Rommel was shaken and bewildered by the insanity of this command. Yet Hitler’s self-deluding lies that enabled him to reject the reality of defeat would be repeated very soon afterwards, to General Paulus in the Don steppe west of Stalingrad. Rommel, despite all his military instincts, felt he had to obey. He issued orders to halt the withdrawal. Only the Italian divisions in the south were told to move north-westwards. This allowed Horrocks’s XIII Corps to advance unopposed on 4 November. Further north, X Corps broke through, capturing the Afrika Korps headquarters and General von Thoma, who surrendered to the 10th Hussars.
Assured of Kesselring’s support, Rommel ordered a general retreat. He told Hitler that it would only be to the Fuka Line, but it carried on all the way across Libya. That the remnants of the Panzerarmee got away at all was due to Montgomery’s slow reactions and excessive caution. Having achieved his victory, he did not want to risk any reverse. It has been argued that his failure to trap Rommel in his retreat prompted Hitler’s disastrous decision to send more troops to North Africa, all of whom would eventually be captured. But this is hardly a testimonial to Montgomery’s generalship, since that was never part of any master plan.
The victory of Alamein had certainly not been won by strategic or tactic al genius. Montgomery’s decision to attack the strongest part of the German line was questionable, to say the least. His infantry and armoured troops had certainly fought bravely, greatly helped by his success in turning around the Eighth Army’s mood. But in most respects the battle had been won by the formidable contribution of the Royal Artillery and by the Desert Air Force in its relentless destruction of the Luftwaffe, panzers and supply lines, as well as by the Royal Navy and the Allied air forces cutting the Axis lifeline in the Mediterranean.
On 7 November, when Hitler was travelling to Munich to make his speech to the Nazi Party old guard, his special train was halted in Thuringia. A message from the Wilhelmstrasse warned that an Allied landing in North Africa was imminent. He promptly gave orders that Tunisia was to be defended. But when informed that the Luftwaffe would be able to do little at such a range from its bases, he became furious with Göring. All the conflicting rumours over the past few months about Allied intentions, and his obsession with the final capture of Stalingrad, had meant that the OKW was completely unprepared for a new front. The big question was how the Vichy regime would react to an Allied invasion of its North African colonies.
Ribbentrop joined the train at Bamberg, and urged Hitler to let him make overtures to Stalin through the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm. Hitler rejected the suggestion out of hand. The idea of negotiating at a moment of weakness was unthinkable. He continued to work on the speech which claimed that the German capture of Stalingrad was imminent, and emphasized his resolve to fight on until final victory. His pride prevented him from considering any other option. He passed over Rommel’s defeat and never mentioned the Allied landings in North Africa, preferring to hark back to his prediction that the Jews would be annihilated. Yet even Goebbels recognized that they were ‘standing at a turning point of the war’. Apart from fanatically loyal Nazis, most Germans now felt that victory was further away than ever, as reports on civilian morale by the Sicherheitsdienst showed only too clearly. Few shared Göring’s notion that the Americans were capable of manufacturing only razor blades. The mounting Allied bombing offensive against their cities demonstrated a growing material superiority.
For Eisenhower and his planners, the reaction of Vichy France and Franco’s regime in Spain had also been a key question. The politically naive Eisenhower soon found that he had entered a minefield of French politics. Roosevelt did not want to have anything to do with General de Gaulle, and he put pressure on Churchill not to tell the Frenchman what was afoot. Churchill’s relationship with de Gaulle had been even more strained by French suspicions that the British coveted Syria and Lebanon, and Churchill knew that he would be furious at being kept in the dark. De Gaulle would also never accept that in order to avoid heavy fighting the Allies had to come to some arrangement with the Vichy authorities in North Africa. But Churchill had one offering in the hope of pacifying the proud general.
The Royal Navy, unable to forget that Japanese aircraft flying from Vichy airfields in Indochina had sunk the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, continued to be concerned by the French colony of Madagascar, which lay parallel to their convoy routes off the south-east African coast. Within a few weeks of the disaster off Malaya, a landing force was allocated to Operation Ironclad–the seizure of the main port Diego Suarez, at the northern tip of Madagascar. At first, both General Brooke in London and Wavell in the Far East had opposed the plan when so much else was threatened. Then, at the beginning of March 1942, American intercepts of Japanese naval codes had revealed that Berlin was urging Tokyo to intervene in the western Indian Ocean to attack British supply ships going round southern Africa to Egypt. On 12 March, the War Cabinet finally approved Operation Ironclad.
