An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  Nor was a great military leader of necessity a great politician, as Patton had repeatedly demonstrated during the preparations for TORCH. While Hewitt readied his ships, Patton readied his men, and he had approached the task by imposing his will on everything and everyone in his path.

  His command for TORCH consisted of three divisions pieced together from other units—the 9th Infantry, the 3rd Infantry, and the 2nd Armored; eight other divisions had been so ransacked of troops and equipment to fill out the departing force that six months would pass before they recovered. In the past two weeks, Patton had traveled to staging areas across Virginia and North Carolina to inspect the troops and “put iron in their souls.” One commander later recalled that he always knew when Patton had visited because the units so honored invariably called to report that assorted officers “had been ordered into arrest after incurring his wrath.” On October 14, Patton sent identical letters to all his senior commanders: “If you don’t succeed, I don’t want to see you alive,” he advised. “I see no point in surviving defeat, and I am sure that if all of you enter into battle with equal resolution, we shall conquer, and live long, and gain more glory.”

  In a dinner toast at one base, Patton declared, “Here’s to the wives. My, what pretty widows you’re going to make.” His advice to the 9th Division for defeating the Germans was: “Grab those pusillanimous sons-a-bitches by the nose and kick ’em in the balls.” To others, he spoke of slaughtering “lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.” At Fort Bragg, while he was addressing troops he had once commanded in the 2nd Armored Division, tears coursed down his cheeks and he stalked from the stage without a word. The men roared their approval. In his diary, Patton had once rebuked himself for being “inclined to show emotion, a most unmilitary trait.”

  On Friday morning, October 23, more than 150 troop commanders, ship captains, and senior staff officers filed into a tightly guarded Army warehouse in Norfolk. Hewitt spoke briefly, revealing to most for the first time that they were bound for Africa. For more than four hours, the TORCH planners reviewed the operation in intricate detail. They finished with the proper procedures for burying the dead and registering their graves.

  Then Patton took the stage in breeches and riding boots, ivory-handled pistols on either hip. He roused the men from their torpor by announcing that he would shoot any American soldier molesting a Moroccan woman.

  “If you have any doubts as to what you’re to do, I can put it very simply,” he said in his jarring falsetto. “The idea is to move ahead, and you usually know where the front is by the sound of gunfire. To make it perfectly clear to you: suppose you lose a hand or an ear is shot off, or perhaps a piece of your nose, and you think you should go back to get first aid. If I see you, it will be the last goddamn walk you’ll ever take. As an officer, you’re expected to move ahead.”

  Then he challenged the Navy to emulate Admiral David Farragut, who had damned the torpedoes at Mobile Bay in 1864. But, Patton continued, “I’m under no illusion that the goddamn Navy will get us within a hundred miles of the beach or within a week of the date set for landing. It doesn’t matter. Put us on Africa. We’ll walk.”

  He finished with a flourish: “We shall attack for sixty days and then, if we have to, for sixty more. If we go forward with desperation, if we go forward with utmost speed and fight, these people cannot stand against us.”

  The men came to attention as Patton strode from the room. Most of the Navy officers, and even some of their Army counterparts, had never heard of George S. Patton before. Now they knew who he was.

  As the hour of departure drew near, anarchy ruled the docks. Sometimes Patton contributed to the disorder. On one especially hellish morning his quartermasters changed the loading plan six times between eight and nine A.M.

  More usually however, Patton, Hewitt, and their lieutenants demonstrated the inventive resolve that would characterize the American way of war for the duration. At the eleventh hour, medical officers abruptly realized that Task Force 34 had stockpiled only a small fraction of the blood plasma required. Recent experience had shown that plasma—the fluid remaining after removing red and white blood cells—was highly effective in keeping wounded soldiers alive, and when dried it could be stored without refrigeration for weeks. With authority from the War Department, the port surgeon by day’s end had requisitioned virtually all the plasma east of the Mississippi River and organized three bombers to deliver it. When bad weather closed in on Norfolk, ground crews lit flares to guide home the pilots. Trucks raced from the airfield to the port with a thousand precious units just before the fleet weighed anchor.

