An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

by Rick Atkinson

“The more stars you have, the higher you climb the flagpole, the more of your ass is exposed,” he once asserted. “People are always watching for opportunities to misconstrue your actions.”

“Don’t mind my continual bitching. It’s only that I hate myself & hate this life & I’m sick of it all.”

The truth was that a callow, clumsy army had arrived in North Africa with little notion of how to act as a world power. The balance of the campaign—indeed, the balance of the war—would require learning not only how to fight but how to rule.

After killing hundreds of American and British soldiers during TORCH, the French had failed to so much as scratch a single German invader.

The faults were clear enough: the greatest of them was an initial lack of appreciation of the possibilities of the enemy; a certain indiscipline of mind; a tendency towards exaggeration…. Men used the skyline because the view was better from there. Men neglected camouflage because it might smack of overanxiety. Men failed to dig slit trenches because the work was hard.

“The best way to describe our operations to date,” he wrote his friend Major General Thomas Handy, “…is that they have violated every recognized principle of war, are in conflict with all operational and logistic methods laid down in textbooks, and will be condemned, in their entirety, by all Leavenworth and war college classes for the next twenty-five years.”

“infantry, like whiskey, loses potency when diluted”

Perhaps the weakest link of all is the junior leader, who just does not lead, with the result that their men don’t really fight.”

Witty and urbane, a Virginian, he was a skilled watercolorist who loved poetry almost as much as he loved massing fires.

For this task, he needed officers who “can sweat, get mad, and think at the same time.”

“We are going to get on top of that mountain and brew tea on the backs of those dead Germans,” one private bellowed. His platoon leader replied, “Private, you are now a sergeant. Let’s go.”