Brothers, Rivals, Victors

On the Allied side of the Dorsals, Major General Lloyd Fredendall’s II U.S. Corps, under Anderson’s British First Army, manned the southern stretch along the Algerian-Tunisian border. In the center stood the French corps, and to the far north, opposite Tunis and Bizerte, Anderson’s British Army completed Eisenhower’s thin chain. To reach the ports, Ike needed Fredendall to hold open two Dorsal crossing points. The first pass lay at Maknassy to the south, a town that straddled a slender, miserable highway stretching toward Gafsa. The second pass, a little north, was Faïd Pass, a winding path east of the town of Sidi bou Zid. If Lloyd could push east from the hamlet of Kasserine and capture Sidi bou Zid and Maknassy, the Eastern Dorsals would be open for business; Ike could drive a wedge between Fifth Panzer Army and Rommel’s men, and his two British steamrollers would crush them one at a time.²

But Rommel and von Arnim were not about to let the green, disjointed Americans get between them, and they prepared to hand the Yanks their first major setback. While von Arnim’s vaunted 10th Panzer Division quietly moved up to Faïd Pass, Rommel’s 21st Panzer Division crept northwest toward Gafsa. The German commanders planned to hit the Americans at Sidi bou Zid, overrun Allied air bases at Thélepte, then push west through Kasserine Pass onto Algerian soil, smashing the south flank of the Allied line. The two German commanders had aligned their sights on the weak link in the chain: Eisenhower’s Americans.³

Allied reconnaissance had detected a concentration of panzers along Anderson’s front, and Fredendall’s hotheaded G-2 intelligence officer, Colonel Benjamin “Monk” Dickson, had warned Anderson of a probable attack from the south. But Ike’s own G-2, Brigadier Eric Mockler-Ferryman, concluded that von Arnim was preparing to hit the Allies north of the American lines, at Fondouk. Because Mockler-Ferryman was one of the few men privy to deciphered German Enigma intercepts circulated under the code name ULTRA, Ike valued his prognostications over the shrill warnings of the man on the ground.⁴

Based on intelligence forecasts from AFHQ and British First Army’s G-2 staff, Anderson moved a U.S. armored column north to shore up the British sector. The move drained reserve firepower from II Corps, and Fredendall further depleted his armored strength by sending other tank crews rearward to Tébessa and scattering the rest like seeds in a strong wind. Though Eisenhower had ordered him to keep a “large, central and powerful reserve” ready, Fredendall allowed pieces of his command to become isolated along the Eastern Dorsals, unable to support one another in the event of a rapid enemy strike.⁵

On February 12, Ike paid a visit to Fredendall’s headquarters, a bunker complex nestled in an immense gulch near Tébessa. The command post, some seventy miles behind the front lines, had been fortified by a regiment of engineers who labored for three weeks boring deep tunnels into the Tunisian rock.⁶

Fredendall’s bunker was beautifully laid out for a heroic last stand, but the compound hardly sent stirring messages of confidence to his troops. It looked more like an Alamo than the headquarters of an aggressive field commander, and enlisted men dubbed the place “Lloyd’s Very Last Resort.” When he glimpsed the monstrosity, Ike was visibly embarrassed, and like many first-time visitors, he made several caustic comments about the place .⁷

Leaving Fredendall and his sappers to complete their excavations, Ike drove to the front and spent the night with the scattered shards of the 1st Armored Division, one that Ike had told Fredendall to hold as a compact, mobile reserve force. What he found at 1st Armored was even more disturbing than Fredendall’s bunker: Tank platoons were spread out, communications were unreliable, and the division’s commander, Major General Orlando “Pinky” Ward, had been shut out of his own command by Fredendall, who despised him. Butcher said the two men were “almost high-schoolish in their criticism of one another, not only to Truscott and Smith, but to Ike.” Fredendall, lacking confidence in Ward, began bypassing the division commander and issued his orders directly to Ward’s combat commands.⁸

