In the midst of all this, the diminutive Ernie Pyle, beloved Scripps-Howard newspaper correspondent, made one of his many insightful observations: “The battlefield was an incongruous thing. Always there was some ridiculous impingement of normalcy on a field of battle. There on that day it was the Arabs. They were herding their camels, just as usual. Some of them continued to plow their fields. Children walked along, driving their little sack-ladened burros, as tanks and guns clanked past them. The sky was filled with planes and smoke burst from screaming shells.”10
The Americans, fighting in the Medjerda River valley, and the British, who had proposed taking from the Germans an eminence they named Longstop Hill,* soon began to run into fierce opposition. Not only was the superiority of the German Mark II and Mark IV Panzer tanks quickly apparent, but the Germans were now bringing in their new Mark VI Tiger, the most powerful tank in the world. The slaughter was both pitiless and pitiful; Allied tank shells simply bounced off the German armor. Hideous scenes were offered up: crews roasted alive in a field of flaming tanks, decapitated or blown to atoms by German guns. Despite mounting casualties the Americans and British fought bravely and with much painful sacrifice while surgeons did their grim work round-the-clock in crude field hospitals. There was little quarter given, and little asked for, most notably by members of certain ethnic groups fighting for the Allies. A mercenary tribe known as the Goums from the deserts of Morocco and Algeria were infamous for entering Allied camps carrying the severed heads of Germans, for each of which they were paid a bounty. A similar terror tactic practiced by the British Gurkhas, learned presumably in their native Nepal, was to sneak up on a sleeping patrol of Germans and slit the throats of all but one, leaving him, when he awakened, to spread the news.11
For more than a month the battle seesawed as the Allies inched stubbornly forward, only to withdraw in the face of German counterattacks. Time and again orders would come down from some headquarters far behind the lines to do this or that, or thus and so, when the men actually fighting on the ground, from privates to senior commanders, could plainly see it was either impossible or foolhardy. This prompted one GI to declare, “Never were so few commanded by so many from so far away.”12 At last the Americans and British were forced to draw back to regroup and refit at a position about twenty miles inside the Tunisian border and sixty miles from their farthest point of advance. General Robinett’s corps alone had lost nearly 75 percent of its equipment and 22 percent of its men.
Finally, on Christmas Eve 1942, Eisenhower himself reached the fighting front. He had been so harassed by political concerns—who would lead the French North African army; how was the British army to be deployed?—that General Marshall himself had to personally order his North African commander in chief to drop these matters entirely and concentrate on beating the Germans. When Eisenhower’s big armored Cadillac staff car pulled up to a camouflaged little farmhouse just inside Tunisia, where Allied headquarters was located, the general had already become depressed. During the entire fifteen-hour trip from Algiers he had witnessed firsthand the effects of the rain and mud on troop movement. From the window of his car he had seen men straining and struggling to free vehicles hopelessly mired and knew deep down that no army could conduct an offensive battle in such conditions. After a few cheerless and uninspiring remarks to American and British senior officers, including General Robinett, Eisenhower was briefed on the tactical situation. It was even more agonizing than he had imagined; because of terrain, the lone road into Tunis, along which the Allies had been fighting so bitterly during all these weeks, had become an unmanageable bottleneck.
Eisenhower asked questions but said little else until the briefing was over, then made his pronouncement: the battle would have to be called off until spring, when the ground had dried out. It was a terrific disappointment, all the wasted lives, all the lost time, but what he had seen and heard made the decision inevitable. That done, at eleven P.M. he went in to Christmas Eve dinner with the British and French senior commanders. As a student of the Punic Wars from his West Point days, it might have crossed Eisenhower’s mind that in the time of Hannibal, the Carthaginians often crucified generals who failed. And fail Eisenhower had; the race for Tunisia had been lost and now he was faced with stalemate, which might easily degenerate into the appalling static warfare experienced in the First World War.
