Brothers, Rivals, Victors

The crescendo of coded chatter rose steadily in the Rock’s communications rooms as reports poured in faster than Ike’s senior men could digest them. But enough fragments of the picture filtered through the fog of war to allow Ike’s mind to form a discernable image of the operation. The Oran and Algiers teams had landed. French defenders at Oran had fought back hard, slaughtering American troops trying to rush the city’s harbor, but other landings were proceeding more or less as planned. Fighting was moderate to heavy, but by nine in the morning Ryder’s objective—Algiers—was in Allied hands.³

Soon more good news filtered in: Admiral Darlan, holed up in Algiers, had been captured. Blida and Maison Blanche airfields, near Algiers, had been captured. Tafaraoui Airfield near Oran was in Allied hands. With the Stars and Stripes flying over the Algerian capital, Clark and a small nucleus of Ike’s staff prepared to take their radios, files, maps, and gold swag to Algiers, where they would set up Eisenhower’s advance base.⁴

The darkest cloud that long morning was the lack of word from Patton. Ike learned through naval channels that Admiral Hewitt’s landings had commenced more or less on schedule, but apart from fragmentary messages from French sources referring to fighting around Safi, Ike received nothing from George all morning. Two messages came in from Hewitt several hours after the landings, but every time Ike’s staff called down to Signals, the colonel on duty had nothing from Western Task Force.⁵

During the agonizing intervals between reports, an idle and more or less helpless General Eisenhower passed the time scratching out a memorandum he entitled “Worries of a Commander.” The list included things like Spanish intentions, air support, and a worrisome lack of cooperation on the part of the French. The last entry, scratched in Ike’s small, efficient script, read, “We cannot find out anything.”⁶

Later that morning, Ike found a way he could make a contribution from his island prison: He made a run at convincing Giraud, who had been secretly ferried to Gibraltar, to throw in with the Allies. Face-to-face talks with Giraud had broken down the night before the invasion when the tall, touchy general insisted upon replacing Eisenhower as Supreme Commander and raved about an immediate invasion of the French coast.

Now, sensing Allied victory, the would-be Savior of France accepted the new reality and grudgingly agreed to Ike’s terms: He would order the French Army to cease resistance, in return for which the Allies would appoint him commander of all French forces in the region and Governor of French North Africa. Ike, Commander in Chief of all Allied forces, promised to cooperate closely with Giraud as they jointly drove the Axis off the continent.

No sooner had Giraud jumped into the Allied camp than Ike got the best possible news at the worst possible time. Admiral Darlan had been captured in Algiers. From house arrest, he sent word to the Allied commander that he wanted to negotiate. Having little leverage and less time to negotiate, Darlan quickly anted up his best play—the French fleet and his legal authority over Vichy Army officers. Darlan’s card unquestionably trumped Giraud’s.⁸

It wasn’t a close call. Although Ike believed Darlan to be a fascist YBSOB—Ike’s private military code for “yellow-bellied son-of-a-bitch”—he was equally certain that Darlan was the man to back. “Kiss Darlan’s stern if you have to, but get the French Navy,” Churchill had told him. But backing Darlan meant reneging on the promise he had just given to the difficult, self-important Giraud.⁹

With stress breaking like a fever, this latest political mess pushed Eisenhower to the limit of his endurance. He was livid at this quirky group of conspirators from a bad Dashiell Hammett novel, men who should have been throwing themselves at the Allied feet for the chance to liberate their country. He fumed to Beetle that he was sick of “the petty intrigue and the necessity of dealing with little, selfish, conceited worms that call themselves men,” and to Marshall he complained, “I find myself getting absolutely furious with these stupid Frogs.”¹⁰

He may have been near his breaking point with the Frogs, but the spark of optimism Ike carried in his chest, the pilot light of his soul, began to glow a little brighter as the picture crystallized. His Mediterranean forces were ashore and, thank God, they had captured enough airfields to land his Spits and Lightnings on African soil. Spanish guns had not opened up on Gibraltar’s airfield—yet—which was another positive sign. Clark was setting up shop in Algiers, and the splintered French leaders from both sides were saying they wished to talk. With any luck, the French fleet would come over before long.

Africa’s Atlantic coast has always been much more dangerous than its Mediterranean cousin. As westerly winds bear down upon the Atlantic’s choppy surface, the water begins to undulate with terrible force—a force pushed up to the surface as the ocean’s depth diminishes, producing great breaker waves that thunder against the beach with monstrous force. Since the summer, Allied meteorologists consistently predicted fifteen-foot swells for Casablanca on D-Day, far higher than the three-to-four-foot chops the smaller Allied landing craft could safely negotiate. More than the French, the Moroccan surf would be Patton’s deadliest enemy.¹¹

Through a flurry of couriers, radiograms, and message slips, what Ike needed to hear—what he was desperate for—was word from Patton’s force. Rumors, some from the Axis, some from the Allies, were unsettling. He received piecemeal reports of heavy resistance from French defenders at Casablanca, Mehdia, and Fedala, and an Axis propaganda broadcast claimed that Patton was retreating to his ships under a flag of truce. Ike scoffed at this last notion, telling Beetle, “Unless my opinion of Georgie is 100% wrong, he wouldn’t reembark anything, including himself.”¹²

But the only definite word Ike received around the time of Patton’s landing was that the battleship Texas was hovering off Rabat, using its radio transmitter to play “La Marseillaise” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” to confused Moroccan listeners. And that told him nothing.¹³

Sometime after four a.m., Admiral Hewitt radioed Gibraltar to report that the Morocco landings were proceeding on schedule. That was good news for the men on the waves, and it meant the Americans might not be fighting the heavy surf they had feared. What that meant to the men on the ground, though, no one on Gib knew.¹⁴

Four hours went by. Hewitt reported French opposition in all landing areas, and at least one French warship was firing on the landing flotilla. French sources implied that Vichy resistance was being snuffed out around Safi, but what was happening at Casablanca and Port Lyautey was anyone’s guess.¹⁵

By late morning, the splintered pieces of contradictory, incomplete, and patently unreliable information left Eisenhower’s nerves frazzled. George was definitely fighting for his life, but was he being driven back? Was he making headway? How bad were his casualties? Were the airfields open? What was the condition of the port?

As the 102-ship armada steamed toward the Moroccan coast, George tilted between nervous energy and easy confidence. On the eve of the invasion, he sought relief from the stress by reading a detective novel and went to bed at ten thirty p.m. dressed for action—his ever-present helmet, large binoculars, and boots accenting a heavy field jacket. Armored for battle, he fell asleep.¹⁶

He awoke at two in the morning and clambered up to the ship’s main deck. From there, he squinted through the inky night toward the glittering lights of Casablanca, an alluring metropolis that, he later remarked, “combines Hollywood and the Bible.”¹⁷

As the flotilla approached its target, George was more interested in Morocco’s surf than its exotic skyline. Breakers had been thrashing wildly against Casa’s shore for several days. Meteorologists and spotter planes had checked and rechecked the breaker pattern over the last few weeks, and they had consistently reported swells of eighteen feet. The pattern was so imposing, so consistent, that Eisenhower had authorized Admiral Hewitt to put Patton’s force ashore at Oran, behind Fredendall and safely inside the Mediterranean, if Hewitt felt the surf was an impassible barrier.¹⁸

The landing was a dangerous gamble, one no meteorologist worth his paycheck would have bet a five-spot on. But George was not the only gambler in the theater. Admiral Hewitt, carefully measuring the rolls and studying reports from his fleet’s van, decided to roll the dice. He ordered his task force to go ahead with the landings as planned. They would strike the enemy at Casablanca.¹⁹

Hewitt’s gamble paid off, and Neptune, to everyone’s relief, remained docile that night. Through the rhythmic circle of a French lighthouse beam, Patton, Hewitt, and the ship’s spotters could see waves teasing the shore but not hammering it. The water, so hostile to the frail Higgins boats the night before, was merely indifferent. The Americans could put ashore wherever they liked. God and His executive officer, Destiny, were still with George.²⁰

The landing craft pushed off around four forty-five a.m. French shore batteries began trading shots with Hewitt’s warships, and a few hours after Patton’s men slogged onto wet sand, the French Navy joined the fray. As the wounded but still formidable battleship Jean Bart opened its fifteen-inch guns upon the Allied fleet, a line of Vichy destroyers began shelling landing craft and firing onto the crowded, vulnerable beaches.²¹

