The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Truscott’s was an unorthodox path to high command. His father, originally a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail, had abandoned the range to become both the physician and the pharmacist in Chatfield, Texas; an unlucky dabbler in racehorse and farmland investments, he later moved the family to Oklahoma. Lucian at sixteen claimed he was eighteen to win a teaching job in a hinterland schoolhouse, walking six miles to and fro each day. A voracious reader who renounced strong drink, tobacco, and profanity, he eventually was promoted to principal. Yet not until he joined the Army and won a cavalry officer’s commission in 1917, at age twenty-two, did he find his true calling. Slowly ascending through the ranks between the wars, Truscott won admirers for both his professional competence and his skills as a polo player. Army life also put rough edges on the former teacher, who soon drank, smoked, and swore profusely. For the past two years in Africa and Italy, he had had few peers as a combat commander, demonstrating what one high-ranking comrade described as “willpower, decision, and drive”; Eisenhower still lamented his inability to get Truscott released from Anzio for OVERLORD. Truscott’s generalship stressed speed, vigor, violence, and clarity; staff papers that displeased him provoked the blunt, scrawled epithet “Bullshit.” Convinced that American soldiers were “hunters by instinct,” he urged his officers to “make every soldier go into every fight feeling like a hunter.”

  To his wife, Sarah, waiting in Virginia, Truscott had confessed in recent letters how “horribly lonesome” he felt. He regretted being so “far removed from the softening touch of women and home.” Before leaving his quarters on Catoctin he took a moment to write her again, beginning, as he always began, “Beloved wife”:

  On the eve of every major undertaking in this war I have always written to you so that you would know that if anything should happen to me you were in my mind and in my heart.… I would live no part of my life over if I had the opportunity. My only real regret is that I have not made you happier and your life easier.

  He stalked from the cabin to join Hewitt on the bridge, jaw set, thick shoulders slightly hunched, the hunter looking for prey.

  * * *

  The enemy never had a chance. In rubber boats and kayaks, and on surfboards with electric motors, three thousand American and French commandos swept onto coastal fortifications and two offshore islands. Much of the littoral was sparsely defended; some hilltop pillboxes were found to brandish only Quaker guns made from streetlight poles. Allied deceivers dropped hundreds of rubber “paradummies” with noisemakers and colored lights far from the actual assault, and electronic simulators created ghost convoys where no ships sailed. So befuddled were the Germans that for days defenders braced against an expected attack at Genoa, two hundred miles northeast.

  The usual anarchy and intrepidity attended the airborne assault. From ten Italian airfields, nine thousand paratroopers and glidermen made for the Riviera. Thick inland fog caused six of nine pathfinder teams to miss their drop zones; more than half of the main jump force in predawn drops also drifted wide. Some sticks fell ten miles or more from their targets, landing on rooftops and in vineyards around St.-Tropez. Despite the muddle, airborne casualties were light—only 230, or under 3 percent—and the Germans were further discomposed.

  At eight A.M., eleven American assault battalions swept ashore in a flat calm, hidden from enemy gunners by summer haze and six thousand tons of smoke spewed from special landing craft fitted with airplane propellers to spread the miasma. At Bougnon Bay, in the center of the assault, discouraged Osttruppen and superannuated Germans facing the 45th Division folded quickly. On the left, the 3rd Division also clattered through the dunes at Cavalaire Bay and across the St.-Tropez Peninsula.

  Among those at the point of the spear with the 3rd Division’s 15th Infantry Regiment was a short and skinny—5’7˝, 138 pounds—staff sergeant who on Sicily and at Anzio had already earned a reputation for élan, and would soon be deemed “the greatest folk hero of Texas since Davy Crockett.” Audie Leon Murphy, Army Serial Number 18093707, was the seventh child of an itinerant farmer who owned a milk cow and little else. A fifth-grade dropout who at one point during the Depression lived in a rail boxcar, Murphy later said, “I can’t remember ever being young in my life.” He had learned to shoot by plinking squirrels—“little greys,” he called them—and became proficient enough to hit a darting rabbit from a moving car. His sister forged his enlistment papers in 1942, falsely attesting that he was eighteen rather than seventeen. He had fainted during the induction immunizations.

