1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Meanwhile, the Americans were using every stratagem they could think of to convince the Vichy French not to oppose the invasions. To the disgust of many of its own citizens, the United States had continued diplomatic relations with the Vichy regime on the theory that it might somehow be useful. In fact, it was. Robert D. Murphy, the American consul general at the Vichy court, had been currying favor with a number of ranking French officers and political figures thought to be opposed to the Vichyites, and who he hoped would cooperate with the Allies once the time came. Being a diplomat from a supposedly friendly country, Murphy was allowed to travel to North Africa, where he not only continued to cultivate important friendships but also gathered critical information on such things as harbor and beach defenses, tide and surf conditions, airfields, roads, and the attitudes of French troops.

  Not only that but just as the U.S. troop convoys were steaming out from American ports, U.S. Army General Mark Clark was sent by Eisenhower to cram his lanky form into a British submarine and cross the Mediterranean to Algiers, where he would meet with French commanders believed to favor the Allies. Here the situation became especially tricky.

  Most French commanders still detested the British for what they had done to the French navy in the summer of 1940, not long after the fall of France. Then, British high command had realized immediately that if the powerful French naval fleet fell into the hands of the Germans, it would spell catastrophe for the British, who would have to face a German navy suddenly more than doubled in size, in addition to the Italian navy. Consequently, plans were laid for the neutralization of the French navy. Those French warships that were in England at the time were seized before they could sail back to France, but that still left four strong French fleets in the Mediterranean and in Africa. One, at the French Mediterranean port of Toulon, was untouchable, but there were other forces at Dakar, French West Africa, in Alexandria, Egypt, and at Oran, in Algeria. The British attacked the French fleet at Dakar without success, but in Alexandria an agreement was reached with the French commanding admiral, who would disarm his ships and not try and sail out of the harbor. It was in Oran that the trouble occurred.

  On July 3, 1940, a British admiral had appeared off the French fleet anchorage near Oran with three battleships, two cruisers, eleven destroyers, and an aircraft carrier. He presented the French admiral with an ultimatum: 1) Come fight with us, 2) Sail your ships to England, America, or some other neutral port, 3) Sink your ships yourselves, or 4) We will sink them for you. Being bottled up in harbor put the French at a decided disadvantage, but the French admiral was having none of the British ultimatum. He radioed for reinforcements from the French fleet at Toulon, then began stalling for time. The British were soon on to this and, just before sunset, they reluctantly opened fire, “the first shots fired by the British against the French since Waterloo.”7

  In the ensuing brief and unequal fight, three French battleships were sunk, as well as many destroyers and support ships, with the loss of more than 1,200 French sailors. The French, from Vichy on up, were enraged at their former ally for taking what they saw as a brutal and unnecessary action.* In any case, two years later, by the autumn of 1942, the French had still not forgiven the British for this perceived treachery and their animosity remained such that even though General Clark arrived at Algiers in a British submarine, the sailors who rowed him ashore were prudently dressed in American uniforms. Clark’s secret talks with the French leaders, held at a farmhouse not far from the coast, were encouraging but inconclusive. For reasons of secrecy, Clark did not divulge the date of the invasion, and so it became difficult for the French leaders, even if they wished, to pass along advance orders to their troops not to resist. There was simply too much risk of a leak.

  Two hours before dawn on November 8, 1942, the U.S. invasion force appeared off Casablanca and also Safi, well to the south. Meteorologists in Washington and elsewhere had gloomily forecast fifteen-foot breakers crashing onto the Atlantic coast, but the American admiral commanding decided to rely on his own weather forecaster, who thought the storm that would bring such dangerous surf was still a few days away. Turned out he was right. Six thousand soldiers, the first wave of the invasion force, began climbing down cargo nets into waiting Higgins boats and navy launches and heading for the beach. Tanks and artillery were loaded into larger landing vessels. The lights of Casablanca twinkled in the distance.