America’s hard-charging battle commander would see little fighting this D-Day. George remained quietly at his command post aboard the U.S.S. Augusta, observing landings and staying out of the way of busy naval officers. Around eight in the morning, a Higgins boat loaded up the general’s bags to take him ashore. He had strapped on his trademark six-shooters and was standing on the Augusta’s main deck when a French cruiser steamed within range.²²

Hewitt’s gunners swung their turrets and blasted away. The roar of the great guns blanketed all other sounds, and the concussion threw George’s little transport boat off its davits, dumping its contents into the foamy sea. George’s personal gear sank beneath the choppy waves as sailors scrambled to save the boat. It was an ill omen, and a disgusted George muttered to an aide, “I hope you have a spare toothbrush with you I can use to clean my foul mouth. I don’t have a thing left in the world, thanks to the United States Navy.”²³

Worse than the loss of George’s toothbrush was the absence of his communications gear. While the Augusta had loaned the Army three radio rooms to relay messages between Morocco and Gibraltar, the hammer blows of the cruiser’s guns shook the delicate instruments so badly they malfunctioned. By the time the problem was diagnosed and corrected, many critical messages had been lost. Ashore, fragile tactical radios succumbed to salt water, misplaced ciphering equipment, rough handling, and countless incidents that made clear communications one of the first casualties of battle. Compounding the burgeoning communications problem, Navy dispatchers signaling Gibraltar failed to classify their messages as URGENT, and Ike’s signal clerks shoved those reports beneath the hundreds of URGENT dispatches pouring in from Oran and Algiers. The chain of mishaps meant a nervous General Eisenhower would know nothing of Casablanca’s fate, or Patton’s, for an uncomfortably long stretch.²⁴

Marooned aboard the Augusta for the moment, George waited while sailors fitted out another launch for him. He had a pleasant lunch with Hewitt’s officers, and at noon he learned that Ernie Harmon’s armored force had captured the beaches at Safi to the south. Buoyed by the expectation that Harmon’s tanks would be rolling north before long, George climbed down the Augusta’s cargo nets into his waiting transport. Waving to cheering sailors as his boat pulled away, George and a skeleton headquarters staff made the bouncy ride to Fedala’s beach and waded into the surf. George’s tanker boots touched African soil at one twenty p.m.²⁵

As reports filtered back that afternoon, George learned it had been a tough fight for most of his men. Harmon’s landings at Safi had gone as well as could be expected, but it would take the column a day or two to reach Casablanca. Truscott’s men, fifty miles to the north at Port Lyautey, had missed their landing zones. As they drove on their objective, they encountered rough terrain, stiff colonial resistance, and stiffer French Foreign Legionnaires, who fought the Americans for the approaches to Lyautey’s precious airfield. Anderson’s team at Casablanca, meanwhile, was facing 2,500 enemy troops at Fedala and over 4,000 enemy reinforcements. Progress, while steady, was painfully slow.²⁶

With his radio equipment in disarray, Patton could exercise little control over his subordinate units on the morning after D-Day. The waves, which had been so lethargic the day before, were building to their typically tempestuous swells. The Americans had no land-based air support, since the closest airfields were still in French hands, so George had to rely upon carrier squads offshore to keep the skies clear. Tanks were still on ships, trucks were in short supply, and communication with Gibraltar was nil.²⁷

Seeing little else he could do to affect the big picture, George launched a personal crusade to clean up the Casablanca landing zone. Using his two stars and a locked-and-loaded vocabulary to get equipment moving inland, he jumped into thigh-deep water and waded ashore a second time. Cursing and bellowing at lieutenants, beachmasters, loaders, and boatswains in equal measure, he slowly directed landing craft onto the beaches, had them unloaded, and got the empty craft shoved out to sea. Between his efforts and those of the Navy’s tireless beachmasters, the Fedala beachhead was partly consolidated by the end of the ninth. A worn-out General Patton prepared for his real work the next day.²⁸

It was not until November 9 that Ike finally heard from George, who reported that all beaches were in American hands. “At no time in the war did I experience a greater sense of relief,” Ike wrote afterward. “I said a prayer of Thanksgiving; my greatest fear had been dissipated.” On the tenth, Ike cabled his old friend, “Georgie—Algiers has been ours for two days. Oran defenses crumbling rapidly with navy and shore batteries surrendering. The only tough nut is left in your hands. Crack it open quickly and ask for what you want.”²⁹

While Ike was relieved to hear of Patton’s success in landing his men, he was heartily disappointed with the dearth of specific information reported back from Western Task Force. When Supply Services cabled from London, to ask Gibraltar whether they could begin shipping supplies and reinforcements through Casablanca’s harbor, Ike had no answer for them. A squadron of P-38 fighters was ready to leave Gibraltar for Casablanca, if Patton would confirm that he had an airfield for them to land on. Again, Ike had no answer.

With the radios silent, Ike tried to reach Morocco by courier, but French interceptors turned back the light bombers that Eisenhower sent to make contact with Hewitt and George. In desperation, Ike asked his Royal Navy fleet commander, Admiral Andrew B. Cunningham, to lend him a fast ship. Harry Butcher, hovering around Eisenhower as the long, chaotic days unfolded, remarked in his diary on Ike’s growing frustration with Patton:

[Western Task Force’s] appreciation of the need of the C-in-C for information is somewhat less than cooperative. They seem to think they are running a little war all their own. . . . Failure to get answers to two questions put to Patton 36 hours ago is bad. Where are his headquarters, and what is the condition of the port at Casa Blanca? Neither do we know the result of naval action in the west. Supply people in London calling for port information. Convoy sailings, loadings, timings, everything dependent on information, yet Patton sits like a lump on a log, tongue-tied. Maybe it’s communications, but Christ he has planes that could fly couriers with complete dope to Gib. Incidentally, outside of Navy, particularly Royal Navy, our signals have been far from satisfactory. Biggest failure of the expedition, except Patton’s silence.³²

It was not the first time this charge had been leveled at Patton; shortly after his first engagement as a battalion colonel in World War I, George got a chewing-out from his Tank Corps commander for leaving his post and wandering around the battlefield, fixing small problems when he should have been reporting the big picture back to his boss. But George was mortified when he heard of Ike’s displeasure, and tried to defuse his commander’s anger with an explanation and some tongue-in-cheek humor: “I regret that you are mad with me over my failure to communicate; however, I cannot control interstellar space and our radio simply would not work any more than yours would to me. Furthermore, the only person that lost by it was myself, as by my failure to communicate with you, the press was probably unable to recount my heroic deeds.”³³

The final push against Casablanca thrust George onto the horns of an awkward dilemma. He had decided to bombard Casablanca with Hewitt’s battleships and whatever airpower he could muster, then have Truscott, Harmon, and Anderson charge in for the kill. But Ike had ordered him to obtain his personal approval before firing on the city, and Patton’s radio connection with Gibraltar was virtually gone. The time to strike was now, he knew, but without a link to Gib, he would be putting his career in harm’s way.³⁴

He sweated out the decision at his command post: Should he wait for Ike, even if waiting meant forfeiting a golden opportunity to take the city? Or should he charge ahead and swallow the consequences? Weighing his chances, George summoned Keyes, Gay, Hewitt, and the rest and told them the coup de main would commence at 7:30 a.m. on November 11, George’s fifty-seventh birthday.³⁵

The battle lines were drawn, the tank engines revved, the gun lanyards strung for the pull. But on the morning of the assault, the French garrison commander, General August Noguès, learned of a cease-fire in Algiers. Before H-hour, word reached Casablanca that the French Navy had come over with Darlan, and Noguès joined the truce. The battle for Morocco was over.³⁶

Later that day, a sullen General Noguès and his entourage arrived at Casablanca’s Hotel Miramar to sign the surrender documents. Patton, resplendent in his Class-A, entered the hotel’s smoking room to face his second dilemma of the day: because the French had resisted the landings, his instructions from AFHQ directed him to use “Treaty C,” a harsh variation of the surrender instrument that required French soldiers to lay down their arms in complete submission. When Noguès and his delegation read this stipulation, they protested vehemently. Noguès pointed out that Morocco, a land of some eleven million restless Arabs and Berbers, was a perilous country to govern. French disarmament, Noguès warned, would lead to the collapse of French authority and invite native uprisings. The Americans would be forced to detach thousands of troops to maintain civil order—and guarantee stability along the Spanish Moroccan borderlands—while their stated business lay on the other side of the Sahara Desert.³⁷

