Free Twelve Desperate Miles by Tim Brady Page A

affection.…”
    While there were moments in the months ahead when Patton questioned whether he’d made the right decision in his spontaneous request that Truscott join his North African adventure, they were fleeting. Unassuming Lucian Truscott would prove to be one of the great generals of the war.

    After briefing Patton on the Torch plans as they existed, Truscott left the general in the hands of Eisenhower, who invited “Georgie” to a drink and a dinner of dehydrated chicken soup at Eisenhower’s apartment. With the two generals was Eisenhower’s aide, Captain Harry Butcher, attached to the general from the U.S. Navy, who made a record of the meeting.
    Despite the possibility of acrimony between them—Patton, the more combat-experienced and older officer, had been passed over as chiefof staff in the European Theater in favor of Eisenhower, while Eisenhower like everyone else, had to forgive Patton’s brusque nature and impulsivity—the two genuinely liked each other and recognized that each had probably been appropriately cast for his respective role in this operation. Eisenhower was the perfect headquarters man and Patton the perfect field general. From the outset of their get-together, they spoke like old, forthright friends, discussing a few personnel decisions, including the switch of Truscott to Patton’s command. Patton worried aloud to Eisenhower about intelligence estimates of French strength on the Moroccan coast, as well as the difficulties of finding suitable landing places in ocean swells that ran upward of fifty feet at times.
    The two generals talked of army personalities and their likes and dislikes in officers. Eisenhower had trouble with “officers who feel they have fulfilled their responsibility when they simply report a problem to a superior and do not bring the proposed solution with them.” In contrast, Patton said he didn’t necessarily want a smart staff but a loyal one. Butcher, who had never met Georgie Patton, liked him and felt the get-together went well. “Patton is a good fellow,” he wrote, “curses like a trooper, and boasts that while he is stupid in many particulars there is one quality he knows he has—the ability to exercise mass hypnotism. ‘In a week’s time,’ [Patton] said, ‘I can spur any outfit to a high state of morale.’ ”
    To his diary, Patton was more cryptic about the meeting. “Had supper with Ike and talked until 1:00 a.m. We both feel that the operation [i.e., Torch] is mostly political. However, we are told to do it and intend to succeed or die in the attempt. If the worst we can see occurs, it is an impossible show, but, with a little luck, it can be done at a high price and it might be a cinch.”
    Patton wound up walking back to Claridge’s from Eisenhower’s apartment because he couldn’t find a taxi at that late hour in blackout London, almost getting lost in the process. He mentioned the fact to his wife, Bea, in a letter two days later: “There were no taxies [
sic
] so I walked and would have been walking yet had I not run into a policeman who, by scent apparently, took me [to Claridge’s].”
    Patton’s humor was not improved two days later when the U.S. Navy was brought into discussions on Operation Torch. Captain Frank Thomas, representing the commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Royal Ingersoll, had much to say about the difficulties of the attack, particularly on the western front. He claimed that to get the necessary forces to Morocco would require the greatest armada in history, a fleet of between two hundred and four hundred transports and two hundred accompanying warships. The resources of the navy were already stretched beyond thin by the needs of waging a war in the Pacific and opening supply lines in the North Atlantic to Great Britain. Now it would have to send an immense armada to North Africa, land troops on its shores, maintain another cross-Atlantic supply line, and provide protection for all of the