Twelve Desperate Miles (32 page)

Medics on board did nothing to allay fears when they suggested that all of the beards that had been growing on crew faces through their days at sea be shaved—the
sailors were told that facial hair left a greater risk of scarring in case of a wound. They were also issued a designated battle
uniform: a one-piece coverall the color of grass, which was supposed to provide camouflage but would actually stand out against the sand beaches near Port Lyautey.

According to Yeoman Second Class George Doyle,
letter writing increased dramatically on board the
Dallas
as she neared Morocco. So did the number of snapshots taken and the exchange of mementos. Perhaps more sobering than any of the other preparations, however, was the moment when Captain Brodie ordered the ship’s depth charges tossed overboard. This was the last bow to the overriding need to lighten the ship’s load for its voyage up the river; but to the crewmen on board, the charges were their only lethal protection against the deadly U-boats that they’d just navigated through in their voyage across the Atlantic. Along with the guns they’d been issued and the grass green coveralls, it was a clear signal that they were not only sailors enlisted to bring the
Dallas
safely across the ocean, but soldiers, too, drafted to fight a land war in Morocco.

The crew and passengers on board the
Susan B. Anthony
were ordered soon after the midocean refueling to don and wear their life jackets at all times. Again, the fear of German submarines near Africa was the cause for this precaution. In addition, enemy aerial surveillance from Morocco would soon be a possibility. An alarm on November 2 sent planes from task-force carriers scrambling into the skies above, but night came to René Malevergne and the others on the
Anthony
with no further distractions.

On the third and fourth, heavy seas pounded the convoy for the first time on the voyage. Colonel Toffey visited with Malevergne in the Frenchman’s cabin and told him that the invasion would not begin before Sunday, the seventh. That sent Malevergne to the map, where he calculated the arrival of the fleet at Mehdia to be at 4:00 a.m. on the eighth, about two and a half hours after high tide.

Malevergne, now dressed in his newly issued U.S. Army uniform, received equipment as well: insignia of rank, a helmet, a revolver, ammunition,
and a gas mask. By the end of the day on the fourth, everyone on board was ordered to wear their helmet, in addition to their life jacket. As he packed his civilian mufti into a kit to be sent to him after landing, Malevergne was momentarily stymied as to how to label the bag. Should he address it to Viktor Prechak? Malevergne? Even the Shark? Finally, he chose to cover all bets and address it to Viktor Prechak, in care of Malevergne at Mehdia.

Rumors spread on board that the Spanish were on the verge of intervening in the affairs of French Morocco, which raised the question of how the French would respond if they did so. It was also reported that Radio Berlin had announced that a large American convoy was sailing to Gibraltar, but the rumor came and went and, at least from the perspective of life at sea, nothing came of it.

On the
Augusta
, George Patton was privy to all the radio news, including the Radio Berlin story, the story about the Spanish intervention, and a strong rumor that the French general Henri Giraud was “on the fence” about defending Morocco and that Robert Murphy was encouraging Allied command to delay the invasion until matters were settled.

Patton’s response was typical: “
As if 100,000 men, all at sea, can wait,” he wrote scornfully in his diary on the fourth. Since radio communication from the convoy was blacked out, all of the reports were one-sided: received but not responded to. Command at Gibraltar, London, and D.C. were spared what surely would have been a profane retort from Patton to this bit of news.

Like Malevergne and everyone else in the convoy, he had experienced the storm for the past couple of days, but Patton took it as a sign that things “
are bound to get better.” When winds hit forty miles per hour, he did “some extra praying” to ensure that was the case.

The Western Task Force commander, as always, kept one eye on destiny—his and his army’s—and one eye on the day-to-day activities around him. “
Every once in a while the tremendous responsibility of this job lands on me like a ton of bricks, but mostly I am not in the least worried,” he wrote in an expansive moment a few days before the eighth. “I
can’t decide logically if I am a man of destiny or a lucky fool, but I think I am destined.… I really do very little, and have done very little, about this show. I feel that my claim to greatness hangs on an ability to lead and inspire. Perhaps when Napoleon said, ‘Je m’engage et puis je vois’ [I start the fight and then I see], he was right. It is the only thing I can do in this case as I see it. I have no personal fear of death or failure. This may sound like junk, or prophecy, within a week.”

Back to earth, he added: “We had a CPX [command post exercise] this morning which was very dull. I can’t see how people can be so dull and lacking imagination. Compared to them I am a genius.” For good measure, he added, “I think I am.”

On November 4, Dwight David Eisenhower took off from London in the same bad weather that afflicted the convoy. His destination was Gibraltar, from where he intended to monitor the two-pronged invasion of Africa. The convoy from Great Britain, steaming largely under British sail to the Mediterranean from several ports in England and Scotland, was already well on its way, as was the Western Task Force under Patton and Hewitt. Like George Patton on the
Augusta
, there was little Eisenhower could do now to change what was about to happen. The steam was already driving the fleet toward its destiny, and now all there was to do was to await the outcome.

The Mediterranean Task Forces, divided into central and eastern groups, carried 23,000 British and 60,000 U.S. troops, all mounted from the United Kingdom. The Eastern Task Force, sailing with the Royal Navy under the command of Major General C. W. Ryder of the U.S. Army, was to capture Algiers. The Central Naval Task Force, another Royal Navy operation, carried 39,000 U.S. ground troops under the command of Major General Lloyd R. Fredenhall. Its object was to capture Oran, Algeria. Militarily, these were larger operations than the Western Naval Task Force and were more likely to face opposition from the Luftwaffe. They were less likely, however, to meet strong resistance from the French
navy in North Africa, whose power was centered on the battleship
Jean Bart
in Casablanca.

