Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (17 page)

Elsewhere, the assault went more according to plan. At Safi, a hundred miles to the south, the attempt to seize a port by a
coup de main
actually worked. Two American destroyers,
Bernadou
and
Cole
, carrying 197 commandos, steamed boldly into the port. The French opened fire, but French defenses at Safi were less robust than at Algiers or Oran, and the American commandos stormed ashore and secured the port. That allowed the big tank carrier
Lakehurst
to follow them in and unload her cargo of Sherman tanks at the jetty. By November 12, the Americans had their foothold in Morocco.
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SECURING THE BEACHHEAD
was only the first step. Within twenty-four hours of the initial landings, Eisenhower was urging Allied forces to “rush
eastward without delay” in order to seize Tunisia before the Germans brought in reinforcements. At first he hoped to do this within a matter of days. After two weeks, he was hoping “to complete the occupation … by mid December.” By the end of the year, he was looking for success “early in March.” With almost comical understatement, the official historian of the campaign wrote in 1957: “Succeeding operations in the Mediterranean area proved more extensive than intended.”
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The “rush eastward” was derailed by several factors. One was the need to consolidate the ports to ensure the continued movement of supplies; another was the need to build new airfields and repair existing ones in order to provide air cover for the advance; a third was that American forces and their equipment had to be moved from Morocco to Algeria, a movement exacerbated by the perpetual shipping problem. Ike noted that “from the day we started,” the problem of inadequate shipping restricted his movements. Now, once again, “the old shipping problem rises up to smite us.” Instead of sending the 250 Sherman tanks that had landed at Safi to Algeria by sea, they were hauled more than eight hundred miles overland on North Africa’s rickety and unreliable single-track railroad. Nor did the weather cooperate. The postponement of the assault from October to November meant that the ensuing ground campaign took place during the rainy season, when swift movement—or any movement—was inhibited by muddy roads.
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Then, too, Eisenhower was sidetracked and frustrated by interminable negotiations with various French leaders. Concluding that the Americans had come to stay, the French agreed to join the anti-Axis alliance. But there was a bitter debate among several self-appointed candidates about who should emerge as the leader of the French contingent in that alliance. The Allies had counted on General Henri Giraud to rally the French to their side, but Giraud declared that he would play no role at all unless he was given supreme command of all Allied forces. As always, Eisenhower remained outwardly calm, though inside he was seething, and he unburdened himself to Marshall. “I find myself getting absolutely furious with these stupid Frogs,” he wrote, bemoaning “the necessity of dealing with little, selfish, conceited worms that call themselves men.” Eventually, Eisenhower made a deal with Admiral Jean-François Darlan granting the Frenchman authority over all of
North Africa in exchange for his cooperation. Eisenhower may have thought that one “Frog” was as good (or as bad) as another, but Darlan had been a prominent Nazi collaborator, and the British and American public response to the arrangement was outrage. Ike survived the criticism, and the awkwardness of working with a former collaborator ended when Darlan was assassinated by a French monarchist on Christmas Eve.
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Most of all, however, the Allied advance into Tunisia was slowed by the Germans, who rushed reinforcements into North Africa and established strong defensive positions before the British and Americans could exploit the surprise of their initial landings. As a result, what was supposed to be a quick dash turned into a lengthy slog. The low point was a surprise German counterattack at Kasserine Pass in February 1943. Directed by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who justified his reputation as “the Desert Fox” in this campaign, two German Panzer divisions smashed through American defenses and advanced for three days before withdrawing. The Americans lost some twenty-five hundred men and more than a hundred tanks. This debacle was a wake-up call for American arms, and for Eisenhower as well. It forced Ike to reassess his assumptions about the timetable, and to make several changes in command, including urging the promotion of George Patton. Some British soldiers, who had been fighting in North Africa since June 1940, saw Kasserine Pass as a kind of comeuppance for the brash Americans. A few punned on the popular George M. Cohan World War I song “Over There” by replacing the line “The Yanks are coming” with “The Yanks are running.”
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Eventually Eisenhower and the Americans recovered, but it took six months—until May 1943—for the British and Americans to drive Axis forces from the continent. It was a significant victory: at a cost of seventy thousand casualties, more than half of them British, the Allies inflicted similar losses on the Germans and Italians, and also took more than a quarter of a million prisoners. Of course, even after this victory, the Allies were no nearer to Berlin than they had been in Scotland, and during that same period, the Russians had been continuously engaged in the ferocious Battle of Stalingrad, inflicting more than three-quarters of a million casualties on the Germans while suffering over a million casualties of their own. Despite
the North African victory, the Russians might still ask, with some asperity, if the western Allies were holding up their end.

Notwithstanding Stalin’s disparagement, Torch was very likely all that was possible for the Anglo-American forces in 1942. The many errors and disappointments of the campaign proved that Churchill and the British had been correct in their assertion that the Allies were not ready to leap across the Channel. By the end of the campaign, even the most sanguine American—Eisenhower included—had come to appreciate that if they had launched their plywood Higgins boats and modified Caribbean freighters filled with inexperienced soldiers and untested commanders against German-occupied France in the fall of 1942, the consequences would have been fully as disastrous as the British had predicted.

IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
, the American folklorist Joel Chandler Harris published a series of tales from the Old South derived from stories he had heard while living among the South’s African-American community. In one of the best-known of those tales, B’rer Rabbit confounds his nemesis B’rer Fox by constructing a mannequin made of tar—a tar baby—and placing it by the road. When B’rer Fox becomes annoyed that the mute figure refuses to acknowledge his greeting, he strikes it with his fist, which sticks fast. Angered, he then strikes it with his other fist, and then with his feet, until he is entirely embedded in sticky tar and rendered helpless.

Though there was no trickster figure to lure the Allies into their Mediterranean adventure, in November 1942 the Allies had hurled their fist into North Africa and it had stuck. In the extended campaign for Tunisia, they employed their other fist. By the time the Allies secured the victory in May 1943, there were eight hundred thousand British and American soldiers in North Africa. As Marshall and Eisenhower had predicted, the lengthy campaign all but ensured that the invasion of Europe would be delayed for at least a year. Churchill had argued from the beginning that an invasion of the European continent in 1942 was simply beyond reach. Now, however, it seemed likely that Torch had made a cross-Channel invasion the following year equally impractical. Still, the landings in North Africa and the campaign for Tunisia did constitute an important, even vital apprenticeship for
the Americans, whose learning curve, perilously steep in 1942, had flattened considerably by May 1943.

Some of those men wondered if, now that the long campaign was over, they might be going home for a bit of leave. They were soon disabused of that. Major General Charles Ryder, commander of the American 34th Infantry Division, set them straight: “We shall fight in Europe,” he told them, “and we shall find that in comparison, the Tunisian campaign was but a maneuver with live ammunition.”
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F
ROM THE OUTSET
, the Allied invasion of French North Africa had been a product of Churchill’s fixation on a peripheral strategy plus Roosevelt’s determination to do
something
in 1942. Now the something had been done, and the principal decision makers confronted the question of what to do next. Back in September, Churchill and Roosevelt had assured Marshall that once North Africa was secured, the Allies would be in a position to execute Bolero-Roundup in the New Year. Marshall had suspected from the start that executing Torch would make a 1943 invasion unlikely, and the disappointments and delays of the ensuing campaign only reinforced that assumption. Though he continued to believe that a surge across the channel was the best and shortest path to victory, his new proposal was significantly less ambitious. Rather than execute Roundup, he wanted to land an Allied force on the Brest peninsula later that summer to secure a beachhead that could be exploited in the spring of 1944.

Two factors worked against him. The first was the momentum of events. By January 1943 the Allies had half a million men plus all their supporting
equipment in North Africa, and that number would rise to eight hundred thousand by May. It would be far simpler to use that force locally, to cross the narrow waist of the Mediterranean to Sicily or Sardinia, than to move all of it, or most of it, back to England for an assault on Brest. The second factor, as always, was shipping. Losses in the Pacific during the fierce battles around Guadalcanal, losses to the U-boats in the Atlantic, and of course losses during Torch all affected both sealift and amphibious capability. Given that, the British argued that it made much more sense to continue operations in the Mediterranean than to try to move hundreds of thousands of men from there to England. The Catch-22 of this option was that another operation in the Mediterranean would deplete Allied shipping even more and delay a cross-Channel move yet again—perhaps indefinitely.
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Roosevelt kept an open mind. He took Marshall’s earnest advocacy of a cross-Channel operation seriously, but he also wanted to talk to Churchill again, and he was especially eager to hear Stalin’s views. He proposed another meeting. Churchill was more than willing. “As soon as we have knocked the Germans out of Tunisia,” the prime minister wrote to Roosevelt two weeks after the Torch landings, “we should proceed with a military conference.” Roosevelt suggested that they meet somewhere in Africa, in part because an African venue might allow Stalin to attend, and in part because he foresaw the political benefits that would accrue from being photographed reviewing American troops on a recent battlefield. Roosevelt initially thought “a secure place south of Algiers” might do, though in the end he accepted Marshall’s suggestion to hold the meeting near Casablanca in French Morocco. Soon thereafter, during movie night at the White House, it suited the president’s puckish sense of humor to screen the new Humphrey Bogart–Ingrid Bergman film
Casablanca
. Since the forthcoming trip was still a closely held secret, only he and a few others got the joke.
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Roosevelt enjoyed the fact that the trip would be both historic and more than a little adventurous. He would be the first American president to fly in an airplane or to visit Africa while in office, and the first commander in chief to leave the country in time of war. As always, the trip was kept utterly secret, and the clandestine atmosphere only added to the president’s boyish enthusiasm. (Hopkins thought he “acted like a sixteen-year-old.”) The presidential
party stole surreptitiously out of Washington late at night on January 9 and headed south by train to Miami. There he and his entourage boarded a plane for Trinidad, where Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, who had been battling a stomach virus, declared himself too ill to continue. The rest of the party flew south again to Belem, on the Brazilian coast. There were some obligatory meetings with local leaders before the official party boarded a flying boat for an eighteen-and-a-half-hour overnight crossing of the Atlantic. The plane splashed down in the mouth of the Gambia River in western Africa, and from there it was back onto another plane that flew the presidential party over the Atlas Mountains to an airstrip only two miles from the hotel that had been secured for the conference.
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