1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  From my mother’s sleep I Jell into the State,

  And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

  Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

  I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

  When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

  Another airplane in the U.S. arsenal was the B-24 Liberator, a heavy bomber flown mostly in the North African and the Italian campaigns. Once the Allies secured Italy, Liberators were able to bomb Germany from the south, in addition to the B-17s in England flying from the west. This forced the German armaments minister Albert Speer to disburse his industrial plants to the far reaches of the countryside, or move them underground, seriously disrupting the German war machine.

  The Eighth Air Force was by far the most well known of the American air forces of its day and its last commander was none other than the famed Jimmy Doolittle. Books were published and movies were made about the Eighth Air Force, including the classic Twelve O’Clock High, starring Gregory Peck. Hundreds of thousands of Americans fought with the Eighth Air Force, and tens of thousands died, high in the skies, destroyed by German bullets and flak, tumbling back down the interminable miles to crash upon the earth.

  Except for the ferocious clashes against German fighter planes, the U.S. Army Air Force fought primarily a sterile, almost impersonal battle, dropping its bombs from heights of 30,000 feet or more, unlike the grubby marines at Guadalcanal or the army soldiers on New Guinea, who often saw their foes face to face on a daily basis. Yet the fliers’ impersonality was not felt by everyone. Listen again to the terrible irony of poet Randall Jarrell, who was there.

  In bombers named for girls, we burned

  The cities we had learned about in school.

  Chapter Twenty

  In North Africa the situation was boiling up to its critical mass. By mid-November 1942, all American and British troops and their equipment were ashore, the French had been subdued, and a fresh Allied buildup was under way. Now the problem was to race into Tunisia and occupy it before the Germans could reinforce it from their bases in Sicily and Italy, the Allies’ utmost fear. Tunisia was already held by the Germans, and there were a number of Luftwaffe airfields there, but the German garrison was light and there appeared a good chance to overcome it quickly. Thus the Allied forces began their long eastward trek across the rugged heights of the Atlas Mountains and through the vast reaches of Morocco and Algeria: tanks and trucks and artillery and, by now, 180,000 soldiers, with more arriving each week. And yet, to say the least, it did not go well.

  Before we go to Tunisia, let us visit for a moment a desolate spot of land in the Libyan Desert just across the Egyptian border where, just as the Allied armada was landing in North Africa, the British were winning a superlative victory against General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. In the summer of 1942 Rommel had pushed the British Eighth Army all the way across the Libyan Desert and into Egypt with brilliant armored tactics that left the British reeling. For a time it appeared the British would lose not only their army but Egypt itself, as well as the Suez Canal, which were the keys to all of North Africa and the Middle East and which, if lost to the Axis, would have upset the entire Allied scheme of the war. The “desolate spot of land” referred to above lay near an obscure Arab town called El Alamein, which became the name given to perhaps the most famous tank battle of all time.

  After the German and Italian forces took the Allied fortress of Tobruk and shoved the British back into Egypt, the British commander General Sir Bernard Montgomery stiffened up and pushed the Germans back out again. By then he was in dire straits, and for the moment the Germans had the advantage. Rommel, the foxy general who had gained a reputation for outwitting the British at almost every turn, now prepared for his final annihilation of the Allied forces. The only thing he awaited were critical shipments of fuel and ammunition for his tanks and for the Luftwaffe to knock the Royal Air Force out of the sky. For supplies, Rommel depended on shipping from the Italians; what he got from them instead were platitudes. And for German superiority in the air, what he got were bromides from Der Führer. These were not enough and Rommel had put up with them far too long.

  For more than a year the Axis had controlled most of the Mediterranean, and convoys from Britain—Montgomery’s only supply line—had to be routed all the way down the African Atlantic coast, around the Cape of Good Hope at South Africa, then back up the Indian Ocean and through the southern end of the Suez Canal, a detour of several thousand miles. But the British were relentless in their determination to supply Montgomery’s army. Braving German submarines and air attacks, they managed to stockpile in Egypt vast numbers of the new American Sherman and Grant tanks, and artillery and fuel, so that by September, when Rommel realized his only choice was to attack or retreat, it was too late. He attacked anyway.

