The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Eisenhower flew over from Algiers to outline his plan for taking Tunis. He proposed a strike eastward to the sea with Major General Lloyd Fredendall’s II Corps to drive a wedge between Arnim’s and Rommel’s armies. Brooke destroyed the idea, pointing out its most obvious defect: with Montgomery and the Eighth Army still five hundred miles to the east, a thrust by II Corps would result in its being trapped between Arnim and Rommel. The most likely result would be the defeat in detail of Fredendall’s force in the south and Anderson’s forces in the north. The idea went nowhere, and Eisenhower flew back to Algiers. Yet with the need to coordinate the British First and Eighth Armies, as well as the French and American forces, it was obvious that a Supreme Commander had to be chosen. It was Eisenhower. He “had neither the tactical nor strategical experience” for such a task, Brooke later wrote, but by “being pushed up into the… rarified atmosphere of a Supreme Commander,” he could attend to “his political problems.” Brooke believed the appointment, while flattering the Americans, would allow British commanders to fight the battles and restore “the necessary drive and co-ordination which has been so seriously lacking.” Eisenhower, with just three stars on his shoulders, was outranked by his trio of British lieutenants—Alexander, Tedder, and Cunningham. Marshall, not impressed with Eisenhower’s results in Tunisia, told Roosevelt that he “would not promote Eisenhower [to four stars] until there was some damn good reason for doing it.” He meant a good military reason. Roosevelt had in mind a good political reason; Eisenhower’s promotion would tell the American people that they were taking charge of the war. Two weeks later, Roosevelt submitted Eisenhower’s name to the U.S. Senate, and Ike got his fourth star on February 11.57

  Although Roosevelt remained committed to Marshall’s cross-Channel strategy, he was opportunistic enough to see the merit of Churchill’s Sicily initiative. After five days of debate, the Combined Chiefs of Staff reached the same conclusion. They also agreed on eight overall strategic priorities. Brooke later wrote that Dill was instrumental in forging the agreement; the alternative, Dill had warned Brooke and Marshall, was to allow Roosevelt and Churchill to make the final decisions, and “what a mess they would make of it!” The final agreement codified the need to defeat Germany first, with wresting control of the Atlantic taking top billing. Second, and closely tied to the first, was the need to get all aid possible to Russia. The plan to take Sicily was third, followed by the continued buildup of American forces in Britain, with the goal of running a small-scale version of Roundup on the Cotentin Peninsula that August. This was a sop to Marshall. Fifth, the British agreed on the need to retake southern Burma (Operation Anakim, scheduled for later in the year) in order to open a supply route to Chiang and to draw the Japanese from MacArthur’s flank as he moved northward. This was a sop to Roosevelt and King; Churchill believed China would play no role of any importance in defeating Japan. In any event, the British lacked the requisite forces to retake Burma that year even if they believed it would result in an earlier defeat of Japan. The sixth term of the agreement called for a study of Axis oil needs and industrial capacity, for purposes of planning the “heaviest possible air offensive” to destroy German industrial capacity (which both Spaatz and Harris believed might end the war in 1943). Next came the need to establish naval and air control over North Africa and the Mediterranean. The final article stipulated that all matters connected with Turkey would be handled by the British. The entire eight-point plan was “a strategic menu they [the Allies] could not digest,” Samuel Eliot Morison later wrote, a case of planners who “had eyes bigger than their stomachs.”58

  Churchill was so eager to get Turkey and its forty-five (underarmed) divisions into the war that he notified the War Cabinet that immediately following the conference he intended to first visit Cairo, to consult with Alexander, who would soon be setting off for Tunisia. Then Churchill intended to set off for Turkey and a meeting with President smet nönü. The War Cabinet objected; the journey was long and dangerous, and Churchill was needed in London. Churchill replied that he was going anyway, and he instructed Eden to arrange with the Turks for an invitation to be sent to Cairo, where Churchill expected to receive and accept it.

