THE CAREER OF Albert Speer continued on the rise. He might have been thrown in at the deep end after the death of Fritz Todt back in February, but Hitler’s favourite young architect certainly appeared to have risen to the challenge. By the autumn, armaments numbers were most definitely on the up: more tanks, more ammunition, more guns, more submarines and more aircraft – only by around 30 per cent on average, but the line on the graph was definitely heading in the right direction.
Speer, however, was not responsible in any way for either U-boat or aircraft production; rather, his remit was for the armaments needs of the army only – that is, around 40 per cent of total armaments production. Furthermore, over and above his Armaments Ministry there remained the Zentrale Planung. He had also benefited from the earlier rationalizations that both Todt and even General Thomas had put in place, and from the fact that Fritz Sauckel, the man in charge of German labour supply, favoured Speer over the Luftwaffe’s and Kriegsmarine’s requirements.
However, this was frankly neither here nor there, because the perception was that Speer had single-handedly taken the armaments industry by the scruff of the neck and given it a good shake. What’s more, unlike his colleagues in the procurement offices of the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe, Speer had access to Hitler – which was one of the reasons Sauckel was favouring his ministry over other demands. This meant he could become the public face of the new armaments drive – and take much of the credit – without anyone spoiling the illusion. As the Nazis had proved very cleverly before the war, projecting an impression of military might was very important even if it belied a somewhat different reality. Speer recognized that this still held true.
Promoting this renewed armaments drive was, he understood, an important part of the job. After the setbacks of the previous winter, both the soldiers at the front and the German people as a whole had to believe that this new armaments drive would bring about a change in German fortunes, and so he had moved very quickly to make himself its public face. Unlike Todt, Speer painted no picture of doom and gloom but one of unbridled optimism, even though to do so was simply encouraging the Führer to continue with a war that could no longer realistically be won. Hitler, who always liked being told what he wanted to hear, lapped it up. So did the German people.
Propaganda was key, and in pushing the armaments drive to the forefront he found a willing collaborator in Joseph Goebbels, whom he knew well from his time in Hitler’s inner circle. Suddenly, tank and shell factories were given plenty of air time on Die Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels, with the dashing young armaments minister pinning medals to foremen and factory workers and making rousing speeches. When the new, cheaper machine gun, the MG42, was launched that autumn – a direct result of Thomas’s demands for simpler weapons the previous December – it was done so with a flourish. ‘The best weapons bring victory,’ was the mantra, along with a claim that this new miracle weapon could fire at a staggering rate of 3,000 rounds per minute.1 This, of course, was nonsense, but even at 1,400 rounds per minute it was still the world’s fastest. That such a rate of fire was still way more than British and US equivalents, or that such a rate of fire brought as many problems as benefits, was understandably kept very quiet.
The truth was, those fundamental shortcomings of Germany’s situation three years into a war they had intended to fight as a series of short, sharp campaigns had not gone away. German industry was still hopelessly short of the resources needed, it was still over-engineering, and although Speer was attempting to make savings and increase efficiency, there was much that counted against that: a lack of space, a largely inefficient workforce based increasingly on forced labour and a culture of production that was changing only very slowly.
At Debden in Essex, in eastern England, a grand ceremony had been held on 28 September to formally transfer the American volunteers of 133 Eagle Squadron RAF over to the embryonic US Army Air Force 4th Fighter Group. ‘It is with great personal regret that I today say goodbye to you whom it has been my privilege to command,’ said Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, the C-in-C of RAF Fighter Command.2 ‘You joined us readily and of your own free will when our need was greatest.’ Yet despite this formal handover and although they had officially become 336 Fighter Squadron, the switch from RAF to USAAF had, in reality, been a little more gradual. Through October they continued flying the RAF Spitfires, although the roundels were gradually replaced with the white star used by the USAAF, and in ones and twos they trooped off to London to pick up khaki green jackets and A2 leather jackets to replace their RAF blues and Irvin sheepskins.
