At 4 AM the compartment lights came on and field rations were passed around-crackers, canned meat, and candy. Then the lights were turned out again. Macurdy was wakeful now, waiting for a dawn that seemed slow in coming. When it did, they were over water-not the Bay of Biscay this time, but the Mediterranean.
They'd flown out of the storm; the sky was merely overcast. Men turned in their seats to peer out the small windows. As the light strengthened, Macurdy could see brown hills ahead. The others saw them too; what they couldn't see were the other thirty-eight planes. Four others, yes, but not thirty-eight. Had they gotten lost in the storm? The talk picked up. Oran was supposed to be up ahead somewhere. Had the pilot gotten the signal from the beacon ship? Where was the invasion fleet? Dead ahead maybe, someone suggested, where only the pilot could see it.
Lieutenant Warner was the senior trooper on board, and getting to his feet, he went to the cockpit. A few minutes later e came back out. "At ease!" he shouted, and the talking stopped. "The pilot doesn't know exactly where we are, or where the other thirty-four planes are. The storm winds blew from the east, which means we blew off course to the west. When we get closer to shore, he and this group are going to fly east for a while, till they see some landmark they recognize from the map."
There were groans and a few oaths. "What about the beacon ship?" someone asked.
"They haven't heard a peep from it. They'll know Oran for sure though, when they see it." Then he moved on to his seat. The Pratt amp; Whitney engines continued their reassuring roar, smooth and constant, as if they could go on forever.
With land close ahead, the five planes veered eastward, continuing on a line of flight that allowed the troopers to make out Arab villages on the shore. Half an hour later, the Lieutenant disappeared into the cockpit again, and this time stayed a while. while. Finale stuck his head out, grinning.
"They know where they are now. They're going inland, and et to La Senia from the west." This didn't bring actual cheers, ut Macurdy felt the tension ease. The airfield at La Senia was their primary target. Engines droning steadily, they flew inland over barren rugged hills.
Soon he could see a large flat area with a whitish look, that he thought might be a salt flat, a dry desert lake. He'd never seen one before, but it fitted the description. Warner came out of the cockpit again. "They've spotted more 47s ahead," he said, "sitting on the ground with guys around them, and our gas gauge reads empty. We're going to land."
There were no cheers, and not much was said, except the wry comment that, if that was La Senia Airfield below, or any other goddamned airfield, they'd sure as hell camouflaged the hangars well.
Other groups of C47s arrived after they did. The lakebed, which their pilot said was 35 miles long and 7 wide, consisted of a salty crust beneath which was the stickiest mud Macurdy had ever experienced. Walk fifty feet, and each boot had ten pounds of it stuck on like glue. None of the pilots had heard a sound from the beacon ship, or picked up the radar beacon that was supposed to mark the drop zone.
Some of the planes that had crossed the coast near Oran had been fired on from the ground; the French had decided to fight after all. When Colonel Raff arrived with six planeloads of troopers, and spotted the planes on the lakebed, the nonjumping Air Corps officer in overall command of the operation radioed him that they were taking sniper fire, and were threatened by enemy armor. So Raff and the six planeloads jumped to attack the armor with small arms, grenades, and anti-tank mines. (Bazookas were still unknown.) The colonel hit a large rock when he landed, broke a couple of ribs and was spitting blood. The sniping, it turned out, was at such long range, it had failed to hit anyone, while the "enemy armor" turned out to be an American armored reconnaissance patrol that had gotten through the French defenses earlier that morning.
Before long, most of the 39-plane armada was there in the mud, with too little gas to fly anywhere, and the nearest target was not La Senia, but the military airfield at Tafaraoui, 38 miles away, much of that distance on the lakebed. Part of the battalion was left with the stranded planes. The rest started hiking through the gumbo toward Tafaraoui. Macurdy had thought that any exertion they'd experience in the field couldn't be worse than they'd survived in training. Now, trudging through the gumbo, he changed his mind. A trooper name Hennessy, a Wyoming cowboy, called it "goddamn 'dobe clay, the worst fucking shit in the world," and no one argued with him.
They hiked all night, arriving at the airfield not long after dawn, utterly bushed, to find it in the hands of an American armored force. The field was beautiful in a way: Rows of willow trees along the road, a tall pink water tower, pink barracks… but Macurdy was too tired to appreciate it.
Some of 2nd Battalion's troopers were already there, some of them dead. While Macurdy and the others had been slogging through the mud, the afternoon before, the force left behind had gotten a radio call. American armor had just taken Tafaraoui, and needed infantry to guard five hundred French prisoners, so Raff ordered the remaining dregs of gas drained from the other planes, until they had enough for three of them to fly there. Then he'd loaded the three with troopers-as many as they'd hold-and the planes had taken off. Partway there, they'd been shot up by three French Dewoitine fighter planes, killing or wounding twenty Americans, and forcing the transports to land on the lakebed again.
Most of the troopers they'd carried, including some of the wounded, marched much of the night to reach Tafaraoui. There, with more than a little satisfaction, they heard that a flight of British Spitfires had jumped the Dewoitines and shot all of them down.
The next day, transportation was sent to the 47s on the dry lake, and the rest of the battalion was trucked north to the airfield. The American armor there was needed for the assault on Oran, so its commander turned the airfield over to 2nd Battalion to defend, and left. In the hills, a lone French howitzer kept lobbing in 75mm shells, and the Spitfires couldn't find the well-camouflaged gun. The battalion took more casualties from the shelling. Meanwhile, the men who'd made the long march took advantage of the barracks there, and slept.
Macurdy dreamed, half-wakened, and dreamed again, dreamed of beaches and monsters and death. Then the platoon was rousted out for muster in the morning, leaving brief dregs of dream, baleful and menacing.
But roll call, the mess line, and rumors banished them. At breakfast it occurred to him that sixty hours earlier he'd eaten supper in England, in what seemed like a different world. Not as different as Yuulith, where he'd fought his last war, but different enough.
16
Dancing in a Vacuum
Oran surrendered on the second day-Algiers, farther east, ' had already surrendered to the British-and all of Algeria was nominally in allied hands. Mostly the French had not fought very hard; they'd had their orders and a Gallic sense of honor, but their hearts weren't in it. Surrendering may have hurt their pride, but most of them disliked or even hated being allied with the Nazis.
Meanwhile, the Allied high command was concerned that the Germans would move to occupy the airfields in eastern Algeria and neighboring Tunisia, where there was a power vacuum. The Ales had only a few divisions in all of Algeria, concentrated in the north. On the other hand, though nominally Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps occupied neighboring Tunisia, his forces there were concentrated near the east coast, where they were engaged with the British 8th Army near the Libyan border.
So on November 15th, most of 2nd Battalion jumped on Youks les Bains Airfield, half expecting to be met by German paratroopers. Instead there was a small number of poorly equipped French infantry, who preferred Americans to Nazis. With no fighting necessary there, Colonel Raff sent a company on foot to take and hold Tebessa Airfield nine miles away, near the Tunisian border. They found no Germans there either. Raffs assigned responsibility was the defense of Youks les Bains and Tebessa airfields, which stretched his battalion thin, but he phoned Allied headquarters in Algiers, asking permission to occupy the central Tunisian town of Gafsa, which controlled key mountain roads. The French told him there still were no Germans there. General Clark approved only a reconnaissance, however, and "not one step farther" than Gafsa Then the British General Anderson, in charge of allied ground forces in Algeria, countermanded even that limited permission.