  The first battle began in the darkness of the last day of August, at a rocky ridge in the desert called Alam Haifa, and it went completely wrong for the German and Italian armies. The British in fact had hoped for such an attack and had prepared well to meet it. First, they had placed hundreds of thousands of antitank mines before their positions and were well dug in. Second, they made excellent use of their airpower with a new tactic: as the German tanks and troops moved forward, a continuous relay of RAF bombers began. They were each led by a single plane that circled above the Germans, relentlessly dropping magnesium parachute flares, which were impossible to put out, “bathing the whole of the desert in a brilliant light.” Hundreds of German and Italian tanks and trucks were blown to bits and soldiers were atomized by the high-explosive bombs as well as by British artillery that had registered in on them.

  Just as Rommel was sourly ordering another withdrawal, a New Zealand brigadier, one General George H. Clifton, was brought to his tent as prisoner. “He said that he was ashamed to have to admit being taken prisoner by the Italians,” Rommel remembered. “He had been in the act of persuading them to surrender and they had, in fact, already started taking the bolts out of their rifles, when to his disgust a German officer came along and ruined the whole affair.” Rommel grilled the New Zealander on “various acts contrary to international law, for which the New Zealanders had been responsible.” In particular Rommel was referring to “repeated massacres of German prisoners and wounded by this particular division.” Clifton explained to the German commander that this was due to the large number of Maoris the division contained.”*

  Rommel found General Clifton a likable character and the two were having a nice chat while they waited for the military police to escort Clifton to the POW compound. At one point, Rommel recalled, “Clifton asked to be taken to the lavatory, where he climbed out of the window and vanished without a trace.” A few days later, however, “several members of my staff were out hunting gazelles when they suddenly spotted a weary figure plodding across the desert carrying what looked like a jerry-can of water with him.” It was Clifton, and the German officers promptly gathered him up and brought him to Rommel again. “I had a talk with him,” Rommel said, “and expressed my appreciation of his exploit. Such a trek through the desert is not everybody’s meat, and not surprisingly, he looked exhausted.”1

  By October 23,1942, Rommel had gathered his army at El Alamein, about twenty miles from the Alam Haifa Ridge battle, and prepared for the worst. Despite repeated pleas to Berlin and Rome, few if any supplies ever reached him, and the British maintained control of the skies. On October 23 the British attacked with ten divisions—120,000 men—along a front of forty miles, advancing with a thousand tanks, to Rommel’s five hundred. Noting the disgraceful unreliability of the Italians, Rommel arranged that they would be interspersed among the Germans, “so that every Italian Army battalion would have a German neighbor.”

  Just hours before battle began, the British soldiers were read a message from Montgomery: “When I assumed command of the Eighth Army I said that the mandate was to destroy ROMMEL and his army, and that it would be d
one as soon as we were ready. We are ready NOW.” The British attack progressed applying the same tactics it had used in the defense of Alam Haifa—a tremendous artillery barrage, followed by planes dropping parachute flares to light the desert landscape for the bombers. The fighting was fierce and bloody but the British forces soon began to close in on the Afrika Korps. The desert around Rommel’s position soon became a sea of burning tanks, smashed artillery, and the bodies of dead German soldiers strewn about like chaff in the wind. With Rommel hanging on by a thread and pleading with authorities to send him critical supplies and fuel, he received instead a congratulatory note from Mussolini conveying his “deep appreciation for the successful counter-attack led personally by you,” as well as his “complete confidence that the battle now in progress will be brought to a successful conclusion.”2

  Rommel must have wondered at this point just what kind of lunatic Mussolini really was. He was already becoming aware of Hitler’s lunacy, which was reinforced during the height of the battle—with the only question left being whether his army could be saved by retreat—when he received the following message from Der Fuhrer:

