An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

Lloyd Fredendall’s chosen avenue for Operation SATIN started on the eastern border of Algeria in ancient Tébessa, the walled city of Solomon the Eunuch and headquarters of Rome’s Third Legion. Nine miles southeast of Tébessa, in a sunless gulch accessible only by a serpentine gravel road, II Corps planted its flag and began staging for the grand march to the sea that would cleave the Axis armies in half. Soon Fredendall and sixty-eight staff officers had established residence in the ravine, officially called Speedy Valley but also known as “Lloyd’s Very Last Resort” and “Shangri-La, a million miles from nowhere.” Inexperienced and unusually young, the II Corps staff was dubbed “Fredendall’s kindergarten” their commander had thrown up his hands in mock horror, exclaiming, “My God, I am going to war surrounded by children!” Three thousand support soldiers—signalers, anti-aircraft gunners, engineers—infested the fir copses around Speedy Valley. “The woods are stiff with troops, and it sounds like the Battle of the Marne though no enemy is within many miles,” a lieutenant wrote. Combat units mustered farther east, toward Bou Chebka and Kasserine.

  Tébessa’s high plateau was “cold as a snake,” one officer reported, adding, a few days later, “Everyone is freezing.” Perpetual shade and frequent snow squalls made Speedy Valley particularly inhospitable. Officers lived and worked in “igloos”—frigid tents with crushed stone floors—wearing every stitch they owned, including wool watch caps that “made the place look like a lumber camp,” a reporter commented. Wearing a knit balaclava with an upturned visor, Fredendall slouched in his canvas chair near a potbelly stove and studied the map, played solitaire, or gabbed with passing correspondents like a cracker-barrel clerk in a country store. He had ordered a bulletproof Cadillac similar to Eisenhower’s, and periodically called Oran to find out why the car had not arrived.

  Day and night, Speedy Valley was a bedlam of pneumatic drills and jackhammers. In a most perplexing decision, Fredendall had commanded the 19th Engineer Regiment to shelter his headquarters by boring a pair of immense, double-shafted tunnels in the ravine wall. The project was like “the digging of the New York subway,” Fredendall’s aide reported. Working from a blueprint labeled “II Corps Tunnel Job,” engineers began excavating two complexes fifty yards apart, each with parallel shafts six and a half feet high, five feet wide, and braced every four feet with timbers ten inches thick. Walls and ceilings were lined with planks milled in the nearby forest and overlapped like shingles. Each complex was to be U-shaped, running 160 feet into the hillside with the parallel shafts joined at the rear by ample galleries designed for offices and a magazine. Fredendall supervised the construction with pharaonic intensity, and the gloomy ravine soon assumed a Valley of the Kings ambience. The work occupied a valuable engineering company for weeks.

  Some officers believed the tunnels a prudent precaution against enemy air attack. Others—noting that Speedy Valley was seventy miles from the front, well concealed, and protected by an anti-aircraft battalion—considered the project a ludicrous embarrassment. Some questioned Fredendall’s courage. Breaking off a chat with visiting reporters at the sound of airplanes overhead, he would roll his eyes heavenward and mumble, “Some of ours, I hope.” Fredendall’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Colonel William A. Carter, later recalled, “We had no proper explosives to use for tunneling, and our men had no experience in tunneling…. But I could not convince him that it would take a long time to do what he wanted.

  “To make the digging as unpopular as possible in an effort to have it stopped, I made sure the blasting was done at night to keep everyone awake,” Carter added. “But that did not stop it.”

  As the Tunisian front lengthened from north to south, Allied and Axis troops jostled each other in a fringe of a fire that extended 200 miles from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. In the far south, Colonel Raff’s task force recaptured the oasis town of Gafsa, gateway to the great desert. Suspected Tunisian collaborators and looters, who sometimes could be identified by the stolen light fixtures hanging from their burnooses, were rounded up outside the pink-walled kasbah and remanded to French troops.

  “Of the thirty-nine Arabs slated to be shot, only one escaped,” Raff reported. “One of them didn’t die immediately so a member of the firing squad pulled out his pistol and pumped four bullets into the man’s head at close range…. They lay in the Tunisian sunlight on view for the whole town to see.”

