Twelve Desperate Miles (39 page)

The
Dallas
maintained her line in the channel and slowly picked up speed. As she neared the Kasbah, however, another obstacle loomed. It turned out that the boom crossing the river had been only partially cut. The cable still stretched over the channel from the south bank to a point about halfway over the channel, and the point where it had
been exploded by
the navy team in the night was shoal. Not only that, beyond the cable to the north side of the jetty, where the river broadened, Malevergne knew the Vichyists had set mines. When he saw where the obstruction had been cut, he said, “
Captain, there is no depth there.”

A machine gun opened fire at that moment from near the Kasbah, again short of its target, but near enough now to spur them forward. Malevergne and Brodie decided to run right through what was left of the cable, and Malevergne ordered full speed ahead.

The boom was strung across the river through a series of anchored floats. The cable remained intact through the first two of these but was down at the third—the one that rested over the shoal. Malevergne pointed the
Dallas
’s bow directly between floats one and two and felt the ship pick up speed to a full eighteen knots. He closed his eyes when he heard the hull grind against the chain, but the destroyer was able to part the boom without a tremor. She rushed deeper into the river.

Up the northeastern angle of the river and through the first bend she sailed, occasionally scraping, occasionally racing ahead. Now the airport loomed. All hands were ordered to take cover and watch for sniping, and, indeed, several machine guns opened fire from the hills above the field. The distance was too far. The rounds sent up puffs of water and sludge from the swamp on the south bank of the river, two hundred yards from the ship.

Next came a series of artillery blasts—three-inch shells now, which once again spluttered in the mud, short of the
Dallas
. For the first time on her voyage, the
Dallas
opened her own three-inch guns and fired in the direction of the barrage. The French gun was quickly silenced. As 0700 neared, the ship approached the bend in the river where the Vichyists had sunk the pair of steamers two nights before as Toffey and company watched. The
Batavia
and the
Saint Emile
lay junked in the river, obstructing passage up the Sebou except for a narrow path between the two ships.

Above, two planes from the
Sangamon
started to fly cover for the old four-piper. From the shore, the men on board the destroyer could see
the column from Toffey’s Third Battalion, who’d spent the night on the edge of the swamp.
They waved at one another, like friends surprised at the sight of each other, and for a moment it felt to Malevergne that the fighting had stopped around them.

The space between the
Batavia
and the
Saint Emile
was just large enough for the
Dallas
to squeeze through; but here, too, the channel of the Sebou was shallow, and to make the bend she would have to run headlong into a strong current rushing out to sea or risk getting hung up in the shallows. If she carefully picked her way through the wrecks, the
Dallas
would face the possibility of running aground as she slowed. If she rushed through the French ships too quickly, she wouldn’t be able to make the bend and would run straight into the riverbank directly behind the wrecks.

Malevergne again ordered full speed ahead. The men at their battle stations watched in silence as the destroyer aimed for the gap between the scuttled steamers. Eyeing the narrow passage between the ships, guiding her against the current, Malevergne felt the
Dallas
roll first to starboard and then to port; but not only did she right herself, but she was able to navigate the corner and get her bow pointed upstream, directly toward her destination. Ahead they could see the airport. The
Dallas
and the commandos she carried with her were now the lead column of the American invasion of Port Lyautey.

At half ebb, the
Dallas
continued to slog her way forward. Again her engines were working at an exaggerated speed. They cycled at twenty knots, while the ship strolled at ten. Just after 0730, she came to a halt in the middle of the river and sat there, stuck in the mud.

Trapped “
like a Dutch canal boat” midstream, the
Dallas
quickly became a target, tempting the same batteries that had stymied the Third Battalion at the Port Lyautey bridge the night before. They began to lob shells that hit her port side and then began to whistle through the
Dallas
’s halyards as the commandos prepared to disembark in rubber boats to starboard. The destroyer once again opened her three-inch guns, and at the same time, one of the escort planes above located the battery
and dropped a depth charge on top of it. The guns fell silent and the commandos were able to finish their disembarkation and reach shore without a casualty.

Once there, they linked up with the company from the Third Battalion, with whom they’d just shared friendly waves. From the southwest side of the airport, elements of the First Battalion, which had moved onto high ground there in the night, formed the other claw in the pincer. The commandos, with the First and Third Battalions, moved immediately on the field, and the French forces there soon high-tailed it toward Port Lyautey. By 1030, the airport was in American hands.

Reconnoitering on the ridge above the Port Lyautey bridge, Colonel Jack Toffey and a company from the First Battalion spied French artillery setting up to the northeast on the Tangier highway—the same road that had carried René Malevergne out of Morocco nearly two months earlier. The U.S. Navy spotters with him called in strikes from the
Texas
, the
Eberle
, and the
Kearny
. The batteries were silenced but evidenced that there was still some fight in the French.

