Twelve Desperate Miles (22 page)

A
l Gruenther was in his early forties, balding, sharp featured, and blessed with a wide, accessible grin and deep smile lines in his cheeks. He greeted René Malevergne soberly, however, when the Frenchman finally got his wish of seeing the “
adjutant of the official representative of the American government.” Gruenther was surrounded by a cordon of British officers and a translator who put the Frenchman immediately on his guard. Malevergne was eager to tell his story directly to the American, and he proceeded as best as he was able to present his bona fides to Gruenther. “Colonel,” he said, again getting the rank wrong, “
Colonel Eddy wrote a letter when I left Tangier that was to have been given to me at Gibraltar to serve as an introduction to you. Monsieur Morris, who handled this affair, assured me that the letter would follow by diplomatic channels and that it would be in London at the same time as I. Where is that letter, Colonel?”

Of course, Malevergne couldn’t have known that Gruenther had just been upbraided in a cablegram by the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about his presence in London. He couldn’t have known that his name—or, more accurately, his occupation as the river pilot at Port Lyautey—was being bandied about at the highest levels of command; or that there was still some uncertainty about whether or not he was who he purported to be. There was also the question of what to do with Malevergne if he was indeed a river pilot from Morocco. In this context, Gruenther’s first question of Malevergne, “Do you know Monsieur Clopet?” made perfect sense. To Malevergne, however, it was an annoyance. He immediately sensed that his identity was doubted. “Monsieur Clopet is the director of a tugboat company at Casablanca,” he answered forthrightly. “He is one of my friends.”

Gruenther seemed not entirely satisfied with this answer, which
further confused Malevergne. Gruenther adjourned with the British officer who’d accompanied the river pilot to the meeting, and the two talked for several minutes. The world of cloak-and-dagger dialogue, whispered asides, and secrets was profoundly discouraging to Malevergne at that moment. Again, perhaps it was his French background, but he couldn’t help but feel that the British were the source of the suspicion surrounding his appearance here. He felt that if he could just talk to Gruenther outside the company of his English escorts, all would be made perfectly clear. But it wasn’t going to happen. At least, not yet.

When Gruenther returned from his tête-à-tête with the British officer, he had abrupt and hard news. “
Monsieur Malevergne,” he said, “a general will visit you tomorrow morning at your hotel. Then, your mission accomplished, you will return to your point of departure.”

Gruenther would not entertain further discussion. He turned on his heel and left Malevergne astonished by this turn and, once again, in the company of the British. Malevergne returned to his hotel “
profoundly discouraged.” There he obsessed about the missing letter from Eddy and the maltreatment that he continued to assume was based on a British perception of who he was and what he was doing in London. “
I was sincere when I agreed to serve the Americans,” he told his diary. “I did not base my agreement on the approval of the English.… I do not understand why they seem to want me to serve the English.”

L
ucian Truscott’s group, including Mountbatten’s Englishmen—Henriques, Costabadie, and Homer, along with Truscott, Hamilton, and Conway—had finally made their way to Washington to oversee the organization, training, supply, and final planning of the Goalpost invasion force in the third week of September.

Once there, Truscott and company set up shop in offices cheek by jowl with Patton’s headquarters in the Munitions buildings. Much needed to be done. While the overall shape of the sub–task force’s role was pretty clear now, gathering all of the elements needed to undertake the mission represented a microcosm of the same difficulties inherent in Torch as a whole.

The troop list for Goalpost included forty different units of various shapes and sizes, including, according to Truscott, “
infantry, artillery, armor, aviation, antiaircraft artillery, tank destroyers, engineers, signal and medical troops, prisoner of war interrogators, counter-intelligence and military government personnel.” The Goalpost commander had finally learned where the bulk of his nine thousand troops would be coming from—the assault troops were from the Sixtieth Infantry Division, which would be joined by an armored battalion combat team from Patton’s old Second Armored Division—but these and the various other units involved were scattered in army bases across the country. The infantry and armored combat units were at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but some of the engineers were in Richmond, Virginia, parts of the medical units were in New Jersey and California, and the air force units were sprinkled in California and Virginia.
By the beginning of their second week in Washington—less than a month now from when the convoy was scheduled to depart—Truscott and his team had no idea where in the
United States they might find half a dozen units that were on their must-have list for sailing to Morocco.

Working hand in glove with the general, as he had for months now, was Major Ted Conway, a former
New York Times
reporter. Conway had been sent to England in late April with Truscott to learn the ins and outs of commando warfare under Lord Mountbatten. To Robert Henriques, they were similar in more than just their duties.
Conway was “another Truscott,” thought Henriques. A man who defeated his expectations of what an American soldier should be like. He didn’t “look and act tough.” He wasn’t “ruggedly efficient, brash, full of pep, all bustle.” Instead, as with “the best of the professionals, Truscott and Ted … had what was in fact a ‘West Point’ manner, just as distinct as the ‘Oxford’ manner of the twenties and thirties but exactly the opposite.” Their style “was a negation of mannerisms. Unless they had something to say they very pointedly did not talk. Unless there was need for propulsion, they made a point of not driving themselves or anybody else. Until it was appropriate to do so, they did not emanate personality. They were scrupulously realistic, quietly efficient, so highly trained and so confident that, when they were ignorant, they never thought of hiding it. But when you saw these people in command of troops and on the battlefield, as [Henriques] did later and often, they were certainly as good soldiers as anything the allies could produce, and a good deal better than most.”