  Noise from the surf rolling onto the beaches masked the sound of the American landing boats for most of the trip, but as they neared shore searchlights began to flash on, first up in the air to look for aircraft, then onto the water where they discovered the invasion force. Almost immediately guns from U.S. destroyers put the lights out, and most of the troops were landed safely on the beaches near the town of Fedala, about twelve miles northeast of Casablanca. Just as a soggy gray dawn began to break over the Atlantic coast, the question of whether or not the French would oppose the invasion was answered by a roar from shore batteries located on either side of the landing beaches. American destroyers, cruisers, and a battleship immediately returned fire and a half day gun battle ensued. Powerful batteries at Casablanca, as well as the large guns of an unfinished French battleship lying in the harbor, entered into the fray. Seven French destroyers and a cruiser sortied from the harbor and joined the sea battle, as well as eight submarines.

  By noon, all of the French destroyers had been wrecked; five of the submarines were sunk and the rest were chased off. The French cruiser was badly damaged by the American cruisers Augusta and Brooklyn and turned tail for the harbor. Aboard the U.S. destroyer Wilkes, which had been screening for the Augusta and Brooklyn during their fight with the French cruiser, the following colloquy was reported between an engine-room officer and a man on the bridge who was sending down orders on the telephone concerning speed. The officer in the engine room felt great shuddering blasts from the Wilkes’s guns and the bridge called for more speed. When he asked, “What’s going on up there?” he was told, “Enemy cruiser is chasing us!” Suddenly he was nearly knocked down by an abrupt swerve as the ship changed directions and an order came down for more speed. “What’s going on now?” the engine-room officer shouted back. “We’re chasing the enemy cruiser!” came the reply.8

  Meantime, Major General George S. Patton sent two colonels and a major bearing an American flag and a white flag of truce to see the French admiral about a cease-fire, but he would not see them and instead sent an aide to tell them to go away. As one of the American officers demanded, “in his best Harvard French,” a personal response from the admiral, a blast from one of the shore batteries firing at the American forces rattled the windows of the Admiralty building, rendering everyone momentarily silent. Then the French aide said haughtily, “Voila, votre reponse!”9

  By afternoon of D-day the town of Fedala had been secured by American troops, but only about 7,500 of the 19,500 soldiers destined to capture Casablanca had been able to disembark, due to the naval battles, lack of landing craft, and other reasons.* The French continued whatever resistance they could manage, but over the next two days they were worn down by planes from American carriers and the big shells from U.S. battleships, whose fingers of death ranged eight to ten miles inland to break up truck convoys of reinforcements. By November 10 Casablanca was surrounded and French honneur at last had been satisfied. At a hastily called peace conference, the French admiral Francois Michelier, who had caused all the trouble, finally shook hands with the American admiral Kent Hewitt. “I had my orders and did my duty,” he told Hewitt. “You had yours and did your duty; now that is over, and we are ready to cooperate.”10

  The landings at the other invasion points in Morocco and Algeria had gone off, if not smoothly at least sufficiently well to convince most French troops to stop fighting. More than a hundred thousand American and British soldiers were pouring in, but diplomatically and politically the affair was still a mess. French admirals and generals had been running about arresting fellow admirals and genera
ls whom they suspected of being disloyal on behalf of the Allies, and all this needed to be straightened out. Further, some weeks before the invasion the Allies had buttonholed a French general named Henri Giraud, who had been hiding in southern France after having escaped from the notorious German prison at Konigstein. Giraud, a nationally known figure who had also escaped from the Germans during World War I, was considered by the Allies a good choice to lead and rally French Vichy forces in North Africa, a man of stature and loyalty, or so they had been told. Accordingly, Giraud was loaded into a British submarine and taken to Gibraltar on the eve of the invasion and led into Eisenhower’s underground headquarters, where he made himself unbearable.

