These considerations argued for putting invasion forces from both armadas onto Mediterranean beaches in Algeria, and perhaps even as far east as the principal Tunisian port of Bizerte. “We should take great risks” to reach Tunis first, the British military chiefs of staff urged. Landings too far west should be avoided “like the plague” because of the hazard that the subsequent advance “eastward will be so slow as to allow Germans to reach Tunisia in force.” In late August, Eisenhower’s preliminary TORCH plan called for landings entirely within the Mediterranean, at the Algerian ports of Oran, Algiers, and Bône.
But General Marshall and War Department planners had other ideas. Tunisia and eastern Algeria lay within range of Axis warplanes on Sicily and beyond range of Allied fighters at Gibraltar. Landings at sites vulnerable to Luftwaffe attack would be extraordinarily perilous. Furthermore, the Americans feared that Hitler might lunge through neutral Spain and close the Straits of Gibraltar, trapping them in the Mediterranean as if cinching the drawstring of a sack. That argued for at least one landing on Morocco’s Atlantic coast to guarantee an open supply line across the Atlantic.
For weeks, cables had fluttered back and forth in what Eisenhower called “a transatlantic essay contest.” The Royal Navy believed that although the Strait of Gibraltar at its narrowest was just eight miles wide, it could not be controlled by enemy forces any more than the English Channel had been controlled. British planners also calculated that even with Madrid’s consent to cross Spain—consent that, London insisted, was unlikely to be given—the Germans would need at least six divisions and more than two months to overpower Gibraltar.
In the American view, however, the risks were too great. The TORCH landings must succeed, Marshall argued, because failure in the first big American offensive of the war would “only bring ridicule and loss of confidence.”
Roosevelt agreed, and again he intervened. “I want to emphasize,” he cabled Churchill on August 30, “that under any circumstances one of our landings must be on the Atlantic.” The president blithely dismissed the notion that Axis forces might build a Tunisian redoubt before the Allies arrived. In another message to the prime minister, he reiterated “our belief that German air and parachute troops cannot get to Algiers or Tunis any large force for at least two weeks after [the] initial attack.”
Again Churchill acquiesced, not least because General Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, shared the American disquiet and believed that diverting Hewitt’s armada to Morocco “is a much wiser plan.”
If not wiser, it was safer in the short run. But rarely are wars won in the short run. The Americans had been audacious to the point of folly in advocating SLEDGEHAMMER, the sacrificial landing of a mostly British force on the French coast. Now, with American soldiers predominant in TORCH, caution prevailed and audacity stole away. Hewitt’s Task Force 34 would deposit one-third of the invasion force more than a thousand miles from Tunis. The invaders would bifurcate themselves by facing east and west, violating the hallowed principle of concentration and weakening their Sunday punch. In London, Eisenhower changed the odds of quickly capturing Tunis from “the realm of the probable to the remotely possible.”
On September 5, the final decision was made to attempt landings at three sites in Morocco and at half a dozen beaches around Algiers and Oran. “Please make it before election day,” Roosevelt asked Marshall. In this, the president would be disappointed. Various delays intruded, and on September 21, Eisenhower fixed the invasion date for Sunday morning, November 8, five days after the U.S. congressional elections.
TORCH remained breathtakingly bold, an enterprise of imagination and power. But at a critical moment, the Allies had taken counsel of their fears.
His business done at the Navy Department, Hewitt emerged at 1 P.M. to find that the day had turned warm and humid, with temperatures edging into the low seventies. The staff car picked him up and headed east on Independence Avenue before angling north across the Mall on 15th Street.
At the White House, a Secret Service agent directed his driver through the southeast gate, then led Hewitt on a circuitous route to avoid nosy reporters. Walking through the narrow corridors, the admiral saw that the mansion was battened down for combat. Blackout curtains draped the windows, and skylights had been painted black. Every room in the old tinderbox was equipped with a bucket of sand and a shovel, along with folded gas masks. The cluttered Fish Room, where Roosevelt kept trophies from his angling expeditions, was a reminder of the admiral’s last encounter with the president. In December 1936, as skipper of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, Hewitt had taken Roosevelt on a monthlong trip to South America. He fondly remembered his passenger casting from the boat deck, then chortling with glee as he hauled in two fish. Roosevelt named them “Maine” and “Vermont,” for the two states he had failed to carry in his recent reelection.
