Assignment to Hell (19 page)

Rommel’s prey was the American II Corps, green GIs commanded by General Fredendall, whom historians invariably describe as “weak” and “bombastic.”
¹³
Fredendall talked tough but retreated into a reclusive lair when the firing started. “His ‘command post,’” Omar Bradley wrote, “was an embarrassment to every American soldier: a deep underground shelter dug or blasted by two hundred engineers in an almost inaccessible canyon far to the rear.”
¹⁴

From his bunker Fredendall ordered a pair of counterattacks but both boomeranged. Besieged Americans, including Andy Rooney’s old artillery regiment, the 17th, began surrendering and deserting en masse: Germans
poured through the Kasserine Pass.
¹⁵
British officers, appalled by the spectacle, scornfully called GIs “our Italians.”
¹⁶

In early March, Eisenhower replaced Fredendall with George Patton, who at Ike’s direction had been planning the coming invasion of Sicily. But the Supreme Commander smartly hedged his bets by appointing Bradley as Patton’s deputy; Ike encouraged Bradley to keep one eye on the battlefield and the other on Patton. Patton was even more bombastic than his predecessor, but wouldn’t have been caught dead in an underground dugout.

Despite its breakthrough, the Africa Korps lacked the firepower to exploit the opening. After annihilating Fredendall, Rommel turned north, hoping to split the Allied armies. Four days of wild combat ensued, with Americans rushing in fresh troops from Oran and the Army Air Force finally flexing its muscles. Eleven days after launching his offensive, the Desert Fox conceded defeat, retreating back through the Kasserine Pass and into the mountainous Mareth Line. He had lost a thousand men, but had killed, wounded, or captured six times that number.
¹⁷

Suffering from nervous exhaustion, Rommel was told by superiors in Berlin to come home. Patton and his II Corps, joined by the British First Army, pressured the Afrika Korps from the north, winning a tank battle at El Guettar, while the British Eighth kept up its harassment from the south. The great American triumph of the North African campaign came at Hill 609 outside Mateur, which fell on May 1 after days of bloody fighting. Hill 609’s capture, wrote Eisenhower, was “final proof that the American ground forces had come fully of age.”
¹⁸
Within days, the Axis armies surrendered. More than a quarter million German and Italian soldiers were bagged in one swoop; another sixty thousand had been killed or wounded. Allied casualties in North Africa were almost as catastrophic: Some seventy thousand were killed, wounded, or captured.

Churchill’s objectives, which had reluctantly become the U.S.’s, too, had been secured. The Axis had been kicked out of Africa, the Suez Canal was no longer threatened, and Germany was no longer poised to gobble up the Middle East.
¹⁹

H
AL
B
OYLE WITNESSED ALMOST EVERY
decisive moment of the Tunisian campaign. The Ousseltia Valley in central Tunisia was a hundred miles or so south of the Mediterranean on the Eastern Dorsal plateau and some sixty miles northwest of the Kasserine Pass. Defense of the Ousseltia had been assigned to a Free French army of thirty-five thousand, but after a combined force of German and Italians suddenly surfaced, the Allied command hurried the First Division and other outfits to the valley. Boyle was there on January 23 with the 26th Regimental Combat Team when American bombers and ground artillery attacked an Axis stronghold.

“From high ground above the valley I could see through field glasses the columns of debris and smoke thrown up as 105-millimeter shells hit among the entrenched Germans,” Boyle wrote. American artillerymen deliberately kept their shelling irregular so the enemy couldn’t time an advance or retreat. When the “harassed Nazis” called in air support hoping the planes would draw fire from the hidden American batteries, the Americans responded in kind. Soon a bevy of P-40 fighters and A-20 bombers “chased [the enemy] from the skies.” A few minutes after noon, Allied bombers unleashed a fierce pounding.

A Free French infantryman had been captured but managed to escape during the pandemonium caused by the Allied bombing. The bombing “threw them [the enemy] into great confusion,” the Frenchmen told American officers, “and I managed to slip out of the ammunition truck in which they were holding me. A few seconds later that truck and another ammunition truck were hit and blown up by the plane’s bombs.”
²⁰

One Big Red One officer enthused that the joint air-artillery bombardment was one of the best-coordinated attacks of the North African campaign. Two other air raids were launched before dark that day, evidence of increasing Allied air superiority, Boyle maintained—an assertion he probably came to regret three weeks later when Stukas and Messerschmitts were scattering American troops all over central Tunisia. The
Post
headlined its article G
ERMANS
B
LASTED FROM
S
TONGHOLD IN
T
UNISIA
, a claim
that didn’t quite jibe with Boyle’s next-to-last paragraph. Axis infantry, “despite the bombardment,” had managed to infiltrate into the mountains west of the valley.
²¹

Two days later, Boyle was still in the Ousseltia, this time riding in a jeep near the front lines with a twenty-five-year-old First Army captain from Long Island named William Byrne. Boyle was again impressed by how air and artillery strikes worked “in perfect unison” to thwart the enemy advance. His article was written in blow-by-blow diary form; it is excerpted here in its raw and unedited “cable-ese.” It offers a revealing snapshot of life at the Tunisian front.

PRESS
VIA CABLE TO

ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON

Censored Boyles 12317—With American Army in Africa, Jan. 25, 1943—Jerry took it on lam today as American forces broke backbone of threatening German drive down Ousseltia Valley in best coordinated attack put on by Uncle Sam’s boys since they came to Tunisia on detour to Berlin Paragraph

In one daylong All-American push which saw tanks artillery and infantry teaming in perfect unison Nazis were slapped back several miles to head of valley and doughboys grabbed and held mountain heights insuring allied control of road to Kairouan vital enemy supply link Paragraph

By eleven thirty a.m., Boyle was pinned down on a hillside by machine gun fire that zipped “like angry bees over our heads.” The whining bullets made Boyle wonder if Mary Frances had paid his life insurance. It would have served her right if she hadn’t, Boyle joked. Fifteen minutes later the
Missourian was likening artillery noise to the “murmurous sounds” of a Keats or Tennyson poem and wondering why he wasn’t teaching English somewhere in the Ozarks.

