by Alan Axelrod
In the days leading up to the landings, the weather along the North African coast was miserable, but, on the morning of November 8, it cleared as if by a miracle. Patton took this as a providential sign and an indication that he was to be permitted to fulfill his destiny by fighting this battle. The landings were resisted by Vichy French forces, but the beachheads were quickly secured. Algiers fell to the Americans on the first day, and the fighting there stopped. Fresh Allied units, mostly British, followed the first wave at Algiers and advanced on Bizerte and Tunis in Tunisia. From his headquarters within the Gibraltar rock, Eisenhower dispatched Mark Clark to negotiate a wide-ranging North African armistice with Vichy admiral Jean Darlan. In the meantime, fighting was sharp at Oran and lasted two days. As for Patton’s sector in Morocco, the French offered stiff resistance, but the landings proceeded briskly nevertheless. Ernest Harmon’s task group pinned down the garrison at Marrakech while Truscott’s group took the vital Port Lyautey airfield. The principal landing was at Fedala, which fell to Anderson’s troops by 8 A.M. At that point, Patton was supposed to disembark from the Augusta. His personal gear had been stowed in a landing craft, and he was about to board it, when he paused to ask his orderly, Sergeant George Meeks, to first retrieve from the craft his trademark ivory-handled revolver. Meeks did so, and Patton took a moment to strap it on just as seven French cruisers opened fire on the landing fleet. Augusta’s guns replied. The fierce muzzle blast from the great cruiser’s rear turret blew the landing craft off its davits and to bits. By pausing to get his favorite revolver and strap it on, Patton had saved his life.
Doubtless gratified by so remarkable a manifestation of what he believed was his providential good fortune, Patton was nevertheless frustrated that he now could not leave the ship until after noon. In a foul mood as he finally came ashore about 1:30, he was appalled by the spectacle of soldiers digging foxholes. To dig a foxhole, Patton always said, was to dig a grave. The object was to advance, not to dig in, and he wasted no time in personally motivating his troops with curses, kicks, and encouragement. Very quickly they left off digging foxholes and went about the business of securing the beachhead and commencing the inland advance.
Although the combat troops now performed well, the unloading of supplies and equipment was sluggish. Early the next morning, Patton again took personal charge, and the logistical problems disappeared. With this matter settled, Patton returned to the Augusta to persuade Admiral Hewitt to move his transports closer to the shore, so that unloading and reinforcement could be handled even faster. Whether it was giving orders to enlisted G.I.’s or cajoling a senior admiral, Patton believed in the persuasive power of personal contact face-to-face.
From the Augusta, he returned to the scene of battle, sent his staff to set up headquarters at Fedala, and advanced on Casablanca with his combat troops. As the Americans approached, the French surrendered the city on November 11, Patton’s birthday. He met with the French officers at his headquarters in the Hotel Miramar at Fedala, having ordered his deputy commander, Geoffrey Keyes, to welcome the delegation with a guard of honor. The Frenchmen were ceremoniously escorted to the hotel’s smoking room, where Patton congratulated the officers on the gallantry of their troops. He well understood the importance of self-respect and honor among military men, and he also understood that even the Vichy French were hardly wholehearted in their commitment to the Axis. The enemy officers with whom he was dealing now were potential allies. His task, however, went beyond ceremony. He carried with him two versions of an armistice agreement, both prepared and authorized in Washington. One version assumed token French resistance and provided lenient terms. The other assumed fierce and stubborn resistance and called for the dissolution and disarming of all French forces. What had actually happened on the beaches fell somewhere between token and stubborn resistance. Moreover, General Auguste Nogues explained that disbanding the French forces would result in violent unrest among the Arabs, Jews, and Berbers, perhaps even civil insurrection. Assuming authority beyond his official instructions, Patton delayed concluding a formal armistice and instead proposed a gentlemen’s agreement by which the French vowed not to hinder the Americans in their contest against the Axis, prisoners of war would be immediately exchanged, and the French troops would retain their arms but remain, for the present, in barracks, pending final word from General Eisenhower. This settled, Patton offered everyone present champagne and proposed a toast to the “happy termination of a fratricidal strife” and “the resumption of the age-old friendship between France and America.”8
Patton’s invasion of Morocco was a triumph and elevated him to the status of national hero. Yet it was Mark Clark that the army immediately rewarded with the third star of a lieutenant general. Patton was intensely jealous of the dashing, handsome, and considerably younger man. He choked back his bitterness as he sent Clark his “sincere congratulations on your promotion and also on the magnificent work you have been doing in connection with the operation.”9
To add to his misery, having taken Morocco, Patton was now sidelined there. Longing to join the battle then under way in Tunisia, he was instead occupied with overseeing the conversion of Casablanca into a major American military base, hardening and training incoming troops, and serving as military administrator of a government putatively run by a sultan, French general Nogues, and French admiral Darlan. He trusted French officers to manage French troops guarding roads and bridges, manning antiaircraft installations, and generally serving to discourage invasion from Spanish Morocco. A stable Morocco meant that American troops would be free to devote their full attention to fighting the Axis.
