Page:Charles Robert Anderson - Algeria-French Morocco - CMH Pub 72-11.pdf/21

 and reached the outskirts of the city, where they were stopped by intense artillery and small-arms fire. Inland, the 15th Group corrected its infantry-artillery coordination and in a day-long battle enveloped Tit Mellil and wrapped around the landward side of Casablanca. By 1700 Anderson's battalions had fought their way to the French defenses on the east and south of Casablanca; as soon as General Harmon's tanks arrived from Safi the city would be surrounded. But the gains of the day had been won at a cost of 36 killed and 113 wounded.

While the fighting continued, messages sizzled between French command posts and Marshal Henri Philippe Petain in Vichy, the temporary French capital in Europe. When neither Patton nor Eisenhower received an answer to the cease-fire proposal Colonel Wilbur had carried to Casablanca, Patton sent another with his chief of staff, Col. Hobart R. Gay. Until the French command responded, Patton had no choice but to prepare to attack the heavily defended city on 11 November.

In his command bunker at Gibraltar General Eisenhower kept a close watch on the widely separated landings and movements ashore comprising Operation While two reinforced U.S. Army divisions fought along the Atlantic coast, other large units moved against objectives hundreds of miles away in the Mediterranean Sea. On the same day that Western Task Force troops ran across beaches near Casablanca, Center Task Force landed one reinforced division at Oran, and Eastern Task Force put ashore two regimental and one battalion landing teams at Algiers. In the Mediterranean, the U.S. Army had to deal with a condition absent from the situation on the Atlantic coast: large-scale British participation. As Center and Eastern Task Force operations unfolded, they forced the Allies to learn to cooperate.

Charged with taking the Algerian city of Oran, Maj. Gen. Lloyd R. Fredendall's Center Task Force consisted of the 1st Infantry Division with the 1st Ranger Battalion attached and Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division. Fredendall's troops were to land at three beaches along a fifty-mile stretch of coastline: Beaches X