  In the muddy north, Allied troops of different nationalities were mingled even more as Eisenhower tried piecemeal reinforcement of desperately weak French segments of the line below the Medjerda valley. Confusion was the result. Ted Roosevelt, who had been peeled away from the 1st Division on temporary duty to help the French, initially was charmed by the Byronic landscape of ancient ruins on a wind-swept tell. “You and I could have a lovely time here were it the piping days of peace,” he wrote Eleanor on January 16. But this romanticism soon clouded over. In the course of a single month, the Fighting First’s 26th Infantry had thirty-three other units attached to it, while the regiment’s 3rd Battalion noted in the daily log, “We have served under everything but the Rising Sun and the swastika.” Roosevelt wrote:

  The units are all mixed—French, English, American. That makes command and coordination a major problem. To mix and fragment units is a military crime of the gravest sort…. I have done all that lies in my power. Man does what he can and bears what he must.

  Among the most active outposts were five camps run by the Special Operations Executive, a British organization established in 1940 to nurture indigenous resistance groups, with help from the American OSS. Intended to bolster Anderson’s First Army and Fredendall’s II Corps, each camp was commanded by a British officer who supervised recruits drawn from Vichy concentration camps and other seedbeds of disaffection. Collectively they were known as the “Bad-Eyes Brigade,” for the unusual number of brigands in bifocals.

  The senior American in the operation, Carleton S. Coon, was a corpulent Harvard anthropologist who had run guns to pre-TORCH Morocco and invented “detonating mule turds,” artistically sculpted plastic explosives that were liberally scattered on Tunisian roads to flatten German tires. Fluent in Arabic and French, Coon had taught the fine art of blowing things up to French irregulars in Aïn Taya until one of his pupils, Bonnier de la Chapelle, showed extracurricular initiative by shooting Admiral Darlan; although Coon had no discernible role in the assassination, he was given leave to disappear until Algiers cooled down. Thus had he appeared at the SOE’s northernmost post on remote Cap Serrat, forty miles west of Bizerte, under the nom de guerre Captain Retinitis and dressed in a British Army uniform with phony officer’s pips cut from the green felt of a billiard table. “Now,” a fellow saboteur observed, “the company of rogues and cutthroats is complete.”

  Leading a band of fifty desperadoes, Coon blew up a railroad bridge, harassed the local Italian garrison, and scattered mule turds by the bushel. His freebooters soon specialized in seizing hostages, usually the sons of elders in villages of doubtful loyalty. The boys were imprisoned in the Cap Serrat lighthouse until their fathers provided authenticated information about enemy positions. “This use of hostages was our chief source of intelligence aside from the work of our own patrols,” Coon reported. Less successful were booby traps, which according to the professor’s accounting claimed only two casualties: “one Arab and one cow.”

  From Cap Serrat to Gafsa and at all points in between, the Tunisian winter proved crueler than most Allied soldiers had imagined possible in Africa. “It is still bitterly cold and as our military with its customary dumbness did not envisage this and considered Africa as a tropical country, we are not well prepared,” Roosevelt wrote. Disclosing that “I have not changed my underclothes for twelve days,” T.R. catalogued what he was wearing: “wool union suit, then my wool trousers and shirt, then a sweater, then a lined field jacket, then my lined combat overalls, then a muffler, then my heavy short coat.” Disheveled as always, he was still freezing.

  So were the tens of thou
sands of other soldiers whom Ernie Pyle christened the “mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys.” Supply trains could not keep pace with the battalions flooding into Tunisia, and II Corps was short of field glasses, machine guns, truck parts, and especially hot food. “If you don’t eat for three days, canned Army grub tastes like chicken,” one resigned soldier wrote home. Another offered an improvised recipe for gruel: cracked wheat and condensed milk boiled together with two rolls of Life Savers. An officer in the 1st Division reported that the battalion cook had been nicknamed Hitler. “We often wonder if all the hogs in America have been turned into Spam and all the cows into corned beef,” he added. Cattle rustling flourished; soldiers claimed that grilled beefsteak was actually “Tunisian deer” or “German chicken.”