On November 30, when Clark telephoned with a request that he fly to Algiers, Patton had a flash of hope, but after supper with Eisenhower and Clark, a phone call came for Ike from Washington via Gibraltar. Eisenhower hung up the receiver and turned to Clark: “Well, Wayne, you get the Fifth Army.” To Beatrice, Patton wrote on December 2: “Some times I think that a nice clean death . . . would be the easiest way out.”10
As Patton stewed, his resentments simmered. He wrote in his diary that Clark was one of the “glamour boys [who] have no knowledge of men or war,” and he complained that Eisenhower was no longer really “commanding” because he always yielded to the British, in depressing contrast to World War I’s General Pershing, who had always put American interests first. The comparison between Eisenhower and Pershing became even more invidious when Patton was tapped to host the Casablanca Conference between FDR, Churchill, and their respective military advisers in January 1943. His dark mood notwithstanding, Patton was a gracious, entertaining, impressive, and efficient host, whose razor-sharp troops made a great impression on everyone. To each compliment, however, Patton gave the same response: I’d rather be fighting. Then he heard that the Casablanca conferees had decided to make the next attack in Tunisia primarily a British show, with the United States II Corps under British command. “Shades of J. J. Pershing,” he wrote in disgust. “We have sold our birthright.”11
One product of the Casablanca Conference did excite Patton. Churchill and Roosevelt definitively agreed to invade Sicily after Tunisia had been conquered. This came as a blow to Marshall and Eisenhower, who had hoped to turn directly to the cross-channel invasion after North Africa, but Patton was thrilled. Not only would this invasion certainly get him back into the fight, it appealed to his sense of history. To jump off from North Africa to the conquest of Sicily would be to follow in the footsteps of Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, and Belisarius, the great generals of the ancient world. Of course, what FDR, Churchill, and, for the moment, even Patton glided over was the fact that Tunisia had to be conquered first. In this, the American army was about to learn a very hard and very bitter lesson.
It was one thing to achieve victory against the Vichy French, quite another to prevail against the German forces of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. On February 14, 1943, the American 1st Armored Division under Orlando Ward was mauled and withdrew, along with Free French force
s, 50 miles to the Western Dorsale, the mountains near the Tunisian-Algerian border. Like Patton himself, Rommel was a believer in relentless attack, and, seeing an opportunity to push the Allies out of Tunisia altogether, he attacked next at the Sbiba and Kasserine passes in an engagement known as the Battle of Kasserine Pass. Rommel very nearly broke through, but chronically beset by logistical problems, unable to maneuver adequately in the rough terrain, and menaced by a buildup of Allied reinforcements, he was forced to break off the offensive on February 22 and withdraw to his formidable redoubt known as the Mareth Line.
