The French, for their part, claimed to be worried about the Moroccan Jews, who were rumored to be stirring up trouble. On orders from Vichy, the French government in Morocco had stripped the Jews of their rights to vote and work in most professions, similar to the way they were being treated in Germany. Furthermore, Germans operating within Vichy had propagandized the North African Arabs to believe that the Allies’ arrival meant the establishment of a Jewish state as had been done in Palestine after World War I. When the Americans sought to restore rights to the Jews, the French demurred, saying it might cause the Arabs to revolt.
Patton’s job now became largely political, which is to say ceremonial, an especially annoying development since his every nerve and sinew strained to get into the fight. “We have been here for a month today,” he wrote to General Thomas Handy, a friend and aide to George Marshall, “which means that for 26 days we have not had any fighting. This is regrettable.”
In keeping with his diplomatic duties, Patton and an aide drove from Casablanca, “a city which combines Hollywood and the Bible,” to Rabat where the sultan was located. First he stopped by the residency of the French governor of Morocco, General Charles Noguès, whom Patton invariably described in letters and memos as “a crook.” Guarding the residency, a magnificent marble structure, were a squadron of Spahis (Arab cavalrymen) and a company of Goums (short for Goumiers, native Moroccan infantry, which Patton understood was pronounced “goons”).
Patton’s party entered an inner court, filled “with white-robed men in biblical dress,” and encountered the grand vizier, “in white, with enormous gold-filled teeth,” who took them up three flights of stairs to see the sultan. The sultan, a handsome, frail young man, rose and shook hands, and speaking in Arabic (though Patton claimed the man spoke perfect French) he made a speech of welcome.
They then got down to business, which was to reassure one another that they must “make common head against the enemy.” Before they left, the sultan admonished Patton about American soldiers not “showing proper respect for Mohammedan institutions,” and Patton reassured him, saying he hoped if any such acts would occur that the sultan would report them to him personally. A few days later Patton flew across the Mediterranean—with an escort of four P-40 fighters—to see Eisenhower at his headquarters at Gibraltar.
“Ike lives in a cave in the middle of the rock—in great danger,” Patton noted sarcastically in his diary. Patton was not, apparently, in a great mood that day. Eisenhower had just informed him that his deputy Major General Mark Clark—eight years Patton’s junior at West Point—was to be commander of the new Fifth Army, which would combine all the American forces that had landed in North Africa. Patton had desperately wanted that job, and in his estimation Clark, whom he neither liked nor trusted, “seem[ed] more preoccupied with bettering his own future than in winning the war.”
At lunch with Eisenhower, Patton met the British governor of the Rock, “an old fart in shorts with skinny red legs,” who asked Patton if Clark was a Jew. “At least one quarter,” Patton replied ignobly, “and probably a half.” On the way back to Casablanca “the Spanish at Tangier shot at my left escort and possibly at me, but their aim was bad.” He had trouble sleeping that night, he wrote Beatrice, but would “get ahead” of Clark yet.
WINTER IN NORTH AFRICA is the rainy season and, as the Allies continued their push into Tunisia, the tanks and trucks could scarcely move along the greasy roads even when not confronted by German and Italian strong points. Worse, the tank models the Americans put up were the woefully outdated General Lee and General Stuart tanks that ran on gasoline with a 37mm gun that could not penetrate the armor on German tank hulls. German diesel Mark IV Tigers, however, were armed with an 88mm main cannon more than twice as powerful. The Americans called their tanks “flaming coffins,” and one old soldier—seeing a column of high-profile Lee models clanking down the road—remarked that the tank looked like “a damned moving cathedral.”