  No less dramatic was the saga of the S.S. Contessa. The War Department for weeks had sought a shallow-draft ship capable of navigating a dozen miles up a serpentine Moroccan river to the Port Lyautey airfield, one of Patton’s prime objectives. A worldwide search turned up the Contessa, a salt-caked, rust-stained scow that drew just over seventeen feet and had spent most of her undistinguished career hauling bananas and coconuts from the Caribbean. She was ordered to Newport News. There the skipper, Captain William H. John, a thick-browed Briton with an untended mustache and a long, saggy face, learned he was to load more than a thousand tons of bombs, depth charges, and high-octane aviation fuel for a destination to be named later. The crew promptly jumped ship.

  The Contessa was emptied of bananas and winched into dry dock on October 24 for a quick caulking of her leaky seams. Captain John and a Navy reserve lieutenant named A. V. Leslie then headed for the Norfolk jail, which state corrections officials recently had identified as the most squalid lockup in all Virginia. John and Leslie interviewed fifty inmates. Many were bibulous seamen, said to be “bleary-eyed and unsteady on their pins,” but game for a voyage described only as high-paying, dangerous, and far from any Norfolk cellblock. Fifteen men were chosen and their sentences commuted. Navy guards with riot guns escorted them to the Contessa. Pumped dry and heavily patched, the fruiter slid from the dry dock with a clean bottom and made for Pier X, the ammunition wharf, to begin loading her cargo.

  All the confusion that characterized the cargo loading now attended the convergence of 34,000 soldiers on Hampton Roads. Troop trains with blinds drawn rolled through Norfolk and Portsmouth, sometimes finding the proper pier and sometimes not. Many men were exhausted, having traveled all night or even all week. One artillery commander, suspecting they were bound for a tropical battlefield, had decided to acclimate his troops by sealing the windows on their train, transforming it into what one surviving officer described as “a sweltering inferno.”

  Military policemen patrolled the tracks and bus stations to watch for deserters. The Army in the past six months had charged more than 2,600 soldiers with desertion and convicted 90 percent of them. Indiscipline also plagued units that had been staging in southeast Virginia for weeks. So many men were sentenced to the crowded brig at Solomon’s Island in Chesapeake Bay during amphibious training that there was a waiting list to serve time; on October 3 alone, thirty men had been court-martialed for various infractions. Sensing they were going to war, many troops drank until they were “knee-walkin’ tight.” Commanders distributed pamphlets warning, “The truth is that using the sex glands too much exhausts them and weakens a man.” Many a weak man dragged himself to the pier.

  Naughty Norfolk catered to those looking for sin before shipping out, notwithstanding the occasional sign that read “No dogs or sailors allowed.” The town’s iniquity grew with the arrival of each new regiment. Every night, thousands of men swarmed down East Main Street, described as “the largest, most solid block of beer joints in the world.” Taxis became rolling brothels, and fleets of “girlie trailers” served the concupiscent. On October 18, vice officers arrested 115 people in the “largest morals raid in local history.” His jail cells bulging, Norfolk’s police chief asked the federal government to “give me a concentration camp…a camp large enough to handle two or three thousand women.” The strains of war—including many U-boat attacks along
the Virginia coast—pushed the town toward hysteria. Widespread rumor had it that local Negroes planned to massacre white citizens during a blackout; the plotters were even said to have purchased 300 icepicks at a downtown hardware store.

  Sober and otherwise, the troops found their way to the twenty-eight transport ships. All public telephones at the wharves were disconnected, and port engineers erected a high fence around each dock area. “If you tell where you are going, you may never get there,” security posters warned—pointlessly, because few men had any inkling of their destination. Some soldiers inflated condoms with natural gas from tent heaters and floated them toward town, with notes attached inviting any girl willing to comfort a departing warrior to infiltrate the security area. In a final, senseless act of confusion, the Army insisted the men board alphabetically rather than by tactical unit. Thousands struggled up the ramps with heavy barracks bags and wandered the companionways for hours in search of their comrades. Others disembarked at night, to re-form on the dock by platoon and then reboard.

