Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  “Behind the Soviet divisions storming toward us we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them the specter of terror, mass hunger, and complete anarchy,” Goebbels described. The goal of Bolshevism, he declared, “is Jewish world revolution. The Jews want to spread chaos across the Reich and Europe, so that in the resultant despair and hopelessness they can establish their international, Bolshevist, concealed-capitalist tyranny.” International Jewry, he sneered, was an “evil fermentation of decomposition”—a threat that “finds its cynical pleasure in plunging the world into chaos, and thereby bringing about the fall of thousand-year-old cultures to which it has contributed nothing.”25

  Considering Jews had made German culture and science world famous, and that the Jewish percentage of Germany’s population in 1933 had been less than 1 percent, Goebbels’s claims were not only preposterous, but malevolent beyond belief—masking, sadly, the real truth: the SS liquidation teams that Hitler and Heinrich Himmler had unleashed when attacking the Soviet Union, as well as the deliberate extermination of innocent Jewish civilians across Europe. Yet before an audience of fifteen thousand Nazi stalwarts, Goebbels’s newsreel cameramen “captured extraordinary scenes of emotion,” his biographer would describe. “Within minutes the audience was leaping to its feet, saluting, screaming, and chanting”—their cries of “Führer command! We obey!” foreshadowing the shrill madness of Orwell’s Animal Farm.

  “The orgiastic climax was reached by the question: ‘Do you want total war? Do you want war more total, if need be, and more radical than we can even begin to conceive of today?’ And then, almost casually, ‘Do you agree that anybody who injures our war effort should be put to death?’”

  “The bellow of assent each time was deafening,” Goebbels’s biographer would record26—the Reich minister’s speech interrupted more than two hundred times by literally hysterical applause. Not least would be the climax, when Goebbels reached his frenzied, rhetorical “masterpiece,” modeled on Hitler’s earlier “masterpieces.”

  “Nun, Volk, steh auf, und Sturm, brich los!”—“Now, people of Germany, rise up—and storm: break loose!”27

  PART FIVE

  * * *

  Kasserine

  17

  Kasserine

  SHORTLY AFTER THE President’s return to Washington, the last pocket of forty thousand starving soldiers of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad raised the white flag—knowing their chances of survival as prisoners of war were dim.

  The SS and Wehrmacht had ruthlessly conquered, murdered, executed, pillaged, and despoiled too much, too mercilessly, since the launch of Operation Barbarossa to expect much mercy. Of the 113,000 German soldiers taken prisoner in the battle for the Russian city of Stalingrad, few would ever return to their Vaterland.1 “I’m not cowardly, just sad that I can give no greater proof of my bravery,” one soldier had written in his last, despairing letter home, “than to die for such pointlessness, not to say crime.”2

  For the Soviet armies, Stalingrad, not Torch, was the turning point of the war. Russian forces had been fighting the Wehrmacht and its Romanian, Hungarian, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and other Axis assault forces relentlessly since June 1941. In those seventeen months, the Soviets had taken phenomenal casualties before finally learning how to halt and defeat Germans in battle. Americans had been in battle barely a few weeks.

  The campaign in Tunisia against predominantly German forces would now evidence the same learning process, if on a considerably smaller scale.

  As Allied units began to meet German rather than Vichy French forces in combat, the situation suddenly resembled chaos in Russia at the start of Barbarossa. Even as Roosevelt presided over the conference at Casablanca, in fact, armored German forces struck at the Allied line in the Eastern Dorsal region of the Atlas Mountains, manned by poorly armed French troops. Some thirty-five hundred troops immediately surrendered; the rest ran for their lives. “The French began showing signs of complete collapse along the front as early as the seventeenth,” Eisenhower jotted in his diary on January 19, 1943. “Each day the tactical situation has gotten worse.”3

  The President, who seldom if ever interfered in tactical dispositions, had urged while at Casablanca that another well-armed U.S. division be sent up the line from northern Morocco, but Marshall and Stimson’s obsession with a possible German counterinvasion via Spain and Spanish Morocco had tied Eisenhower’s hands. Transportation was a further fetter. “We’ve had our railroad temporarily interrupted twice,” Ike lamented. “I’m getting weary of it, but can’t move the troops (even if I had enough) to protect the lines.”4 Wisely waiting for better weather and more troops, he wanted to hold fast until Montgomery’s British Eighth Army drew closer from Libya, and a proper, integrated Allied offensive could be readied within the capabilities of largely green troops.

