An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  Sadly, yes. By November 14, the Germans had inserted 3,000 men into Bizerte alone. They controlled all the important buildings in Tunis, where troops marched four abreast to occupy the Marshal Foch barracks downtown. The abandoned U.S. consulate became the Axis command post, notwithstanding German grumbling that Tunisian “office personnel cannot read or write.” To make the German contingent appear even larger, paratroopers were driven in circles around the city in armored cars loaned by helpful French commanders. The Tunisian bey—whose family had long ruled the country beneath the firm hand of French guardians—quickly pledged loyalty to Berlin. In gorgeous uniforms of scarlet, black, and gold, his bodyguard marched from the royal palace, using the newly fashionable goose step.

  Soon enough, Derrien would receive a German ultimatum: surrender all French troops and ships in Bizerte within thirty minutes, or see 6,000 French sailors shot. He capitulated after extracting a single concession: the retention of a French company under arms to lower the garrison tricolor with honors. Derrien’s request to keep his own sword was denied.

  A French court after the war would convict and imprison Estéva for “national unworthiness.” Although the admiral once asserted that “it is an honor to suffer for the high ideals of civilization,” his own suffering derived from baser stuff. Derrien, too, eventually drew life in prison; he would be freed less than two weeks before his death. After killing hundreds of American and British soldiers during TORCH, the French had failed to so much as scratch a single German invader. Only the French commander of the Tunis Division, General Georges Barré, refused to kowtow. With 9,000 troops and fifteen ancient tanks, Barré sidled westward into Tunisia’s wild hills, there to await developments.

  The fire that consumed proud Carthage after Romans sacked it in 146 B.C. was said to have burned for seventeen days. French Tunis was a cold ember from the moment the first German shadow loomed. “We live in tragic hours,” Pétain observed. “Disorder reigns in our spirits.”

  Conviviality reigned in the spirit of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, known as Smiling Albert for his toothy grin and unquenchable optimism. On the morning after the Anglo-American invasion, Hitler had phoned Kesselring to give him “a free hand” in Tunisia. This was the Allies’ misfortune.

  The son of a Bayreuth schoolmaster, Kesselring belonged to an ancient Bavarian clan whose fortune had been lost in the hyperinflation following World War I. Courtly and fluent in Italian, he had broad hips and a hairline in full retreat. He had been an artilleryman and balloon observer in the Great War, then had learned to fly at the age of forty-eight and soon ranked high in the Luftwaffe. One of the Reich’s ablest commanders, he was both daring—shot down five times in his career—and brutal, having orchestrated the terror bombings of Warsaw, Coventry, and many cities in between, as well as the air campaign against Russia. When German anti-aircraft gunners in Tunis fired at his plane by mistake, Kesselring rebuked them—for missing an easy target.

  On November 10, Hitler formally seconded Kesselring to Rome as Mussolini’s deputy. With authority over Axis air and ground forces in the Mediterranean, the field marshal politely rebuffed Il Duce’s proposals to attack the Allies with poison gas and to transport war stocks in hospital ships. Instead, he focused on building a bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerte, dismissing complaints from subordinates that the Axis forces amounted to only “a drop of water on a hot stone” compared to the Allied host.

  The Allies had achieved strategic surprise, Kesselring conceded, but could they exploit it? Why had they not also landed in Tunisia, which had nearly 800 miles of coastline? Kesselring approved the conscription of Tunisian civilians to build fortifications and unload Axis ships. But an impenetrable bridgehead was not enough. On November 13, he ordered his lieutenants to plan an offensive to the west. The only way to forestall the loss of Africa was to counterattack across the Tunisian mountains into Algeria. Smiling Albert meant to chase the Anglo-Americans back to their ships.

  A Cold Country with a Hot Sun

  FIVE hundred and sixty road miles separated Algiers from Tunis, and the first Allied troops cantered eastward in the rollicking high spirits obligatory at the beginning of all military debacles. Virtually everyone from private to general presumed the expedition would be a promenade. Much chatter was devoted to the likely date of arrival in Tripoli or even Naples. One soldier spoke for many in his bravado toward the Germans: “Those squareheads can’t fight. Hell, leave them to the Limeys, we’ll finish the Japs.” A young officer reported that the only anxiety in his tank battalion was “that all of the Germans would escape” before the Americans could prove their mettle.

