An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

  Over tea during a visit to Hitler’s secret command post in the Ukraine, Rommel futilely urged the Führer to shrink the Tunisian bridgehead to a defensible inner keep. Hitler dismissed the notion with a rant. “If the German people are incapable of winning the war,” the Führer declared, “then they can rot.” To his young son, Rommel confided, “Sometimes you feel that he’s not quite normal.”

  “Dear General Arnim,” Rommel wrote on March 12:

  A further withdrawal of forces is not approved for the present…. I am only sorry that the Führer has refused my urgent request to be allowed to return immediately to Africa. He has ordered me to begin my course of medical treatment at once. My thoughts and concern are now as before with Africa. Long live the Führer!

  He was doomed and he knew it, and so too was the unspeakable cause he had served. “Our star was in decline,” Rommel later wrote. The glory was gone forever. He told his son, “I’ve fallen from grace.”

  On Friday, March 12, as Rommel lamented his plight, Eisenhower wrote his own son at West Point: “I have observed very frequently that it is not the man who is so brilliant [who] delivers in time of stress and strain, but rather the man who can keep on going indefinitely, doing a good straightforward job.”

  A “good straightforward job” was now called for, and in this homely requisite the Americans found their genius. If the winter campaign in North Africa had revealed Eisenhower’s infirmities, just as it revealed those of his army, spring would elicit strengths of character and competence in both the man and the host he commanded. Eisenhower had been naive, sycophantic, unsure of his judgment, insufficiently vigorous, and a more titular than actual commander. The U.S. Army had been sloppy, undisciplined, cavalier, insufficiently vigorous, and a more titular than actual army. These traits did not abruptly slough away, molting into brilliances of generalship and élan. But new martial lineaments emerged, and they became the stuff of victory and liberation.

  After months of sailing with the wind in his face, Eisenhower now found a fresh breeze at his back. His health returned. Alexander and Patton shouldered many of his battlefield burdens. Axis weakness and the weight of Allied material strength became increasingly evident. The praise he craved was forthcoming—from Churchill, who publicly extolled his “selflessness of character and disdain of purely personal advancement,” and from President Roosevelt, who sent word: “Tell Ike that not only I, but the whole country is proud of the job he has done. We have every confidence in his success.” With his equilibrium restored and his job apparently secure, Eisenhower’s leadership ripened with the season.

  “I have caught up with myself and have things on a fairly even keel,” he assured Marshall in early March. He sensed the power of a few fixed ideas compellingly preached, and these became tenets of the armies he commanded, even if sometimes practiced more in the breach than the observance. Foremost was Allied unity. “German propaganda is trying to convince the world that [the] British and Americans are at each other’s throats in this theater,” he told Alexander in a handwritten note. “We’ll show them.” He also radiated certitude of victory, which he saw in raw terms: good triumphing over evil after a struggle to rival the primordial brawl of angels. “We have bitter battling ahead, even in Tunisia,” he wrote an old friend on March 21. “Beyond this is the more serious, long-termed prospect of getting at the guts of the enemy and tearing them out.” To his brother Edgar he asserted, “We’re going to clear the Axis out of Africa—and that’s something!”

  He was busier than ever, but more focused. “Political questions are not plaguing me as much as formerly,” he told Edgar. He announced that visitors to Algiers were unwelcome unless vital to victory. “American Legion commanders, princes, and others of that stripe are nothing but a deadly bore,” he wrote Marshall. “I am cutting everybody off my list [who] has not something specific to do with winning the war.” He took a personal interest in fielding better mine detectors, better tank sights, even better colored smoke for battlefield signaling.

  Endearingly modest, he retained the homespun authenticity that was part of his charisma; men would do much to evoke that remarkable grin. “Eisenhower’s genius seems to be that of a good chairman,” the reporter Philip Jordan, once a harsh critic, told his diary in the weeks after Kasserine. “I have changed my views of this man: he has something.” To a former schoolteacher in Abilene, who had once had trouble distinguishing between the six Eisenhower boys, the commander-in-chief wrote on March 5: “I was third in line and the homeliest of the lot, if that will assist your memory.” The award of his fourth star, he told his son John, “doesn’t amount to a tinker’s damn in the winning of this war—and that is all that concerns me.” Whatever his relationship with Kay Summersby, he clearly pined for Mamie. “I miss her so much that every letter from her is worth more than anything else to me.”