The first two Spitfires to be given US markings were those of Dixie Alexander and Jim Goodson. They had not stopped flying, but the new squadron had not been on an official USAAF fighter mission yet, so Goodson and Alexander started badgering the CO, Don Blakeslee, to let them head over to France on a ‘rhubarb’, or nuisance raid, as a pair. Blakeslee liked the idea well enough and so put it to Brigadier-General ‘Monk’ Hunter, the C-in-C of Eighth Fighter Command, the US Eighth Air Force’s fighter component. Hunter, who expected the 4th needed to harness a bit of identity and spirit, agreed.
On 29 October, at around 2.25 p.m., Goodson and Alexander took off and headed out down the Thames estuary and under the grey clouds over the Channel. They were so low it felt as though they were almost skimming the waves, but it was important to keep below German radar. Alexander was leading and Goodson following and they made landfall exactly where they had intended at Gravelines, then turned east, so that almost immediately they were over Dunkirk. Hurtling down the big canal, they fired on a large barge they guessed would probably be carrying coal. Then they saw Ostende, but kept going until they reached Bruges. It was off-limits for bombing but not strafing and they soon spotted a train with its steam up. Flak was rising up and they had to do a lot of jinking and stomping on the rudder as they lined up their targets. Gun button to fire, the judder of the plane as bullets and cannon shells spat from the gun ports, and in a flash they were over, still hugging the deck, the flak arcing over them harmlessly. They turned north, roared over a cyclist on a quiet country road, which made him topple over, then in a flash they were back over the sea and heading home. They touched back down at 4.10 p.m.
Both men gave the intelligence officer an appropriately modest report, forgetting this was the 4th’s first mission and there was a host of newly arrived press men hungry for news. ‘At dawn today,’ ran a piece in the US forces newspaper, Stars and Stripes, ‘fighter planes of the US Eighth Army Air Force carried out daring low-level attacks on rail, road, and water transport in Northern France and Belgium, leaving behind a trail of destruction.’3
Blakeslee was furious. He’d been in the RAF long enough to know that a fighter pilot should never boast, or ‘shoot a line’. Seeing Goodson, he said, ‘All right, where’s the other half of the Eighth Air Force?’
Both Goodson and Alexander protested their innocence. ‘All I claimed was one bicycle damaged,’ Goodson told him.
It hadn’t been quite the glorious level of destruction claimed by Stars and Stripes, but the 4th Fighter Group was now up and running, with its first combat mission under its belt.
Also now over in Britain was the recently promoted Captain Gabby Gabreski. Back in the summer, while still stationed in Hawaii, he and his fellows had been visited by a number of US Navy fighter pilots, including Butch O’Hare, who had won a Medal of Honor. Talking to them, Gabreski had realized the US Navy had it pretty much sewn up in the Pacific and that the USAAF was not going to get much of a look in. That had set him thinking. He wanted to get involved. More than that, with his Polish roots, he wanted to get over to Europe; he felt very strongly about what the Nazis had done to Poland. Furthermore, having read about the Polish squadrons in the Battle of Britain, he now wondered whether maybe he could get himself assigned to one of their squadrons in the RAF in England. It was a long shot, but he reckoned it had to be worth asking the question.
Much to his surprise, his squadron commander thought it a good plan and agreed to pass it up the line. Months went by and Gabreski had pretty much given up hope, but then a wire arrived from the War Department telling him to report to Eighth Air Force HQ for further processing to a Polish fighter squadron. He was to stop en route in Washington and take a week’s leave, then head over the Atlantic.
For a reason he never quite understood, in Washington he was issued with a civilian passport then put on a Yankee Clipper to Lisbon, from where he flew to neutral Ireland before finally reaching England. Heading straight to Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Bushy Park, south-west London, he was slightly surprised to discover only about twenty people there and in what appeared to be complete confusion. No one seemed to know anything about him or his assignment to join the Poles. Instead, they gave him a pass for a hotel in town and told him they would be in touch. At the hotel, he was in for another surprise. One of its walls was completely missing: his room consisted of three walls and a tarpaulin. He had come from Hawaii to England in October: a cold, damp land of three-walled hotels.