Even with these challenges, the Americans and British crawled forward on the main road that led from Algeria into northern Tunisia. They headed toward its capital, Tunis, which on a clear day could be seen gleaming tantalizingly white against the cobalt blue of the Mediterranean Sea. It would “remain a haunting memory through many tough days ahead,” as the Germans were now streaming in great strength from their bases in Sicily and Italy, while Rommel’s horde of 80,000, pressed hard by the British, was slouching Sphinx-like across the desert toward Tunisia.7
Patton had heard that the Americans in Tunisia were taking enormous losses against the Germans, and in early December he flew to Algiers. From there he went by staff vehicle to the Tunisian battlefields to see for himself what was going wrong. Tunisia was the land of the Carthaginians of antiquity who had made a great Mediterranean empire, fought the Punic Wars against Rome, and lost their civilization because of it. The Romans then began a prosperous centuries-long occupation until their hour came at the hands of the Vandals, plunging Western culture into a thousand years of darkness. Patton knew all about this, savoring it in his absorbent mind, for here upon this bountiful land, amid the olive groves, vineyards, and fields of golden wheat, were being fought some of the fiercest tank battles of the war.
Ernie Pyle, the diminutive and beloved Scripps-Howard correspondent, observed that “The battlefield was always an incongruous thing … some ridiculous impingement of normalcy”—in this case, the Arabs. “They were herding their camels as usual, some of them continued to plow their fields. Children walked along, driving their little sack-laden burros, as tanks and guns clanked past them. The sky was filled with planes and smoke burst from screaming shells.”8
Patton visited his son-in-law John Waters, Bee’s husband, now a colonel commanding a tank battalion that “had lost 39 tanks—two-thirds of its original strength.” There, Patton found he was the only American general the men had seen their entire time at the front.
Leadership, poor tactics, and the inferiority of the American tanks and their ammunition were the culprits, Patton concluded. When he returned to Algiers he wrote up his notes and gave them to Eisenhower and Clark, neither of whom had visited the front. On a nighttime flight back to Casablanca, Patton had “the most dangerous experience I have had [so far] in this war.” His plane was caught in an impossible rainstorm and they were considering jumping out. When the aircraft landed miraculously safe, Patton noted in his diary, “Again, God has saved me for something.”
At last, on Christmas Eve, Eisenhower visited the fighting front after George Marshall himself ordered him to stop worrying about political considerations and concentrate on beating the Germans. He watched, appalled, during the fifteen-hour drive from Algiers in his big armored Cadillac staff car, witnessing firsthand the continual sights of men straining and struggling to free vehicles that were hopelessly mired in mud that “had the consistency of glue,” in the words of the First Infantry Division commander. An army could never conduct offensive operations under those conditions, Ike concluded, and he called off the battle until spring. It was a terrific letdown, all the wasted lives, all the lost time, but there was nothing to do except wait until the ground dried out.
No sooner had Eisenhower returned to headquarters than he received an alarming message. As if Eisenhower didn’t have enough on his plate, in less than three weeks President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and all their top aides and staff were going to descend on Casablanca for a high-level conference to decide what to do next, assuming that they took North Africa from the Axis. The man Ike detailed to receive this great assembly of free world leaders was none other than George Patton.
Most of the pomp and circumstance was to be muted because of the secrecy imposed, but Patton personally scoured his army units for a band that could play “Hail to the Chief.” He located a compound outside Casablanca where everyone could stay, and as Churchill, Roosevelt, and their people arrived at the airport, they were hustled into automobiles whose windows had been smeared with mud to
conceal the identities of those inside. Patton was irked when a gaggle of Secret Service agents got into a jeep and rode behind Roosevelt brandishing pistols, as if his 50,000-man Western Army Corps was unable to provide enough security for the president. (Afterward Patton described the agents as “a bunch of cheap detectives always smelling of drink.”)
IN MID-FEBRUARY 1943, the Axis became worried at the advance of the Allies, slow as it was, across the Atlas Mountains and into Tunisia. Rommel, the infamous Desert Fox, had arrived in the area and linked up with the forces of General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, but the Germans feared that the Americans and their Allies might drive deeper into Tunisia and split their armies. The decision was made to attack. On February 14, von Arnim’s tanks surprised and overwhelmed the American forces under General Lloyd Fredendall’s II or Eastern Corps at a place named Sidi Bou Zid. More than a hundred tanks and several thousand troops were lost, including those of Patton’s son-in-law John Waters, who went missing when his battalion was cut off and destroyed by a force of eighty German tanks.