From the ancient crenellated walls of the Kasbah, soldiers of the French Foreign Legion fired down at Colonel de Rohan’s Second Battalion below in a setting that seemed, except for the modern weaponry, like a tableau from an earlier century. The Americans had thrown all of their available troops at the attack, including reserve forces of engineers and the “cooks and clerks” organized in the aviation companies by Nick Craw in transit across the ocean. They had cleared all entrenchments and machine-gun nests outside the wall of the structure but were pinned down by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire from within. Soon a call came to Truscott’s command center. Would it be possible to get some air support? And if so, how long would it take for it to get to the Kasbah?

As it happened, eight naval dive bombers were nearby, about to fly missions further inland to Meknes. Truscott’s command was able to locate a U.S. Navy spotter, who raced forward from the beach in a Bantam
jeep. Now stationed near the cannery in the shadow of the fort, Truscott watched as the planes circled above the site and then began their descent upon the target. The bombs whistled down on the fort and landed, rocking the ground all the way back to Truscott, who saw “
great clouds of smoke and dust rolling upwards” from within the bastion. “It was a beautiful sight for an old soldier’s eyes,” he would write later.

Major Dilley of the Second Battalion moved a company forward with bazookas, and they took aim at point-blank range at the Kasbah’s gate. An opening was blasted into the fort, and infantry rushed forward with bayonets at the ready. Soon a steady stream of French soldiers was coming out with hands up, prisoners of the Sixtieth Infantry.

Late in the morning of the tenth, Army Air Force pilot Daniel Rathbun was looking down from his P-40 at the Port Lyautey airfield, wondering where he was supposed to land. Launched a few minutes earlier from the
Chenango
, his plane was the first of some seventy-five P-40s that were coming into the airport, but what he saw on the strips below was more than a little daunting. Bomb craters pockmarked the concrete runways from one end to the other. Grass fields on both sides of the strip had been flooded. Also littering the ground were seven French Dewoitine D.520s that had been caught refueling and put to rest by Navy Wildcats on the first day of action.

To avoid the most hazardous crater at the start of the runway, Rathbun decided to begin his touchdown just past it; however, the strip was not very long to begin with—about 1,800 to 2,000 feet, he guessed—and landing at the spot he’d chosen would leave him just 1,000 feet in which to come down. He cut his speed so he wouldn’t come in so hot he’d run right off the runway, but as he did so, Rathbun’s engine stalled and his plane dropped down on the very crater he had tried to avoid. He skidded and turned and wound up in one of the watery grass strips beside the runway, but he was alive and uninjured.

The next P-40 to land, coming in on Rathbun’s tail, saw what had
happened to the first flier and decided to land in the swampy grass. He, too, landed in one piece, but his wheels were mired in mud, and the nose of his plane wound up pointing upward with a damaged propeller.

Rathbun immediately decided that he had to warn the other P-40s coming in that the airfield was in no condition to receive them. He saw a destroyer stuck in the river to the east of the Port Lyautey field and raced in her direction. Rathbun hollered to the
Dallas
to please send a message to the
Chenango
to halt further launches until the runways could be repaired. Whether the message was sent and ignored or never sent Rathbun never knew. Forty-five minutes later, more planes began to arrive, and the airport remained in no shape to receive them.

G
reat, billowing clouds of dark smoke blossomed above the city of Port Lyautey and rose skyward early in the afternoon of the tenth. The canopy of smoke and flame was coming from oil storage tanks located near the port, hit by U.S. Navy gunfire. Evidence of continuing battle could be heard and seen to the southeast of the airport as well, toward Meknes; and to the north, the French had blown several arches on the bridge above Lyautey, which drooped down toward the river. P-40’s were still trying to land at the airport, but the damaged field continued to take its toll. Planes avoiding the potholes that Daniel Rathbun had tried to warn them about were ditching into the swampy water on either side of the east/west runway. Before the day was through, at least twenty P-40s had been made inoperable by the landings.

Meanwhile, the
Dallas
stayed trapped in its mire, waiting for high tide to come and push it free. René Malevergne sat feeling the uneasy mix of tension and exhaustion that had been his ongoing condition for days now. Rumor in the officers’ wardroom had it that the Kasbah was taken, and its capture, along with the taking of the airport, meant that the battle was winding down. He assumed he would soon be able to see Germaine and the children, but as much as anything else it was this nearness to the finish line that was driving his tension. He was so close to home now that he could feel the warmth of reunion, but he still must do his duty for the Americans.

A
Dallas
officer asked Malevergne if he could come to the bridge. Three citizens of Port Lyautey, who’d been found wandering between the lines, were on board for questioning, but they spoke little or no English. Could he translate? So apparently Malevergne, the man who had had trouble making himself understood to Al Gruenther a month earlier, was now an interpreter for the Americans, as well as a river guide. He
got up to help and found himself greeting a trio of French Moroccans who turned out to be acquaintances of his. They had gone out toward the bridge out of simple curiosity; and now, looking at Malevergne, they were astonished to find their neighbor on this American ship, serving as translator of their explanation.

Malevergne asked immediately about his family. Unfortunately, no one in the group had any news for him. He was asked by the Americans to quiz them about French troop strength in the city, but they were hesitant to supply information. Despite the obvious evidence that a new regime was here, they still were concerned about the Vichyists.
What if the police commissioner finds out?