  Town mayors donned their frock coats and top hats to greet the Allied convoys with warm, incomprehensible welcoming speeches. Cheering crowds offered rough Algerian wine and hampers of tangerines. Jeep drivers, in vehicles named Kidney Buster, Miss Conduct, and Miss Demeanor, twined winter roses around their radio antennas, and pretended to enjoy the proffered local cigarettes, soon dubbed “Dung d’Algerie.” “Vive l’Amérique!” shouted the Arab children, to mostly British troops. To deal with the inevitable traffic fatalities a sliding scale of reparations was established, paid in the oversize French currency GIs called wallpaper: 25,000 francs ($500) for a dead camel; 15,000 for a dead boy; 10,000 for a dead donkey; 500 for a dead girl.

  British troops dominated the initial convoys, camouflage cloths knotted in big bows atop their helmets like “Edwardian motoring veil[s].” The Algerian villages reminded some veterans of Flanders, with their shuttered hotels and their fishmongers in striped sweaters. For those traveling by rail, the narrow-gauge boxcars with neatly lettered signs—“Hommes 40, chevaux 8”—brought memories of the Western Front: there, too, the French railcars had fitted forty men or eight horses. So slowly did the Algerian trains chuff uphill that soldiers often hopped off to walk, brewing their tea from hot water in the engines as they ambled alongside.

  For the Yanks, it was all new: the skinned goat carcasses dripping blood in roadside stalls; the Algerians hawking grass mats and bolts of blue silk; the cursing muleteers; the peasants leaning into their iron-shod plows; the buses propelled by charcoal engines lashed to the bumper and stirred by each driver with a poker. American units chosen for the vanguard strutted with pride. The 2nd Battalion of the 13th Armored Regiment rolled out of Arzew toward Algiers and beyond, their tanks stuffed with eggs and hidden bottles of Old Grandad. The 5th Field Artillery Battalion swung onto the road with guidons snapping; each battery presented arms to the 1st Division color guard, and “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along” crashed from the division band.

  Eastward the caissons rolled, past Algerian villages with adobe walls loopholed for muskets, past groves of mandarin oranges “hanging like red lamps.” Past clopping French army columns of hay carts drawn by crow-bait horses, past mounted artillery officers in double-breasted tunics. Past stubbly wheatfields that had once served as Rome’s granary, and past aqueducts dismembered during the Vandals’ century of anarchic misrule and now bleaching like stone bones in the sun.

  At dusk they bivouacked. Soldiers swam in the chill Mediterranean or washed from their helmets in the delicate ritual called a whore’s bath. They staged scorpion fights in gasoline flimsies or spooned whiskey into pet lizards to watch them stagger about. The evening mist rose from fields with a scent like fresh-mowed hay, which troops had been taught was the odor of deadly phosgene; at least one unit panicked, with shrieks of “Gas! Gas!” and a mad fumbling for masks before reason returned.

  Soldiers sharpened their bartering skills with hand gestures, talking loudly in the distinctively American belief that volume obviates all language barriers; one sharp trader swapped a box of candy, piece by piece, for three bottles of perfume, a dozen eggs, a large portrait of Pétain, and a small burro named Rommel.

  Pilfering by the impoverished locals was epidemic. Troops smeared fuel cans with bacon rind in hopes that the Koranic prohibition against contact with pork might deter thieves. “All
ez!” the soldiers would shout—often their only French except for the hugely popular, “C’est la guerre”—after discovering that thieves had slashed the canvas top from a jeep to make shoes. A single parachute canopy was said to yield more than 500 sets of silk drawers. “If they could have carried it away,” a division history declared, “they’d have stolen the air out of tires.” Disdain for the Arabs grew by the hour. The Army’s chief quartermaster described his native workforce as “useless, worthless, illiterate, dishonest, and diseased.”

