The Day of Battle (8 page)

None of the namesake camps were as pleasant as their originals. At first light the Arab vendors appeared, selling lemonade, or “wog wine,” or haircuts, or ceramic “Roman” vases. By midmorning the heat was beastly, with Saharan winds “like a wall of fire” and tepid drinking water sprinkled with peppermint to make it palatable. Flies and mosquitoes infested the straddle-trench latrines and the mess tents where cooks made hash
for tens of thousands on captured German field ranges. Commanders tried to occupy their men with morning hikes or full-contact volleyball. Anglers in the 19th Combat Engineers dropped half-pound blocks of TNT in Lake Bizerte, collecting enough belly-up fish in two hours to feed nearly two hundred men. Officers in the 82nd Airborne bought ten young bulls, a flock of sheep, and four thousand liters of beer for a preinvasion barbecue.

They were in an ugly mood, spoiling for a fight. Paratrooper marksmen “have practiced on some menacing looking Arabs,” Colonel James M. Gavin, who commanded a regiment in the 82nd, wrote his daughter. “It makes [the Arabs] mad to get shot and we should stop it.” Dummy tents and phony radio transmitters began to appear in Florida and Texas and Virginia and Kentucky, as the troops were trucked company by company to loading points around the lake. Herded by bellowing sergeants, they shuffled aboard the LSTs and LSIs and LCTs, every soldier’s identity checked against a cumbersome passenger list; eight clerks assigned to each convoy kept twenty-three copies of the manifests, and a typical convoy—for reasons known only at echelons above reason—required more than six thousand pages of names.

Congestion and confusion remained the order of the day: truck drivers took wrong turns; sailors removed cargo from overloaded vessels only to have soldiers stow it back aboard; an ammunition dump caught fire, and flames jumped the firebreaks to consume two thousand tons of munitions in a spectacular series of explosions; novice boat crews fouled their anchors, and shouted curses carried across the water as they tried to free themselves with chains and hawsers and grappling hooks.

No wrong turn or fouled anchor could stop them, of course. Brute-force momentum—and ingenuity, and willfulness—had carried them this far and would carry them farther. One by one the vessels moved into the lake and assembled into color-coded convoys. Sweating soldiers settled belowdecks or found a patch of topside shade. Gazing north toward the open Mediterranean, they packed away their newly issued sulfa powder and battle dressings, wondering precisely where in this world they would need such things.

Still farther east the British made ready, from Benghazi to Haifa and Beirut. Eighth Army had fought across North Africa in various guises since 1940 and now resembled, one admirer wrote, “a vast gypsy camp on the move, or a tribal migration.” Snatches of Arabic seeded the soldiers’ palaver, notably
maleesh,
“no matter,” and
bardin,
“in a little while.” Many wore a mauve ointment on their arms and faces as treatment for septic desert sores
caused by prolonged exposure to dust and sand. War weariness also afflicted them—no ointment could soothe three years of fighting. One soldier confessed to “some disintegration of corporate purpose,” a state of affairs given voice by the drunken veterans who strode through their battalion encampments barking, “Fuck the bloody fuckers, we’re doing no more fucking fighting.”

But fight they would,
bardin.
One armada gathered in the northern Gulf of Suez, with regiments such as the Dorsets and Devons and Hampshires aboard, respectively, the former liners
Strathnaver, Keren,
and
Otranto.
White-coated Indian waiters served four-course dinners and the men sang nostalgic Edwardian airs—“
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!
”—before cashing in their sterling for invasion currency. The fleet squeezed through the Suez Canal in early July, past sunken wrecks and the open-air cinemas at Ismailiya. At Port Said, one regimental history recorded, “a great bathing parade was ordered and all the troops were taken ashore to march through the town” to the beach, which soon was covered for miles with naked Tommies. The troops gathered “round a huge desert campfire, consuming as much beer as possible,” then marched back to their ships behind kilted pipers in white spats and full skirl.