  Churchill and Roosevelt had one final piece of business to conduct. It centered on Generals Giraud and de Gaulle. Churchill had included in his birthday eve broadcast the battle cry “France will rise again!” Whether de Gaulle would rise with it was the question. Roosevelt’s feelings on the subject were well known to Churchill, to wit, the Frenchman was an obdurate obstacle to the advancement of American policy, which held no promise of any meaningful war role (or postwar role for that matter) for France and the French Empire, de Gaulle or no de Gaulle. Roosevelt had for months artfully avoided any official recognition of de Gaulle by arguing that the sovereignty of France rested solely with its people.

  But the French, prisoners of Germany, could make no such choice. In contrast to Sikorski and Beneš, who were leaders of governments in exile, de Gaulle was only the leader of certain military units in exile. Churchill had tolerated and supported de Gaulle in that role for thirty months, but on December 10, in secret session, he told the House, “We must not be led to believe that General de Gaulle is an unfaltering friend of Britain.” Quite the contrary, de Gaulle possessed the “traditional antagonism engrained in French hearts” toward the English, and had left “a trail of Anglophobia behind him” wherever he went. Churchill’s strategy was clear: by sketching de Gaulle in dark shades, he prepared the House for his removal from the political scene were the Americans to demand it. The scathing attack on de Gaulle was symptomatic of Churchill’s evolving relationship with Roosevelt and the subtle lessening of Britain’s influence over inter-alliance political affairs. Once Darlan was removed from the picture, Roosevelt’s man in North Africa, Robert Murphy, lost no time in propping Giraud up as the civil and military leader there. De Gaulle knew the Americans foresaw no role for him, Eden later wrote, and “began to suspect that the British and United States governments were going to make an agreement with Giraud over his head.” Eden rode to the Frenchman’s rescue when he drew from de Gaulle a promise to meet with Giraud, but Giraud refused on the flimsy pretext that Darlan’s assassination created “an unfavorable atmosphere” for such a meeting. The strain imposed by the totality of the political situation in North Africa—Darlan, Giraud, Mark Clark, and Murphy, and their sundry intrigues—led Eden to later observe, “I was not alone in feeling the physical and mental burden. As the months passed we were all to show it, even the Prime Minister.”59

  De Gaulle proved himself the most tiresome Frenchman of the lot. Roosevelt and Churchill had brought Giraud around; he agreed to meet de Gaulle in Casablanca in order to work out a civil and military partnership. But de Gaulle refused, telling Eden that he would agree to meet Giraud alone, perhaps in Chad, but not in Casablanca, where such a meeting could only amplify the subordinated stature of the French. Gallic honor was at stake. Eden tried a different tack; the president, he told de Gaulle, would like to meet with him in Casablanca. De Gaulle again refused, telling Eden that if Roosevelt wanted to meet, they could do so in America. Eden reported de Gaulle’s recalcitrance to Churchill, who responded with a warning that de Gaulle’s failure to appear would result in his forfeiting any chance of assuming any role in Algiers, even the subordinate role envisioned by the Americans. The message was, show up or HMG will be done with you. Roosevelt, who had prevailed upon Giraud to come to terms with de Gaulle, cabled Eden: “I have got the bridegroom, where is the bride?”60

  After a weeklong sulk, de Gaulle finally agreed to go, arriving in Morocco on January 22. That night, he met with Churchill. “I was pretty rough with him,” Churchill told Lord Moran after the meeting, as the two watched de Gaulle make his way down the hill from the residence. Yet, Churchill added, “France without an army is not France. De Gaulle is the spirit of that army… the last survivor of a warrior race.” Moran asked Churchill if he had heard Roosevelt’s quip that de Gaulle
fancied himself a descendant of Joan of Arc. Churchill had and “was not amused.” De Gaulle was defiant and arrogant, Churchill told the doctor, but he offered that, with tears now in his eyes, “England’s grievous offense in de Gaulle’s eyes is that she has helped France. He cannot bear that she needed help.” The tears appear to be plausibly Churchillian, yet so do the sentiments he expressed in a letter to Clementine two days later, when he wrote that de Gaulle brought “comic relief” to the conference. “He thinks he is Clemenceau (having dropped Joan of Arc for the time being).” Of French leaders, including de Gaulle, Churchill told Clemmie, “They hate each other far more than they do the Germans” and they “care more for power and place than for the liberation of their country.”61