  At dawn, the promenade resumed. One sergeant, perhaps confounded by the stink of human waste widely used as fertilizer, wrote home, “Every town over here smells like something dead.” The day would come when that was literally true. For now, though, the benign sun and doughboy camaraderie moved some men to lyricism. “The sky is almost unbelievably blue,” wrote an officer in the 1st Division, “and the nights are a poet’s dream.” In the gnarled hills that steadily mounted toward the Tunisian frontier, shepherds watched the columns draw near and heard the chorus of a battle hymn sung with sufficient verve to carry above the harsh grind of truck gears:

  She’ll be coming ’round the mountain,

  She’ll be coming ’round the mountain,

  She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes.

  Thanks to Ultra’s decipherment of Axis codes, Eisenhower and his lieutenants knew precisely how many German and Italian troops were flooding into Tunisia. But poor understanding of these deployments’ significance compounded other, earlier miscalculations. Allied intelligence had predicted that up to 10,000 Axis soldiers could reach Tunisia within two weeks, but that these would be troops of “low category and without motor transport.” The Allied forecast as to “the probable scale of Axis intervention turned out to be an underestimate in every respect,” a British intelligence study later concluded, “with results that were to say the least unfortunate.” After a fortnight, the actual number approached 11,000; they included crack paratroopers and panzer grenadiers with heavy equipment and trucks, and they were soon followed by the tanks of the 10th Panzer Division.

  There was much talk in Allied councils of speed in countering the Axis intervention, but little speed was applied. Eisenhower and Clark had planned that the seizure of Tunisia would fall primarily to the British. Having carried most of the load in TORCH, the Americans would provide an occupation force and reserves to guard against a German thrust through Spain into Morocco. Scant thought had been given to actions after the initial landings, and only sketchy staff work was available on terrain, logistics, and air support in Tunisia. But given German celerity in occupying Tunis and Bizerte, Allied leaders decided to hasten the move of American troops eastward to bolster the British. Three U.S. armored battalions and other units were to be dispatched disparately and then farmed out—fragmented—to British commanders who possessed scant armored forces of their own. This American muscle would add more than 100 tanks to the Tunisian front.

  Proverbially, no military plan survives contact with the enemy. That is never truer than when there is no plan to begin with. No scheme existed for integrating U.S. units into British organizations, or for provisioning them, or for getting them to the front in the first place. Eisenhower would complain that his ad hoc orders to support the British with American troops “were not clearly understood nor vigorously executed.” To his brother Edgar he confided, “I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.”

  “I get so impatient to get ahead that I want to be at a place where there is some chance to push a soldier a little faster or hurry up the unloading of a boat,” Eisenhower cabled Beetle Smith on November 16. Yet he remained in his Gibraltar grotto for nearly two weeks after the French surrender—far from Algiers and far, far from the battlefield. From his office, he railed against Estéva and other French commanders in Tunisia, who “without the slightest trouble could cut the throat of every German and Italian in the area and get away with it.” The Allies “could take all sorts of reckless chances,” Eisenhower added, but only if Estéva resisted and the French took chances of their own. His denunciations of the enemy were often mild, even prissy. “We will all be together in a fine headquarters one of these days,” he told Smith, “and really set out in earnest to whip these blankety-blank Huns!” Rarely did he convey savage determination to overcome all obstacles; to smash, to destroy, to butcher. He professed “a violent hatred of the Axis and all that it stands for,” but no hate lodged in his bones. He was not yet ruthless.

  Nor was he yet much of a field marshal. Air and naval attacks were poorly planned and indifferently carried out. Few Allied aircraft had been allocated for reconnaissance or for assaults on Axis forces arriving by sea. Strategic bombing was launched only against targets in Italy and elsewhere outside North Africa, with no bombers initially available to batter Axis concentrations in Tunis or Bizerte. No naval attacks were launched against Axis convoys for three weeks. Not a single Axis ship was sunk on the run to Tunis in November.

