An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  The third and final frontal assault against a defended port in Operation TORCH was planned for Safi, 140 miles south of Casablanca. A Portuguese trading post in the age of Columbus, Safi had once earned fame for horse breeding and then as the world’s largest sardine fishery. Now it was an unlovely phosphate-exporting town of 25,000, famous for nothing. Much of the American battle planning was based on a yellowed 1906 French nautical chart, as well as on picture postcards from the Navy’s hoard of tourist snapshots and other memorabilia showing various ocean frontages. Jew’s Cliff, a sheltered beach outside Safi, had been identified through just such a faded postcard; renamed Yellow Beach, it was designated as a prime landing site.

  To seize Safi port itself, the Navy chose a pair of ancient destroyers, the U.S.S. Cole, which in 1921 had been the world’s fastest ship, capable of forty-two knots, and the U.S.S. Bernadou. A secret refitting in Bermuda intended to lighten the vessels and lower their profiles by amputating all masts and funnels had left them “sawed-off and hammered-down.” Each destroyer would carry 200 assault troops from the 47th Infantry Regiment, who received American flag armbands and two cartons of cigarettes apiece with which to buy French amity. Capturing the little harbor would allow Patton to land a battalion of fifty-four Sherman tanks, which could then outflank Casablanca from the south without exposure to the city’s formidable coastal guns.

  The Safi assault, known as BLACKSTONE, differed in key details from the port attacks at Oran and Algiers. Safi’s defenses were less sturdy than those in the Algerian cities, and American warships stood ready to pulverize any resistance. Also, to avoid alerting the defenders, the attack would slightly precede the beach landings. Commanding the 47th Infantry was Colonel Edwin H. Randle, an Indiana native with slicked hair and a wolfish mustache. “Violent, rapid, ruthless combat is the only way to win,” Randle told his men. “Fire low—richochets may kill the enemy and they certainly will scare him…. Make it tough and make it violent.”

  The usual muddle obtained during disembarkation, delaying the attack for half an hour. Loadmasters finally stretched a huge net at an angle from the transport Lyon to the destroyers’ decks and rolled the troops down into their comrades’ waiting arms. Only one soldier tumbled into the Atlantic, never to be seen again. At 3:50 A.M., Bernadou headed for shore, with Cole trailing. As the lead destroyer glided toward the granite breakwater, a sharp-eyed French sentry challenged her by flashing two Morse letters: “VH.” Bernadou’s captain answered by semaphore with precisely the same signal. The ruse befuddled the defenders for eighteen minutes until Bernadou rounded the bell buoy and announced her presence in the harbor at 4:28 A.M. by firing a pyrotechnic gadget designed to unfurl an illuminated American flag. The stubborn flag stayed furled, and the French opened fire.

  Machine-gun rounds cracked overhead and 75mm shells whistled into the water with a smoky hiss. Bernadou answered, sweeping the jetties with cannon and mortar fire, then ran aground so hard that her bow lurched thirty feet onto the fish wharf. The assault troops in Company K were flung to the deck.

  At sea, two radio messages ran through the American fleet. “Batter up” announced French resistance. “Play ball,” at 4:38 A.M., authorized retaliatory fire. With a tremendous roar, the battleship New York and cruiser Philadelphia complied, aiming at muzzle flashes nine miles away. Mesmerized soldiers and sailors watched the glowing crimson shells arc across the sky before smashing into the shore batteries north of Safi. One of New York’s fourteen-inch shells caught the lip of the three hundred-foot cliff at Pointe de la Tour, dug a furrow twenty feet long, then richocheted up through the fire control tower at Batterie la Railleuse, killing everyone inside. Scraps of scalp and the battery commander’s shredded uniform painted the shattered walls.

  Unsettled, the troops on Bernadou were slow to leave her. They flopped back to the deck with each new shell burst until rousted by their officers and shoved toward the single scrambling net now draped over the bow. Canteens and cigarette cartons snagged in the webbing, leaving soldiers caught like seined fish. The men finally found their valor on solid ground. French troops clattered down a jetty with a small field gun pulled by a donkey; sheets of American bullets sent them fleeing. The Cole managed to berth at the phosphate quay at five A.M. Company L swarmed ashore, chasing Foreign Legionnaires from the docks and seizing the railroad station, post office, and Shell Oil depot.

