Twelve Desperate Miles (35 page)

Earlier that morning on the
Texas
, UP reporter Walter Cronkite had been summoned to the bridge by Admiral Monroe Kelly. Like Patton, Kelly had wanted to transmit a message to the men on board as the battle approached. He was looking for an appropriately inspiring conclusion to his speech but was having trouble coming up with the right language. “
You’re a writer, Mr. Cronkite,” he said to the journalist. “Perhaps you could come up with something.”

Cronkite was stumped. He did, however, witness the opening salvo
from the battleship’s gigantic fourteen-inch guns, and its awesome display loosened his writing ability. “
The great belch of yellow flame threatens to engulf the ship itself, and the blast of heat sears the freshman war correspondent on the bridge. The gun blows its own great smoke ring and the shell can actually be seen disappearing toward the horizon in the middle of the donut. Whatever has been loose on deck is sent skyward, sucked into the vacuum the explosion has left behind.”

Seconds after witnessing the initial blast from the guns, Cronkite, standing with his hand on a rail on the bridge, was amazed to find a deck of cards floating in the air around him, sucked skyward by the whoosh of the explosion. A single card, the ace of spades, rocked back and forth on the current in front of his eyes, before it fell gently on the back of his hand.

Cronkite’s cabinmates, the team operating Radio Maroc, were also affected by the blast. Working with U.S. Army communications engineers, they had spent hours through the course of the voyage setting up their equipment in order to broadcast the speeches of the president and General Eisenhower. Having successfully sent those messages over the air to French Morocco, they were beginning general transmission of Allied news of the invasion shoreward when the
Texas
opened her guns. In the process, their equipment was bounced around the communications room, and Radio Maroc fell silent.

“
If they had asked, we could have told them how to prevent that,” a navy communications officer subsequently told Cronkite with a shrug.

From the
Allen
, Truscott saw the shore batteries open up to the south of Mehdia and watched the U.S. Navy batteries respond from the sea. As he described it later: “
Great chains of red balls streaked through the darkness toward shore.” He had just bade adieu to Pierpont Hamilton and Nick Craw as they climbed down into a waiting LCM. They were clad in their best uniforms—starched shirts and caps, brass and leather gleaming, rows of ribbons and pilots’ wings festooning their chests and
sleeves—and carried Truscott’s beribboned message to the French commander at Port Lyautey. They arrived on shore just before the sunlight at 0600.

The pair ran into immediate trouble as they neared their landing site. Craw sent a message back to Truscott. “
At mouth of river,” he radioed. “Being shelled by enemy and our own Navy. Going to land at Green Beach.” A little later, after they’d found safe harbor and a jeep, Craw sent an update. “On Green Beach. Bantam stuck. Looking for [a new jeep]. Troops landed and moving inland. Proceeding on mission.”

Meanwhile, five miles north of Red Beach on the other side of the Sebou, Toffey’s Third Battalion found itself facing an extremely steep escarpment and the same soft, white sand that René Malevergne had feared would impede their progress inland. Toffey knew instantly that the landscape would make a trial not only of unloading the landing craft but of transporting supplies off the beach. Adding to his miseries was the sudden appearance of the French air force, in the form of four planes swooping in from the nearby Port Lyautey airfield. They began to strafe the beaches and the landing craft, both those ashore and those that had made it off the sand and were heading back to the convoy to pick up the second wave of troops and cargo.

The Third wasn’t the only combat team having a difficult time exiting the beach. The sand dunes to the south of the River Sebou were just as difficult to traverse as the escarpments to the north. In fact, only at Blue Beach was a simple route inland found. Compounding these difficulties was the fact that there were delays in getting bulldozers and engineers on shore. The appearance of the French planes and the shore batteries prompted the transport and cargo ships waiting offshore to move further out to sea to safeguard troops climbing into the boats. That meant longer trips to and from shore for the landing craft, thus slowing debarkation to a crawl.

Still, the French defense of the beaches themselves was not fierce. And when Toffey’s group was able to unload two .30-caliber machine
guns and a trio of .50 caliber guns to take aim at the French planes buzzing overhead, it soon became even less daunting.

The guns knocked down two of the four aircraft. One, which turned out to be piloted by Captain Mathon, commandant of Port Lyautey airport, was sent in swirling flames to the sea two hundred yards off Red Beach.

Aside from being bombarded by their own navy (the
Texas
would later be pinpointed as the culprit), Craw and Hamilton had also been strafed by the same French planes that had attacked the Third Battalion. But once they got their Bantam jeep off the beach and pointed in the direction of Port Lyautey, the way seemed clear. Along with driver, Private First Class Orris Correy, they started off through the highland between Mehdia and the port with a prominent white flag attached to the back of their jeep and smaller American and French flags hooked on the radiator in front.

