The Plotters of Souk-el-Spaatz

In the evening, Tin Pan Alley tunes, thumped and wheezed from a piano and an accordion, split the African darkness. The racket came from a rococo Moorish villa which soldiers in the area call "Souk*-el-Spaatz." But the concerts are only occasional. Most of the time Souk-el-Spaatz is a silent hive of conspiring and conferring men. It is the headquarters of the air war being waged by the Allies in Tunisia.

The principal conferees are four: shrewd, jug-eared Sir Arthur Tedder, dried-up, taciturn Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, wiry, ebullient Jimmy Doolittle and handsome Arthur ("Mary'') Coningham. They are a quartet of British and U.S. airmen who have one plan: to let loose a thunderbolt on the enemy.

Correspondents were allowed to cable strong hints that the thunderbolt might fall soon. Last week the Allied Commander in Chief, U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, said: "For the immediate future I know that each of us has no other thought than to do his full duty and more in clearing Tunisia." Eisenhower's "immediate future" started a flurry of newspaper speculation. For reasons best known to the Allied staffs, they were clearly telegraphing the punch.

Four months and seven days after U.S. and British forces had landed in French North Africa, the Tunisian theater was in a state of suspense. Rommel, beaten and hurt (see p. 25), growled at the British Eighth Army with his artillery, snapped at British and French patrols which had run around the southern end of the Mareth Line to get in on his flank.

In the central sector, U.S. and French patrols cautiously tested the Axis line from Gafsa to Faid Pass. North, the British First Army, which had repulsed two weeks of savage German jabs, now showed signs of taking a limited offensive. Something was imminent. The possibilities were too explosive for any comparative quiet to last very long. Said Eisenhower:

"Possibly he [the enemy] will make further and desperate efforts, but I know that the troops of our field armies will, with the continued effective support of our naval and air forces, inexorably push him back to the sea and destruction."

It will be up to the planners and plotters of Souk-el-Spaatz to defeat the Luftwaffe, support their own troops while they maul the Axis and block the enemy's evacuation from Tunisia. Their thunderbolt is an air weapon, but they have designed it to strike when & where it will best aid the men and weapons on the ground. This integration was the great achievement of Spaatz & Co.; how to achieve it was something they had learned the hard way.

The Freshmen. One day last November, three weeks after the Allied landing on the coast, a group of sweating U.S. tankmen halted their 750-mile dash from Oran, near the crest of a hill overlooking Tunis. The prize was twelve miles away. They had paused for orders from the officer commanding the shoestring force of British infantry behind them. As they waited, two German fighter planes swooped over the hills and strafed the British infantry, whose commander had belatedly decided to wait for air support. The support never came in time. Rushing German strength stopped the Allied dash.

The first convoys did not bring enough fighter planes. Advanced airdromes were scarce and ha'penny size. The Luftwaffe, with its shuttle service from Sicily, got there first. The Allies backed up into the hills of northern Tunisia and the Allied campaign mired down in the mud of North Africa's winter, while Axis reinforcements, ferried partly by air, poured in from Sicily.

When U.S. airmen finally got their planes, they were not too sure how to use them. Actual combat held surprises which no amount of maneuvers had trained them to meet. SOP (standard operating procedure) did not cover the reality of battle.

There were tragic and vexatious blunders. U.S. pilots in fighters and hedgehopping bombers strafed and bombed U.S. tanks. In self-defense -- and sometimes in panic and ignorance--tankmen turned their ack-ack fire on their own planes.

The bungles could hardly be blamed on Jimmy Doolittle, who then commanded the Twelfth U.S. Air Force, or on anyone else in particular. All U.S. troops made errors in those frantic, freshmen days of combat, when the Allied armies were struggling across the muddy, mountainous country between Algeria and the coast of Tunisia.

The vexatious thing was that U.S. and British troops outnumbered the Axis. But the veteran Germans, working with the coordination of a meat grinder, cut them off and chewed them up, while Rommel, retreating from Tripoli, established himself strongly along the coast, reached out and joined hands with Colonel General Juergin von Arnim.

The Heroic. It was not all a tale of Allied confusion and ineptness. There were plenty of stories of smart improvisation, reckless courage. Overnight, during the December days of the drive to the coast, engineers magically rolled out landing fields in the muddy hollows of Tunisia's sharp ridges. Pup-tent bases sprang up like fungi. Overworked and weary crews serviced their own planes, nightly refueled their Fortresses by hand from five-gallon tins (fuel capacity of a Fortress: over 2,000 gallons), then crawled under pup tents to sleep a few hours.