Waiting, as planned, in a small, vaulted antechamber of the Oval Office was the battle captain who would command the American troops in Morocco once Hewitt put them ashore: Major General George S. Patton, Jr. He, too, had been escorted by a roundabout route to avoid the press, but Patton was incapable of looking inconspicuous. Tall and immaculate in his starched pinks-and-greens, the crease in his trousers bayonet sharp, gloves folded just so in his left hand, Patton seemed every inch the warrior looking for a war.
Even as he shook Patton’s hand and returned his broad smile, Hewitt remained uncertain what to make of this strange man. That he was a gifted and charismatic officer bound for glory seemed obvious. But, thoughtful and utterly charming one moment, he could be profane and truculent the next. Later in the war, military planners were to recommend at least six months’ preparation from the day an invasion order was issued to the day the fleet sailed; the belated decision to invade Morocco had given Task Force 34 only seven weeks to ready one of the most complex military operations in American history. George Patton seemed determined to make every hour as difficult as possible.
Rather than move his headquarters to Hampton Roads, Patton had remained in his capacious office loft in the Munitions Building on the Mall, even as he railed against the “goddam fools in Washington.” “By all means, as I have already written you, come see us as soon as you can,” Hewitt wrote in exasperation. Without consulting the Navy, Army planners proposed Moroccan landing sites, one of which had no beach and another of which was boobytrapped with shoals. In recent days Patton had finally traded Washington for Norfolk, yet he still seemed deeply suspicious of naval officers in general—“that bunch of rattlesnakes,” he called them—and of Hewitt in particular. Hewitt had been puzzled, then annoyed, then alarmed, and his mild complaints of August had escalated by mid-September to a formal protest at “the Army’s failure to cooperate.” Only Eisenhower’s personal warrant to the War Department of his old friend’s virtues had prevented Patton from being sacked and ending a luminous career before it began. Marshall added his own admonition in a private meeting with Patton: “Don’t scare the Navy.”
Another tense moment came when Hewitt proposed delaying TORCH a week to give the invaders a rising tide rather than risk having their boats stranded on the beaches by the ebb tide forecast for dawn on November 8. Patton objected with arm-flapping vigor, and even Hewitt’s Navy superiors agreed that a postponement was impossible. Oddly, Patton seemed to take personally neither Hewitt’s complaints about him nor their professional disagreements. Odder still, Hewitt found himself liking the man, and he suspected that Patton liked him, too. Hewitt could only chuckle at the shotgun marriages made by war.
At precisely two, the wide door to the Oval Office opened and Roosevelt spoke: “Come in, skipper and old cavalryman, and give me the good news.” The president sat in his armless wheelchair, beaming and gesturing to a pair of empty chairs. Patton, unaware that Hewitt and Roosevelt had been shipmates six years earlier, looked nonplussed to find himself introduced to the president by the admiral.
“Well, gentlemen,” Roosevelt asked with a wave of his cigarette, “what h
ave you got on your minds?”
Hewitt had a great deal on his mind, but he tried to summarize the TORCH plan as succinctly as possible. Three hundred warships and nearly 400 transports and cargo vessels would land more than 100,000 troops—three-quarters of them American, the rest British—in North Africa. Task Force 34 would sail for Morocco on Saturday morning. The other armada would leave Britain shortly thereafter for Algeria. With luck, the Vichy French controlling North Africa would not oppose the landings. Regardless, the Allies were to pivot east for a dash into Tunisia before the enemy arrived.
The gray-green walls of the Oval Office gave the room a nautical air. Patton waited for a lull, then in his shrill, nasal voice said, “Sir, all I want to tell you is this—I will leave the beaches either a conqueror or a corpse.”
Roosevelt smiled and deflected the remark with that jaunty toss of the head that George Marshall privately called the “cigarette-holder gesture.” Did the general plan to mount his old cavalry saddle on a tank turret? the president asked Patton. Would he charge into action with his saber drawn?
