Assignment to Hell (15 page)

D
ESPITE ITS MANY DEFECTS, FROM
a logistical standpoint, Torch was staggering—by far the biggest amphibious assault ever attempted. To work
effectively, Churchill said that Torch’s various movements had to “fit together like a jeweled bracelet”—and, almost miraculously, they did.

Hal Boyle and Walter Cronkite got to admire up close one of Torch’s glittering gems—the oceanic transport of nearly forty thousand men and tens of thousands of tons of equipment. Five years after they had covered the New London explosion, the two Kansas Citians were billeted together in Norfolk, Virginia, for a week before the flotilla’s departure.

Norfolk was so manic in the weeks preceding the launch of the Torch armada that merchants posted signs saying, N
O DOGS OR SAILORS ALLOWED
. Its streets were full of prostitutes and, it was feared, German operatives. To keep the enemy guessing as to where the U.S. and Britain would strike, Allied intelligence planted a series of ruses. One of them involved sending a group of correspondents to the Scottish Highlands to take lessons in skiing and cold-weather survival, then encouraging the reporters to file stories about their experience.
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Admiral Kent Hewitt, the commander of Task Force 34, is one of the war’s unsung heroes. Hewitt not only oversaw the safe passage of a hundred vessels across the Atlantic and arrived at his precise destination eight minutes ahead of schedule, but also had to put up with the histrionics of one George Smith Patton.

Even senior military people had never heard of Major General Patton. But after Patton blistered enlisted men all over the Tidewater, dictated letters to his senior commanders that snarled, “If you don’t succeed, I don’t want to see you alive,” and concluded a toast to the wives at a formal dinner party by chortling, “My, what pretty widows you’re going to make!”
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everyone knew who he was. His notoriety was such that when it came time to select GI password commands for Torch, planners chose “George!” to be followed by “Patton!”

What Cronkite called Patton’s “cracked pipe” tenor was as far removed from actor George C. Scott’s thunderous baritone as a voice can be; it was so effeminate that soldiers could barely wait until the general was out of earshot to do cruel impersonations.

Never subtle in issuing barbs, Patton told anyone who would listen—including the President of the United States—that Admiral Hewitt and the
Navy could not be counted on to deliver the men and matériel needed in North Africa. As was often the case, Patton was dead wrong.

Task Force 34 is among World War II’s unheralded triumphs. Hewitt headed a magnificent fleet: thirty troop transports carrying tens of thousands of GIs, along with three battleships, seven heavy and light cruisers, thirty-eight destroyers, four submarines, one fleet, and four escort aircraft carriers stocked with more than two hundred fighters and dive-bombers and torpedo bombers, plus sundry minesweepers, tankers, and tugboats—not to mention a couple of dozen correspondents, two of whom were named Boyle and Cronkite. It was the most formidable American fighting force ever assembled.

Churchill’s jeweled bracelet began long before Allied warships had to navigate the Strait of Gibraltar. The vessels in Task Force 34 left from a variety of eastern U.S. ports, including one as far north as Casco Bay, Maine. Other task forces left from ports in Great Britain. The ships originating in the U.S. set out on or around October 23, reconnoitering in midocean.

Hewitt was in many ways Patton’s temperamental opposite. Cronkite and other correspondents met with Hewitt four days before they shoved off. “[Hewitt] looks like anything but the commander of a tough amphibious force with a dangerous mission to perform,” Cronkite wrote in his diary. “If he were in civilian life I would pick him as the manager of the lace department at Macy’s.”
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A former professor of mathematics at the Naval Academy, Hewitt had been a young staff officer when the Great White Fleet, the pride of President Theodore Roosevelt, had circumnavigated the globe in 1907, delivering TR’s not so subtle message about America’s burgeoning power.

T
HE STATURE
C
RONKITE ACHIEVED WITH
his
Wakefield
-burning-at-sea exclusive helped earn him United Press’ berth as the Navy correspondent on the battleship USS
Texas
, a veritable twin of the USS
Arkansas
. On October 19, Cronkite flew from New York to Norfolk in a military transport, a converted DC-3, “and I do mean converted,” he wrote. The plane’s
amenities had been ripped out, replaced by crude benches. Cronkite propped his feet on freight boxes as the plane made stops in Philadelphia and Washington before arriving in the Tidewater.