  The Germans, however, would not oblige. On January 30, 1943, five days after the President’s departure from Morocco, the Twenty-First Panzer Division “struck Faid Pass in a three-pronged attack as precise as a pitchfork,” campaign historian Rick Atkinson aptly described—killing almost a thousand French defenders in a day.5 Then, luring counterattacking U.S. armored forces into a trap, the Germans decimated both U.S. infantry and tanks—leaving Wehrmacht forces, backed by Stuka dive-bombers, in control of Faïd Pass and the Eastern Dorsal.

  This, however, was just the beginning. On February 14 the Germans launched a Valentine’s Day massacre. Warned that German armor was on the move, Eisenhower wanted to withdraw fifty-nine-year-old Lloyd Fredendall’s II Corps to safer positions in the Grand Dorsal, but General Fredendall resisted, and Eisenhower felt too much of a tenderfoot to insist, especially since Fredendall was a protégé of General Marshall’s. The result would soon be a bloodbath—this time American.

  A German officer “could not help wondering whether the officers directing the American effort knew what they were doing.”6 They didn’t. Their forces were dispersed and were mutually unsupporting, as well as lacking effective air cover. They were, in short, completely unprepared for the two German armored contingents about to hit them: General von Arnim’s Frühlingswind assault through the Faïd Pass to Sidi Bou Zid, and Field Marshal Rommel’s attack further south: Morgenluft. “We are going to go all out for the total destruction of the Americans,” Field Marshal Kesselring, the German commander in chief South, declared.7

  “You’re taking too many trips to the front,” General Marshall had criticized Eisenhower at Algiers, after flying there from Casablanca. “You ought to depend more on reports,” he’d advised—obtusely. Patton had counseled the opposite.

  Eisenhower’s deference to Marshall’s authority pretty much condemned the Allies to defeat—Eisenhower still too young to defy the U.S. Army chief of staff. “Absolute priority” alerts had been sent out, once Ultra intelligence decrypts of German signals recognized something big was up, but it was too late. As German forces smashed their way forward with the latest Tiger tanks, new Nebelwerfer multiple-nozzled mortars, and Stuka ground-attack dive-bombers dovetailing with the Wehrmacht advance, American officers began openly yelling at their men to flee for their lives. In less than twelve hours von Arnim and Rommel’s pincers had closed, having seized the high spine of the central Dorsal and threatening to end run the entire Allied line in Tunisia.

  Absolute pandemonium characterized the initial U.S. response—followed once again by brave American tankers, ordered to counterattack, being lured into German 88mm mobile-artillery traps: almost a hundred American tanks destroyed with their crews, twenty-nine artillery guns, seven half-tracks, and sixteen hundred casualties suffered at Sidi Bou Zid alone. And this was just the start. Open Allied radio communications allowed the Germans to know American whereabouts and moves without difficulty. Huge Allied gasoline and ammunition dumps were blown up or surrendered, as were three U.S. airfields. The German 88s and Tiger tanks had a field day. The battle became a rout as American troops retreated, pell-mell. Fredendall abandoned his laboriously ca
rved subterranean hideout, far behind the frontlines. By February 17 his corps had been thrown back fifty miles—in three days. On February 19 Rommel then attacked at Kasserine. Panic ensued, with the British First Army commander of the overall Tunisian front ordering “no further withdrawal,” and to “fight to the last man.” Or last American, wags sneered.

  Fredendall even began moving his headquarters back to Constantine—more or less where Torch had begun, in November.

