Twelve Desperate Miles (42 page)

The battle for Port Lyautey was over. Eighty-four American soldiers had given their lives in the fight, beginning with Nick Craw. Another 11 members of the U.S. Navy were dead, and more than 250 soldiers and
seamen were wounded. Soon ground would be broken on a cemetery. It was decided that a corner of the Kasbah would be an appropriate site, and Nick Craw was the first person interred there.

Early in the morning on the eleventh, a car holding a pair of French officers coming from Rabat approached an American outpost north of Fedala with a bugle blaring and white flags affixed to its bumpers. It carried papers from General Lascroux in Rabat to General Esre in Casablanca ordering the French army to immediately suspend hostilities against the Americans. The car was directed to George Patton (at the Hotel Miramar in downtown Fedala), who authorized their continued trip to General Esre in Casablanca. Patton warned the envoys that they must hurry: he had ordered an attack at dawn, and it would be too late to prevent it if they could not return with an agreement from Casablanca before then. As a precaution against needless bloodshed, however, Patton radioed Admiral Hewitt after the French officers left, to let the navy know that a cease-fire was pending.

Not only was this Armistice Day, but November 11 was George Patton’s fifty-seventh birthday as well. He’d spent the night at the hotel, sleeping in the bed previously occupied by the chief of the German Armistice Commission—a symbolism that Patton relished. He’d gone to sleep with a great deal of confidence about what the morrow would bring. His army forces, under the command of General Jonathan Anderson, ringed 180 degrees of the city of Casablanca; “
only the Sherman tanks from Safi were wanting for a complete investiture.” The day before, Truscott had taken the airfield and Kasbah at Port Lyautey, and Harmon’s tanks, after successfully thwarting an effort by the French in Marrakech to reinforce Casablanca, were speeding north from Safi. Furthermore, in Casablanca harbor, the
Jean Bart
, which had been silent since being hit on the first day of the invasion, had suddenly opened up on the
Augusta
. This last-gasp attack prompted a nine-plane assault from navy bombers from the carrier
Ranger
. Two hits from a couple of thousand-pound bombs put
gaping holes in the side of the French battleship’s hull. She did not open her guns again.

Essentially, Casablanca was surrounded from the sea and land. Attacks on the city proper had been incidental and damage light, but should the French continue to resist, the peace in Casablanca would be gone. At 0600, as Patton waited in Fedala to hear back from the officers who’d sped away to the city, Anderson sat poised to enter; the warships of the navy, including the
Augusta
, the
New York
, the
Cleveland
, and several destroyers, ringed the harbor of Casablanca, ready to finish off the
Jean Bart
and support the army’s advance; and planes from the
Ranger
were set to begin the first of many bombing runs on the city. The attack was scheduled for 0715. At 0655, the French officers returned under a flag of truce. General Noguès, commander of the French army in Morocco, and Admiral Michelier of the French navy had
received word from Admiral Darlan, who had been recognized by Eisenhower as the chief military authority in French Morocco, to suspend hostilities.

The Western Task Force of Operation Torch had achieved its goal: French Morocco was in American hands, and now the Allies could turn their attention to the Germans. The French had fought, but not so fiercely as to truly test American forces. Many, especially the British, would continue to question the strategic need for the invasion of Morocco, but it had brought almost 35,000 troops to Northwest Africa with a relatively light amount of damage and many lessons learned about amphibious assault in the process.

For Patton, it was now time to begin the process of reestablishing ties with the United States’ ancient allies, the French. An Armistice Day celebration was in order.

“
General Noguès and Admiral Michelier came [to the Miramar Hotel] to discuss terms at 1400,” Patton told his diary that night. “I had a guard of honor for them. No use kicking a man when he is down.”

At 1400, surrounded by that guard, Patton and Hewitt received Noguès and Michelier at the Hotel Miramar. Hewitt apologized to Michelier, regretting that he had been forced to fire upon French ships.
“
I had my orders and did my duty,” the French admiral said. “You had yours and did your duty; now that is over, we are ready to cooperate.” Patton complimented the French military commanders on the effectiveness of their defenses and read a draft of the armistice statement.

Like Truscott’s regional proposal delivered at the Kasbah, it was generous and informal. Prisoners would be exchanged; French troops would be confined to their barracks but not disarmed; and Americans would control and occupy the region. They would await word of more lasting terms from the Joint Allied Command meeting then in Algiers.

This business taken care of, champagne and lunch were brought to the table. Patton rose to deliver the first of many toasts made with many glasses of champagne: “
To the liberation of France,” he said, “by the joint defeat of a common enemy.”

It had been a good birthday, indeed.

O
n that same Armistice Day, Warner Brothers sales executives in New York sent an excited suggestion to Jack Warner in Hollywood: To take further advantage of the studio’s unbelievable good luck in having a soon-to-be-released picture with a title that matched the exact location now at the center of the war effort, let’s shoot an additional scene that will reference the invasion. The idea was to add a coda to the film. Put Claude Rains’s Renault and Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine on the deck of a freighter on its way to a landing at Casablanca. Surround them with about fifty extras dressed as French freedom fighters. Have them listening to FDR’s stirring speech from early morning on the eighth as they approach the shore. Shoot it in a sound studio at Warner. Put it all on a foggy night.

