War Stories III

by Oliver North

  German U-boat attacks against British merchantmen had begun in September of ’39—shortly after Hitler invaded Poland. By the summer of’41 U-boats were sinking almost 500,000 tons of merchant shipping a month. The Sterett did anti-submarine patrols between Bermuda and the east coast from June to December of ’41—but shortly after Pearl Harbor, we were ordered to escort convoys to Iceland and England.

  Duty on a little destroyer in the North Atlantic is tough. A lot of it is in frigid, terrible weather—and a lot of the guys get seasick. Sometimes it was worse to be at the mercy of the weather and the sea than to get into a fight. On one very stormy transit, in March–April of ’42, we had a rear admiral aboard—John W. Wilcox—and in the midst of this rough weather, there was a signal sent that a man had been sighted in the water. We were told to hold muster, and after we took roll call, everyone was accounted for. The officer of the deck told the admiral’s orderly to inform the admiral that they had conducted a muster, but found no one missing. But when the orderly went into find the admiral, he wasn’t there. He was the one who had gone overboard!

  The “big ship” that we escorted in that convoy was the USS Wasp—a carrier. She was transporting aircraft to the British. By then we knew that carriers were a number one priority for Dönitz. Shortly after the Dunkirk evacuation the British carrier HMS Glorious had been sunk by German cruisers and later on, in November ’41, just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, a U-boat sank the carrier HMS Ark Royal in the Mediterranean. Then in December, a week after the Japanese sneak attack, a U-boat sank HMS Audacity, an escort carrier on convoy duty in the North Atlantic.

  German U-boat commanders were incredibly audacious throughout the war. In October 1939, the U-47 slipped into Scapa Flow—the Royal Navy’s principal anchorage—and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak and then got away! When we pulled into the anchorage, we could see the superstructure of the Royal Oak sticking out of the water—just like with our sunken battleships at Pearl Harbor.

  At Scapa Flow we came under the command of a British admiral and served with their “Home Fleet” for three months. Toward the end of our deployment, we were part of a big British convoy to Malta. We raced through Gibraltar into the Mediterranean with the Wasp to resupply the British garrison on the island and deliver Spitfire aircraft. That trip turned out to be easier than we expected. The Germans apparently never knew we came in. We ran within 300 miles of Malta and launched the Spitfires without incident.

  By May we were back in New York, where they slapped radar aboard—we had no idea what it was, or how to use it. I’m not even sure they gave us instruction books. But we figured it out by the time we got through the Panama Canal and up to San Diego, which was where the 1st Marine Division was embarking for combat in the South Pacific. Our job was to get them there.

  Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, was the first American offensive of the war—and the battle to take and hold Guadalcanal lasted from 7 August 1941 until February 1943. We had several big engagements during that time frame—the toughest of which occurred between 12 and 16 November against the “Tokyo Express”—the Japanese air and surface action groups that came down “the slot” between the islands to pound the Marines trying to hold Henderson Field on the northeast coast of Guadalcanal island.

  We were in action every night and every day. At night it was against Japanese transports, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships and in the daylight it was against Japanese air attacks. The area between Savo Island and Guadalcanal had the wrecks of so many ships in it that we called it “Ironbottom Sound.”

  On 13 November 1942, the Sterett was credited with shooting down two Japanese torpedo bombers—and an “assist” on two others. One of the damaged Japanese planes hit the San Francisco that afternoon, in the after-fire control tower, and killed thirty of their crew.

  By the time that battle was over, the crew of the Sterret had done it all—“neutrality” duty before Pearl Harbor, anti-submarine patrols off the U.S. east coast, convoy duty in the North Atlantic, service with the British Home Fleet, escorting a carrier in the Mediterranean, and fighting Japanese surface ships and aircraft in the Pacific. It shows the kind of stuff Americans are made of.

