Some of the planes that had crossed the coast near Oran had been fired on from the ground; the French had decided to fight after all. When Colonel Raff arrived with six planeloads of troopers, and spotted the planes on the lakebed, the nonjumping Air Corps officer in overall command of the operation radioed him that they were taking sniper fire, and were threatened by enemy armor. So Raff and the six planeloads jumped to attack the armor with small arms, grenades, and anti-tank mines. (Bazookas were still unknown.) The colonel hit a large rock when he landed, broke a couple of ribs and was spitting blood. The sniping, it turned out, was at such long range, it had failed to hit anyone, while the "enemy armor" turned out to be an American armored reconnaissance patrol that had gotten through the French defenses earlier that morning.
Before long, most of the 39-plane armada was there in the mud, with too little gas to fly anywhere, and the nearest target was not La Senia, but the military airfield at Tafaraoui, 38 miles away, much of that distance on the lakebed. Part of the battalion was left with the stranded planes. The rest started hiking through the gumbo toward Tafaraoui. Macurdy had thought that any exertion they'd experience in the field couldn't be worse than they'd survived in training. Now, trudging through the gumbo, he changed his mind. A trooper name Hennessy, a Wyoming cowboy, called it "goddamn 'dobe clay, the worst fucking shit in the world," and no one argued with him.
They hiked all night, arriving at the airfield not long after dawn, utterly bushed, to find it in the hands of an American armored force. The field was beautiful in a way: Rows of willow trees along the road, a tall pink water tower, pink barracks… but Macurdy was too tired to appreciate it.
Some of 2nd Battalion's troopers were already there, some of them dead. While Macurdy and the others had been slogging through the mud, the afternoon before, the force left behind had gotten a radio call. American armor had just taken Tafaraoui, and needed infantry to guard five hundred French prisoners, so Raff ordered the remaining dregs of gas drained from the other planes, until they had enough for three of them to fly there. Then he'd loaded the three with troopers-as many as they'd hold-and the planes had taken off. Partway there, they'd been shot up by three French Dewoitine fighter planes, killing or wounding twenty Americans, and forcing the transports to land on the lakebed again.
Most of the troopers they'd carried, including some of the wounded, marched much of the night to reach Tafaraoui. There, with more than a little satisfaction, they heard that a flight of British Spitfires had jumped the Dewoitines and shot all of them down.
The next day, transportation was sent to the 47s on the dry lake, and the rest of the battalion was trucked north to the airfield. The American armor there was needed for the assault on Oran, so its commander turned the airfield over to 2nd Battalion to defend, and left. In the hills, a lone French howitzer kept lobbing in 75mm shells, and the Spitfires couldn't find the well-camouflaged gun. The battalion took more casualties from the shelling. Meanwhile, the men who'd made the long march took advantage of the barracks there, and slept.
Macurdy dreamed, half-wakened, and dreamed again, dreamed of beaches and monsters and death. Then the platoon was rousted out for muster in the morning, leaving brief dregs of dream, baleful and menacing.
But roll call, the mess line, and rumors banished them. At breakfast it occurred to him that sixty hours earlier he'd eaten supper in England, in what seemed like a different world. Not as different as Yuulith, where he'd fought his last war, but different enough.
16
Dancing in a Vacuum
Oran surrendered on the second day-Algiers, farther east, ' had already surrendered to the British-and all of Algeria was nominally in allied hands. Mostly the French had not fought very hard; they'd had their orders and a Gallic sense of honor, but their hearts weren't in it. Surrendering may have hurt their pride, but most of them disliked or even hated being allied with the Nazis.
Meanwhile, the Allied high command was concerned that the Germans would move to occupy the airfields in eastern Algeria and neighboring Tunisia, where there was a power vacuum. The Ales had only a few divisions in all of Algeria, concentrated in the north. On the other hand, though nominally Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps occupied neighboring Tunisia, his forces there were concentrated near the east coast, where they were engaged with the British 8th Army near the Libyan border.
So on November 15th, most of 2nd Battalion jumped on Youks les Bains Airfield, half expecting to be met by German paratroopers. Instead there was a small number of poorly equipped French infantry, who preferred Americans to Nazis. With no fighting necessary there, Colonel Raff sent a company on foot to take and hold Tebessa Airfield nine miles away, near the Tunisian border. They found no Germans there either. Raffs assigned responsibility was the defense of Youks les Bains and Tebessa airfields, which stretched his battalion thin, but he phoned Allied headquarters in Algiers, asking permission to occupy the central Tunisian town of Gafsa, which controlled key mountain roads. The French told him there still were no Germans there. General Clark approved only a reconnaissance, however, and "not one step farther" than Gafsa Then the British General Anderson, in charge of allied ground forces in Algeria, countermanded even that limited permission.
Raff pretended he hadn't gotten the countermand, and his idea of a reconnaissance was more than liberal. It seemed to him that Gafsa and its airfield were a prize the Germans would grab if he didn't. Besides, he was looking for a fight.
As Gafsa was eighty miles southeast of Tebessa via a mountain road, the French commander at Tebessa provided him with two dilapidated, green and white civilian buses, so covered with dirt as to be nearly camouflaged by it. Raff, his broken ribs taped and padded, loaded twenty men in each bus, and started off with them down the road. Macurdy was included because he spoke fluent German. Being within easy range of German fighter planes, Raff had a machine gun mounted atop each bus, with gunners to man them. He had no artillery and no air support.
As reported, there were no Germans in Gafsa, just a French unit of thirty chasseurs, light reconnaissance cavalry stationed there to keep a finger on the local pulse. The French commander really did have his finger on that pulse-in fact on the pulse of all Tunisia-and knew the country intimately. So the two commanders set about to do as much with their tiny forces as they could.
Meanwhile the distant generals decided it had been a good idea after all, and the paratroopers in Gafsa were increased to all of eighty-five.
Back in England, British airborne officers had told Raff that the Germans didn't like operating at night. So Raff sent men by jeep, civilian car, even a hitchhiker on a train, on small nocturnal demolition raids and reconnaissance patrols. Sometimes troopers went out on their own. Macurdy tried his hand at that, with a sergeant named Cavalieri, whose Italian was as good as Macurdy's German.
Then Macurdy got transferred to Kasserine, just in time to miss a sharp fight-the "Battle of Gafsa"-with German troops and Italian light tanks. Fortunately Raff's tiny army just been reinforced by a company from the 1st Infantry Division, and a platoon from the 701st Antitank Battalion.
Meanwhile the troopers had just learned that their battalion was no longer part of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, and hadn't been for weeks. The 503rd, with a new 2nd Battalion, was being shipped to Australia, halfway around the world; Raffs Ruffians had been redesignated the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion. The plan was to expand it to a full regiment, when enough qualified troopers were available.