An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  At seven A.M., on November 9, the 18th Infantry attacked again, with nearly 7,000 troops. By noon the attack had failed, with heavy casualties. For Colonel Frank Greer, the regimental commander, St. Cloud had become a grudge fight. The entire Allied drive on Oran was stalled because of this town’s resistance. Greer stood on the concrete loading ramp of the winery that served as his command post, studying St. Cloud through field glasses. Half the church steeple was gone now, and with it the clock chimes. Palm trees had been sheared off mid-trunk, and yawning holes could be seen in several house roofs. A riderless black mount, wearing a French cavalry saddle and dragging its bridle, grazed at the edge of town. A dozen other horses lay dead, their legs in the air, like upended tables.

  “I’m going to put a creeping artillery barrage through that town, starting at this end and working right over it,” Greer said. Two hundred shells had been fuzed and stacked at each battery; the barrage of 1,500 rounds would begin at one P.M., followed thirty minutes later by a three-battalion assault. Scouts reported that hundreds of women and children were in the town, huddling in shuttered rooms as the world detonated around them. Some had already been killed, and many more no doubt would die in the bombardment.

  At that moment a hatless, weathered figure in shirtsleeves pulled up to the winery in a jeep. Terry Allen had spent the night in a Tourville schoolhouse, wedged into a child’s desk with a gasoline lantern illuminating photos of Pétain and colorful wall maps of France’s colonial empire. Battle reports indicated that Roosevelt’s men were on Djebel Murdjadjo, the high ground west of Oran; T.R. himself was said to be chasing French hussars with a carbine. Tafaraoui airfield had fallen quickly, and 5,000 troops from the 1st Armored Division, having skirted a French strong point at Misserrhin, had just captured La Sénia airfield. Little was known of the VILLAIN paratroopers or the RESERVIST raiders, but a Foreign Legion counterattack from Sidi Bel Abbès in the southern desert was collapsing. “Boys,” Allen said, “I’ve just sent a signal to the French to put in their first team.” To an exhausted rifle company huddled in a ditch, he urged, “There are a lot of good-looking girls in that town ready to welcome the liberating Americans.” Others he simply warned, “Take Oran or you don’t eat.”

  Standing beneath a fig tree, a cigarette dangling from his lips, Allen swiveled his head from side to side to keep the smoke from his eyes. Greer explained his intentions; a soft hiss leaked from Allen’s cheeks as he studied St. Cloud in the middle distance. The division staff opposed Greer’s plan. It took little imagination to picture terrified civilians mumbling their Hail Marys and fingering their rosaries in preparation for the next world. Terry Allen himself had prayed this morning, as he did before every battle.

  He studied the map and took a long, final gaze at St. Cloud. Allen had been in a dozen provincial French towns like it during the Great War. Among his idiosyncrasies was a disdain for all foreign names more complicated than “Paris,” and he routinely substituted “Whatever-the-Hell-They-Call-It” for any polysyllabic place. But in St. Cloud he could picture the greengrocer, the dressmaker’s shop, the scruffy taverns with their Dubonnet signs and bored waiters in cummerbunds.

  He turned to Greer. “There will not be any general artillery concentration,” he said. “If we bombard the town and then fail to take it by attack, it would be disastrous.”

  Obliterating a French town “would make a bad political impression,” he added. And it would use too much ammunition. “We don’t need the damned place anyway. We can bypass St. Cloud and take Oran by night maneuver.” Leave one battalion as a holding force, Allen said, then swing the rest of your men wide of the town and get them moving toward Oran. Greer saluted, disappointment etched on his face.

  If the order to sidestep St. Cloud seems obvious in retrospect, at the time it was not. By leaving a large armed force in his rear, and suppressing the impulse of his men to avenge their losses and win the town at any cost, Allen had taken a calculated risk. He had calibrated political and battlefield variables to make the first singular tactical decision by an American general in the liberation of Europe.

  “I just couldn’t do it,” Allen later mused. “Just couldn’t. There were civilians in that goddam place. I couldn’t blast hell outta all of them.”

  The circumvention of St. Cloud and the capture of La Sénia unhinged French defenses. Oran was encircled. For the final assault on the city, Allen at 7:15 A.M. on November 10 dictated “field order No. 3,” which ended: “Nothing in hell must delay or stop this attack.”