  The USS Sterett’s dramatic entry into World War II—and subsequent service in two theaters of the conflict—may not have been altogether typical, but Charles Calhoun’s experience demonstrates the remarkable transformation the U.S. Navy made, once war was thrust upon us. The same thing happened in the U.S. Army. One who was there when it happened was another son of Philadelphia, Charles Hangsterfer. Like Calhoun, he too had “signed up” before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  FIRST LIEUTENANT CHARLES HANGSTERFER, US ARMY

  1st Infantry Division, England

  16 November 1942

  I went to Gettysburg College after high school because my eyes weren’t good enough to get into West Point. I’d always wanted to be a soldier—and going to college near where a great battle had been fought less than eight decades before just reinforced the idea.

  During the Depression a military career was a pretty good deal. Back then there were relatively few jobs available and duty in the peacetime Army wasn’t bad at all—or so I thought. I had a chance to go on active duty under the Thomason Act. That law allowed the Army to take a thousand college graduates from ROTC, and select a hundred for a regular Army commissions.

  After receiving my new gold bars as a 2nd lieutenant, I was sent to the first communication officers’ class at Fort Benning, Georgia. From there I was assigned to the 16th Infantry, then stationed at Fort Jay, on Governor’s Island in New York City.

  By the time I got to Fort Jay in early 1941, the war in Europe was on in earnest. But we were doing very little to prepare for the kind of mechanized warfare the Germans were fighting. For several weeks we went to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland for amphibious training along the Gunpowder River. Since we had no landing craft, we used rowboats. Unfortunately, most of the soldiers were from New York City and I don’t think they had ever seen a rowboat—much less knew how to row one through the water.

  By the summer of ’41 it was apparent that people in Washington were getting serious. We moved to Fort Devons, Massachusetts, and started building barracks and training ranges, then went on maneuvers in North Carolina and finally to Puerto Rico for real amphibious training—this time with Higgins boats—real landing craft. I was in Puerto Rico when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

  We returned to Fort Devons for a few months—and the 1st Division was fully “fleshed out” with thousands of new recruits and all kinds of new equipment. That summer the officers were told that we would be deploying overseas and I was sent over with the advance party to Tidworth Barracks in England, to get the place ready for the division. The rest of the division sailed from New York aboard the Queen Mary on 2 August 1942.

  Training at Tidworth and later in Scotland was very realistic. We had some very good, experienced British instructors. All of them had seen action and many of them had been wounded. We did a lot of long hikes, conditioning exercises, marksmanship training, practice with artillery and air—and the senior officers were almost always there. Our division commander, Major General Terry Allen, and the assistant division commander, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., were both well-loved by the men. By the time we sailed for North Africa and Operation Torch in November of ’42, I was in the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry and the 1st Division was ready to take on the Germans

  During peacetime, the U.S. military had been all male. The onset of war brought hundreds of thousands of American women into the Armed Forces. No woman could be subject to conscription, but they didn’t have to be: they volunteered so fast that many had to be told to return weeks or months later, after uniforms were made and facilities to house and train them were built. One of those young American women who volunteered early was nineteen-year-old Pearlie McKeogh from Minneapolis, Minnesota. After Pearl Harbor, she and her boyfriend decided to enlist together.

  PEARL M
CKEOGH, WAAC

  St. Paul, Minnesota

  13 November 1942

  When Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, I was in business college but planned to join the Navy. Then I found the Navy wouldn’t let women serve overseas, so I switched to the Army. I wanted to do something different—get away—I had never been out of Minnesota. My boyfriend at the time said, “Let’s both sign up.” So we did. But he was rejected—I was accepted.

  My oldest brother went into the Coast Guard. One brother was a farmer in North Dakota and didn’t enlist. Another brother worked for a manufacturing plant in Milwaukee and my fourth brother was a minister. Both my sisters were teachers.

  Within a few days of being accepted as a WAAC—Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps—I was sent to Fort Snelling, near Saint Paul, for basic training. From there I was sent to a camp outside of Des Moines, Iowa.