  Concerned that he had not sufficient supplies or reserves to fight much beyond Kasserine, Rommel was satisfied with what he’d achieved; he obtained grudging consent to withdraw, sowing forty-three thousand mines as he did, and blowing up all bridges. He had given the Allies a “bloody nose”—inflicting six thousand casualties, destroying almost 220 tanks and over 200 artillery guns, for less than a thousand German casualties, and had set back the Allied timetable for advance by months.

  Joseph Goebbels, ecstatic at the reception given to his totaler Krieg speech, was further delighted by the news of German victory in Tunisia, which went some way to overcome public despondency when word of the surrender of Stalingrad was finally released.

  Once again German troops had proven they were the best soldiers in the world and could not be beaten, even by numerically larger forces. “The Americans have made a really terrible showing,” Goebbels noted in his diary—“absolutely awful. Which is reassuring, in the event the Americans try to mount an invasion of continental Europe against German troops. They will probably be so smashed up,” he commented, “they won’t know what hit them.”8

  The next day, still savoring the news from Tunisia, he reflected: “This U.S. defeat gives us an excellent insight into American fighting ability in case of an American invasion of Europe. I think our soldiers would sooner rip their throats out than let them into Germany. At any rate, the spirit here among the German people is hard to beat.”9

  Hitler was außerordentlich zufrieden with Rommel—extraordinarily pleased, Goebbels added, after speaking with the Führer.10

  18

  Arch-Admirals and Arch-Generals

  IN WASHINGTON, NEWS of the American defeat at Kasserine was met with disbelief.

  The secretary of war and senior officers in the War Department who had urged the President to mount a cross-Channel invasion in the summer of 1943, as soon as Tunisia was cleared of enemy forces—even in tandem with an invasion of Sicily, should the President insist on Operation Husky, as it was code-named, to placate British anxiety to clear the Mediterranean sea route to Suez and India—were chastened. The prospects for a successful cross-Channel assault now looked pretty dire, even to Pentagon fantasists. For a moment, in fact, it looked as if Tunisia might be cleared not of Axis forces, but of American.

  Stimson, sadly, took this as a sign the Allies should not have landed in Northwest Africa at all. The President demurred. The lesson, in his view, was the opposite: namely the need for more battle experience against German troops.

  Combat, command, and campaign experience: these were crucial—not only at unit level, but in senior command and international-coalition cooperation. It was not only Fredendall who failed in battle. Colonel—later Brigadier General—Paul Robinett would afterward write, “One would have to search all history to find a more jumbled command structure than that of the Allies in this operation.”1 Until the onset of battlefield defeat, however, no one had seemed interested in command structures or battle techniques against a German enemy. In Tripoli, General Montgomery had organized a special “study week” or teach-in to “check up on our battle technique,” launching it with a two-hour address that one British general thought “one of the best addresses I have ever heard and that is saying a lot.” Thanks to Rommel’s attack only a handful of U.S. officers were sent to attend, however, and among those who did go, General Patton was heard boasting, “I may be old, I may be slow, I may be stoopid, and I know I’m deaf, but it just don’t mean a thing to me.”2

  On his return to Morocco, once the true extent of American debacle became clear, even Patton began to rethink his supercilious judgment. “The show was very bad—very bad indeed,” he confided in a letter to his wife.3 The matter of how to fight the Germans in battle had come to mean life or death to ninety thousand American soldiers in Tunisia. Even Stimson, in Washington, was shocked. “Heavy fighting is going on,” he’d noted in his diary on February 15, “and we have yet to see whether the Americans can recover themselves and stand up to it.”4 That they hadn’t, in the days thereafter, was galling.