Back at Eighth Air Force HQ, they still couldn’t sort out his transfer to the Poles, so he was made a ferry pilot instead and told to go to Prestwick in Scotland, where aircraft from the States were being received. He flew a P-38 twin-engine fighter, a P-39 and B-17s and B-24s too. It was all quite interesting and good experience, he supposed, but wasn’t the reason he’d come over to Britain. Gabreski hadn’t given up yet, however. By hook or by crook, he was going to join those Poles.
Across the Channel, Siegfried Bethke, now a Hauptmann, was still one of the few Luftwaffe fighter pilots to have been based continuously in the West. His Jagdgeschwader JG2 had, from time to time, moved up and down the Channel coast, but now he was back in Cherbourg, a place for which he had no affection at all.
The summer had been marked by an invasion scare, but since the Dieppe Raid the heightened alert had been downgraded. Bethke was struggling, however, and had been for some time. Although he was continuing to shoot down enemy aircraft, his love of flying had been replaced by fear; Bethke was losing his nerve. ‘I have a proper fear of the Channel and Spitfire “fantasies”,’ he had jotted in his journal.4 ‘I can no longer lead the squadron, because I get alarmed at even the smallest group of enemy fighters. I have a proper fear, and I am afraid that my pilots will find out. But mainly it is the water. Defensive fighting over land would not be so bad, but the moment I start thinking about water, it is over for me.’ That had been back in May, but somehow he managed to continue to dig deep, to fly and lead his men; a few weeks after that confession, he shot down two Spitfires in one sortie. Then he was posted briefly to Paris for some courses, flew numerous missions during the Dieppe Raid and by the autumn was still both flying and leading his Staffel. It was typical of the Luftwaffe that someone should still be leading a front-line squadron in Bethke’s condition. And he had been in JG2, at the front, since May 1940. It was inconceivable that a British or American pilot would have had such an excessive tour.
By September he was utterly sick of the war, praying constantly for bad weather and panicking more than ever over water. ‘I will call the group today,’ he wrote on 6 September, ‘and ask to talk to the group commander.5 I can no longer lead the squadron with the necessary enthusiasm and courage. I can’t look at the water any more, and I get all worked up when I hear the word Spitfire.’ His case went all the way up the chain to General Adolf Galland, the C-in-C of Fighters, and finally, in October, he was posted to southwest France as an instructor at a replacement training unit where fresh pilots were prepared for combat. He could not have been more relieved.
Also still in the West was Leutnant Heinz Knoke, who had been stationed in Norway with JG1, but back in June had been posted to Jever, near Wilhelmshaven, with his Gruppe and there placed under the command of the Fliegerkorps XII Experimental Unit as a test pilot. This was so that he could test the new ‘Y’ System ultra-short-wave radios. This was a greatly improved long-distance radio, which would massively enhance both in-flight communications and those with ground controllers down below. Finally the Luftwaffe were creating the kind of air defence system Britain had developed before the war – one in which a more centralized control could follow any approaching enemy formation through a combination of radio interception, radar and ground observers. This information was then fed out to a series of regions rather like those of RAF Fighter Command and to both flak units and fighter ground controllers.
As with the British system, there were now concrete bombproof shelters with large map tables, a raised dais on which the controllers sat, and female plotters. Knoke was given a detailed tour. ‘A glance at the map,’ he noted, ‘is all that is required to obtain a complete picture of the changing situation at any given moment.’6 He had been mightily impressed. Had the Luftwaffe known the RAF had much the same system back in 1940, perhaps they would not have begun the Battle of Britain with quite the same level of over-confidence.
