African Armada

OPERATIONS IN NORTH AFRICAN WATERS, OCTOBER 1942-JUNE 1943 (297 pp.) --Samuel Eliot Momon--Little, Brown ($5).

More words were written and read about World War II than any other war in history. But much of the writing came from correspondents who were usually in a hurry, and often able to observe only one closeup section of a big scene. And the official writings were usually cramped by the dictates of security and the censors.

In the past year there have been beginnings of an attempt to put together the war as it really was--its grand strategies, the sprawling campaigns, the great inside hazards and little offside fumbles. Samuel Eliot Morison's book, and the series of which it will form a part, is the most considerable attempt to date. Extraordinarily well informed and detailed, it is authoritative without the curse of being "official."* Its subject is the U.S. Navy's part in Operation Torch, the Allied assault against French Northwest Africa in November 1942. (Historian Morison's book is Volume II, though the first to be released, of a series which will eventually run to 13 or 14 volumes.) The story:

The Devious Course. When the U.S. convoy in Operation Torch set out, it was the "largest . . . overseas expedition in the history of man." With its outriders, it covered 600 square miles of sea. It crept out of east coast U.S. ports at different times and in different directions. Five "beacon" submarines sneaked out of Long Island Sound. The new battleship Massachusetts, with cruisers and destroyers, set out from a point near Portland, Me. The Air Group, consisting of U.S.S. Ranger and four Sangamon-class escort carriers, sailed for Bermuda, presumably for maneuvers. The bulk of the 40-odd other warships and 35 transports and cargo vessels left Norfolk, Va. as though also

West Indies bound. The rest steered northeast, in the direction of Britain.

Following courses as devious as "the track of :,, reeling drunk in the snow," the several groups circled, twisted, finally met on schedule off Cape Race, Nfld. Long before sunrise, eleven days later, having zigzagged 4,000 miles without mishap, the entire convoy lay nervous and expectant within reach of French Morocco. Here & there along the coast a few lights gleamed in the darkness, writes Morison. "Africa was never so dark and mysterious to ancient sea rovers as she seemed that night to these 70,000 young men who had retraced the path of Columbus."

Full, Accurate, Early. Harvard's tall, austere Trumbull Professor of American History knows what he is writing about. He is not only the best of Columbus biographers (in his Pulitzer Prizewinning Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942) but he was a member of the ship's company aboard U.S.S. Brooklyn in those anxious invasion hours. Soon after Pearl Harbor, he had suggested his assignment himself to his fellow Harvardman and fellow naval enthusiast, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was Morison's idea that a "full, accurate and early" history of the naval war ought to be written. In May 1942 Morison was commissioned a lieutenant commander, with a special assignment: to get the history written.

It was probably the best extracurricular job any college professor ever had. Eventually promoted to captain, Morison could go & come as he pleased throughout the world-flung U.S. Navy. By V-J day he and his staff had witnessed all the major U.S. naval operations, discussed them with admirals, petty officers and seamen, consulted reams of action reports and war diaries. If North African Waters is a fair sample, the completed history will be one of the basic records of World War II.

The Gamble. Though it has not been souped up for popular appeal, North African Waters makes fascinating reading. The narrative repeatedly slows down to take aboard tables, charts and technical details. More informal books--e.g., Ernie Pyle's Here Is Your War--give more colorful pictures of life on the Operation Torch convoys, and still others (since this is a naval history only) deal more fully with the beach fighting and the land battles. But no other book shows as clearly what a slam-bang gamble the invasion was, and how easily--and tragically--it might have gone to smash.

It was, Morison reminds readers, no neat and compact affair. It was a mammoth multi-pronged attack, with the flanks about 900 miles apart. While the U.S. task force struck Morocco along the Atlantic coast, two separate Royal Navy task forces, carrying both U.S. and British troops, struck from the Mediterranean against Oran and Algiers. Ultimate success depended not only on the luck and timing of all three strikes, but upon what happened when Montgomery suddenly turned on Rommel at El Alamein. Montgomery needed tanks before he could turn. Stripping its own armored divisions, the U.S. had sent him 400 General Shermans, with all the engines stowed aboard one ship. That one ship was singled out by a U-boat and sunk soon after clearing port. Another ship was frantically loaded with engines, and sent off--unescorted--to catch up with the rest. Miraculously, it got through.

The Torch convoys were already at sea when Montgomery threw his punch. Two British convoys proceeded through Gibraltar unscathed, and it was not until Nov. 7 (the day before North African Dday) that U-boats attacked. As for the U.S. convoy, it was first attacked by U-boats 48 hours after Dday. The richest, most obvious submarine target in history, much of it at sea for weeks, was totally missed by German Intelligence.

The Breaks. But without the planning, and above all, without the breaks, it might have been the greatest setback to Allied arms since Dunkirk. Ship crews and assault troops alike, Morison explains, were in most cases only half-trained. When it came to combat, nine out of ten were utter greenhorns. With huge fleets committed far from home, heavy weather on D-day might have been fatal. The weather was in fact generally calm and clear, although high seas (15ft. surf) had swept the Moroccan coast almost until the morning of the landings.

The U.S. had almost unbelievable luck during the Casablanca naval battle. More 6-inch and 5-inch shells were thrown by the light cruiser Brooklyn alone than by the entire U.S. fleets against the Spanish at Manila Bay and Santiago. But at Casablanca U.S. ships suffered only five minor hits, while the French lost more than a dozen ships, sunk, missing or disabled. The Massachusetts almost took a spread of four torpedoes at once, but maneuvered between Nos. 3 & 4 of the spread, with No. 4 only 15 feet to starboard.

Franklin Roosevelt had "suggested and even urged" the operation from the start. But General Eisenhower, for one, had termed it a plan of "quite desperate nature"; General Marshall had reported that old hands in Washington gave it only a 50-50 chance; both U.S. and British navies had counseled against it. That it succeeded, Morison concludes, proves that it was "fundamentally sound and wise." But, he adds, the difference between success and failure is sometimes less a matter of wisdom than of inches in a torpedo's course or "a few yards deflection in the fall of a.salvo."

-The royalties go to the U.S. Treasury, but the judgments are Morison's rather than the Navy's.

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