The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  On the ninth, the Germans volunteered to Pétain to put men and planes into Tunisia in order to “help” Vichy defend its sovereign territory. Pétain had no choice but to agree to this “favor.” The first Germans arrived in Tunis by air that evening, followed by squadrons of Stukas and Messerschmitts. Then, by ship, came Mark IV tanks, the twenty-five-ton workhorses of the German army, armed with 75mm cannons, deadlier than any American or British tank and manned by experienced crews who had learned their trade on the Russian front. And by ship came heavy artillery, German 88s, the deadliest field guns ever built.343

  On the Moroccan coast, where Patton’s troops had come ashore at three points—the port of Safi, Fedala, and Mehdia—the weather and landing crafts proved as troublesome and deadly as the enemy. The seas, roiled for a week by storms, calmed somewhat in the last hours before the landings but not enough. The first lesson learned, before a boot hit the beach, was that American landing craft of the era—Higgins Boats—were obsolete. They were made of plywood and without bow ramps, and the troops on board disembarked by jumping over the sides. Dozens of Americans drowned when they jumped into the turbulent waters; Patton himself pulled at least one body from the surf. Tanks and trucks were swept off the flimsy, flat-bottomed barges that carried them. After avoiding the enemy and without the loss of a single ship across the thousands of miles of ocean, Patton’s command lost more tanks and trucks in the landings than it did during the day’s combat with the defenders.344

  Patton’s troops had the benefit of five hours of darkness to cover their drive to the beaches. The American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who served as an officer aboard one of the covering cruisers, described the night as quiet, with not a light to be seen, the African shore “veiled in clouds and hushed in silence.” An offshore breeze carried “the smell of charcoal fires and parched dry grass” out to the ships. An hour passed, and another. Then a beam from a French searchlight shot seaward. Within minutes a dozen French warships—destroyers, a cruiser, and submarines—sailed to engage the Allied fleet. The American admiral Kent Hewitt issued his pre-arranged signal for a general engagement: “Play ball.” And then came the bursts of machine guns, “blinding gun flashes,” and the “crash of heavy ordnance.” For the next several hours, the new French battleship Jean Bart, not yet entirely fitted out and incapable of sailing but able to use its fifteen-inch guns, waged a furious gun battle with USS Massachusetts. By the end of the day, Jean Bart was a burned-out wreck, and seven French warships along with three French submarines and a thousand French sailors lay at the bottom of the Atlantic. George Patton watched the battle unfold from the deck of USS Augusta; the landing craft that was to have taken Patton ashore was blown into splinters by the concussion from Augusta’s guns. Eisenhower, meanwhile, was unaware of any of the goings-on in Morocco. He had lost all radio contact with both Patton and the navy when the shock waves from Augusta’s heavy guns knocked out all of his radio equipment as well.345

  Once ashore, Patton’s 34,000 men received a hot reception from Vichy forces, a resistance spurred in part by Roosevelt’s decision to broadcast a message of peace to the Vichy French in Morocco hours before Patton came ashore, thereby giving the defenders time to prepare. In Rabat, the resident governor general, Auguste Paul Noguès, his honor at stake, ordered an attack against the invaders. Noguès commanded at least 60,000 men in the protectorate, including several hundred fighter pilots. Fortunately for Patton’s men, the French pilots who arrived over the Fedala beaches were not the cream of the Vichy air force and missed the beach entirely on their strafing runs. On the other hand, the American navy had put many of Patton’s troops on the wrong beaches, where U.S. Navy planes proceeded to bomb them, as did some elements of Patton’s artillery. The scene was utter chaos. While curious Arabs wandered among the wreckage, green American troops fired at shadows or, having lost their weapons in the surf, crouched behind trees. Some of the troops carried a new weapon. Alan Brooke called it a “rocket-gun” after watching a demonstration in June; the Yanks called it a bazooka. Indicative of the confusion on the beaches, the first bazooka fired in anger at a French tank missed its target and slew a nearby tree. Patton’s tanks could not communicate; their radio batteries had drained during the sea voyage. His signal corps was in total disarray. The plan called for Patton to take Casablanca with the consent of the citizens, not to have to conquer it, for the simple reason that he might not be able to take the city should the Vichy put up enough of a fight against the untested Americans. With that in mind, Churchill had warned Roosevelt, “The first victory we have to win is to avoid a battle.” But by noon on the eighth, Patton was in the thick of a bloody battle, and it was not going his way.346