The conversation rambled on, with much more left unsaid than said. Hewitt chose not to dwell on TORCH’s risks. Unlike most senior officers, he had felt only relief upon learning that there would be no frontal assault against the French coast; even zealous advocates of SLEDGEHAMMER had been chastened in mid-August, when a raid by 6,000 Canadian and British troops on the German-occupied French port of Dieppe ended in catastrophe. Hewitt had watched a rehearsal for Dieppe during a visit to England, and he still found it hard to accept that half of those eager young men were now dead or in German prison camps.
But TORCH had its own hazards. Except for the Guadalcanal landings in August, it was the first large amphibious operation by the United States in forty-five years, and the most audacious ever. Some believed it to be the greatest amphibious gamble since Xerxes crossed the Hellespont in the fifth century B.C. The only modern precedent for landing on a hostile shore after a long sea voyage through perilous waters was the British disaster at Gallipoli in 1915, which cost a quarter of a million Allied casualties. The initial mission of seizing three port cities—Casablanca, Algiers, and Oran—was complicated by the need to land at nine coastal sites scattered across 900 miles. And not only U-boats menaced Task Force 34: so would the sea, for the long fetch across the Atlantic often brought mountainous waves to the Moroccan coast.
For his part, Roosevelt chose not to mention the War Department’s lingering resentment of TORCH—even his secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, had accused him of the “wildest kind of dispersion debauch,” and called North Africa “the president’s great secret baby.” Nor did the president complain about delays in the invasion date, although he must have suspected how badly his party would fare in the elections, less than two weeks away. (The Democrats were to lose almost sixty congressional seats to a disgruntled electorate unaware that their nation was about to strike back.)
After half an hour, the conversation drifted into trivialities. Roosevelt offered Hewitt detailed advice on how to moor a ship with a stern anchor to keep her head into the wind, a tactic he had once employed with a yacht. Patton made a final effort to pull the discussion back to TORCH. “The admiral and I feel that we must get ashore regardless of cost, as the fate of the war hinges on our success,” he told the president. But the meeting was over. “Of course you must,” Roosevelt replied with a final cigarette-holder gesture. He ushered them out the door with handshakes and a hearty “Godspeed.”
Patton returned to the Munitions Building. Hewitt drove directly to Anacostia Field and flew to Hampton Roads. By late afternoon he was back in his office, a tiny converted bedroom in the Hotel Nansemond at Ocean View. He had been gone only ten hours, but a thick stack of papers awaited him, including weather reports for Africa and the Atlantic, and the latest intelligence on German U-boats.
You do everything you can, then you hope for the best. Night had fallen by the time he stepped into his admiral’s barge at the Willoughby Spit boat landing. The coxswain steered across Hampton Roads toward the Hotel Chamberlin at Fortress Monroe, where Hewitt had a suite with his wife, Floride. He studied the silhouettes of the ships moored in the great bay. Their superstructures loomed against the skyline, inky black but for the occasional orange glow of cigarettes on the weather decks. In two days, this fleet would carry 33,843 soldiers, every last one of them his responsibility.
Hewitt ate a quick supper at the Chamberlin, then moved to an armchair in the sitting room and unfolded the afternoon newspaper. A few minutes later, Floride Hewitt looked in on her husband and screamed: he lay crumpled on the floor. Hewitt sat up slowly, more bemused than shaken. “I guess I just dropped off,” he said. The barge was dispatched for a medical officer, who examined Hewitt and pronounced him healthy but exhausted. The admiral, he admonished, really should get more rest.
Gathering the Ships
AN unholy din rolled across Hampton Roads at dawn on October 22. Aboard a dozen ships at five sets of piers, sailors in dungarees and white pillbox caps ripped out linoleum decks, wood paneling, and cork insulation. Hundreds of other swabs with hammers and chisels scraped the painted bulkheads to bare metal. Raging ship fires in the Solomon Islands earlier that fall had convinced the Navy to strip Task Force 34 of all combustible furnishings, giving the fleet the fighting trim of an unfinished garage.