One P-40 squadron carried on a single-handed guerrilla warfare in support of U.S. and French troops. Unofficial leader of the squadron: Major (now Lieut. Colonel) Philip Cochran, the original "Flip Corkin" of Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates comic strip (see cut). He dashed one early morning to the holy city of Kairouan, swooped at low level and dropped a bomb smack on to a building where the German staff was meeting. There was many another story of luck and heroism. But U.S. air and ground units, blundering through the complexities of coordinated operation, were about ready to declare war on each other when Tooey Spaatz was ordered from England to act as air adviser to Eisenhower.

The Graduates. Allied officers had compiled a fat, black book of errors which Spaatz and they hastened to correct. Instead of trying to identify each other in the heat of action, commanders of the various units would have to know in advance where and how each arm intended to operate at a given, precise time. Spaatz learned the German's science of establishing local air supremacy. He learned that, overnight, in an area where experience and reconnaissance indicated he would oppose 50 enemy fighters, the German strength would become suddenly 100 fighters. He learned that when the Germans intended to go somewhere on the ground, Nazi dive-bombers would abruptly take command.

The Allies worked doggedly to overcome the difficulties of supplying forward bases. Reinforcements arrived. Long-range, multipurpose P-38 Lightnings flew from England with extra fuel tanks strapped to their bellies, fought back Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, which thus far had reigned supreme. Tropicalized Spitfires arrived, Marauders, Mitchells, Bostons, Airacobras, Hurri-bombers, Hurricanes carrying tank-busting cannon. In late January the British Eighth Army drew up in the south with its powerful Allied Western Desert air forces.

Axis air strength grew too. Estimates, probably exaggerated, were that one-fifth of Germany's Luftwaffe was concentrated in the area, almost the entire Italian air force. German veterans from France and Russia appeared. P-38 pilots developed a "Messerschmitt twitch," a nervous glance back over the shoulder. Axis anti-aircraft fire intensified, caught many an unlucky medium bomber before the high command realized that these planes were better suited to sweeps against shipping.

But, except for fewer & fewer occasions when the Germans seized local command, the Allies won ascendancy and held it. During the first four months the Allies destroyed 790 Axis planes over Northwest Africa, lost 333. During the past six weeks U.S. pilots have scored 2-1. They had come far since the awkward, learning days of early winter.

The Doctrine. Pale, birdlike Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who had planned the strategy for cracking Rommel's Luftwaffe in Egypt, had become Spaatz's boss by then. The Casablanca conference had given Sir Arthur command of Allied air from North Africa's west coast throughout the Mediterranean area.

Spaatz had been made his chief of operations in Tunisia. Under Spaatz the jobs were carefully subdivided. One job was the bombing of Axis ports and supply lines; the other was the operation of fighter planes and attack bombers in coordination with ground activities. Spaatz's deputy to run the long-range bombing was Jimmy Doolittle, who had been none too happy with the mass of administrative detail which his original command had involved. His deputy to command the ground support: Arthur Coningham, the tall, genial expert who had run Tedder's Egyptian show (see map, p. 20).

Spaatz and Tedder see eye to eye. They have the same airman's view of how air power should be used. Ground staffs conceived of it too often merely as "field artillery." This was not the way airmen saw it. Tedder spelled out their doctrine: "Air war is a separate war, though linked to those on land & sea. . . . Command of the air determines what happens on land & sea. . . . The essential lesson learned in the Middle East is that an air force is a separate offensive entity, striking at the enemy in cooperation with the army."

The U.S. Air Forces do not have the R.A.F.'s complete independence, but they do have operational autonomy. In Africa Spaatz's airmen found themselves operating with the same freedom enjoyed by the R.A.F. Said one U.S. officer at Souk-el-Spaatz: "The high command merely says 'The air force will take care of that,' and by God we do."

Spaatz and Tedder would not argue that they are fighting an unconnected war. Their main objective is the same as the ground troops'. Tedder and Spaatz confer often with Eisenhower and General Sir Harold Alexander, General Ike's chief of ground operations. They compose the tune. Spaatz arranges and conducts it. Doolittle and Coningham bang it out in the air.

At Souk-el-Spaatz the entire air command has become an interlacing of U.S. warp and British woof. For every staff office held by a Briton, an American occupies an opposite number. Tedder calls Spaatz "Tooey"; Spaatz calls Tedder "Arthur." It is Arthur who occasionally in the evening plays U.S. tunes on the piano. Tooey, who is a guitar virtuoso, broods because he has no instrument with him. The French are scouring Algeria for one so Tooey can join in.

The Plot. The tactics which the plotters of Souk-el-Spaatz have worked out are probably based on Tedder's tactics in the Egyptian campaign.