Although Marshall had warned Ike to get rid of anyone in whom he lacked confidence—and Eisenhower repeated this instruction to other generals—Ike hesitated to replace Fredendall. After all, Marshall had shown confidence in Lloyd by placing him in command of the Oran landing force, and Marshall’s approval counted for a great deal in Ike’s book. Besides that, Eisenhower was still feeling his way through the process of executive command. At this point, he felt he needed to give field commanders a fair chance—perhaps more than one fair chance—before casting them into the darkness. If he didn’t, he worried, he would never find out who would become this war’s Phil Sheridan, Stonewall Jackson, or William T. Sherman.⁹

On February 14, the Germans struck. Von Arnim’s 10th Panzer Division burst through the Faïd Pass, slashing through Fredendall’s thin lines around Sidi bou Zid and sending the Americans reeling west toward Kasserine. The next morning, Rommel’s 21st Division rolled up from the southeast, steamrolling through Gafsa and enveloping the startled Yanks. As Fredendall’s men withdrew toward Kasserine Pass, crowding the valley floor, Rommel’s panzers caught up with them like Pharaoh’s chariots. Germans and Italians swarmed over the high ground, sending artillery shells down upon the confused, retreating soldiers, and by February 20, Fredendall’s line buckled as his men fled for their lives.¹⁰

In the first two days of fighting, Ike learned, Fredendall had ordered supply dumps destroyed, abandoned his bedrock headquarters, and lost over 2,500 soldiers, 112 tanks, and 280 other vehicles. The advance air base at Thélepte, a critical link in the Allied air defense chain, had to be evacuated. By the time Ike got back to AFHQ on February 16, he feared that Fredendall might have squandered as many as five thousand men and vast amounts of critical equipment.¹¹

As casualty returns were counted and re-counted, Ike learned that American losses along the eighty-five-mile retreat were even worse than he had feared. In the end, his boys were saved only by German indecision and severe fuel shortages, which forced Rommel to pull back on the night of February 22–23. Butcher summed up the candid view among Ike’s inner circle: “It’s the worst walloping we have taken in this fight, and perhaps the stiffest setback of our ground forces in the war.” “Headquarters,” remarked Kay, “had all the cheer of an empty funeral parlor.”¹²

What made Kasserine Pass particularly demoralizing for Ike was that it was U.S. troops whose teeth were being kicked in. Eisenhower may have been an Allied commander leading a multinational coalition, but these were American troops—his troops—and they had been humiliated before the world. The defeat tore a hole in American morale, from the private in the slit trench to the brass at the St. Georges; against the impersonal rumble of conversations, telephones, and typewriters in the background, Ike sank into despair. After a day absorbing reports of disaster, he slumped back to his quarters, plucking out “Taps” on the villa’s piano as he stared blankly at the black and white keys. “I don’t think I ever saw him lower than he was that night,” his faithful sergeant Mickey McKeogh wrote.¹³

One of a commander’s duties is to deliver bad news to his superiors, and Ike dutifully sent reports back to Washington and London, the capital cities where office-bound superiors in wood-paneled rooms expected the African war to be over by mid-May. Teletype lines crackled as memoranda, situation reports, and explanations buzzed from Algiers to the various Combined Chiefs. So many explanations, in fact, that Marshall shot back, “I am disturbed by the thought that you feel under necessity in such a trying situation to give so much personal time to us. . . . You can concentrate on the battle with the feeling that it is our business to support you and not to harass you.”¹⁴

If Ike had felt a noose tightening around his throat at Casablanca, he now felt the trapdoor opening beneath his feet. The grilling from Marshal Brooke at Anfa, the tepid reception from Roosevelt and Churchill, and now the American defeat at Kasserine pointed to one conclusion he could no longer deny. Sensing his tenure as Supreme Commander drawing to a close, on February 19 Ike laid some hard psychological groundwork for his family in a letter to his son, John. “It is possible that a necessity might arise for my relief and consequent demotion,” he wrote. “It will not break my heart and it should not cause you any mental anguish. . . . Modern war is a very complicated business and governments are forced to treat individuals as pawns.”¹⁵

