Читать книгу Sicily '43 - James Holland - Страница 17

BY LATE JUNE 1943 the Allies were almost ready, and in Algeria the US 9th Division was among the American units training for the forthcoming invasion. Since the end of the Tunisian campaign, they had been based in the middle of the rocky desert 30 miles south of Sidi bel Abbès, an ancient walled oasis town south of Oran. The 9th Division, like all those American ground units that had fought in Tunisia, had learned the hard way and learned fast; well aware by now there was no room for any kind of complacency, they had, since arriving back in Algeria, been training hard.

Within the division, the 39th Infantry Regiment had been adopting a number of British tricks of the trade, thanks to 24-year-old Lieutenant Charlie Scheffel, who had spent time attached to a British brigade in England and then more recently, during the Tunisian campaign, at the battle schools set up under British instructors in Algeria. Since victory in Tunisia back in May, Scheffel had been promoted from platoon commander to first lieutenant, and was now 1st Battalion S-3 staff officer – plans and operations. After imparting the benefits of his fast-growing experience to the whole of the battalion, Scheffel had been asked to do the same for the other two battalions in the division. In the 39th, as elsewhere, there was a hunger to learn and get better; after all, it didn’t take a genius to realize that the better the soldier, the better the chances of survival. Combine that with dramatically increased amounts of supplies and there was every reason to think the US Seventh Army would soon be a formidable outfit. No one, though, could expect this to happen overnight. Apart from the fifty US Army Rangers who had taken part in the ill-fated Dieppe Raid the previous August, it was only since November that American troops had been in combat on the ground in the western theatre and, for the vast majority, only since the turn of the New Year that they’d been fighting the Germans and Italians. That wasn’t very long, yet very soon the Americans would be providing an entire army to help re-enter Europe and capture Sicily. It was a big ask, to put it mildly, in this still early phase of their part in the war against Germany and Italy.

Raised in the small town of Enid in Oklahoma, Charlie Scheffel was the son of a German and a Swedish immigrant. His parents had reached America with little but had done well; after briefly serving in the US Army, his father had had first the insight to set up a filling station and then the entrepreneurial flair to start prospecting for oil. By the summer of 1929 he had a number of highly successful wells, plenty of money and a brand new Studebaker, in which the family drove to California for an unforgettable and wonderful holiday. Then, in October, everything had come tumbling down around them with the financial crash. First the oil business collapsed, and then Scheffel’s father, always so strong and vital, contracted pneumonia; three months after the Wall Street Crash he was dead, aged just fifty. ‘All of a sudden,’ noted Scheffel, ‘we were alone in a world that seemed increasingly uncertain.1 I was scared.’

The Great Depression that hit the United States after the crash brought untold hardship to millions. It is extraordinary to think how many of the young men like Charlie Scheffel, now fighting in the war, had grown up deprived of one, if not both, parents. Undoubtedly it made them tougher and, generally speaking, better able to cope with the challenges and adversity flung at them now America was at war. The Scheffel family, cruelly shorn of a husband and father as well as their livelihood, had somehow to pull themselves together and play with the cards they had been dealt – a prospect made even tougher by the dwarfism suffered by Scheffel’s younger brother, Stanley, in an era when physical differences were a considerable handicap.

Charlie himself grew up physically strong and athletic and won a sports scholarship to Oklahoma A&M University, where he played tennis, basketball and, especially, baseball. He also joined the college ROTC, which provided him with a useful few extra dollars. In the summer he played semi-pro baseball for a dollar a day; and back home in Enid he had a girlfriend, Ruth, with whom he was smitten, so life had been looking up. In the fall of 1940, the draft was introduced and the college ROTC began recruiting for the advanced course; signing up for this meant he would not be conscripted before completing his college degree, and also that later he could join the army directly as a second lieutenant.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 changed everything. With the United States now irrevocably at war, Scheffel had returned to college expecting to be sent off to the army full time right away, but was given a reprieve to complete his degree the next May. With the future suddenly so uncertain, Scheffel asked Ruth to marry him; after their wedding at the end of March 1942, they spent their honeymoon in a dollar-a-night room above a garage. ‘We had no time to go anywhere else,’ Scheffel recalled.2 After graduating, he was offered a place in the Finance Corps, but spurned the chance of an easy war and instead joined the infantry. ‘A surge of patriotism made me want to get to the SOBs who had attacked us,’ he wrote.3 ‘I was also young and needed to prove myself as a man.’