  Giraud’s story warrants amplification. The sixty-three-year-old general was, among other things, a master of disguises. When he had escaped from the Germans in 1914, he made his way across half of Europe posing as “a butcher, a stable boy, a coal merchant and a magician in a traveling circus.” In his more recent escape from the Konigstein dungeon, he “shaved his mustache, darkened his hair with brick dust,” and, using a homemade rope, which he had plaited himself, lowered himself down 150 feet to the Elbe, after which he billed himself as an engineer from Alsace and made it back to France “with a 100,000 mark reward on his head.”11

  After the formalities were concluded, the first thing Giraud announced to Eisenhower—through an interpreter, since he spoke no English—was that he expected to be in supreme command of all Allied forces in North Africa. He had even brought with him detailed plans for defeating the Germans completely, as well as for the liberation of France. The startled Eisenhower offered Giraud command of all the French forces in North Africa, but was not about to offer him his own job, especially not since the invasion was set for the following morning. For his part, Giraud persisted, grandstanded, sulked, and threatened not to help the Allies at all.

  Meanwhile, Eisenhower had found bigger fish to fry. It turned out that on D-day, November 8, the five-star French admiral Francois Darlan, the current supreme commander of all Vichy affairs in North Africa, had gone to Algiers to visit his sick son, arriving as it turned out just in time for the Allied invasion. He was promptly captured and put under the screws of the American high command. If nothing else, Darlan was a superb waffler. He at first agreed to order all French sailors and troops to lay down their arms; then he changed his mind and said he would first have to ask Petain at Vichy. When, as expected, Petain told him to fight on, Darlan caved again to Allied pressure, but then lied and insisted he had no legal authority outside the city of Algiers.

  As the invasion progressed, Darlan—then jailed by the Allies—began to see the magnitude of it, and the handwriting on the wall, if he refused to help. Finally he began issuing orders in the name of the Vichy government, which slowly brought the French military and civil units around. For the present, this was a good thing; French North Africa was populated with more than twenty million dependent Arabs, all of whom required at least the facade of civilization: the administration of railroads, electric power, water, roads and bridges, hospitals and other civil services, and infrastructure, which would have been almost impossible for the Allies to have taken over and still fight a war against the Germans. Over time, however, Darlan proved to be, in the words of one American commander, “a needle-nosed, sharp-chinned little weasel,” and thus there was little or no regret in the Allied high command when he was assassinated in his own office by an Algerian lunatic whose goal seemed to be the restoration of the monarchy in France.12

  In the midst of this opéra boujfée came excellent news from a thousand miles to the east. There, after defeating the army of General Rommel on November 5, and (once again) driving it out of Egypt, the British Eighth Army, under General Bernard Montgomery, was pressing the Germans westward across the great Libyan Desert, hoping to deliver it into the waiting embrace of the Americans who, according to plan, should have occupied Tunisia within a few weeks. As it turned out, the road to Tunisia was a hard road to travel, harder than anyone would have expected. Not long after Casablanca was taken, an American lieutenant wrote to his mother, “This is a land of strange ways, just like the old Bible pictures. Camels and donkeys plow together, the Arabs pray and the women do all the work.”13

  Chapter Nineteen

  While encouraging events were coming to pass in North Africa, in the South Pacific, and for the Russian armies around Stalingrad, an ordeal of fiendish cruelty was in progress in the Philippines, where thousands of American prisoners languished in Japanese prison camps.

  After the horrid Bataan Death March and the misery and death at Camp O’Donnell, in June 1942 the Japanese decided to move the American soldiers to a more permanent POW camp: Cabanatuan, about forty miles northeast of O’Donnell. Cabanatuan, which means “place of rocks,” had been a half-finished training camp for a newly created Philippine army division. It was located in flat, arid country about ten miles outside the city of Cabanatuan, a bustling town of about fifty thousand. About seventy rickety, palm-thatched barracks had been constructed there to hold forty men each; when the POWs arrived, they were crammed in as many as a hundred and twenty to a building.