Frowning, George grasped their point immediately. Noguès was right. But he had been directed to apply the terms of the hard-line Treaty C, and orders were orders. If he dared agree to a different settlement—and if Eisenhower didn’t back him—then AFHQ’s staffers would set upon him like a pack of mastiffs and he might be sent home. On the other hand, his communications were compromised, and he was unable to ask Ike, or even Clark in Algiers, for instructions. Once again, he was on his own.³⁸

As George’s aide wrote, “It did not take him long to decide. Rising to his full height, he picked up the familiar typescript of Treaty C and tore it into small strips.” He stared across the table at the French commanders. His blue-gray eyes aflame, George asked for their word of honor as officers and gentlemen that there would be no further firing on American troops, and that the French Army would consider itself bound by Patton’s orders. The Frenchmen nodded. With that sweeping gesture, Morocco fell into Allied hands.³⁹

George knew he was wading into political waters, and for George, political waters were always deep, murky, and teeming with carnivores. He had taken it upon himself to leave the colonial government and its army intact, contrary to orders from AFHQ, and Ike had no reason to trust Noguès, a known fascist sympathizer.⁴⁰

George appreciated the realities of the desert kingdom. Over many decades, the French had forged an effective administrative system. Emasculating the French bureaucracy might invite a revolt that would tie down soldiers who should be kicking the hell out of the Boche in Tunisia. He knew he might get into hot water with the politicos over his deal with Noguès, but he figured that in the end, Ike would back him. After all, for a cost of eleven hundred men killed, wounded, and missing, he had delivered French Morocco.⁴¹

When AFHQ’s staffers learned of George’s “gentlemen’s agreement,” they were furious, and several of Ike’s retainers sailed to Hewitt’s flagship to straighten Patton out. Speaking to them plainly, George convinced them, at least for the moment, of the wisdom of his decision. “A bunch of Ike’s staff tried to put me on the spot for not disarming the French,” he wrote in his diary that night. “I assumed the offensive, showing them that to disarm or discredit the French meant an Arab war which would mobilize 60,000 as a starter. All agreed with me at last.” George then penned a personal explanation to Eisenhower. Ike sent word back approving Patton’s arrangements with the French administrators and assured him, “As reports begin to come in from your sector, it is obvious that you have done a fine job—as I knew you would! Keep it up; the one now in front of us is, in some respects, harder than the fighting. But I know you’ll do it.”⁴²

To this George replied, “When I had to make the decision to form a Gentleman’s Agreement without any knowledge of what was going on anywhere else, I certainly thanked the just God that I was working for a man like you, because I know many generals who would have jumped all over me for not sticking to the letter of the law.” He outlined a credible case for the way he had handled the cease-fire, and then, as he was apt to do, George tossed in an impromptu postscript that reduced his eloquent report to a lower denominator: “On starting [to see the Sultan of Morocco] I was in such a rush that I forgot to button my fly. Keyes noted it and we closed the gap [because] it might have looked as if I was prepared to go all out in the harem to Produce allies!”⁴³

Even as he congratulated his friend and subordinate, Ike was more than a little disappointed with the cavalryman’s performance at Casablanca. George had taken until D-plus-3 to capture the city, and he had neglected to keep the Supreme Commander regularly informed of his progress. This told Ike that George was not considering the larger picture.

Taking a cue from Marshall, Ike was determined to keep a tighter rein on his horse soldier in the future. As he recovered from the tempest that had tossed him since the TORCH landings, Ike sent Marshall a list of seven of the operation’s “outstanding performers.”

In the hurricane’s eye, Ike had more to worry about than Patton’s negotiations over Casablanca, for the political situation in Algeria was breaking down rapidly. Clark, working from AFHQ’s advance post in Algiers, had managed to convince Darlan to come over to the Allied side and order French resistance to cease in return for being named civil governor of French North Africa. Giraud, whose influence over French troops turned out to be nil, exploded when he learned of Clark’s negotiations with Darlan, leaving a thorny problem for Ike and Clark to work out. Adding to Ike’s festering political sores, General De Gaulle notified Churchill that he wanted to send a Free French contingent to Algeria to assist the Allies. This offer placed Eisenhower between the twin forces of Churchill, who supported De Gaulle, and FDR, who thoroughly disliked the man.⁴⁵

While the political landscape in Algeria remained foggy, the military situation to the east was clear. Sadly clear, for it was plainly falling apart. In the early hours of the invasion, word of the Allied landings reached the prominent ears of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, a cunning, aggressive Luftwaffe commander whom Hitler had placed in charge of the Mediterranean theater. Known as “Smiling Albert” for his toothy grin and unflappable public optimism—much like his opposite number on Gibraltar—Kesselring was quick to send his warplanes into African skies. Messerschmitt fighters began arriving at Tunis the morning after the landings, followed by waves of Junkers medium bombers, Stuka dive-bombers, troop transports, reconnaissance planes, and rear-echelon personnel for the new Fifth Panzer Army headquarters. Under heavy air cover, Axis ships steamed into Tunis and Bizerte, offloading tons of ammunition, food, supplies, tanks, and wheeled vehicles to support the growing host.⁴⁶

On Friday the thirteenth, as Eisenhower was in the air toward Algiers, Clark and Murphy finally wrung from the Frenchmen an arrangement the Allies and French could live with. Giraud would command all French military forces in the region, but Darlan would lead the civil government in North Africa. Noguès would remain governor of French Morocco, and General Alphonse Juin, Darlan’s army commander, would lead the French field forces under Giraud’s overall command.⁴⁷

As the terms of this deal were being ironed out, Ike’s plane touched down in Algiers. Murphy and Clark quickly debriefed him, then ushered him into a conference room, where he briefly shook hands with the assemblage of would-be chieftains. He approved the arrangement, then departed as abruptly as he came.⁴⁸

In approving the Darlan-Giraud agreement, Ike sensed he was skating on thin ice. The Vichy government had collaborated with the Nazis, and Darlan and Giraud, who despised each other, were bitter rivals with De Gaulle, whose credentials as a genuine resistance fighter made his anti-Darlan propaganda credible to the British and American public. AFHQ’s political and public relations advisers feared it would look like Eisenhower had committed the Americans to work with a pro-Nazi, an image that would not go over well in the Washington Post. Ike, growing apprehensive as he thought about how the deal would look to the folks back home, hoped the firestorm would pass. But the realistic side of him feared a backlash that would reflect badly upon Marshall and the commander in chief.⁵⁰

Ike’s political instincts, as usual, were sound. In radio broadcasts, De Gaulle railed against the Allied command for bargaining with a “traitor.” Radio commentator Walter Winchell called it “a deal with the devil,” and Time accused the Roosevelt Administration of aligning itself with fascists. From bomb-ravaged London, Edward R. Murrow boomed, “What the hell is this all about? Are we fighting Nazis or sleeping with them?”⁵¹

To dampen the shock waves, the day after approving the “Darlan Deal,” Ike wrote a six-page memorandum justifying the bargain on military grounds. His reasoning privately convinced FDR and Churchill, but both men publicly distanced themselves from the arrangement as popular bitterness toward the deal swelled. In a private talk with Bedell Smith, Churchill growled that he found the arrangement thoroughly disagreeable, even if he accepted the pact as a matter of military necessity. In Washington, Roosevelt tried to deflect criticism from the press, joking with reporters about an old Balkan proverb that went, “You are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge”—though he emphasized that no decision had yet been made as to the composition of France’s successor government.⁵³

Even sequestered in the dark, dripping tunnels of Gibraltar, Ike began feeling the heat. Acutely sensitive to domestic politics, at least for an Army officer, Ike complained to Beetle that the high command didn’t understand that the Darlan Deal was necessary to allow the Allies to turn their attention toward the Germans in Tunisia. He wrote defensively to the chief, “The authorities in London and Washington continue to suffer a bit from delusion over the extent of our military control over this country. It will be a long time before we can get up on our high horse and tell everybody in the world to go to the devil!” To Mamie, whom he knew read the editorials each day, he sighed, “Many things done here that look queer are just to keep the Arabs from blazing up into revolt. We sit on a boiling kettle!!”⁵⁴

Patton, sitting on his own bubbling kettle, had become convinced of the necessity of retaining the existing French administrative structure, and he firmly supported Eisenhower’s Darlan Deal. Hearing of Ike’s woes, he wrote a letter of encouragement to his beleaguered friend. “As I see it,” he told Ike, “the French position in Morocco rests almost entirely on the mythical supremacy of France, which at the present time is represented to the Arab mind by Darlan. . . . I am fully in accord with you as to the necessity of dealing with Darlan if for no other reason than to retain this prestige. . . .”⁵⁵

