An Army at Dawn Read Free

correspondent Ernie Pyle noted a “new professional outlook, where killing is a craft.” North Africa is where irony and skepticism, the twin lenses of modern consciousness, began refracting the experiences of countless ordinary soldiers. “The last war was a war to end war. This war’s to start ’em up again,” said a British Tommy, thus perfectly capturing the ironic spirit that flowered in North Africa.
    Sixty years after the invasion of North Africa, a gauzy mythology has settled over World War II and its warriors. The veterans are lionized as “the Greatest Generation,” an accolade none sought and many dismiss as twaddle. They are condemned to sentimental hagiography, in which all the brothers are valiant and all the sisters virtuous. The brave and the virtuous appear throughout the North African campaign, to be sure, but so do the cowardly, the venal, and the foolish. The ugliness common in later campaigns also appears in North Africa: the murder and rape of civilians; the killing of prisoners; the falsification of body counts.
    It was a time of cunning and miscalculation, of sacrifice and self-indulgence, of ambiguity, love, malice, and mass murder. There were heroes, but it was not an age of heroes as clean and lifeless as alabaster; at Carthage, demigods and poltroons lie side by side.
    The United States would send sixty-one combat divisions into Europe, nearly 2 million soldiers. These were the first. We can fairly surmise that not a single man interred at the Carthage cemetery sensed on September 1, 1939, that he would find an African grave. Yet it was with the invasion of Poland on that date that the road to North Africa began, and it is then and there that our story must begin.
     
    September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds. Within four weeks of the blitzkrieg attack on Poland by sixty German divisions, the lightning war had killed more than 100,000 Polish soldiers, and 25,000 civilians had perished in bombing attacks. Another 10,000 civilians—mostly middle-class professionals—had been rounded up and murdered, and 22 million Poles now belonged to the Third Reich. “Take a good look around Warsaw,” Adolf Hitler told journalists during a visit to the shattered Polish capital. “That is how I can deal with any European city.”
    France and Great Britain had declared war against the German aggressors on September 3, but fighting subsided for six months while Hitler consolidated his winnings and plotted his next move. That came in early April 1940, when Wehrmacht troops seized Denmark and attacked Norway. A month later, 136 German divisions swept into the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Winston S. Churchill—a short, stout, lisping politician of indomitable will and oratorical genius, who on May 10 became both Britain’s prime minister and defense minister—told President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood.” It was the first of 950 personal messages Churchill would send Roosevelt in the most fateful correspondence of the twentieth century.
    France was not small, but it was smashed up. German tactical miscalculation allowed the British to evacuate 338,000 troops on 900 vessels from the northern port of Dunkirk, but on June 14 the German spearhead swept across the Place de la Concorde in Paris and unfurled an enormous swastika flag from the Arc de Triomphe. As the French tottered, Germany’s partner in the Axis alliance, the Italian government of Benito Mussolini, also declared war on France and Britain. “First they were too cowardly to take part,” Hitler said. “Now they are in a hurry so that they can share in the spoils.”
    After the French cabinet fled to Bordeaux in shocked disarray, a venerable figure emerged to lead the