America At War - Concise Histories Of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexington To Afghanistan (24 page)

The landings took place on November 8, 1942. American troops went ashore at three locations. On Morocco’s Atlantic coast some 25,000 men, under the command of Major General George Patton, hit the beaches near Casablanca. In the Mediterranean 39,000 U.S. soldiers landed at Oran. These troops were led by Lloyd Fredendall, also a major general. And, 250 miles farther east, another 43,000 troops landed at Algiers. In total, the United States Army placed 107,000 men onto the northwestern shores of Africa. It was, up to then, the largest military amphibious operation ever attempted.

Once ashore, these soldiers were joined by British troops and by those French forces who decided the enemy was Germany, not Britain or America. Eisenhower, in overall charge of the invading force, hoped to reach Tunis quickly but was unable to do so. One reason was the inexperience of U.S. troops. The other was the German army.

Torch surprised the Nazi high command. But it reacted swiftly. Hitler deposed Pétain and had his army occupy the rest of France. He also sent reinforcements to Tunisia.

The result was a series of nasty little battles in which the Americans initially did poorly. At Sidi bou Zid and the Kasserine Pass, the Germans thrashed Eisenhower’s men. In tactical command of U.S. ground forces was Fredendall. Clearly, he was not up to the job. (The senior British general in Africa, Harold Alexander, is reported to have said to Eisenhower, “I’m sure you must have a better man than that.” An American commander put it more bluntly, saying, “He’s no damn good.”) General Eisenhower sacked Fredendall, although, to avoid a public relations disaster, the army promoted him to lieutenant general and gave him a training assignment back in the States.

Patton was put in charge of the American troops, who, gradually but decidedly, learned how to fight. As 1942 turned into 1943, the U.S. soldiers and their allies began to make headway against the Germans. By mid-January, General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, having defeated Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein, was closing in from the east. German forces in Africa thus were confronted by Patton to the west and Montgomery to the east. It was not an enviable position.

Montgomery was a very capable military leader. He was battle-tested and, unlike many British generals up to then, had led British troops to victory. He was also rather arrogant. He had an extremely high opinion of his own abilities, and a correspondingly low opinion of those of his American counterparts. Of Eisenhower he wrote—privately—that the U.S. commander in chief “knows nothing about how to make war or to fight battles.” Throughout the war, Montgomery never could understand why he was not the Allies’ supreme commander. Patton, needless to say, could not stand the man.

By May, the Americans and the British were squeezing the German army hard. Rommel flew to Germany to plead for more troops. Worried more about Russia and judging Tunisia to be a sideshow, Hitler said no. The führer then relieved Rommel of command, ordering him to remain in Germany (losing battles, which the field marshal of late had been doing, was no way to win favor with Herr Hitler). To lead the dwindling German army in Africa the High Command dispatched a veteran of the Russian front, Jürgen von Arnim.

It mattered little who was in charge. Victorious American troops entered the key port city of Bizerte on May 7. British troops took control of Tunis shortly thereafter. Von Arnim is remembered today simply as the commander of 125,000 German troops who surrendered to the Allies.

With the entire northern coast of Africa secure, the question arose of where next the American and British forces would strike. The answer had been given at Casablanca. There, in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill had met, joined as always by their respective nations’ armed forces chiefs. Several key decisions were reached. The Americans would institute a campaign of daylight strategic bombing of Germany. Preliminary planning for a cross-channel invasion of France would begin. The Allies would stop fighting only when Germany surrendered unconditionally. And, most relevant to our narrative here, Sicily would be the next objective.

Attacking the island of Sicily held several advantages. It would draw German units to its defense, thereby easing the pressure on Stalin’s armies. It also would maintain the momentum the Allies had gained by their victory in Africa. Additionally, it would encourage the Italians to get rid of Mussolini. And, much to Churchill’s satisfaction, it would reflect the strategy he favored of invading Europe not from England directly, but from the Mediterranean.