But for the moment, he was still the Allied commander, and running his tired blue eyes over the jumbled situation maps, Ike wondered whether it might be time to replace Fredendall. Although Lloyd had been hamstrung by orders from Anderson, the irascible Westerner had made some terrible dispositions of his own. He never visited his front line, he’d built a hideout worthy of a Cecil B. DeMille film, and he collapsed under pressure. Then, when the extent of the defeat became apparent, Fredendall spouted off about Anderson and Ward, and why the disaster was their fault, not his. Why Ward, he contended, should be immediately relieved of command.¹⁶

Ike was skeptical of Fredendall’s shrill protests of innocence, but he could not diagnose the problem accurately from Algiers, and he didn’t have time to conduct a personal investigation. So he sent for Ernie Harmon, the barrel-chested tanker who had led the armored landings in Morocco. He ordered Harmon to stabilize the situation, then recommend whom Ike should send home.¹⁷

It was a delicate time for the II Corps, and Ike tried to buck up Fredendall by offering his support for any offensive action the corps commander might see fit to take. He even told Fredendall, without much sincerity, “I have every confidence that under your inspiring leadership current advances of the enemy will be stopped in place.” But deep inside, Ike knew either that Fredendall or Ward was to blame for the Kasserine disaster, and someone’s head had to roll.¹⁸

The first head, however, would not be Fredendall’s. Years before, after graduating from Leavenworth, Ike had written, “Trust not the G-2 artist; he fools himself, let him not also fool you.” Seduced by Mockler-Ferryman’s ULTRA analysis, Eisenhower had been guilty of that sin. AFHQ and First Army had refused to heed warnings from Fredendall’s staff, warnings based on hard evidence from the field rather than jumbled radio intercepts. So Ike relieved Brigadier Mockler-Ferryman, replacing him with a capable British brigadier named Kenneth Strong. For good measure, Ike also sent one of Pinky Ward’s commanders packing, along with one of the 1st Division’s regimental colonels.¹⁹

In the midst of disaster, Eisenhower was learning the vital art of relieving subordinates. The Army’s rolls boasted a thousand generals and seven thousand colonels, and though each blow of the ax pained him, Ike was learning to tap into this vast, willing pool of replacements. A few days after Rommel withdrew from Kasserine, Ike gave his friend Gee Gerow some stiff advice that reflected his current thinking:

[O]fficers that fail to devote themselves completely and exclusively to the task must be ruthlessly weeded out. . . . You must be tough . . . [on] the lazy, the slothful, the indifferent or the complacent. Get rid of them. . . . For God’s sake don’t keep anybody around that you say to yourself, “He may get by”—He won’t. Throw him out.²⁰

“Throw him out.” Ike was hearing that chorus a lot lately. Ernie Harmon, a man who had all the charm of a half-track, bluntly told Ike that Fredendall was “no damned good. You ought to get rid of him.” Alexander, who took command of Fifteenth Army Group as Rommel’s panzers were battering the Americans, delicately seconded Harmon’s opinion. He suggested, “I’m sure you must have a better man than that.”²¹

Omar Bradley, commanding the 28th Infantry Division at Camp Gordon Johnston, was preparing his men for amphibious training, a phase he hoped would be the last step in his division’s long journey from reactivation to combat.²³

As Brad saw it, he had earned the right to lead his men into battle. Three decades in uniform seemed an awfully long time for him to wait, and his years at Benning, his years under Marshall, and his years in the War Department should have earned him command of a fighting division by now. In fact, why not a corps? After all, a third star would require only a couple of orphaned divisions in need of a good, solid commander, and Brad knew he could do the job.²⁴

Bradley’s dreams of higher command were stoked by a telegram from General Marshall that landed on his desk on February 12, 1943, his fiftieth birthday. Scanning it rapidly, Brad’s eyes quickly lighted on the cable’s concluding paragraph:

IT IS ONLY FITTING THAT YOUR BIRTHDAY SHOULD PRECEDE BY ONLY A FEW DAYS YOUR TRANSFER TO COMMAND A CORPS WHICH COMES AS A LONG-DELAYED ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF YOUR SPLENDID RECORD WITH THE 28TH DIVISION. CONGRATULATIONS AND BEST WISHES.²⁵

It was about the sweetest thing Bradley had ever read. Words like those did not come lightly from the tight-lipped Marshall. Something, he knew, was about to happen. The message from Olympus was too specific to be anything but a harbinger of good things. Make that great things.