  Perhaps the biggest deficiency was transportation. Ignoring their logisticians, Eisenhower and Clark had chosen to devote the limited TORCH shipping space to tens of thousands of extra troops at the expense of vehicles and arms. For an American force designed as an occupation army, the decision was plausible. But the Oran convoy alone was pared by 10,000 vehicles before leaving Britain. Unloading snarls made matters worse: by November 12, 8,700 vehicles were planned to be ashore in Oran, the actual number was 1,800. Now, with the ostensible occupation army transformed into a strike force, most units were immobile. “Inevitably there was chaos,” the correspondent Philip Jordan wrote, “that sort of amateur bungling to which the army is liable when it tries to organize something outside routine.”

  Ordnance officers wandered through Oran with $5,000 in silver ingots to buy trucks fueled with charcoal, or to hire horse-powered livery for hauling ammunition. The North African rail system proved particularly frail. Half the rolling stock was paralyzed for lack of fuel. Few French railcars were strong enough to carry medium tanks such as the American Sherman. Of the nine small trains that crept eastward from Algiers every day, two were required to haul coal for the railroad itself and one carried provisions to keep the local civilians from starvation; French, British, and American logisticians fought over the remaining six, which usually took nearly a week just to reach the Tunisian border.

  Even success in snaring a train was no guarantee of movement. To demonstrate the new fraternity between former adversaries, U.S. Army public relations officers organized a festive departure in Oran for a French battalion heading to Tunisia. As newsreel photographers recorded the scene, American soldiers crowded the rail siding to exchange cigarettes with their French comrades and wave bon voyage—only to hear the stationmaster announce that delays in the east meant the train could not leave for at least another day. The engine and cars rolled a few hundred yards down the tracks, gayly huzzahed for the benefit of the cameras, then backed up after dark to await a better day to go to war.

  This muddle greeted Lieutenant General Kenneth A. N. Anderson, who on November 11 took command in Algiers of the newborn British First Army with orders to hie east. “I applaud your dash and energy,” Eisenhower cabled him on the twelfth. “Boldness is now more important than numbers. Good luck.”

  For a commander of congenital pessimism—and Anderson’s was bred in the bone—this dismissal of mere “numbers” rang hollow. First Army comprised hardly a division, with four British brigades and a hodgepodge of American units. Even so, Anderson moved from the command ship Bulolo into the Hotel Albert and announced plans to “kick Rommel in the pants as soon as possible.” Then, alarmed that the phrase implied an insouciance he did not feel, he circulated a written addendum to correspondents: “The German is a good soldier and I expect hard fighting.”

  Anderson had been born in India on Christmas Day, 1891, son of
a knighted railroad executive who eventually packed him off to Sandhurst. Badly wounded on the Somme, he also had fought in Palestine, in Syria, on the Indian frontier, and at Dunkirk, where he commanded a division during the evacuation. He was clean-shaven, thin-lipped, and deeply religious, with untidy gray hair, small eyes, and—one American officer noted—“an air of grinning preoccupation.” He was said to lack “the jutting chin that gives force to personality” a British acquaintance wrote that “he looks more like a moderately successful surgeon” than a soldier. In dress he favored old-fashioned breeches and puttees; as his troops moved east, he could occasionally be seen peering under the tarpaulin of a rail flatcar to see what the train had brought him.

  One British general damned Anderson with faint praise as a “good plain cook,” a bon mot that soon circulated through all the right clubs. Certainly he was the sort of gauche, abrasive Scot invariably described as “dour.” A sardonic subordinate nicknamed him Sunshine, while his American code name was GROUCH. Fluent in French and Italian, he could be silent in any language. Even his rare utterances were to remain private: he soon threatened to expel from North Africa any correspondent who quoted him. Eisenhower remarked that “he studies the written word until he practically burns through the paper.” Few guessed at Anderson’s perpetual struggle against what he called “a queer sort of inhibition, or shyness, which prevents me coming out of my shell…. Often I would like to expand, but find it very difficult. A queer thing, human nature.” It was no doubt God’s will, and he very much believed in God, just as he also believed “it is good medicine to one’s self-esteem to meet with serious setbacks at timely intervals.” Such palliatives awaited him on the road to Tunis.