In terms of night defence, the Himmelbett system seemed to be working well too. A newer, more efficient ground radar system, Würzburg-Riese, had been put in place, and by now Hauptmann Helmut Lent, the leading night ace, and nearly all the Nachtjagd pilots were using onboard Lichtenstein radar. Because the Germans had not developed the cavity magnetron, Lichtenstein was not as sophisticated as the British and American sets. The Mk VIII AI (Air Interceptor) used by the British had a range of around 5½ miles and a sharply focused beam that meant it avoided ground reflections even at pretty low levels. Nor did it really have a minimum range. Currently being developed were an improved Mk IX version and a British variant of the US SCR-720, which could pick up a scan of between plus-50 and minus-20 degrees and, like the Mk VIII, in a very focused way.
Lichtenstein, in contrast, had a maximum range of 2 miles and minimum range of around 200 yards, and still meant having enormous and complex antennae, which caused terrible drag and acted like an air brake. British and American radar was onboard and so presented no such problems.
Even so, Lichtenstein was certainly helping. Of the 531 RAF bombers that had been shot down between June and August, the Nachtjagd had claimed 349 of them.
There were also new aircraft coming into service. By the beginning of October, Heinz Knoke was testing the new Messerschmitt 109G, the ‘Gustav’. This was the same aircraft that had dramatically caught fire and killed Jochen Marseille, but Knoke jotted in his diary on 2 October that it was ‘definitely superior’ to the Spitfire.7 Later that day, Knoke learned of the death of Marseille and the circumstances in which he had died. Then, at around 12.15 p.m. they had an alert: a Mosquito was reported in the Oldenburg area. With Feldwebel Hans-Gerd Wenneckers as his wingman, off they flew, climbing quickly, but Knoke noticed Wenneckers falling behind. By the time they had reached 12,000 feet, he had lost sight of him altogether. Knoke called him on the radio, but got no reply, then noticed the flaming wreckage of an aircraft on the plain below. Was this Wenneckers, he wondered.
Knoke never caught up with the Mosquito on this occasion and so, descending in a handful of wide spirals, he headed back to Jever. On landing, however, there, much to his surprise, was Wenneckers, laughing at Knoke’s shocked expression. The sergeant-pilot then explained that his Gustav had suddenly caught fire mid-air for no apparent reason – in exactly the same way as the plane Marseille had been flying had done. They were all baffled. And apparently, a Gustav in 4/JG1 had also caught fire in the same way. ‘I begin to look at my plane,’ jotted Knoke, ‘with some misgiving.’8
Back in 1940, the Me109E – or ‘Emil’ – had been unquestionably the finest fighter aircraft in the world. It could do the three things a modern fighter needed to do better than any other: it could climb fast, dive fast, and with its fifty-five seconds’ worth of ammunition and combination of cannons and machine guns, it had better fire-power than any other operational single-engine fighter at that time.
By 1942 standards, however, its airframe design was beginning to creak. The enclosed cockpit, cut into, rather than above, the fuselage, and straps of metal between the Perspex meant the pilot had poor visibility. The biggest problem of all, however, was that the Me109E had swiftly been overtaken in terms of performance. The ‘Friedrich’ had redesigned wings, improved overall aerodynamics and beefed-up Daimler-Benz 601 engine, but still only managed 1,300 HP, so that, although it had an improved performance on the Emil, it still wasn’t enough. What was needed was a bigger engine, and that came in the form of the Daimler-Benz 605, which gave it 1,455 HP. Since the Friedrich, all armament had been moved to the central engine cowling area: two machine guns were placed between the cylinder banks and a single cannon was placed so that it fired through the centre of the propeller hub. This was a bit of a fiddle to mount. Furthermore, the DB605 was some 250kg heavier than the DB601 and also performed poorly at low speeds. Flying straight and level, the Gustav was quick enough and it could fly up to 40,000 feet but had lost some of its agility.
