War Stories III (13 page)

During peacetime, the U.S. military had been all male. The onset of war brought hundreds of thousands of American women into the Armed
Forces. No woman could be subject to conscription, but they didn't have to be: they volunteered so fast that many had to be told to return weeks or months later, after uniforms were made and facilities to house and train them were built. One of those young American women who volunteered early was nineteen-year-old Pearlie McKeogh from Minneapolis, Minnesota. After Pearl Harbor, she and her boyfriend decided to enlist together.

What Private Pearlie McKeogh didn't know—but would soon find out—was the general she was assigned to drive was fast becoming one of
the most successful officers in the U.S. Army. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been a colonel, serving in the Philippines on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur. He was just completing four years with MacArthur when Hitler started his blitzkrieg across Europe.

After eight years of desk duty, Eisenhower was glad to return to the U.S. in January 1940 to help organize the training for a slowly growing U.S. Army. Eisenhower established himself as a master logistician and planner during the Louisiana exercises in 1940. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was a general, one of General Marshall's most trusted and highly regarded subordinates.

At the Arcadia Conference in Washington in December 1941, Churchill had pressed Roosevelt for an operation in North Africa. Marshall resisted the idea—urging instead that the Allies gather necessary troops and materiel in England for a cross-channel invasion of France. By April 1942, when the U.S. and British military chiefs met in London for further strategic talks, it was increasingly clear that a “Second Front” in Europe in 1942 or '43 was simply too risky.

Months later, from 18–27 June 1942, Churchill again visited Washington. This time his arguments for attacking Hitler's forces in North Africa as a second front persuaded Roosevelt. The decision made, Marshall set a date—the first week of November 1942—and appointed Eisenhower to command the first U.S. offensive in the European theater: Operation Torch.

CHAPTER 5

AMERICA GOES ON THE OFFENSIVE 1942

E
very Allied military planner hoped that Operation Torch could be carried off without pitting a green, untested U.S. Army against the Wehrmacht. Accordingly, the landing beaches selected for the operation were well to the west of the combat-hardened German and Italian troops of the Afrika Korps—led by one of Hitler's ablest generals, Erwin Rommel, nicknamed the “Desert Fox.” Nothing, however, could change the fact that the operation would take place in some of the most inhospitable and difficult terrain on the planet—the largely barren, trackless North African desert.

Senior U.S. officers in London and Washington pointed out that raw American soldiers—some just weeks out of recruit training—and their inexperienced leaders were unprepared to go up against the Vichy French in North Africa, much less the Axis powers. Some feared that if the operation went badly, it could well lead to postponing or even canceling plans to force a landing on the European continent until 1945 or '46.

George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff—and one of Roosevelt's most trusted advisors—was utterly opposed to the North African endeavor, arguing that it would sap personnel and equipment needed for invading
the continent. The operation's strongest proponent—Winston Churchill—remained adamant that a “Second Front” had to be opened in Europe to help relieve pressure on Stalin and the Red Army, and he strongly believed that North Africa was the place. Roosevelt resolved the matter after Churchill's visit to Washington at the end of June 1942.

FDR informed Marshall of his decision to proceed with Torch on 25 July. The next day, Marshall appointed General Dwight Eisenhower as the Allied commander in chief of the American-British expedition. Though he had never led so much as a platoon in combat, Eisenhower was now going to command an entire army.

 

Rommel, the Desert Fox

For the next three months, Eisenhower and his staff engaged in a furious round of planning. The goals of Torch—although ambitious—were relatively simple: first, to deny the use of air and naval bases in northwest Africa to the Axis, and then—by driving the enemy out of Mediterranean North Africa—create secure sea-lines between Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. If all went as planned, Rommel's German-Italian army would be caught in a pincers between General Bernard Montgomery's British 8th Army on the east and the forces landed in Torch moving in from the west.

To achieve these ends, Eisenhower assembled a fleet of more than 100 troop and cargo vessels, 200 U.S. and British warships, 500 aircraft, and 107,000 troops to force an entry in North Africa. Though Tunis was his ultimate goal, Eisenhower deemed that it was too far from his Gibraltar-based air cover—and too close to enemy air bases in Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy. He therefore selected three landing beaches well to the west, all in Vichy French territory.

A Western Task Force, commanded by General George Patton, would sail directly from the United States and seize Casablanca, Morocco. The Center Task Force—comprised of the U.S. II Corps—would sail from England to seize Oran, Algeria. And the Eastern Task Force of British and Americans—also deployed from England—would capture the Algerian capital.

Eisenhower hoped that the French colonial forces holding these port cities would quickly renounce fealty to the Vichy regime and aid the Allies in throwing the Nazis out of Africa. Weeks before the invasion, he commenced a series of sensitive, covert negotiations with French colonial officials—military and civilian—trying to ensure that the Vichy troops in North Africa would not contest the landings. On 21 October Eisenhower dispatched Brigadier General Mark Clark by submarine to Algeria for an abortive clandestine meeting with French officers thought to be opposed to the Vichy regime.

It was all for naught. By 5 November, when Eisenhower boarded a Flying Fortress in London for a secret flight to his forward command post inside “The Rock” at Gibraltar, he and his commanders expected to have to fight their way ashore against as many as fourteen French divisions. Duplicity, intrigue, anti-British resentment going back to Dunkirk, personal rivalries and antipathy toward Charles de Gaulle among French officers—all doomed Allied hopes for a “gentle welcome” to North Africa.

Yet, as the convoys closed in on their landing beaches on the night of 7 November 1942, there was still reason for optimism. The hundreds of ships steaming from England, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States had made their transits without being attacked by enemy aircraft or submarines. Scores of bombers and fighters assembled at Gibraltar—the only Allied airbase within range of the Torch landings—were unscathed and ready. And in the east, Montgomery's 8th Army had broken the long siege at El Alamein, Egypt. On 23 October his combined British, New Zealand, Australian, South African, Indian, Free Polish, Free Czech, and Free French force had smashed through Rommel's lines and was now driving the battered Afrika Korps and their Italian comrades westward toward the Libyan border.

Few of the young Americans preparing to land before dawn on a hostile shore were aware of these details. Some of them knew that FDR would broadcast an appeal to the French just before the landings: “The sons of those who helped liberate your fathers from the Germans in 1918 are coming to free you from Hitler . . . do not fire upon them.”

But for most, like Lieutenant Robert Green, in the 1st Infantry Division, the hours before the assault were consumed with final preparatory details, a letter home—to be left on the ship, just in case—and perhaps a prayer for what was to come in the morning, just before dawn.