  In the camp at Des Moines they took the roster and they divided it in three. To one of the groups they said, “You’re cooks and bakers.” To another they said, “You’re secretarial.” And to the third group they said, “You’re drivers.” I ended up in the office because I had just finished business college, but they quickly figured out that I didn’t know anything about typing.

  So they put me in the motor pool, where I wanted to be—driving a jeep and a two and a half ton truck. We had girls out on that range that had never driven before, but the Army taught them how to be good drivers.

  After learning how to drive and maintain jeeps and trucks, we went to Florida for more training and then in late December of ’42 we were ordered to Brooklyn, New York, to await shipment overseas.

  In early January ’43, I was one of 196 WAACs loaded on a troopship for deployment overseas. We had our own compartment on one deck, and there were soldiers above and below us.

  We had no idea where we were going and the weather was terrible. We ended up in Algiers, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a German air raid. We loaded up on trucks—I was in a truckload of women. Because of the blackout, the driver of our truck got lost, so we were the last ones to arrive at our billet. We were billeted in a home operated by the Daughters of Charity. It was rough—there was no running water, no amenities.

  A couple of days later, I was told to report to the 1st Army Headquarters to see if General Eisenhower wanted a woman driver. Not many generals did, but General Eisenhower said to Colonel Lee, the Headquarters Commandant, “I’ll take one, and if she works out, the rest them can also work in the motor pool.” So I was picked as the test case and it evidently worked out, because the rest of the women went to work in the motor pool.

  When I got to Algiers, I didn’t know what a general was. The highest rank I had seen up to that point in the Army was a colonel, back at Des Moines. He was in charge of the training center. But, the first day that I went to work Colonel Lee in Algiers he said, “Pearlie, take the general to the airport.” I didn’t know where the airport was but I said, “Yes, sir!”

  One of the other drivers, who knew where the airport was, jumped in the jeep with me. That was my first day on the job as General Eisenhower’s driver.

  What Private Pearlie McKeogh didn’t know—but would soon find out—was the general she was assigned to drive was fast becoming one of the most successful officers in the U.S. Army. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been a colonel, serving in the Philippines on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur. He was just completing four years with MacArthur when Hitler started his blitzkrieg across Europe.

  After eight years of desk duty, Eisenhower was glad to return to the U.S. in January 1940 to help organize the training for a slowly growing U.S. Army. Eisenhower established himself as a master logistician and planner during the Louisiana exercises in 1940. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was a general, one of General Marshall’s most trusted and highly regarded subordinates.

  At the Arcadia Conference in Washington in December 1941, Churchill had pressed Roosevelt for an operation in North Africa. Marshall resisted the idea—urging instead that the Allies gather necessary troops and materiel in England for a cross-channel invasion of France. By April 1942, when the U.S. and British military chiefs met in London for further strategic talks, it was increasingly clear that a “Second Front” in Europe in 1942 or ’43 was simply too risky.

  Months later, from 18–27 June 1942, Churchill again visited Washington. This time his arguments for attacking Hitler’s forces in North Africa as a second front persuaded Roosevelt. The decision made, Marshall set a date—the first week of November 1942—and appointed Eisenhower to command the first U.S. offensive in the European theater: Operation Torch.

  CHAPTER 5

  AMERICA GOES ON THE OFFENSIVE 1942

  Every Allied military planner hoped that Operation Torch could be carried off without pitting a green, untested U.S. Army against the Wehrmacht. Accordingly, the landing beaches selected for the operation were well to the west of the combat-hardened German and Italian troops of the Afrika Korps—led by one of Hitler’s ablest generals, Erwin Rommel, nicknamed the “Desert Fox.” Nothing, however, could change the fact that the operation would take place in some of the most inhospitable and difficult terrain on the planet—the largely barren, trackless North African desert.