Sent to Britain as part of a replacement unit, he bade farewell to his mother, brother and new wife, and set sail across the Atlantic. He and the rest of his provisional company were initially attached to a British brigade, most of whom had already fought in France back in 1940. This was an early experiment to see whether British and American troops could operate and fight literally side-by-side, and although Scheffel soon realized there were a lot of cultural differences, he learned much from his new comrades. British officers, for example, had batmen – soldier-servants. This was not for the maintenance of some antiquated class division but rather because an officer needed a personal assistant, not least to dig a foxhole when first in the line. ‘If you’re an officer in command,’ he was told, ‘you’re going to be so damn busy figuring out how to get out of the mess you’re in, you’ll never have time to dig your own slit.’4 Scheffel also learned it was far better to dig a foxhole for two men than for one, as he’d been taught back home. Two men could support each other, watch backs, one staying awake while the other slept. They could provide more warmth, and emotional as well as physical support.

He learned much more besides, and even went off to war on an all-British ship as part of Operation TORCH. Soon afterwards, though, the novelty of being with the more experienced British began to wear off. He and his fellow Americans, still part of a provisional company, seemed to be given all the worst tasks – endless night patrols and night duties – and Scheffel, for one, wanted to be back with his own kind. ‘I think we got the shit details because we were rookies,’ he noted, ‘and the Brits didn’t trust us much.’5 After a few days, he asked the brigadier if he and his men could rejoin the US Army – and the very same day, they were on their way: half, Scheffel among them, sent to join the 39th Infantry Regiment in the 9th Division, and the other half to join the Big Red One, the 1st Infantry Division.

While the Big Red One had fought alongside the British in northern Tunisia, the rest of the US II Corps had suffered its bloody nose at Kasserine Pass. The perceived humiliation of being so badly overrun by Rommel’s Panzerarmee cut deep, but was none the less an important stepping stone in the development of the US Army. The British had suffered their fair share of setbacks too, having also begun the conflict with a tiny standing army. It was inevitable. Training was, of course, vital, but required battle experience to be truly valuable; route marches, map reading and rifle firing only took the raw recruit so far. The Americans were growing their army exponentially, mobilizing more men at greater speed than even the British, and for much of the time so far had had insufficient equipment with which to train and few instructors with any experience whatsoever. The lessons of modern combat had to be learned, absorbed and applied.

Scheffel had seen plenty of action in Tunisia, and like many Americans who survived the early fighting in that campaign, he had emerged a considerably better soldier – and officer. After Kasserine, a number of the American units had been rotated through the battle schools that had been set up in Algeria on the model of those originally established by the British following the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. These were the brainchild of General Sir Harold Alexander, who had the idea of training conscripts in simple battle drills to which they would react automatically in times of stress – orders, such as ‘Down, crawl, observe, fire!’ Alexander had also recognized that some kind of battle inoculation was needed before green troops were subjected to the terrors of dive-bombing, shelling, mortaring and machine-gunning. This could only be done using live ammunition. Finally, he also realized that it was essential that all troops were battle fit. For the time, such training was quite innovative, and battle school soon became a key part of a young conscript’s training.

Despite his earlier time with the British, Scheffel was one of those packed off to battle school. He reckoned he had been pretty lucky to have made some mistakes and yet lived to tell the tale, so had paid keen attention to all he had been taught. While there, he spent an evening with a group of junior British officers in a mess tent drinking local wine and shooting the breeze. Most didn’t think they had much chance of surviving. ‘We sat there giving coarse opinions on the war,’ recalled Scheffel.6 ‘We gave everybody hell – Patton, Eisenhower, Churchill, Montgomery, Alexander – we didn’t miss anybody except ourselves. We were the only good guys in the war, serving at the mercy of fools.’

