HMS Hartland on fire and sinking after following HMS Walney into Oran Harbor even after it was made clear to the gung-ho “Operation Reservist” commander Captain Frederic Thornton Peters that there was no truth to Allied intelligence claiming that the Vichy French (fascist) forces would not fire on the two ships. The casualty rate for the 400 infantrymen — including my mother’s beloved older brother Connie Freed — on the two ships was 90%. “Operation Reservist” was a disgrace leading to a massacre of US and other Allied troops. Peters told the decorated US war correspondent Leo Disher that he loved the smell of gunpowder and did not really feel alive unless he was under fire. He was idiotically and posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross for leading his men to slaughter. My mother’s family had little if any idea how or why Connie died. It is doubtful that Connie and his fellow infantrymen on the Walney and Hartland knew that French and not German forces were slaughtering them. Like most US-Americans, neither Connie nor his family appeared to have any sense of what fascism was and how the Third Reich was already well into conducting the Holocaust that Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler essentially promised (along with the mass murderous invasion of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. Absurdly and unncessarily massacred thanks to bad intelligence and reckless combat-craving valor, the sharp young writer and aspiring architext Connie Freed died as a badly sacrificed pawn in one of the great inter-imperialist chess matches of The Age of Extremes (Eric Hobsbawm).
My Uncle Connie Freed's Death in World WWII