Assignment to Hell by Timothy M. Gay

amphibious and desert warfare. Yet a half year later those same tenderfoots helped trap more than a quarter million of Hitler’s finest troops, forever puncturing the myth of the Wehrmacht’s invincibility.
    Torch became a testing ground not only for grunts in the field, but also for their commanders—Generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Lucian Truscott, Mark Clark, and Omar Bradley, among them—and for their commanders’ commanders, the great Anglo-American alliance led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, and Field Marshal Harold Alexander, as well as President Franklin Roosevelt and his top military advisor, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall.
    North Africa is where Walter Cronkite burnished his reputation—but only by getting bum information and inadvertently leaving the field ofbattle. It’s where Hal Boyle and Joe Liebling became lifelong friends—where Boyle, the Irish shanachie, established his signature column and where Liebling, the urbane stylist, encountered a corpse that became the genesis of his greatest war essay. It’s where Andy Rooney and Homer Bigart narrowly averted an international incident while meeting the King of England and where Bigart prepared for his first amphibious assault. Finally, it’s where Liebling, Boyle, Ernie Pyle, and a coterie of correspondents sipped black-market scotch on a seaside veranda, cheering on Allied warplanes as they attacked German fighters and bombers.
    North Africa was undeniably a pivot point in American history. 6 But as eyewitnesses Boyle, Cronkite, and Liebling could attest, it was hell getting there.
    A MERICA’S GROUND WAR AGAINST A DOLF Hitler was launched in the most improbable of places. At the insistence of Churchill and Brooke, the U.S. slugged not at the guts of the Third Reich, but at its extremities. After Germany captured France in the summer of 1940, Hitler cut a loathsome deal with France’s Great War hero, Marshal Philippe Pétain. Pétain and other leaders of the Vichy puppet regime assured the Nazis that they would defend, with French troops, France’s old colonial empire along the Mediterranean. In exchange, Hitler agreed not to “occupy” the South of France, although the Gestapo would still exercise brutal control.
    To extend Joe Liebling’s boxing metaphor, America’s opening jab was thrown not at crack
Panzer
troops, but at a peculiar adversary. The French were not just the U.S.’s traditional ally, but also its historic partner in the democratic revolution that upended repressive monarchies in both hemispheres.
    It was a bizarre first round in what became the most transcendent fight in history. Stalin, under siege from 225 German divisions gunning toward the oil fields of the Caucasus, wanted what amounted to a main event—a full-bore second front in the European Theater that would compel Hitler to divert troops and resources. But in truth neither North Africa nor anyof the Allies’ subsequent thrusts in the Mediterranean ever rose beyond the level of an undercard—an ancillary bout that had relatively little to do with the fight’s outcome.
    Ostensibly to avoid chaos in North Africa, the U.S. ended up making one deal after another with Fascist collaborationists—the very thugs that Roosevelt and Churchill had vowed to bring to justice. Watching the disquieting scene unfold from London, CBS Radio’s Edward R. Murrow fumed: “Are we fighting the Nazis or climbing into bed with them?” After a few days in Algeria, Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle somehow slipped this line past the censors: “We have left in office most of the small-fry officials put there by the Germans before we came…. Our fundamental policy still is one of soft-gloving snakes in our midst.” 7
    Moreover, the U.S. committed the weight of its prestige to a part of the world where Great Britain had long vied with Germany and France for colonial supremacy. Much of the rationale behind the U.S.