  More and more of his time was spent on HUSKY, the invasion of Sicily tentatively scheduled for a fair moon in mid-June, and he now looked over the horizon toward the next campaign, as a commander-in-chief must do. He formed a secret group called Force 141—the number was that of a meeting room in the Hôtel St. Georges—to draft and redraft nine separate plans for the assault. “HUSKY planning is most involved and difficult…[and] presents intricacies and difficulties that cause me a lot of headaches,” he told Marshall. He scrutinized lessons from TORCH regarding landing craft, shipping schedules, paratrooper operations, and a hundred other elements.

  With one eye on Sicily, he kept the other on Tunisia. Perhaps his chief contribution in the spring campaign was to ensure that the matériel needed to finish the job was at hand. After the war a belief would take root that the successes of the American Army were attributable to overwhelming material superiority—brute strength—while setbacks could be chalked up to poor generalship. But modern war was a clash of systems: political, economic, and military. The engine of an enemy’s destruction could be built only by effectively integrating forces that ranged from industrial capacity to national character to educational systems that produced men able to organize global war.

  “The battle,” Rommel famously observed, “is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.” The shooting had begun months before in northwest Africa, but now the quartermasters truly came into their own. The prodigies of American industrial muscle and organizational acumen began to tell. In Oran, engineers built an assembly plant near the port and taught local workers in English, French, and Spanish how to put together a jeep from a box of parts in nine minutes. That plant turned out more than 20,000 vehicles. Another new factory nearby assembled 1,200 railcars, which were among 4,500 cars and 250 locomotives ultimately added to North African rolling stock.

  In late January, Eisenhower had pleaded with Washington for more trucks. Less than three weeks later, a special convoy of twenty ships sailed from Norfolk, New York, and Baltimore with 5,000 two-and-a-half-ton trucks, 2,000 cargo trailers, 400 dump trucks, 80 fighter planes, and, for ballast, 12,000 tons of coal, 16,000 tons of flour, 9,000 tons of sugar, 1,000 tons of soap, and 4,000 submachine guns, all of which arrived in Africa on March 6. “It was,” an Army account noted with justifiable pride, “a brilliant performance.”

  In World War I, more than half of all supplies for American forces were obtained abroad, including nearly all artillery and airplanes. In this war, almost everything would be shipped from the United States, including immense tonnages sent to the Russians, British, French, and other allies. The demands of modern combat were unprecedented. Although a latter-day infantry division was half the size of its Great War predecessor, it typically used more than twice as much ammunition—111 tons on an average fighting day. In Africa, total supply requirements amounted to thirteen tons per soldier each month.

  Can do. From late February to late March, 130 ships sailed from the United States for Africa with 84,000 soldiers, 24,000 vehicles, and a million tons of cargo. Although the U.S. II Corps lost more armor at Kasserine than the Germans had mas
sed at the beginning of the battle, those losses were replaced immediately. Other matériel appeared just as fast, including 500 miles of extra communications wire shipped to the front from Algiers less than a day after it was requested. When Patton requested—no, demanded—new shoes for his entire corps, 80,000 pairs arrived almost overnight. So much ammunition arrived in Tunisia that it was stacked in pyramids and thatched with branches to simulate an Arab village.

  The Americans’ “genius lay in creating resources rather than in using them economically,” a British study observed astutely. Room was found in cargo holds for countless crates of Coca-Cola, to the disbelief of British logisticians. A train supposedly hauling rations to Béja for 50,000 men was found upon arrival to carry one sack of flour, a case of grapefruit juice, a boxcar of crackers, and sixteen boxcars of peanut butter. Truck chassis and truck cabs were loaded on different ships and dispatched to different ports if not different continents; so were artillery projectiles and artillery charges, radios and radio batteries, and many other components whose utility is rarely improved by divorce. Quays became so cluttered with arriving cargo that ships could not even load ballast for the return trip home and began carrying it with them on the outbound voyage. Inventories were confused beyond computation: not until the summer of 1944 would the Army be able to tally with some confidence precisely what had been shipped to North Africa.