Patton was devastated, not only for himself but for his daughter “Little B.” “I could not feel worse,” he wrote Beatrice, “if [his son] George had been in John’s place. I feel terribly sorry for B, but John may turn up yet.”
Five days later, the Germans under Rommel attacked the Americans at the Kasserine Pass inflicting even worse losses and driving the Allies back more than fifty miles to the western passes of the Atlas Mountains. The Battles of Sidi Bou Zid and Kasserine Pass were among the worst defeats in American military history—some ten thousand men and hundreds of tanks lost. Worse, there were reports of incompetence, shirking, and even cowardice. The Americans, it seems, despite verified accounts of undaunted courage, were not performing—although they did manage to rally after the retreat and, with massed artillery barrages, successfully blocked Rommel from entering any of the passes along what was known as the Western Dorsale. With that, the Battle of Kasserine Pass, while still a defeat, was not an unmitigated Allied disaster; Rommel concluded that with Allied reinforcements he would be unable to break through and wreak havoc, so he ordered the Afrika Korps to return to its original positions along the so-called Mareth Line, a series of captured French-built forts in southern Tunisia.
Two weeks after the Kasserine Pass debacle, Patton “got a sudden call to go to the vicinity of the place where John [Waters] was last seen.” When he reached Algiers, which had become Allied headquarters, Eisenhower told Patton that he was going to replace Fredendall as commander of II Corps. It was because “the fighting in Tunisia is a tank show and I know more about tanks,” Patton wrote on March 6.
Fredendall, it seemed, had badly bungled the job. He was a likable and mostly able commander, but in Tunisia he never visited his front lines and positioned his infantry units from maps at headquarters, allowing them to be cut off in detail. Nor was he very cooperative with the British, a serious offense in Eisenhower’s mind. Ike sent him a brief note to clear out and Patton now found himself in charge of both American corps in North Africa. The two corps constituted an army—except that they were separated by a thousand miles of some of the most hostile terrain on the African continent.
Six days later Patton heard from the radio that he was promoted to lieutenant general and, courtesy of his aide Captain Richard “Dick” Jenson, who had been carrying them for months, had a third silver star pinned on his shoulders. Patton told his diary that night: “When I was a little boy at home I used to wear a wooden sword and say to myself, George S. Patton, Lieutenant General.”
Getting back to work, Patton’s first move was to make Omar Bradley his deputy commander. It was an odd move, inasmuch as Bradley was nearly as different in personality from Patton as was possible. Bradley was a teetotaling, straitlaced midwesterner who found Patton’s penchant for profanity appalling. But the cautious Bradley also acted as a kind of brake on Patton when he was in one of his loose-cannon frames of mind.
Patton’s problems began almost immediately, some of them brought on himself—not the least of which was that he had become an inveterate Anglophobe when his II Corps was to be under the tactical command of the British general Harold Alexander. Patton immediately flew to Constantine to meet with Alexander, who “seems competent,” he told Beatrice, yet impressed Patton by giving him a free hand with his corps, as opposed to being directly under British authority. Still, Patton resented being placed under the overall command of the British, and resented even more Eisenhower’s acquiescence to it. “I think he [Eisenhower] has sold his soul to the devil with this ‘cooperation,’ ” he remarked.
Patton’s new command contained about 90,000 men in four divisions: Terry Allen’s First Division, Orlando Ward’s First Armored Division, Manton Eddy’s Ninth Division, and Charles Ryder’s Thirty-fourth. Upon his arrival in the combat zone, Patton immediately took note of the decidedly unmilitary bearing of the troops and issued orders that the soldiers would wear clean uniforms with ties, shined boots, polished brass, and helmets. GIs would always salute officers and discipline would be rigidly enforced. “It’s absurd to believe that soldiers who cannot be made to wear the proper uniform can be induced to move forward in battle,” explained his thinking on the subject. Worse than their dress, Patton found that the men’s morale was low, and he believed the best way to raise it was to be seen and heard as much as possible.