After Rommel's attack on the Alamein line in August had been turned back, Allied planes began a campaign of strategic bombing. They blasted Rommel's transport columns, bases, shipping. Then, in a second phase, Coningham stepped up his operations until he was conducting an all-out air offensive. He knocked out the Luftwaffe. The onslaught was independent of and preceded by two weeks General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery's ground attack. But when Montgomery's Eighth hit, air and ground were immediately coordinated in the third phase. Coningham's bombers pounded rear lines while his fighters strafed the front. All through the long desert chase Coningham and Montgomery worked hand in glove.

Last week the Tunisian air campaign was in Phase No. 1--the strategic bombing of Axis bases and land & water supply routes. Phase No. 2 will come when the ground forces are ready, or almost ready, to start their drive. Then "Mary" Coningham's short-range planes will try to liquidate the Luftwaffe. The whole execution is in the hands of Tooey Spaatz. For the Allies to win on the ground, he must first win the air. In Phase No. 3 will come the payoff.

The Troubadour. The man in whose hands rests the thunderbolt has had a typical veteran U.S. air-force man's career. It varied from the norm only in details. In 1899--at the age of eight--redheaded Carl Spatz (later changed to Spaatz) was the youngest linotype operator in Pennsylvania. He operated the machine in the Boyertown, Pa. print shop where his Pennsylvania Dutch father and grandfather published the Berks County Democrat. Carl had a happier time playing the guitar, which Father Spatz taught him in the evening. Father Spatz, who became a state senator, got him an appointment to West Point, so off he went in 1910, lugging his guitar.

He strummed his way through without scholarly distinction, but with plenty of friends and a new nickname, Tooey. He caught a glimpse one day of Glenn Curtiss making his record-breaking flight from Albany to New York. That day Tooey had a glimpse of his own career. The army, he figured, was at least the place where he could learn to fly.

In Mexico with Pershing's Punitive Expedition, he played his guitar, collaborated on a composition called the Punitive Rag, and when World War I came along sailed for France. There to his chagrin he was assigned to a pilot-training job at Issoudun.

The legend is that he went AWOL from the school in order to get in a few personal licks at the Germans and narrowly escaped serious disciplining. The fact is he was decorated with a Distinguished Service Cross for his exploits in France.

During the postwar days of aviation Tooey Spaatz (who added the extra "a" because frequent mispronunciations of Spatz as "Spats" instead of "Spots" sent him into a fury) became one of the faithful around Billy Mitchell. In 1942 he was serving as Chief of the Air Force Combat Command, when he was suddenly yanked out and sent to England to command and train the Eighth Army Air Force.

The Veteran. The British approved him. Blunt as a hammer, he remarked to Sir Sholto Douglas, then chief of the Fighter Command: "Sir Sholto, I hear you are a son-of-a-bitch and that I'm not going to get along with you at all. Is that right?" They got along like a thumb and a first finger. At a military demonstration he sat next to King George for half an hour, exchanged only a how-do-you-do and a goodby. Spaatz's verdict on the equally reserved King of England: "A wonderful man." When the Queen paid a visit to the U.S. Air Forces and it began to shower, quiet, grizzled Spaatz wrapped his raincoat around Her Majesty. Another man might have preserved the coat as a relic. Spaatz wears it all the time. It is as torn and stained as his old pancake cap with the ripped-out lining.

His own men learned to venerate the old-line, wind-beaten, open-cockpit veteran of the Air Corps. They told each other the story of the night he stood on a London rooftop observing a German air raid. The Nazis' aim was wild, the bombs fell helter-skelter. Spaatz began to fume and curse, suddenly roared: "The damn fools are setting air power back 20 years."

Early last December he was sent to North Africa. There he learned, last week, that he had been made a lieutenant general. Spaatz has few relaxations: squash, fishing, poker, which he plays with a sometimes wild abandon, betting, according to his wife, "on anything." But at Souk-el-Spaatz, he plays less & less. His habitual tension has increased. Recently he wrote to Mrs. Spaatz: "I'm looking forward to the day when we can reoccupy our shack . . . own a boat on the Potomac and float up & down on the tide." The "shack" is the comfortable, 133-year-old home in Alexandria which Tooey bought one week before Dec. 7.

Tooey Spaatz was probably kidding himself. He looks forward to action. After Tunisia is cleared out, Axis bases on Pantelleria and Lampedusa must be blasted off the face of the Mediterranean, the great Axis strongholds on Sicily and Sardinia reduced, Italy or the Balkans--whatever the route--pummeled and softened for the invading Allied armies. It will be a long time before Tooey Spaatz floats up & down on the tidewater of the Potomac.

*Arabic for market price.

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