by John Dalmas
"They think of it as fighting Nazis. The whole family hates Hitler, especially the old lady. She says he'll be the ruin of Germany."
"She got that right. Well, it's a good thing to have another guy in the platoon that speaks German. A guy named Mueller speaks it, too; he's from North Dakota." Ruiz got to his feet "Come on. I'll introduce you to Sergeant Powers. He's your squad leader."
* * *
As it turned out, Macurdy had no problems at all in his new squad. It already knew of him by reputation; he was a man people noticed.
* * *
As summer waned into autumn, their officers were briefed on what was to be the battalion's—and the Army's—first airborne operation. And although for some weeks the troopers were not told what was up, training intensified, carrying now a sense of urgency.
They were made familiar with French arms and equipment, which to some suggested a raid into German-occupied France. The battalion had read and heard about the disastrous cross-channel Dieppe raid by seven thousand commandos, a few weeks earlier. And eager though they were to see action, the debacle at Dieppe was sobering. Even elite units could come to grief in an operation sufficiently ill-conceived.
One day they were visited and inspected in ranks by the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who paused to ask questions of the men. Macurdy was as impressed by her aura as by her height, and she was taller than most of the troopers.
Meanwhile Mary had written that she was pregnant. Curtis didn't much fret about it; he was remarkably focused on where he was and what he was doing. Which helped him get another quick promotion to buck sergeant, replacing a squad leader who'd broken a collarbone.
* * *
Shortly afterward, the men were put on restriction and briefed on their upcoming operation, until they knew their drop zone and missions about as well as they could, considering they still didn't know where in the world that drop zone was.
Not that they'd drop there, or carry out that mission—a remarkable set of snafus would intervene—but they'd make themselves valuable regardless, on the ground and in the evolution of new warfare.
Finally they were loaded onto trains and taken to Land's End, in the extreme southwest of England.
15
Snafu in the Desert
On November 4,1942, 2nd Battalion of the 503 Parachute Infantry Regiment was put on a train. They'd removed their unit patches. Their equipment, even their jump boots and jump suits, was sent separately; no one was to know they were paratroopers.
Their route was indirect, and of course they spent a lot of time waiting. On November 7 they arrived at two small airfields in the southwesternmost corner of England, Land's End. There they learned what their mission actually was, and what the circumstances were. In small groups, again to be inconspicuous, thirty-nine twin-engined C47 transports arrived, to fly them to French-ruled Algeria, in North Africa.
At that stage of the war, there could be no adequate fighter escort for slow, unarmed transports flying over Nazi-occupied France. So the small armada was to fly well out over the Atlantic, and then, without Spanish approval, cross neutral Spain and the western Mediterranean, to capture two key airfields in Algeria, to keep them out of German hands. Meanwhile seaborne attacks would take place at the city of Oran and elsewhere.
There were complications of course: the French defense forces. "Free France" was ruled by a Nazi puppet dictatorship under 86-year-old Marshal Henri Pétain, who'd sworn allegiance to Hitler. An American general, Mark Clark, had been landed covertly at Oran by submarine, to negotiate a secret agreement with the French commander there, allowing allied forces to land unopposed. But considering Pétain's attitude, it wasn't certain the French commander would be obeyed.
If it seemed the French would fight after all, the planes would leave England early enough to jump their troopers while it was dark in Algeria. If it seemed the French would not fight, the planes would leave later, and land with their troopers by daylight. In either case, the battalion was to secure the airfields from possible German takeover.
There was also the problem of the planes finding the drop zone, 1,600 miles away over water and across Spain, without benefit of beacons enroute, or familiarity with Spanish geography. The pilots hadn't been trained for that sort of navigation. Most wouldn't even be given a map; they were to follow the leader. On the plus side, compass bearings should keep them approximately on course (unless it was windy), and the British would have a beacon ship some miles off the port of Oran, near the targeted airbases; the planes should pick up its signal as they crossed the southeastern coast of Spain. It would also notify the planes if the French changed their minds. (Unfortunately its radioman was given the wrong frequency, and its signals were never received.)
