ranks of the Honourable Artillery Company as a nineteen-year-old. During his twelve years of pre-war service with the HAC, he’d taken his soldiering seriously and had risen to acting major, and in March 1941 he had transferred out of the territorials and into the regular army by joining the 17th Field Artillery. A further eighteen months had been spent in England training until finally he and the regiment were posted overseas to Tunisia, where they’d been fighting with First Army in the north of the country since the previous November. The 17th had performed well in North Africa, but Pettit, now aged thirty-four, was not a man to sit on any laurels and took the business of being a gunner very seriously. Aware how vital the artillery had become in the British way of war, he thought deeply and carefully about how it could best support the infantry and armour, writing down his thoughts about the relative values of different types of barrages and fire support patterns, and ensuring there had been no let-up in training. ‘Training from 0600 to 1200,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 June, ‘and training from 1700 to 1900.’3 In his next entry, he jotted: ‘Gun drill for four hours, very hot.’4 Joint exercises were held with the Irish Brigade, one of three infantry brigades in the 78th. Combined all-arms training was vital because invariably infantry would be advancing with fire support from the gunners; and the more training there was, the more officers such as Major Pettit got to know their fellows in the infantry, all of which helped enormously when doing it for real.
While it was the infantry – and armour – who had to make the leap of faith and advance across ground if the enemy was to be overrun and beaten, both the British and the Americans put increasing weight on fire-power to bludgeon the enemy – and on the ground, at any rate, it was the artillery who could provide that support. Fire plans, barrages, counter-battery fire, the siting of forward observers – all required enormous skill and training, and since the 17th FA was the senior artillery regiment in 78th Division, Peter Pettit, for one, was determined his men should be up to the job. Very often, a skilfully executed fire plan could be the difference between living and dying for the infantry up ahead of them.
On 1 July, General Montgomery, commanding Eighth Army to which they were now attached, came to visit the officers of the division, assembled under a large canopy of old car hoods put together by the engineers, just a hundred yards from the sea. ‘He said he planned on three principles,’ wrote Pettit, ‘that he would not move until he was ready, that objectives would be limited, and that he would not ask formations to do something they could not do.’5 Having been part of First Army in Tunisia, they’d not fought under Monty before, so this was their first proper sighting of their commanding general. Earlier, Montgomery had driven up to the men in the regiment and asked them to gather round. This had prompted something of a stampede, but Pettit knew the men had loved it, seeing this famous general – now their general – right there, in front of them, happily answering questions. ‘He got right under their skins at once,’ Pettit later jotted in his diary.6
Meanwhile, at the coastal port of Oran in Algeria the US 1st Infantry Division had also been gearing up for this next phase of the war against Nazi Germany and its Italian ally. The men of the Big Red One – as the 1st Division was known – had been part of the initial TORCH landings at Oran and Arzew the previous November and had spent the most time in the line during the Tunisian campaign: 112 out of 132 days, which was a lot more than any other American troops. Second Lieutenant Franklyn A. Johnson had celebrated victory in North Africa with three days sleeping and loafing in Bizerte, but then the division had been transferred back to Algeria, and to a training camp at Mangin, 12 miles from the city of Oran. An officer in Cannon Company of the 18th Infantry Regiment, Johnson had survived the North African campaign with no further damage than a painful but not serious shrapnel wound to his hand, but he was tired after the long campaign and in need of some R&R. They all were; and, recognizing this, the divisional commander, Major-General Terry de la Mesa Allen, had announced a brief moratorium on training, plus unrestricted passes and trucks to take his boys into town.
Inevitably, after such a sudden release of steam, drunken mayhem had followed. The next morning, General Allen himself had gone down to the city’s jails and bailed out the many men who had been locked up for over-exuberance the previous evening. The episode had cost Allen a severe dressing-down from Lieutenant-General George S. Patton, the commander of Force 343 for the upcoming invasion – what would soon become the US Seventh Army. Patton disapproved of his soldiers going on drunken sprees, and even more strongly of commanders encouraging such behaviour.
Frank Johnson had been among those assembled for a pep-talk by Allen a day or so later, by which time the holiday period was over and training had resumed. No mention was made of the drunken revelry in Oran. Instead, Allen had praised them all for their work in Tunisia, highlighting the GIs – the rank and file – above any of the officers. ‘Do your job,’ he finished. ‘We don’t want heroes – dead heroes. We’re not out for glory – we’re here to do a dirty, stinking job.’ It went down well. ‘We love and respect Terry Allen even more after he talks frankly to us at Mangin,’ noted Johnson.7
Johnson was from New Jersey, the son of a professor of Military Science and Tactics at Hamilton College, New York. With poor eyesight, he’d known he would not get a regular army commission, but at Rutgers University had joined the ROTC – Reserve Officer Training Corps – graduating in May 1942 and heading off to join the army for the duration immediately after. He had shipped to England in September and been posted to Cannon Company of the 18th Infantry Regiment, arriving in Algeria in November, just behind the invasion. More training had followed, and then they’d been sent into Tunisia to help stem the flow at Kasserine in February 1943, when the US II Corps had suffered a severe setback at the hands of a briefly resurgent Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel and his Panzerarmee. Johnson and the rest of the 18th Infantry had been in the thick of it throughout the rest of the fighting.
The cannon company attached to each infantry regiment provided a mixture of fire support – a platoon of tracked 105mm howitzers on a Sherman tank chassis known as a Priest, 75mm guns mounted on half-tracks, and anti-tank guns. Johnson commanded an anti-tank platoon and was very relieved to be giving up the 37mm pea-shooters with which they’d fought through Tunisia and getting his hands instead on the new 57mm, a gun of greater velocity and far superior range that packed a considerably bigger punch – essentially a British 6-pounder in all but name. At last, Johnson and his men had realized, they would be able actually to disable a German tank. That was quite something.
They had been working hard that June, training for village infiltration, firing upon towed targets and conducting invasion exercises. At one such landing exercise, General Patton had turned up to watch. Many of the men in the Big Red One thought little of Patton; he was too spick and span, insisting on the wearing of ties at all times and on being clean-shaven. They also suspected he was a glory hunter – and that he wasn’t known as ‘Old Blood and Guts’ for nothing. Patton’s approach to the military – that it was his life’s mission and that appearances counted for everything – stood in sharp contrast to that of General Terry Allen and his Executive Officer, Brigadier-General Teddy Roosevelt, son and namesake of the former president, who were decidedly more laissez-faire over such matters. Allen’s and Roosevelt’s approach inevitably flowed downwards to the men. It also put Allen on a collision course with Patton, who had originally planned to leave the 1st Infantry Division out of the HUSKY order of battle. But the Big Red One was now comfortably his most experienced division in a force startlingly lacking in that most precious commodity. He needed them.
Johnson and his men had heard the sirens screaming before they’d seen Patton’s cavalcade arrive. Then suddenly there he was, stepping out and inspecting them as they were hastily brought to attention. Johnson couldn’t help but be impressed by the general’s appearance: shiny leather boots and spurs, pink breeches, silver buckled belt and shellacked and star-studded helmet. ‘After the aide signals that the inspection is over,’ noted Johnson, ‘we return to our work as someone mumbles.8 “Yeah, your guts and our blood.”’
The Tunisian campaign had ended on 13 May, when the German General Jürgen von Arnim had surrendered all German and Italian forces – two entire armies, amounting to more than 250,000 men – on the Cap Bon peninsula, the north-eastern tip of Tunisia. Later that day, the Allied ground forces commander, General Sir Harold Alexander, commander-in-chief of 18th Army Group, had signalled to the British