On July 5, the invasion armada assembled in the Mediterranean roads off the Egyptian coast. Some efforts to boost morale simply annoyed the men, for example the incessant playing of “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” over the loudspeakers of the ship carrying the 2nd Inniskillings. Padres offered eve-of-battle prayers, asking a “special intercession…for the recapture of Europe.” Signalmen in khaki shorts wigwagged their flags at departing ships from the quays at Tripoli and Alexandria. Sergeants hectored the men to take their antimalaria pills, prompting one soldier in the 1st Royal Tank Regiment to conclude, “Like fat cattle who are pampered to the very doors of the slaughterhouse, it was important that if and when we died we should be in good health.”

Many regretted leaving Africa, where they had been “sleeping under great ripe stars.” Here Eighth Army had found as much glory as perhaps could be found in modern war. Here, too, they would leave thousands of comrades in African graves. “Yet we went with light hearts,” the tanker added, “for somewhere at the end of all this we could go home.”

The
Monrovia
singled up her lines shortly after ten
A.M
. on Tuesday, July 6, heaved in the starboard anchor, and with the help of two tugs edged from the Basin de Vieux to the twelve-fathom line outside the Algiers port. To Kent Hewitt’s chagrin, as the French harbor pilot stepped over
Monrovia
’s side to return to shore, he yelled, “Have a good trip to Sicily!” Counterintelligence
officers ordered the pilot and his tug crews arrested and held incommunicado until the landings had begun.

Despite elaborate security precautions, Hewitt remained uncertain whether
HUSKY
’s secrets still held. Sealed maps of Sicily and other classified documents had been delivered throughout the fleet by armed couriers, to be stored before sailing under lock and key. Not until the last minute were Italian-speaking interpreters sent to their respective Army units. Yet breaches had occurred; there was loose talk on the wharves, while on some ships the premature distribution had occurred of “The Soldier’s Guide to Sicily,” which featured a large silhouette of the island on the cover. A British officer in Cairo had even sent his gabardine uniform to be dry-cleaned with a notebook containing the
HUSKY
battle plan left in the pocket; security agents raided the shop and found that the incriminating pages had been torn out and used as scratch paper to write customer invoices.

As Hewitt paced
Monrovia
’s flag bridge, listening to the commotion of eight hundred men practicing abandon-ship drills, he had a thousand other details to contemplate besides whether the Germans knew he was coming. The fleet included twenty LSTs carrying ten thousand gallons of water each. Was that enough? Seventeen hospital ships had been sent to North Africa, of which five now sailed toward Sicily. Was
that
enough? Six hundred miles of African coastline and the sea approaches to Malta had been swept for mines. Were they completely clean? What about enemy submarines? Hewitt had lost several ships and 140 men to U-boats after the landings in Morocco the previous November, and the memory still pained him.

As for the eighty thousand soldiers now in his custody, Hewitt could only take comfort in his favorite maxim: You do everything you can, then you hope for the best. Disagreements with the Army, which had begun a year earlier during the preparations for
TORCH
, had continued during the
HUSKY
planning. Some frictions were petty: Army and Navy supply officers had jacked up Algerian warehouse prices by bidding against each other, and the Army insisted on calling
Monrovia
a headquarters ship when any fool knew it was a
flagship.
Hewitt had been astonished, a few days earlier, to find sentries posted on Patton’s orders outside
Monrovia
’s operations room, barring access to the admiral’s own staff—
that
indignity had soon been corrected. More troubling had been Patton’s months-long refusal to move his headquarters from Mostaganem, nearly two hundred miles from Algiers; the distance had made joint planning more difficult.

Still, Hewitt and Patton had found common ground and even mutual affection. The formality of
TORCH
, when they addressed each other as “Admiral” and “General,” had yielded to a more intimate “Kent” and “Georgie.” Patton was ecumenical enough to occasionally side with the Navy, as in one
recent dispute when Army planners—contrary to Hewitt’s advice—proposed to slip troops onto the Sicilian beaches in rubber boats. “Sit down!” Patton had finally snapped at his officers. “The Navy is responsible for getting you ashore and they can put you ashore in any damned thing they want.” To celebrate their final evening on land, Hewitt on Monday night had invited Patton and several other generals to dinner at the admiral’s quarters, a villa requisitioned from a Danish vintner. After several hours of convivial drinking Hewitt helped the generals to the staff cars that would take them to their ships; more sober than most, Patton on his way out the door studied the risqué wall frescoes of half-nude women and muttered, “Thank God I live in a camp.”

