Tactician's Dream

The ancient, tranquil towns of Provence stirred uneasily in the hot August sun. This year there were no vacationing Parisians on the beaches but a new wave of American tourists had arrived. Through the nodding summer countryside came the faint chatter of machine-gun fire, the roar of a big gun, the crack of a rifle. On dusty roads columns of tanks grumbled by, and above them fighter planes rode busily to work.

Warmed by the sun, cooled by the fierce, antiseptic mistral, favored by commerce and the sea, the land had bred a human race tolerant and amused. Now the Provencals joined in with the invaders to drive the German from their land. Along the shore among groves of cork oak, on the hills where pines tinged the air with the clean smell of resin, Frenchmen fought alongside the swiftly advancing troops of Major General Alexander M. (for McCarrell) Patch, U.S. commander of the Allied Seventh Army.

The town of Saint-Tropez, with tall pink and ocher houses overlooking the protected bay where in peacetime the British Mediterranean Fleet used to anchor on its annual vacation cruise, was captured by a parachute unit dropped there by mistake. In sun-drenched Hyeres, where the girls are dark and Saracen and the streets are lined with palms, the Germans still held. Frejus, where Julius Caesar planted supplies for Gaul, was taken the first day. Saint-Raphael, a modest fishing village gone garish with the trappings of a modern coast resort, was quickly captured, too. But Cannes, its luxury hotels, meager beach, its dreams of gambling and fish, yachts and flowers still belonged to the Germans.

Oleander and Hyacinth. As the invasion entered its second week the Seventh was beyond such tactical baubles; it was swooping out northwest and northeast at top speed. Already it had secured for its supply establishments a good portion of the Riviera land of pink oleander, grassy seaside terraces, garden walls, pastel villas, lush shrubbery, handsome estates, hyacinths, white beaches and mountain roads that hang like cornices over the cliffs and sea. Already Allied fighter planes were fly ing from southern France.

Bawdy, overcivilized Marseilles, a seaport that must be also won, was already outflanked; Allied troops were less than nine miles away. The naval base at Toulon, with the tragic wreck of the French fleet rusting in its harbor, was under attack. Avignon, home of the Popes for 76 years, would soon feel the hot breath of war. Aix, heart of Provence, oldest Roman town in Gaul, was directly in the path of the pelting Allied army. The fourth front in Europe was proceeding not according to plan, but better.

Ships and Bombs. D-day was Aug. 15. It began in cloudy night with a crescent moon shining fitfully through the overcast upon calm sea. Before the day was 30 minutes old the attack began with a commando landing on the Hyeres Islands off Cap Benat--where the now sunken French fleet used to take its exercise on sunny days. A few hours later more parachutists and gliders landed beyond the Monts des Maures --the Moorish Mountains--that rise between Toulon and Saint-Raphael.

By 5 a.m. the task force of some 1,000 ships (there were 4,000 in the Normandy invasion) had assembled off the 40-mile stretch of beaches between Le Lavandou* and Saint-Raphael--the least frequented stretch of the Riviera, connected with the rest of France only by a little Toonerville Trolley of a railroad. The armada had come from Italy, North Africa, Corsica and Sardinia loaded with men and materiel.

While the men waited, huddled quietly in the darkness, the naval guns spoke, and ripped the shore. At dawn the bombers arrived, began walking their explosives through the fringe of water near the beach, shooting for mines, underwater obstacles, wire barriers and enemy positions; it was the culmination of weeks of heavy air preparation deeper in southern France. Then the rocket ships darted in, seared the sand black with their deadly fire.

At the Weak Hinge. At 8:02 a.m.--just two minutes late--the landing by the VI Army Corps began. Three veteran U.S. divisions--the 3rd, 36th and 45th--blooded and tempered by landings and fighting in Italy, poured into an area bisected by the mountainous Esterel, which divides the Riviera. The Esterel was also the hinge of two German divisions. The invaders struck their flank regiments, plowed through them.

The result was almost an anticlimax. Some Americans died on the Riviera beaches and on the right the first three waves of invaders were thrown back. But German opposition was a brittle shell over a soft, rotten core. Only 20 German planes were seen all day. Only a ragtag little fleet of eight German corvettes sailed out from Toulon to suicide, like fleas attacking elephants.