And then there were those fires that kept breaking out. In almost every way, the Gustav was more complicated and difficult to build than the Emil, yet one economy was the switch from ball bearings to plain bearings in the engine. It was, on the face of it, a small thing, but was typical of the somewhat haphazard approach the Germans had: excessive over-engineering on one hand, but corner-cutting on the other; there never seemed to be a happy medium between practicalities and high design spec. This meant the bearings were roller-bearings rather than cylindrical, which in turn meant there was more friction. These would overheat more quickly; with half-decent lubricants this would not have necessarily mattered, but with poor synthetic lubricants, the bearings and metal around them would get so hot the oil within the engine would combust. Hence the engine fires.
The truth of the matter was that the Me109 had peaked with the Emil and Friedrich and, because of its early 1930s designed airframe, had no real development scope left by the time the Gustav was being proposed. What was needed was a new fighter entirely, but at the time, the FW190 had problems of its own and Feldmarschall Milch had been forced to climb down on making it the priority Luftwaffe single-engine fighter. To meet the rising aircraft production in Britain and the USA, time had been very much of the essence, and there certainly had not been enough of that precious commodity to go back to the drawing board.
So the Gustav had got the nod and had been a central part of the rationalization of the Luftwaffe that he was now overseeing. This, Milch had realized, was absolutely essential because it was the only chance they had of implementing any kind of mass production. Two projects that had already absorbed far too much time, money and effort were the Me210 – the planned replacement of the Me110 twin-engine fighter – and the Heinkel 177 four-engine heavy bomber. Both projects were now scrapped; painful though this was, Milch believed they had no choice but to cut their losses. From now on, all available capacity was to be focused on just a few models that had already been tried and tested. In the case of the bombers, it was the 1934 vintage Heinkel 111 and the Ju88. The Ju88 was renamed the Ju188 – ‘so that the enemy gets the impression it’s something new,’ admitted Milch.9
Yet there were other battles to be fought in Milch’s drive to increase production, not least Sauckel’s favouring of Speer’s and the Army’s requirements, so that Milch’s factories never had as many workers as they might otherwise have done. Then there was the problem of materials allocations, which were never enough. This was a particular source of frustration because, as with most other areas of the Nazi armaments production, there was always wastage, even now at a time when the industry was supposed to be economizing and becoming more efficient. He had, for example, sent inspectors around some of Germany’s shipyards and at the end of August they had reported seeing large quantities of steel lying about doing nothing at Wilhelmshaven, Kiel and Hamburg. When asked, workers said these had been there for years.
None the less, by November 1942, German aircraft production was significantly on the rise.10 Costs were plunging as manufacturers became more efficient. And as costs fell, so unit numbers rose. In the second half of 1941, Germany had produced, on average, a total of 870 aircraft per month. During the second half of 1942, that average had risen to 1,341 per month and the line on the graph was still going upwards.
The trouble, though, was that greater quantity was coming at a qualitative cost.
Out at sea, the invasion fleets were steaming towards North Africa – one travelling 3,000 miles from the United States and two travelling more than 1,000 miles from Britain. In all, some 370 merchant vessels and a further 300 warships had been assembled for what was the world’s largest armada ever and the biggest seaborne invasion in the history of the world. The plan for TORCH had been agreed only two months earlier, yet miraculously the three task forces were out at sea and all appeared to be on schedule after what had been a truly breathtaking planning operation; just working out and writing all the various orders was a feat in itself and one that had taken four days of near-continuous dictation to two teams of stenographers.
Commander-in-Chief of the Naval Forces was Admiral Cunningham, the former C-in-C of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. After long years of evacuations and attrition in the Mediterranean, it made a good change to be commanding such a mighty force and yet, as he was well aware, there was much that could go wrong.
He arrived at Gibraltar on 1 November and installed himself in the recently built tunnels under the Rock – a feat of engineering in their own right. Here were map rooms with wall charts on which the progress of the three task forces could be monitored. U-boats had been more active on this side of the Atlantic again in recent weeks, and such huge forces were vulnerable to attack by enemy submarines. Both British and American bombers had been attacking U-boat bases and extra ASW patrols had been carried out in the Bay of Biscay. The convoys had hefty protection from their escorts too, but even so, it was a worry. On 30 October, for example, eight merchantmen had been sunk as their convoy passed by the Canary Islands. They had been nothing to do with TORCH, but the attacks had been only 100 miles south of where the Western Task Force from America would be passing.
