans agreed beforehand that if they received hostile fire, they were to report, “Batter up!” and the order to return fire would be “Play ball!”
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In hindsight, it might have been worth risking the secrecy of the operation to bring the French more fully into Allied confidence, for instead of being greeted as friends, the Americans met fierce resistance. Some of this was because the French navy, frustrated by the fact that it had not had the opportunity to fire a shot during the 1940 campaign against the Germans, was eager to defend not only French territory but honor. In addition, when the shellfire erupted out of the predawn darkness on November 8, it was only natural for the French to respond in kind. At a few minutes past 6:00 a.m., Hewitt ordered, “Play ball!”
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Though there were no Germans in either Morocco or Algeria, the landings there constituted the first Anglo-American counterattack against Hitler’s empire. Given that, it was absolutely essential that the Allies succeed. Failing
in this first effort would badly damage Allied morale and confidence and send the planners back to the drawing board. Russia would feel abandoned, and the peoples of the occupied nations would lose whatever hope they had. It would delay indefinitely any invasion of Europe. Finally, the landings would test, really for the first time, the ability of the Allies to conduct a large-scale multinational amphibious operation against a defended shore. As Hewitt put it, “The
TORCH
Operation served as a severe material test.” Much, then, was riding on what happened in the early morning hours of November 8, 1942.
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THE ALLIED LANDINGS OCCURRED
on a front that was seven hundred miles wide—from the Moroccan city of Safi, a hundred miles south of Casablanca, to Algiers, on Africa’s northern coast. At each site, the Allies landed on several different beaches with code names such as Red One and Blue Two. Because of the importance of securing undamaged port facilities before they could be sabotaged, the Allies also tried the unusual gambit of sending specially selected warships filled with British and American commandos charging directly into the harbors of several of the port cities.

At Oran, that assignment went to two British corvettes,
Hartland
and
Walney
, both of them former U.S. Coast Guard cutters. The planners hoped to achieve surprise, but when the ships entered the harbor, crewmen on board could hear sirens wailing ashore. Then the shore lights went out, the searchlights came on, and the batteries opened fire. The two corvettes pressed on and even managed to land a small shore party in some canoes. Soon enough, however, both ships were burning wrecks. Of the 393 commandos onboard, 189 were killed outright and another 157 wounded—a casualty rate of 88 percent.
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The results were not quite as horrific at Algiers, though only one of the two destroyers assigned to the mission managed to make it into the harbor. The initial idea here had been to wait until three hours after the landings to send in the two destroyers, in the hope that by then some kind of accommodation might have been worked out with the French. But the landings were late, and the British destroyers
Broke
and
Malcolm
encountered the same kind of heavy battery fire as the corvettes had at Oran. The
Malcolm
was hit several times and set afire, so it had to withdraw. The
Broke
got through on her third try, and even landed her embarked American commandos under Lieutenant Colonel Edwin T. Swenson. Swenson led his men inland, secured the facilities, and set up a defensive perimeter, while the
Broke
remained alongside the pier to provide support. Soon, however, the
Broke
came under such heavy and accurate fire from the shore batteries that her captain sounded the recall. By then, the shore party was also under heavy fire, and Swenson decided his men could not make it back to the ship. He opted to stay. The crippled
Broke
was towed out to sea and later sank. Swenson and his command held off a force of French colonial infantry from Senegal backed by Renault tanks for several hours before surrendering at 12:30.
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British and American forces coming ashore elsewhere met with widely divergent reactions. At Algiers, Allied commandos encountered furious resistance as they sought to secure French coastal guns, but at a landing beach twelve miles to the west, the Americans were greeted with cries of “Vive les américains!” In the suburbs of Algiers, there was house-to-house fighting before French and American officers negotiated a cease-fire. A final armistice was delayed by French concern that if they openly welcomed the Americans and the incursion proved to be only a raid, the Germans would return afterward and exact fearful revenge. Once it was clear that the Allies had come to stay, it became possible to work out a series of cease-fires that led eventually to an armistice that included the release of Swenson and his men.
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It was different in Morocco, where American readiness to conduct an amphibious landing faced a much sterner test. This was especially true at Fedala (now Mohammedia), five miles north of Casablanca, the site of the largest American assault. The British had wanted to bypass Morocco altogether, but Marshall and King, fearful of being cut off at Gibraltar, saw the control of Morocco as essential and convinced Roosevelt to insist upon landings there. Now the Americans would pay the price for that insistence. Almost from the start, the landings in Morocco, and especially at Fedala, revealed just how much work the Allies still needed to do before they could even consider a cross-Channel invasion.