On the beaches there were few underwater obstacles, few mines. For the most part there was only desultory small-arms fire ashore. The truth was that German manpower was stretched so taut that there was only a relative handful of second-grade troops with which to defend the south of France (of the two German divisions 40% proved to be Russians, Czechs and Poles).

Against this feeble defense the Allies poured in so much that military men for once seemed to have achieved their dream of overwhelming power. In the air alone the Allies had almost as big an army as the Germans had on the ground. Fourteen thousand Allied airmen flew that first day from aircraft carriers, from Italian and Corsican air bases; they made 4,285 sorties, lost but seven planes.

Prime Minister Churchill, hunched comfortably in a chair on the destroyer Kimberley's bridge, watched while the whole intricate apparatus of invasion unfolded on the beaches. Troops faded off inland, their footsteps filled immediately by the next wave; men and materiel poured in like a never-ending flood. By 10 a.m. tanks and artillery were coming ashore.

Two hours later larger landing craft nudged onto the beaches for direct unloading. At dusk the French came in and as the light faded thousands of fresh parachutists and gliders passed over, their planes winking the signal lights to identify themselves -- a lesson learned from unhappy experience.

One for the Books. Thus ended Dday. It was so successful that by midnight the Allies had captured not only the objectives of the first day but the objectives of the second. The attack had started late (it was originally planned to coincide with the Normandy attack). It had been a poorly kept secret.

But it rolled off like a tactician's dream. Said Allied headquarters later: the beachhead "is the largest created ... in less than three days during this war." Purred Washington: "a model of effective organization, cooperation of all services and vigor of action . . . one of the best co ordinated efforts in all military history." Against broken opposition most military operations look like that.

Responsible for this whopping success was a large collection of Allied brass, starting down from General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, Mediterranean Commander in Chief and his U.S. deputy Lieut. General Jacob L. Devers. Lieut. General Ira C. Eaker headed up the air forces and Admiral Sir John H. D. Cunningham the naval forces. But operations, another rung down the hierarchy, were in the hands of an all-American team: Brigadier General Gordon P. Saville of the Twelfth Tactical Air Force, Vice Admiral Henry K. Hewitt, and thin, wiry 54-year-old Major General "Sandy" Patch.

Open Secret. From the moment the troops hit the shore it was Patch's day. He had taken command of the Seventh Army from swaggering George S. Patton (see ARMY & NAVY) in March, had begun his planning then with only a staff. The divisions that would flesh it out were off fighting on the Italian front in General Mark Clark's Fifth Army.

When the date was finally set, it became an open secret and even the most stupid German could read the bombs three days before Dday. Every type of plane in the tactical catalog opened up on the Rhone valley and the coastal area, succeeded in isolating it from supply and reinforcements. By that time it was too late. Even if the Germans had the troops to spare, the bridges and roads to move them were gone.

Thus when the invasion came it swept through like a wind. By D-plus-one the invaders held a coastal strip 40 miles long, up to 20 miles deep. Most of the assault troops were ashore and nearly 3,000 prisoners had been taken. (This week the total had reached more than 14,000.)

By the third day the Allies held a 50-mile front as much as 30 miles deep, a total of some 500 square miles. At least nine important towns were in Allied hands and spearheads were ten miles from the naval base of Toulon, ten miles from Cannes. Seaborne and airborne troops had met ashore; reinforcements and supplies flowed in like a spring freshet.

Sandy Goes Ashore. Nervously impatient, General Patch, tired of straining through his green glasses from the bridge of a ship, hurried gratefully ashore. Characteristically he zipped right up to the front, piled out of his jeep to superintend the surrender of nine anxious Germans. Lean, ramrod-straight, he popped up at critical points wearing a handsome gold-buckled belt and a trick silk scarf printed with a map of southern France.

As the drive developed sensational speed over the weekend, Patch was beginning to look like the U.S.'s newest expert in the new kind of amphibious war. But that was a surprise only to the public; Army men had long kept an eye on this scholarly looking soldier's soldier, a classic specimen of the U.S. Regular Army officer.

He had been born to the Army, grown up in the Army, been educated by the Army; like his father, Colonel Alexander M. Patch, his brother Major General Joseph D. Patch, his son, Captain Alexander M. Patch Jr., he had made a career of the Army. He rode beautifully, loved horses, dogs and hunting, memorized Kipling's poems, played bridge and poker. His looks, his background, his character and his habits were like those of scores of other top officers who turned up ready for war when the enemy struck.