  Two days later Stimson was acknowledging that Rommel had mounted a veritable “coup” in southern Tunisia. “He has attacked our thin line of American troops in that region with a comparatively overwhelming force of tanks and has driven them back some thirty miles. Eisenhower has been expecting it and two or three days ago sent a full appraisal of the situation and of his expectation,” Stimson recorded, “and he has withdrawn his force to a new line I hope without suffering irretrievable losses.” The secretary worried, nevertheless, that the very distance that reinforcements would have to travel would count against the Allies. “We had such good luck in the beginning but these things were lost sight of”—thanks largely to his and Marshall’s obsession with a German flank attack across Spain and the Mediterranean. “Now they will begin to count against us,” he lamented. “Nevertheless we must not forget the tremendous and permanent gains which our adventure has brought us—the thus far safe occupation of northwest Africa; the acquisition of Dakar and west Africa; the diversion of Hitler’s troops from the eastern front, and the irretrievable losses which he has suffered aided by that fact. All of these gains to us are, I hope, permanent and well worth any local setbacks.”5

  Elderly and obstinate to a fault when it came to the stark, bloody business of fighting real Germans in real battle, Stimson was still thinking of “gains” in strategic terms, however—not in combat and command experience: the blooding of those who had to do America’s fighting, and who deserved better of their senior officers. Yet as the hours went by and reports came in of panic, desertions in the field, mass flight, surrenders, and demolitions, Stimson felt it was time to be honest. On February 18 he finally gave a press conference that even Joseph Goebbels found “extraordinary in its frankness.”6

  “Today I had a sharp reverse to report to the press at the press conference,” Stimson admitted frankly in his diary, having “decided to make no effort to whitewash it but to present it in its sharp outlines and simply in my own language to admit that it was a sharp setback and it would be folly to try to minimize it and it would be still greater folly to exaggerate it . . . I talked it over with Marshall afterwards. The only thing Marshall was worried about is that there are two extra divisions that apparently Rommel hasn’t used of armored forces and is wondering where those are. Incidentally he told me that when they were in Casablanca the President wanted to divert another one of the divisions from George Patton’s force at the gates of Gibraltar and ship them up into the attack in Tunisia. The Staff, however, had refused to agree to this.”7

  The true lesson—that Tunisia was America’s military training ground—still eluded Stimson, though. Despite his own trip to Casablanca and then Algiers, General Marshall seemed similarly blinkered. At the Pentagon, Stimson shared with Marshall, on Marshall’s return, his feeling they’d had extraordinary “luck so far and all the excitement of the success of the first attack, but now the length of communications is going to tell and we are going to be under constant pressure from the President, among others, to strip our force at the Gate [in Morocco] and send them out to Tunisia to meet the pressure that is going on there. He agreed with me that this would be disastrous.”8

  Disastrous?

  That Marshall and Stimson should have continued to take counsel of such fears of a German invasion of Morocco through Spain and across the Straits of Gibraltar, even in mid-February 1943, was almost risible; certainly it made their continuing urging of a cross-Channel attack that coming summer,
in tandem with the plan to invade Sicily, jejune beyond belief.

  Fortunately, saner minds saw the situation differently. In the press, at least, the U.S. debacle in Tunisia did at least serve to dampen public ardor for a cross-Channel assault that year.

  In Berlin, Dr. Goebbels was derisive. Reading British reports of the battle, expressing ill-concealed contempt for American fighting skills, Goebbels likened the situation to that of German forces having to fight with disappointing allies. “So the English now have their own Italians,” he mocked. “We can grant them that. The British have always known how to get others to fight their battles; now they have to acknowledge Americans are even better at it,”9 he sneered. As if this were not enough, he went on: “The Americans prefer to fight their battles in Hollywood rather than on the rough ground of Tunisia, where instead of facing paper tanks they’re up against German panzers.”10 And given the awe of Rommel once again being expressed in London newspapers, his endlessly suspicious mind made him wonder if the British, in the aftermath of the battle, were using the American defeat to quieten calls for a Second Front, which the British wisely knew would fail—or at any rate “delay” the cross-Channel assault Stalin was calling for. “They’re seriously doubting if they can really put together a successful Second Front.”11

  Kasserine, then, provided a wake-up call for the Allies. Obtaining authorization from Marshall to dismiss Fredendall and replace him with General George Patton, Eisenhower told Patton to fire the incompetent and “to be perfectly cold-blooded about it.”12