The Day of Battle (7 page)

Secrecy was paramount. Hewitt doubted that three thousand vessels could sneak up on Sicily, but
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’s success relied on surprise. All documents that disclosed the invasion destination were stamped with the classified code word
BIGOT
, and sentries at the
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planning headquarters in Algiers determined whether visitors held appropriate security clearances by asking if they were “bigoted.” (“I was frequently partisan,” one puzzled naval officer replied, “but had never considered my mind closed.”)

Soldiers and sailors, as usual, remained in the dark and subject to severe restrictions on their letters home. A satire of censorship regulations read to one ship’s crew included rule number 4—“You cannot say where you were, where you are going, what you have been doing, or what you expect to do”—and rule number 8—“You cannot, you must not, be interesting.” The men could, under rule number 2, “say you have been born, if you don’t say where or why.” And rule number 9 advised: “You can mention the fact that you would not mind seeing a girl.”

One airman tried to comply with the restrictions by writing, “Three days ago we were at X. Now we are at Y.” But the prevailing sentiment was best captured by a soldier who told his diary, “We know we are headed for trouble.”

More than half a million American troops now occupied North Africa. They composed only a fraction of all those wearing U.S. uniforms world
wide, yet in identity and creed they were emblematic of that larger force. One Navy lieutenant listed the civilian occupations of the fifteen hundred soldiers and sailors on his Sicily-bound ship: “farm boys and college graduates…lawyers, brewery distributors, millworkers, tool designers, upholsterers, steel workers, aircraft mechanics, foresters, journalists, sheriffs, cooks and glass workers.” One man even cited “horse mill fixer” as his trade.

Fewer than one in five were combat veterans from the four U.S. divisions that had fought extensively in Tunisia: the 1st, 9th, and 34th Infantry Divisions, and the 1st Armored Division, each of which was earmarked for Sicily or, later, for mainland Italy. “The front-line soldier I knew,” wrote the correspondent Ernie Pyle, who trudged with them across Tunisia, “had lived for months like an animal, and was a veteran in the fierce world of death. Everything was abnormal and unstable in his life.”

In the seven weeks since the Tunisian finale, those combat troops had tried to recuperate while preparing for another campaign. “The question of discipline has been very difficult,” the 1st Armored Division commander warned George Marshall. “There is a certain lawlessness…and a certain amount of disregard for consequences when men are about to go back.” In the 34th Division, “the men did not look well and seemed indifferent,” a visiting major general noted on June 15. Among other indignities, a thousand men had no underwear and five thousand others had but a single pair. “They felt very sorry for themselves,” he added. Thirteen hundred soldiers from the 34th had just been transferred to units headed straight for Sicily, leading to “incidents of self-maiming and desertion.” A captain in the 1st Division wrote home, “Too much self-commiseration, that is something we all must guard against.”

Even among the combat veterans, few considered themselves professional soldiers either by training or by temperament. Samuel Hynes, a fighter pilot who later became a university professor, described the prevalent “civilianness, the sense of the soldiering self as a kind of impostor.” They were young, of course—twenty-six, on average—and they shared a sense that “our youth had at last reached the place to spend itself,” in the words of a bomber pilot, John Muirhead.

They had been shoveled up in what Hynes called “our most democratic war, the only American war in which a universal draft really worked, [and] men from every social class went to fight.” Even the country’s most elite tabernacles had been dumped into a single egalitarian pot, the U.S. Army: of the 683 graduates from the Princeton University class of 1942, 84 percent were in uniform, and those serving as enlisted men included the valedictorian and salutatorian. Twenty-five classmates would die during the war,
including nineteen killed in combat. “Everything in this world had stopped except war,” Pyle wrote, “and we were all men of a new profession out in a strange night.”

And what did they believe, these soldiers of the strange night? “Many men do not have a clear understanding of what they are fighting for,” a morale survey concluded in the summer of 1943, “and they do not know their role in the war.” Another survey showed that more than one-third had never heard of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and barely one in ten soldiers could name all four. In a secret letter to his commanders that July, Eisenhower lamented that “less than half the enlisted personnel questioned believed that they were more useful to the nation as soldiers than they would have been as war workers,” and less than one-third felt “ready and anxious to get into the fighting.” The winning entry in a “Why I’m Fighting” essay contest declared, in its entirety: “I was drafted.”