  De Gaulle met with Giraud on January 23 and afterward issued a typically enigmatic announcement: “We have met. We have talked.” Roosevelt also met with the two Frenchmen, separately. Giraud and the president chatted with no bodyguards in attendance, but when de Gaulle arrived at Roosevelt’s villa, the Secret Service detail—many of the agents armed with tommy guns—took up concealed positions behind shrubs and draperies. The union of sorts between the reluctant Frenchmen appeared to be a fait accompli, although the governing body that was struggling into existence was so ill defined as to be nonexistent, and was not recognized by London or Washington as having any official role elsewhere within the French empire, or in France, where de Gaulle was considered a national hero.62

  Just after noon on Sunday the twenty-fourth, a fiercely sunny and hot day, de Gaulle and Giraud’s union—a “shotgun wedding,” Eden and Roosevelt called it—was consummated with a ceremonial handshake on the lawn of Roosevelt’s villa, with Roosevelt (hatless) and Churchill (under a gray homburg) looking on. Fifty shocked reporters were also present; they had been brought over from Algiers not knowing whom they’d be meeting. One photographer in the group was Sammy Schulman, a short, mustachioed, and brassy shooter whom Roosevelt had known for a decade. A month later, Roosevelt regaled Washington reporters with the story of what happened next: “I worked it out beforehand with Sammy. After the pictures of the four of us were taken, Sammy Schulman in the front row said, ‘Oh, Mr. President, can we have a picture of the two Generals shaking hands?’ So I translated Sammy to Giraud, and Giraud said, ‘Mais, oui,’ and he got right up and held out his hand. It took Churchill and myself five minutes to persuade de Gaulle to get on his feet to shake hands. And we got them to do it. And I think you have all got that picture. If you run into a copy of the picture, look at the expression on de Gaulle’s face!”63

  The expression of feline contentment Churchill wears betrays the fate of the canary. Sammy’s shots of the four leaders and of de Gaulle and Giraud are some of the most iconic images of the war. Yet they capture a false image; de Gaulle, in fact, had agreed to nothing more substantive than a handshake with Giraud. As much as Roosevelt derided de Gaulle, the Frenchman had had the last laugh at Casablanca. His Fighting French forces numbered 50,000, just one-fifth the number of former Vichy troops serving under Giraud, yet de Gaulle and his men supplied the spirit of the French army in North Africa. De Gaulle’s army had been formed in reaction to established authority; in a legal sense they were mutineers, first against the defeated Third Republic, then against Vichy, where they were considered freebooters. Charles Maurass, a septuagenarian royalist, Vichy mouthpiece, poet, polemicist, and Pétain counselor, pronounced, “De Gaulle is a traitor who leads the scum of the earth.” This the Gaullists took as a compliment. The Fighting French would never serve willingly under former Vichy loyalists, and although Giraud was brave and decent, many in his officer corps were not. Giraud himself served at the pleasure of the Americans, an insult to Gallic pride, and he had so far failed to repeal anti-Jewish Vichy laws or free Gaullist prisoners. The handshake altered nothing, and meant nothing. The marriage lent credence to an old saying in the French cavalry: “Beware of women when they are in front of you, beware of horses when they are behind you, and beware of your leaders wherever they were.”64

  Moments after Sammy snapped his photos, Roosevelt uttered one of the most iconic phrases of the war. Speaking from notes, he outlined in general and necessarily imprecise terms the decisions taken over the previous ten days. Then he nonchalantly added an incendiary line: the Allies demanded “unconditional surrender” from the Axis. Hopkins later recalled the president telling him that the phrase had simply “popped into his mind” as he compared the difficulty of getting Giraud and de Gaulle together to that of arranging a meeting between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. “And the next thing I knew,” Roosevelt told Hopkins, “I had said it.” Roosevelt the multilateralist had just seemingly issued one of the most unilateral declarations in American history, but it was not spur of the moment. In fact, Churchill days earlier advised his War Cabinet that he and Roosevelt had discussed the matter and decided upon terms of “unconditional surrender” for Germany and Japan. The War Cabinet insisted Italy should be included. Churchill understood the matter was to be kept secret. But Roosevelt let it slip. Churchill, in his memoirs, took a mild swipe at Roosevelt when he wrote of Roosevelt’s explanation of how he came to utter the words: “I do not feel this frank statement is in any way weakened by the fact that the phrase occurs in the notes from which he spoke.”65