  Three more waves of infantrymen landed, remarkably, where they were supposed to land. White-robed Arabs crowded balconies above the harbor to watch. An American major later reported to the War Department:

  A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street intersections were crowded with head-turning natives, like a tennis gallery, following the whining flight of bullets over their heads.

  By early afternoon, the invaders held a beachhead five miles wide and half a mile deep. American sharpshooters knocked out three Renault tanks with rifle grenades, then turned the tank guns on a French barracks. Three hundred colonial troops surrendered. A solitary Vichy bomber made a feeble pass at the port; American anti-aircraft gunners, with zeal far eclipsing their marksmanship, shot up warehouse roofs and their own deck booms so vigorously that richocheting .50-caliber tracers resembled “someone trying to cut the cranes with a welder’s torch.”

  It was all too much for the French garrison commander. American troops stormed his headquarters at Front de Mer, capturing him and seven staff officers without a struggle. Their combined arsenal consisted of two revolvers. Except for a few snipers, Safi had fallen. U.S. casualties totaled four dead and twenty-five wounded.

  Eisenhower had trusted in his luck, and so far his luck had held. Only by the clock on his office wall in the Gibraltar tunnel did the commander-in-chief know that dawn had come on November 8. He neither heard the church bells in Gibraltar town on this balmy Sunday morning nor saw the Spitfires lift from the runway to patrol the approaches from Spain and Italy. Eisenhower rose from his cot and padded down to the lavatory for a cold-water shave. To Marshall, he reported:

  Everything appears to be going ahead about as anticipated…. Information directly from task forces is meager, but I do not care to worry commanders at this stage by demanding reports. But I’d give a month’s pay for an accurate report this minute from each sector. We do know that we are fairly solidly ashore at eastern and central points, and that western attack began as scheduled.

  Besides that, he knew very little. The message center at Gibraltar had fallen hours behind in decoding the dispatches pouring in from Algeria and Morocco, as well as from Washington and London. Sketchy reports from Algiers and Oran indicated troops were ashore at all six Algerian landing sites. As for Task Force 34, almost nothing was known beyond a brief message from Hewitt reporting that he was proceeding apace. Eavesdroppers had picked up radio broadcasts of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the “Marseillaise” from Patton’s propaganda station aboard the Texas, but not a word had been heard from Patton himself.

  “When you get to high places in the Army,” Eisenhower had recently written to his son, John, a cadet at West Point, “this business of warfare is no longer just a question of getting out and teaching the soldiers how to shoot or how to crawl up a ravine or dig a foxhole—it is partly politics, partly public-speaking, partly essay-writing, partly social contact…. A fellow wishes he could just get into a hammock under a nice shade tree and read a few wild west magazines!”

  “This business of warfare” was also partly about waiting. As the hours ticked by, a few more dispatches dribbled in, including vague accounts of “trouble in Algiers harbor” and resistance at the Oran port. By nine A.M., one airfield outside Algiers was supposedly in Allied hands, but except for reports that three transport aircraft from Operation VILLAIN had been forced down, nothing was heard regarding the airborne operation. Eisenhower’s naval aide and confidant, a former CBS executive
named Harry C. Butcher, wrote in his diary, “What becomes of thirty-six paratroop planes?” Another garbled dispatch indicated that at one Moroccan beach, Patton was re-embarking the landing craft under a truce flag. “That I do not believe,” Eisenhower wrote to his chief of staff, Major General Walter B. Smith, who was still in London. “Unless my opinion of Georgie is 100 percent wrong, he wouldn’t re-embark anything, including himself.”

  Lighting another Camel, Eisenhower retreated into his tiny office. He had agreed to another negotiating session with Giraud in an hour. That unpleasant prospect now was complicated by perplexing reports that Admiral Darlan was in Algiers talking to Robert Murphy. Eisenhower remembered Churchill’s advice: “Kiss Darlan’s stern if you have to, but get the French navy.” But what about Giraud?