Eisenhower flew in a group of six B-17 Flying Fortress planes, which turned out to be pummeled by the weather and an attack from a German fighter plane. He was piloted by Major Paul Tibbets, the man who would one day fly the first atomic bomb mission in the
Enola Gay
. Despite the bad weather and the German plane, Eisenhower and his entourage landed safely on the Rock and were soon sped to the underground headquarters there, where, it turned out, there wasn’t much to do but wait. As mentioned, radio communication between Eisenhower and the two great convoys sailing to Africa was blacked out, so Ike, Mark Clark, and Captain Harry Butcher essentially sat in the offices, biding their time without information about the status of the fleets on their way to North Africa.

Clark had recently returned from a secret mission to Algeria, arranged by American diplomat and spymaster Robert Murphy. For weeks, Murphy had been meeting with officers in the French army in North Africa to assess how they would respond to an Allied invasion. His hope was to convince them to cooperate and join forces with the Americans and the British and thus avoid bloodshed in North Africa altogether; but before any agreements were made, the French wanted to meet directly with representatives of the Allied Forces headquarters. So in late October, Clark and a handful of officers took a remarkably hazardous and risky journey from Gibraltar to the shores of North Africa, where they met secretly with General Emmanuel Mast of the French army.

Mast was a protégé of General Henri Giraud, a great hero of the French and a man unsullied by association with the Vichy government. He had been the commander of the French Seventh Army at the start of World War II. Mast suggested to Clark that the Allies bring Giraud, who had recently escaped from German custody and was hiding in the south of France, to North Africa. There Giraud would galvanize French resistance and draw three hundred thousand Vichy soldiers to the Allied cause. If the Allies would wait until the following spring, they could also invade southern France with the aid and under the command of Giraud.

Clark was sworn to keep from the French the fact that the Allied invasion of North Africa was just weeks away. There was also simply no way that the Allies were going to give Giraud or anyone else in the French army the command of Allied forces, particularly since it was apparent that Giraud, hiding out in France, currently commanded no French troops. It was apparent that there was no certainty beyond their own impassioned sensibility that either Mast or Giraud could guarantee that any forces in the French army would join the Allied side in the coming invasion.

For all their hopes that the French army would drop arms and ally itself against Germany and its own Vichy government when the invading force appeared on the shores of North Africa, Allied headquarters had had no contact with the French army in North Africa until Clark made his bold trip to Algiers. While Murphy, who had fostered the hope that the French army would not resist, continued to do so even at this late hour, no one in London, or now in Gibraltar, could be certain of anything regarding the French army’s response to attack. It could, however, be almost guaranteed that the French navy, controlled by Admiral Darlan, would fight.

Little wonder, then, that Eisenhower, now ensconced on Gibraltar and waiting for the invasion to begin, remained no less edgy about the outcome of Operation Torch than he’d been through the months of September and October when it was in its planning stages. In fact, he’d recently sent a note to Marshall in which he confessed with regard to the upcoming assault, “
If a man permitted himself to do so, he could get absolutely frantic about questions of weather, politics, personalities in France and Morocco, and so on.” The risks of what the Allies were doing, given their level of unpreparedness and uncertain knowledge of what was about to happen, were remarkable. Still, he felt that “a certain amount of good fortune will bless us when the critical day arrives.”

A
s the
Contessa
came abreast of the Azores, Lieutenant Leslie finally informed Captain John of the ship’s ultimate destination. They were heading to a port on the coast of French Morocco, northeast of Casablanca. Mehdia was the village they would first encounter at the entrance to the Sebou River, and then twelve miles farther up river, they would deposit their load at an airfield at Port Lyautey. The
Contessa
would follow on the heels of a destroyer. The airfield would be secured by the time the banana boat arrived; the
Contessa
was to simply unload its cargo and await further orders.

The fact that the cargo was a highly volatile cocktail of explosives; that the river was narrow, winding, and twelve miles from sea to port; that the Atlantic coast at Morocco would make entry into the river a serious hazard; and that the river itself had a depth of just seventeen and a half feet were all nail-biting circumstances. But given the uncertainties of their current situation—looking for their convoy and in the midst of an area known to be prime U-boat hunting grounds—their ultimate mission seemed less an imminent danger than simply an end to the hazards that currently engulfed them.

Presently, the
Contessa
had no idea where the convoy that she was to join was located; in fact, she still had not seen another ship at sea. The gale that afflicted all the other vessels crossing the ocean that early November struck the
Contessa
too, rocking her wickedly off the coast of the Azores and causing Leslie and John to spend the
most disconcerting evening of the trip on the sixth. In spite of the storm whipping the ocean around them, they knew they must maintain a fast clip on their way to catching up with the convoy—maintaining their average speed of fifteen knots—because as they neared Africa, they were once again in the thick of German U-boat waters. Given their lack of identifying signals,
however, they worried deeply about running headlong into the convoy, which, because of their proximity to Morocco, they knew couldn’t be far off. There was also no moon above to illuminate either them or the convoy, thus increasing the possibility for blind trouble.