George, it turned out, had been weathering criticism from local State Department officials, whose reaction to his policy of allowing Noguès to run the country’s affairs ranged from mild disappointment to outrage. George simply shrugged. He saw the bellyaching from State as a political problem, and political problems, he felt, took a backseat to military necessity. What George saw—and what Washington and London didn’t seem to grasp—was that the Allies in North Africa were not strong enough to impose martial law at one end of the continent and fight the Axis at the other.⁵⁶

Though he felt Ike had done the right thing with Darlan, a political decision, privately George felt Ike was losing his grip on the military situation. From his post in Casablanca, George concluded that the Rock-bound Supreme Commander was too detached to command his army effectively, which should have been Job Number 1 for the lieutenant general. On November 17, after trying to make sense of Ike’s directives for Morocco, he groused to his wife, Beatrice, “I am flying to Gib . . . to see Ike. He and Clark certainly need to know the facts of life. They send some of the most foolish instructions I have ever read.”⁵⁷

Winging his way to Gibraltar aboard a B-25 Mitchell bomber, George spent the day with his old friend, his first visit to Ike in nearly three months. On his return, he supplemented his diary entry with a short, caustic summary of his visit:

Flew to Gib . . . Ike lives in a cave in the middle of the rock—in great danger. His chief of staff, G-2, and G-4 are British, and so are many of his words. I was disappointed in him. He talked of trivial things. We wasted a lot of time at lunch. . . . He was nice but not enthusiastic over our war.⁵⁸

George flew back to Casablanca disillusioned by the role that Eisenhower laid out for him. He would be in Morocco, a quiet theater, for the near future, while far to his front he could see the U.S. Army, which should be thundering into Tunisia, melting into a pot of mediocrity, swimming among two defeated allies. An army losing its identity and, perhaps, some of its honor. The very thing his idol, General Pershing, never would have countenanced.

Patton would spend the rest of the war searching for a Black Jack Pershing within his old friend, but it was an expectation bound to disappoint. Eisenhower was a man whose horizons enveloped politics, industrial policy, planning, and diplomacy, fields as foreign to George as they were immaterial. A romantic at heart, George could not grasp that the era of the Pershings—and the Wellingtons, the Napoleons, even the Fochs—had given up its ghost on the fields of Flanders, and perhaps even earlier. Modern industrial wars were now waged by consensus; they were fought with production, alliance, and diplomacy as much as strategy and tactics. While battle captains would still reign on the battlefield, the supreme commanders in this new age would rise through their administrative, political, and diplomatic brilliance.

George couldn’t fathom the demands of coalition warfare. For all his willingness to embrace military technology, he was the product of bygone times—of days when a general stood or fell on his tactical acumen, and not because of his ability to tease a consensus out of clerks and bureaucrats. For that reason, he could never fully appreciate the abilities of his old friend.

Years before, Ernest Hemingway had written of the legendary Spanish bullfighters, “Those that have known the former great ones rarely recognize the new ones when they come. They want the old, the way it was that they remember it.” George had known a great one in the last war. What he could not see, what he couldn’t admit to himself, was that the world no longer needed a Black Jack. It needed an Ike.⁶⁰

While Eisenhower and Patton were hip-deep in the battle for North Africa, Omar Bradley felt the war slipping under his feet. Just as in World War I, Brad learned he was being shunted off to a division of apple-green recruits, a hard-luck bunch that General Lesley McNair had told him was in bad need of help. Turning over the 82nd to Major General Matthew Ridgway, Brad transposed his numbers and joined the 28th “Keystone” Division on June 26, bringing a skeleton staff, two aides—Captains Chet Hansen and Lew Bridge—and his driver, a bighearted Cajun named Alex Stoute, who, Brad would later appreciate, spoke French.⁶¹

Brad spent the next few weeks rooting out the causes of the division’s many problems. It wasn’t glamorous work, and he expected few plaudits from either the brass or the public. “The media were ever present,” he remembered, “on the lookout for ‘color’ and anecdotes, always hoping, I suppose, to discover a new Patton. I think they found me disappointing.” Bradley recalled one journalist writing of him, “He is not showy enough to become legend. He is not mystic enough to cause wonderment. He is tough but not cussed enough to provide narrative. In a service where personal conspicuousness is regarded with awe and something of disfavor, Bradley appears solid and stable.”⁶²

But even in his relative isolation, Brad’s talents cut through some of the haze of obscurity that surrounded him. The reporter covering the Keystone Division cautioned his readers, “[D]on’t confuse glamour with leadership. Bradley is preeminently a leader. . . . The general doesn’t only command respect; he wins devotion. That, perhaps more than anything else is responsible for the heated loyalty to his command. That more than anything else is the key to his character.”⁶³

As 1942 slid to a close, Brad had his ear to the ground. While keeping a close watch over the 28th Division’s progress, he also made time for the occasional duck hunt with the Chief of Staff, outings where his shooting prowess stood him in good stead.⁶⁴

Through the Army grapevine, Brad learned that his division would be heading to Camp Gordon Johnston, a new amphibious training center in the warm, muggy Florida panhandle. The news delighted him, for amphibious instruction meant real action; a stint in Africa, perhaps, or the Pacific, or France, could not be far off.

But Brad’s aptitude for training raw recruits—like Eisenhower’s talent in the previous war—threatened to derail his dreams of higher command. As Marshall wrote Bradley in late 1942, “I think they have asked for you five or six times to command a corps, each of which I disapproved because I thought we must not have such rapid changes in National Guard units we are trying to build up.” It looked like Brad would be stuck in Florida for the near future. But the old man admitted that he “felt rather badly” about keeping Brad at home, and he vaguely promised a “more interesting assignment” in due course.⁶⁵

While Brad squirmed in the United States, a restless Patton fidgeted on the sleepy Moroccan front. Once hostilities there had ended, the battle lines shifted hundreds of miles to the east, along the Algerian-Tunisian border. George was left on the other side of Africa, guarding the Allied rear and playing the part of ambassador with the French and the Sultan of Morocco.

To everyone’s surprise, George took to the role of diplomat exceptionally well, proving that his smooth handling of the French surrender was no beginner’s luck. On the advice of Patton’s intelligence officers, supplemented by his own intuition, Patton had left Rabat, the administrative and spiritual capital of the Muslim country, untouched by the invasion, which pleased the sultan and his court. George’s relaxed but dignified bearing at banquets, ceremonies, dances, boar hunts, parades, and reviews impressed both Moroccan royalty and the French military, while his firm hand ensured the safety of Allied supply lines from the west. He may have ruffled a few feathers with the State Department by refusing to clamp down on the Noguès clique, but as George saw it, his job wasn’t to keep the Washington Post happy. His job was to keep the supply terminal safe from Spanish, French, and Arab threats.⁶⁶

To get an idea of what was going on at the unimaginably distant front, in late November George squeezed his six-foot frame into the Plexiglas nose cone of a B-25 bomber and flew to Oran, then pushed on by car to see General Fredendall, commander of the Army’s II Corps. Fredendall, a sour Anglophobe, didn’t lift George’s mood, and Oran, hundreds of miles behind the real front, seemed almost as dull and complacent as Casablanca. George fretted to himself: “I seem to be the only one beating my wings against the cage of inaction. The others simply say how much better off we are than the people at home. I dont want to be better off—I want to be Top Dog and only battle can give me that.” He repeated his theme in a letter home to Beatrice: “I have the most awful blues today. Nothing seems to be happening and I just sit. I suppose it is because I want to go on [campaign] and have nothing to go on with. . . . I think I will go mad if we don’t get some more battles.”⁶⁷

George’s awful blues ran a deep shade of indigo around the first of December, when, over dinner with the “Sacred Family”—Eisenhower and Clark—he learned of Clark’s next assignment. Clark, Ike informed him, would command the Fifth U.S. Army for the invasion of Italy.⁶⁸

The blow hit George squarely on the chin. Clark had been a snot-nosed Army brat skipping around Fort Sheridan when George was already a commissioned officer. Now Clark, whom the War Department had promoted to lieutenant general, outranked him by a star. It was an especially bitter pill, given that Clark’s army would probably requisition Patton’s remaining combat troops, as well as the U.S. II Corps, which Fredendall, not Patton, would lead. Thinking of the ancient lands Clark would have the honor of conquering—lands he had studied as both child and adult—George could only plaster a counterfeit smile over his face and fervently wish the dinner would come to a rapid and merciful close.⁶⁹