  Sharpshooting now served him well. Murphy and his rifle platoon were making for St.-Tropez at ten A.M., when German machine-gun fire rattled down a rocky draw, stopping the advance with the incivility of a slammed door. Murphy scampered back to the beach, grabbed a light machine gun from a dawdling gunner, and dragged it back uphill to his men. With his commandeered gun, grenades, and a carbine, he killed two enemy gunners atop a knoll and enticed a white flag from a second nest. But when Private First Class Lattie Tipton stood to take the surrender, a sniper shot him dead. Enraged, Murphy killed the surrendering Germans with grenades before seizing an enemy machine gun; firing from the hip, he exterminated two more enemy fighting positions. “My whole being,” he later wrote, “is concentrated on killing.” Here surely was Truscott’s instinctive hunter. When the shooting finally ceased, Murphy slipped a pack under Tipton’s head as a pillow, then sat down and wept. The Army would award ASN 18093707 the Distinguished Service Cross.

  Only on the invasion right flank did the enemy stiffen, particularly along the Gulf of Fréjus. Napoléon had landed on this shore after returning from Egypt in 1799, and fifteen years later embarked from the same beach for his exile on Elba, complaining that the French mob was as “fickle as a weathercock.” Now, thick mines, barbed-wire tangles, and strongpoints hidden in villas and seaside gazebos proved irksome, although hardly as lethal as Admiral Moon had feared. Secret Navy drone boats—radio-controlled landing craft packed with four tons of explosives to blow holes in beach obstacles—failed abjectly, possibly because German radios used the same frequencies. The boats “milled around at high speed in crazy directions, completely on their own,” a witness reported; some reversed course toward the offshore fleet and had to be sunk by destroyers. “As a general proposition,” a Navy demolition officer reported, “the drone boats did not function.”

  The American weight of metal soon carried the day. Bombers and naval gunfire raked the coast, leaving the piney hills charred and smoking. Boats carrying a regiment from the 36th Division pulled back from Fréjus, momentarily infuriating Truscott, who squinted through the haze from Catoctin; sensibly, officers orchestrating the landing chose to put in on an easier beach farther east. Hewitt’s dispatch that afternoon was only slightly exaggerated in reporting unqualified success:

  All ships and craft reached their final assault destination as per plan.… Airborne landings were on schedule and successful.… No losses of own aircraft reported.… Bombardment reported excellent.… Landings on all beaches successful with good timing.

  A naval officer aboard LCI-233 was more succinct in his diary: “Frankly, this has been the quietest beachhead I have ever seen.”

  By the close of this D-Day, 66,000 troops were ashore with fewer than 400 casualties, including 95 dead. Some 2,300 German prisoners had been captured—many preferred to surrender rather than risk the vengeance of the maquis roaming the coastal uplands—and Hitler would declare August 15 “the worst day of my life.” DRAGOON had fallen on an attenuated Army Group G: the German commander in southern France, General Johannes Blaskowitz, already in bad odor for objecting to SS atrocities in Poland, had been forced to give one-quarter of his infantry divisions and two-thirds of his armor to the struggle in Normandy. He was left with a hollow force of less than 300,000, including Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and four battalions of “Russians in France Fighting for Germany Against America.” Within Blaskowitz’s far-flung Nineteenth Army, the 11th Panzer Division, his only mobile reserve, wa
s stuck west of the Rhône after the Army Air Forces destroyed every bridge on the river’s lower reaches. Ferrying the entire division across took nearly a week; even then some panzers would be stalled for lack of fuel, which had to be floated down from Lyon.

  By twilight on Tuesday, many defenders were scrambling north in disorder, jamming hijacked buses and even dray carts. American patrols snaked into the steep red-rock hills, thick with maritime pines and cork oaks. The coastal roads were “already choked with traffic, and bands of prisoners, their hands in the air, were marching toward the water line,” wrote the reporter Eric Sevareid, ashore with the 45th Division. To oversee both Truscott’s corps and follow-on French forces, the U.S. Seventh Army command post moved into Hôtel Latitude 43, an Art Deco complex on the lip of St.-Tropez; the army war diary noted that “resistance by German forces has been weak at most points.” Sevareid described “the Cinzano signs, the powder-blue denim of the workmen, the faintly sourish smell of wine as one passed the zincs, the dusty plane trees, the little formal gardens, the soft, translucent air.” A French admiral aboard Catoctin declared, “What happiness to recover this coast of France, the most fair, the most amiable, and the most smiling of our country.” Truscott and his staff motored ashore to dine in a nearby château on white linen with the VI Corps crystal and silver service. Bill Mauldin declared DRAGOON to be “the best invasion I ever attended.”