  The French in fact delayed them, at Arcole and then at St. Eugène, but not for long. When a young major complained that his tired, hungry men needed rest, the 16th Infantry commander rounded on him and snapped, “You will not talk that way. You will attack.” By dawn on November 10, following a night of sleet and wild wind, the converging U.S. forces faced little more than sniper fire. Lieutenant Colonel John Todd, known in the 1st Armored Division as Daddy Rabbit, was told, “Take your tanks in and mill around.” Shoving the road barricades aside, Todd’s tanks rolled down the Boulevard de Mascarad and reached the blue bight of Oran bay; they were too late to prevent the harbor sabotage that followed RESERVIST, but they thwarted a French scheme to flood the port with fuel oil and set it ablaze. Lieutenant Colonel John K. Waters, commander of another armored battalion (and Patton’s son-in-law), put on an intimidating show of force along Boulevard Paul Doumer—although the tanks seemed less fearsome after some ran out of gas near the cathedral.

  Festive crowds filled the sidewalks, flashing Vs with their fingers and flinching at occasional sniper fire. The pretty girls Allen had promised blew kisses from balconies on Boulevard Joffre and dropped hibiscus garlands onto the tank turrets. A potbellied burgher with a black felt hat and a white flag rapped on a tank hull, introduced himself as Oran’s mayor, and offered to surrender his town. The 1st Battalion of the 6th Armored Infantry—sister unit of the battalion destroyed in RESERVIST—stormed the gates of Fort St. Philippe to free more than 500 Allied prisoners: paratroopers, pilots, British tars, and American infantrymen from Walney and Hartland. Liberators and liberated wept alike. French camp guards formed up, stacked arms, and marched smartly to confinement in their own barracks.

  For more than five hours, St. Cloud resisted a final attack—sans artillery barrage—by the 1st Battalion of the 18th Infantry and Darby’s Ranger battalion. The town finally capitulated after house-to-house combat, yielding 400 French prisoners, fourteen artillery tubes, and twenty-three machine guns. No one counted the bodies. At Château-Neuf, where golden carp swam in a tinkling fountain amid syringa and pepper trees, General Robert Boisseau surrendered his Oran division at noon on Tuesday, November 10. A large blue pennant was hoisted above the city, the prearranged American signal of Oran’s fall.

  Beyond the killed and wounded of RESERVIST, the Big Red One alone suffered more than 300 casualties at Oran. Allen and Roosevelt also relieved two of their division’s nine infantry battalion commanders for various inadequacies. The tally of French dead in defending the city was put at 165.

  The liberators immediately set to work converting Oran into a vast supply depot. Quartermasters requisitioned the local bullring for a food warehouse, then realized that it reeked, indelibly, of bulls. The provost marshal built a fenced compound in which to quarantine 150 soldiers who had developed venereal disease during the passage from Britain. Troops named the camp Casanova Park; the barbed wire, one commander explained, was “to make them feel like heels.” Lieutenant Colonel Waters, showing the initiative that would one day lead him to four-star rank, liberated ten barrels of red wine from the Oran docks and filled the helmet of every soldier in his battalion. A tank destroyer unit threw a jolly party for Allen and Roosevelt, who upheld Fighting First tradition by getting pie-eyed drunk.

  Almost 37,000 men now occupied a beachhead seventy miles wide and fifteen miles deep. With the surrender of Algiers, the capture of Oran gave the Allies virtual possession of Algeria, although Morocco was still
contested and North African politics remained more tangled than ever. Still, the dispatch sent from Oran to Eisenhower at dusk on November 10 summed up the prevailing sentiment, however ephemeral: “Everything is rosy.” After three days of fretful confusion this news proved bracing. “Now we must get ports in shape and rush eastward without delay,” Eisenhower cabled London that same Tuesday.

  “This business of battle is just rush and rush,” he added. “But I like it.”

  “An Orgy of Disorder”

  CASABLANCA provided Vichy with its best anchorage south of Toulon, and the French navy had chosen to defend the Moroccan port with valor worthy of a better cause. Not one French sailor in a thousand knew the identity of the hostile fleet that appeared in the morning haze at dawn on November 8. But just after seven A.M., the great coastal battery at El Hank had opened fire, followed moments later by the four fifteen-inch guns on the front turret of the berthed battleship Jean Bart. Searing plumes of orange flame and cylindrical smoke rings blossomed from the muzzles. At eighteen thousand yards—ten miles—El Hank’s first salvo straddled the battleship Massachusetts, whose skipper the previous evening had uttered those fine Latin words about seeking peace with a sword. Jean Bart’s shells then lifted immense gouts of seawater 600 yards off the starboard bow. Massachusetts and her sisters soon answered, and what the U.S. Navy cheerfully called “an old-fashioned fire-away Flannagan” had begun.