After dinner George bemoaned, “I had expected this but it was a shock. . . . I felt so awful I could not sleep for a while.” His frustration and jealousy growing, he reacted by finding fault with the Eisenhower-Clark faction. He complained to Beatrice a few days later, “Ike and Wayne have the inside track. Their Hq certainly is a mess and gets out contradictory orders almost daily. Some day they will be found out.”⁷⁰

For all his complaints about his old friend, George was not blind to Eisenhower’s strengths. He was proud of Ike’s political talents, as well as Ike’s capacity for crafting the right solution to the big Allied problems. These were gifts George knew he lacked. He admitted to himself after one dinner meeting, “Ike certainly makes a fine impression when he talks. I was proud of him. I think that I could do better in the same job, but I seem to lack something which makes the politicians trust Ike.” ⁷¹

Eisenhower had ordered General Anderson to run pell-mell into Tunisia and capture Bizerte and Tunis before Hitler and Mussolini could reinforce those ports. But the distance from Algiers to the Gulf of Hammamet was four hundred miles, and the dirty, primitive roads skirting Africa’s coast were wholly inadequate to the task. Ike’s lightning thrust to the Tunisian capital thus turned into a piecemeal, amateurish stumble. As Ike later admitted to a New York Times reporter, “The battle line at that time was in a hell of a mess. It was the most messed up thing imaginable. We had gambled everything sending small bits and pieces from many outfits to the front to try and take Tunis and Bizerte quickly and all of the outfits were mixed up together strung out over hundreds of miles of hills and muddy country.”⁷²

Once the Allies lost the race for Tunis and Bizerte, the territory east of Tunisia’s Dorsal Mountains became a formidable Axis redoubt. During November, Italo-German transports shipped in 176 tanks, 131 artillery pieces, 1,152 vehicles, and 13,000 tons of supplies to the thousands of soldaten forming the newly activated Fifth Panzer Army. In December those numbers would grow yet again. Against this expanding force, Eisenhower fielded two overstretched groups—Kenneth Anderson’s five-division British First Army, and Fredendall’s four-division U.S. II Corps.⁷³

Unfortunately for Eisenhower, each day’s delay in the race to Tunisia meant pointed interrogatories from the Combined Chiefs, as well as “suggestions” from Allied capitals that came perilously close to telling Ike how to do his job. On November 21, after getting called on the carpet about the ill-advised publicity of his generals, he complained to Clark, “I’ve been pounded all week from the rear. Sometimes it seems that none of us in the field can do anything to the satisfaction of Washington and London.”⁷⁴

Partly to escape the python-like cable that bound him to London, on November 23 Eisenhower moved his headquarters to Algiers, where Clark and Murphy had been working since TORCH’s early days. Twenty-seven years after he first put on a soldier’s uniform, he was finally in a war zone. A convoy arrived to meet him at Maison Blanche airfield, and he moved into the Hôtel St. Georges.⁷⁵

The St. Georges was an elegant bastion of French Old World colonialism. New York Times columnist Drew Middleton described it as “a white, rambling building, decorated with hideous statues and paintings, the kind of hotel favored by elderly spinsters on Mediterranean tours.” Its fashionable decor, palm-lined courtyard, and polished mosaic floors—which now lay beneath a spiderweb of Signal Corps lines—seemed out of place for a wartime headquarters. But it was roomy enough to accommodate a respectable proportion of AFHQ’s senior staff, which would descend like the Huns on Rome and occupy much of the city before the war’s end.⁷⁶

Two days after arriving in Algiers, Ike and his official family moved their private quarters into rented villas overlooking the harbor. His house, named Villa dar el Ouard (“Villa of the Family”), was a six-bedroom rococo mansion nestled amid a patchwork of trees not far from the St. Georges .⁷⁷

Ike didn’t like the place, and he complained that the largest room, the tile-floored bathroom, was “as cold as Greenland.” Tex Lee’s girlfriend, a Red Cross volunteer, dubbed the home’s baroque decor “whorehouse French.” But the mansion was fine for entertainment, as it boasted a library, a parlor with a grand piano, a formal dining room and, before long, a Ping-Pong table, a game Ike often played with Admiral Cunningham, Harry Butcher, and other senior visitors. A few days later, a frisky Telek arrived from London, to the delight of Ike and Kay Summersby—though the Scottie added to the burdens of Ike’s other personal staffers, who considered Telek an imbecile, as dogs went.⁷⁸

Working from the St. Georges, Ike immersed himself in the operational details that consumed his days from early morning until almost midnight. He arbitrated bombing priority disputes (Luftwaffe airfields hit first), recommended currency policy (seventy-five francs to the dollar), harangued his adjutants for better rear-area security (Eisenhower’s Ford was “liberated” by passing troops), and straightened out shipping and supply tangles. He made certain the Army’s equipment—half-tracks, night-fighter radars, boots, bandages, spare tires, ammunition, mess tins, plasma, shovels, and gasoline—got to the right places, and he kept in touch with the field commanders, asking what they needed, where their troops were going, and what their plan was for getting there. He described a typical day to Mamie as “one of vexatious problems, each requiring hours of dictating, writing, scratching the head and plenty of profanity. War, politics, economics, food, munitions, jealousies, and repeat the list ad infinitum—then you have some idea of the jumble still going through my poor old head!”⁷⁹

Perhaps the toughest part of Ike’s job was that he had to answer to so damned many people. As a U.S. lieutenant general, he had to satisfy Marshall. As the senior American planner, he had to satisfy the U.S. Joint Chiefs. As Supreme Allied Commander, he had to satisfy the Combined Chiefs, which included both the U.S. and British Joint Chiefs. As the man making interim political decisions, he had to satisfy Roosevelt and the State Department. And no matter what hat he wore, he always had to satisfy Churchill, whose reach extended to anyone connected with the Allied war effort.⁸⁰

And those were just the people who outranked Ike. Eisenhower, like Marshall, considered headquarters to be servants of the field commanders and their troops. This meant Ike and his staff also had to satisfy Anderson’s British Army, the scattered U.S. II Corps, Clark’s skeleton staff for the U.S. Fifth Army, and Patton’s dwindling force guarding the back door in Morocco. He had to satisfy U.S. and British navies at sea, bomber forces operating in the skies, and fighter groups defending bombers, cities, harbors, and bases. And for all these undersupplied, self-centered, squawking constituents, Ike and his staff had to come up with answers to their problems. Problems of resources. Problems of personnel. Problems of direction.⁸¹

The dilemmas Ike struggled with daily were enough to shorten anybody’s fuse, and Ike’s was never long to begin with. He had become so distracted by political matters during the first two weeks of the invasion that he hadn’t devoted enough time to the military side. He bellowed to one associate, “For Christ’s sake, do you think I want to talk politics? Goddammit, I hate ’em. I’m sick to death of this goddamn political question!” And he told Marshall, “I have lived ten years each week, of which at least nine are absorbed in political and economic matters.” His pace was so frenetic that Marshall began to worry Ike was burning out from the “terrific pressure put on him more or less to do the impossible.”⁸²

One way Ike sought to escape the spiral of anxiety was to visit the front. He had always drawn energy from visits to the troops, for in the bivouacs politics was banished. Sheltered from the elements by a wood campfire and a canvas roof, Ike could feel like a real soldier again. He found he could relax as he quizzed the fighting men about their food, their equipment, their backgrounds, and their gripes. He loved to inspect what they were carrying, eat C-rations with them over a campfire, and talk to them under the shady wing of a parked Dakota. Those were the general’s duties Ike relished, trips that gave him a sense of freedom.⁸³

As he drove along the front in late November he saw plenty of the fighting man’s problems. The worst was the Luftwaffe’s ability to throw Stukas and Messerschmitts against them with impunity. Next came his army’s leadership; nosing around Anderson’s headquarters, Ike returned from his trip quietly worried that the pessimistic Scot was not the right man to lead the British First Army.⁸⁴

As he took stock of his army, Ike’s military worries ballooned. How, he asked himself, could he take Tunis without tactical air superiority? Would he have to abandon his cherished hopes of a “quick thrust” to the coast? How much of 1943 would be spent tied to this desert wasteland? These were the problems that bore down on Ike as he saw the front from the perspective of his field officers. By the time he returned to Algiers, he was beaten down: exhausted, depressed, and suffering from a hacking cold that worked its way deeper into his lungs with each punishing day.⁸⁵

Back at the St. Georges, Ike saw the sand in his hourglass running low, for although 1943 wasn’t quite knocking on his door yet, it was strolling past the mailbox and moving briskly toward his front steps. Desperate to break the stalemate, Ike knew he had to make something happen before year’s end.