From Norfolk and Portsmouth on the southern rim of the Roads, to Newport News and Hampton in the north, tugboats bullied another clutch of cargo ships into the wharves. Stevedore battalions swarmed onto each vessel, stacking hatch covers on an aft deck and swinging a boom over the exposed hold. Gangwaymen clipped the cargo sling to a pallet on the dock, and chuffing steam winches hoisted another load onto the ship. Above the cacophony of welders and riveters and that infernal scraping, the strains of “Over There” drifted from a warehouse where the port band practiced its war repertoire. The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming.…
Into the holds went tanks and cannons, rubber boats and outboard motors, ammunition and machine guns, magnifying glasses and step-ladders, alarm clocks and bicycles. Into the holds went: tractors, cement, asphalt, and more than a million gallons of gasoline, mostly in five-gallon tins. Into the holds went: thousands of miles of wire, well-digging machinery, railroad cars, 750,000 bottles of insect repellent, and 7,000 tons of coal in burlap bags. Into the holds went: black basketball shoes, 3,000 vehicles, loudspeakers, 16,000 feet of cotton rope, and $100,000 in gold coins, entrusted to George Patton personally. And into the holds went: a platoon of carrier pigeons, six flyswatters and sixty rolls of fly-paper for each 1,000 soldiers, plus five pounds of rat poison per company.
A special crate, requisitioned in a frantic message to the War Department on October 18, held a thousand Purple Hearts.
In theory, only 800 people in the world knew the destination of the TORCH armadas; many boxes had been sealed and placed under guard to avoid leaking any hint of French North Africa. Phrase books with pronunciation keys, to be distributed at sea, perfectly captured Allied ambivalence, giving the French for both “I am your friend” and “I will shoot you if you resist.” A propaganda radio station, cobbled together with a transmitter salvaged in Jersey City and a generator from a South Carolina cotton mill, was secretly installed in the U.S.S. Texas, along with a script to be broadcast to Berber tribes: “Behold, we the American holy warriors have arrived…. We have come to set you free.”
Quartermasters had rounded up not only all that lingerie but also 70,000 pairs of goggles and a comparable number of havelocks—neck cloths—sewn at a secret plant in Philadelphia, as well as 10 million salt tablets and 67,000 American-flag armbands, with 138,000 safety pins to secure them to uniform sleeves. Black-lettered labels on the boxes warned: “Do not open until destination is reached.” A thirty-day supply of poison gas bombs, shells, and mines had been tentatively consigned to a follow-up convoy, then canceled in late September after Allied commanders deemed it “most unlikely” th
at an enemy would use chemical weapons early in the North Africa campaign.
Using a Michelin commercial road guide to Morocco, a government printing plant outside Washington had spent weeks reproducing sixty tons of maps, which were manhandled into the holds along with sealed bundles of Baedekers, old issues of National Geograpic, French tourist guidebooks, and volume “M” of various encyclopedias. Armed couriers brought aboard plaster-of-Paris relief maps of Moroccan ports and coasts; the War Department had found that men drafted from the confectioners’ and bakers’ union became the best model makers. Other secret crates contained peculiar fifty-four-inch open tubes and three-pound darts—along with instruction sheets, because almost no one in the task force had ever heard of a “launcher, rocket, antitank, 2.36-inch, M9,” soon to be known as a bazooka.
All cargo was supposed to be combat loaded, a key principle of assault in which equipment is stowed in reverse order of the sequence needed upon landing under fire. Instead, the only principle in effect was chaos. Matériel had been cascading into port since late September, in rail cars so poorly marked that at one point all loading stopped while soldiers pawed through 700 mysterious boxcars that had been diverted to a Richmond siding.
Different railroads served different piers, so that misdirected freight had to be lightered across the bay. Docks grew cluttered with dunnage; cargo holds were packed so haphazardly that soldiers climbing over vehicles in search of their kit broke nearly a third of the windshields. Ammunition needed for ballast arrived late, forcing some ships to warp back to the docks for reloading. Artillery shells, loose grenades, and TNT were simply dumped on the decks, or in passageways, staterooms, and troop holds. The captain of U.S.S. Lakehurst confided that a torpedo would sink his ship in five minutes—unless the stocks of gasoline and ammo were hit, in which case it would be quicker.
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