Twelve Desperate Miles (14 page)

For all the pressures, Eddy gave an impressive performance, describing the French Resistance in terms of numbers, organization, leadership, and capability during the coming invasion. Eddy’s report was so thorough and detailed that it prompted all of his subsequent travels in August. By the time of his last visit to England in the planning stage of Operation Torch in early September, he was being asked for his opinions on such delicate matters as the presence of British troops in the invasion and the supreme question: what would the French military do when the Allies struck?

Eddy advised that British forces be included in the campaign only for the purpose of fighting Germans and Italians and that the French know that they were there “only in transit” to Tripoli and Sicily. “The essential
point is the assurance to the French that there will be no occupation and annexation of French territory by the British.” Of the French military response, he wrote: “
We can count on the submission or active support of the French Army as we must also count upon the determined resistance of the French Navy and of the aircraft under the Navy’s control.”

To help counter this “determined resistance,” Eddy volunteered his agents in Morocco to perform some of the sabotage that they’d already been planning in Casablanca and elsewhere. This included those plots to destroy bridges and power stations, as well as plans to eliminate the German Armistice Commission through assassination.

He also recommended that a Frenchman, who for months had been helping in the Tangier office, be summoned to London to offer assistance in planning the invasion of Casablanca. Carl Clopet had for years worked as a salvage tug operator in Casablanca. He was a hydrographer who, according to Eddy, “
knows every rock and buoy and wreck, as well as being an expert on the very treacherous swell which is perhaps the chief hazard for any landing party.”

Clopet would soon be off to London. Nor would he be the last expert on a Moroccan port suggested by Eddy to the Joint Command. It turned out that Dave King in Casablanca had recently recruited another Frenchman for the OSS. His code name was “the Shark,” and, like Clopet, René Malevergne knew every rock, buoy, and wreck at the entrance to another port in Morocco, at the River Sebou. Depending on where the final plans for invasion might lead Allied forces, “the Shark” could be an invaluable aid to the cause.

F
or General Lucian Truscott, it felt like high time to get back to the States. His assignment was rapidly shifting from planning to operation, yet here he was, still stuck in England, mapping out the invasion as the clock continued its inexorable countdown to the action itself. He was now definitely to have the command of the northernmost of three amphibious assaults on the Moroccan shore, but his troops would be sailing from the United States. Not only had he not even laid eyes on the soldiers he would be commanding, but they hadn’t yet been decided upon. He didn’t even know what troops he would be leading. This was no small thing for a man whose reputation had been built on his ability to train soldiers.

And there were still huge problems to deal with in the overall amphibious planning for the Western Task Force. At the Allied headquarters, Truscott gathered together a group of American and British officers to tackle those issues and send along recommendations to Patton in Washington. Along with Truscott, the group including two U.S. Army majors, Pierpont Morgan Hamilton and Theodore Conway, and three British members of the team drawn from Mountbatten’s staff: Major Robert Henriques, Lieutenant-Commander R. de (“Dick”) Costabadie, and Wing Commander John Homer.

One of the thornier issues of amphibious assault on Morocco was quickly elucidated by the members of the group from Lord Mountbatten’s team. In November in North Africa, practicable landing conditions for an amphibious strike within the Mediterranean could be counted on four days out of five. On the Atlantic side, however, the odds were exactly reversed: out of five typical days in November on the Moroccan shore, only one offered decent weather for landing an amphibious army. Not only was the pounding surf on the northwest corner of Africa
an impediment, but suitable beaches and ports were scarce. A largely man-made harbor at Casablanca was the best landing site in the area, but the French navy anchored there made a direct assault on the city a hazardous operation at best.

A few widely scattered ports north and south of Casablanca presented possibilities for attack. These included Fedala, a few miles north of Casablanca; Safi, about 130 miles to the south; Port Lyautey, which lay a dozen miles up the River Sebou, 80 miles north of Casablanca; and Rabat, which lay about halfway between Port Lyautey and Casablanca.

Patton’s initial plan, put together in Washington, called for the Western Task Force to be divided into three forces. The largest, a division-sized expedition headed by Patton himself, would point toward Fedala, the center point of the three-pronged attack, with the assault and taking of Casablanca as its main objective. A second group, the one designated for Truscott, would land at Rabat with two battalion combat teams and one armored battalion. The smallest of the three groups would land at Safi to the south and include one combat battalion team and one armored battalion, whose tanks were to provide support for the taking of Casablanca.

This plan went to the Supreme Allied Command in London with a copy to Truscott for comment and consideration in the first week of September.
To Truscott’s mind, the attack on Rabat was a mistake. Intelligence had informed him that its port was in disrepair from lack of use—sandbars had built up around it. It was also the residence of the sultan of Morocco, the spiritual and political leader of the nation’s native population. An attack against Rabat might be seen as an assault on the Muslims of Morocco and impair efforts at quickly winning over the country as a whole.

Truscott and the others in his group felt that invading Port Lyautey, to the north of Rabat, offered both strategic and tactical advantages. Not only would an assault away from the home of the sultan offer fewer political complications, but the airport in Lyautey was the newest and best in the region, built with the only concrete runways in northwest Africa.

From the outset, the army’s Twelfth Air Force, along with Patton, Eisenhower, and most of the Allied command, believed that the quick capture of a northwest African airfield was of crucial importance to Operation Torch. With an airport in hand, the army could catapult single-engine, P-40 fighters from carriers attached to the convoy in order to neutralize the French air force and aid in Patton’s assault on Casablanca. Port Lyautey’s was a quality airfield just two hundred miles from Gibraltar. If it were quickly captured, the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF) could also fly bombers in from England. Gibraltar would be more secure; the path into and out of the Mediterranean would be safer.