The other American aide that Truscott had brought with him from England, Major Pierpont Morgan Hamilton, was a forty-four-year-old international banker born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Lean and dapper, Hamilton was erudite, cosmopolitan, and an impeccable speaker of the French language. He had spent the years between the wars earning a bachelor’s degree, and then a master’s degree in business, from Harvard, before taking a job in banking in Paris, where he polished his French for seven years. Hamilton’s bloodlines were decidedly upper crust. His surname came from his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Hamilton of Founding Father fame; his first and second names were derived from his grandfather, J. P. (John Pierpont) Morgan, the legendary financier.
Educated at Groton prior to World War I, Pierpont Hamilton had served as an airman in the war. He rejoined the service four months after Pearl Harbor and was quickly placed on active duty in the Army Air Force. Major Hamilton was sent to England and, like Truscott and Conway, attached to the combined operations staff of Lord Louis Mountbatten as an intelligence officer. With Mountbatten, he helped plan the Dieppe raid and then returned home with Truscott to work on Operation Torch.

The weeks of working together under Mountbatten had made Conway, Hamilton, and the trio of Brits already quite familiar with one another by the time they arrived in Washington. There they continued their collegial duties under Patton and Truscott on sub–task force Goalpost.

Robert Henriques arrived in Washington to find a city that “
was not unqualified fun for anyone in British uniform.” Not only had amenities in the crowded capital failed to keep pace with the hordes of newly arrived war workers, but he found a general sense among Americans, often stated bluntly to him, that the United States was being called to duty to save Great Britain and the Allied powers from yet another European mess, as it had in the First World War. “
‘Again’ was the savage adverb,” Henriques wrote, and he heard it on more than one occasion. As in: “Again ‘our boys’ were to be ‘sacrificed’ to save Europe.”

Neither was Henriques completely sold on the mission to which he was assigned. Like most of the British high command, he thought Americans were too concerned about an Axis attack on and through Gibraltar. Like them, he sensed that the fight should be carried out inside the Mediterranean. Morocco was a waste of time. The Germans were unlikely to defend the country, feeling that its distance from the more serious upcoming battles east of Algiers made it strategically unimportant ground. In general, he thought Operation Torch was “
a bad, mad gamble which the American Chiefs-of-Staff decided to take because it was the view of their Intelligence Chiefs that the French would not fight.”

Yet Henriques was more than willing to concede the fallacies of the British perspective as well. He understood, for instance, why the British were being wholly excluded from the Moroccan invasion and limited in
their role in the Mediterranean invasion. He agreed with the American perspective “
that the French did not like the British” and admitted that “while the British knew this to be true—and did not themselves like the French—they resented the Americans saying it.”

Henriques’s expertise was in planning and attention to detail. He had a reputation for obstinacy and steering relentlessly through bureaucratic roadblocks, and he was there to provide the continuing background on prior British amphibious assaults to the Americans through Truscott’s staff. He went about his business with diligence and speed, as he had to, given the fast-dwindling time at hand and the fact that he was about to be given a daunting task.

A week after Truscott got home from London, he left the Washington offices of his sub–task force to go to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and prepare the soldiers whom he’d been assigned for Goalpost. These were assault troops from the Sixtieth Infantry Regimental Combat Team of the Ninth Infantry Division, headed by Colonel Frederic J. de Rohan; and an Armored Battalion Combat Team of the Second Armored Division, under Patton’s old World War I friend Lieutenant Colonel Harry Semmes. Yet another hiccup awaited Truscott at Fort Bragg: he discovered that no provisions had been made for him to have a regimental staff, which meant that he was forced to call on Conway and Hamilton to join him in North Carolina, leaving Henriques and the rest of the Mountbatten contingent to continue with the preparations for invasion in Washington.

It was in this same week that Truscott learned positively that there would be no paratroopers available for his use in attacking the Port Lyautey airport for Operation Torch. Patton and the combined chiefs of staff, however, had enthusiastically endorsed his idea of using Army Rangers for the same goal, and a company of seventy-five was delegated to the task. Now all that was needed was a ship to deposit these soldiers at the airport.

It fell to Henriques, near supply sources in Washington, to find one. He went first to the navy and then to the War Shipping Board. He was told, according to his own account, written much later, that “
every available ship in the allied pool which was capable of sailing the Atlantic had long ago been enlisted for the TORCH assaults,” but he remained persistent. Truscott had an October 14 deadline by which he needed to present to Patton a final plan for sub–task force Goalpost. Just three and a half days prior to that day, Henriques finally found the ship he’d been looking for.

The USS
Dallas
was a World War I–vintage destroyer of the Clemson class, 314 feet and about 1,200 tons, with a top speed of thirty-three knots. She was a four-piper, the nickname given to destroyers that sailed with four distinctive funnels running along their midships; but she also had another distinguishing characteristic and another nickname. The
Dallas
, like others in her class, lacked a raised forecastle, which gave her profile a distinct sheer strake running from stem to stern. It earned her that second nickname: she was both a four-piper and a flush decker.

Far lighter than the newest World War II destroyers being put to sea by the U.S. Navy, she displaced about half as much water as the Fletcher class of destroyers. The
Dallas
had run coastal patrol duty from Argentina to Nova Scotia from mid-1941 to March 1942. Then she’d served as escort for a couple of convoys to Iceland and Northern Ireland before settling into duty, once again, patrolling the U.S. Atlantic coast from New York to Cuba from April to the first week of October.
She was docked in Philadelphia awaiting her next duty when someone from Truscott’s staff—probably Henriques—discovered her. Captained by Robert Brodie and with a crew of about one hundred, she was not a ship that had been scheduled to see much action in the war. Her day, for the most part, had come and gone.
But rid of her masts and superstructure, she might be just light enough and speedy enough to navigate the River Sebou with a detachment of Army Rangers.
And she had some firepower to defend herself as she sailed up the river: four 4-inch deck guns, one 3-inch antiaircraft weapon, twelve torpedo tubes, and two stern-mounted
depth charge racks. So the
Dallas
was called to Norfolk and prepared for sailing.