  Fewer than 9,000 Americans out of the original 12,000 who had been captured on Bataan ever got to Cabanatuan; the rest had died or been murdered on the way. Most of those who did arrive were in terrible health and not much could be done for them. They had diphtheria, chronic dysentery, beriberi, pellagra, edema, scurvy, malaria. Although there were a number of American doctors in the compound, lifesaving supplies such as sulfa, quinine, bandages, antiseptics, and anesthesia were unavailable. There wasn’t even soap or toilet paper. Food was at the starvation level, and most of the men had become scarecrows or, as one man expressed it, “the living dead.” If only because it was larger, and there was more water (though most of it was disgustingly polluted), Cabanatuan was at least a slight improvement over the hellhole of O’Donnell.

  Cabanatuan was surrounded by barbed wire, with guards manning machine guns posted in towers at each corner. Still, the Japanese were fearful about possible escapes and to discourage this they divided all the prisoners into ten-man “shooting squads.” In other words, if any man in the squad escaped, the rest would be lined up and shot. Once, the Japanese roster showed that a man was missing and the other nine were sent to the guardhouse to await the firing squad. At the last moment good news arrived: “the tenth man’s body was discovered under one of the buildings where he had crawled to die. He was clutching the uneaten portion of a dead rat.”1

  Occasionally, sympathetic Filipinos from the city would try to get a little food to the prisoners, but this was dangerous business. One night three officers were caught dragging sacks of food and a Japanese court was convened. The three were given a choice of being executed immediately or enduring three days of torture. The officers elected for the torture, hoping to make it through. They were taken just outside the fence, in plain view of the entire camp, and forced to dig their own graves. Then the torture began. The three Americans were tied to poles in the baking sun and the Japanese took turns beating them. They cried pitifully throughout the day as they were beaten by each change of the guard. An old colonel was the first to crack, begging to be shot. The Japanese obliged him; a firing squad was hastily assembled and he soon toppled into his grave. Next day a second of the officers, whose eye had been gouged out and hung from its socket, could stand it no more and also asked to be shot, and was. The third man, a lieutenant, “toughed it out until nearly the third day. Beaten until an ear hung by a thread down to his shoulder, and unrecognizable,” he too asked for death. Army Captain Ralph E. Hibbs, a doctor, who saw it all, remarked, “He was a brave man. He gave it all he had. They killed him with a three-man execution squad as he knelt at his grave staring at them.”2 Atrocity stories such as this are so common they soon become depressingly repetitive and so I have tried not to relate too many of them in this narrative.

  The American prisoners continued to die at a horrific ra
te: in June, 503; in July, 786. A crude hospital was quickly set up by American POW medical officers, but there wasn’t much that could be done; soldiers who were clearly dying got sent to a lice-, rat-, and maggot-infested barracks known as St. Peter’s, or in one case the Zero Ward. Few got out alive. Disposing of the bodies was a particularly hideous chore. The men had blocked out ground for crude cemeteries, which were given such names as the Pearly Gates and Boot Hill—this passed for humor among those tormented souls.

  “All that could be done was to bury the dead each day in mass graves, over which dirt was shoveled, and when it rained the dirt would often wash away and the bodies float to the surface in various stages of decomposition. Once an old toothless sergeant appeared at the hospital and asked to speak with the colonel:

  “‘Colonel, we’re uh . . .’

  “‘Speak up, sergeant.’

  “‘We want a doctor to go to Pearly Gates with us. Uh, we’re afraid.’”

  The colonel, who was witnessing death by the hour, became flushed and angry.

  “‘Afraid? Afraid!’

  “‘Not like that, colonel. The other day we laid one out and were getting ready to cover him up, you see, and, well, I looked down and he was still breathing, and, well . . .’

  “‘I see,’ the colonel said, softening. ‘Yeah, okay. I’ll send a doctor in each morning.’”3

  The poet-lieutenant Henry Lee, soon himself to die, looked out on the foulness of the burial grounds and composed a heartbreaking epitaph to his fellow prisoners, living and deceased.