  Eight to twelve officers shared each stateroom. The ranks wedged into holds with bunks stacked four high and hammocks slung in every open space. “God must love enlisted men,” they told one another; “he made so many of them.” Poker and dice games raged in the stairwells. Sailors scraped and scraped. Boys barely old enough to shave lay in their bunks and stared vacantly at the bulkheads, or struggled to articulate in letters home what every one of them felt: I’m scared. I miss you. I love you.

  A distant clatter of winches signaled the lifting of the last cargo slings. And a new sound joined the racket: the harsh grind of a thousand whet-stones as soldiers put an edge on their bayonets and trench knives.

  Dawn on October 24 revealed a forest of masts and fighting tops across Hampton Roads, where the greatest war fleet ever to sail from American waters made ready. Brief squalls blew in from the Atlantic, shrouding the ships in gray mist. Launches with hooded lanterns carried a few officers from a final night with their wives in the Chamberlin Hotel. Wrapped in a boat cloak, Hewitt boarded his flagship, the U.S.S. Augusta. The rising trill of a bosun’s whistle announced the admiral’s arrival.

  From this very anchorage, dispatched with patriotic huzzahs and guided from the Roads by Theodore Roosevelt aboard his yacht, Mayflower, Hewitt had sailed the world with sixteen battleships in the Great White Fleet in 1907. To make the current departure less conspicuous, Hewitt arranged for a mid-ocean rendezvous with several of his biggest warships, including the new dreadnought Massachusetts, which had sortied from Maine. An even larger contingent awaited the task force near Bermuda. This group included the Ranger, his only true aircraft carrier, and four “escort” carriers—oil tankers overlaid with flight decks. None of the carriers had more than half a dozen experienced aviators; the Navy also reported that some crews included “a bare handful of officers and men who had previously seen salt water.” But of the 102 ships in the fleet, only Contessa was seriously delayed. Still loading fuel and bombs at Pier X, she would follow the convoy in two days, alone.

  Patton settled into the comfortable captain’s cabin aboard Augusta. A stack of mystery novels lay on the table by his bunk, along with the Koran, which he planned to read during the passage. He had often practiced a fierce martial scowl in the mirror, but there was no need for dramatics now. He was alone, as only a battle commander could be, bound for the sharp corners of the world.

  “This is my last night in America,” he had written in his diary the previous evening. “It may be years and it may be forever. God grant that I do my full duty to my men and myself.” He thought of his Wednesday morning in Washington three days earlier. Before going to the White House, he had driven up 16th Street to Walter Reed Army Hospital to call on his ancient hero, General John J. Pershing. A feeble eighty-two, Pershing had reminisced about their adventures in Mexico, where Patton had served as an unofficial aide-de-camp. “I can always pick a fighting man,” Pershing said. “I like generals so bold they are dangerous.” Patton kissed Pershing’s hand, as desiccated as a fallen leaf, and asked for his blessing. “Good-bye, George,” the old general replied. “God bless you and keep you and give you victory.”

  Generals so bold they are dangerous. He would take that challenge. To his old friend Eisenhower in London he had written, “We should plan either to conquer or to be destroyed at Casablanca.” He also scribbled two notes to Bea. “It will probably be some time before you get a letter from me but I will be thinking of you and loving you,” he wrote in one. In the other, to be opened only “when and if I am definitely reported dead,” he confessed how difficult it was to convey his feelings for a woman he had known since they were both sixteen years old. He addressed her as if from beyond the grave: “Your confidence in me was the only sure thing in a world of dreadful uncertainty.”