At the beginning of May the British force, sailing from South Africa, stormed the port of Diego Suarez with marines landed at night in fine Nelsonian style. That was as far as the plan went, for it was assumed that a modus vivendi would be established with the Vichy authorities in the capital of Tananarive. But on 30 May a Japanese midget submarine torpedoed the battleship HMS Ramillies in the harbour of Diego Suarez. The Japanese submarine flotilla went on to sink twenty-three ships with supplies for the Eighth Army, marking the only direct assistance which the Japanese gave their German ally during the war.
A reluctant Churchill, persuaded by Field Marshal Smuts that the Japanese might establish bases in other Vichy ports on Madagascar, agreed to the conquest of the whole island. He also thought it might be a way of pacifying de Gaulle, who had wanted to take the island with Free French forces and then been furious to discover that the British planned to deal with the Vichy authorities there. Once the whole island was captured, it could be handed over to de Gaulle. This was finally achieved on 5 November, after a fruitless guerrilla campaign waged by the Vichy governor, Armand Annet. A week before Annet’s surrender, Churchill had been able to enquire graciously of General de Gaulle whom he would like to appoint as governor of Madagascar. De Gaulle suspected that the Allies were planning to land in North Africa, but if he had known of all the American dealings with Vichy generals that had been going on to prepare for Operation Torch, he would probably have stormed out of the room.
Robert Murphy, who had been the American chargé d’affaires in Vichy and was now Roosevelt’s emissary in French North Africa, was also convinced that de Gaulle should be kept out of the picture entirely. For most officers of the French colonial army, de Gaulle was still seen as little better than a traitor in the pay of the English. They needed to be reassured with a figurehead to their liking. General Henri Giraud was a tall and brave officer with a magnificent moustache, but not famed for his intelligence. De Gaulle called him the ‘tin soldier’. Giraud, who had been captured at the head of the French Seventh Army in 1940, had escaped from Königstein, a fortress prison in Saxony. He had made his way to Vichy where Pierre Laval, Pétain’s prime minister, had wanted to hand him back to the Germans, but the Maréchal refused.
Murphy felt that Giraud could best serve Allied interests, but Giraud had his own ideas. He insisted that he should be the commander-in-chief of Operation Torch and he demanded that the Allies should land in France as well as North Africa. He also did not want the British involved, since the Royal Navy attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir had not been forgotten or forgiven. Giraud was also a close friend of General Charles Mast, a key commander of French forces in North Africa. Murphy, who had developed a network of contacts among senior officers and officials, arranged a secret meeting between General Mast and his fellow conspirators with Eisenhower’s deputy, Lieutenant General Mark Clark.
On the night of 21 October, Clark had been landed near Algiers from the British submarine HMS Seraph, accompanied by commando bodyguards. His main task was to convince
Mast that the American forces would be so overwhelming that the French should not attempt to oppose them. Clark claimed that half a million men would be landed, when the forces consisted of only 112,000. Mast warned him that, although the army and air force could be won over, the French navy would resist with determination. Other French officers provided Clark with valuable intelligence on the disposition of their troops and defences. Fear of discovery by the local gendarmerie, who had been told that smugglers had landed, led to Clark’s undignified return to the submarine the following night without his trousers. Despite this minor humiliation, his dangerous mission had proved largely successful.