Three days later secret orders arrived directing General Bradley to take command of X Corps, a headquarters outfit assembling in Texas. But Brad barely had time to savor his new orders when an abrupt call from General McNair’s personnel chief jostled him from dreams of a third star and a corps command:

The question “Which way do I go?” was a tough one to ask a War Department staffer over the telephone. Army regulations were specific on that point—no discussing troop movements on an open line, even if it was only the movement of one soldier. Loose lips sink ships, and all that.

Try as he might, by the end of the call, all Brad could ferret out was that he would report to General Eisenhower in Africa, and would receive an initial briefing in Washington as soon as he could get there. He could take only a couple of low-level staffers—his aides Chet Hansen and Lew Bridge, to be exact. Even his driver, Sergeant Stoute, would have to stay home for this trip. And because Brad’s orders were secret, he couldn’t even tell his staff where he was going.²⁶

Still wondering what Marshall had in store for him, Bradley stuffed his shaving kit and a few essentials into a footlocker and suitcase; because he was going to face the German Army, the War Department also ordered him to bring along a .45 pistol, twenty-one rounds of ammunition, a helmet, and a gas mask. Thus outfitted, Brad sped to the airport, Chet and Lew in tow, and flew to Washington for an appointment at the newly completed Pentagon building.²⁷

Marshall, it seems, had decided that Ike needed more professionals with him. American professionals, to be precise. Men to direct the battles at the corps and army level while Ike tangled with the Combined Chiefs, Churchill, the French, the media, and everyone else. The day before the Kasserine disaster unfolded, Marshall had cabled Ike, “I propose General Omar N. Bradley for the detail in question,” and Eisenhower quickly accepted. Bradley would be the Supreme Commander’s eyes on the front, the man who would give Ike his unvarnished opinion on the state of the battlefield.²⁸

Reflecting on his assignment, as well as his loss of both the 28th Division and X Corps in a two-day span, Omar Bradley decided he hadn’t been robbed after all. At least, not completely. His train to corps command may have been derailed for now, but he had a ticket to the front lines, which was in some ways even better. The experience he would gain would make him a natural for a corps command in the Mediterranean theater, and if nothing else, he was finally going to see some action. “For the first time in thirty-one and a half years of active Army service,” he remembered, “I was on my way to a real war.”²⁹

After enjoying his last American meal for the unforeseeable future—a slice of cherry pie and two glasses of milk—Brad embarked on a mind-numbing ninety-hour journey to Algiers. He, Chet, and Lew touched down on February 23, the day Rommel’s panzers withdrew from their Kasserine victory, and Kay picked up the trio in Ike’s big armored Cadillac. She drove the tired men through the twisting streets of Algiers, and deposited them at the entrance to the Hôtel St. Georges.³⁰

Bedell Smith, Prince of Algiers, greeted Brad warmly and showed the newcomers around the bustling hotel, now cluttered with phone lines, filing cabinets, couriers, and staffers scurrying about in French, British, and American uniforms. After a few brief introductions to the Allied team, the Hoosier ushered Bradley into the office of the Supreme Commander, where Brad would find out exactly why he had been summoned from sunny Florida.³¹

“In a way it was a ‘get to know each other’ session,” Bradley recalled afterward. “Although we had known each other at West Point thirty years before, serving in the same company, we had not been close. We had seen little or nothing of each other in the intervening years. We had never served together; we had exchanged few letters. In all those years I had only seen Ike a few times, fleetingly, at class reunions or Army-Navy football games, usually with Mamie and Mary in tow. Since Mary and Mamie did not—and never would—take to each other, these occasional social meetings had not rekindled our earlier acquaintance into any sort of flame.”³²

