Rick Atkinson. An Army at Dawn

To deal with the inevitable traffic fatalities a sliding scale of reparations was established, paid in the oversize French currency GIs called wallpaper: 25,000 francs ($500) for a dead camel; 15,000 for a dead boy; 10,000 for a dead donkey; 500 for a dead girl....

For the Yanks, it was all new: the skinned goat carcasses dripping blood in roadside stalls; the Algerians hawking grass mats and bolts of blue silk; the cursing muleteers; the peasants leaning into their iron-shod plows; the buses propelled by charcoal engines lashed to the bumper and stirred by each driver with a poker. American units chosen for the vanguard strutted with pride. The 2nd Battalion of the 13th Armored Regiment rolled out of Arzew toward Algiers and beyond, their tanks stuffed with eggs and hidden bottles of Old Grandad. The 5th Field Artillery Battalion swung onto the road with guidons snapping; each battery presented arms to the 1st Division color guard, and "When the Caissons Go Rolling Along" crashed from the division band.

Eastward the caissons rolled, past Algerian villages with adobe walls loopholed for muskets, past groves of mandarin oranges "hanging like red lamps." Past clopping French army columns of hay carts drawn by crow-bait horses, past mounted artillery officers in double-breasted tunics. Past stubbly wheatfields that had once served as Rome's granary, and past aqueducts dismembered during the Vandals' century of anarchic misrule and now bleaching like stone bones in the sun.

At dusk they bivouacked. Soldiers swam in the chill Mediterranean or washed from their helmets in the delicate ritual called a whore's bath. They staged scorpion fights in gasoline flimsies or spooned whiskey into pet lizards to watch them stagger about. The evening mist rose from fields with a scent like fresh-mowed hay, which troops had been taught was the odor of deadly phosgene; at least one unit panicked, with shrieks of "Gas! Gas!" and a mad fumbling for masks before reason returned. Soldiers sharpened their bartering skills with hand gestures, talking loudly in the distinctively American belief that volume obviates all language barriers; one sharp trader swapped a box of candy, piece by piece, for three bottles of perfume, a dozen eggs, a large portrait of Petain, and a small burro named Rommel (pp. 168-69).

Harold Macmillan, whose mother was from Indiana ("I am a Hoosier," he declared with perfect Oxbridge diction upon introducing himself to Eisenhower), advised a British officer: "You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans--great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run AFHQ as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius" (p. 258).

Churchill, upon hearing Montgomery boast that abstinence made him "100 percent fit," replied that he both drank and smoked and was "200 percent fit" (p. 418).

[Omar Bradley] descended from hardscrabble Missouri farmers and one itinerant schoolteacher, his father. Eisenhower had contributed a generous accolade for his classmate's yearbook entry at West Point: "True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes" (p. 485).

God's bounty meant nothing to these men. Beneath the vernal landscape every soldier now saw topography, just as a pathologist can see the skull beneath a scalp. A streambed was not a streambed but defilade; pastures were not pastures but exposed fields of fire. Laurel thickets became ambush sites, and every grove of cork trees might hide a German 88. No soldier could look at this corrupted terrain without feeling that it had become sinister and deeply personal. (Rick Atkinson. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43. New York: Henry Holt, 2002, pp. 480-81).

Washington Post journalist Rick Atkinson won the Pulitzer Prize for this first volume of his so-called Liberation Trilogy, the second volume of which, Day of Battle, treats the allied invasions of Sicily and Italy. (I suppose the third volume will have the word "dusk" or "night" in it.) It's a well-written and gripping account of the US and British invasion of Algeria and its assault on Tunis, and it's especially revealing on account of US naivete and incompetence -- the allies had a long ways to go, before they could work as a team, much less manage logistics and field maneuvers. Equally revealing is Atkinson's account of the education of Eisenhower, his generals, and his soldiers -- all of whom were obliged to learn the twin arts of self-confidence and ruthlessness. At any rate, Atkinson makes it clear that the US and English were in no shape to assault Fortress Europe in 1942 -- that they had very, very much to learn. The allies suffered 70,000 casualties in North Africa.