No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  Word had just come in that Eisenhower had personally discovered that a man couldn’t even lift his feet out of the Tunisian mud, let alone drag them along through it. On that day on which the big push to settle everything was to have been launched, Eisenhower had been forced to cancel it indefinitely. There could be no offensive till spring.

  God alone knew what would happen to us all by then in the face of the steady Axis build-up from Sicily and under a rain of Axis bombs from good all-weather Tunisian airfields while our own planes couldn’t lift themselves out of the mud. As usual, it would, of course, be up to God and the Navy, British and American, to save the situation for the land and air forces. Meanwhile, the gloom at Allied Force Headquarters that day before Christmas among those who already had learned the sad news was so oppressive it was sickening.

  CHAPTER

  27

  WHILE JERRY WRIGHT AND I WERE glumly discussing this unhappy situation, in walked a classmate of Jerry’s, Captain Olton Bennehoff, U.S.N., commanding officer of that U.S.S. Thomas Stone about which Admiral of the Fleet Cunningham had been so concerned the day before. Within ten seconds of the time Bennehoff’s eyes lighted on me, I realized perfectly well why Cunningham had been so concerned—nobody, regardless of his rank, who was within reach was going to be allowed to remain unconcerned when Bennehoff’s ship needed attention. Without even a ranging shot to see if he were on the target, Bennehoff promptly opened up on me with full salvos—I was Principal Salvage Officer for the Torch theater; if ever a ship in the Torch area needed (and was entitled to) the services of a salvage officer, his ship was it. What was I going to do about it?

  Nothing—yet, I had to tell him. General Eisenhower had himself set the order of priority. If he could get General Eisenhower to put the new U.S.S. Thomas Stone ahead of an ancient French tub loaded with casks of wine and called the Spahi, it was all right with me. I’d turn to then with all hands on the Thomas Stone and let the Spahi go hang; otherwise not.

  Well, when then would I get to the Thomas Stone? In a few weeks, I assured him; just as soon as I got the Spahi out of the entrance to Oran harbor and off my chest. I was personally as anxious as he was himself to see an important naval vessel like the Thomas Stone back helping to win the war; so was Admiral Cunningham, I knew. What more could he ask? His was the number two job.

  Bennehoff, “Benny” ever since his Naval Academy days, was stumped. His slight figure, wholly a bundle of nerves and iron resolution, vibrated dissent; for him, nothing took precedence over getting his ship swiftly back into the fight. But since for the moment at least, General Eisenhower wasn’t within reach to be convinced of his mistake, Benny did the next best thing. There still was I. Would I take lunch with him aboard the Thomas Stone? She wasn’t alongside any quay; she wasn’t even in the harbor, really, but we could get there quickly. I’d need hardly more than a good pair of hip boots to get aboard her from the sandy beach on which she now lay stranded.

  The invitation, I felt, was more a stratagem on Benny’s part to get me where a sight of his necessities would overwhelm my better judgment and put me on his side for a joint assault on Eisenhower, rather than any real social courtesy, but I accepted. Sooner or later, I’d have to see the Thomas Stone; the lugubrious occasion might as well be now when it could be garnished with a decent meal which was unobtainable anywhere ashore. So saying good-by to Jerry Wright, both of us started down the steep hill in a staff car for Algiers Bay.

  Shortly we were passing on our right the Palais d’Etat. It was quite a building, set back a little from the road and surrounded by a high iron picket fence. Before that fence, at the only gate and flanking each side of it, stood rigidly at “Attention” a pair of Spahi sentries, gorgeous in their gaily colored uniforms topped with flowing Arab turbans. That building was the seat of Darlan’s government, as well as his personal residence. Considering the turbulent state of French opinion in North Africa, I thought those Spahi sentries right on Darlan’s doorstep, with their wicked-looking bayoneted rifles, might well be necessary.

  Finally we had dropped down the hill enough to turn eastward along the waterfront, leaving behind us to the westward the enclosed artificial harbor with all its jam of shipping. We skirted the empty beaches of Algiers Bay, a vast open crescent circling northeast toward Cape Matifou, some eight miles from the enclosed harbor.

