The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [174]
At times it must indeed have seemed like divine destiny that the third son of a failed Midwestern merchant, who had chosen a military career only because it afforded him a free education, who had never commanded so much as a platoon in combat, who had spent sixteen years as a major, and who thirty months before had been a mere lieutenant-colonel, could be placed in overall command of the largest amphibious operation of the past two millennia.62 Yet Eisenhower’s time in the Operations Division of the US War Department gave him a fine strategic sense, his mentor General George Marshall’s stalwart support for him in Washington gave him political power, and his own charm and growing charisma gave him the ability to referee the increasingly bitter contests between the prima-donna generals who were to dominate the next stages of the western war, primarily Montgomery, Patton, Omar Bradley and Mark Clark. Squabbling schoolgirls could hardly have been as petty and bitchy as these senior Allied commanders. (Harold Alexander and William Slim were men of different temperaments, while Douglas MacArthur was 5,000 miles away.) One of Patton’s biographers observes that he was ‘obsessed with beating the British on the battlefield, both to satisfy his personal vanity and to demonstrate that the American soldier was second to none’.63 Yet Patton was hardly any less hard on American rivals such as Mark Clark, and he recorded in his diary in September 1942: ‘He seems to me more preoccupied with bettering his own future than with winning the war.’64 The only consolation is that the German and Russian generals seem to have been just as vain, ambitious, backbiting and political as the British and American ones. The pretence of many generals to be bluff soldiers just doing their duty without regard to fame or promotion was for the most part just that.
Despite all the preparations at Gibraltar and elsewhere, and a need-to-know list numbering 800, somehow Torch achieved operational surprise. Both Vichy and the Abwehr assumed that such an attack was being considered, and the Italians even correctly predicted where it would land, but it was not spotted beforehand.65 Task Force 34 was lucky that a U-boat wolf-pack off the Moroccan coast had moved off to attack a British convoy sailing from Sierra Leone, although a total of twelve merchant ships were not.
In all there were nine Torch landings at three ports in Africa, which met differing levels of resistance from the Vichy French forces. Those at Casablanca were unopposed on the beaches, which was fortunate because they were the riskiest in terms of high surf and heavy tides. Nevertheless immediately afterwards they met the fiercest resistance of all three. Meanwhile, Major-General Lloyd R. Fredendall’s force attacked Oran over a 50-mile front, and met only ‘hesitant and uncertain’ resistance.66 The briefest resistance of the three was faced by Major-General Charles W. Ryder’s force at Algiers – the capital of the French Empire in North Africa – which attacked over a 25-mile front and suffered few casualties. The French Navy tended to be far more aggressive than the Army, recalling with undimmed fury the sinking of its fleet at Oran by the Royal Navy in July 1940. Yet its attempts at serious resistance collapsed after three days, once the sheer scale of the Allied offensive was revealed, especially at sea and in the air. Although Marshal Pétain issued orders for continued resistance against the Allies, the commander of all Vichy forces in Africa, Admiral Jean-Louis Darlan, whose great-grandfather had died at the hands of the British at the battle of Trafalgar