Yet Rommel had succeeded in doing plenty of damage. Lloyd Freden-dall, commanding the U.S. II Corps, had been woefully outgeneraled. More than 3,000 of his troops were killed or wounded, and another 3,700 were taken prisoner. Equipment losses were heavy, including 200 tanks. Bad as all this was, far worse was the effect on American morale. In this, the first direct American encounter with the Germans, the United States Army was not merely defeated, it was humiliated. A shiver of panic shot through the American home front. As for the British, alarm and disgust ran high. Tommies and officers alike began slyly referring to their American allies as “our Italians,” a cutting reference to the notoriously inept service Mussolini’s army rendered to the Germans.
Removed from battle, Patton writhed in his Casablanca seat. Such a blow to the pride of the American army, his army, was agony. That his own son-in-law, John Waters, the husband of his eldest daughter, Bea, was now a prisoner of war added to the pain. Patton felt both neglected and useless. Then, on March 4, he picked up a telephone message from Eisenhower ordering him to leave the next day for extended field duty. He flew to Algiers, where Ike was waiting for him at the airfield. Ike was relieving Fredendall and giving Patton temporary command of II Corps. His mission was to transform the corps from a defeated army into a victorious one or, as Eisenhower put it in a formal memorandum of March 6, to effect “the rehabilitation of all American forces under your command.” In his memorandum, he made clear that Patton was “taking over a difficult task. . . . But I know you can do it and your success there is going to have far-reaching effects. . . .” He also reminded Patton of having spoken to him “about personal recklessness. Your personal courage is something you do not have to prove to me, and I want you as Corps Commander—not as a casualty.”12
British general Sir Harold Alexander briefed Patton on the role of the II Corps, which, he said, was to support British forces under General Bernard Law Montgomery by threatening the Axis flank. Patton did not relish a supporting role, and he was distressed not only that it would inhibit him personally, but that it would not allow sufficient scope of action for the American army to redeem itself after the failure at Kasserine Pass. But Patton accepted that Alexander was in command, and he bit his tongue.
Patton formally replaced Fredendall on March 6 and contemplated the sloppy, demoralized, unsoldierly command the general had left to him. The soldier is the army. Plans, equipment, commanders, all are necessary, but without hard, disciplined soldiers, there could be no army, and without an army, there could be no victory. His orders were to take II Corps into action in 10 days’ time. That gave him little more than a week to transform a beaten rabble into a force of warriors absolutely determined to win.
What he did became one of the legends of the United States Army. As usual, he was everywhere, speeding about in a siren-equipped scout car accompanied by a motorcycle escort. He demanded that the officers and men of II Corps look and behave like soldiers. He ordered everyone to wear clean, pressed uniforms, complete with neckties, leggings, and helmets. He established rigorous schedules and requirements for every activity, no matter how mundane. He insisted on the strict observance of all military courtesies, including the salute. (It is said that anyone in the army could instantly recognize a “Patton man” by the sharpness of his salute.) He had his troops carefully overhaul all weapons. He instituted a strict schedule of monetary fines for the slightest infractions. The men grumbled, but they soon began to see themselves as soldiers: Patton’s men. While he saw to the minutiae of the troops’ discipline, he also delivered talk after personal talk, exhorting his men to fierce, aggressive action. He did not want them to die for their country, he said, but to kill for it.
Even as he demanded the utmost from II Corps, he moved heaven and earth to see that its personnel were the best-equipped and best-fed men in the U.S. Army. Even as he set the bar higher and higher, demanding more and more, he continually assured his men that they would be worthy, they would succeed, they would win. Many men hated him, but no one ignored him, and everyone, even the grumblers, was excited by what he had to say.
In the meantime, he found that he had an old comrade, Omar Bradley, to deal with. Although Ike had expressed total confidence in Patton, he sent Bradley to Patton as his personal “representative.” Patton took this to mean spy, and he responded by securing Eisenhower’s approval to appoint Bradley his deputy commander. Once the transformation of II Corps had been completed, Patton would go on to continue planning Operation Husky, as the Sicily invasion was called, and Bradley would assume command of the corps.