Despite their years of separation, or perhaps because of them, Ike was delighted to see his old classmate. He had a high regard for Omar, who had outranked him when they wore the cadet shako. Ike had, in fact, written a warm tribute to Brad in the West Point Howitzer twenty-eight years earlier: “Some of us will some day be bragging to our grandchildren, ‘Sure, General Bradley was a classmate of mine.’ ” In Bradley, Ike felt he had another friend in Algiers, someone he could trust, someone loyal to him. “He greeted me warmly and effusively,” Brad remembered, “like a long-lost brother, and instantly made me feel at home—and needed.”³³

Their pleasantries finished, Ike got down to business. As Brad recalled, “he took the time to brief me personally (map, pointer and all) on the recent German offensive.” Eisenhower outlined the disposition of the opposing armies; then he sketched out Omar’s first assignment: “Just as quickly as you can,” he began, “I want you to get up to the front and look for the things I would want to see myself if I only had the time. Bedell will give you a letter telling Fredendall and the others that you are to act as my eyes and ears.”³⁴

What struck Bradley as he watched his old friend sweep the pointer over the African expanse was how much Ike had matured. He was no longer the class-cutting, cigarette-sneaking rulebreaker from F Company whom Brad had known so long ago. The Ike he saw pacing the office in a buzz of nervous energy was a charming, mature, almost patrician statesman with a first-rate mind and a sense of his own businesslike authority. He could charm, he could curse, he could persuade, and he could demand. The small-town Kansas linebacker had become a commander.³⁵

But as impressed as Bradley was with Ike’s poise, the Missourian also thought he sensed another Dwight Eisenhower lying just below the surface, an Eisenhower shielded from the public and let out only among those he trusted. As Ike spoke, Brad remembered later, “I noted another aspect of Ike new to me: a deep-seated, barely controlled anger. The public perceived him as smiling and genial. But I saw that he had very thin skin, a short fuse, and an explosive temper.” When the conversation drifted to the Darlan Deal, Brad wrote, “Ike’s anger welled up and for a very long time—overly long, I thought—he defended the deal, for which he had been severely criticized in the media worldwide. Media criticism was a new experience for Ike, as it was to all of us who had grown up in the obscurity of the peacetime Army. It was not easy for any of us to cope with it.”

Over the next two days, Brad pored over situation reports and maps, acclimating himself to the headquarters and the front. One thing he immediately noticed was that “Ike brooked no American criticism of the French or British—especially the British. Any American who criticized the British stood a very good chance of being busted and sent home.” He later recalled, “I came away with the opinions expressed back in Tom Handy’s OPD: In his efforts to achieve harmonious ‘coalition warfare,’ Ike had become excessively pro-British in his attitudes and thinking. . . . I believe his close association with Kay and her family likewise contributed to Ike’s pro-British attitudes, that her influence over him was greater than is generally realized.”³⁶

As Ike’s spy, official or otherwise, General Bradley did not rate much of a welcome in Fredendall’s house. Upon Bradley’s arrival at II Corps’s command post, Fredendall banished him to a small, windowless building—“quarters unsuitable even for a second lieutenant,” Brad complained. From there he began watching and learning.³⁷

Bradley and Bedell Smith spent the next couple of days listening to Fredendall and his staff expound on the many places, other than Fredendall’s abandoned bunker, where the real blame for Kasserine lay. Brad found Fredendall and his staff to be “rabidly, if not obscenely, anti-British,” and Beetle snorted that the major general was “incompetent or crazy or both.” Even Butcher, a novice at military matters, understood the problem. He wrote in his diary, “If you ask me, it should have been Patton in the first place, and if it weren’t for Ike not wanting to let a commander down when he is drooping, Fredendall would be out, but Ike isn’t the kind to let his commander down. Ike told me a week ago he wished he had sent Patton instead, but Patton had to be held in Morocco to cover possible Spanish moves, and also for the American attack in [Sicily].” ³⁸