  Kent Hewitt was on Augusta’s flag bridge when excited calls of “Batter up!” and “Play ball!” began spilling from the radios, signaling, respectively, hostile fire and the authorization to reply in kind. After two weeks of relative indolence during the passage from Hampton Roads, during which he had eaten too much, exercised too little, and put on weight, Hewitt had been relentlessly busy since deciding to trust his aerologist’s weather eye and proceed with the three Moroccan landings. He knew that the assault on Safi in the south was going well, although only the sketchiest reports had come from General Truscott’s force at Mehdia in the north. The cloak-and-dagger efforts by the OSS to stage a coup through the rebel general Émile Béthouart had evidently failed; Hewitt could only guess that the resident-general, Auguste Noguès, had chosen to resist the invasion. At Fedala, just above Casablanca, where 20,000 of the Army’s 33,000 assault troops aimed at Morocco were to land, the first craft had reached shore two hours earlier. Despite calm seas and mild surf, many boats had broached or capsized, but at least some soldiers were on the beach and preparing to advance on Casablanca. Hewitt had dutifully reported these developments in coded dispatches every couple of hours, unaware that, because Navy signalmen had neglected to classify the messages as urgent, Eisenhower had received hardly a syllable.

  Hewitt considered that Divine Providence was still with him, but he had begun to fret about his “velvet.” The aerologist, Steere, warned that the weather was likely to begin deteriorating within a day. Enemy submarines would hardly remain at bay forever, despite the destroyers patrolling the fleet’s flanks and the eight minelayers scattering sea mines around the troop transports. Another large convoy from Hampton Roads was scheduled to arrive on Friday, November 13, despite Hewitt’s efforts to persuade the Army to delay the follow-on force until he could guarantee enough secure berths in Casablanca harbor.

  Now it appeared the French intended not just to fight but to fight with passion. At first the defensive fire on the beaches had seemed sporadic, more symbolic than lethal. The captain of the cruiser U.S.S. Brooklyn had signaled Hewitt at 5:39 A.M.: “Have noticed gunfire and am moving into position to take care of eventualities.” But the shells from El Hank and the Jean Bart were ship-killers; they opened what became one of the most intense naval battles of the Atlantic war.

  Within ten minutes of the first salvos, the sky seemed to leak steel across Casablanca’s moles and harbor basins. American shells gouged great divots from the docks, spraying concrete shrapnel against hulls and across decks. Ten merchantmen lay defenseless at their moorings, and there they would sink, along with three French submarines. The last of 2,000 civilian refugees who had arrived from Dakar on three passenger ships the previous evening fled down piers soon pounded to rubble. Dozens of sailors, including several captains, died on the docks short of their gangplanks and the dignity of a seagoing death.

  The Jean Bart—France’s newest dreadnought, with turrets heavy as a frigate—was still unfinished: she could not leave her slip. A sixteen-inch shell from Massachusetts burrowed through the battleship’s forward turret. Another hit the turret’s armored apron, immobilizing the guns. After firing just seven rounds, Jean Bart fell silent. Three other shells from Massachusetts punched through the armored decks, the side, and the keel, and Jean Bart settled on the bottom along the Môle du Commerce. Oddly, not one of the shells exploded; they, along with more than fifty other American duds—the consequence in part of fuzes dating to 1918—spared Casablanca worse destruction.

  The commander of the French 2nd Light Squadron, Rear Admiral Gervais de Lafond, was as ignorant as his seamen of the enemy’s identity. Haze prevented him from making out the battle pennants on the enemy ships, and he had received no authoritative reports from his superiors or from the beaches. But Lafond clearly saw a disaster in the making. Only by putting to sea and slipping along the coastline under the blinding glare of the rising sun could his squadron escape obliteration.