  The next day, Eisenhower, desperately trying to bring Darlan around to the Allied side, discovered a fact of French military life long known to Churchill: “the traditional French demand for a cloak of legality over any action they might take.” French generals, Eisenhower later wrote, had cast their surrender in 1940 as “merely the act of loyal soldiers obeying the legal orders of their civil superiors.” Honor was thus preserved. Churchill, in explaining the Darlan negotiations to the House, offered a less subtle explanation: “The almighty in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to create Frenchmen in the image of Englishmen.” The French need for legal justification—“this peculiar form of French mentality”—stemmed from a belief that “an unbroken chain of lawful command” insulates those in the chain from any recriminations, moral or legal. Pétain resided at the top of the chain. So dominant among Frenchmen was this legalistic mind-set, Churchill told the House, that “if Admiral Darlan had to shoot Marshal Pétain he would no doubt do it in Marshal Pétain’s name.”347

  On November 10, before Patton took the battle into the streets of Casablanca, Admiral Darlan ordered a cease-fire throughout the theater. As he was senior military commander on the scene, the order was within his authority. Pétain, exercising his authority, immediately rescinded the order and dismissed Darlan.348

  The next day, in violation of the armistice signed in 1940, Hitler invaded unoccupied France. This freed Darlan entirely from the restraints imposed by law and Gallic honor. With Pétain now virtually a German prisoner, Darlan’s orders carried the legal weight to deliver both North Africa and the French navy to the Allies. That morning, the commander of Vichy troops in Casablanca approached Patton’s lines carrying a white flag. It was a flag not of surrender or capitulation but only of cease-fire. But it ended the hostilities. Thanks to Darlan, Patton, who had promised Roosevelt and Marshall that he would leave the beach “either a conqueror or a corpse,” was ashore to stay. Yet, with Darlan, Eisenhower had on his hands a political poison pill. The Frenchman was universally reviled in Washington and London. Although Darlan had issued the orders that secured Casablanca and Oran, he had yet to give the most critical order of all, the order that the French fleets in Toulon and Dakar make for North Africa.

  On the night of November 8, the high holy anniversary of his 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler made his yearly address to his brown-shirted cronies in Munich. The Führer spoke at the more elegant Löwenbräukeller, the old Bügerbräukeller having been bombed in a bungled 1939 assassination attempt on his life. Hitler informed his audience that Stalingrad, but for a few pockets of resistance, “was firmly in German hands.” The job of erasing the city from the banks of the Volga, he promised, would soon be finished, but to avoid another Verdun, it would be done methodically. After all, he announced, time was now of no consequence. This was an exaggeration but not an outright lie. After losing twenty divisions during five weeks of murderous fighting in metropolitan Stalingrad, Paulus’s Sixth Army had reached the Volga in the northern part of the city two days earlier. The Fourth Panzer Army was just two miles away from the south bank, which, when secured, would complete the encirclement of the inner city. The first reports from North Africa, meanwhile, were positive—fierce resistance by the French on all the beaches, German reinforcements about to depar
t for Tunis. Hitler did not disclose that Operation Anton, the occupation of Vichy France, was set to begin in thirty-six hours. From all appearances, the tide was still rising under the Third Reich. In fact, during the very hours Hitler spoke, and while his train got up steam for the journey to his East Prussian headquarters, and while his loyal brown shirts strutted and swayed under a thick haze of cigarette smoke on the beer-drenched floors of the Löwenbräukeller, the Third Reich reached flood tide.349

  A freezing blue haze drifted low over the Volga that night and the next morning, a harbinger of the hard freezes that very soon would render the river a land bridge to Stalingrad. Fifty miles to the north and south of Stalingrad, the number two man in the Red Army after Stalin, Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, had assembled two gigantic forces made up of eight infantry and four tank armies. Now Zhukov waited. In a sense, Hitler had spoken the truth to his Munich cronies when he offered that time was of no consequence. Zhukov had it all on his side, while for the Germans in Stalingrad, it was running out.