American and British troops, about eighty thousand in number, invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943. The campaign to capture the island took thirty-eight days and produced nineteen thousand Allied casualties. Although a large number of German soldiers escaped, the fact was that, once again, American and British soldiers had engaged the enemy and emerged victorious.

Worth mentioning is an incident involving U.S. paratroopers. As part of the invasion of Sicily, some two thousand soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division made a night jump onto the island. Their planes took the paratroopers over the invasion fleet. Nervous gunners then mistook the American aircraft for German intruders. The results were disastrous. Twenty-three planes were shot down, and 229 paratroopers were killed or wounded. This was not the first incident of “friendly fire,” nor would it be the last. It did, however, reflect a risk of warfare, one that remains today. To ensure it did not recur when, in 1944, the Allies invaded Normandy, the commander of the 82nd insisted that the planes carrying the paratroopers make a wide berth of the invasion fleet.

Next up was Italy. The British were eager to proceed, the Americans less so. Generals Marshall and Eisenhower were concerned that a campaign to seize the Italian mainland would divert resources required for the cross-channel invasion. But when they learned that invasion would not occur in late 1943 as originally thought, but in the spring of 1944 at the earliest, they agreed to the venture. The initial goal was to capture the port city of Naples and the airfields surrounding the town of Foggia. Later, this was expanded to include Rome, and later still, the entire peninsula. The result was a major Allied military effort. The campaign would last until April 1945 and cost many, many lives. Author Robert Wallace described the fight for Italy as “one of the most grinding and protracted struggles of the entire war.”

It began on September 3, 1943, when British troops crossed over the Straits of Messina and entered the continent of Europe. Six days later, additional British troops landed at Taranto. That same day, American and British soldiers under the command of Mark Clark went ashore on the beaches of Salerno, just south of Naples. German forces contested the landing and came close to pushing the Allied troops into the sea. But, after nine days of intense fighting, the invaders prevailed, though at the cost of thirty-five hundred casualties.

Naples fell on October 1. Days later, the airfields of Foggia were in Allied hands. This enabled the American Fifteenth Air Force, with its B-17s and B-24s, to begin its strategic bombing of Germany, which it did, and which it continued until the day the war ended.

The Italian terrain of mountains and rivers favored the Germans, who proved adept at defensive operations. This, plus the cold weather and lack of roads, made Allied advances extremely difficult.

By early 1944, a stalemate had arisen. So General Clark launched an amphibious operation hoping to outflank the Germans. American troops landed at Anzio, a small coastal town on the western side of Italy, some twenty-five miles south of Rome. The Germans pounded the position, and Anzio became a problem for the Allies. Not until mid-May were the U.S. troops able to break free and then only because the Germans had decided to move farther north.

At Anzio the Americans displayed much courage, none more so than the U.S. Army nurses who served in the field hospitals. These medical stations provided immediate care and, illustrating the scale of the Anzio endeavor, treated more than thirty-three thousand men. Throughout the ordeal German artillery fired on the Americans. Most of the shells hit legitimate targets. Some, however, struck the hospitals, where some two hundred nurses were at work. Six nurses were killed at Anzio. Four won the Silver Star, the first women ever to do so.

The Allied advance from Naples to Rome was never more difficult than at Monte Cassino. The town of Cassino lies midway between the two cities, on the western side of the Apennine Mountains. Its most noteworthy feature was the monastery atop a seventeen-hundred-foot-high hill immediately adjacent to the town. The monastery was a historic treasure. The birthplace of the Benedictine order, it contained medieval manuscripts of great value. It also was a perfect place for the Germans to observe Allied movements.

Respecting the historical significance of Monte Cassino, the German army had not occupied the monastery. The Allies, whose army by then included troops from New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Poland as well as Free French forces, did not know that. They assumed the Germans were watching their every move. Thus the Allies attributed the difficulties they were having in capturing Cassino to the ability of the Germans to pinpoint their positions. After repeated failures to capture the town, they decided to eliminate the monastery and all of the Germans therein.