  “Churchill was indignant” at dinner that night, recalled Averell Harriman, angered not so much by the policy of unconditional surrender but the “unfortunate way Roosevelt announced it.” The words “unconditional surrender” sent several messages to several quarters. To the British and American people it signified that there would be no “Darlan deal” with Hitler, Tojo, or Mussolini. It meant that no mere armistice would leave Germany free to refit for purposes of future misdeeds. It meant that no Wilsonian-style Fourteen Points—imprecise, and open to infinite interpretation—would infect the negotiations. In fact, there would be no negotiations. “Unconditional surrender” told Stalin that the Americans and British were in it for the duration. Yet it also told Stalin that his allies expected him to go the distance. The prospect of Stalin making a separate peace with Hitler had worried the Anglo-Americans for more than a year.66

  Churchill’s memory proved fallible when in 1948 he told Roosevelt biographer Robert Sherwood that he had “heard the words ‘Unconditional Surrender’ for the first time from the president’s lips at the conference.” Ernest Bevin’s memory, too, proved faulty when in 1949, as a cabinet member in Clement Attlee’s Labour government, he excoriated Churchill and “unconditional surrender” for the crippling costs associated with rebuilding Germany. Churchill replied to Bevin as he had to Sherwood, that he had heard the words for the first time from the president’s lips at Casablanca. Only later did Churchill recall the telegram to the War Cabinet of January 1943. Such errant recollections have muddled the issue ever since.67

  Criticism and controversy attended the expression from the moment Roosevelt uttered it. Eisenhower didn’t like it because it did not define “unconditional,” and when the time came for cease-fires and surrenders, Eisenhower would be the man on the spot. “Around headquarters,” wrote Eisenhower’s press aide, Harry Butcher, such troubles were “attributed to the hard-boiled” insistence of Churchill and Roosevelt on “unconditional surrender…. No surrender has ever been made without some conditions.” Eisenhower would later ask his superiors to precisely define the term; they would not. Stalin had said he need not be consulted but only be apprised of decisions taken at Casablanca, and so he was. He did not make a public statement on “unconditional surrender” until his annual May Day speech, where he turned the tables on his two allies by implying that unless they kept their promise to open a second European front that summer, any talk of unconditional surrender was just that, talk. Later in the year, Stalin told Harriman that Roosevelt’s remark “was an unfortunate statement.” Two years hence, Goebbels employed it as a propaganda tool, extolling Germans on the need to fight to the death because the enemy h
ad left open no other option. “It was a godsend to Goebbels,” Harriman later recalled. By the end of the year, Churchill, too, harbored doubts, and told Stalin as much. That conversation remained private until after the war. In public, Churchill never wavered on “unconditional surrender.”68

  Following the news conference, Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to delay his departure to the United States for one day in order to accompany him to Marrakech, “the most lovely spot in the whole world.” It is “the Paris of the Sahara,” he told the president, where for centuries caravans had arrived from central Africa and where the traders were swindled in the markets and entertained in “the most elaborately organized brothels in the African continent.” The two leaders—Macmillan called them the Emperors of the West and the East—sent most of their troop on ahead by air. A small motorcade carried the president, Churchill, and a few aides on the 150-mile trip. The road was lined on both sides by American sentries positioned a few dozen yards apart, an entire division of Patton’s infantry, which might better have served the cause by fighting in Tunisia than by performing guard duty in Morocco. In Marrakech the party bivouacked in the Villa Taylor, an oasis of orange and olive groves surrounded by high walls, and home to the American vice consul Kenneth Pendar. A narrow three-story tower rose skyward from the house. Churchill ordered Roosevelt and his wheelchair carried up in order that the president might take in the Atlas Mountains at sundown when, as the sun fell into the Atlantic, the distant snow-covered peaks slowly faded from white to rose to blood red. The two partners enjoyed a “jolly” dinner that night after composing a joint telegram to Stalin in which they congratulated him for his leadership at Stalingrad. The cable also outlined the decisions made during the conference, only one of which held any interest for Stalin, the pledge to put men into France that year.69