Five hours later, Boyle was comparing the tumult of an enemy counterattack “to the sounds of ten thousand kids outside your window on the Fourth of July only these firecrackers are playing for keeps.” As the fire grew ferocious, Boyle couldn’t resist taking a quick look-see. “Just one quick glimpse,” Boyle wrote in cable-ese, “and machine gun bullet has me biting sand and shooting backward on my belly like a crab stop Its pleasure to skin hands in such worthwhile cause Paragraph.”

He ended the piece by observing that American soldiers were trying to end the war the only way they knew how: by ferreting out the enemy. “Tonight they will know neither food nor sleep dash only the terrible loneliness of clashing in battle in midnight blackness with foe stop Tomorrow some will be dead stop None will be defeated.”
²²

How journalists such as Boyle and Norgaard had the poise to jot down names, ages, and hometowns with machine gun fire whizzing all around is remarkable—but they did it all the time. It’s clear from the telegrams and letters Boyle was receiving from his bosses in New York that they were delighted with his impressionist style and nudging him to do more of it.

A week later, the peripatetic Boyle heard a story about a German soldier caught “roaring drunk” while pushing a stalled motorcycle up a road near Medjez el Bab in northern Tunisia. The soldier “had gotten muzzy on native wine and stolen the motorcycle. Somewhere along the road he had met with an accident. His face was bloody and the machine smashed and he was singing half to himself when an American patrol overtook him. Not at all displeased by capture, he submitted readily to a soldier who took the motorcycle while the others took away the singing and hiccoughing prisoner.”
²³

A road incident that Boyle described for readers a few days later was less amusing. Sergeant Dan L. Mullis, a twenty-one-year-old antitank specialist from Georgia, found himself surrounded by German tanks moving through the Ousseltia. Several members of Mullis’ outfit were killed; as the enemy approached, Mullis jumped into a ditch with fallen comrades and
played dead. For a few minutes, his ruse worked but enemy soldiers in a passing half-track hauled him into custody. Halfway toward the rear, Mullis’ German captor, “about thirty years of age and about one-half drunk,” forced Mullis at gunpoint to show him how to operate the machine gun on a captured American truck, then made him join the German caravan. After subsisting for two days on bread and a little water, Mullis and other American prisoners were dumped into a truck with French captives. Three or four miles up the road, Mullis’ truck was machine-gunned by Free Frenchmen hidden in the hills who had no idea that the vehicle contained Allied prisoners. One American and two French prisoners were killed; fifteen were wounded. The driver of the truck ran off; their German guard was mortally wounded. Mullis was fortunate: He escaped serious injury and eluded enemy patrols.
²⁴

When Boyle and other correspondents in northern Tunisia heard about Rommel’s offensive in mid-February, they scrambled southward. Three days into the German drive Boyle filed an article that cracked the lead pages of the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
as well as the
Stars and Stripes
. “As one who has slept and eaten in the field for almost two months of steadily more successful operations with every branch of the American Army, I had my first opportunity to see how they reacted when the going really got tough,” Boyle wrote.

To ensure that his piece would pass muster with censors, Boyle avoided panicky descriptions. Still, one can sense the battlefield chaos Boyle witnessed when he wrote, “As one who watched for three straight days as American tank men threw away their lives in a gamble to stem the onward avalanche of the German armored force, I for one, couldn’t question the decision to withdraw. That’s why German patrols roam the plains of the Sbeitla-Feriana Valley tonight.”
²⁵

Just three months into being a war correspondent, Boyle had figured out ways to outsmart the censors. His third paragraph casts the retreat in upbeat terms yet makes it abundantly clear that it was a rout. “Out into the long valley and into the hills they marched and rolled on wheels—thousands of American soldiers fighting mad because they had to march backward toward New York instead of forward toward Tunis and Sfax.” He
also adroitly handled the fact that Rommel had essentially overrun Joe Liebling’s pals at the Thélepte airdrome (barely two weeks after Liebling departed) by pointing out that all Allied planes had been flown to safety instead of writing that the Germans now had control over a vital airstrip.

Boyle ended the piece with a poignant vignette of French soldiers and American tankmen exchanging the V for victory sign, even as American tanks raced away from the advancing enemy.
²⁶

J
OE
L
IEBLING AND
H
AL
B
OYLE
must have encountered one another in the new mobile press camp that Army public relations had proudly deployed in midcampaign. For correspondents, the early days of Torch were a filing nightmare. They were supposed to submit their stories for transmission back home at Army message centers that tended to be poorly equipped and erratically staffed. When they learned that the message centers weren’t reliable, reporters began giving carbons and oilskins willy-nilly to pilots, Army couriers, jeep and truck drivers—anyone heading toward the rear. If through some miracle an article reached Allied Force Headquarters, an Army wireless could, at least in theory, transmit the message back to the States. But even going through HQ didn’t guarantee success.
²⁷
It was driving reporters, their employers, and their PRO handlers up a wall.

Enter Brigadier General Robert McClure, the director of information services in the North African theater, and Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Phillips, the former managing editor of
Newsweek
. In early ’43, the pair devised a mobile field press camp that became the template for future press operations in the Mediterranean and European theaters. Besides facilitating the gathering of battlefield news, it fed and housed correspondents, transported them to the front lines, and relayed their dispatches via Army teleprinters and air couriers to Allied HQ.