  Dysentery, parasites, trench foot, and bad teeth bedeviled those living in the open in mid-winter. So did Luftwaffe fighters. Soldiers joked bitterly about “Stuka time”—comprising nearly all daylight hours—and “Spitfire time”—the half hour or so each day during which friendly aircraft appeared. Slit trenches were dug deeper with each strafing until they became caves. Skittish soldiers often confused migrating “Messerstorks” with approaching enemy planes. After strafing caused 250 Allied casualties in one week along a six-mile stretch of road outside Medjez-el-Bab, Evelegh ordered that all vehicles destroyed in air attacks be removed from sight immediately to avoid lowering morale. Morale sank anyway.

  “Never out of artillery range, mail weeks catching up, warm rations one time…. An old man at twenty,” one private wrote. Day by miserable day the troops eased themselves into combat “like an old man with chilblains getting into a hot bath,” A. J. Liebling observed. The troops also edged toward that timeless state common to veteran armies in which the men trusted no one less wretched than themselves. Still they did not hate. But each time they had to bundle up unopened mail for the dead and return it to the rear, their blood rose. An officer noticed that American artillery barrages now elicited raucous cheers. “Lay it on them!” the men yelled. “Give it to the bastards!” And the poignancy of young men dying young intruded every hour of every day. This farewell note was found in a dead pilot’s sunglasses case:

  Mother, please do not grieve but rather console yourself in the fact that I am happy. Try to enjoy the remainder of your life as best you can and have no regrets, for you have been a wonderful mother and I love you. Jim.

  It was enough to incite a man to murder.

  As the day for SATIN drew nearer, the man who would lead the armored thrust to the coast finally stepped onto the Tunisian stage. Major General Orlando Ward, commander of “Old Ironsides”—the 1st Armored Division—had waited first in Britain and then in Oran for permission to unify his force at last. Ward had been no less irked than Terry Allen at the splintering of his division. He held Mark Clark responsible for keeping him in England while CCB landed in TORCH and headed east. “I should have begged to go instead of taking orders,” he told his diary in mid-November. Paul Robinett, eager as ever to prevent his superiors from making a mistake, fueled Ward’s anguish by telling him, “I would either go or be relieved of my command.” But Ward played the dutiful soldier, and now his moment had arrived.

  Ward was a quiet, genteel man, with large sensitive eyes set in an oval face; some thought he resembled a schoolmaster more than a tank commander. Known as Dan to his family, he was Pinky to everyone else, though only graying wisps remained of his crop of red hair. “I am fifty and at times feel my age,” he had confessed a year earlier. A residual reddish cowlick grated so on George Marshall’s mania for order when Ward worked for him in the late 1930s that the Army chief had demanded, “Ward, make that hair lie down.”

  Born in Missouri and raised in Denver, Ward had graduated from West Point a year ahead of Eisenhower, invaded Mexico with the 7th Cavalry in 1916, and fought five battles in France. Homesick for his new bride, Edith, he wondered whether he was better suited to farming. “The husband in me tends to make me not much of a soldier,” he told his diary. Transfer to the field artillery put to rest the farmer in him (although not the horticulturalist: as commander of a frontier post in Wyoming in the 1920s, he planted 25,000 trees). His innovations in gunnery at Fort Sill in the 1930s became the stuff of legend, including a technique that reduced the time required to concentrate the fire of twelve battalion howitzers from several hours to six minutes. (“Like squirting a hose,” he said with a shrug.) As secretary of the Army General Staff before the war, Ward so impressed the phlegmatic Marshall that the chief recommended he be immediately promoted two grades, from colonel to major general, cowlick be damned.

  Ward was honest, ambitious, and emotional. “If the sermon moved him, the pew would shake,” his daughter Robin recalled. He could be irreverent, often quoting Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards!” To a group of younger officers he had recently confessed, “It has been my observation that most generals are generally unaware of their most peculiar peculiarities.” While working in Washington, he had often visited the National Zoo to study the monkeys on the theory that their behavior would illuminate that of the primates in the War Department. An imperishable grief also marked him: When his daughter Katherine, just eighteen, had died of cancer on Christmas Day, 1938, Ward entered “a period of numbness from which I will never recover.”