  About half way along the southern edge of this crescent, where the city of Algiers was beginning to thin out to open country, we came to where lay the U.S.S. Thomas Stone, masked from our view from the road by the high oil tanks and buildings of a considerable bulk petroleum terminal belonging to Shell Oil. We left the car to thread our way on foot down to the beach along a narrow sandy alley between the walls protecting the oil tanks.

  If Captain Bennehoff had anticipated that a sight of his distressed ship herself would make an impression, he was decidedly not disappointed.

  Before me, rising abruptly on that beach almost out of the sand at my feet with no great stretch of water in between, was the towering bulk of the Thomas Stone. Not till eighteen months later on the Omaha Beach in Normandy, after an 80-mile hurricane which hit us a few days after D-day, was I ever to see a ship stranded so high and dry. There had been little exaggeration about our getting aboard her in hip boots; had Benny and I both been about as tall as Jerry Wright or, anyway, Giraud, we might just about have made her bow in wading suits. But inasmuch as we had neither hip boots nor wading suits, Benny simply sang out to his Officer of the Deck, easily within hearing distance, to send a boat in for the captain. Swimming out would have been much quicker.

  In very few minutes we were climbing the high side ladder of the Thomas Stone, unusually high because she was so far out of water. In a few minutes more, I was seated in the cabin with Captain Bennehoff. The messboy began serving lunch; after that, I would inspect the ship herself.

  The Thomas Stone saga I knew already from end to end from various other sources. An unkind Fate, more vindictive than the ancient Furies, had dealt the Thomas Stone, one after another, a series of deuces off the bottom of the deck. And the end was not yet.

  The U.S.S. Thomas Stone, a new armed naval transport, had been specially designed for carrying assault troops and their landing craft, including tanks, close up to an enemy beachhead. She had been provided with special gear for getting the heavily loaded boats swiftly away on their mission. She had been heavily armed with naval guns, large and small, to smother opposing fire on the beaches while her brood of ducklings swam in as the first assault wave. She had been destined for the Pacific to go to work on the Japs, with endless coral and palm-fringed island beachheads envisioned in her future.

  Hardly had Captain Bennehoff finished the intensive training of his crew for that novel warfare and made ready to sail for the Pacific, than his ship was temporarily diverted to the Torch operation instead, where there would also be beaches to assault. On October 26, she had sailed from the Clyde in Scotland in a fast convoy loaded with British and American troops bound for Algiers, carrying herself 1400 troops of the 39th U.S. Infantry, intended as the first assault wave on the beaches just to the eastward of Algiers.

  Heavily escorted by patrolling planes, cruisers, destroyers, and corvettes (all British), the Thomas Stone and her troop-laden convoy had negotiated the Atlantic part of the voyage successfully, so timed as to put them through the Straits of Gibraltar during the dark hours of the night of November 5-6. This was of particular importance; it was obvious that any news available to Spanish sources of their passage or composition would as instantly be received in Berlin and Rome as if we had radioed it in ourselves.

  So far all still went well. Once through the Straits and into the widening Mediterranean, the convoy, strengthened now by battleship and aircraft carrier support, took the route normally used by ships bound for Axis-beleaguered Malta, trusting that any snooping Axis planes or periscopes would be deluded thereby as to their objective. They were, incidentally. Both Rome and Berlin believed the objectiv
e was either Malta or Sicily; North Africa never entered their minds. All that day and all night through they steamed onward for Malta; only at the last moment were they to turn abruptly southward to their real objective, Algiers.

  Daylight came on November 7. They were off Cape Palos, Spain, about 300 miles beyond Gibraltar and with only 150 miles left to their assault positions off Algiers at H-hour, twenty hours yet. Against the dawn just breaking to the eastward over the Mediterranean the Thomas Stone stood beautifully outlined, the finest ship in the convoy. She paid for the distinction.

  A torpedo wake was sighted to port, close aboard. Even before the rudder could be put over to dodge, it struck, exploded with terrific violence aft, killed or wounded nine seamen, tore away the rudder and rudder post and the lower hull thereabouts, broke the propeller shaft, and left the Thomas Stone wholly helpless to move or to steer. The other transports steamed off with all the escorts, leaving their wounded sister alone to fight it out with that U-boat, with only H.M.S. Spey, a British corvette, remaining behind to lend what aid she could.