At five
P.M
.
Monrovia
signaled anchors aweigh and moved into the swept channel, surrounded by warships and landing craft of every description. Panic briefly seized the fleet when radar showed an apparent swarm of hostile planes; the blips proved to be the ships’ own barrage balloons, hoisted on tethers to discourage dive-bombers and strafing fighters. Semaphores blinked out Morse messages and the convoy began zigzagging, as previously agreed, at ten knots under sailing pattern number 35.

The white vision of Algiers fell behind. Hewitt studied the African mountains to starboard. Iron oxide in the scree was fired bloodred by the setting sun as it plunged into the purple sea. He had done everything he could, and now he would hope for the best.

Behind the bridge, in
Monrovia
’s spacious flag cabin, George Patton felt the ship’s screws gnaw the sea as she picked up speed. The Navy had tried to make him feel like a wanted guest, greeting him with incessant piping when he came aboard and assigning two mess boys as his personal attendants. The cabin, opulent by warship standards, measured eighteen by fifteen feet, with a desk, bunk, table, and shower. Still, Patton harbored private reservations about both the sister service—“The Navy is our weak spot,” he told his diary—and Kent Hewitt: “very affable and in his usual mental fog.”

He was ready for battle and looked the part, immaculate in his whipcord breeches and tailored blouse, the famous pistols holstered and near at hand. He had lost weight in the last few months by running and swimming, and improved his fighting trim by cutting back on both liquor and tobacco. For six weeks Patton had commanded American forces in Tunisia, following the debacle at Kasserine Pass and the sacking of the II Corps commander; since resuming his preparations for
HUSKY
in mid-April, he had pondered the checkered performance of U.S. troops and their officers. In a memo to his commanders in June, Patton offered twenty-seven tactical adages, distilled
from the campaign experiences in Africa and thirty-six years in uniform. Number 7: “Always fire low”; number 13: “In mountain warfare, capture the heights and work downhill”; number 22: “In case of doubt, attack”; and his personal maxim, number 18: “Never take counsel of your fears.”

Yet fears possessed him—of failure, of flinching under fire. The sickly California infant had grown into a shy and sensitive boy, and then “a timid man by nature,” one of his oldest friends had noted on June 26 after seeing Patton in Mostaganem. Flamboyance compensated for his inner doubts, and provided the mask he believed a confident commander should wear. “I don’t like the whine of bullets any more than I ever did,” Patton wrote on July 1, “but they attract me just the same.” His superior officer in 1928 had concluded that Patton “would be invaluable in time of war but a disturbing element in time of peace.” Now his time had come. Patton himself had predicted as a young man, “Someday I will make them all know me.” That day had also come.

In recent weeks he had traveled from camp to camp, preaching violence and transcendent duty. “Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best. It removes all that is base,” he told the 45th Division. To their officers he added, “You have a sacred trust to your men and to your country, and you are the lowest thing that lives if you are false to this trust.”

At a large outdoor amphitheater in Algiers, he strode onstage to “Ruffles and Flourishes,” his tunic ablaze with decorations. “There is no better death than to die in battle for a noble and glorious cause,” he told the troops. As for the Army’s policy against fraternization, he added, “That’s bullshit. An army that can’t fuck can’t fight.” The soldiers “howled, stamped [their] feet and whistled with approval,” one medic reported. Such profane performances, an observer said, were intended “to toughen them, to blood them with language.” In a letter on June 19, Patton’s aide wrote, “He is a great hate builder, and believe me, when the time comes, the Axis boys are going to be very sorry to meet him.”

Some GIs were already sorry. Upon discovering a 45th Division soldier asleep in a foxhole during a landing exercise, Patton jabbed the man in the ribs with his own rifle and bellowed, “You son of a bitch. You get out of there.” During another exercise near Oran, Patton yelled, “Captain, get these men off the beach and onto their objective.”

“But, sir,” the officer replied, “I am a chaplain.”

“I don’t give a damn if you are Jesus Christ himself,” Patton snapped, “get these men the hell off the beach.”