Patton was promoted to lieutenant general on March 12. On March 17, a II Corps division under Terry Allen took the village of Gafsa, the first objective Alexander had assigned the corps, then advanced toward the second objective, Gabes, along the way achieving a fine victory at the Battle of El Guettar. Here Allen’s division checked the advance of a German and an Italian panzer force, not once but twice. In contrast to the demoralized chaos of Kasserine Pass, the American troops fought bravely and efficiently, destroying 30 Axis tanks and driving the enemy from the field. The victory was well publicized and, on the home front, did much to exorcize the shame of Kasserine.
Less impressive was Orlando Ward’s performance at Maknassy Pass, the third of Alexander’s prescribed objectives. Bogged down in mud, Ward was at a loss. Patton, who did not believe a commander should allow himself to be defeated by mud or any other natural circumstance, ultimately relieved Ward.
In contrast to his command in France during World War I, Patton could not be everywhere at once on the battlefield. El Guettar and the Maknassy Pass were simply too far apart, and although he made frequent front-line inspections, Patton had to spend most of his time at his headquarters, between the widely dispersed divisions. It was yet another frustration.
At length, as Montgomery finally forced the German tanks out of the Mareth Line, Alexander ordered Patton to pull out of stubborn Maknassy and attack down the road toward Gabes with the object of harrying the German retreat from Mareth. Patton was resentful of the condescending tone of Alexander’s orders, which were so detailed as to leave nothing to Patton’s discretion. Hadn’t the American army proven itself at El Guettar? Nevertheless, Patton took the assignment and put together what he hoped would be another brilliant victory. In fact, the assault, under C. C. Benson, made little progress. This Patton ascribed in part to an absence of close air support from the Allied air forces, which were under the command of Alexander’s own air officer. When, on April 1, Patton’s aide, Captain Dick Jenson, the son of a family friend and a young man of whom Patton was very fond, was killed in an air attack on the general’s headquarters, Patton complained that “total lack of air cover . . . has allowed German air force to operate at will.” Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham responded angrily and insultingly that Patton was using the air force to excuse his own failures on the ground. Patton, in turn, demanded a public apology for this slander. Seeking to avoid an ugly breach in the alliance, three air force generals were dispatched to Patton’s headquarters to assure him that air support was forthcoming. As they spoke, the headquarters came under air attack again, and a portion of the ceiling collapsed around Patton and the air force officers. Fortunately, everyone escaped unharmed, but Patton could have said nothing that would have made his case more eloquently.
“How in hell did you manage to stage that?” someone was heard to ask.
; “I’ll be damned if I know,” Patton replied, “but if I could find the sons of bitches who flew those planes, I’d mail each one of them a medal.”13
Following this, Coningham agreed to send a cable retracting his remarks and closing the matter. For his part, Patton returned to the struggle on the Gabes plain. Benson was still making little headway there, so Patton visited him in his headquarters. He told Benson to keep his units moving until he either found a fight or ended up in the sea, then both men drove out to the units in the vanguard. Finding the tanks halted at the edge of a minefield, Patton, preceded by a Jeep and a scout car, drove through the mines himself, leading Benson’s tanks safely through them. It was an extreme instance of leadership by example, and it demonstrated precisely the kind of reckless courage Eisenhower had warned Patton to avoid. In any case, the gesture had not been worth the risk. By the time Benson’s tanks were rolling again, the bulk of the Axis troops had already moved on, evading any attempt to engage them.
Although disappointed by the action at Gabes, Patton felt that the victory at El Guettar was sufficient proof of II Corp’s rehabilitation. Alexander was about to commence what he intended as the final operation in Tunisia. When Patton learned that Alexander did not intend to include II
Corps in it, he protested to Alexander as well as to Eisenhower. He had given back to the unit its self-esteem and its honor, and he insisted that II Corps be given a fitting role in the culmination of the Tunisian campaign. Once Patton had secured a promise that the American army would indeed be represented in the final operation, he turned over command of the corps to Bradley and returned to his headquarters in Casablanca.