NOVEMBER 8, 1942
ATLANTIC OCEAN
OFF THE COAST OF CASABLANCA, MOROCCO
0215 HOURS
Major General George S. Patton is eager to fight.
No more Louisiana war games. H hour for Operation Torch is two hours away. The enemy is Vichy France, not Nazi Germany. For the first time in twenty-four years, Patton will taste real combat. He is up and wide awake, showering, shaving, and dressing in his tailored battle uniform. Eager. Impatient.
Ready.
The steel deck is steady beneath Patton’s polished boots. USS Augusta is six hundred feet long and just sixty-six feet at the beam, yet barely sways from side to side. This is extraordinary news.
The general is trim, maintaining fitness during the Atlantic crossing by running in place in his quarters. Patton’s custom holster belt will still buckle easily over his hips. Though known for his personal eccentricities, the donning of the pistols can wait until just before going ashore at 0800. Strolling the decks of a warship wearing ivory-handled revolvers is too much, even for the idiosyncratic George S. Patton.
Days ago, swells were running at eight feet, the breakers crashing onto beaches far too high for putting men and equipment ashore safely. With winter storms coming, today’s landing date is as late in the year as war planners dare schedule the invasion. Poor weather would mean pushing to spring. So these flat seas elate the general. “Dead calm, no swell—God is with us,” he writes in his journal.
The Augusta cruises eight miles out to sea. Patton’s stateroom for the Atlantic crossing is among the most well-appointed in the Navy, once even used by President Roosevelt for a 1941 meeting off the Newfoundland coast with Winston Churchill. But after two weeks of relative luxury, the general is impatient for the Spartan rigor of battle.
Patton strides onto the main deck and stands at the rail. A new moon makes for a dark night on the water. He studies the silhouette of Casablanca. “Lights at Casa burning,” Patton notes, gazing toward land. The city’s profile is low, save for the towering El Hank Lighthouse rising from a rocky bluff like a towering waterfront minaret. Its glaring searchlight still guides ships into port, Casablanca’s defenders having no idea that over one hundred Allied vessels bob unseen offshore.
The Moroccan city’s population is just over a quarter million, not including the European refugees filling its hotels and guesthouses. These transients are exotic and pedestrian, Jew and Gentile, giving the city a vibe one Operation Torch planner describes as “half-Arabian, half-European, and half-Hollywood.” Pleasure craft anchor in the protected harbor. French warships such as the Jean Bart dock quayside. Somewhere in the darkness bristles a hidden thicket of coastal artillery batteries. El Hank, given its strategic location, has a battery all its own, perhaps the most formidable in all Casablanca—every single onshore gun pointed straight out to sea.
Mysteriously, the lighthouse’s powerful beam goes dark at 0300.
Operation Torch will simultaneously drop 100,000 American troops on landing beaches in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. General Dwight Eisenhower, newly appointed supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in North Africa, supervises the overall operation.
Patton commands the western sector, focused on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. The landing beaches at Oran and Algiers in the Mediterranean will require British assistance, but Patton’s force of 33,843 is all American.
Although Morocco is a colony of France, none of Charles de Gaulle’s Fighting French troops are taking part. General de Gaulle has long suspected the Allies of planning this invasion. Yet he has been kept in the dark, given absolutely no information about when or where Torch might occur, for the Americans are backing a very different Frenchman to take charge of all those Vichy forces in North Africa who might choose to surrender and change sides.
The suave, undeniably brave, and equally dimwitted General Henri Giraud was Charles de Gaulle’s commanding officer just prior to the war during a posting to the garrison at Metz in eastern France. Giraud still considers the Fighting French leader his subordinate, showing superiority by using the less formal “Gaulle” when addressing him, rather than full name or rank.
But Charles de Gaulle is not cowed.
On May 13, 1940, just three days into the war, the sixty-one-year-old Giraud, a square-shouldered, balding man with a thick black mustache, blundered into a German patrol while conducting reconnaissance in the Ardennes. He was taken captive and imprisoned in Germany’s Königstein Fortress, a four-century-old castle on the river Elbe. After two years of planning he escaped by lowering himself down steep castle walls using a rope he wove in secret from bedsheets and strands of wire, then leapt onto a moving train. He connected with the British SOE. The commandos provided Giraud with money, clothes, and identity papers, allowing him to finally reach the safety of Gibraltar. Giraud’s escape is a courageous tale, most appealing to an American president hitching his wagon to a genuine French hero. Not surprisingly, like an ancient storyteller again and again spinning an epic saga, Giraud never tires of sharing his story in dramatic detail. For good measure, he sometimes tells the story of his World War I POW escape involving a circus and legendary nurse Edith Cavell.