  Senior U.S. officers in London and Washington pointed out that raw American soldiers—some just weeks out of recruit training—and their inexperienced leaders were unprepared to go up against the Vichy French in North Africa, much less the Axis powers. Some feared that if the operation went badly, it could well lead to postponing or even canceling plans to force a landing on the European continent until 1945 or ’46.

  George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff—and one of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisors—was utterly opposed to the North African endeavor, arguing that it would sap personnel and equipment needed for invading the continent. The operation’s strongest proponent—Winston Churchill—remained adamant that a “Second Front” had to be opened in Europe to help relieve pressure on Stalin and the Red Army, and he strongly believed that North Africa was the place. Roosevelt resolved the matter after Churchill’s visit to Washington at the end of June 1942.

  FDR informed Marshall of his decision to proceed with Torch on 25 July. The next day, Marshall appointed General Dwight Eisenhower as the Allied commander in chief of the American-British expedition. Though he had never led so much as a platoon in combat, Eisenhower was now going to command an entire army.

  Rommel, the Desert Fox

  For the next three months, Eisenhower and his staff engaged in a furious round of planning. The goals of Torch—although ambitious—were relatively simple: first, to deny the use of air and naval bases in northwest Africa to the Axis, and then—by driving the enemy out of Mediterranean North Africa—create secure sea-lines between Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. If all went as planned, Rommel’s German-Italian army would be caught in a pincers between General Bernard Montgomery’s British 8th Army on the east and the forces landed in Torch moving in from the west.

  To achieve these ends, Eisenhower assembled a fleet of more than 100 troop and cargo vessels, 200 U.S. and British warships, 500 aircraft, and 107,000 troops to force an entry in North Africa. Though Tunis was his ultimate goal, Eisenhower deemed that it was too far from his Gibraltar-based air cover—and too close to enemy air bases in Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy. He therefore selected three landing beaches well to the west, all in Vichy French territory.

  A Western Task Force, commanded by General George Patton, would sail directly from the United States and seize Casablanca, Morocco. The Center Task Force—comprised of the U.S. II Corps—would sail from England to seize Oran, Algeria. And the Eastern Task Force of British and Americans—also deployed from England—would capture the Algerian capital.

  Eisenhower hoped that the French colonial forces holding these port cities would quickly renounce fealty to the Vichy regime and aid the Allies in throwing the Nazis out of Africa. Weeks before the invasion, he commenced a se
ries of sensitive, covert negotiations with French colonial officials—military and civilian—trying to ensure that the Vichy troops in North Africa would not contest the landings. On 21 October Eisenhower dispatched Brigadier General Mark Clark by submarine to Algeria for an abortive clandestine meeting with French officers thought to be opposed to the Vichy regime.

  It was all for naught. By 5 November, when Eisenhower boarded a Flying Fortress in London for a secret flight to his forward command post inside “The Rock” at Gibraltar, he and his commanders expected to have to fight their way ashore against as many as fourteen French divisions. Duplicity, intrigue, anti-British resentment going back to Dunkirk, personal rivalries and antipathy toward Charles de Gaulle among French officers—all doomed Allied hopes for a “gentle welcome” to North Africa.

  Yet, as the convoys closed in on their landing beaches on the night of 7 November 1942, there was still reason for optimism. The hundreds of ships steaming from England, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States had made their transits without being attacked by enemy aircraft or submarines. Scores of bombers and fighters assembled at Gibraltar—the only Allied airbase within range of the Torch landings—were unscathed and ready. And in the east, Montgomery’s 8th Army had broken the long siege at El Alamein, Egypt. On 23 October his combined British, New Zealand, Australian, South African, Indian, Free Polish, Free Czech, and Free French force had smashed through Rommel’s lines and was now driving the battered Afrika Korps and their Italian comrades westward toward the Libyan border.

  Few of the young Americans preparing to land before dawn on a hostile shore were aware of these details. Some of them knew that FDR would broadcast an appeal to the French just before the landings: “The sons of those who helped liberate your fathers from the Germans in 1918 are coming to free you from Hitler . . . do not fire upon them.”