Uninvited to any Christmas supper of their own, the troops outside the farmhouse headquarters huddled beneath haystacks or in tents and vehicles, listening to the rain drum down. Lonely, homesick, and frightened, whether they knew it or not, or even cared, the blood of soldiers on both sides was now being mixed in the same rich dirt as those who had died two thousand years earlier under Hannibal, or Caesar or Scipio. One of their number had composed a piece of verse:
Twas the night before Christmas, in Africa’s plain,
The men were all drenched in a deep drizzling rain.
Tomorrow our folks will eat turkey and duck,
We’ll probably have C-rations down by the truck.13
No sooner had Eisenhower returned to his headquarters in Algiers than he received an alarming message. In under three weeks’ time the president of the United States and the prime minister of Great Britain, and their top staffs and aides, were coming to Casablanca for a meeting—as if Eisenhower didn’t have enough on his plate already.
The Casablanca Conference was convened because, assuming they took North Africa from the Germans, the Allies had no agreed-upon plan whatsoever for what they would do next. Casablanca had been decided as the site for a variety of interesting reasons. Churchill had visited the United States twice since the war broke out, and Roosevelt, ever the politician, was champing to take a trip himself. At first it was suggested that the conference should be held in England, but this was vetoed when someone pointed out it might anger the powerful British-hating American Irish vote. Roosevelt himself wanted to convene somewhere close to the war itself, and Churchill agreed. They tried to persuade old Joe Stalin to join them but he begged off on grounds that the fighting around Stalingrad had reached critical proportions and he was needed in Moscow. (This did not square with the reports stating that Stalin didn’t like to fly, which would have been the only way he could have gotten to Casablanca.)14
Roosevelt left Washington under a cloak of utmost secrecy. In the middle of the night he was spirited out of the White House by Secret Service agents and taken to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, an imposing redbrick building a few blocks away. There, in an underground tunnel, waited his private train cars. To preserve security, the regular porters and dining car waiters had been replaced by Filipino staff servants from his mountain retreat at Shangri-la. After a few fake maneuvers to discourage possible espionage agents from divining where the train was headed, the entourage took off southward for Miami. Aboard with the president were General Marshall and Admiral King, and their staffs, representatives from the Department of State, and Roosevelt’s close aide Harry Hopkins.
At Miami Roosevelt boarded a big flying boat and took off for Trinidad, then to Belem on South America’s Brazilian coast, and from there an exhausting eighteen-hour flight across the South Atlantic to the West African nation of Gambia, arriving at an old slave port on the Gambia River. An army transport plane then carried them north, above the Atlas Mountains to Casablanca.
Vast preparations had been under way since Eisenhower first got the word, and the man he appointed to receive this great assembly of free world leaders was none other than General George Patton. Pomp and circumstance was Patton’s specialty but there was little of it here because of the secrecy imposed. Patton, who was chafing to get into the battle, found himself scouring army units to find a band that could play “Hail to the Chief,” quietly.* Outside of Casablanca Patton’s staff had located a comfortable and secure compound where everyone could stay, and as they arrived at the airport Roosevelt, Churchill, and their people were hustled into waiting cars whose windows had been plastered with mud by a
GI detail in order to conceal the identities of those inside. One thing that incurred Patton’s displeasure was Roosevelt’s accompanying guard of Secret Service agents, who rode in a open jeep behind his limousine brandishing pistols. Patton felt that with his 50,000-man Western Army Corps he had provided adequate security and described the Secret Service men as “a bunch of cheap detectives always smelling of drink.”15
When the luminaries arrived at their elegant villas it was like Old Home Week. Roosevelt’s sons Elliott and FDR Jr. were there in their army and navy uniforms, respectively. (Another son, James, was still off in the Pacific with the marines.) So was Churchill’s son, Randolph, who was serving with the British commandos near the front. As well, Sergeant Robert Hopkins, Harry’s son, whom Eisenhower had dug up out of his foxhole in Tunisia, arrived to complete the party.16
The principal agenda of the conference had been set by both the British and the Americans—on opposing sides. The Americans wanted to attack the Germans in France the following year (1943) and the British still wanted to attack someplace in the Mediterranean so as to get at Italy: Sicily, Sardinia, Crete, Rhodes, or even the mainland of Greece were all on the table as potential points of invasion. This was Churchill’s pet theory of invading Europe’s “soft underbelly,” until they were strong enough to attack across the English Channel, and it had much to recommend it. British staff officers estimated that there were eighty German divisions in France, but only forty Allied divisions would be capable of invading in 1943. Yet there were troops enough to knock out Italy beginning as soon as North Africa was conquered—assuming that it was; so far things had not been looking up along those lines.