  Bennehoff, a very pugnacious officer, was perfectly willing to fight it out with his hidden antagonist, though the latter now held all the trumps. He prepared to do so. But Benny had for the moment more important matters than that lurking U-boat on his mind—the only reason for the Thomas Stone’s being in the Mediterranean at all was to land 1400 assault troops at H-hour on the beaches east of Algiers, and by God, he was going to land them there!

  Conventional tactics required him to launch his landing craft a mile or two off the beach a little before H-hour. Nothing he knew of prohibited him from launching his attack from 150 miles off the beach twenty hours before, so long as in either case the boats with their assault troops were on the beach at H-hour, or as soon thereafter as they could get there. Immediately, even while the convoy was fast disappearing to the eastward, leaving him as a sacrifice to hold the wolves, he began launching landing craft. The weather was good, the sea smooth, the boats were intended to make eight knots. In somewhere around twenty hours, if the weather got no worse, they should arrive.

  But the boat compasses were all unreliable for so long a voyage over the open sea. And should the U-boat choose to follow the landing craft instead of playing tag with him, once they were out of his sight, it could surface and slaughter all the troops in those boats at leisure and with impunity. To prevent that, to guide the boats, and to help them should the weather get worse in passage, he ordered H.M.S. Spey, the sole guard he had, to abandon him and steam off, convoying his flotilla of twenty-four troop-laden landing craft!

  “A notably courageous decision!” exclaimed Admiral Cunningham when he heard of it by radio at Gibraltar.

  That left Benny and his helpless ship completely alone on the bosom of the ocean, but not so helpless as she might have looked. The Thomas Stone might be so wounded she couldn’t move, but she still had fangs and Benny bared them. Fortunately, at least, it was daylight; he could keep a good watch. His sky guns were manned against prowling vultures from the air seeking to pick the bones of an easy victim. His few remaining landing craft were loaded with depth bombs and put over the side to patrol the seas all roundabout and drop those high explosive charges on any U-boat if Benny’s submarine detection gear (our equivalent of the British Asdic) showed the near presence of one, or if the feather wake of a periscope, easily detectible on that smooth sea now that it was light, appeared anywhere.

  The landing craft and H.M.S. Spey disappeared over the horizon to the southeast, night came, both the danger and the watchfulness increased. Finally at 9 P.M., a burst of cheers rose from the darkened decks of the Thomas Stone. Two British destroyers, H.M.S. Velox and H.M.S. Wishart, dispatched by Admiral Cunningham from Gibraltar, 300 miles away, raced up through the night to help!

  With the Wishart circling about as guard, the Velox passed them a towline and they started once more for Algiers. But being unable to steer, the bulky Thomas Stone yawed erratically; finally the hawser parted. The Wishart sheered in, picked up another hawser from the Thomas Stone, towed on through the night while the Velox guarded.

  At daybreak on November 8, a British tug, the St. Day, also sent out by Admiral Cunningham from Gibraltar, caught up with them and took a hand. But by now wind and sea had kicked up; towing conditions were terrible. Every possible towing combination was tried out but heavy hawsers snapped like threads and time and again the Thomas Stone went adrift. Still all hands stuck doggedly to the task; for four nights and three days they fought the seas and struggled haltingly onward toward Algiers.

  Finally on the morning of November 11, the Thomas Stone was brought safely into harbor at Algiers, there to unload directly on the quay all the precious heavy equipment and especially the priceless tanks she was carrying. And there Captain Bennehoff learned also that H.M.S. Spey had arrived with all the troops he had sent out, late for H-hour, but still in time for the ensuing combat, had there been any.

  But there had not been. In Algiers, the French army (not dominated as in Oran or Casablanca by French admirals with peculiar ideas of l’honneur) had accepted our assurance that “We came as friends” and had surrendered after only token resistance. Benny’s assault forces had therefore no need to land on the open beaches; the Spey had landed them all dryshod on the quays of Algiers’ inner harbor.