They approached a French outpost near the Kasbah and asked the soldiers stationed there if an escort could be made available for their trip for safety purposes.
They were told either that one was not available or that it was unnecessary. Correy drove on with Craw beside him in front and Hamilton behind Craw.

Near the edge of the city of Port Lyautey, they rounded a blind curve on the corner of a hillside and ran headlong into a machine-gun nest, from which immediately spluttered a burst of machine gunfire. Nick Craw fell heavily against Correy, who brought the jeep to a halt. It was quickly surrounded by the Moroccan soldiers who had fired upon it. Their rifles were now aimed at Hamilton and Correy.

Naturally shocked and frightened, Hamilton had enough bold adrenalin to “
exhaust all the French profanity that I’d learned in eight years in Paris” on the French lieutenant who was in charge of the group. How dare they fire on a white flag! How dare they inhibit this opportunity for peace between their two great nations! Hamilton also insisted that he be taken to Port Lyautey to present his neatly bound document
to the commander of French forces there. In fact, with Craw slumped in the front seat and Hamilton defenseless in the back, he was hardly in a position to dictate what would happen next. The great-great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, along with Private Correy, was subsequently taken to Port Lyautey, where Hamilton was able to present Truscott’s letter. Unfortunately, the commander was in no position to negotiate with the Americans. Only General Mathenet had that power, Hamilton was told, and he was not in the city.

Major Hamilton and Correy were taken into custody. The last opportunity to avoid a full-scale battle over Port Lyautey had passed, but its first American victim had a name. Nick Craw was dead.

The violence of the invasion was general now, both at sea and on shore. The First Battalion, which had landed between Blue and Green, had gotten off the beach and moved inland, south of the lagoon. Its members organized there at 1045, setting up roadblocks toward the direction of Rabat, from where the French Renault tanks were expected to come. They didn’t have to wait long for that eventuality.

Two platoons were arranged on either side of the highway. One antitank group was armed with one of the newfangled bazookas, and one had a machine gun. Early in the afternoon, the French tanks appeared and came within fifty yards of the trench holding the soldiers armed with the bazooka. The Americans fired their weapon and missed the tank; but a thick eucalyptus tree, about ten yards off the road behind the French, was mowed down like a weed. The blast of the launcher alerted one of the French tanks to the existence of the Americans. It pivoted its gun in their direction and fired, knocking out the gunner and killing his loader. The second American unit was soon destroyed as well.

Afterward, as the French paused to take their prisoner and inspect the launcher that he’d been holding, they refused to believe that a hand-carried weapon could simply slice through a foot-thick eucalyptus tree, decapitating it in one vicious swipe. The consensus among the French
was that some artillery must be in the area as well. The tank column from Rabat proceeded to waste precious time reconnoitering for a nonexistent battery.

Closer to Mehdia and the Kasbah, the Second Battalion was having a hard time organizing. After its landing at Green Beach early in the morning, two assault teams advanced toward the Kasbah but were stopped by U.S. Navy gunfire. They crossed the northern tip of the lagoon and occupied high ground above the lighthouse. From there, through misunderstanding of an order, the Second began to advance toward the airport, rather than focusing on the Kasbah. As it headed in that direction, French infantry and tanks drove it back, and the teams wound up between the Kasbah and Mehdia, back near the lighthouse.
Here they stayed for the afternoon, pinned down by the French infantry and the continuing fire from the U.S. Navy.

Toffey’s Third Battalion was the most advanced of the three attack teams, but it, too, had its stumbles and fumbles. From its landing north of Red Beach, the battalion moved rapidly inland and by noon had occupied a hill overlooking the airport from the north side of the Sebou—a move of about five or six miles. But the lack of exits through the sandy escarpments prevented the battalion from getting artillery or any other heavy equipment to their position until 2230 on the night of the eighth. It wouldn’t be until D-day plus one that the big guns would arrive at their position; and the rubber boats, which had been critical to their orders to cross the river and aid in the assault on the airport, were left in half-tracks at the beach. They, too, would not be arriving at the Third Battalion position until the next day.

From their post on the bare hills to the north of the Sebou, Toffey and company had perhaps the best view of the river and the action taking place along it between the Kasbah and the airport. They could see the full extent of the Sebou’s horseshoe shape as it veered northeast from Mehdia and the Kasbah for four or five miles, then took a turn
to the east for about two miles opposite the airport, and then took another hard turn to the south, almost bending back on itself, toward Port Lyautey four or five miles upriver. A deep blue green, the river was about a quarter of a mile wide at its most expansive but considerably narrower at its turns.

Anticipating this view and its advantages, the navy had sent along a radio operator and spotters, who set up a transmitter in the caves above Red Beach and then ran wire up to the high ground. There the spotters began locating French artillery fire for the ships out at sea. From their post opposite the airfield, the battalion could see “
large numbers of French troops … running as a result of the fire.”