As a result, when he was not in conferences planning the next move, Patton was out giving pep talks to the troops the language of which, in the opinion of his then deputy corps commander Omar Bradley, “would not be suitable family fare.”9
One of the most pressing military issues Patton had to face was a lack of air cover. The British seemed unable to intercept German fighter-bombers that continually bombed and strafed his troops, adding to the morale problems. The Englishmen dismissed Patton’s complaints and pleas, insisting that the British had complete air control. After a particularly nasty contretemps between Patton and a British air commander, a meeting to resolve the problems was arranged by the British air marshal Arthur W. Tedder and U.S. Lieutenant General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz at Patton’s headquarters. They had barely finished formalities when four German Focke-Wulf fighter-bombers roared in, strafing the streets with their machine guns and dropping bombs that sprayed plaster from the ceiling and dislodged Patton’s office door.
When the fracas was over and the German planes roared off, Spaatz asked Patton incredulously, “Now how in hell did you manage to stage that?” Tedder rose from the floor and said to Patton, “I knew you were a good stage manager, but this takes the cake.” For his part, Patton dusted himself off and replied with a grin, “I’ll be damned if I know, but if I could find the sonsofbitches who flew those planes I’d mail them each a medal.”
Meanwhile, Allied air and sea power had “virtually isolated” the German and Italian armies in Tunisia from resupply and reinforcements. Rommel, sensing a disaster, flew to Berlin to try and organize a Dunkirk-style plan to evacuate his Afrika Korps. But Hitler, suicidal even then, utterly refused and insisted that they fight to the death. The toady-like Mussolini did the same for his Italian command.
Alexander’s plan in North Africa was to defeat the Axis by initiating a “squeeze play” in which General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army would attack and smash Rommel’s Germans at the Mareth Line, while another British army under Kenneth Anderson (including some 50,000 converted Vichy French) would hold the north and north-central sectors of Tunisia. For the Americans, whose battleworthiness Alexander held in contempt, was reserved a minor role of “demonstrating” (i.e., feinting, taking a few small objectives, mostly making noise) to convince the Germans they were about to be attacked. They were expressly prohibited from making a thrust into the coastal plain.
Disgusted, Patton resigned himself to the situation and drew a battle plan in which the First Infantry Division would march out of the Western Dorsale and drive to Gafsa, while the First Armored Division would strike at Maknassy in t
he Eastern Dorsale. The Ninth Division would stay behind in reserve and the Thirty-fourth Division would hold back until the Axis retreated and strike them at Sbeitla.
On March 16, the night before the battle, Patton told his astonished staff: “Gentlemen, tomorrow we attack. If we are not successful, let no one come back alive,” then went to his room to pray.10 He wrote in his diary, “The hardest thing a General has to do is to wait for a battle after all the orders are issued.” At 11 p.m. he heard firing from the direction of Gafsa and wrote, “Well, the battle is on. I’m taking off my shoes to go to bed.”§
Patton joined the First Infantry troops in the front line when they jumped off before dawn. The Americans easily rolled over the initial objectives. Gafsa was taken without much fanfare. It wasn’t much in the way of big battles, but it served to restore the Americans’ confidence after Kasserine and added mightily to Patton’s reputation back in the States. (“If any American officer ever had the will to win that officer is Lieutenant General George S. Patton,” crowed a prime-time radio show.)
He wrote to Beatrice: “The weather is frightful cold and wet. The Roman ruins are wonderful and one gets quite used to passing huge cities without even knowing the names. It’s hard to believe the Romans were here for 700 years. I have found out why all the pillars are broken: the Romans pinned them together with bronze pegs, and the Arabs pushed them over to get the metal. What a race! I feel sorry for the men in this cold.”
On March 19, Patton joined the First Armored Division that was utterly bogged down in mud on its way to attacking the Maknassy Pass. It was important to Patton, because if the pass were breached the Americans would threaten to break out into the coastal plain with possibly disastrous results for the Afrika Korps. After a forty-two-mile jeep ride that took three hours Patton arrived at the command post of General Orlando Ward.