  He uncapped a fountain pen and in his tight cursive wrote at the top of a sheet of notepaper: “Worries of a Commander.” Beginning with “Spain is so ominously quiet,” he listed ten anxieties. Number three: “Defensive fighting, which seemed halfhearted and spiritless this morning, has blazed up, and in many places resistance is stubborn.” Number six: “Giraud is difficult to deal with—wants much in power, equipment, etc., but seems little disposed to do his part to stop fighting.” Number nine: “We don’t know whereabouts or conditions of airborne force.” And number ten: “We cannot find out anything.”

  Having unburdened himself, he capped the pen and reviewed the message traffic once again. Casualties seemed modest, pending further word on RESERVIST, TERMINAL, and VILLAIN. It was tragic that France felt compelled to fight, but the defenders had displayed remarkable lassitude in failing to lay mines, conduct reconnaissance, or to sortie Vichy submarine and air fleets.

  Yet if politically ambivalent and militarily inert, the French had not capitulated. Vichy resistance near Casablanca and Mehdia appeared to be stiffening. Darlan’s intentions remained opaque. Giraud was brooding somewhere in this Gibraltar grotto. Murphy apparently was under arrest. Many French rebels were in irons. German and Italian forces would not likely remain quiescent for long. And Tunisia—the reason for launching the most ambitious seaborne invasion in history—remained far, far away.

  Sometimes a fellow just wished he could crawl in a hammock and read a few wild west magazines.

  3. BEACHHEAD

  A Sword in Algiers

  EISENHOWER’S uncertainty over the progress of Operation TORCH was shared by every soldier in the Algerian and Moroccan beachheads. No man knew anything irrefutably except what he had witnessed. Sailors at sea could see nothing except gun flashes ashore. Soldiers ashore remained ignorant of what was beyond the next djebel. Commanders received fragmentary reports that proved to be incomplete, or contradictory, or wrong. This was war, “our condition and our history, the place we had to live in,” as one correspondent wrote, but to many it seemed like a street brawl with artillery. For neophyte troops, this first combat experience was revealing: war was fought by ignorant armies on a darkling plain.

  The fighting between Anglo-American invaders and Vichy French defenders would last just over three days; sometimes it was a matter of halfhearted potshots, but there were pitched firefights on a dozen battlefields across two countries. This little war between ancient friends—many Americans still could not believe they were fighting the French—was complicated by concomitant diplomatic maneuvers and the first attacks from Axis forces. All this happened more or less simultaneously, from Sunday morning through Tuesday night—November 8 to 10, 1942—but for narrative simplicity the action can unfold counterclockwise around the northwest rim of Africa, beginning in Algiers and ending in Morocco.

  East of the Algerian capital, a battalion from the U.S. 39th Infantry had appeared at the gates of the Maison Blanche airfield just after dawn on November 8. French soldiers fired a few wild shots for honor’s sake and then surrendered. At ten A.M. the first Hurricane fighters, launched hours earlier from Gibraltar with no guarantee of a place to land in Africa, touched down on the runway.

  From Castiglione on the western edge of the beachhead, where industrious Algerians were stripping abandoned landing craft of their compasses and propellers, British troops captured another airfield at Blida and looped into Algiers from the south. One impatient commander seized half a dozen hostages—whom he described as “all very friendly and matey”—then drove to the docks, put a pistol to the head of the concierge, and hoisted a British ensign above a French command post. “Cheers rent the welkin,” he reported.

  Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. Doyle, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 168th Infantry, also grew impatient with his unit’s dawdling progress against French snipers in the western suburb of Lambiridi—the same gunmen who had clipped Robert Moore’s helmet earlier that morning. Ignoring orders to hold in place, Doyle flanked the skirmishers with two dozen men and sprinted through Algiers. Soon he was rattling the gates of the governor-general’s Summer Palace. A watchman refused to admit him. “The governor,” the Frenchman advised, “is at the beach.” American troops responded by shooting out the tires of a well-heeled gentleman leaving the German consulate across the street. The driver’s rage—good tires were particularly dear—was interrupted by the crack of a sniper’s rifle. Doyle pitched to the pavement, mortally wounded by a bullet below his left shoulder blade. After Colonel Marshall in Operation RESERVIST, he was the second American battalion commander to die that morning.