The other worry was the weather, especially for the Western Task Force, which would be landing in French Morocco outside the Mediterranean; it was now November, after all. Sure enough, on 2 November the weather over the Atlantic began to roughen. By the following day it was worse; and by the 4th, the Western Task Force was sailing through a full-blooded Atlantic storm – precisely the kind of weather ABC and the planners had most feared.
‘Ring out the bells!’ General Alexander signalled to Churchill on 6 November.11 ‘Prisoners now 20,000, tanks 350, guns 400, MT several thousand. Our advanced mobile forces are south of Mersa Matruh. 8th Army is advancing.’ Despite this euphoria, however, bad weather had struck the Western Desert too, and air operations, so crucial for harrying the retreating enemy, had been brought almost to a standstill that same day, 6 November. On the ground, Eighth Army’s spearhead had also become bogged down in the downpours. ‘We got soaked to the skin,’ said Albert Martin, who was now back in his truck once more, ‘and freezing cold.12 We were bogged down in mashed, gritty sand and had to stop.’ Further along the coast, the Sherwood Rangers had also ground to a halt as their B Echelon – the regiment’s support troops – had tried to follow the tanks across the desert and had now become stuck. ‘The rain continued practically throughout the night,’ noted Stanley Christopherson.13 ‘We slept in our tanks. Not a very comfortable night.’
Because the remnants of the Panzerarmee had given themselves a head start and because they were mostly using the metalled coast road, the rain was not proving the hindrance it was to Eighth Army. Montgomery had intended to pursue Rommel’s broken forces, catch them and annihilate them. But they were slipping away, just as Eighth Army had done after Tobruk. Unlike Eighth Army, however, there was no obvious place to stand and fight until they got to within spitting distance of Tripoli and the Panzerarmee’s main supply base. That, however, was still a very long way away.
What’s more, the Panzerarmee remained in complete disarray, as Adolf Lamm was discovering. Lamm was thirty-two and an Unteroffizier – sergeant – and panzer radio operator who had flown to Tobruk from Athens as a replacement earlier in October. That alone had been hairy enough, as their transport had been attacked by enemy aircraft en route. Fortunately for all on board, they had managed to get away, but on reaching Tobruk he had immediately been told to head to El Daba, further east down the coast towards Alamein.
Lamm had then been sent up to the front just as the Alamein Line was collapsing and the Panzerarmee was streaming back. Hastily assembled into a tank crew with men he had never met before, they joined the retreat as the defeated Army began hurrying back westwards. The situation was utterly chaotic. No one seemed to know where Lamm should be or what he should be doing. He was now in 15. Panzerdivision, or what remained of it, but had not the faintest idea where he was; he had no map, had not served in North Africa before and, as far as he was concerned, the desert all looked pretty much the same. Nor did he have any orders for radio operations, any radio-code table, and no wavelength and no ciphers. The tank commander was equally in the dark, but they followed the others and tried to keep going.
Yet not everyone was getting away. On that Friday, 6 November, Luigi Marchese was keenly aware that the British were hot on their tails. There were no trucks, so he and his comrades were forced to march across the desert. Around noon, they paused briefly and, sitting on a rocky outcrop, Marchese decided to eat the last bit of food he had with him – a tin of meat still in his haversack. Opening it with his bayonet, he realized immediately that it had gone rotten. Despite this, he was so hungry he would have eaten it anyway, but it was horribly salty and he had run out of water; and so he remained hungry.