But it is not solely General Giraud’s bravery that so enamors the Americans—and, to a lesser extent, an increasingly exasperated Winston Churchill. It is de Gaulle himself. The general has grown intractable in the defense of his Fighting French, even smashing a chair during a Downing Street meeting with the prime minister. De Gaulle’s fondness for comparing himself with Joan of Arc, whom he claims to be a distant relative, strikes many in Allied leadership as pretentious and off-putting.*
General de Gaulle has many things going for him, including a Fighting French army of 50,000 men stationed throughout Africa and the Middle East. He also enjoys increasing loyalty from the French Resistance, now nearly unified under the leadership of Jean Moulin. But no one really likes him. General Henri Giraud—pliable, vainglorious, and all too eager to accept any compliment sent his way—is much easier for the Allies to manage.
So, as far as the Americans are concerned, General Charles de Gaulle should just go away.
If not for Winston Churchill’s support, the general might already be gone.
General George S. Patton’s infantry will land on a broad sandy beach eighteen miles north of Casablanca, at a resort known as Fedhala. Paratroopers will secure the main airfield. Three columns of mighty M4 Sherman tanks will put ashore at Safi, 140 miles south. Infantry and armor will then race to capture the heavily defended naval base at Casablanca, attacking from opposite directions.
The conquest will not be easy. Vichy defenders number more than 55,000, armed with a complement of 120 tanks and almost 200 fighter and bomber aircraft—of which more than half were manufactured in the United States and purchased before the war.
In addition, Casablanca is defended by submarines, destroyers, lightweight cruisers, and the half-built Jean Bart. The warship was still under construction as France fell. In a dramatic getaway, Jean Bart survived an unintentional grounding in shallow waters and then bombing by German Heinkel bombers while fleeing the shipyard at Saint-Nazaire. She limped across the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, still missing her primary turrets. Yet, unfinished as she might be, Jean Bart is still quite capable of opening fire from her main battery on the bow, four-barrel fifteen-inch guns with an accurate range of twenty-five miles, more than capable of pulverizing the American landing force all the way north on Fedhala beach with two one-ton shells per minute.*
Patton has drilled his men relentlessly in the eleven months since America entered the war. His new style of tank warfare is his own version of blitzkrieg. Tanks and other vehicles are always on the move, remaining fifty yards apart to prevent a bunched target. Infantry follows close behind. This style has worked splendidly for Erwin Rommel and the German panzers but remains unproven by an American force.
Thus, Patton has prepared for this morning with furious attention to detail. Training took place in the searing heat of California’s Mojave Desert, offering the best available simulation of North Africa. Troops were instructed to protect their skin from the sun’s debilitating rays by keeping sleeves rolled down at all times. Patton rationed water so his men would train their bodies to do without. Over and over, he repeated that movement is vital. Digging a foxhole is no different from digging a grave.
“When the great day of battle comes,” he writes in a letter to his troops during the Atlantic crossing, “remember your training.”
To avoid enemy detection, the task force has sailed from several American ports, traveling 4,000 nerve-racking miles across ocean prowled and dominated by German U-boats.* These submarines have devastated convoys of merchant marine vessels carrying vital war supplies to England and are more than capable of sinking all 102 aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, tenders, and assorted other vessels of the naval task force.
“And remember above all that speed and vigor of attack are the sure roads to success and you must succeed—for retreat is as cowardly as it is fatal. Indeed, once landed, retreat is impossible. Americans do not surrender,” the general admonishes his men.
And yet, Patton has long been unsure Operation Torch will succeed. The enormity of transporting an invasion force across thousands of miles of dangerous ocean, the determination of a defensive army fighting for territory they call their own, and temperamental autumn weather has him fearing this could be “a very desperate venture.”
But as the general himself writes, there is no turning back.