It was this argument that held sway. The plan for attacking Rabat was scrapped and
a sub–task force named Goalpost, a reference to Truscott and Patton’s polo-playing interest, was established with a primary focus of taking the airport at Port Lyautey as quickly as possible after D-day. Truscott would lead this wing of the assault.

Despite the work of the operatives in Morocco, intelligence remained a problem in both London and the United States. Useful photographs for the invasion were so rare that the American public was actually asked to provide general vacation
snapshots and film footage from foreign travels in the hopes that images of North African locales would turn up and help to fill gaps in the general understanding of the area. In fact, the principal reason Truscott and his contingent, itching to get to Washington to prepare for the invasion with their troops, were kept in London was that they were waiting for photographs of the Atlantic Coast to come from British reconnaissance planes. British intelligence was, however, in Truscott’s words, “
extremely reluctant to undertake new photographic missions for fear of disclosing our intentions to the enemy.”

Regardless of what those photos might tell, it was almost dead certain that
the basic objectives of Goalpost would remain constant. The
first of these “was to capture and supply one or two air fields whence our aircraft (which are to be flown into Gibraltar as soon as the situation permits) can support our forces in the south [i.e., Patton’s force] who will be operating against Casablanca.” The aim of the northernmost portion of the three-pronged attack on Morocco, wrote Truscott, “should be to have one air field available for use by our aircraft not later than nightfall on D-day.”

The first combat mission of Truscott’s infantry (whoever they were) was to “capture, hold, and supply” the airfield at Port Lyautey “for the use of aircraft, to be flown in from Gibraltar.” The second goal of the mission was to capture and hold Port Lyautey itself.

The success of the operation as a whole depended upon the neutralization of French aircraft. Getting American planes into the skies as soon as possible would not only deter the French from entering the fray but would aid Patton’s assault on Casablanca. Furthermore, if Gibraltar were subject to heavy Axis air attack in response to the North African invasion, it would be vital to have African air bases for its defense and as an outlet for aircraft stationed there already.

There were obstacles to both the taking and the supplying of the Port Lyautey airstrips, to be sure. Intelligence had described the field as lying within an inverted loop of the River Sebou on well-protected terrain. There was high ground to the south in the form of a ridge that ran parallel to the seacoast. A marsh marked the airfield’s western edge, and a second ridge lay to the northeast of the Lyautey field. The width of the series of runways was about five thousand yards.

A lagoon, about three and a half miles long and a mile south of the river, ran parallel to the coast toward Rabat. It was fringed by steep cliffs that fell down to the beach into soft white sand. Steep sand dunes and shale slopes marked the north entrance to the river, along the ocean, and they stretched within the interior to about three quarters of a mile. Farther inland, to the north, there was more high ground with rough grasses but a commanding view of the southern bank of the river,
suggesting that a landing to the north of the river could provide a quick means of assault on airfield defenses.

The most formidable barrier to supplying the airport was the course and shallowness of the river. A sandbar at the mouth of the Sebou had a depth of seventeen and a half feet at high-water peaks and a mean depth of just thirteen feet at low tide. Bringing cargo up the river for the field would require shallow draft shipping and would have to be done within the blessing of a high tide. The river itself was said to have a depth of only seventeen feet. In addition, the French had recently constructed a chain boom across the Sebou that would have to be cut in order for traffic to flow by.

All this was to say nothing of the problem, already pointed out by members of Mountbatten’s staff, of the hazardous and pounding conditions of the Moroccan surf at that time of year. In the back of everyone’s minds was the report that the Atlantic offered just one in five days in November when its pounding assault on the northwest African shore calmed enough to make an amphibious landing feasible.

Nor was it to mention the press of time that everyone agreed was crucial for the success of the operation. The quicker Torch was completed, the better it was for the inexperienced American army. Any delay in taking Morocco would invite what Marshall, Eisenhower, and Patton feared most: an attack by Germany or Spain on Gibraltar, and through Gibraltar to North Africa. They wanted to take the airfield in a single day.

Because of the land and river obstacles to the airport and the speed at which it needed to be grabbed, initial discussions on taking the field centered on the possibilities of using parachute troops and sabotage as a means of quickly circumventing obstacles. Also put forward by Truscott himself was a novel idea: using commando forces on a ship that would steam up the Sebou River soon after the invasion force struck.
A small unit of specially trained infantry would be delivered at the airfield by whatever vessel was chosen for the mission, there to strike quickly and efficiently at the French forces guarding the strips, á la raiding groups that Truscott had helped organize in England.

While this last idea seemed speculative in London, it would gain more currency in Washington as time passed and the countdown to invasion neared. It was, after all, the very sort of small, surprise attack that Truscott had been learning at the side of Mountbatten in London for months. Why not employ it here, in conjunction with the larger amphibious assault on Port Lyautey?

Of course, such an attack would rely heavily on the navy’s ability to navigate the treacherous shoals at the entry to the Sebou River, to say nothing of the difficulties of sailing up the shallow river to its inland port. And it would have to be done in haste and presumably under the extremely dangerous conditions of amphibious assault. To mount a commando raid on the airfield under those circumstances would require someone deeply familiar with the passage.