They’d been grousing a while when the tent flap opened and in stepped a trim British officer whom all recognized immediately, the American included. Hastily they got to their feet and saluted. The visitor addressed Scheffel.

‘You’re an American?’7,

‘Yes, sir,’ Scheffel replied. ‘Oklahoma.’

‘I’ve been to Fort Sill,’ he said, then motioned to the group – ‘Sit down, gentlemen’ – before joining them. He confessed he’d heard some of what they’d been saying, but swiftly allayed their fears. He, too, had been a young officer once. He understood their concerns, and reassured them a corner had been turned. Eventually, ready to leave, he stood. ‘I want you to remember this,’ he said.8 ‘Gentlemen, the Boche are beginning to lose this war. If you think it’s bad on our side, just be glad you’re not on theirs.’

Their visitor had been none other than General Alexander himself, at the time newly arrived in Tunisia to take command of 18th Army Group.

Alexander – or ‘Alex’, as he was always known – was really a rather remarkable character, although not one ever to blow his own trumpet. In the world of high command, where ego and personal ambition often went hand-in-hand, Alex was notable for having very little of the former and almost none of the latter. Certainly, there were few people more prone to self-deprecation. Such unassuming modesty had been drummed into him during a childhood in which he had been brought up to respect notions of honour, duty and impeccable manners in all things and at all times.

His had been an aristocratic upbringing: a large estate in Northern Ireland, school at Harrow, then a commission in the Irish Guards. Charming, well connected and with no small amount of dash, he effortlessly excelled at all sports, was a highly talented artist and even took up motor racing at Brooklands. The four long years of the First World War developed him as a soldier. He quite openly enjoyed it, despite – or rather, because of – spending almost the entire war with fighting troops. At the First Battle of Ypres in November 1914 he was seriously wounded in the thigh and hand and invalided home. Recovering well and determined to get back to the front as soon as possible, he walked 64 miles in one day to prove to a cautious doctor that he was fit enough. Sure enough, by February 1915 he was back, and later that summer led his company at the Battle of Loos. His reputation had grown rapidly, notably for exceptional personal courage, but also for extraordinary imperturbability and the gift of quick decision. Always leading from the front and with no regard to his own personal safety, he soon had the complete devotion and respect of all those who served under him.

Though wounded twice more, Alex survived the carnage of the Somme, Cambrai and Passchendaele, and in 1917, aged just twenty-five, became acting lieutenant-colonel commanding the 2nd Battalion. By the Armistice, he had earned a DSO and bar, an MC and the French Légion d’Honneur, and had been mentioned in dispatches five times. Nor did his combat record stop with the end of war. In 1919 he was sent to command the Baltic Landwehr, part of the Latvian Army, in the war against Russia. Since most of the men in this force were of German origin, he was unique among the current Allied commanders in having led German troops in battle. Staff college and staff appointments were followed by stints of further action along the North-West Frontier between India and Afghanistan, where he was one of very few guardsmen to command a brigade. By the outbreak of war in 1939, this gilded officer was one of the army’s youngest major-generals and commanding 1st Division. He went with them to France, and after the British retreat in May 1940 was left behind to supervise the final withdrawal of British troops. Alex, in fact, was the final British soldier to be evacuated – the last man out of Dunkirk.

Remaining in England for the next two years of war, Alex realized that the vast majority of infantry troops under his command were simply not ready for battle, and it was at this point that he instigated the battle schools. It was also during this time that he particularly came to Churchill’s notice. The prime minister was certainly influenced by Alex’s easy charm and illustrious background, but also by his calm control and a military record that was second to none. Even when sent to oversee the retreat from Burma in May 1942, Alex had impressed with his unflappable ability to make the best of a bad situation. And he looked the part, too: although by early 1943 a rather shabby military chic had developed with Eighth Army, Alex always looked immaculate. There was a bit of sartorial flair to his style. ‘As calm and serene as a lecturer in a college,’ noted the American war correspondent John Gunther.9 ‘Everyone calls Montgomery “Monty” but Alex is General Alex.’