  “In the situation in which you find yourself there can be no other thought than to stand fast and throw every gun and every man into the battle. The utmost efforts are being made to help you. Your enemy, despite his superiority, must be also at the end of his strength. It would not be the first time in history that a strong will has triumphed over the bigger battalions. As to our troops, you can show them no other road than that to victory or death.” To this, Rommel remarked acerbically, “Arms, gas and aircraft could have helped us, but not orders.”3

  With the German army now down to about eighty tanks—against some eight hundred for the British—Rommel was forced to begin a retreat toward Tunisia, more than fifteen hundred miles to the west where, unbeknownst to him at the time, the strong Allied force of Americans and British were preparing to greet him. His withdrawal, however, was a military classic. Instead of conducting a slow retrograde movement, fighting to keep Montgomery’s Eighth Army at bay across the vast Libyan Desert, with his last remaining fuel Rommel made it literally a race, using the only road, the one that ran along the Mediterranean coast, to speed his army along so fast that the British could not even catch the retreating tanks and troops, let alone outflank them. From time to time, he stopped the Afrika Korps at good defensive positions and put up a brisk fight to keep his enemy off balance. But even as they eluded the rapacious British, Rommel and his army had to wonder if in the end it would all come to naught.

  Thus, both sides were rushing toward Tunisia from opposite directions: the Americans and British from the west and Rommel’s Afrika Korps, for different reasons, from the east. By late November 1942, the spearhead of the Torch army that landed in French North Africa had made its way east into Tunisia. These first were only 12,000 strong and received a hot reception from units of the 56,000 Germans who now occupied Tunisia, with more arriving every day. Terrain was a major obstacle. Tunisia is slightly larger than the state of Florida and much of the eastern part is mountainous, with steep valleys and few roads and bridges, and the Germans had thoughtfully covered them all with powerful, well-dug-in and camouflaged defensive positions, bristling with artillery, armor, land mines, and antitank guns. These would soon prove to be a disaster for the Allied forces.

  Not only that but unlike the German predicament in the far eastern Libyan Desert, the Luftwaffe now could bring to bear in Tunisia overwhelming airpower from its bases in Sicily just a hundred miles across the Mediterranean. Worse, the American armored troops who had landed with Torch were equipped for the most part with outdated and pathetically armed and armored General Lee and General Stuart tanks, the newer and more powerful Grants and Shermans having been sent to Montgomery’s army. This generous Lend-Lease donation may have helped save the British Eighth Army from defeat at the hands of Rommel, but to the Americans involved in Torch their obsolete vehicles—run on gasoline instead of diesel oil—became “flaming coffins,” and one old soldier seeing a column of the high-profile Lees clanking down the road described the tank as looking “like a damn moving cathedral.”

  Everything seemed to go against the Allies as they pushed into Tunisia—including the weather. Winter in North Africa is the rainy season, and tanks and trucks could scarcely move even when not confronted with German strong points. Furthermore, the temperature hovered around freezing and they were unprepared for it. As they crossed the higher elevations, there was even snow and ice. Heat, such as in the Guadalcanal and New Guinea jungles, is unpleasant, but for troops having to fight and live in frigid weather it can be disastrous without proper clothing. Brigadier General Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt Jr., the spitting image of his Rough Rider father, and a cousin to FDR, was assistant commander of the First Infantry division and a jovial wit and raconteur under normal conditions. But in a letter to his wife, he complained, “It is still bitter cold and as our military with its customary dumbness did not envisage this and considered Africa a tropical country; we are not well prepared. I have not changed my underclothes for twelve days,” he told her, and described his dress as a “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.” And still he was cold.4