To bolster their argument the British pointed to their disastrous raid on the French port town of Dieppe only five months earlier. The raid had been planned partly in response to Stalin’s continued insistence on an immediate second front in France and partly to see just how hard or easy it would be to breach the German defenses.* They might as well not have bothered. Some 6,000 soldiers, most of them Canadians,† had landed on the beaches of Dieppe, August 19, 1942, a few days after the U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal. The Germans were ready for them. Machine guns blasted many of the invaders before they could even get out of their landing barges. Tanks that had been sent with them foundered on German obstacles set along the beaches. After nine hours of fighting nearly a thousand of the raiding force were killed and twice that taken prisoner. The rest managed somehow to escape into waiting barges and returned dejectedly to England. With all these arguments on their side, in the end the British Mediterranean attack plan was persuasive and it was decided that Sicily would be the best invasion point once the German armies were captured or driven out of Tunisia.
That out of the way, Churchill and Roosevelt left the details to be bickered about among their various staffs and turned to the ever vexing problem of what to do about France. Roosevelt was enduring vitriolic attacks at home over his administration’s decision to continue dealing with the discredited Vichy French regime. Operating from London and a base in the former Belgian Congo, Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, a borderline renegade, had assembled and taken command of a force he called the Free French and refused to have anything to do with Vichy at all. Like General Giraud, de Gaulle proclaimed himself the only true French leader, which the State Department suspected was done so primarily to gain future political advantage, after the war. (They of course suspected the same of Giraud.) But to ease the political strain back in the United States as well as to get these two vain Frenchmen to cooperate in the common cause, it was considered necessary to present to the public at least a perceived reconciliation of their bitter antagonisms.
This was accomplished, superficially, only with the greatest of difficulties. At first de Gaulle refused to leave his London office and go to Casablanca and did so only after Churchill threatened to cut off his funding. When Giraud and de Gaulle arrived at the conference they said as little as possible to each other and were barely civil, but the propaganda purpose of having them there was brilliantly accomplished when Roosevelt paraded them out onto the lawn with himself and Churchill and had them shake hands for the waiting photographers (after which they were hustled off before any reporters could talk to them). The picture, however, was flashed around the world as proof that Roosevelt and Churchill had patched up all French dissension when, in fact, it was merely a shrewd photo op.
At one point Churchill, who had wonderful memories of North Africa, took Roosevelt on a sightseeing tour, their limousine followed as always by the pistol-waving Secret Service men. They rode through miles of countryside, past bazaars, veiled dancing girls, snake charmers, and Arabs riding camels, ending up at a six-story observation tower near Marrakech. With Churchill leading the way as Roosevelt, seated in a garden chair, was lugged up the stairs by his Secret Service detail, the two world leaders were treated to a sight to behold: the snowcapped Atlas Mountains in the distance, illuminated by a setting sun reflecting purplish hues upon their magnificent slopes.17
On the final day of the conference, with a gaggle of newsmen and photographers standing or sitting cross-legged on the lush grass before them, Roosevelt and Churchill sat in little white chairs amid African palms and fruit trees and gave a brief recitation of what had been decided at the meetings, leaving out of course the part about invading Italy through Sicily. Then at one point, seemingly off the cuff, Roosevelt made one of the most controversial statements of the war.