It should have been an easy move, Ike figured. After all, when Wayne took over Fifth Army, he had assured Ike, “I hope you will consider my going as only temporary and know that I stand ready and anxious to serve you in any capacity in order to bring you the success you deserve.”⁴⁰

But the “American Eagle” refused to take over the corps. He was concerned, he intimated, that since he was commander of Fifth Army, reassignment to a mere corps command would be perceived by everyone as a demotion. If Ike would assign an army to him, that of course would be a different story. Otherwise, he had pressing business with Fifth Army to manage.⁴¹

Ike was flabbergasted. He had told Marshall in 1942 that he would never, ever commit the sin of placing his personal ambition over the role assigned to him, even if that meant sitting out the war as an unknown brigadier, shuffling papers behind a government-issue desk in Washington. Now his best man was committing that very sin. Clark may have been a publicity hound, someone Ike had to rein in from time to time, but this was just the sort of thing he would have expected from a prima donna like MacArthur. Not Clark.⁴²

Well, Ike’s personal disappointment was beside the point. He would not push Clark if Clark didn’t want to go. Clark could keep his “manure pile,” as Ike called it. But Ike needed an aggressive leader, someone to get the American fighting man back on his feet, and he needed that leader now.⁴³

He might shuttle around Rabat or motor over to Casablanca in his Packard limousine. Or fly over the desert inspecting scattered remnants of his original force. But with no operations to run, nothing to plan, no enemy to fight, Patton played the comfortable but unfulfilling role of American viceroy in Morocco.

Every now and then he stirred himself and vented to his friends, usually over the way the war was being run. At the end of January, for instance, he had a long conversation with Clark, who “told me the damndest thing I have ever heard.” The final attack on Tunis, Clark said, was to be carried out by two British armies, Monty’s Eighth and Anderson’s First—and Anderson, a Briton, would command the American II Corps! George raged to his diary: “Shades of J.J. Pershing! We have sold our birthright and the mess of pottage is, in my opinion, the title of Allied Commander to General Marshall. I am shocked and distressed.”⁴⁴

Personally, he was glad it was Ike’s mess, and maybe Clark’s, so he couldn’t be blamed for whatever insults would be inflicted on American honor. “I think that I was fortunate in not being made Deputy Commander-in-Chief to Ike,” he told himself. “I truly think that the whole set up is the result of clever politics by the British and selfish ambition on our part.” ⁴⁵

But the biggest threat to Patton’s aspirations did not come from the British, or AFHQ, or the politicians. It came from George’s own mouth, his pronouncements and witticisms rattled off with a deliberate, offending flippancy that cloaked years of thought and study.

His sharp, vulgar wit was something his father had warned him about at the end of the last war, something Katherine Marshall had chided him for during his Fort Myer days. But it was a trait George could never shake—nor did he try—and in early February, after a lunch meeting where George had run his mouth one time too many, Ike sent his old friend a personal message:

You are quick-witted and have a facile tongue. As a result you frequently give the impression that you merely act on impulse and not upon study and reflection. People who know you as well as I do are quite well aware of the fact that much of your talk is a smoke-screen, but some of those in authority who have a chance to meet you only occasionally do not have this knowledge.

Talking as a kindly parent would to a troublesome adolescent, Ike continued,

My advice is, therefore, (if you want it) merely the old saw to “count to ten before you speak.” This applies not only to criticism of Allies, a subject on which I am adamant, but to many others. A man once gave me an old proverb. It was this: “Keep silent and appear stupid; open your mouth and remove all doubt.” I do not mean that this applies to you, as you damn well know, but I do mean that a certain sphinx-like quality upon occasion will do one hell of a lot toward enhancing one’s reputation.⁴⁶

Ike’s words cut George to the quick. Patton had taken the young officer under his wing since 1919, invited the Eisenhowers to countless lunches and dinners, introduced Ike to the right people. He had even helped Ike and Mamie remodel their family living quarters at Camp Meade. As for his own reputation, George had studied the art of war, and he practiced it better than any other officer in the service. Ike had no business telling him to shut his mouth.