  Luftwaffe pilots flying from Italy on Sunday afternoon made their first appearance off Cap Matifou, where a covey of transport ships lay at anchor. An enemy Ju-88 dodged Allied flak and launched two torpedoes from an altitude of fifty feet. One missed. The second caught U.S.S. Leedstown on the starboard flank, carrying away her rudder. Dead in the water and listing with 500 men still aboard, the ship was easy prey. Near misses by dive-bombers opened her seams; then two more torpedoes amidships caused her to quickly settle by the head. Men leaped overboard, only to be sucked back into the ship through the torpedo holes; they scrambled topside and leaped again. Castaways on rafts paddled toward shore, singing with lusty abandon until they saw the heavy surf at Aïn Taya. The locals stopped their looting long enough to cut tall reeds, with which they pulled capsized survivors from the foaming water. Led to an abandoned theater, the shivering men were bedded in straw and revived with brandy. Leedstown sank in twenty fathoms.

  Pleasing as such retaliatory Axis raids may have been, Admiral Darlan recognized with the discernment of a professional survivor that the jig was nearly up. The Vichy commander-in-chief had only 7,000 badly armed troops in Algiers; both major airfields had been captured, his fleet was bottled up by British men-of-war, and the city was surrounded by 30,000 soldiers. At three P.M. on Sunday, Darlan reappeared at the Villa des Oliviers, where Robert Murphy and Kenneth Pendar had been spared execution through the timely clemency of General Juin. The admiral found the American diplomats at lunch, watching the port warehouses burn and dive-bombers pirouette over Algiers Bay. Darlan announced that he was ready to parley. Would M. Murphy find the American commander, who was said to be on the beach ten miles west of Algiers?

  In Juin’s limousine with a white flag and the French tricolor flapping from the fender, the diplomats threaded their way through straggling columns of American soldiers west of Algiers. At Beach Beer White, they discovered Major General Charles W. Ryder, commander of the 34th Infantry Division, sitting on a large rock. A fellow Kansan and West Point classmate of Eisenhower’s, Ryder—Doc, to his friends—was a tall, angular infantryman, highly decorated in the Great War. Asked if he would discuss terms with the French, he replied evenly, “I will go anywhere to talk to anyone who wishes to surrender Algiers to me.” He then went nowhere. Sitting his rock, fussing about the need for a fresh uniform, he composed a one-paragraph report to Gibraltar with the speed of a man dictating to a stonecutter. “You will have to forgive me,” he told Murphy. “I haven’t slept in a week.” Murphy stopped pacing, took the general by the arm, and bundled him into the limousine.

  A b
ugler perched on the running board blew “Cease Fire” as they careered through Lambiridi to the Avenue Maréchal Joffre. Outside Fort l’Empereur, headquarters of the Vichy military, Juin’s chief of staff stood at rigid attention in the street. Behind him were spaced six soldiers in a V formation. “I don’t like blood,” Murphy confided to Ryder as they climbed from the limousine. With the precise gestures of a man practiced in capitulation, the French chief of staff extended his sword to Ryder, hilt first, “like a historical painting in some museum,” Pendar observed. Murmuring a few words of abdication, he wheeled smartly and marched into the fort.

  Ryder and Murphy followed. They entered a cavernous hall where stuffed hunting trophies and booty from ancient battlefields hung from the wainscoting. Fifty French officers stood along the walls, glancing between the Americans and General Juin, who stood at the head of a long table swathed in green baize. Juin had exchanged his pink-striped pajamas from the previous night for the bemedaled splendor of his finest uniform. The distant mutter of small-arms fire was swallowed by the roar of bombs from Royal Navy planes attacking French targets barely a hundred yards distant. “How wonderful!” Ryder exclaimed. “This is the first time since World War One that I have been under fire.” Icy silence greeted this remark.

  “Are you the senior commander?” Juin finally asked, tossing his left-handed salute.