They soon got walking again, aware that the enemy guns had stopped firing and that the skies were now blissfully clear. ‘Our group had been reduced to a long, straggling line of a few hundred men,’ he wrote.14 Then, at around three o’clock, Bren Carriers appeared from the north. They all knew what this meant and understood why they had been left in peace by both aircraft and guns. They were now surrounded. One of the officers now ordered them to destroy their weapons and ID cards, which they did with tears in their eyes. The British troops fired a few volleys from their machine guns over their heads and approached them, while the Italians stood and waited. ‘Then, in that sandy defile,’ wrote Marchese, ‘no more shooting was heard, and there fell on us a deathly silence.’15
The same day, Major Hans von Luck and his 21. Panzerdivision Reconnaissance Battalion were in action, easily seeing off tentative British patrols far to the south. He had been brought up from Siwa early on 3 November to help support the Italian XX Corps, but had been able to do little with their armoured cars, low-calibre anti-tank and machine guns. As Tuker’s Indians and the follow-up British armour had destroyed the Italian corps, von Luck had watched the thin-skinned tanks of their allies burning. ‘It was heart-rending to have to witness how the Ariete Division,’ he wrote, ‘and the remains of the Trieste and Littorio Divisions, fought with death-defying courage.’16 But von Luck was still in radio contact with Rommel’s headquarters and had then been sent back southwest to patrol the desert above the Siwa and Giarabub oases and prevent any outflanking.
Like everyone else, he and his men suffered in the rain and wind, but on 7 November his troops made contact with General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke and his brigade of Fallschirmjäger, now only 700 strong. ‘I shall never forget the sight of Ramcke’s men coming towards us, exhausted, out of the desert,’ wrote von Luck.17 ‘For reasons of space, they had left everything behind except for weapons and water, but their morale was astonishing.’
Ramcke asked to be taken to Rommel, but the Army commander flew down to see him and von Luck instead, early the following morning. There he briefed them both, telling them of terrible scenes that were taking place on the coastal road: columns shot up and bombed, vehicles left burning, men desperately trying to keep going on foot. ‘Through Hitler’s crazy order to hold out,’ Rommel told them, ‘we lost a vital day, which cost us losses that cannot be made good.’18 He could no longer hold Cyrenaica, he explained. He intended to set up a defence line at Mersa el Brega, on the edge of Tripolitania, some 800 miles away. He was worried about the southern flank and so had decided to send von Luck reinforcements.
Von Luck thought Rommel remained unbroken, but couldn’t help but notice his profound disappointment. ‘What had become of Rommel’s proud Africa Army?’ he noted.19 ‘How depressing it must have been for him to have to give up in a matter of days all that had once been conquered in unprecedented operations.’
Yet while Hitler’s order had undoubtedly brought nothing but greater casualties, the defeat at Alamein had been because Rommel had urged his superiors to allow him to press on into Egypt. In so doing he had gone way, way past his operational reach. The responsibility for that – for putting tactical dash over sound operational reality – lay primarily with Rommel.
The bad weather had been buffeting southern England too and had delayed Eisenhower’s and Clark’s departure so that it wasn’t until 5 November that they finally left Bournemouth for Gibraltar in their fleet of B-17s. That same night, the Eastern Task Force began passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, still in complete radio silence and with the ships all blacked out. Between 7.30 p.m. on 5 November and 4 a.m. on the 7th, the entire Eastern and Central Task Forces successfully passed into the Mediterranean. It was a vast armada: together, in all three task forces, there were 107,453 men heading to the North African shores in 107 troop-ships protected by 350 warships.
Despite the size of the escort force, at 5.35 a.m. on the 7th, Allied headquarters learned that a ship in the Western Task Force, the USS Thomas Stone, had been torpedoed. There were 1,400 on board, but soon after another signal arrived with the news that the ship – with the men all still on board – was not only still afloat but being towed. She would make the landings, albeit a little late.
Meanwhile, Eisenhower and his team still had plenty of other things to worry about: the reaction of the Spanish, for one, and the whereabouts of Giraud for another. Since Seraph had gone to fetch him, there had been just one message and a cryptic one at that: ‘Task gone, radio failing.’ At the Rock, Ike had called a meeting to discuss how they should handle Giraud should he baulk at their plans. Cunningham tried to reassure them. ‘He’s thrown his coat over the fence,’ he said.20 ‘He will do what he’s told.’