He and Churchill, the president suddenly announced, had determined that the only way to end the war was by demanding the “unconditional surrender” of Germany, Italy, and Japan. There were to be no “deals,” or armistices, such as there were in 1918. The only way out for the Axis, Roosevelt said, was total capitulation. Among the people shocked by this declaration was Churchill himself, who had no inkling that it was coming; for so many years of their illustrious military history the British had always tried to leave themselves a little wiggle room, but here there was none. Roosevelt later told the press that the idea “just popped into my mind,” but this was not entirely so; Harry Hopkins revealed that Roosevelt had thought it out the night before and had put it into his notes.18
Whatever the case, it created an uproar at the time, and has among historians ever since. “There were many experts,” wrote Hopkins’s biographer Robert Sherwood, “who believed that the utterance of these words would put the iron of desperate resistance into the Germans, Japanese and Italians and needlessly prolong the war and increase its cost; there are some who still believe it did so. There were others who were violently opposed to the principle itself, and still [attribute] the world’s postwar troubles to the enforcement of unconditional surrender.”19
In any event, the die was now cast, with the end of the game yet to be played out in the years 1943, 1944, and 1945.
Chapter Twenty–one
The fateful year of 1942, which began in a cataract of defeat and humiliation—in Europe, North Africa, and the Soviet Union, and in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific—would end with the complete and abrupt halt of Axis expansion everywhere—German, Italian, and Japanese.* The Casablanca Conference of January 1943 pronounced its eventual doom. Having said this, it would be not only profoundly wrong but insulting as well to imply that everything coming afterward was somehow anticlimax, for terrible battles remained to be fought and millions of people were yet to suffer and die before the beast was run to ground. Still, it would not be wrong to say that a year that began in shock and anxiety for the Allies had ended on a note of high confidence, and with the smell of victory in the air.†
The stalemate in Tunisia continued until mid-March, when Allied armies began to break out. It was ugly at first. There were frightful American losses at Sidi bou Zid and during the Battle of the Kasserine Pass in mid-February, as the U.S. First Armored Division, the U.S. First Infantry Division, and British units went up against Rommel’s veterans of the Afrika Korps. These were among the greatest defea
ts in American history, some 10,000 men and hundreds of tanks lost. The U.S. forces, it seemed, were simply not performing. As well as verified reports of undaunted courage, there was also evidence of incompetence, shirking, even cowardice. The American army was green and in many cases poorly led. If any good thing came of the Kasserine tragedy it was the replacement of the II Corps commanding officer by General George S. Patton, who would finally get his chance to lead great numbers of men in battle. Rommel had gone back to Germany on sick leave and Patton now faced General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered who he faced. By the end of the campaign the Allies had built more than a hundred airfields near the battle area and simply overwhelmed the Germans in every aspect.
As the American soldiers became battle-hardened at last, they also began to harden their souls, and this would haunt some of them for the rest of their lives. Increasingly, incidents were reported of U.S. soldiers raping Arab women and outright murdering Arab men, all of whom they suspected of working for the Nazis, true or not. But murder was something they had now become good at and, like it or no, this is one thing that makes a man into a true combat soldier—absolute hate and desire to kill his enemy. At least it did in World War II, and General Patton, perhaps the greatest German hater of them all, managed to instill in his men precisely that emotion.
Scripps-Howard News Service war correspondent Ernie Pyle detected this new attitude. “The most vivid change was the casual and workshop manner in which they talked about killing,” he wrote. “They had made the psychological transition from their normal belief that taking a human life was sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing was a craft. No longer was there anything morally wrong about killing. In fact, it was an admirable thing. He wanted to kill individually and in vast numbers. He spoke excitedly of seeing great heaps of dead ... of Germans by the thousands dying miserably in a final Tunisian holocaust of their own creation.”1