  When the Germans broke into unoccupied France on November 11, they drove straight for Toulon, where French naval commanders awaited orders to scuttle the fleet—two battleships, several heavy cruisers, sixteen submarines, eighteen destroyers—and therefore deny the Nazis a naval force that might have won them the Mediterranean. Only Darlan could give the order. He had promised in 1940 that he would never allow the French fleet to fall into German hands; on that day he made good on his promise. He ordered the French fleet to bolt Toulon and make for Africa, to join the Allies. The French naval commanders in Toulon, still loyal to Pétain, chose to stay in Toulon. By then, the Germans had surrounded the port. Even were the French captains inclined to obey Darlan, any attempt to do so would result in the Germans commandeering the fleet, which they were in fact drawing up plans to do. For almost two weeks, the French warships rode at anchor and in their slips. On November 27 Hitler struck. It took less than an hour for German tanks and troops to smash into the naval base and make for the dockyard, but that was more than enough time for the French commanders, sure now that they had been betrayed, to issue the orders to scuttle. Almost the entire fleet was sent to the bottom. Darlan, whatever his other faults, had kept his promise.

  Reaction to the courtship of Darlan and the marriage of convenience came fast and furiously in Britain, and in America, where Roosevelt liberals, Churchill later wrote, were “agog… at what seemed to them a base and squalid deal with one of our most bitter enemies.” Millions of Britons, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “are convinced that appeasement of a man of Vichy or a man of Munich smells just about the same, no matter what fancy name you want to call it.” Churchill, for his part, thought the military gains achieved by Darlan’s cease-fire orders outweighed the political risk. Yet, in a cable to Roosevelt he expressed his conviction that the Darlan deal “can only be a temporary expedient.” Roosevelt issued a public defense of Eisenhower; Churchill did not. He spoke to Parliament in Secret Session, where he described Pétain—whose name he pronounced as “Peatayne”—“as an antique defeatist.” Roosevelt had not consulted HMG on the Darlan matter, Churchill told the House. Yet, from the standpoint of reaching military objectives and saving the lives of his troops, “General Eisenhower was right” to court Darlan. But in public he accorded Eisenhower no such endorsement. Since the Americans, after all, had insisted that Torch was to be an all-American affair, they could stew in their own juices. Stalin, ever pragmatic, offered his thoughts on the subject to both Churchill and Roosevelt. The value of military diplomacy justified not only the relationship with Darlan, Stalin wrote, “but with the Devil himself and his grandma.” Stalin also tossed out a phrase that was being much heard around London: the tide has turned.350

  The Darlan expedient indeed proved temporary when on Christmas Eve, Darlan, who had managed that year to earn the enmity of de Gaulle, Vichy France, Churchill, Eisenhower, and Hitler, was shot dead by a young French royalist named Ferdinand Bonnier de la Chapelle. Although trained by the SOE, Chapelle was not acting under orders from London. He was tried, convicted, and shot, all in less than two days. The mystery around the murder deepened when it was revealed that MI6 chief Stewart Menzies, having left England for the first time during the war, was dining just a few hundred yards away from Darlan’s house. Darlan’s last words were said to have been “the British have finally done for me.” Whether or not the English had a hand in the murder, Darlan’s exit freed the Allies from having to further explain their association with the disreputable admiral. Churchill, in his memoirs, acknowledged that Darlan—a Fascist and Anglophobe who had made wrongheaded decisions for two years—had in the end made a decision that allowed the Allies to gain their foothold in North Africa. Had he ordered resistance against the Allies, Torch might have failed. Whether or not Darlan at the time fostered ambitions of ruling over French North African under Allied protection became moot with his death. He had deservedly earned the reputation of an arrogant, conniving turncoat, but his last turn of coat had finally put him on the right side. “Let him rest in peace,” Churchill wrote of Darlan, “and let us all be thankful we have never had to face the trials under which he broke.”351

  Darlan’s exit left Giraud as head of the French military in North Africa, but it also left a vacuum in French civil affairs. The way was now open for de Gaulle and the Fighting French to assume a place at the table—at the head of the table if de Gaulle was to realize his ambitions. He was loathed in Washington, where Cordell Hull called the Free French “polecats.” Roosevelt, in a sarcastic handwritten addition to a cable to Churchill asked, “Why doesn’t de Gaulle go to war? Why doesn’t he start North by West half West from Brazenville? It would take him a long time to get to the Oasis of Somewhere.” The reference was to Brazzaville, located on the Congo River, and the capital of French Equatorial Africa. Yet despite the Frenchman’s arrogance, de Gaulle remained for Churchill and Britons the symbol of French valor, the hero who had wanted to fight Germans for three years and deserved the opportunity to do so. Two weeks before Darlan’s assassination, Eden had asked de Gaulle whether, if Darlan were to disappear from the scene, de Gaulle could reach some sort of agreement with French North African authorities. De Gaulle answered yes. Darlan had indeed disappeared. In order that the British (and therefore de Gaulle, to whom the British had made commitments) not be excluded from North African politics, Churchill appointed Harold Macmillan (with Roosevelt’s approval) as resident minister to Allied Headquarters, where, Churchill hoped, he would serve as a counterweight to Roosevelt’s man in Morocco, Robert Murphy. Macmillan, Churchill informed Roosevelt, “is animated by the friendliest feelings towards the United States, and his mother hails from Kentucky.” Actually, his mother was a Hoosier, and although Macmillan, like Churchill, was half American, he was British to the bone, and a Tory. Churchill had just dealt himself into the political game in North Africa. Given the stubbornness of Charles de Gaulle, it was to prove a risky and frustrating game of chance.352

  On November 10, 1942, Churchill delivered two of his most memorable lines while addressing the traditional Lord Mayor’s dinner at Mansion House (the Guildhall having been destroyed during the Blitz). Referring to Montgomery’s desert victory, Churchill cautioned, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Then, after calling himself Franklin Roosevelt’s “active and ardent lieutenant” in the “mighty undertaking” taking place in French North Africa, Churchill sought to dispel any notion that he had just admitted to a subordinated role within the alliance. “Let me, however, make this clear…. We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” In uttering those words Churchill appeared to have confirmed for critics, then and since, his status as an outdated imperialist who either could not see or could not abide a simple truth—the age of European colonialism was just about over, its expiration aided and abetted by Frankli
n Roosevelt. Yet Churchill’s next line, infrequently noted, completed his thought: “For that task, if it were prescribed, someone else would have to be found, and under democracy, I suppose this nation would have to be consulted.” Churchill had been asked to form a government for one reason only, to win the war. He was determined that at war’s end Britain would regain territories lost to the Axis, much as America expected to recover Guam and Wake Island. If future events demanded a restructuring of the British Empire, the British people would decide the issue. Churchill ended his address with words that encapsulated his belief in both England and the Empire: “Here we are, and here we stand, a veritable rock of stability in this drifting world.”353

  For Churchill, the British Empire was a variation on German philosopher Gottfried Liebniz’s best of all possible worlds. Yet that sentiment formed only a part of his worldview. He was a great European patriot as well as a British patriot, and his willingness to stand alone against Hitler was both an expression of that patriotism and the defense of a truth as Churchill saw it: Europe was the birthplace of Western political and aesthetic traditions, the defense of which, since the fall of France, had fallen to Britain. During his Wilderness Years, he had warned of the danger Hitler posed to Europe and by extension to Britain and the Empire. Even after war came, sober men such as Baldwin and Halifax believed they could preserve the Empire by reaching an agreement with—by again appeasing—Hitler. Churchill did not. Britain had gone to war to restore liberty to Europe. Yet he knew that if Britain emerged from the war victorious, it would possibly emerge broken as well.