Free The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson

fragments that fell like steel hail. On other occasions, German propaganda flights showered Tunisian villages with leaflets: “The day has come to fight against the Anglo-Americans and the Jews…. Bring up your children to hate them.”
    Here had gathered three of the Army’s most celebrated units: the 1st and 3rd Infantry Divisions, and, farther south near Kairouan, the 82nd Airborne Division. In a scheme that would be replicated before Normandy, troops were assigned to areas coded by state and city: a regiment might bivouac in “Florida,” with battalions at Miami, Daytona, and Jacksonville, or in “Texas,” at Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth.
    None of the namesake camps were as pleasant as their originals. At first light the Arab vendors appeared, selling lemonade, or “wog wine,” or haircuts, or ceramic “Roman” vases. By midmorning the heat was beastly, with Saharan winds “like a wall of fire” and tepid drinking water sprinkled with peppermint to make it palatable. Flies and mosquitoes infested the straddle-trench latrines and the mess tents where cooks made hashfor tens of thousands on captured German field ranges. Commanders tried to occupy their men with morning hikes or full-contact volleyball. Anglers in the 19th Combat Engineers dropped half-pound blocks of TNT in Lake Bizerte, collecting enough belly-up fish in two hours to feed nearly two hundred men. Officers in the 82nd Airborne bought ten young bulls, a flock of sheep, and four thousand liters of beer for a preinvasion barbecue.
    They were in an ugly mood, spoiling for a fight. Paratrooper marksmen “have practiced on some menacing looking Arabs,” Colonel James M. Gavin, who commanded a regiment in the 82nd, wrote his daughter. “It makes [the Arabs] mad to get shot and we should stop it.” Dummy tents and phony radio transmitters began to appear in Florida and Texas and Virginia and Kentucky, as the troops were trucked company by company to loading points around the lake. Herded by bellowing sergeants, they shuffled aboard the LSTs and LSIs and LCTs, every soldier’s identity checked against a cumbersome passenger list; eight clerks assigned to each convoy kept twenty-three copies of the manifests, and a typical convoy—for reasons known only at echelons above reason—required more than six thousand pages of names.
    Congestion and confusion remained the order of the day: truck drivers took wrong turns; sailors removed cargo from overloaded vessels only to have soldiers stow it back aboard; an ammunition dump caught fire, and flames jumped the firebreaks to consume two thousand tons of munitions in a spectacular series of explosions; novice boat crews fouled their anchors, and shouted curses carried across the water as they tried to free themselves with chains and hawsers and grappling hooks.
    No wrong turn or fouled anchor could stop them, of course. Brute-force momentum—and ingenuity, and willfulness—had carried them this far and would carry them farther. One by one the vessels moved into the lake and assembled into color-coded convoys. Sweating soldiers settled belowdecks or found a patch of topside shade. Gazing north toward the open Mediterranean, they packed away their newly issued sulfa powder and battle dressings, wondering precisely where in this world they would need such things.
     
    Still farther east the British made ready, from Benghazi to Haifa and Beirut. Eighth Army had fought across North Africa in various guises since 1940 and now resembled, one admirer wrote, “a vast gypsy camp on the move, or a tribal migration.” Snatches of Arabic seeded the soldiers’ palaver, notably maleesh, “no matter,” and bardin, “in a little while.” Many wore a mauve ointment on their arms and faces as treatment for septic desert sorescaused by prolonged exposure to dust and sand. War weariness also afflicted them—no ointment could soothe three years of fighting. One soldier confessed to “some disintegration of corporate