The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II (16 page)

The Great Depression had not hit them as hard as it had the cities up north, and even if a man couldn’t find a job with a good wage, he could provide for his family, netting fish, trading for vegetables and fruit from farms that spread out east of Tampa Bay. Logan’s uncle Henry had been the great teacher, had taken the boy out in a wide, flat-bottomed boat, fishing, while the boy stared down into crystal water, watching the trout and mackerel, or the heart-punching glimpse of the big sharks. When Logan was old enough to handle a fishing pole, his uncle revealed the closely guarded secrets, would carve a short stub of a stick to look like a minnow, wrap it in colored ribbon, one handmade hook dangling from the tail. The stick would float, Henry twitching it across the surface of the rippling water, irresistible to the predators below. The watery explosions were a pure delight to Logan, inspiring the boy to learn, and by the time he was ten, the bucket of fish they took home would just as likely have been his. There were other lessons as well, closer to shore, his uncle easing the boat silently past clusters of tangled mangroves, edging into shallow coves, looking for the vast, swirling schools of mullet. They were an easy target for a man like Henry, who had skills with a net that Logan could never match.

The family gatherings were mostly on Sundays, on the wide, breezy beach, the older men carting beer and smoked fish, the women carrying bowls of potato salad and cabbage slaw. Immediately, the small children would scamper away, mothers handling the inevitable crises as tender, bare feet collided with the occasional sandspur. With the beer flowing, the men would tell the stories, but to Logan, they seemed to be more like Hollywood than Hollywood itself. The men would lower their voices, drawing the younger boys in close, would roll out the bawdy stories, risqué jokes, tales of indiscreet French girls and too much wine. It was an annoying mystery to him that the veterans seemed so focused on stories about parties and drunken adventures, as though there had never been a war at all. But Logan had seen the photographs, the film clips, smoke and barbed wire and biplanes swooping out of the sky. In 1918 there had been
combat,
the dead and dying, outrageous weapons, a horror that swept away ten million men. He wanted a glimpse, some notion of what that was like, and so he pushed them, kept asking the hard questions, began to wonder if any of these men had been there at all, if their stories were more from stateside barrooms than any battlefield in France. He knew from his mother that Uncle Henry had been captured, had at least come face-to-face with Germans.

Even as a teen Logan had a deep curiosity about combat, not what Errol Flynn showed him, but the truth, what the sounds were, the smells, and the hardest question of all, what it was like to kill a man. Logan had rehearsed the questions, then waited for the right moment, a quiet time on the bay when the fishing was slow. His uncle Henry had made a point of avoiding Logan’s specific questions about the war, the fighting, never revealed any more than the others, instead told the same tired tales about adventures in Paris. This time, Logan insisted, probed his uncle for answers, experiences. He pushed him hard, too hard, and his uncle had exploded at him, had seemed to come apart, shouting at him to mind his own affairs. Logan was shocked at his uncle’s response, the man refusing to speak to him for many days. But soon, Henry had rejoined the others at the beach, had returned to entertain the high school boys, regaling them with more of the same harmless adventures. Logan tried to understand, wondered if Henry was embarrassed, ashamed that he had been captured, or perhaps there were memories that Henry had sealed away, secrets that were best left alone.

When Logan enlisted, he had tried to become a pilot, but his unwilling stomach betrayed him, and so, he had taken one piece of wisdom from all the tales he’d heard of the Great War. The veterans had spoken of the brutally absurd marches, comical tirades about endless roads, marches to nowhere that destroyed the feet. Logan absorbed that lesson with perfect clarity. If he was going to be a soldier, he would find some way to avoid the infantry. If he couldn’t fly, he would ride.