All the Navy told Cronkite was “You’ll be gone for some time”
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—and that once he registered at the Tidewater base, he couldn’t leave. “The story is underway!” Cronkite ethused in a journal he began keeping October 15. Associated Press’ Navy correspondent in Norfolk was John Moroso; International News Service was represented by John Henry. Security was so tight that reporters weren’t even supposed to divulge to what ships they’d been assigned, but Henry couldn’t help but brag that he’d been given the
Massachusetts
, a brand-new battleship. A newly christened battlewagon made for a better story than the creaky old
Texas
—or so the “heartsick”
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Cronkite told his diary.

When Cronkite asked Moroso where he thought the armada was headed, the AP reporter guessed Africa. UP editor Harrison Salisbury, “a keener mind on affairs international,” Cronkite confided, had correctly predicted Morocco in a conversation the previous week in New York. Cronkite noted that German radio propaganda was claiming that western Africa would be invaded and that its U-boat wolf packs were being transferred to the African coast—an assertion that didn’t exactly assuage Norfolk’s hysteria.

On Cronkite’s second evening in town, Navy press liaison officers, decked out in dress whites, took Cronkite out for cocktails at the Norfolk Yacht and Country Club. His new friends offered to get him a date for the evening, but Cronkite, lonely for Betsy, declined. As he watched the officers dance and crack jokes, Cronkite couldn’t help but wonder what they were thinking “in moments of periodic silence. ‘How many of these guys will come back with me?’ And, then, just as an afterthought, ‘Well, what the hell, I wonder if I’ll come back?’” Cronkite was surprised that his own existential musings began to mirror a typical sailor’s: that somebody else would get it, but not him.
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Navy and Marine officers gave an amorphous briefing to reporters that hinted the operation would be the long-anticipated “second front” without identifying its objective or describing its interlocking parts. A Marine
colonel called the maneuver the biggest of the war, surpassing that summer’s invasions of Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Without disclosing much, an admiral made it clear that it was an amphibious action. “A landing operation!” Cronkite enthused in his diary. “What a terrific story, what an amazing assignment!”

It may have been an amazing assignment, but Cronkite soon learned there was a catch, at least in theory. Once Task Force 34 reached its destination, Cronkite the battleship correspondent was supposed to continue filing stories from the
Texas
about Navy operations, not jump ashore to cover the Army as it moved inland. Knowing UP wanted him on the ground, Cronkite hatched other plans.

“I had assumed (and I assumed that the Navy had assumed) that any red-blooded war correspondent was going to jump ship and stay where the action was,” he wrote. So as the
Texas
zigzagged across the Atlantic in late October and early November, Cronkite made a point to befriend officers whom, he reckoned, would have shore responsibilities in the days following the initial assault.

In the meantime, Cronkite enjoyed the spectacle of watching Army men try to acclimate themselves to life at sea. “There may be nothing more amusing than the Army afloat, except perhaps the Navy ashore,” he recalled. One of the propaganda ploys contrived by Army intelligence was to create an ersatz radio station that would broadcast pro-Allied messages to Moroccan soldiers and citizens, hoping to facilitate a quick surrender. Much to the amusement of the ship’s crew, the Army had crammed their radio equipment onto the
Texas
.

Once the invasion started, the station’s first job was to air a “we-come-in-peace” message recorded by President Roosevelt and converted into French. George Patton detested the idea of radio-fueled propaganda, disliked the conciliatory tone of the Roosevelt statement, and, as an ardent Francophile, deplored the way the remarks had been translated.

The Army’s clandestine broadcast outfit went by the name Radio Maroc; it was run by a group of peacetime advertising and radio executives who, Cronkite noticed, were taking themselves and their Manhattan social standing way too seriously for the Navy crew’s liking. One evening, as the
battleship churned through rough water, a hatch located just above the quarters of the radio team was mysteriously left ajar. Seawater began cascading into their rooms. Convinced that the ship was foundering, the Army officers charged onto the deck, shrieking for everyone to head toward the lifeboats—a scene that doubtless gave the Navy men something to chuckle about for the remainder of the voyage.