  Shortly before seven A.M., the Joseph T. Dickman slipped her lines and moved into the stream, joined by the Thomas Jefferson, the Leonard Wood, and a stately procession of other transports. Destroyers darted ahead into the seaward mists—the lead ship in the position known as Dead Man’s Corner—as the transports threaded the antisubmarine nets protecting Hampton Roads. With radio silence imposed, course adjustments swept across the fleet in an ecstasy of signal lamps and semaphore flags. Patrol planes and two silver blimps scouted the swept channel that angled eastward between Cape Henry and Cape Charles. Building to fourteen knots, the transports steamed out the drowned mouth of the James River, across Thimble Shoals and Tail of the Horseshoe. Soldiers cinched their life jackets and lined the weather-deck rails, staring in silence at Old Point Comfort.

  The dawn was bright and blowing. Angels perched unseen on the shrouds and crosstrees. Young men, fated to survive and become old men dying abed half a century hence, would forever remember this hour, when an army at dawn made for the open sea in a cause none could yet comprehend. Ashore, as the great fleet glided past, dreams of them stepped, like men alive, into the rooms where their loved ones lay sleeping.

  Rendezvous at Cherchel

  EVEN before the fleet weighed anchor in Virginia, a small invasion vanguard had arrived off the African coast. This party comprised fewer than a dozen men; their mission—both courageous and daft—would become one of the most celebrated clandestine operations of the war.

  It began with a single light. Major General Mark W. Clark stood on the bridge of the submarine H.M.S. Seraph at ten P.M. on October 21, peering through his binoculars at a bright beacon on the Algerian coast. Braced to absorb the submarine’s roll, he raked the lenses across the white line of surf two miles away. After several days of creeping submerged across the Mediterranean from Gibraltar at four knots, Clark was desperate to get ashore. Though Seraph surfaced every night to recharge her batteries, the fetid air inside grew so stale each day that a struck match would not light. Clark and the four other American officers had passed the time playing countless rubbers of bridge or, after lessons from the British commandos aboard, hands of cribbage. Small bruises covered Clark’s head; at six foot three inches tall, he found it impossible to dodge the sub’s innumerable pipes and knobs.

  “There’s the sugar-loaf hill to the left. I can see its outline against the sky,” Clark told Seraph’s commander, Lieutenant Norman L. A. Jewell. A pale glow to the east marked the fishing port of Cherchel, said to have been founded by Selene, daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Algiers lay another sixty miles up the coast. Clark focused again on the light burning in the seaward gable of an isolated farmhouse. “There’s a beach below the house. A black splotch behind the beach—that’s the grove of trees,” Clark said. “Yessir, this is the place we’re looking for.”

  Jewell ordered the diesel engines started. Seraph edged forward to within 400 yards of the breakers and hove to. A rising moon silvered the deck and dark sea. The commandos deftly assembled the folbots—two-man kayaks made with hickory frames and canvas skins. Clark and the other Americans rechecked their inventory, including money belts stuffed with greenbacks and $1,0
00 in Canadian gold pieces, which had been obtained with difficulty from the Bank of England vault in central London on Sunday afternoon. Every man wore his military uniform; six German saboteurs, captured in civilian clothes after being put ashore by U-boat in New York and Florida, had died in the District of Columbia electric chair two months earlier. No one on this mission wanted to be executed as a spy.

  The first three pairs of men successfully grabbed the folbot rails and eased themselves into the waist holes. But as Clark was about to step from the submarine, the heavy lop flipped his boat and the commando already in it, Captain Godfrey B. Courtney. “I’ve got to get off!” Clark shouted. “I’ve got to go now.” Another folbot was recalled and one of the Americans surrendered his seat to Clark. The submarine crew righted the capsized craft and fished Courtney from the sea. Ready at last, the men feathered away from Seraph with their double-scoop paddles, then turned in a V formation toward the beckoning light above the beach.

  Mark Clark—Wayne, to his friends—was an odd choice to lead a clandestine mission behind enemy lines. As Eisenhower’s deputy and chief planner, he knew more about Operation TORCH than any man alive. He also was among the few Americans privy to Ultra, the intelligence gathered through British decipherment of coded German radio messages—a secret so profound it was jokingly known as BBR, “burn before reading.” Should Vichy forces capture Clark and surrender him to the Gestapo, the consequences would be incalculable, for both TORCH and the Allied cause.