Their pervasive “civilianness” made them wary of martial zeal. “We were not romantics filled with cape-and-sword twaddle,” wrote John Mason Brown, a Navy Reserve lieutenant headed to Sicily. “The last war was too near for that.” Military life inflamed their ironic sensibilities and their skepticism. A single crude acronym that captured the soldier’s lowered expectations—SNAFU, for “situation normal, all fucked up”—had expanded into a vocabulary of GI cynicism: SUSFU (situation unchanged, still fucked up); SAFU (self-adjusting fuck-up); TARFU (things are really fucked up); FUMTU (fucked up more than usual); JANFU (joint Army-Navy fuck-up); JAAFU (joint Anglo-American fuck-up); FUAFUP (fucked up and fucked up proper); and FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition).

Yet they held personal convictions that were practical and profound. “We were prepared to make all sacrifices. There was nothing else for us to do,” Lieutenant Brown explained. “The leaving of our families was part of our loving them.” The combat artist George Biddle observed, “They want to win the war so they can get home, home, home, and never leave it.” A soldier in the 88th Division added, “We have got to lick those bastards in order to get out of the Army.”

The same surveys that worried Eisenhower revealed that the vast majority of troops held at least an inchoate belief that they were fighting to “guarantee democratic liberties to all peoples.” A reporter sailing to Sicily with the 45th Division concluded, “Many of the men on this ship believe that the operation will determine whether this war will end in a stalemate or whether it will be fought to a clear-cut decision.” And no one doubted that come the day of battle, they would fight to the death for the greatest cause: one another. “We did it because we could not bear the shame of be
ing less than the man beside us,” John Muirhead wrote. “We fought because he fought; we died because he died.”

A later age would conflate them into a single, featureless demigod, possessed of mythical courage and fortitude, and animated by a determination to rebalance a wobbling world. Keith Douglas, a British officer who had fought in North Africa and would die at Normandy, described “a gentle obsolescent breed of heroes…. Unicorns, almost.” Yet it does them no disservice to recall their profound diversity in provenance and in character, or their feet of clay, or the mortality that would make them compelling long after their passing.

Captain George H. Revelle, Jr., of the 3rd Infantry Division, in a letter to his wife written while bound for Sicily, acknowledged “the chiselers, slackers, people who believe we are suckers for the munitions makers, and all the intellectual hodgepodge looking at war cynically.” In some measure, he wrote on July 7, he was “fighting for their right to be hypocrites.”

But there was also a broader reason, suffused with a melancholy nobility. “We little people,” Revelle told her, “must solve these catastrophes by mutual slaughter, and force the world back to reason.”

Across the great southern rim of the Mediterranean they staged for battle, the farm boys and the city boys, the foresters and the steelworkers and at least one horse mill fixer. Much of the American effort centered in Oran, two hundred miles west of Algiers on the old Pirate Coast, where billboards above the great port now advertised Coca-Cola and Singer sewing machines. Two of the five U.S. Army divisions that would participate in the
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assault mustered in Oran. The 2nd Armored Division had begun loading on June 21 after traveling five hundred miles by rail across the Atlas Mountains from bivouacs in Morocco, where locust swarms had dimmed the sun and training began at four
A.M
. to avoid the midday heat: temperatures could reach 140 degrees inside a tank. Only a hundred flatcars in all of North Africa were sufficiently sturdy to carry a thirty-two-ton M-4 Sherman, and the division’s journey had taken a month; the erratic French colonial rail system so enraged one captain that he forced the engineer at gunpoint to keep moving.

Among
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units, the 45th Infantry Division, comprising 21,000 soldiers in 19 ships, plus 46,000 tons of equipment—including 4 million maps—in 18 others, was unique in sailing directly from Hampton Roads to Sicily, with a one-week stop in Oran. Its embarkation in Virginia on June 8 had been beset by the usual SNAFUs, TARFUs, and JANFUs: a frantic, last-minute plea to the War Department for mine detectors; the diaspora of an engineer battalion across all nineteen troopships; and the
stunned realization that the Army landing craft crewmen with whom the division had trained for weeks on the Chesapeake Bay had been abruptly ordered to the Pacific, to be replaced by Navy crews unfamiliar with both the 45th Division and the boats they were to man. Also, by the time the nineteenth ship slipped her lines, AWOLs had become so numerous that one regimental stockade was dubbed Company J, for jailbird. Still, the passage was pleasant enough: Red Cross girls passing out paper cups of iced tea; “Happy Hour” boxing matches on the weather deck; messboys dancing on the fantail as steward’s mates beat time with their hands on the taffrail; afternoon naps in lifeboats swaying from their davits. One officer played classical music over his ship’s public address system; when the contralto Marian Anderson sang “Ave Maria,” a sailor remarked: “God, but isn’t it good to hear a woman’s voice again?”

