In the final phase of the Tunisian campaign I never heard a word of criticism of our men.  They fought like veterans.  They were well handled.  They had enough of what they needed.  Everything meshed perfectly, and the end was inevitable.  We need never be ashamed of our American fighters.  Even though they didn’t do too well in the beginning, there was never at any time any question about the Americans’ bravery.  It was a matter of being hardened and practiced by going through the flames.

Tunisia was a good warm-up field for our armies.  We would take an increasingly big part in the battles ahead.

The greatest disservice the folks at home did our men over here was to believe we were at last over the hump.  For actually—and over here we all knew it—the worst was yet to come.

18. AFTERMATH

The Tunisian campaign was ended.  Our air forces moved on farther into Tunisia, to the very edge of the chasm of sea that separated them only so little from Sicily and Sardinia and then from Europe itself.  We and the British leaped upon the demolished ports we had captured, cleared out enough wreckage for a foothold for ships, and as the ports grew and grew in usefulness they swarmed with thousands of men, and ships, and trucks.  Our combat troops moved back—out of range of enemy strafers—to be cheered and acclaimed momentarily by the cities in the rear, to take a few days of wild and hell-roaring rest, and then to go into an invasion practice that was in every respect, except the one of actually getting shot, as rigorous as a real invasion.

Surely before autumn we of Tunisia would be deep into something new.  Most of us realized and admitted to ourselves that horrible days lay ahead.  The holocaust that at times seemed so big to us in Tunisia would pale in our memories beside the things we would see and do before another year ran out.

Tunisia for us was not only an end in itself, but without the War of Tunisia we would have been ill-prepared to go on into the bigger wars ahead.  Tunisia has been called a warm-up ground.  That is a proper word for it, I suppose.  We found through actual test which of our weapons and planes and vehicles were good, and which were bad, and which could be made good with a little changing.  We seasoned our men in battle, and we found the defects that needed to be found in our communications systems, our supply lines, our methods of organization.

It is hard for you at home to realize what an immense, complicated, sprawling institution a theater of war actually is.  As it appears to you in the newspapers, war is a clear-cut matter of landing so many men overseas, moving them from the port to the battlefield, advancing them against the enemy with guns firing, and they win or lose.

To look at war that way is like seeing a trailer of a movie, and saying you've seen the whole picture.  I actually don't know what percentage of our troops in Africa were in the battle lines, but I believe it safe to say that only comparatively few ever saw the enemy, ever shot at him, or were shot at by him.  All the rest of those hundreds of thousands of men were churning the highways for two thousand miles behind the lines with their endless supply trucks, they were unloading the ships, cooking the meals, pounding the typewriters, fixing the roads, making the maps, repairing the engines, decoding the messages, training the reserves, pondering the plans.

To get all that colossal writhing chaos shaped into something that intermeshed and moved forward with efficiency was a task closely akin to weaving a cloth out of a tubful of spaghetti.  It was all right to have wonderful plans ahead of time, but we really learn such things only by doing.  Now, after our forces have had more than six months’ experience in North Africa, I for one feel that we have washed out the bulk of our miscomprehensions, have abandoned most of our fallacies, and have hardened down into a work-weary and battle-dirtied machine of great effect, capable of assimilating and directing aright those greener men who are to follow by the hundreds of thousands and maybe millions.