T
he First Armored Division reached Northern Ireland in May of 1942, the tank crews training there for nearly five months, exercises that repeated many of the same drills and maneuvers Logan had endured at Fort Knox. Northern Ireland didn’t seem that different from Kentucky, enormous fields of green, patches of forest, but the rains were worse, and so the men had to learn to deal with mud, a great deal of mud. He had learned about tanks by training in the M-2, a machine considered obsolete now. With the astounding success of Hitler’s blitz across Europe, the American army had seemed to wake up to the brutal necessity of tanks, as though generals in Washington had completely forgotten their usefulness in the First World War. With the tank battles rolling across North Africa, the urgency for better armor had increased even more, and factories in the States began to churn out hundreds of machines that might at least compete on the battlefield with the exceptional German armor. Most of the heavier American tanks had been sent to the British, but once the American First Armored Division had been mobilized for England, their own tanks had gotten better as well. The M-2 was replaced by the M-3 Light tank, what the British called the Stuart. It was a strange salute from the British, that they would label the American machines with the names of famous American generals, particularly Civil War generals. “Jeb” Stuart had been the Confederacy’s finest cavalry commander, and so Logan had accepted the logic that this new, fast tank was the closest thing the Allies had to a fast armored horse. Another enormous improvement in the M-3 Light had special appeal to a man trained in the handling of rolling artillery. The M-2 had been armed only with machine guns. The M-3 Light had machine guns as well, but now, a real piece of artillery was attached, the turret mounted with a 37 mm cannon.

The Americans had produced a larger weapon as well, the M-3 Medium tank, carrying a 75 mm cannon. Logan had heard enough talk from the tank commanders to know they were proud that the larger M-3s had been sent to the British, were in use now against Rommel, to respond to the power of the German armor. The British referred to the M-3 Mediums as Grants. Logan hadn’t spent much time studying the Civil War, but it made sense to him. The tank with the bigger gun should be named after the man who’d won the war.

LANDING BEACH X, CAP FIGALO, ALGERIA—NOVEMBER 8, 1942

The infantry had gone ashore first, squads of reconnaissance soldiers, fanning out through darkened houses that lay scattered along the beach. Behind them went more infantry, mortar carriers, and machine-gun crews. But for the tanks and heavy trucks, the gaping mouths of the LSTs had not provided easy passage to the beach. Hidden sandbars had nudged the ships to a halt more than three hundred yards from shore. The work had then fallen to the engineers, transport vessels hauling pontoons forward, the engineers working feverishly to hammer together a makeshift bridge. The bridge was only one delay. As the troops rolled ashore, one of the landing craft caught fire, nothing more sinister than mechanical failure. The men on board had safely escaped, but the flames from burning oil had provided an unmistakable beacon for miles in any direction. Any hope that the landings could remain a secret were erased.

By seven in the morning the last of the tank squadrons had rolled ashore, the machines pushing quickly across soft sands. Beyond the beach, the ground rose, a low, rocky escarpment that lined the coast far out in both directions. The reconnaissance battalions had already moved inland, had marked their way along several trails, cut into the crevasses of the escarpment. The trails were wide enough for the Stuarts to pass through, allowing them to climb the rise. The maps showed a single road, leading away from the beach, and the scouts had found that as well, a narrow strip of hard gravel. As the jeeps and light trucks came ashore, the infantry began to push off the beach, a tight column of anxious riflemen, engineers, and gunners, every man wondering when the shooting would start. Far out in the deeper water, British naval warships stood broadside to the shore, the big guns aimed toward the heights, nervous gunners waiting for the orders to fire the first salvo. To all of them the orders were specific and brief and had been passed down from officer to crewman, the same order that the tank commanders had been given, passed from General Oliver to Colonel Todd to Captain Gregg, and finally, to the crews of every tank, and every man with a rifle. The wording varied, but the message was clear:
Do not fire upon any person unless that person first fires upon you.
But out in front of the tank columns, the infantry had advanced unopposed, had not found a confrontation, had found almost no one at all.

L
ogan sat in his perch, could see faint daylight through the magnification of the gunsight. The hatch above him was open, Hutchinson sitting up behind him, head and shoulders exposed. With no enemy yet in front of them, it was the best position for the tank commander to see the terrain, to spot whatever might be waiting for them. Logan shivered, had not stopped shivering since he had climbed down into the tank. Disembarking the LST had seemed to take endless frustrating hours, but once the tank was in motion, the impatience was gone, erased by the hard roar of the engine, the M-3s moving quickly to reach the heights, to find the road, to find out just what was
out there
. Logan moved his foot lightly over the pedal that fired the cannon, stared out now through the rectangular glass lens of his periscope. No one spoke, all eyes focused forward, watching for any movement, some flash of light, a flare, the streak of artillery fire, any sign the infantry had finally found a fight.