At West Point Sandy Patch did not shine when the grades were posted, but he pole-vaulted nearly twelve feet for the track team, boxed and made wry, quiet wisecracks. Target of most of the cracks: Sandy Patch. In 1933, for the Twenty Year Book of his West Point class of '13, he wrote a story entitled "How I Became a Hero."

In 1917, he wrote, an eager young captain wanted desperately to be a hero--not one of a mass of heroes but "a single, lone, magnificent sort of hero." Ashore in France his regiment was training when an air alarm sounded. The young captain brushed aside one of his machine-gun crews, grabbed the weapon, turned it on a plane heading straight for him. To his amazement he hit it and the plane flopped off wounded. Soon an aide came hurrying up to inquire for the commanding officer.

"Modestly I allowed my friends to push me forward. The aide saluted and said: 'The General's compliments, sir. ... He directs you to report to him now. . . . You have just shot down a French plane.' "

In "How I Became a Hero" Patch said nothing of his World War I record--combat on the Aisne and Marne, at Saint-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne. Later he taught machine-gun operation at Fort Benning, taught military science at Staunton Military Academy, attended the Command and General Staff School, was graduated from the Army War College.

The Americals. In 1933 he wrote: "Now I am back at Staunton where I hope they will forget all about me." They didn't. After Pearl Harbor, Sandy Patch was sent to the French island of New Caledonia in the Pacific. Here, from a collection of stray units which were originally en route to the Philippines and Australia, he whipped the Americal (America- Caledonia) Division into a sort of shape. Modest, officially unaggressive, usually in control of what his brother officers called "a temper like the devil before dawn," he waited for the action he really wanted.

In the fall of 1942 it came.

He was ordered to relieve the Marines on Guadalcanal, finish the job of clearing the island with his pick-up division. It was his first battle command of the war and in two months he wound up the campaign successfully.

His severest critics said that while the campaign might not have been particularly brilliant it was clean and sharp. But the late great General McNair called Patch one of the finest corps commanders in the Army. Patch's success (and diplomacy) in coordinating Army and Navy forces on Guadalcanal won him a Navy D.S.M., with a citation for "brilliant tactical generalship," to add to the Army D.S.M. he already had.

Hot Impatience . . . Cold Calm. In Guadalcanal malaria and dysentery plagued him, but the nervous energy that had made him a fast-walking, constantly moving driver all his life kept him on his feet. He burned with intense impatience when the battle was joined; when the news was bad he took on a chilly professional calm, thought out problems with a deliberation that nothing could hurry.

He mixed easily with his troops,* often chatted with them while he rolled a cigaret from a sack of Bull Durham. Known as a commander who tried to spare his men, he suffered the war with them, had deep lines burned into his gaunt, hard face.

Back in the U.S. Patch went to the Desert Training Center to handle large masses of men and motorized equipment, then headed the IV Army Corps at Camp Young, Calif. Although hit with a bout of pneumonia Patch had time in this interval between battles to relax a little. Perhaps he was able to help dry the dishes for his wife again, see his daughter Julia Ann and his West Pointer son, now somewhere with his infantry outfit in the northern France drive.

Then came another step upward--overseas orders once more, the Seventh Army command and, after months of planning, the amphibious attack on the south of France.

Next, the Rhone Valley. By the fifth day of the invasion the first beachhead phase was over, more than 100,000 of Patch's troops were ashore. The second phase began with a breathless series of plunges that sharply outlined the aim: a rapid push northwest to the Rhone valley. From there Patch's men would go north to meet the forces of General Eisenhower (350 airline miles away). Perhaps sooner than that he might reach west into the Garonne valley and take the port of Bordeaux as he was preparing to take Toulon and Marseilles.

Whatever Sandy Patch should contrive under the plans laid out for him, he had already run off a textbook operation in amphibious tactics. On D-plus-three the fact was recognized: President Roosevelt nominated him for promotion to lieutenant general.

* The little fishing village where two years ago a British submarine picked up General Giraud escaping to join the Allies.

*Once he invited the officer who chose a bivouac area to walk with him past the troops in the dark. They heard a soldier say: "You can tell the son-of-a-bitch that picked this area picked it in the dark." Said Patch quietly to the officer: "Now you know what they think of you."

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