  Meanwhile, taking advantage of the Allied holdup at the bridges and passes leading into Tunisia, the Germans began to rush across by sea and air huge numbers of troops and hordes of munitions from their Italian and Sicilian bases. One arrival was the Mark IV Tiger tank, whose main 88mm cannon outgunned the Allied U.S. Stuart’s 37mm, somewhat as a rifle compares with a peashooter or, in the words of one officer who had to fight one, “popcorn balls thrown by Little Bo Peep would have been just as effective.”5 Furthermore, by Christmas 1942, the vanguard of Rommel’s remaining 80,000 troops had begun to arrive in Tunisia after their grueling retreat across the western desert. Hitler, for his part, had finally decided to do what he should have done in the first place, which was to provide all the arms, men, fuel, and supplies available to make a stand against the Allied armies in an all-or-nothing gamble for North Africa and control of the Mediterranean.

  There were other issues, too. For one thing, the North African Muslims had been propagandized by the Germans to believe that the American and British presence was a prelude to establishing a Jewish state in their countries, as had been done in Palestine. Not all Arabs believed this, but enough did so that sniping, sabotage, and espionage—principally as to Allied troop movements—became a constant threat.* After the fall of France, courtesy of the Vichy regime, Jews in French North Africa had been stripped of most of their rights, including voting, and were banned from working in occupations such as law, medicine, education, and banking. When the Americans arrived in Morocco and Algeria they pressed the French to restore Jewish rights, but the French demurred, claiming it might ignite an Arab uprising, and that they had trouble enough ahead as it was.

  In Tunisia, the plight of the Jews became far worse as the Germans poured in and took over the country completely. Jews were rounded up by the thousands and forced to work for the German army, building defensive fortifications and airfields and set to other labor-intensive drudgery. To add insult to injury, they were ordered to bring their own tools and food. Not only did the Germans begin to loot the Jews’ bank accounts, gold, and jewelry but they accused them of supporting the Allies and levied the equivalent of a $25 million fine on them, which had to be paid through usurious bank loans, with Jewish land, farms, and houses as collateral.6

  Through November and December the Americans and British pressed forward along the main road leading from Algeria through northern Tunisia to its capital, Tunis. Once, on a clear day, from a rise of hills, the Allied columns even got a glimpse of the famed ancient city gleaming white against the cobalt blue of the Mediterranean Sea. Tantalizing as that vista was, it was also “to remain a haunting memory through many tough days ahead,�
�� since the Germans were now coming in great strength. By the end of December the Americans and British had arrived in the valley of the Medjerda River.7

  Here was the land of the Carthaginians of antiquity, who had built a great Mediterranean empire and fought the Punic Wars against Rome and lost their civilization because of it. The Romans then occupied the place and turned it into a prosperous and abundant province until their hour finally came round at the hands of the Vandals, plunging Western culture into more than a thousand years of darkness. Ruins of Roman houses, temples, and baths still stood among the fertile hills and fields where Arabs now cultivated their crops: oranges, lemons, and other citrus, almonds, grapes, olives, apricots, and wheat. One American officer observed, almost wistfully, that “the citrus fruit was almost ripe.”8 And it was upon this bountiful land, amid the groves and vineyards, that some of the fiercest tank battles of the war took place.

  “Tunisian mud had the consistency of chewing gum,” wrote Brigadier General Paul M. Robinett, commander of a tank regiment of the U.S. First Armored Division.9 The incessant rainfall reduced the roads and countryside to almost unimaginable traveling conditions. Trucks and artillery sank axle-deep in the muck. Even tanks often could not operate properly. Oxen, commandeered from local Arabs by the exasperated Allies, managed to haul a few guns forward and get some trucks unstuck, but all in all it was beginning to seem as futile as had the mud-bound attacks on the Western Front during World War I. Worse, this spirit of futility seemed to be spreading into the rank and file of the American army. Unlike the Germans, who had been fighting for two years, the Americans were not yet “battle-hardened,” and the combination of cold, wet, and mud and constant German air attacks was badly affecting their morale. There were few hot meals and the men were filthy from living in the open or in watery holes in the ground; anyone who was clean became immediately conspicuous.