In conjunction with General Anderson, Eisenhower set a December 9 D-Day for an all-out push against Tunis. But a few days before the attack was to begin, Anderson informed Ike of a “nasty setback” along his front. Smiling Al Kesselring had launched a spoiling attack; shrieking Stukas and field artillery pounded the Allied advance posts, while Mark IVs, Tigers, and 88mm antitank guns from Germany’s 10th Panzer Division inflicted heavy losses. Anderson managed to halt Kesselring’s offensive by December 10, but in view of British casualties and heavy tank losses, a glum Eisenhower had no choice but to accede to Anderson’s request to delay the final offensive to December 20—about the time the rainy season, with its formidable mud traps, was due to begin.⁸⁶

Eisenhower tried to remain optimistic, but each day’s worries plowed deeper the lines that creased his brow. Allied losses were mounting, and a decisive battle had not been joined. He had lost the race for Tunis and Bizerte, and now he faced a slow, bloody grind through the foothills and mountain passes of Tunisia that would cost more Allied lives. The setback might even delay the great cross-Channel invasion that he and Marshall had worked so hard to secure.⁸⁷

Eisenhower was floundering, and he knew it. He needed a trusted pair of eyes at the front, eyes that knew armor and terrain. Looking for an experienced doctor to diagnose his army’s problems, and particularly its high losses in tanks, he called Casablanca and rang up George Patton.⁸⁸

Answering Ike’s call, an energized George flew to Algiers to meet with Ike, and the two men talked until well after midnight. Ike was glad to see an optimist whose advice he trusted; his opinion of George had generally improved since he scratched the cavalryman’s name off his “outstanding performers” list in mid-November. After the meetings, Ike even remarked to Harry Butcher, “Among the American Commanders, Patton I think comes closest to meeting every requirement made on a commander.”⁸⁹

The feeling was not entirely mutual. George was still wary of Ike’s military prowess, and he saw the Supreme Commander letting the ground situation slip past him. “Ike and Clark were in conference as to what to do,” George muttered to his diary on December 13. “Neither had been to the front, so they showed great lack of decision. They are on way out, I think. Have no knowledge of men or war. Too damned slick, especially Clark.” The day after Christmas, George sent his wife a veiled message in which he predicted the end for Eisenhower: “I get fed up sitting here and seeing the war lost but it may all work out for the best as some goats will have to be found soon and they are all ranker than me. There are already rumors that one of them is on the way out. I fear it is the better of the two.”⁹⁰

George’s ambivalence toward the “Sacred Family” went double for Clark, who, unlike his boss from Abilene, had few qualities George considered redemption material. In another letter home, George implied to Beatrice that Clark was somehow responsible for his remaining a major general:

I had my three stars but they have never arrived to date. Something failed to click. Or rather some one else filched them. However I am not sure that it is not all for the best as I am convinced that things are not going too well with and between the “boy wonders.” One will cut the others throat and then break his own neck.⁹¹

As December progressed without any forward movement, a frustrated Eisenhower grew bitter around his staff. He fretted to his brother Milton, who was visiting Algiers on business for the Office of War Information, “Damned if I’m not about ready to quit. If I could just get command of a battalion and get into a bullet battle, it would all be so simple.” At one luncheon, he announced, “Tell everybody here that anyone who wants my job can damned well have it.” Harry Butcher, Ike’s emotional barometer, told his diary, “Ike should stop saying at the lunch table: ‘Ch-ee-r-i-s-t, anyone who wants the job of Allied Commander-in-Chief can have it.’ Not because he isn’t right, but because it may spread the wrong kind of stories of his ability to take it. . . . Milton and I agree on this.”⁹²

Ike may have wanted a simple bullet battle, but inside he knew that he no longer fit the mold of a traditional field commander. Yet he wasn’t exactly an armchair general, either. As he wrote to his old West Point roommate, P. A. Hodgson: “I think sometimes that I am a cross between a one-time soldier, a pseudo-statesman, a jack-legged politician and a crooked diplomat. I walk a soapy tight-rope in a rain storm with a blasting furnace on one side and a pack of ravenous tigers on the other. . . .”⁹³

The ravenous tigers would only grow more ravenous if Ike didn’t produce a victory, and by mid-December, he knew victory lay far, far beyond the forbidding Dorsal Mountains. On December 22, General Anderson launched his army on its long-awaited drive. But what neither Anderson nor Ike had counted on was Tunisia’s rainy season, which turned its few roads into muddy, washed-out gullies in which trucks and men slowed, struggled, and sank.⁹⁴

Acknowledging both the beating he was taking over the Darlan affair and the slow progress on the ground, Ike tried to remain outwardly philosophical about the whims of public opinion. To his son, John, a second-classman at West Point, he wrote, “From what I hear of what has been appearing in the newspapers, you are learning that it is easy Enough for a man to be a newspaper hero one day and a bum the next. The answer is that just as one must not let his head swell too much by a bit of acclaim, he must not be too upset and irritated when the pack turns on him.” After all, he said, a soldier’s job is to do his duty, “and not be too much disturbed about popularity or newspaper acclaim.”⁹⁵

Ike’s desire to get out of the political front and onto the battlefront was driven home by a peremptory order from Marshall. “Delegate your international problems to your subordinates and give your complete attention to the battle in Tunisia,” the Chief growled.⁹⁶

Ike took the message to heart. Sputtering from a debilitating mixture of chest cold and cigarettes, he left for the front on December 23, stuffing his lean frame into his traveling “goop suit,” consisting of a pair of overalls, a field jacket, and a knit cap. He also carried his lucky coins, some reports to read on the long trip, and a dagger concealed in a swagger stick—reasoning that if the Supreme Commander’s defense required anything more than a small knife, the four heavily armed escort vehicles in his convoy could provide it. Thus outfitted for battle, Ike’s armored Cadillac gunned its engine and the convoy began its long, slow journey to the front.⁹⁷

As his escort slogged its way toward British V Corps headquarters at Souk el Khémis, a relentless, pounding rain drenched the brown Tunisian countryside, hammering Ike’s soul with the same thumping it gave the Caddy’s metal roof. The trip was something of an education for the Allied commander, for the farther the convoy waded through the slashing rainstorm, the better Ike understood the problems facing Anderson and his beleaguered men. Rain and mud, he saw, were staking their claim to the battlefield. Ike prayed the weather would break by the time he reached the front.⁹⁸

Rolling to a stop after a punishing thirty-two-hour road trip, he arrived at V Corps on Christmas Eve. Climbing out from his Caddy under storm clouds, both literal and figurative, Ike squinted through the lashing rain and beheld a city of slick pup tents pitched in huge brown puddles. It was an unkempt, forlorn picture that would have made Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe grimace. Anderson’s men, when they weren’t huddled in their canvas tents, pinwheeled in the Tunisian mud while their vehicles wallowed like steel hippopotami in the axle-deep mire. With a wince, Ike swallowed a reality apparent only to himself, Anderson, and the 39,000 other men at the front: The Allies would not be in Tunis by Christmas, nor even by the end of the year. They would be lucky to get out of the thick, glutinous mud by then.⁹⁹

“This was a bitter disappointment to Ike,” Butch remarked with some understatement. Anderson, who had a tendency to oscillate between confidence and despair, offered to resign, but Ike shrugged him off. He had seen just enough of that impassible Tunisian goo to know that a change in the weather, not a change in command, was what the Allies needed. Until the roads congealed into passable avenues, Hannibal himself couldn’t move against Tunis. His spirits as gloomy as the black African skies, Ike went into a tent and dictated a message to Washington that stuck hard in his craw:

DUE TO CONTINUAL RAIN THERE WILL BE NO HOPE OF IMMEDIATE ATTACK ON TUNIS.¹⁰⁰

Ike was irritable and exhausted. He sank into a functional depression, a blue funk that allowed him to smile at his men even as his heart broke beneath his tunic. The barracks bags under his eyes grew dark, and some days he seemed to spend as much time blowing out his infected sinuses as he did sucking in nicotine. His language grew profane and violent around his staff, a fact he didn’t relish but couldn’t help, and the strain of keeping his pessimism hidden from his lieutenants added fresh burdens to old ones.¹⁰¹

About the only bright spot in Ike’s dreary existence that Christmas was news that the troublesome Admiral Darlan had been assassinated by an anti-Vichy radical on Christmas Eve. His joke on Gibraltar about a “damned good assassin” had found a fatal punch line, and the killer’s work had removed a lingering public relations problem for the Allies. Nonetheless, Darlan’s demise—a relief to everyone except, presumably, the late admiral and Mrs. Darlan—was a rose that bristled with many thorns. “Popeye,” for all his fascist sentiments, had honored his commitments to the Allies. Ike might be exchanging the devil he knew for one he didn’t.¹⁰²