The drop zone itself was to be marked by a spy-placed radar beacon to be activated shortly before the troop planes arrived. (However, the intelligence officer who placed and activated it was given the wrong expected arrival time. When the planes didn't appear, he blew up his top-secret device, as he was supposed to, and slipped away dressed as an Arab.)
At almost the last hour, word came that the French would cooperate. Thus the planes waited an extra four hours before taking off, in order to arrive at the landing site in daylight.
* * *
It was not a joyride. The troopers sat shoulder to shoulder on metal bucket seats, the only upholstery their packed chutes. At the head of the troop compartment were two strapped-down barrels of aviation gasoline, backing up the fuel tanks and reminding the troopers that this would be a long flight. The November night was chilly, and not only was the compartment unheated, the doorways held no doors; the propwash sucked out and blew away whatever body heat they produced. Furthermore they were flying at an altitude of nearly two miles.
Despite the cold, they dozed, Macurdy better than most because he drew heat from the Web of the World. From time to time he'd waken, to peer through the small windows behind him. The only lights were one or two glowing cigarette tips marking wakeful troopers. On almost none of those occasions did he hear a word from anyone, and for the first several hours, all the window showed him were ocean and stars, and the blue lights of other planes in the formation.
After some hours, his dreams became restless, and he awoke to bouncing and swaying. Turning to the window again, his eyes found darkness, rain, and cloud. What he couldn't see was the thirty-knot east wind. They'd run out of their good weather. If there were other planes nearby, he couldn't see them, either.
At 4 AM the compartment lights came on and field rations were passed around—crackers, canned meat, and candy. Then the lights were turned out again. Macurdy was wakeful now, waiting for a dawn that seemed slow in coming. When it did, they were over water—not the Bay of Biscay this time, but the Mediterranean.
They'd flown out of the storm; the sky was merely overcast. Men turned in their seats to peer out the small windows. As the light strengthened, Macurdy could see brown hills ahead. The others saw them too; what they couldn't see were the other thirty-eight planes. Four others yes, but not thirty-eight. Had they gotten lost in the storm? The talk picked up. Oran was supposed to be up ahead somewhere. Had the pilot gotten the signal from the beacon ship? Where was the invasion fleet? Dead ahead maybe, someone suggested, where only the pilot could see it.
Lieutenant Warner was the senior trooper on board, and getting to his feet, he went to the cockpit. A few minutes later he came back out. "At ease!" he shouted, and the talking stopped. "The pilot doesn't know exactly where we are, or where the other thirty-four planes are. The storm winds blew from the east, which means we blew off course to the west. When we get closer to shore, he and this group are going to fly east for a while, till they see some landmark they recognize from the map."
There were groans and a few oaths. "What about the beacon ship?" someone asked.
"They haven't heard a peep from it. They'll know Oran for sure though, when they see it." Then he moved on to his seat. The Pratt & Whitney engines continued t
heir reassuring roar, smooth and constant, as if they could go on forever.
With land close ahead, the five planes veered eastward, continuing on a line of flight that allowed the troopers to make out Arab villages on the shore. Half an hour later, the Lieutenant disappeared into the cockpit again, and this time stayed a while. Finally he stuck his head out, grinning.
"They know where they are now. They're going inland, and get to La Sénia from the west." This didn't bring actual cheers, but Macurdy felt the tension ease. The airfield at La Sénia was their primary target. Engines droning steadily, they flew inland over barren rugged hills.
Soon he could see a large flat area with a whitish look, that he thought might be a salt flat, a dry desert lake. He'd never seen one before, but it fitted the description. Warner came out of the cockpit again. "They've spotted more C47s ahead," he said, "sitting on the ground with guys around them, and our gas gauge reads empty. We're going to land."