The submarine HMS Seraph, this time pretending to be American, was sent to collect Giraud from the Côte d’Azur and then convey him to Gibraltar to join Eisenhower. Axis agents and air reconnaissance reported the growing presence of shipping at Gibraltar. Fortunately for the Allies, German intelligence assumed that the vessels were intended either to reinforce Malta or to land forces in Libya to cut off Rommel’s line of retreat. German U-boats in the Mediterranean were therefore ordered to concentrate off the Libyan coast, well to the east of where the invasion forces were going to land. Another Axis theory was that the Allies intended to take Dakar on the west African coast as a naval base, to help them in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Through Murphy, the Americans had received overtures from Admiral Darlan. Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt’s former ambassador to Vichy, saw Darlan as a dangerous opportunist. The fact that Darlan loathed Laval, who had replaced him as Pétain’s deputy, was hardly a guarantee of his trustworthiness. Yet even Churchill was prepared to have dealings with this most determined anglophobe, if it might lead to the French fleet at Toulon coming over to the Allied side. Eisenhower preferred to stick with Giraud, but then Giraud, on reaching Gibraltar, again expected to be made Allied commander-in-chief. Seldom had a military operation been so complicated by politics and personal rivalries.
On 4 November, just four days before the landings, Darlan, who had been on a tour of French African colonies, flew to Algiers. He had just heard that his son, a naval lieutenant suffering from polio, had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Darlan had no idea that Allied fleets were at sea, and when his son’s condition improved he planned to fly back to Vichy. Western Task Force, containing 35,000 troops commanded by Major General George S. Patton, had already left Hampton Roads, bound for Casablanca. The other two task forces which had sailed from England were headed into the Mediterranean for Oran and Algiers. Altogether the troopships were escorted by 300 warships under the overall command of Admiral Cunningham, who was delighted to return to the Mediterranean.
On the evening of 7 November, Darlan was at dinner at the Villa des Oliviers, the residence of General Alphonse Juin, the commander-in-chief in Algiers. Juin had replaced Weygand, who was now imprisoned at Königstein in Giraud’s place because Hitler feared that he would side with the Allies. They were interrupted towards the end by the chief naval officer at Algiers, who rushed in to tell them that the Allied ships were perhaps not heading for Malta after all. They might be coming to land troops at Algiers and Oran. Darlan dismissed such fears and went off to get some sleep before his flight early next morning. At midnight, Murphy heard the codeword over the French service of the BBC to confirm that the landings were going ahead. He sent the French irregulars that he and General Mast had recruited to seize key installations and headquarters.
In the early hours of 8 November, Murphy went to the Villa Oliviers and had Juin woken. He informed him of the landings. Juin was dumb-struck at first. He then said that he must first consult his senior officer Admiral Darlan, who was present in Algiers. Murphy felt that he had no alternative but to talk to Darlan. Murphy’s Buick was sent to fetch him.
Darlan arrived in a fury. The short, bald, barrel-chested admiral, who constantly smoked a pipe, was soon nicknamed ‘Popeye’ by the Americans, who were amused by his built-up shoes. Darlan’s hatred for the English had an illustrious pedigree since his great-grandfather had been killed at the Battle of Trafalgar. But he was also a practised turncoat. Just after the armistice in 1940, the veteran French politician Édouard Herriot had said of him, ‘This admiral knows how to swim,’ when Darlan, having promised the British total resistance, secretly joined the capitulards.
While Murphy was trying to calm Darlan and persuade him that resistance to the landings would be futile, a group of Mast’s irregulars turned up and took Darlan and Juin prisoner. Then a squad of Gendarmerie arrived to release them and take the insurgents and Murphy prisoner. Murphy had been expecting American troops to have arrived by this time, but they had landed by mistake further down the coast.
But a far greater disaster was unfolding. The British plan to take both the ports of Algiers and Oran in a coup de main was a complete failure, involving massive casualties, especially in Oran, where 189 men were killed and 157 wounded out of a force of 393 men, while the Royal Navy lost 113 dead and 86 wounded. This, not surprisingly, provoked considerable American anger. In the harbour, French shore batteries and naval vessels bombarded two Royal Navy destroyers flying the stars and stripes, as they attempted to bring in American landing parties, just as they had at Diego Suarez. An airborne operation with a single American parachute battalion to capture Oran’s airfields also proved a fiasco. Operation Torch appeared to be falling to pieces in a grotesque farce.
Despite Roosevelt’s request to keep the Free French in ignorance, Churchill had asked General Ismay to call General Pierre Billotte, de Gaulle’s chief of staff, to warn him of the invasion just before the troops began to land. But Billotte decided not to wake de Gaulle, who had gone to bed early. When de Gaulle heard the news next morning, he was incandescent with rage. ‘I hope the Vichy people will throw them into the sea,’ he stormed. ‘You don’t get France by burglary!’ But by the time he had lunched with a soothing Churchill, de Gaulle had calmed down. That evening he made a broadcast fully in support of the Allied operation.
Only when American troops arrived in strength, many hours late due to the chaotic landings, did Darlan’s attitude change. He asked to meet the commander of the 34th Infantry Division to discuss a ceasefire, and one was agreed for Algiers. French troops would march back to barracks without surrendering their arms.
Hitler’s suspicions about the reliability of the Vichy regime as an ally flared up. Severing diplomatic relations with the United States was not enough, nor was Pierre Laval’s agreement to allow Axis aircraft to use French airfields in Tunisia. On 9 November, Laval was summoned to Munich and challenged to prove his loyalty to Germany by declaring war on the Allies. This was a step too far for Laval, and also for the rest of the administration in Vichy.
Darlan, meanwhile, would not extend the ceasefire to Casablanca and Oran, where fighting still continued. He needed to know what was happening in Munich and in France. Confusion mounted with the arrival in Algiers of General Giraud, followed by General Mark Clark, who indicated that they should prepare to drop Giraud and deal with Darlan instead. Giraud fortunately accepted that Darlan was his senior and did not make a fuss. But Eisenhower, back in the humid tunnels of the Rock of Gibraltar, had only a few confusing reports on which to assess progress. Nothing had been heard from General Patton on the Casablanca landings. A keyed-up Eisenhower chain-smoked his Camel cigarettes and prayed for the best.
In Munich Hitler accompanied by Count Ciano, Mussolini’s foreign secretary, received Laval and demanded that French troops should secure ports and airfields in Tunisia for the landing of Axis troops. French resentment against Italy, after Mussolini’s stab-in-the-back in June 1940, was so intense that Laval hesitated over allowing Italian forces on French territory. But he indicated that he would bow to a German ultimatum, providing Marshal Pétain could make a formal protest.
The next morning, 10 November, Darlan came to the Hôtel Saint-Georges in Algiers, which Clark had taken over as his headquarters. Clark’s undiplomatic manner did not go down well with Darlan,
who emphasized that he held a much more senior rank. Clark even threatened to impose Allied military government on the whole of French North Africa. Darlan kept his temper, because he had to play for time. He could not order the ceasefire which Clark so urgently wanted until Hitler ordered troops into the demilitarized zone of France, thus breaching the 1940 armistice agreement. Eisenhower, on hearing from Clark that negotiations had stalled, exploded: ‘Jee-sus Christ! What I need around here is a damned good assassin.’ At least Oran was secured that day by the US 1st Infantry Division at the cost of 300 casualties, but French forces were still resisting Patton’s troops in Morocco even after almost all their warships had been sunk off Casablanca in a furious battle.
Early the next day, Hitler announced that German troops would occupy southern and south-eastern France in Operation Anton. He would still recognize Pétain’s government, but the Marshal’s reputation was now in tatters. Many of his supporters felt that he should have fled to North Africa to join the Allies. Hitler also gave orders that the Pyrenees should be occupied by German troops. Franco’s government feared that Hitler might demand the passage of troops through Spain to attack Gibraltar, and a council of ministers in Madrid on 13 November ordered a partial mobilization.
With the German move into the unoccupied zone of France, Darlan was now able to argue that Pétain was a prisoner. He gave instructions that the ceasefire should extend throughout French North Africa. But Darlan did not manage to deliver the French fleet in Toulon, as Churchill had hoped. The commander there, Contre-Amiral Jean de Laborde, who resented Darlan and feared that his sailors and officers wanted to join the hated Anglo-Saxons, remained loyal to Vichy in splendid isolation. Assured by officers of the Kriegsmarine that German forces would not try to seize his ships or the port of Toulon, Laborde decided to stay put. But the arrival of SS panzer troops, and increasing dissent among his crews, forced him to make up his mind. As German forces entered the port, he gave the order to scuttle the fleet. Almost a hundred warships were sunk or blown up.
The Second World War Page 53