On February 15, 1944, Allied aircraft dropped bomb after bomb on the monastery, destroying it completely. The unintended result was to create such rubble that once the Germans occupied the hill, which they quickly did, seizing the hilltop became that much more difficult.

At about the same time the Allies finally took control of Cassino, the Americans at Anzio broke out. As Anzio was north of Cassino, the hope was to trap the retreating Germans. This might have happened but for a decision made by the senior American general in charge. Mark Clark decided he’d rather be the first to reach Rome than destroy the retreating German Tenth Army, the unit which so capably had been resisting the Allied advance. Eager for the glory associated with the capture of the Eternal City, Clark directed his divisions north to Rome. They entered the city on June 4. Clark got his reward. But it was short-lived. Two days later, events in Normandy overshadowed the general and the Italian campaign.

The advance up the peninsula would continue. Lasting a total of 607 days, the entire Italian campaign was costly in matériel and expensive in lives. American dead eventually numbered 19,475. Four times that number were wounded. The losses to Britain and the other Allied nations were comparable. It was a high price for an effort than in his memoir General Eisenhower described as a “distinctly subsidiary operation.”

Yet the campaign’s accomplishments were many. The fighting forced Italy out of the war. It secured the Mediterranean for the British. It provided airfields for the strategic bombing of Germany. It kept the U.S. Army in battle for the year 1943 and gave FDR a response to Stalin when the Russian leader complained that only the Red Army was fighting the Nazis. Most important, at least for George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, it tied down twenty German divisions that otherwise would have been available to confront the Allies in Normandy.

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Of necessity, this narrative contains few references to individual combat units of the U.S. Army. Numbered field armies and air forces, such as Patton’s Third Army, that fought in Normandy and the Fifteenth Air Force are mentioned, but smaller organizations, such as infantry divisions or fighter groups, rarely are identified. One exception is the Army Air Force’s 332nd Fighter Group.

This air force unit has become known as “the Tuskegee Airmen.” Composed exclusively of African-Americans, all of whom were trained at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the 332nd flew in both North Africa and Sicily. Later, based in Italy and equipped with P-51 Mustangs, the group escorted Fifteenth Air Force bombers on raids into Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Commanded by Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the group compiled an outstanding combat record. For the loss of fifty-one pilots, the 332nd Fighter Group destroyed 119 enemy aircraft.

This record is even more noteworthy in view of the discrimination these black Americans had to endure. In the early 1940s, the United States was an overtly racist society. African-Americans were denied equal opportunities and equal rights. Few institutions were more racist than the U.S. Army. The 332nd overcame such injustice. The 92nd Infantry Division could not.

The 92nd was composed of African-American enlisted men and white officers. The former were poorly trained. The latter were unhappy in their assignment. The result, not surprisingly, was failure in battle. Only with time would the army rid itself of the absurd notion that black Americans could not fight with skill and courage. During the Second World War, some 961,000 African-Americans served in the armed forces. Most, however, were relegated to support units.

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When Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca in January 1943, they reached agreement on an Allied military priority in addition to that of Sicily and the strategic bombing of Germany. The president and the prime minister agreed that the defeat of the enemy’s submarine forces was to be Britain’s and America’s most urgent objective.

Throughout the Second World War, German submarines, the U-boats (
Unterseeboote
), waged a campaign to defeat Great Britain by depriving her of food and war materials. Nazi Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boats, reasoned that if his boats were to sink enough of the ships delivering supplies, Britain would have no choice but to surrender. Germany had tried this plan of attack once before, in 1917. She failed then and would fail again. But from September 1939 to May 1945, her submarines would wreak havoc at sea, ultimately sinking 5,140 merchant vessels.

Thus was fought what is called the Battle of the Atlantic. This was not a single engagement, but a host of small battles below, on, and above the ocean. The combatants were the U-boats and those Allied ships and planes attempting to sink them. The battle began the day the war started. It ended on May 4, 1945, when Dönitz signaled the U-boats to cease operations and return to base. In his memoirs Winston Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic, “the dominating factor all through the war.”