Also that day, 7 November, Ultra decrypts revealed that the Germans had sighted the convoys; and Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes were spotted shadowing the Eastern Task Force. None the less, there was, incredibly, no indication that they suspected an invasion of north-west Africa, even though Berlin was aware of the massive increase in traffic at Gibraltar; rather, they seemed to think it was a large convoy to Malta or a landing aimed for Libya or even Sicily.
The weather in the Atlantic was also improving, and then came some further good news: Giraud had been safely picked up and was on his way. A Catalina flying boat was sent out to meet him and brought him to Gibraltar at around 4 p.m. that afternoon. At 5.20 p.m., Eisenhower gave the operation the final go-ahead. ‘Warning order,’ he signalled.21 ‘H-Hour confirmed November 8. For East and Centre, 1 a.m. For West, about 4.30 a.m.’
Evening, Saturday, 7 November. At Allied headquarters in Gibraltar, Eisenhower and Clark were finally talking face to face with Général Giraud. Eisenhower explained the Allied plans and told him a message had been prepared for all the French people in North Africa, to be signed by the Général, calling on them to support the invasion.
Giraud sat up stiffly. ‘Now let’s get it clear as to my part,’ he said.22 ‘As I understand it, when I land in North Africa I am to assume command of all Allied forces and become the Supreme Allied Commander in North Africa.’
Clark gasped audibly; both he and Eisenhower were thunderstruck. This was arrogance or stupidity, or both, of the highest order. How a French general, still bound to the pro-Axis Vichy, could possibly imagine he would be given command of combined Anglo-US-Franco armed forces is hard to fathom. Taking a deep breath, Clark explained that no, Giraud would not be Supreme Commander.
‘But what would the French people think of me?’ Giraud asked. ‘What about the prestige of Giraud; what about my family?’
Clearly, neither Clark nor Eisenhower could give a damn about that. Clark patiently explained that he could command French forces in North Africa but that was all.
‘Then,’ replied Giraud, ‘I shall return to France.’
‘Oh, no,’ Clark replied. ‘That was a one-way submarine. You’re not going back to France.’
It was clear Giraud was stalling and waiting to see how the invasion would pan out. All that effort and trouble in getting to him and then bringing him from France appeared to have been for nothing. The discussions continued, but Giraud wasn’t budging. Some time after 11 p.m., Clark said to him, ‘Old gentleman, I hope you know that from now on, your ass is out in the snow.’
It was, frankly, about time Giraud was brought down to earth. Henri Frenay had learned how insufferable he was earlier in the summer when one of his Combat members had met with the Général at the latter’s house in Lyons. ‘He’d been very unfavourably impressed,’ noted Frenay.23 ‘To be sure, the man was deeply anti-German and hostile to Vichy, but he was also unduly respectful of the Maréchal. Moreover, he acted idiotically self-important.’ It had also been abundantly clear that he knew nothing at all about the Resistance and that his motives were rooted entirely in self-interest rather than in any altruistic desire to help liberate the oppressed French people.
While these talks were going on, the task forces were approaching their invasion zones. Off Algiers, near the coastal towns of Oran and Arzew, the Central Task Force successfully rendezvoused with their beacon submarines. In the darkness, the men huddled together, packs on their backs and weapons slung over their shoulders. The Bowles twins in the 18th Regimental Combat Team and Bing Evans with the Rangers were in Z Sector, where they were to storm Arzew. On land, the lights of the towns twinkled in the night sky as the troops prepared to clamber on to the nets and down into the landing craft now bobbing on the water below. And from the shore, not a shot had yet been fired. Miraculously, it seemed the invasion was still a secret.
It was now Sunday, 8 November 1942. The first major Anglo-American military land operation of the war was about to begin.