  So when the last tank and the last gun of the army’s heavy artillery had been hoisted out of his capacious holds and landed on the quay to be delivered into army hands, Captain Bennehoff could heave a sigh of relief and report to Admiral Cunningham,

  “Mission accomplished.”

  It had been. All his troops and all their fighting equipment had been delivered safely in North Africa, ready now for the next phase, the overland assault on Tunisia for which they were urgently needed.

  But poor Benny himself had plenty to sigh over aside from relief. While his sister transports might start home for the green pastures beckoning in the Pacific where special assault ships such as his were wanted badly to work north on the island beaches from Guadalcanal toward Tokyo, there wasn’t any immediate starting home for him and the Thomas Stone. With her rudder gone, her propeller hanging by a broken shaft, her underwater stern blasted away, and some forty feet of her above water fantail no longer supported by anything below and drooping wearily like last week’s bouquet of flowers, she wasn’t going anywhere. Not till a powerful ocean going tug or an ocean going ship and a super-extra towline could be obtained from somewhere to tow her, not the 150 miles only to Algiers, but this time the long 4100 miles across the U-boat infested Atlantic to Hampton Roads where she could get a new stern.

  The Thomas Stone was 95 per cent intact and uninjured, but that missing 5 per cent of her astern was vital. Benny needed it badly to get back into action. But the particulars of the tow home were a matter for the higher American naval authorities to decide. Till the word came from Washington, he must wait in Algiers with his ship. All that, on top of what he’d been through, was trying enough to the exhausted skipper of the Thomas Stone who for four days and nights had had next to no sleep, but worse followed immediately.

  Hardly had the last heavy army tank been lifted out of his hold and swung ashore, to leave him light and clear of all cargo, than a group of puffing little French tugs appeared to swarm around the Thomas Stone, a naval officer from the Port Captain’s office showed up to direct the casting loose from the quay of his mooring lines, and a French pilot clambered up on his bridge.

  “What’s all this for?” asked the astonished Benny of the officer down on the quay.

  “We need the quay space you’re occupying here in the harbor for unloading other ships!” came the reply. “We’re moving you from the harbor to an anchorage in the bay outside!”

  “Like hell you are!” snapped out Benny. “You just hold everything till I get the Captain of the Port!” and he dashed down his side ladder to the quay and the nearest telephone. But he might have saved his breath. He learned only, as I had, that
Port Captains whether going by the name of Commandant du Port or its English equivalent, are bureaucrats who see nobody’s problems but their own. The Port Captain stuck by his decision; he needed the quay space, the Thomas Stone must leave the protected harbor for an anchorage in the open bay till she could be moved onward to the United States.

  In vain Captain Bennehoff protested that his ship was helpless, that she had no engine power to help herself in case of storm. Nothing made any difference. The Thomas Stone must move to the open bay; the quay space she was taking up was needed urgently for unloading other ships.

  Benny was no person to take lying down any “no” from a Port Captain; he burned up that telephone line going all the way up the naval line, then up the army command to the top, violently objecting. But everywhere poor Benny was thrown back on the Port Captain. The Port Captain was responsible for getting the cargoes ashore; if he, having heard all Benny’s objections, still felt he had to have that quay space, he would be backed up from above. Benny went back to the Port Captain with his final appeal; it was rejected.

  There was nothing further he could do. Heart-broken, he climbed back up his side ladder, stood silently by while he was cast free and towed out of the harbor to the open bay to be anchored there in the open roadstead, completely exposed to every wind blowing off the Mediterranean to the northward of him and no longer sheltered by the powerful defenses of Algiers harbor from air attack. Except that the water was shallower, he might as well have been out in the open sea again.

  Benny prepared for the worst. Fate might have it in for him, he might be powerless to defeat it in the end, but before it got through with him, even inexorable Fate was going to know it had been in a battle. He made sure his anchor had a good grip on the bottom, paid out plenty of cable to make assurance doubly sure, personally checked his other anchor and cable to be certain they were ready for quick letting go. Then he stationed all his gun crews for round the clock action and posted extra lookouts, in boats as well as aloft, to keep an eye out for both U-boats and planes.