To deceive Nazi intelligence, Hewitt’s fleet steamed southeast, looking as if it were going to conduct a training exercise in the Caribbean. Fortunately no U-boat detected Task Force 34’s easterly twist toward the Azores. German wolf packs were busily engaged a thousand miles north, where that same week Convoy SC 107, en route from Cape Breton to Liverpool, lost fifteen of its forty-two ships.
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On day two at sea, the task force’s orders were unsealed: Journalists were briefed on “the whole story of our operation,” Cronkite wrote. General Dwight Eisenhower, they learned, was in charge of a joint (but primarily American) invasion. Pointing to reconnaissance maps, charts, and photographs, Rear Admiral Monroe Kelly, the
Texas
’ skipper, walked reporters through the planned three-pronged assault on Africa’s Atlantic coast. “The scope of the movement absolutely startled me,” Cronkite typed that night in his journal. “This is THE SHOW!”
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The next morning, just as the church service was getting under way, Cronkite’s “show” got precariously close. A destroyer spotted something suspicious and dropped depth charges; Hewitt then ordered the carriers to dispatch their planes. It made for a tension-filled Sunday morning, but there was no U-boat attack. A sobering chart posted on the
Texas
’ bridge purported to track enemy sub movements in and around the Azores.

Every night, Cronkite and his new friends gathered around the radio to listen to both legitimate news and the latest propaganda from Berlin and Vichy. Field Marshal Harold Alexander and General Bernard Montgomery had just launched their triumphant offensive against Rommel’s forces at El Alamein in Egypt, pushing the Germans westward in the first move of the Allied pincer attack meant to trap the Axis host somewhere around Tunisia. Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda mouthpieces, meanwhile, were claiming
that the Allies would attack along the Moroccan shore—a bit of prescience that didn’t make the officers rest any easier.

Just before reaching the African coast, Task Force 34 planned to break into three invasion armadas: the southern group would go to Safi, south of Casablanca; the main group, including Hal Boyle, went to Fedala, just north of Casablanca; and the northern group, with Cronkite, targeted Port Lyautey, twelve miles northeast of the Moroccan capital. Cronkite was told that the
Texas
would be joined off Port Lyautey by the cruiser
Savannah
; five destroyers; the
Chenango
, a onetime oil tanker that had been hastily transformed into a crude aircraft escort carrier; eight troop transports; and various cargo vessels. The
Chenango
was carrying seventy-seven P-40 fighter planes slated to be transferred to Port Lyautey as soon as its airstrip was captured.

The seaborne infantry’s job, Cronkite wrote in remaining true to the Navy’s admonition not to commit specific targets to print lest they fall into enemy hands, “will be to take an all-important ____ and silence a great _____ that, remaining in enemy hands, could jeopardize the venture. We also shall seize or bombard ____—and, as Admiral Kelly says, ‘this is our meat,’ an _____.”
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Among the blanks, as soon became apparent, was the airdrome located seven miles inland of Port Lyautey, some sizable artillery guns, and a garrison of about three thousand French, Senegalese, and Moroccan soldiers.

While quietly marking his twenty-sixth birthday on November 4, Cronkite must have wondered if he’d ever see another one. An unidentified plane “gave us a short fright” and rumors persisted that U-boats were lurking off the African coast.

A musical combo put on a boisterous show that buoyed spirits in the middle of continued foul weather. “I wondered what the militaristic Nazis would think if they could see our boys going into battle with a smile on their faces and ‘Flat foot floogie with a floy-floy’ on their lips?” jazz buff Cronkite wrote on his birthday.

On the evening of November 7, Admiral Kelly summoned Cronkite to his quarters. The battleship’s crew at that point had still not been fully
briefed on their mission. Kelly planned on delivering remarks over the ship’s public-address system and wondered if Cronkite could compose something inspirational.

Cronkite racked his brain but couldn’t come up with anything more fitting than what Kelly had already scribbled. The Navy and Army hoped their men wouldn’t need big pep talks. In fact, they hoped American soldiers and sailors wouldn’t have to fight at all. At several strategic points along the North African coast, Eisenhower sent either furtive messengers operating under the cloak of darkness or French-speaking agents operating under a flag of truce to negotiate “diplomatic” solutions or foment mutinies, depending on circumstances.
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