  “The American Army does not solve its problems,” one general noted, “it overwhelms them.” There was prodigal in economy—of time, of motion, of stuff—but beyond the extravagance lay a brisk ability to get the job done. After Kasserine, American aviation engineers built five new airfields around Sbeïtla—in seventy-two hours. More than one hundred fields in all would be built during the Tunisian campaign. The enemy would not be “solved” in Tunisia. He would be overwhelmed.

  The German military had pioneered modern military logistics, but as the war entered its forty-third month Wehrmacht victualers could not keep pace with the Allies on all fronts simultaneously. With so much effort devoted to the Eastern Front, and with the overmatched German navy occupied elsewhere, supply lines to North Africa depended heavily on the Italian fleet.

  That was a flimsy reed. One-third of the Italian merchant fleet had been interned when Rome entered the war; by September 1942, half of the remainder was at the bottom of various seas. Then things got worse. From the beginning of TORCH to May 1943, the Italians would lose 243 ships and boats on the Tunisian run—most to Allied air attack—with another 242 damaged. The Sicilian Channel was described by one German officer as a “roaring furnace,” and to Italian sailors it became “the death route,” the most dangerous sea passage in the world. Italian captains often feigned engine trouble to avoid it; the skipper of one transport carrying 600 mules for the Wehrmacht’s 334th Division headed out three times, turned back three times, and never did reach Africa.

  Ships not yet sunk were often immobilized for lack of fuel. Allied bombers battered Italian shipyards so relentlessly that at any given moment two-thirds of all escort vessels were unfit for service. Enthusiasm for “the Germans’ war” dwindled with each new casualty list, and Italians increasingly worried over the dolorous prospect of defending their homeland.

  As spring advanced, nights grew shorter, offering less cover to those sneaking across the Mediterranean. The heavily armed, shallow-draft vessels known as Siebel ferries gave some relief, and ninety had braved the furnace by late January. But German logisticians calculated that they needed four times that number, and steel shortages kept the ferry fleet small. Before his departure, Rommel warned that “to create the build-up necessary for a defense against a major attack” in Africa would require shipping 140,000 tons of supplies each month; that was double the amount received in January and February combined, even before Allied interdiction intensified. By contrast, the Allies in March moved 220,000 tons just through the ports around Oran.

  Other woes also plagued German logisticians. The relentless Allied air raids so unnerved Arab dockworkers that stevedores had to be imported from Hamburg. The ports being damaged, more and more supplies had to be hauled by a fleet of 200 Ju-52 transport planes, but each plane carried less than two tons. Trains used to move matériel within Tunisia required coal imported from Europe; as supplies dwindled, crews turned to local lignite, which greatly reduced locomotive efficiency. When even lignite grew scarce, the only alternative was a feeble mixture of oil cakes and sediment from the olive harvest. Cheap Tunisian wine was distilled into a thin fuel.

  These tribulations stirred mild interest in the German high command and at Comando Supremo, where, as one account noted, “paper divisions had the strength of real ones,…ships and convoys were never sunk, and…armies, at least on paper, were always up to strength.” Even as the Allies crumpled at Kasserine, an inspection team from Berlin reported that if Axis ships kept sinking at the current rate none would remain afloat by early summer. Alarms from Africa grew shrill. Arnim warned that “if no supplies reach us, all will be up in Tunisia by 1 July.” The Axis bridgehead, he added, was becoming “a fortress without ammunition and rations.”

  In Berlin and Rome promises were issued and broken, re-issued and re-broken. Without stripping the other battlefronts or resurrecting the Italian navy, little could be done. Even less was done. “Hitler wanted to be stronger than mere facts, to bend them to his will,” Kesselring’s chief of staff observed. “All attempts to make him see reason only sent him into a rage.”

  “The Devil Is Come Down”

  THE soft whir of a film projector silenced the British officers in Montgomery’s mess. Setting down their tea mugs, the men pivoted their canvas chairs toward an army blanket hung as a makeshift screen. The familiar supper smell of bully beef and biscuits was overpowered by the stink of sweat-stained khaki and ripe cardigans. Brilliant white flashes limned the jagged rim of the wadi sheltering the command post, and the grumble of artillery carried on the evening airs beneath a waxing moon.