There were no cheers, and not much was said, except the wry comment that, if that was La Sénia Airfield below, or any other goddamned airfield, they'd sure as hell camouflaged the hangars well.
* * *
Other groups of C47s arrived after they did. The lakebed, which their pilot said was 35 miles long and 7 wide, consisted of a salty crust beneath which was the stickiest mud Macurdy had ever experienced. Walk fifty feet, and each boot had ten pounds of it stuck on like glue. None of the pilots had heard a sound from the beacon ship, or picked up the radar beacon that was supposed to mark the drop zone.
Some of the planes that had crossed the coast near Oran had been fired on from the ground; the French had decided to fight after all. When Colonel Raff arrived with six planeloads of troopers, and spotted the planes on the lakebed, the non-jumping Air Corps officer in overall command of the operation radioed him that they were taking sniper fire, and were threatened by enemy armor. So Raff and the six planeloads jumped to attack the armor with small arms, grenades, and anti-tank mines. (Bazookas were still unknown.) The colonel hit a large rock when he landed, broke a couple of ribs and was spitting blood. The sniping, it turned out, was at such long range, it had failed to hit anyone, while the "enemy armor" turned out to be an American armored reconnaissance patrol that had gotten through the French defenses earlier that morning.
Before long, most of the 39-plane armada was there in the mud, with too little gas to fly anywhere, and the nearest target was not La sénia, but the military airfield at Tafaraoui, 38 miles away, much of that distance on the lakebed. Part of the battalion was left with the stranded planes. The rest started hiking through the gumbo toward Tafaraoui. Macurdy had thought that any exertion they'd experience in the field couldn't be worse than they'd survived in training. Now, trudging through the gumbo, he changed his mind. A trooper named Hennessy, a Wyoming cowboy, called it "goddamn 'dobe clay, the worst fucking shit in the world," and no one argued with him.
They hiked all night, arriving at the airfield not long after dawn, utterly bushed, to find it in the hands of an American armored force. The field was beautiful in a way: Rows of willow trees along the road, a tall pink water tower, pink barracks ... but Macurdy was too tired to appreciate it.
Some of 2nd Battalion's troopers were already there, some of them dead. While Macurdy and the others had been slogging through the mud, the afternoon before, the force left behind had gotten a radio call. American armor had just taken Tafaraoui, and needed infantry to guard five hundred French prisoners, so Raff ordered the remaining dregs of gas drained from the other planes, until they had enough for three of them to fly there. Then he'd loaded the three with troopers—as many as they'd hold—and the planes had taken off. Partway there, they'd been shot up by three French Dewoitine fighter planes, killing or wounding twenty Americans, and forcing the transports to land on the lakebed again.
Most of the troopers they'd carried, including some of the wounded, marched much of the night to reach Tafaraoui. There, with more than a little satisfaction, they heard that a flight of British Spitfires had jumped the Dewoitines and shot all of them down.
* * *
The next day, transportation was sent to the C47s on the dry lake, and the rest of the battalion was trucked north to the airfield. The American armor there was needed for the assault on Oran, so its commander turned the airfield over to 2nd Battalion to defend, and left. In the hills, a lone French howitzer kept lobbing in 75mm shells, and the Spitfires couldn't find the well-camouflaged gun. The battalion took more casualties from the shelling. Meanwhile, the men who'd made the long march took advantage of the barracks there, and slept.
Macurdy dreamed, half-wakened, and dreamed again, dreamed of beaches and monsters and death. Then the platoon was rousted out for muster in the morning, leaving brief dregs of dream, baleful and menacing.
But roll call, the mess line, and rumors banished them. At breakfast it occurred to him that sixty hours earlier he'd eaten supper in England, in what seemed like a different world. Not as different as Yuulith, where he'd fought his last war, but different enough.
