There were more than 12,000,000 Americans who participated in WWII of which 150,000, including my father, landed in North Africa in November, 1942 in Operation Torch. Unfortunately, Americans do not know their collective story in fighting the Vichy French, Erwin Rommel, and his Africa Corps. It is tragic and revealing that newspapers never, even the local ones that recorded their return, carried but a handful of the stories of returning GIs and the strange things and places they saw like Oran, Mers El-Kébir, Algiers, Philippeville, Bone, Kasserine, and Bizerte. Nor does the public appreciate that the overwhelming majority were not technically in combat, but were in the Services of Supply (SOS) that included the Engineers, Chemical units, the Quartermaster Corps, Ordnance, Medical units, Signal Corps, and the Transportation Corps.
Dad was in the Center Attack Group transports of the 2nd Corps in the 1st Infantry Division. The 1st Division Headquarters Co. and its 1st Quartermaster Co. landed at Oran in the second wave at “Z” landing zone from the passenger liner H.M.S. Reina Del Pacifico, the ship that carried him. Oran forms a perfect harbor. It’s an artificial indentation among the surrounding hills with a 2,000 ft. peak on its west side. The November weather was cold and rainy the first days of the landing. Oran was also a dangerous place. He told me of the sight of one troop ship sitting in the ocean under a perfectly clear Mediterranean sky when a German submarine blew it up. He said that in 10 minutes there was nothing left, not one thing, but a ring of smoke where the ship once was. He said that the Mediterranean was the “bluest of blue”. The Germans sank the freighter Arthur Middleton on January 1, 1943 , bombed Oran nineteen days later, and bombed the harbor on March 19, 1943 . Dad underwent aerial bombing and saw a black soldier get decapitated from shrapnel.
Dad spent two years in Africa running convoys and hauling supplies eastward through the coastal valleys of the Atlas Mountains to help the 1st Infantry Division take the port of Bizerte, the German’s last supply base. At Oran he became a platoon sergeant over 16 trucks with black drivers and white guards. A major Transportation Corps truck head was established at Mostaganem up the coastal road east of Oran for the drive against Bizerte. Convoys were always getting shot up. Dad was proud of his plan to stagger trucks of six each to get to the destination without being bombed or strafed in a large convoy.
At the eastern most point of the Atlas Mountains there is a hook or chain of mountains that goes southward from Bizerte forming what they used to call the dorsal. The chain formed a natural barrier to the German’s armor so the main supply base was established at Tébessa west of the Kasserine Pass. Rommel tried to break through, but mountains, B-24s, and armor don’t get along. After an unsuccessful early attack by the Americans in 1942, the African Campaign drew down with the final assault on Bizerte near Tunis in the spring of 1943. There were 275,000 German POWs taken at Tunis. Dad probably took part in their evacuation to Oran and POW camps. He also saw U.S. troops in African prison camps overlooking the Mediterranean where they had been placed because of desertion. He said they would jump over the cliff there rather than fight. I believe that was at the Santa Cruz stockade above Oran. One night he fell asleep on the side of the road with his rifle at his side while all night German prisoners went by. That might have been at Tunis, but it drives me crazy because I can’t remember what he said.