  Then the movie began. Artillery booms and flashes on the screen mingled with the real thing until they were almost indistinguishable: a celluloid depiction of the battle of El Alamein five months earlier was superimposed on tonight’s opening barrage of Eighth Army’s assault against the Mareth Line. But it was the film that held the men rapt. Churchill himself had sent this print of Desert Victory, a sixty-five-minute documentary that had become a worldwide propaganda sensation in the two weeks since its London premiere. Montgomery had seen the movie already, on March 16, but now, four nights later, he seemed no less entranced as he watched again, “a wee bugger in a black beret”—as a Scottish soldier described him—reliving the greatest triumph of British arms since Waterloo. His vulpine face, whitened with reflected images from the screen, hardly moved except for faint twitches of his thin black mustache.

  There was Rommel, seen in captured German footage, sporting his leather duster and goggles. Then Monty himself, that “intensely compacted hank of steel wire,” in George Bernard Shaw’s arch phrase. Tankers stacked their shells, medics unfolded their stretchers. Then: sappers wriggle forward to snip the wire, and gun chiefs squint at their watches before shouting the command: Fire! The terrible cannonade turns night to noon. Infantrymen in baggy shorts surge forward, their rifles held at port arms. Bayonets thrust. Pipes keen. Then it’s over, except for the final flickering frames of dead Germans blackening in the sun and POWs scuffing toward their cages as Eighth Army pushes west. The Union Jack flaps over Tobruk on November 13, then Benghazi a week later, then Tripoli on January 23—way stations to Médenine and the current line at Mareth. “Pursuit,” the narrator asserts, “was relentless.”

  The leader slapped round and round on the spinning reel as the officers shambled back to their bivouacs. They had a battle to fight, not just one to relive, and so far it was not going especially well. Montgomery stood and stretched to his full five foot seven—perhaps a bit taller in chukka boots—before returning to his caravan. He loved the film. “It is first clas
s,” he wrote Alexander. As one reporter noted, “He was thoroughly enjoying this conqueror business.”

  Bernard Law Montgomery was a bishop’s son who had passed a “lonely and loveless” childhood in remote Tasmania, dreaming of greatness and believing himself born to conquer. Near the photo of Rommel above his desk was a copy of Drake’s prayer before the attack on Cádiz in 1587, entreating God for “the true glory.” There lay Montgomery’s quest: the true glory. He was ascetic and fussy, a teetotaling, Bible-reading maverick who cited Cromwell and Moses among his favorite great captains and who had opened a commanders’ seminar on El Alamein a few weeks earlier by forbidding not only smoking but coughing. (Churchill, upon hearing Montgomery boast that abstinence made him “100 percent fit,” replied that he both drank and smoked and was “200 percent fit.”) Hardened in the trenches—he had been badly wounded at Ypres—he was hardened more by the early death of a wife he adored. “One only loves once,” he told Alexander, “and now it is finished.”

  A line from the Book of Job was among his favorites: “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” He was a master of organization and training, of the set battle, of the theatrics of command. “Kill Germans, even padres—one per week and two on Sundays,” he told his soldiers. Not a man among the 200,000 in Eighth Army doubted that he was their leader, or that he would be stingy in spending their lives. That was something. A majority of his forty-three infantry battalions came from Commonwealth or allied armies, and he had enough political moxie to avoid prodigality with other nations’ troops. After taking command in Egypt in mid-August 1942 under Alexander’s indulgent supervision, Montgomery had whipped Rommel first at Alam Halfa, then a second, decisive time at El Alamein. That British attack on October 23, with more than a thousand tanks, cracked the much weaker Axis defenders across a forty-mile front. “The sheer weight of British resources made up for all blunders,” one account noted. Twelve days later, Rommel was in the full retreat that had led to southern Tunisia. Until Alamein, the British Army had been mostly winless; his victory in Egypt gave new life to Churchill’s government and to empire, at a cost of 13,560 British casualties but with more than twice as many exacted from his enemies. Church bells had pealed in Britain for the first time in three years. Fan letters arrived at Montgomery’s bivouac by the thousands, including some marriage proposals, and soldiers rushed to glimpse his passing car as if he were a film star, which now he was. “We all trust him to win,” one brigadier said. As a redeeming virtue, that too was something.