  Within the Allied high command, perhaps only the prime minister was disgruntled. Wearing his blue, brass-buttoned Trinity House uniform, he had sailed for five hours from Corsica aboard H.M.S. Kimberly to join the bombardment fleet nine miles from the Riviera. Although Churchill was particularly keen to see French colonials in action—he described them as “frog blackmoors, whose bravery I do not doubt”—the Kimberly ventured no closer than seven thousand yards for fear of sea mines. St.-Tropez remained swaddled in haze and smoke, all but invisible. Out of cigars and “in a querulous mood,” as his physician noted, the prime minister retired below to read Grand Hotel, a novel he had found in the captain’s cabin. On the flyleaf he scratched an inscription: “This is a lot more exciting than the invasion of Southern France.”

  The Avenue of Stenches

  THE immediate objective of DRAGOON were the ports of Toulon and Marseille, respectively code-named ASTORIA and CYRIL. Seventh Army had little capacity for unloading supplies over the beach, so trucks, gasoline, ammunition, and other matériel needed to sustain Truscott’s lunge to the north could come only through the twin anchorages, the capture of which was assigned to the French. On Wednesday evening, August 16, four divisions from the French II Corps began landing in the Gulf of St.-Tropez, a day ahead of schedule owing to feeble German resistance. They eventually would be joined by three more divisions in I Corps, giving France a quarter-million men under arms in the south.

  Known for now as Army B, it was a vivid soldiery, as picturesque as Leclerc’s division then capering toward Paris. Nearly half were from North Africa or the sub-Sahara, complemented by Somalis, New Caledonians, Tahitians, Indochines, Syrians, Lebanese, and Legionnaires. Africans composed almost three-quarters of the infantry regiments, including six thousand ferocious Berber goumiers wearing sandals and striped djellabas, with boots tied around their necks as they led their mules across the beaches. With little capacity for modern military logistics, the French relied on the U.S. Army for everything from pork-free rations for Muslim soldiers to French-English dictionaries. This summer alone the Americans had provided 1,100 tanks, 215,000 rifles, 17,000 tons of corned and frozen beef, 20 million Atabrine antimalaria tablets, 7 million packets of pipe tobacco, and 7,000 extra canteens. (Senegalese soldiers were said to require four liters of water each day, double the normal ration.) Extra tanker trucks also were needed because of French reluctance to convert cherished wine transports into gasoline carriers.

  The gimlet-eyed commander of this force stepped ashore at six P.M. Wednesday after a voyage from Taranto aboard the former Polish cruise ship S.S. Batory: General Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny, whose impeccable ensemble included kepi, yellow gloves, and a swagger stick tucked beneath his left arm. Described by French colleagues as “an animal of action” and “jupiterien,” De Lattre impressed Hewitt as “very pleasant, very volatile,” while Truscott saw “thin hair graying around the temples, a square open face with cold eyes, medium height, trim, neat, and very soldierly.” Given to abrupt dead-of-night appearances in the ranks, roaring, “What have you done for France?,” De Lattre would be acclaimed by one biographer as “the greatest soldier to serve France since the age of Napoleon I.”

  De Lattre sprang from minor gentry in the Vendée on the Atlantic coast and graduated near the bottom of his St.-Cyr class in 1909. During the Great War, he twice gathered intelligence by slipping through the lines disguised as a factory worker to dine in a Metz restaurant packed with German officers. In a skirmish in 1914, he killed two enemy soldiers with a sword his grandfather had carried in the Napoleonic Wars, but was impaled by a German lance; a sergeant had to stand on his chest to yank it out. He was to suffer three more wounds before the Armistice and be mentioned in dispatches eight times. A fervent Catholic—in peacetime he routinely helped, barefoot, to carry the sick at Lourdes—he had insisted that chaplains accompany his assault troops in order to give quick absolution to the dying. His personal motto, adopted in the 1930s, was Ne Pas Subir: Do not give up.