By early 1943, there was no British commander with a greater reputation, not even Montgomery. Now a full general, Alex was also unique in having commanded men in battle at every single officer rank. He never swore and never really lost his temper – not publicly, at any rate – and also somehow managed to speak German, French, Italian, Russian and even Urdu fluently. He had also developed a very sound sense of judgement and, perhaps even more importantly, an understanding of the men under his command, including the recognition that confidence and good morale were absolutely vital ingredients for success – especially with largely conscript armies. And this in turn meant that the approach to battle – the preparation and the removal of potential stumbling blocks – was the key to victory.

This stood him in good stead as Eighth Army began to claw their way back across North Africa in the summer and autumn of 1942. Although Alamein is seen as Montgomery’s victory, Alex – appointed C-in-C Middle East at the beginning of August 1942, and so Monty’s boss – deserves every bit as much credit for that crucial turning point in British fortunes. It had been Alex who had first made clear there would be no more retreats. It had also been Alex, arriving at Alamein in the middle of the battle with matters not going entirely according to plan, who subtly suggested a different approach to his army commander.

When Alex had been appointed commander of the newly formed 18th Army Group after the Casablanca Conference, his brief had been to finish the battle in Tunisia as quickly as possible. Reaching Tunisia immediately following the setback at Kasserine, he had hurtled up and down the front to see the situation with his own eyes, and spent the first week swiftly reorganizing his forces into greater concentrations, plugging gaps and then counter-attacking. Within ten days of his arrival at the front, the Kasserine defeat had been reversed, allowing Alex breathing space to lick his forces into shape and to develop a new plan to complete the Allied victory in North Africa. Raw and undertrained units were whisked off to the battle schools in Algeria, while Alex himself spent as much time as possible at his tactical headquarters camp near the front and visiting as many troops as he could – including Charlie Scheffel, on whom he had certainly made an impression. ‘I had great respect for Alexander,’ he noted.10 ‘Maybe my meeting him had something to do with that opinion … but General Alexander inspired me and I know I was a better officer for having met him.’

In this still new situation of coalition warfare, a deft touch was needed to ensure the Anglo-US partnership worked on the battlefield. Alexander was ideally placed to provide this steer and soon won over his new American subordinate commanders, including Major-General Omar Bradley, who at the end of March 1943 was soon to take over command of US II Corps. Initially put out that his corps were not to be used in the final drive on Tunis, Bradley had braced himself for a confrontation, only to be swiftly disarmed. Alex had listened and assured him II Corps would be part of his plans. ‘We were impressed with Alexander,’ noted Bradley’s aide, Captain Chester B. Hansen.11 ‘He was a striking and possessed individual who simply exuded an air of confidence.’ Later in the campaign, once II Corps had been sent to northern Tunisia and Bradley had taken over, Alexander had visited his headquarters. Bradley had shown him the current map and his dispositions and planned movements, of which Alex did not entirely approve. ‘By a brilliant piece of diplomacy,’ noted Harold Macmillan, then the British political advisor to General Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander in North Africa, ‘he suggested to his subordinate commander some moves which he might well make.12 He did not issue an order. He sold the American general the idea, and made him think that he had thought of it all himself.’ It was a command style particularly suited to coalition operations.

Alex was far too polite ever to have looked down upon his new peers and comrades in arms; and moreover, a sense of unity of purpose, of working together, side-by-side, hand-in-hand, was stressed over and over by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was personally championed with religious zeal by Eisenhower. It was a firm policy that stood in stark contrast against the naked contempt with which Nazi Germany regarded its allies.