Then again, George could not dismiss Ike’s words lightly, especially if, as Ike said, the opinion was held by “other” people. If by “other” people Ike meant Marshall or McNair or McNarney, then George was already in trouble, and he had damned well better take Ike’s lecture to heart. Mulling the matter over, George wrote in his diary that night, “Got a secret letter from Ike in which he advises me to be more circumspect and less flip in my conversation on military matters. He means well and I certainly have thus far failed to sell myself in a big way to my seniors.” ⁴⁷

The next day, George drafted a letter to Ike thanking him for the frankness of his advice. He wrote, “Let me start by assuring you that I want your advice. I want it for two reasons, because you are my Commanding General and because you are my friend.”

He explained to Ike that his apparently flippant manner was the result of much forethought, not a half-cocked approach to war as it might have seemed to the less perceptive. But he admitted, “I have realized for sometime that I do not present myself in the best light to my seniors. I feel that thanks to your thoughtfulness in writing me frankly, I shall in the future do much better. At least it shall be my constant study to follow your advice.”⁴⁸

Patton was onto something here. He might grouse about Ike to his diary, or gossip with Clark and Hughes about the miserable way Eisenhower was running the war, but deep in his heart he knew his friend “meant well,” and that, to a point, Ike would protect him from wolves who wore stars. Their friendship had become exactly what George had predicted a year earlier: a symbiotic relationship in which Ike’s need for George’s military talents, and George’s need for a protector on high, were the central pillars.

At the end of January, a light flickered in Patton’s long, dreary tunnel. He learned, unofficially, that he had been tapped to plan Operation HUSKY, the invasion of Sicily. Ike confirmed the news over lunch on February 3. An elated Patton gave Eisenhower the credit for his ticket out of calmed waters, and a few weeks later he gave Beatrice a revised opinion of his former Tank Corps brother: “D. has realy [sic] developed beyond belief and is quite a great man. He has certainly been nice to me. In fact I seem to have got more of a job than W[ayne], but that remains to be seen.” ⁵⁰

Not that the Sicilian operation was without its drawbacks, the most obvious being its low probability of success. After all, the Allies had been given a bloody nose by a French enemy that had inwardly wanted to surrender, and Patton’s phenomenal luck with the Casablanca surf was a bolt of lightning that might not strike twice. After a few weeks in Rabat, where his newly organized I Armored Corps (Reinforced) was studying the challenges of an amphibious landing, George confessed, “We all realize it is a damned poor bet.” But he added, “It is an honor to be trusted with the American part of the plan. I feel I will win.” ⁵¹

While Patton was planning his “damned poor bet,” he had a chance to see his British colleagues—the ones he would be fighting alongside—up close for the first time. Hopping a B-17, he flew to Tripoli for a military conference, where for three days British ground and air commanders lectured their American cousins on lessons they had learned while fighting the Germans over the past three and a half years. George scribbled down some initial impressions of His Majesty’s field commanders, including Alexander (“very quiet and not impressive looking”) and Montgomery (“small, very alert, wonderfully conceited, and the best soldier—or so it seems—I have met in this war”). Aside from Montgomery, whom he called “sort of a Stone Wall Jackson type”—big words from a former VMI cadet—he dismissed most of the British war chiefs as “the same non-committal clerical types as our generals.” Patton’s instincts told him that where fighting was to be done, he was still in a class by himself.⁵²

On the fourth of March, while returning from an afternoon ride on General Noguès’s big charger, a thoroughbred named Joyeuse, George was flagged down by a messenger bearing an urgent dispatch from Algiers. It was from Eisenhower. The message directed General Patton to leave for Algiers the next day for extended field service. George told his diary that night: “I phoned ‘Beetle’ Smith, Ike’s chief of staff, and asked what it was about. He said that I may relieve Fredendall. Well it is taking over rather a mess but I will make a go of it. I think I will have more trouble with the British than with the Boches. ‘God favors the brave, Victory is to the audacious!’”⁵³