Page:Charles Robert Anderson - Algeria-French Morocco - CMH Pub 72-11.pdf/23

 hit a transport offshore, threatening the arrival of support weapons ashore, but British naval gunfire distracted the battery the rest of the day. Roosevelt's troops pushed inland to clear roads and take two villages by midmorning, when they were stopped by fire from a hill mass five miles behind the beaches.

Late in Center Task Force planning the British had added another landing. Operation called for 400 men to assault Oran harbor itself to prevent sabotage and, possibly, accept the surrender of the city from surprised officials. But even before the troops reached shore, became the biggest disappointment of all  landings. The troops, from the 6th Armored Infantry Regiment, 1st Armored Division, boarded two British cutters. Entering the harbor, the two cutters were soon found by searchlights and by devastating fire from shore batteries and French destroyers. One cutter tried to ram a destroyer and in a crunching sideswipe received pointblank fire which killed or wounded nearly half of the American troops and British crew. Both cutters were reduced to burning, sinking hulks with survivors scrambling for launches. Only 47 American troops eventually landed.

Another Allied failure was only slightly less significant. To assist assaults on the two airfields, the U.S. 2d Battalion, 509th Parachute Regiment, an airborne force, was flown from England on 7 November. En route, bad weather and faulty communications caused varying numbers of planes to land at Gibraltar, French Morocco, Spanish Morocco, and several points along the Algerian coast. Some of the troops arriving in Algeria became prisoners of civil police, while the rest were too disorganized to contribute to the battle for Oran. However, they were able to participate in the battle for Tunisia later in the month.

Beach Z, twenty miles east of Oran, received most of General Fredendall's troops. The 16th and 18th Regimental Combat Teams of Maj. Gen. Terry Allen's 1st Infantry Division, the attached 1st Ranger Battalion, and most of Combat Command B under Brig. Gen. Lunsford E. Oliver transferred from transports to landing craft, happily free of the many problems that delayed landings everywhere else. Led by Lt. Col. William O. Darby's Rangers, the 7,092 men of the 18th Team put ashore unopposed between the villages of Arzew and St. Leu and quickly moved inland on objectives. The Rangers infiltrated behind two coastal batteries and took both after a brief firefight. Infantry followed and after another brief fight took the town of Arzew, a barracks, and thirteen seaplanes. But the string of easy victories abruptly ended. Moving west toward Oran, the 18th Team met intense fire at the village of St. Cloud. Two American assaults fizzled, and a