  Loyal to Vichy for more than two years after the German invasion, he had finally refused to countenance Hitler’s occupation of southern France following the Allied seizure of North Africa in November 1942. Charged by a Vichy court-martial with abandoning his post, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. His son Bernard, then fifteen, aided his escape by smuggling tools and a rope into his father’s cell. In September 1943, De Lattre loosened a window frame, shinnied down to a courtyard, scaled an outer wall, and fled to Algiers by way of London. There De Gaulle gave him command of the French army in exile. Known as le Roi Jean for his imperial airs, De Lattre stationed an imposing sénégalais outside his office door to sound a clarion on a trumpet whenever the double doors flew open and the general stepped out. He “lived on stage,” the historian Douglas Porch later wrote, “as gracious to dignitaries, whom he received with Bourbon éclat, as he was severe with subordinates, whom he slaved to exhaustion.” Often dining at midnight, he worked until five A.M., then signed orders in bed at dawn; visitors to his headquarters might sit for days on the outer stairs, awaiting an audience. “The General,” an aide explained, “is a nocturnal.”

  The DRAGOON landing plan for Army B had been redrafted seventeen times at De Lattre’s insistence. While conceding that “we Frenchmen are not the masters” and that subordination “is the price we must pay to be able to participate in the liberation of France,” he resented being under American command and beholden to American supply. Storming into a U.S. Army headquarters, aflame with grievances, De Lattre would let loose a torrent of French as an interpreter struggled to keep pace, then stalk out, always saluting smartly before slamming the door. He was “ardent to the point of effervescence,” said De Gaulle, who believed that De Lattre’s faults derived from “the excesses of his virtues.” Now accompanied by Bernard, the youngest soldier in the French army, he collared a subordinate in St.-Tropez and with eyes bright told him, “Toulon awaits you.”

  The Germans waited, too. Here and in Marseille, thirty miles farther west, 35,000 defenders had been ordered by Hitler to stand “to the last man.” General Blaskowitz reported that his fortifications at Toulon were 75 percent complete, with Marseille a bit more advanced; water and ammunition had been stockpiled, and both garrisons reinforced. Port demolitions began soon after the first Americans crossed the beaches to the east.

  Toulon was the greatest naval base in France and the tougher nut. Three craggy fortresses dominated the landward approaches, and nearby mountainsides were rigged with dynamite to trigger rockslides. Seventy or more guns ranged the roadstead, among them
“Big Willie,” a turret with two 340mm barrels plucked from the scuttled French battleship Provence and installed in armor plate and thick concrete at St.-Mandrier, commanding the harbor mouth; with a range of twenty-two miles, the guns were more than a match for any weapon in the Allied fleet. Even so, Admiral Hewitt ordered the hornet’s nest poked. On Saturday, August 19, after the fortifications had been pummeled from the air, Nevada, Augusta, Quincy, and the French battleship Lorraine paraded along the horizon, lobbing two hundred shells like so many playground taunts. Not until Sunday did Big Willie reply, chasing the interlopers back into their smoke banks at flank speed with a splashy fall of shot that quickly closed from a two-mile miss to a thirty-yard miss. Big Willie was “too much for us,” an officer aboard Quincy confessed; Allied shells striking the turret’s concrete casements “just bounced off like us spitting against the wall.” The naval brawl would last more than a week, but Toulon—like Cherbourg—clearly would not fall from the sea.

  De Lattre had assumed as much and so cleaved his army into five battle groups, with orders to outflank and encircle both Toulon and Marseille. This scheme began badly when German gunners demolished the lead French tank in a convoy on Highway 57, then cut down trees behind the rear tank to trap the column and pick off eight more. In Hyères, ten miles east of Toulon, defenders who included stranded submariners made a fortress of the Golf Hotel and adjacent links; three French artillery battalions fired a thousand rounds point-blank, augmented by two hundred naval shells. A sunset bayonet charge by Tahitian troops through the dining room and cellars ended resistance, with 140 Germans captured and many more slain.