The 45th was a National Guard division, among eighteen that had been federalized early in the war. Some Regular Army officers sneered that “NG” stood for “no good,” and most of the Guard’s senior officers had been purged by the War Department for age or incompetence. But the Pentagon considered the 45th—known as the Thunderbirds—“better prepared than any division that has left our control to date.” They were westerners, with one regiment derived from Colorado mining camp militias like the Wolftown Guards and the Queen’s Emerald Rifles. Two other regiments hailed from Oklahoma, and their ranks included nearly two thousand Indians from fifty-two tribes, including Cherokee, Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, and Navajo. On the night before the departure from Virginia, an artillery captain had organized a spirited war dance around a roaring council fire.

Now their week in Oran was up and the Thunderbirds shuffled back to the ships, at least a few emerging from the red-light district known as Chancre Alley. “I know I have a fighting outfit,” said their commander, Major General Troy H. Middleton. “I can tell that from the provost marshal’s report.” Up the gangplanks they trudged; at the top each man received a life vest and a tiny bottle of brandy against seasickness. Finance officers brought aboard $2 million for the division payroll, drawn from the Bank of Oran; when a sack stuffed with ten thousand dimes burst and scattered coins across the deck, a quick-thinking officer called the troops to attention while paymasters crawled around the immobilized soldiers, scooping up coins.

Along with the money and the ninety tons of maps, stevedores had loaded two hundred Silver Stars, six thousand Purple Hearts, and four thousand other decorations for valor; in the coming months those medals proved but a down payment on the courage required of the 45th. As the ships began to warp away from the Oran piers on the afternoon of July 4,
some soldiers pulled out bricks to use as whetstones: General Patton had inspected the division a few days earlier and declared their bayonets too dull for the harsh work ahead.

Three hundred and forty crow-flying miles east of Algiers, more U.S. legions prepared for battle in the treeless flats around Lake Bizerte, a shallow bay south of Tunisia’s second-largest city. In early May, the retreating Germans had scuttled a dozen ships atop one another like jackstraws across the bay’s narrow neck; Navy salvage divers for weeks trisected the sunken vessels with saws and acetylene torches, then dynamited the sandy bottom beneath the hulks to blow the wreckage
down
and reopen the channel.

Now Lake Bizerte presented “a solid forest of masts”: LSTs and LSIs (landing ship, infantry) and LCTs (landing craft, tank) and the eleven other species of amphibious vessels. Ancient French hydroplanes and rusting scows, destroyed in the Tunisian campaign, lay half submerged along the shore, cluttering the waterway so that cumbersome landing craft routinely “ran into sunken ships, each other, on the rocks, and into anchored vessels,” one witness reported. Popular doggerel held that “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can steer an LST.” Luftwaffe raiders sometimes sneaked across the Sicilian Strait before dawn, waking the sleeping camps but rarely inflicting much damage. Alarms wailed, smoke generators churned out a thick gray blanket to hide the ships, and searchlight batteries impaled the planes on their beams as hundreds of antiaircraft guns threw up fountains of fire around the lake. Those on deck sheltered under the lifeboats from the spent fragments that fell like steel hail. On other occasions, German propaganda flights showered Tunisian villages with leaflets: “The day has come to fight against the Anglo-Americans and the Jews…. Bring up your children to hate them.”

Here had gathered three of the Army’s most celebrated units: the 1st and 3rd Infantry Divisions, and, farther south near Kairouan, the 82nd Airborne Division. In a scheme that would be replicated before Normandy, troops were assigned to areas coded by state and city: a regiment might bivouac in “Florida,” with battalions at Miami, Daytona, and Jacksonville, or in “Texas,” at Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth.