The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Churchill, elated by the news from Egypt (and a handwritten congratulatory note from the King), told luncheon companions on November 6 that Rommel’s army had been cut from its positions, like a limpet is cut from a rock. Slashing the air, as if with a knife, Churchill asked, “And what happens to a limpet when it is cut from its rock. It dies a miserable death.” But not for nothing was Rommel called the Desert Fox. He had escaped and would live to fight another day, giving the lie to Machiavelli’s maxim that the fox cannot outrun the wolves. The Italian infantry were not as fortunate as their mechanized German brethren. To evacuate their own, the Germans commandeered what little transportation the Italians had. “The Italians,” Churchill told the Commons on November 10, “were left to perish in the waterless desert or surrender as they are doing.” The Battle of Egypt was won.328

  On the final day of October, U-559 was depth-charged by the Royal Navy and forced to the surface off Port Said. Its crew was taken aboard British cutters while three tars boarded the submarine and made for the radio room. The scene played out almost exactly as it had aboard U-110 the previous year. U-559 foundered and went down, taking two of the British sailors with her. But the third managed to escape with the boat’s codebooks and Enigma machine, complete with the fourth wheel that had stymied Bletchley for almost a year. The British now held the key to unlocking Dönitz’s naval communications. With that month’s U-boat codes in hand, Bletchley began reading German radio traffic even as the Torch armada lingered off North Africa. But the advantage vanished when Berlin changed the codes later in the month. Bletchley’s wizards found themselves once again stymied. The captured Enigma machine ensured a breakthrough, sooner or later, but later would not do. Dönitz now had more than two hundred U-boats available for duty in the North Atlantic. He sent one hundred or more on patrol during each of the next six months, more than twice as many as at the start of the year. British losses alone pushed over 710,000 tons in November, the worst of any month of the war; 117 ships went down that month, far more than could be made up by new construction.329

  On the political front, Cripps, having had his fill as leader of the House, resigned and finally agreed to take the job Churchill had offered early in the year—minister of aircraft production. Cripps’s flame had flared in February; El Alamein had snuffed it out, along with any hopes he harbored of leading the nation after the war. Cripps, an American newsweekly offered, had proven himself “politically inept,” and had been adroitly kicked by Churchill onto the sidelines. Eden took over the leadership of the House, while keeping the Foreign Office. Beaverbrook, meanwhile, under whom Cripps had refused to serve, returned to London after spending the summer in America, where he had adroitly pushed for a second front while simultaneously defending Churchill against criticism that he wasn’t pursuing a second front fast enough. The Beaver was back, and a regular dinner guest at No. 10.330

  On November 6, as Churchill conjured up images of limpets over lunch, the Torch invasion fleet—more than 650 transports, tankers, hospital ships, and 172 warships, carrying 90,000 men—made for the African coast. It had been at sea for more than two weeks. The ships had sailed from Canada, Hampton Roads, and Britain, and had arranged themselves into three task forces. The Western would land Patton’s 34,000 men on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. On the fifth, the Center and Eastern task forces had run past Gibraltar on their way to Oran and Algiers. The armada expected a hot welcome from U-boats, but as the hours passed, not an enemy periscope was seen. The Germans, as the British learned from Ultra decrypts, did not know the fleet was on its way. Bletchley also passed on the astounding (and welcome) news that the Germans had no plan in effect to either destroy or blockade Gibraltar—the key to the entire enterprise, as the Allies needed to run the straits in order to first land and then reinforce the Central and Eastern task forces. But, as Churchill had learned earlier in the year in Egypt, Bletchley was not always correct.

  Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs: “British Gibraltar made possible the invasion of northwest Africa.” This was so because in early November 1942, the Allies occupied not one other piece of real estate in Europe and the western Mediterranean from which an invasion of North Africa might be launched. The Rock was blessed with a deep harbor where Allied warships could refuel and re-arm, and also was home to a small airfield, which in the weeks before the invasion was crammed full of fighter planes—fourteen fighter squadrons of sixteen craft each—and drums of gasoline. To Eisenhower’s dismay, the airstrip was separated from Spain by nothing more substantial than a barbed-wire fence, against which “almost physically… leaned any number of Axis agents.” The Spanish government was leaning, as well, toward Hitler. In order to put troops ashore at Oran and Algiers, Allied ships would have to sail through the thirty-mile-long gauntlet between Spain and Spanish Morocco that is the Strait of Gibraltar, less than ten miles wide in places. Were Spanish guns sited on either side of the straits to take those ships under fire, Torch would be doused. Eisenhower could only hope that the Spanish and the French in North Africa remained aloof from the fray and that the Axis presumed the buildup in Gibraltar was a prelude to the relief of Malta (as in fact they did). Regardless, sound strategy called for the Axis to bomb the Rock. Each night, Eisenhower waited for bombings that never came. Each night, Allied soldiers found fitful sleep in the twenty-five miles of tunnels cut deep within the Jurassic limestone, and each morning, they awoke “puzzled, even astonished,” to find that no German planes had drubbed the Rock.331

  During the early planning stages for Torch, the bottleneck of the straits was considered so dangerous by the Americans that they refused to send their ships into the Mediterranean lest they be trapped in that inland sea. Safety first had never been one of Churchill’s dictates. Secrecy, not danger, was the first concern of the British. Churchill and Brooke believed that the Americans, inexperienced in such operations, might prove loose-lipped enough to jeopardize the entire plan. American trepidation and ability to keep a secret were but two concerns among many. Churchill also expected the Italians to send out their fleet, still dangerous with six battleships and dozens of supporting warships. Eisenhower—mistakenly—thought the Germans had two aircraft carriers with which to harass the Allied invasion fleet. Darlan and the French fleet were always a wild card.332

  A vexing question remained up to the eve of the invasion: Did the Germans and Italians have any idea of where the Allies were going, and when? Brooke, for his part, considered Eisenhower’s headquarters to be “conspicuously leaky as regards information and secrets.” The unexpected could always be depended upon to happen. In late September, British intelligence had learned that the body of a British officer killed in an airplane crash off the coast of Spain had washed up on a Spanish beach. The dead man carried letters in his tunic that contained enough veiled references to the invasion to clarify for the Germans where the invasion was to take place—if, that is, the Spanish allowed the Germans access to the body. But the Spanish handed the body over to the British, who deduced from beach sand still wedged between the tunic’s buttons and buttonholes that the letters had most likely not been extracted from the tunic. The episode troubled London, but it also served to stimulate furtive imaginations within Combined Operations, where the idea took hold of misleading the Germans by planting a body carrying false information on a European beach. The following year the British would do just that with a ploy aptly named Operation Mincemeat.333

  Eisenhower’s main problem as his army neared the African coasts was not compromised intelligence or strictly military, but political. He later wrote that Torch was “a most peculiar venture of armed forces into the field of international politics; we were invading a neutral country to create a friend.” Such an action has not, traditionally, been a recipe for friendship. The Americans had known for weeks that the chances for a successful invasion would be greatly increased by having a Frenchman of great stature on their side and on the ground in North Africa when the landings took place, someone who could rally both pr
o- and anti-Vichy elements and, most important, 230,000 Vichy troops and their officers. But the Allies had done little in the way of addressing the question of who that would be. Pétain or some other authority within the Vichy government would not do; the Americans, having pulled their ambassador in April, no longer recognized Vichy as a legitimate government. America’s formerly cozy relationship with Vichy was resented by many in France, and viscerally by the Fighting French, yet de Gaulle, around whom Frenchmen now rallied, was loathed by the Americans and had not even been told of Torch. Representatives of Admiral Jean Darlan had sent messages to the senior American diplomat in Algiers, Robert Murphy, to the effect that the Germans suspected something might soon occur on the Moroccan coast and when it did, they, the Germans, intended to occupy French North Africa. Murphy and Eisenhower concluded that Darlan might be willing to “play ball” and bring the French fleet over to the Allies. Yet Washington and London distrusted Darlan more than all other Frenchmen but Laval. Then, almost on the eve of the invasion, the Americans discovered General Henri Giraud, a brave and decent man. Captured during the fall of France, Giraud had escaped a German fortress to Vichy France, where he was allowed to live under house arrest only after he promised loyalty to Vichy. He was senior to de Gaulle in rank and beloved by Frenchmen. He looked every inch the gallant soldier—tall, stiff, plainspoken. He was also vain and stupid.334

  Eisenhower secreted Giraud to Gibraltar by submarine and flying boat on November 7, and that evening as the invasion fleets neared the beaches, he made his pitch to the Frenchman to accompany the Allied forces to North Africa, and there to join the Allies in the first step on the road to the liberation of France. Giraud eagerly embraced the concept, but with two caveats. Honor demanded that he must assume overall command of the entire enterprise, including American and British troops; and the supporting invasion must be launched directly into France. Eisenhower, taken aback, thanked the general for his support but told him his conditions were quite impossible to meet. Giraud was adamant; he must command. They talked well into the evening, but Eisenhower simply could not bring Giraud around to the fact that a Frenchman could not command the Allied armies, in which not a single Frenchman served. The discussion, Eisenhower later wrote, was “one of my most distressing interviews of the war.”335

  That evening in London, the Soviet ambassador to the European governments in exile gave a reception. There, a Czech diplomat took one of de Gaulle’s colleagues aside and whispered, “It’s for tonight.” A telephone call was placed to de Gaulle, who was awakened at home and took the call in his pajamas. Thus, de Gaulle learned that Anglo-American armies were about to land on French soil. His reaction was typical, if understandable: “I hope the Vichy people throw them into the sea! You don’t go into France like a pack of burglars.”336

  Churchill was at Chequers that night. Since early October, Ultra decrypts had told him that Field Marshal “Smiling Albert” Kesselring—whose Luftflotte 2 had almost brought Fighter Command to bay in 1940—knew that the British were up to something big, but he didn’t know when or where and so could not deploy his aircraft to best effect. Many in the German high command were convinced that the Allied destination was northern Norway, which it might have been had Churchill gotten his way with Operation Jupiter. Admiral Raeder, in 1940, had predicted Churchill would strike French North Africa, but he had been ignored by Hitler and the army sycophants at OKW. Most in Berlin thought the attack zone would be the Mediterranean, but not the southern shore. Why land there if the objective was to fight the German army in Europe? Armies fought at close quarters, on land, not from across seas. That had been George Marshall’s argument exactly, until Brooke and Churchill—two saltwater strategists—wore him down with relentless argument.

  Thus, while the Germans and Italians scanned the sea approaches to Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta, more than three hundred Allied transports and warships, having run the straits, turned southward on their true course. They divided into two streams, the Center force, carrying the American 1st Infantry and 1st Armored Division, on a heading for Oran; and the Eastern, Anglo-American force, bound for Algiers with 23,000 British and 10,000 American troops. Part of the Algerian force—not much greater in size than a division, and wistfully designated British First Army—was ordered to wheel east from Algiers after landing and strike 450 miles to Bizerte and Tunis. Its commander, Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson, was a blunt, abrasive, and dour Scot given to skepticism that bordered on pessimism. A man of few words, he was nicknamed “Sunshine” by his men. Expecting to be reinforced as he moved east (after all, fully 90 percent of the Torch forces were at his rear), he concluded that he might well reach Tunis in two weeks, before the Germans could reinforce the city and dispute the issue. The first hours of the invasion certainly justified his unusual spate of optimism. Only a single American transport suffered any damage, after being torpedoed far out to sea by a stray U-boat. Undeterred, the battalion of soldiers on board climbed into their landing crafts and headed for shore, a hundred-mile journey. Despite the inexperience of the landing-craft crews, the Algerian landings came off the next morning better than any of the planners had hoped for.337

  Sarah Churchill, commissioned in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, was assigned to photographic interpretation and intelligence duties at Medmenham, near enough to Chequers for her to hitchhike there to spend weekends with her parents. She arrived at the house late on November 7, to find her father toweling off in his dressing room as Sawyers assembled his evening attire. As Churchill wielded a pair of ivory hairbrushes to part the few remaining hairs on his dome, he turned to Sarah and said, “Do you know, that at this moment six hundred forty-two ships are approaching the coast of North Africa?” “Six hundred forty-three,” replied Sarah. “How do you know?” he asked. “I’ve only been working on it for three months,” answered Sarah. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Churchill asked, his feelings slightly bruised. “I believe there is such a thing as security,” Sarah answered. He chuckled, and retold the story at dinner. Some hours later, as father and daughter sat together before the hearth, the clock in the great hall struck one o’clock. At that moment British troops, including Randolph, began to go ashore on the Algiers beaches.338

  They met virtually no resistance. This was what the planners had hoped for. Torch was a bold plan, and it was extremely risky. No American involved had ever participated in such an operation, and very few had even seen combat. No such “ship-to-shore” invasion had ever before crossed an ocean to reach the target. Except for the Guadalcanal invasion in August, Torch was the first large-scale amphibious operation conducted by American forces in forty-five years. At Algiers all went well, although two British destroyers were sunk in the harbor while trying to put American Rangers ashore. The fighting was finished by late morning, and the city surrendered early that evening. “Well, here we are,” Randolph wrote in a letter to his father, “safe and sound.” The trump card in the African deck was in the Allies’ hands. It had been secured by Churchill’s and Brooke’s insistence on attacking Algiers.339

  Then a message from Algiers reached Eisenhower though Admiral Cunningham: “Darlan wants to negotiate.” By a stroke of supreme good luck, Admiral Jean Darlan, commander of all Vichy armed forces, was in Algiers, visiting his son, who had contracted poliomyelitis. Just before Eisenhower left London the previous week, Churchill had told him, “If I could meet Darlan, much as I hate him, I would cheerfully crawl a mile on my hands if by doing so I could get him to bring that fleet of his into the circle of Allied forces.” To Cunningham, Churchill made his point more bluntly: “Kiss Darlan’s stern if you have to, but get the French Navy.”340

  Vichy loyalists contested the assault at Oran, where the naval forces were British and the landing parties American. Two British cutters trying to land American troops at the harbor docks were raked by ferocious fire from French shore batteries. The docks remained in Vichy hands. The fighting continued throughout that day and the next. The defenders awaited or
ders; they had not heard from Pétain. In effect, America had gone to war against a people who had been allies since Lafayette helped George Washington secure his Great Republic. Herr Dr. Goebbels believed that the entire North African campaign was a “fight between the City and Wall Street for French colonies.” Edward R. Murrow and many of his fellow correspondents in North Africa harbored similar suspicions. American policy, Murrow wrote to a friend, “looks like a sort of amateur imperialism, which aims at making the continent safe for the National City Bank.”341

  The Cross of Lorraine had long suspected as much. During lunch on the eighth, Churchill informed de Gaulle of the landings (about which de Gaulle already knew). Yet Churchill, true to his May pledge to hold Madagascar in trust for the French, also turned over the administration of that island to the Free French, in effect a recognition of de Gaulle’s claim to constitutional authority. The Americans, meanwhile, to the chagrin of Churchill—and especially Eden—continued to ignore de Gaulle. In fact, having discovered Darlan in Algiers, they were about to actively court him. Early on November 9, Eisenhower put Mark Clark and General Giraud aboard separate planes bound for Algiers in hopes that Clark could bring Darlan and his fleet into Allied hands while Giraud persuaded the Vichy forces there to lay down their arms. Darlan could not ignore Clark when the American appeared at his villa. But the Vichy commanders in Oran ignored Giraud; they had taken an oath of loyalty to Pétain. With de Gaulle consigned to irrelevancy by the Americans and hated by Vichy, only Darlan remained as a possible peacemaker. He was the worst of all possible choices.342