Word of the assassination brought Ike scurrying back to Algiers, where he arrived on Christmas Day. When his mud-splattered Cadillac rolled up to Beetle’s magnificent villa, Ike got out, stretched his stiff limbs, confirmed that the city hadn’t descended into anarchy, then declared the war off-limits to AFHQ for a few hours. He celebrated Christ’s birthday with his staff, singing carols in his hoarse baritone, and the group dined on a turkey that George Patton had shipped from Casablanca along with two complimentary tanker’s uniforms—subtle reminders that a certain tanker was waiting in the wings.¹⁰³

The endless, mind-numbing procession of troubles continued to take its toll on Ike’s mind and body. Butch observed in early January, “After a solid month of colds, sniffles, and general below-par physical condition, Ike laid up in bed until lunch, then got up and sat by the fire. Had lunch with him at the house, and he feels punk and looks the same. Carpetbags under his eyes.” By the middle of the month, Butch noted little or no improvement: “Ike went to bed the same day with a severe head cold and general grippy condition. Had been persisting in keeping on ever since it first struck him shortly after we arrived here ‘permanently’ . . . The succession of events kept him from stopping even one day to give his system a chance to throw off the cold, and the accumulated lack of rest for many months finally compelled him to give himself unto the doctors.” Ike’s blood pressure, his doctors told him, was running dangerously high.¹⁰⁴

It was clear something had to be done to get the Allies, and the Supreme Commander, out of the quicksand, and Ike saw a direct role in the battle as his only way out. Lowering his balding head, he ground out another plan for the capture of Tunis and Bizerte, this time by an attack up the center, which he hoped would split the two wings of the Italo-German army. The offensive aimed to capture Gabès and Sfax, two Tunisian coastal towns that lay between Rommel’s forces, on the Libyan border, and the Fifth Panzer Army, under General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, in Tunisia’s north. After talking over dispositions with Anderson, Ike decided to employ Lloyd Fredendall’s II Corps in an attack on Gabès on the southern end of the Tunisian coast, just north of Rommel. With an American corps athwart German supply lines to Libya, they hoped that Rommel would be forced to detach troops that were badly needed for his fight against General Montgomery in Libya.¹⁰⁵

Ike held Truscott in high regard, though he wished he could have used his trusted friend Wayne Clark, who had left AFHQ to head up the Fifth U.S. Army, which was assembling in Morocco and Algeria. Clark had been bucking for a field command; when the Fifth Army position opened, he had lamented that, while he would prefer to be on the front lines with II Corps, he would accept the Fifth Army command as a matter of soldier’s duty.

Few believed him. Ike later remarked that his schoolmate had “begged and pleaded” for the job with the more prestigious title. Butch wrote in his diary, “Ike doesn’t think Clark is disappointed [to be sent to Morocco]—in fact thinks he is rather relieved as he hadn’t wanted the [II Corps] particularly.”¹⁰⁶

About the time Clark was taking his leave of AFHQ, Ike and Marshall compared notes on their field commanders. When they got to Patton’s name, Marshall, pleased and no doubt surprised with George’s diplomatic aptitude, pointedly asked Ike if the cavalryman should be given command of American and French forces covering the south Tunisian front. Ike demurred, but did rate George highly among his senior generals. Ultimately, he recommended his friend for a corps command. “He does render willing and generous support to the plans of his superiors regardless of his personal views in the matter,” Eisenhower wrote. “Of the approximately 150 general officers of his grade personally known to me, I would rate General Patton number 5.” Completing Patton’s annual evaluation form, Ike commented: “This officer is energetic, courageous, well informed, impulsive; definitely a leader type; devoted to the service.”¹⁰⁷

From his house in Casablanca, Ike’s number five general squirmed as the war receded over the burning horizon. He fidgeted his days away on the “Ice Cream Front,” shuttling between his third-floor office in the Shell Oil building and local Moorish palaces, where he did little more than put a friendly face on America’s occupation. He disliked the country and its inhabitants, and his military duties were confined to keeping an eye on the Spanish to the north and protecting Casa’s harbor. Important work, but it wasn’t fighting.¹⁰⁸

Patton, from an early age, had been driven by an insatiable need to be the center of attention, whether at a dinner party, a polo match, or, as he preferred, a military campaign. When he was fighting, his thoughts were focused and efficient; his blood was up, his spirits high. When he was in the grip of ennui, his thoughts turned brooding and destructive. He became depressed. He blamed his friends, sought out conspiracies against him, and denigrated colleagues behind their backs.

Succumbing to the temptation to find fatal flaws in other men, Patton reflected on Eisenhower and Clark, insisting to himself and his confidantes that the “Sacred Family,” riddled with professional incompetence, would soon collapse under its own weight. “The old sawdust basket is bound to collect a few heads soon,” he predicted to Beatrice. “One for sure and possibly two.”¹⁰⁹

But by January 10, the Fifth Army commander’s head was still attached to its corpus, and George rolled out an honor guard to greet Clark at the airport when he came to inspect the rear areas. Spending the day with Clark, George found the lieutenant general dismissive of everything other than his own career interests. Patton scribbled down his impressions of his new commander in his diary that day:

I took him on inspection of all local troops. He was not in the least interested. His whole mind is on Clark. We went to the house and for one hour he spent his time cutting Ike’s throat. And Ike, poor fool, sent him here. Of course Clark came so that if, as most likely, the new attack fails, he can crawl out from under and land it on Fredendall. . . . It is most discouraging.¹¹⁰

As the month wore on, George’s cloaked bitterness festered. He told Bea,

There is so much back bighting between soldiers and also politicians or between soldiers who are primarily politicians. We have many commanders but no leaders. . . . Sometimes I wish I was retired but I guess I would not like that either. Probably I would only be content if I was god and probably some one ranks him.¹¹¹

After a visit with Everett Hughes, Ike’s incoming deputy and an inveterate headquarters gossip, George wrote in his diary, “We had a long talk about the glamour boys. He fears that the senior partner is on his way out due to the knife work of the other, concerning whom he has the same ideas as I have.” Following a similar bull session with his task force surgeon, Brigadier General Albert Kenner, he quipped, “[Kenner] too feels that Ike is not commanding and that Clark is an s.o.b.”¹¹²

In early January, George learned that his city had been tapped to host a gathering of “VIPs” and their even loftier superiors, known around headquarters as “VGDIPs.” Roosevelt and Churchill would be holding a secret summit, code-named SYMBOL, at the upscale suburb of Anfa, and for this meeting the two leaders would bring their full entourages: chiefs of staff, personal advisers, military advisers, Secret Service, press, the works. Patton, as Ike’s proconsul in Morocco, would arrange accommodations, logistics, and area security.¹¹³

The Casablanca conference, held from January 14 to January 24, introduced George to a menagerie of politicians, allies, and generals whom he would never have met in the usual course of his work. It was much closer to Ike’s world than his own, and in most cases he came away unimpressed with the civilians who claimed to run the free world. Churchill, in George’s view, “speaks the worst French I have ever heard, his eyes run, and he is not at all impressive,” while Giraud, George sneered, “is an old type Gaul with blue eyes and limited brains.”¹¹⁴

The Americans generally fared better in Patton’s estimation. Roosevelt, he decided, was “a great Statesman,” while Admiral King, “when off duty, is most affable.” As for Harry Hopkins, the president’s close adviser, “[He] is very clever and intuitive—like a Pilot Fish for a shark . . . extremely intelligent and very well-informed.” Of Marshall, a man who had fought honorably alongside Black Jack Pershing, George would never utter a word of criticism. But at the end of the day, George concluded, “The more I see of the so-called great the less they impress me—I am better.”¹¹⁵

Ike arrived at the Anfa conference on January 15, winging in on a dangerously broken-down B-17 that threatened to quit in midair. His first stop was a turbulent session with the Combined Chiefs, where he patiently endured a grilling from Field Marshal Brooke over the Allied failure to reach Tunis and Bizerte. Once the scathing welcome concluded, a besieged Eisenhower shuffled from villa to villa, caucusing with Roosevelt, Marshall, and Admiral King, hoping to pick up a crumb or two of support.¹¹⁶

To Ike’s quiet disappointment, President Roosevelt remained noncommittal about his performance as Supreme Commander. He offered no clear-cut words of encouragement, no pledge of friendly support, and Ike began to get the distinct feeling that the Washington jury was still in the back room deliberating. Until some decision was reached on the battlefield, Ike would not hear the verdict.