Certainly, it would have been a crime had the chiefs of staff allowed Eisenhower to resign back in January 1943. While not all had run smoothly on the battlefield, there was no doubt he had handled the extremely difficult political situation, with the Vichy French leadership coming in from the cold, as well as the myriad different personalities under his command, with admirable deftness and diplomacy.

Eisenhower – or Ike, as he was widely known – understood that given the cultural differences, and given that Britain had been fighting the war for far longer than the Americans and had a more entrenched military tradition, it would be all too easy for their new British colleagues to appear superior and to look down their noses at their new Johnny-come-lately comrades in arms. Equally, it was every bit as important the Americans did not develop unhealthy chips on their shoulders about British snootiness or perceived standoffishness. National pride and competitiveness – tribal instinct – were one thing; Anglophobia and Americaphobia, quite another. ‘I do not allow, ever,’ Eisenhower made clear, ‘an expression to be used in this Headquarters in my presence that even insinuates a British versus American problem exists.13 So far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t.’

‘In his current efforts to improve British and American relationships,’ noted Eisenhower’s good friend and naval aide, Harry C. Butcher, in March 1943, ‘I see in Ike something akin to a fireman atop an observation tower watching a forest for smoke or flame.14 He has to put out some fires by logical argument that to win the war the Allies must stick together.’

Eisenhower warned all his US senior commanders that any American preaching anti-British sentiment would be sent home. Alexander was similarly impressed upon to do the same with British commanders, as were the other British top brass. Publicly, Alex certainly made sure the Americans got their due deserts following victory in North Africa. The 34th ‘Red Bull’ Division were a case in point. They had arrived in North Africa having never even seen a tank, let alone trained with one, and their first engagement at Fondouk in Tunisia in February had been a disaster. Sent to battle school, they had then returned and in April had captured from the Germans and held a vital high point, Hill 609, despite repeated enemy counter-attacks. In recognition of this, Alex had insisted the Red Bulls lead the subsequent victory parade in Tunis.

And while a host of varied factors had contributed to that huge Allied success, there was no question that Alex, as the overall Allied battlefield commander, had gripped the situation swiftly, acted with tact, charm and sound judgement, and played a key role in making sure the fighting in Tunisia was brought to a rapid and successful conclusion. Equally, it was Eisenhower who had led from the front in terms of forging the coalition. There were disagreements, naturally, but there were many new – and lasting – friendships being developed too, and these relationships were ensuring that the Allies were indeed working together towards one united goal: the eventual unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, as had been agreed at the Casablanca Conference back in January; and with it, victory.

Sicily, however, would be very different from Tunisia, for both men. For Eisenhower, the challenges of preparing for Operation HUSKY were gargantuan, especially since planning had been taking place concurrently with the campaign in Tunisia. The responsibility, too, for overseeing the Allied re-entry into Axis-controlled Europe was on an entirely different level from the campaign in North Africa, carrying a hugely increased weight of importance. Alexander, for his part, also found himself in uncharted territory. Up to this point, he had repeatedly been brought in to salvage a situation that had gone badly awry. Now, for the first time, he was commanding a multinational force that was in the ascendancy, and at this stage in the war it was essential that Allied fortunes remained that way. Under him were two army-sized forces: the brand new and comparatively inexperienced US Force 343, which would become Seventh Army, and the battle-hardened and experienced British Eighth Army, still code-named Force 545, both with commanders whose experiences mirrored those of the men they commanded. Yet those two men – Patton and Montgomery – were also strong-willed and highly divisive characters and would need careful handling. In fact, the entire operation would need careful handling, to put it mildly, for the pressures now were even greater. Failure was not to be countenanced. It was simply unthinkable, and yet the risks remained huge. No one could say for sure how the enemy would react. Would the Italians fight as they had in Tunisia? Would the Germans throw more men and materiel into the island as Hitler had so dramatically reinforced Tunisia? No amphibious operation on this scale had ever before been attempted. There was, unquestionably, much that could still go wrong.