  Ward had two peculiarities of his own that informed his generalship. The first was a picayune Anglophobia. He likened the U.S. Army to “a pointer pup. If someone with a red mustache, a swagger stick, and a British accent speaks to us, we lie down on the ground and wiggle.” On invasion day, November 8, he wrote in his diary, “Went to church. They prayed for Empire, and the King, but not the Allies.” The destruction in Oran harbor of his armored infantry battalion during the British-led Operation RESERVIST simply fed his prejudice. “I hate to serve under the British,” he wrote. “They have misused my troops enough already.”

  The other peculiar trait was an instant willingness to take offense from General Fredendall, his superior officer. Arriving in Constantine on January 15, Ward wrote in his diary, “Went [to] corps HQ to see Fredendall. Did not see fit to see me as I waited over an hour…. Corps does not look with favor on matters I suggest.” Ward urged the concentration of Old Ironsides for maximum combat power in SATIN, but his advice was brushed aside in favor of what Ward considered a “dribbling commitment” of the division. Fredendall seemed “prone to make map judgment sans advice” by issuing orders without reconnoitering the terrain to determine if his map corresponded to reality. Ward soon concluded that Fredendall and the II Corps staff were not even studying the map carefully before drafting deployment orders “on absurd lines.”

  Even as Allied leaders in Casablanca were struggling to resolve their differences in pursuit of a common purpose, the senior American commander in Tunisia and his top armor lieutenant had, with remarkable speed, cultivated a deep mutual hostility. Staff officers were surprised, then perplexed, then alarmed at this inauspicious development, explicable only in terms of personal chemistry and human folly.

  “The Touch of the World”

  THE Emperor of the West arrived in Casablanca at 6:20 P.M. on Thursday, January 14, 1943, tired but exhilarated after the five-day journey from Washington. With the gray in his cheeks offset by the glint in his eye, Roosevelt was bundled into a mud-smeared sedan for the circuitous drive to Anfa Camp. Installed in Villa Dar es Saada, the president welcomed Churchill for the first of ten meals and forty-three hours of conversation they would share in Casablanca. An air-raid warning after midnight required them to finish the colloquy by candlelight before Roosevelt finally went to bed at three A.M. “Winnie is a great man for the status quo,” he mused, smoking a final cigarette in his uptilted holder. “He even looks like the status quo, doesn’t he?”

  Preserving the status quo ante bellum—particularly in maintaining His Majesty’s empire—was very much part of the British scheme and, in keeping with Churchill’s plan, the prime minister wooed Roosevelt while hi
s military lieutenants wooed the American joint chiefs. At 2:30 P.M. on January 15, a dozen of the most senior generals and admirals in the Anglo-American alliance strolled back from lunch to a high-ceilinged, semicircular banquet room off the main corridor of the Anfa Hotel. Full of sunbeams and the fragrance of cut flowers, the room was dominated by a large rectangular table. Sentries guarded the door, where a neatly printed placard read: “Business: Chiefs of Staff Conference.” This would be the third session of the combined chiefs in Casablanca, and before returning to the paramount issue of a global war strategy they were to hear from General Eisenhower this afternoon on the Tunisian campaign and his plan for Operation SATIN.

  Poor Eisenhower: yet another room filled with bemedaled generals whose military plumage bespoke battlefield exploits greater than his own. He looked haggard, thanks to his high blood pressure, the purple bags beneath his eyes, and the lingering grippe—exacerbated by chain smoking—that had kept him in bed for four days after Christmas. “Ike seems jittery,” Roosevelt later commented. The flight from Algiers this morning had hardly been restful. Two engines on Eisenhower’s Flying Fortress had failed and the passengers spent the last fifty miles of the flight standing at the exits with parachutes on, ready to jump. As he strode to the head of the table the British eyed him curiously, still intrigued by how such a man could emerge from lowborn obscurity to hold this high command.

  He spoke without notes. Yes, there had been setbacks in Tunisia, unfortunate delays. The roads were bad, the weather horrid, the mud unspeakable. A single dirt runway needed 2,000 tons of perforated steel matting to make it mud-proof, but to carry that matting required the total cargo capacity of the North African rail system for at least a day. British and American soldiers had learned valuable combat lessons. As for the French—and here Eisenhower took his revenge for those long hours in the Gibraltar tunnel—they had the misfortune of being led by General Giraud, who “might be a good division commander but has no political sense and no idea of administration.” In a final plunge of the knife, Eisenhower added that dealing with the late Darlan had been easier.