Fortunately for the movie, cooler heads prevailed in Hollywood, and ultimately the sales reps in New York were vetoed. Jack Warner himself put the kibosh on the idea: “
It’s impossible to change this picture and make sense with story we told originally,” he wrote. “Story we want to tell of landing and everything would have to be complete new picture and would not fit in the present film. It’s such a great picture as it is, would be a misrepresentation if we were to come in now with a small tag scene about American troops landing etcetera, which as I have already said is a complete new story in itself.… Entire industry envies us with picture having title ‘Casablanca’ ready to release, and feel we should take advantage of this great scoop. Naturally the longer we wait to release it the less important title will be.”

The movie was originally scheduled to be released in early 1943. To
take advantage of the timing of the invasion of French Morocco, Warner Brothers pushed up
Casablanca
’s New York premiere to Thanksgiving Day 1942. It was an instant success. In a ten-week run at the Hollywood Theater in Manhattan, box-office receipts reached almost a quarter of a million dollars—the proceeds from one theater covering nearly a quarter of the cost of making the movie. The movie was given another boost when it opened across the nation in January. That release happened to coincide with FDR’s visit with Winston Churchill in Casablanca, centering worldwide interest once again on Morocco. As author Aljean Harmetz put it in
Round Up the Usual Suspects
, “
Casablanca
had sold the need for engagement on the side of the Allies in a war against fascism. Now the war sold the movie.”

On the morning of the thirteenth, two days after the armistice, UP reporter Walter Cronkite was allowed to go to Port Lyautey in the company of a
Texas
gunnery officer who wanted to assess the accuracy of the ship’s firing during the campaign. It was the first time he’d set foot in Morocco; Cronkite had filed a number of stories from the
Texas
via radio to British communications offices in Gibraltar, but he hadn’t yet been allowed on the battlefield itself by Navy authorities. As Cronkite and the
Texas
’s officer approached the center of Port Lyautey, an army colonel, spying the Navy man, came speeding toward them in a jeep. It turned out that there was an unexploded shell from the
Texas
just blocks ahead of them. What, the colonel wanted to know, was the navy going to do about it?

“
We’ve got an old rule in the Navy,” the lieutenant said in response. “Once the shell leaves the muzzle of the gun, it doesn’t belong to the Navy any longer.”

As far as the accuracy of the
Texas
’s fire was concerned, Cronkite offered an assessment in another anecdote from the same tour: Much of the
Texas
artillery over the past few days had been aimed at the Port Lyautey arsenal. When he and the gunnery officer approached this site, they came
across a moonscape of shell holes on the roads and surrounding acreage, but the arsenal still stood. An old French soldier, a World War I artilleryman, approached them. He wanted to congratulate the Americans on the precision of their shooting. “
You cut every road leading to the arsenal and not one shell inside to do damage,” the old soldier said. “You have left it intact for yourselves.”

Cronkite, attached to the
Texas
, was forced to return with the ship to Norfolk a week after the armistice. He was hoping that he could be the first war correspondent back to the United States from Morocco, but he learned en route that another correspondent from the INS news agency had already left for Boston on the battleship
Massachusetts
. A navy pilot came to his rescue. He offered to fly Cronkite to Norfolk from the sea, once the ship was within safe flying distance of the shore. It would save a couple of days of ocean travel.

Cronkite jumped at the offer. The plane was catapulted off the
Texas
, literally fired off the ship by way of one of the
Texas
’s fourteen-inch cannons. He and the pilot made it to Norfolk, and Cronkite immediately caught a plane for New York. When he entered the UP offices there, he was greeted like he had been lost at sea since October. It turned out that he might as well have been. None of the stories he’d filed from Morocco had been forwarded by the British at Gibraltar. “
I later learned that this had happened to several of the American correspondents in North Africa,” Cronkite later explained, “as the British military favored the dispatches from their own newspapers and press agencies.”

Cronkite did have the satisfaction of beating the INS reporter back to the States and soon filed the first of his many stories as a war correspondent.

The
Contessa
remained trapped in the Sebou for a full week after the end of hostilities, waiting for the monthly shift in the tide to raise the water high enough for her to navigate back down the river to the sea. In the meantime, a team of repair specialists from the
Texas
came aboard
to patch the hole in her bow, but the fix was only intended to get her to Gibraltar, where major repairs could be done. She left Morocco on the nineteenth and spent the next twenty-one days at anchorage in the British port while a more lasting repair made her fit to travel back across the ocean. U-boat activity around the coast of Africa had grown thick in the wake of the American invasion, so two destroyers accompanied the
Contessa
back to Casablanca. There she hooked up with convoy GUF 2A for a return voyage to the States. Once again the
Contessa
lost her group on the trip across the Atlantic, but she made it singly to New York at last, on Christmas Day 1942.