  Lafond failed to realize that his foes had radar. The admiral issued his orders, boarded the destroyer Milan, and headed for the harbor entrance at 8:15 A.M. Attacking dive-bombers struck the commercial basin even as French submarine crews muscled a few final torpedoes aboard before casting off. A brave figure in a black cassock, the fleet chaplain, sprinted through the bombardment to the end of the pier, where he waved the sign of the cross at each warship as it sortied past. Along the corniche the wives and children of French sailors gathered on rooftops to cheer the sixteen ships into battle. They would have an unobstructed view as American fire whittled away the familiar silhouettes of the Casablanca fleet.

  French shells were dye-loaded to help gunners see the fall of shot. Majestic geysers of green, purple, magenta, and yellow erupted around the American ships. On the presumption that no two enemy rounds would land in the same spot, helmsmen were ordered to “chase the splashes”—an especially difficult maneuver when gunfire straddled a ship. Cruisers, destroyers, and the Massachusetts swerved to and fro, battle ensigns snapping. The battleship was hit once, suffering little damage; another shell tore her colors to tatters. The concussion of their own big guns knocked out the radar range finders on Tuscaloosa and Massachusetts, so the gun teams had to aim crudely, by sight, wasting quantities of shells. Shock waves from Augusta’s number three turret jarred a radio receiver from its mountings. It smashed to the deck, thus producing one among many communications problems that by noon led to the sacking of several signal operators for incompetence.

  Concussion from the flagship’s aft turret claimed another victim: the landing craft Patton intended to ride to the beach had its bottom blown out while hanging from davits over the port rail. His kit—except for the ivory-handled Colt Peacemaker and Smith & Wesson .357, which he had just strapped on—plunged into the Atlantic. In Norfolk Patton had vowed to land with the first wave and die at the head of his troops; now, immaculately dressed in his shiny two-star helmet and cavalry boots, he was trapped on Augusta. “Goddammit,” he barked at an aide. “I hope you have a spare toothbruth with you I can use to clean my foul mouth. I don’t have a thing left in the world, thanks to the United States Navy.”

  He stopped fuming long enough to scribble a letter to Bea—“It is flat calm. God was with us”—and record the morning events in his diary:

  I was on the main deck just back of number two turret, leaning on the rail, when one [French shell] hit so close that it splashed water all over me. When I was on the bridge later, one hit closer but I was too high to get wet. It was hazy and the enemy used smoke well. I could just see them and make out our splashes. We
had the [Massachusetts], the Brooklyn, the Augusta and some others all firing and going like hell in big zig-zags…. You have to put cotton in your ears. Some of the people got white but it did not seem very dangerous to me—sort of impersonal.

  Hewitt was too busy to fret over Patton’s impatience or his snippy assessment of naval combat. This sea battle would certainly dispel any doubts Patton still held about the Navy’s desire to fight. So engrossed was the Navy in the duel with Jean Bart and the shore batteries that the warships soon found themselves nearly thirty miles south of Fedala—with Admiral Lafond’s squadron angling straight for the vulnerable American transports. A report from a spotter plane alerted Hewitt to the French sortie from the harbor, and shortly before 8:30 A.M. he ordered Augusta, Brooklyn, and two destroyers to intercept the French at flank speed. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison, aboard Brooklyn as a naval reserve officer, reported that “the four ships went tearing into action like a pack of dogs unleashed.”

  It was a near-run thing. The rising sun, the glare, and the sporadically malfunctioning Navy radar reduced the French ships to black dots dancing on the horizon. Visibility was further cut by the pall from oil tanks blazing ashore and by the French squadron’s smoke generators. Shooting at the agile Vichy destroyers was likened to “trying to hit a grasshopper with a rock.” Shells from a shore battery holed the destroyer U.S.S. Palmer—one blew through a galley trash can without scratching the two sailors carrying it—and severed the mainmast; she fled west at twenty-seven knots. The destroyer U.S.S. Ludlow, firing so furiously that her deck guns appeared to be squirting a solid stream of tracers, hit Lafond’s flagship, Milan, and set her ablaze, only to be answered with a six-inch shell that wrecked the wardrooms and ventilated the port bow. Every swatch of unchipped paint seemed to burn like tar paper. Ludlow also fled. Those French submarines that escaped the carnage of the harbor nearly took their revenge: Massachusetts threaded a four-torpedo spread, with number four missing the starboard paravane by fifteen feet. Several minutes later Tuscaloosa avoided another four torpedoes, from Méduse, and Brooklyn dodged five others, fired by the Amazone.