Ike began with qualifications, outlined his operating assumptions, gave caveats about the uncertainties and permutations. But Roosevelt, a thirty-second-degree master of obfuscation, knew how to draw out precisely what he wanted. Like a fly in a web, Ike wriggled and struggled until he saw he would not leave before he answered the question. So he hazarded a rough guess:

There. Now he had done it. He had given his commander an end date. And he knew no matter what other caveats, qualifications, or conditions he might add, only the date—the early date—would stick. The President of the United States would leave Casablanca remembering the Supreme Commander’s estimate of victory by “the middle of May.” May 15. Ike had just committed himself to clear Africa of some 200,000 Axis veterans within 120 days.

After dinner and more interminable meetings that droned well into the night, a wilted Eisenhower invited Patton to join him for a postmortem of his disastrous first day at the conference. Until half past one in the morning, the two men dissected the corpse and mulled over Army politics, military strategy, and Eisenhower’s exposed political flanks.¹¹⁸

As the hours ticked by, their conversation turned, inevitably, to their colleagues. When Ike casually referred to Clark’s twin weaknesses of self-promotion and ambition, George, eyeing a fracture among the Sacred Family, concluded, “He and Clark are at outs, and he thinks his thread is about to be cut.” George plied Ike with advice, and he told himself afterward,

Ike was his old self and listened. I told him he had to go “to the front.” He feels that he cannot, due to politics, said he had suggested to Gen. Marshall that I be made Deputy Commanding General AFHQ and run the war while he runs the politics.¹¹⁹

Ike was under incredible strain as he presented himself to the various chiefs the next day, for he knew his fate was as much a political as a military matter. “It seemed to me,” Butch commented afterward, “the absence of clear-cut words of thanks from the President or the Prime Minister showed they had their noses to the political winds, and weren’t going to be caught holding the bag for a general who had made an unpopular decision and hadn’t yet got Tunisia.”

The Anfa conference proved to be a boon to Patton, who had played the part of host, concierge, and security chief with the grace of an old-line Southern caterer and the decisiveness of a New York precinct boss. Cunningham, Churchill, Marshall, and others congratulated him on his fine hospitality and the men’s smart appearance. Ike awarded him a second Distinguished Service Medal, and later, he repeated his ideas of making Patton his deputy commander for military strategy.¹²¹

But Patton aspired to something that society lunches and conferences with the top brass could never give him. He wanted a fight. To an old secretary from his Washington days, he wrote, “[F]or the last ten days we have been very busy entertaining the leading lights of the world. It was very amusing but was not war. Personally, I wish I could get out and kill someone.”¹²²

Patton’s hopes were dashed when he learned that Ike’s intention to promote him to deputy commander had fallen by the wayside. Under a new command structure worked out by the Combined Chiefs at Anfa, once Montgomery’s British Eighth Army crossed into Tunisian territory from Libya, General Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander, British ground commander in Egypt and Libya, would command the new Eighteenth Army Group. This group would encompass Anderson’s First Army, Montgomery’s Eighth Army, the U.S. II Corps, and General Juin’s French XIX Corps. Patton, to his private distress, would play no part in the final campaign for Africa.¹²³

George searched his soul for the reason why he, the tactical expert, the founder of America’s desert training school, a pioneer in tank development, kept getting pushed aside in favor of lesser men like Fredendall. “I wish someone would listen to me,” he wrote. “I have something which makes people reluctant to question me; perhaps I always have an answer based on truth and not bootlick.”¹²⁴

What Patton did not know—what few people were permitted to know—was that another, bigger assignment lay just around the corner. At the Anfa conference, FDR, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs had struck a complex bargain that called for an amphibious invasion of Sicily, dubbed Operation HUSKY. The chiefs had placed General Eisenhower in charge of planning the operation, but this put Ike in a bind because, as the chiefs may have noticed, he was already running one campaign, and not making swift progress at that. Two campaigns, in two different lands, would be asking a great deal of any man.¹²⁵

Stuck with these widely disparate tasks, Ike asked Patton, his most experienced amphibious commander, to plan the American side of the HUSKY invasion. George’s appointment provided some direction to the U.S. ground forces, but with naval, air, and British ground chiefs reporting to him on both North Africa and Sicily, Ike’s duties still stretched him to the breaking point. Marshall, quick to spot an organizational disaster in the making, urged Ike to find some “eyes and ears” to watch over the battle front while Ike took care of the big picture in Algiers. Shortly afterward, Ike cabled Marshall a list of stateside officers he wanted to help him run the theater. On his list was Major General Omar N. Bradley.¹²⁶

As Ike adjusted to the realities of his expanded theater, a personal problem emerged in the complicating presence of his comely driver, Kay Summersby. Kay stood out in press photographs of Ike’s staff, and her central position in his entourage—a position not typically occupied by a foreign driver—brewed tension on the home front. After a reference to Ike’s “beautiful Irish driver” appeared in Life magazine, Ike had to go out of his way to assure Mamie there was nothing untoward between him and Kay—or anyone else, for that matter. He pointed out that by moving to North Africa, Kay was stationed closer to her fiancé, whom she planned to marry the following June. Shoring up his defensive lines, he answered Mamie’s unspoken question by declaring, “If anyone is so banal and foolish Enough to lift an eyebrow at an old duffer such as I am in connection with Waacs—Red Cross workers—nurses and drivers—you will know that I’ve no emotional involvements and will have none.”¹²⁷

Of course, regardless of the true nature of their affiliation, Ike and Kay’s proximity was wonderful grist for the office gossip mill. Lord Nelson had once remarked, “Once past Gibraltar, every man is a bachelor,” and now that Ike’s cadre had forged well beyond that famous landmark, many an officer had stowed his wedding band or embarked upon a campaign of conquest. President Roosevelt’s son Elliott, a reconnaissance pilot, was briefly engaged to Beetle’s secretary, for instance, and Tex Lee quickly took up with one of the available Red Cross girls.¹²⁸

It was hardly an unusual story, though the fact that the Kay Summersby tale implicated the Supreme Commander made the subject irresistible to much of the AFHQ staff, and even Ike’s field generals. Eisenhower’s deputy, Everett Hughes, for instance, included a number of references to Ike and Kay in his diary. “Discussed Kay [with Ike],” Hughes scribbled in one entry. “I don’t know if Ike is alibiing or not. Says he likes her, wants to hold her hand, accompanies her to house, doesn’t sleep with her. He doth protest too much, especially in view of the gal’s reputation in London.” Patton, who didn’t like Kay, afforded her the same polite deference one would give to a venomous spider. But publicly, he and Bradley kept tight-lipped about their inferences, even though the two men saw little to allow them to certify that Ike’s association with Kay was a wholly innocent one.¹²⁹

Eisenhower, stuffed into the pressure cooker that was AFHQ, needed as much unofficial companionship as anyone; an extrovert by nature, he probably needed more than most. Whether it was playing bridge with his staff, whacking golf balls with Butch, shooting pistols with Tex Lee, or riding horseback with Kay, Ike thrived on the energy of companions, who took his mind off the business of death and acted as his sounding board from time to time. Kay’s earthy charm eased Ike’s mind, and his confidence in her as a driver, secretary, bridge partner, and friend made her an immovable fixture in his wartime domain. Whatever the nature of their relationship, Everett’s diary hit upon the one dispositive point: “Maybe Kay will help Ike win the war.”¹³⁰

In mid-February, General Marshall reaffirmed his faith in Eisenhower’s stewardship by promoting him to full general. Despite the lukewarm reception Ike had received at the Casablanca conference, Marshall had pressed Roosevelt for Ike’s promotion when they returned to Washington. On February 11, FDR submitted Eisenhower’s name to the Senate, which ratified the promotion that same day. As the twelfth officer in U.S. history to wear a fourth star—his hero Ulysses S. Grant was the first—Ike gathered his household staff together and gave them each a one-grade promotion. Patton sent Ike a warm congratulatory cable, to which Ike graciously responded, “No one else can understand as well as I how much I owe you.” That evening, Ev Hughes and Harry Butcher broke out drinks to toast to Ike’s good fortune, and a beaming General Eisenhower and his war family broke out the phonograph to sing “One Dozen Roses” and other popular tunes. It was a badly needed respite from the strains of war.¹³¹

Far to the east, a world away from the delighted notes wafting through a little villa in Algiers, tank and scout car drivers gunned engines in the darkness. Rommel’s troops began assembling at jumping-off points. Gasoline was distributed. Ammunition stocks were sent forward; weapons were checked.