The American transports dropped anchor off Fedala in the early morning hours of November 8. Within minutes they began hoisting out the Higgins boats, and soon the soldiers were climbing down into them on nets made of chains. It was dark, the ships were blacked out, and the sea was rough. The chains were slippery, and men reached out gingerly in the dark for the footholds. More than a few ended up in the water, and some were injured when the Higgins boats bobbing alongside collided with the hull of the transports. Even after the landing craft successfully cast off from their mother ships, many had to go around from ship to ship to find the particular units they had been designated to transport. As a result, the first wave was an hour and fifteen minutes late in heading for the beaches.
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Once the landing craft were finally on their way, the coxswains often took them to the wrong beaches, in part because it was still full dark, and in part because they did not have adequate maps. The only coastal reconnaissance the Allies had conducted was to peer at the target beaches through submarine periscopes, and the vague maps that resulted failed to give the coxswains a clear understanding of the terrain features. The results would have been comic had they not been so disastrous. For example, two landing boats from the transport
William P. Biddle
got so disoriented they not only missed their assigned beach but motored into Casablanca harbor, five miles away, and stopped a passing French patrol boat to ask directions. The French opened fire, sinking both of the landing craft and taking the survivors prisoner.
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On the beaches themselves, the landings were unopposed, but the surf was heavier than anticipated, and the big waves lifted up the plywood Higgins boats and slammed them down on the sand with a mighty thump, often doing damage to the hull as well as to the embarked soldiers. The boats all crowded together along the beach, and the big waves threw them into one another. Several broached, their sterns cast up onto the sand so that they lay parallel to the beach instead of perpendicular to it. Unable to back off, the inexperienced crews simply abandoned them. Afterward, Hewitt reported that Higgins boats were “definitely unsuited for landing through a surf higher than seven feet.” The soldiers, too, had trouble with the high surf. When they scrambled out of the boats, many were knocked
off their feet by the waves. Overloaded as they were with heavy gear, some were unable to regain their footing and drowned in water that was only three or four feet deep.
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There were other problems. The electric ramp-operating mechanisms on some of the boats failed, and the ramps had to be cranked down manually. This took more time and played havoc with the schedule. Worse, once the ramps were deployed, the backwash from the receding waves ran into the well of the boats and flooded some of them, making it difficult or impossible to get off the beach again. As a result, many of the scarce Higgins boats were so wrecked after the first landing they became inoperable. On one beach, only seven of twenty-five Higgins boats were able to extricate themselves and return to the transports for a second load, and of those seven, five more were wrecked during the next trip. On another beach, twenty-one of thirty-two boats were smashed up in the initial assault. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison estimates that “altogether between 137 and 160 out of 347 landing boats in the Center Attack Group, 40 to 46 percent of the total, were expended” on the beaches that morning. The steel LCMs carrying the Sherman tanks fared better in the heavy surf, but they encountered a different problem: many of the tanks rolled off the LCMs and immediately sank up to the middle of their treads in the soft sand and couldn’t get off the beach.
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All in all, the American ship-to-shore movement at Fedala was anything but a model of efficiency. It was evident to all that had this landing been directed at a prepared enemy determined to resist, it would have been a disaster. Even as it was, it came near enough to failure. Hewitt noted that the landings suffered from “insufficient training, improper debarkation priorities, and inadequate means.” Major General Lucian Truscott went further, declaring, “The combination of inexperienced landing craft crews, poor navigation, and desperate hurry resulting from the lateness of the hour, finally turned the debarkation into a hit-or-miss affair that would have spelled disaster against a well-armed enemy intent upon resistance.”
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The Americans did eventually get most of their men and equipment ashore. By dusk of the first day, the surviving Higgins boats had delivered a total of 7,750 men to the beaches. More followed the next day, and more
the day after that. By then Patton was leading an advance southward toward Casablanca. Efforts to convince the French that their best interest lay in welcoming the Americans bumped up against French concepts of duty and honor, and the Americans met heavy resistance. French cruisers and destroyers charged out of Casablanca harbor, steaming boldly into the midst of the invasion fleet. The brand-new
Richelieu
-class battleship
Jean Bart
, though unfinished and immobile in port, fired her big 15-inch guns at American ships offshore. Luckily, the USS
Massachusetts
landed a 16-inch shell on the only turret of the
Jean Bart
that could bear on the American fleet, jamming it and putting it temporarily out of action.

Casablanca surrendered on November 11 (fittingly, Armistice Day), but the delays in executing the landings and the battle for the city meant that the transports and cargo ships had to remain off the landing beaches longer than intended. That gave the German U-boats an opportunity to find them. As Hewitt noted, “the anchorage at Fedhala was not a completely secure one,” and the American ships were sitting ducks. Spending four days in one spot proved to be one day too many. On the evening of November 11, U-173 fired a spread of torpedoes into the anchorage, hitting the transport
Joseph Hewes
, the tanker
Winooski
, and the destroyer
Hambleton
, all within a tenminute period. The next day, torpedoes from U-130 struck three more troopships, all of which sank, though by then they had discharged their priceless cargo. Nevertheless, the losses demonstrated the inherent danger of lingering too long off an invasion beach.
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