Nothing.

The intercom crackled now, startling him, the sound cutting him through his earphones.

“Easy, screwballs. Eyes sharp.”

It was Hutchinson, beside him, a needless order from a man Logan knew was probably more nervous than the other three men in his command. Brinkley Hutchinson was four years younger than Logan, had earned sergeant’s stripes as quickly as any man in the tank school. He was a Kentuckian, had come to the army from near Lexington, some of the loudmouths in the company claiming that his rise in rank had come only because he lived close to the base, indiscreetly joking that his mother must be
friends
with the base commander. Logan had arrived there the same week as Hutchinson, heard it every day, a relentless drill sergeant singling the unfortunate man out for his strangely aristocratic name. If the sergeant saw Hutchinson as a target for his sadistic playfulness, the others soon learned that
Brinkley
hated his name even more than he hated the drill sergeant.

Early in their training, Logan had made friends with the young man, had learned immediately that Hutchinson preferred to keep his privileged upbringing a secret. Hutchinson had none of the aristocrat’s snottiness, had not come into the army looking for a rich boy’s advantages. Logan knew that Hutchinson had earned his sergeant’s stripes only because he was one of the best tank commanders in the company. Logan was certain that in time the aristocratic young man would end up an officer on his own.

Hutchinson commanded Logan’s tank now, fitting well with Captain Gregg’s idea of how an armored squad should be run. To the left, in front of Logan, the driver, Skip Parnell, steered the tank along the narrow ribbon of road, and beside Parnell was the front machine-gunner and assistant driver, Pete Baxter. They were the lead tank in the column, a decision made by the captain. Behind them, nine more tanks spread out in a single, snaking line, half the tank force that had come ashore at Beach X. The rest of the battalion would hold back at the edge of the escarpment, allowing a gap to form in the advance, waiting for the order from the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Todd, to move out along the same route. It was a precaution against dive bombers; if enemy planes suddenly appeared overhead, the entire column wouldn’t become one fat target. But so far, there had been no sign of planes at all, no telltale antiaircraft fire from the infantry ahead of them.

The infantry was to move quickly to their first objective, a village called Lourmel, a crossroads, where the primary rail line in this part of Algeria extended east and west, connecting Oran to the border crossings that led into Morocco. At Lourmel, the column would turn eastward, on what was supposed to be a primary highway. That route would lead them toward the crucial airfield at La Sénia, one of two major airfields where the French maintained fighter wings. Whether or not the French had any intention of making a fight, capturing and occupying the airfields was a priority. Both La Sénia and the second field at Tafaraoui could be used by incoming German fighters and bombers, should the French call for reinforcements in counterattacking the Allied invaders. If the French welcomed the Americans as friends, the airstrips would allow British and American transports to begin the enormous job of supplying the men in the field. Tafaraoui was the objective of the easternmost pincer, another heavy column of armor and infantry that was to have come ashore east of Oran, a place designated Beach Z. Only when the armor and infantry forces had established secure bases across Algeria could the next part of the operation begin: the rapid push toward Tunisia, to occupy the primary seaports that had served as the crucial back door to Rommel’s army.

The M-3 had a top speed of just over thirty-five miles per hour, and Logan knew the rhythm of the engine, the familiar whine, the vibrations, knew through the rumble below him that Parnell was following orders, the tank moving only about twenty-five, a precaution to ensure that the column would stay close together. The gray sky above him had grown lighter still, the sun just breaking above the hills to the east, rising directly over the city of Oran, what the maps said was forty miles away. The tank crews knew nothing of the fighting there, no word of how or why there was a fight at all, no word either if the landings at Beach Z had been as uneventful as at Beach X, which, up until now, resembled a training exercise. But the action at the city itself had been serious, heavy artillery, either from British warships or French shore batteries, or both, and Logan had tried to hold on to the images, those curious thumps and flashes of light, the first sign of any real combat he had ever seen. But the dawn had swept it away, his attention focused only on the stretch of road that lay right in front of him, ribbons of tracks from the jeeps and small trucks of the infantry, still advancing far out in front of his gunsights.