16
Dancing in a Vacuum
Oran surrendered on the second day—Algiers, farther east, had already surrendered to the British—and all of Algeria was nominally in allied hands. Mostly the French had not fought very hard; they'd had their orders and a Gallic sense of honor, but their hearts weren't in it. Surrendering may have hurt their pride, but most of them disliked or even hated being allied with the Nazis.
Meanwhile, the Allied high command was concerned that the Germans would move to occupy the airfields in eastern Algeria and neighboring Tunisia, where there was a power vacuum. The Allies had only a few divisions in all of Algeria, concentrated in the north. On the other hand, though nominally Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps occupied neighboring Tunisia, his forces there were concentrated near the east coast, where they were engaged with the British 8th Army near the Libyan border.
So on November 15th, most of 2nd Battalion jumped on Youks les Bains Airfield, half expecting to be met by German paratroopers. Instead there was a small number of poorly equipped French infantry, who preferred Americans to Nazis. With no fighting necessary there, Colonel Raff sent a company on foot to take and hold Tebessa Airfield nine miles away, near the Tunisian border. They found no Germans there either.
Raff's assigned responsibility was the defense of Youks les Bains and Tebessa airfields, which stretched his battalion thin, but he phoned Allied headquarters in Algiers, asking permission to occupy the central Tunisian town of Gafsa, which controlled key mountain roads. The French told him there still were no Germans there. General Clark approved only a reconnaissance, however, and "not one step farther" than Gafsa. Then the British General Anderson, in charge of allied ground forces in Algeria, countermanded even that limited permission.
Raff pretended he hadn't gotten the countermand, and his idea of a reconnaissance was more than liberal. It seemed to him that Gafsa and its airfield were a prize the Germans would grab if he didn't. Besides, he was looking for a fight.
As Gafsa was eighty miles southeast of Tebessa via a mountain road, the French commander at Tebessa provided him with two dilapidated, green and white civilian buses, so covered with dirt as to be nearly camouflaged by it. Raff, his broken ribs taped and padded, loaded twenty men in each bus, and started off with them down the road. Macurdy was included because he spoke fluent German. Being within easy range of German fighter planes, Raff had a machine gun mounted atop each bus, with gunners to man them. He had no artillery and no air support.
As reported, there were no Germans in Gafsa, just a French unit of thirty chasseurs, light reconnaissance cavalry stationed there to keep a finger on the local pulse. The French commander really did have his finger on that pulse—in fact on the pulse of all Tunisia—and knew the country intimately. So the two commanders set about to do as much with their tiny forces as they could.
Meanwhile the distant generals decided it had been a good idea after all, and the
paratroopers in Gafsa were increased to all of eighty-five.
Back in England, British airborne officers had told Raff that the Germans didn't like operating at night. So Raff sent men by jeep, civilian car, even a hitchhiker on a train, on small nocturnal demolition raids and reconnaissance patrols. Sometimes troopers went out on their own. Macurdy tried his hand at that, with a sergeant named Cavalieri, whose Italian was as good as Macurdy's German.
Then Macurdy got transferred to Kasserine, just in time to miss a sharp fight—the "Battle of Gafsa"—with German paratroops and Italian light tanks. Fortunately Raff's tiny army had just been reinforced by a company from the 1st Infantry Division, and a platoon from the 701st Antitank Battalion.
Meanwhile the troopers had just learned that their battalion was no longer part of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, and hadn't been for weeks. The 503rd, with a new 2nd Battalion, was being shipped to Australia, halfway around the world; Raff's Ruffians had been redesignated the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion. The plan was to expand it to a full regiment, when enough qualified troopers were available.
* * *
It was at Kasserine that Macurdy's mail caught up with him. He got seven letters from Mary, and realized he'd written her only once since leaving England. Her most recent letter said she'd miscarried again, and he sensed her deep disappointment. That night he wrote her a three-page letter—long by his standards. It would have been longer, but as he pointed out, there wasn't that much to say that the censors wouldn't delete.