Each day brought new difficulties in the development of plans for the operation. Among these intricate problems was, for example, interference with shipments to Russia. The withdrawal of shipping from the sea lanes in time to refit, load, assemble, and make the transit to the Mediterranean was certain to cut seriously into the Murmansk convoys; this interference began as early as September 1942.15 This same consideration applied to other vital shipping commitments of Britain and America but it was, of course, one of the inescapable costs of undertaking the operation.
Another complication arose out of the fact that all of the earliest shipments of American supplies and equipment into England were in anticipation of an eventual cross-Channel attack. Since haste in unloading ships and speeding up their turn-around was initially the pressing consideration, supplies and equipment were thrown into warehouses and open storage without regard for segregation and inventories. We had thought there would be ample time for this as the organization grew. Now we were suddenly faced with an immediate need for the things we had already brought over but without the necessary records under which required supplies could be selected, packaged, and loaded in the least possible time.16 We should have paid more attention to “red tape” and paper work.
Still another complication involved our air forces. In the summer of 1942 we had made only a good beginning at organizing a bomber and accompanying fighter command for conducting air operations against Germany. A considerable number of air units had to be hastily called away from their original tasks, retrained, and reshaped toward participation in the African invasion. Some American fighter organizations had to be equipped with the British Spitfire.17 Similar problems arose with respect to the internal transportation systems of England, the use of her crowded ports, and the training of ground troops.
Each week brought us records of additional ships sunk or damaged by enemy U-boats, ships that were included in our programs for the transport of troops, equipment, and supplies. Each sinking caused revisions in operational and tactical plans.
All these things called for constant conferences, usually with members of the tactical staffs and services in Great Britain but frequently also with the Prime Minister. During this time, at his request, I fell into the habit of meeting with the Prime Minister twice each week. On Tuesdays we would have luncheon at 10 Downing Street, usually present at which were one or more members of the British Chiefs of Staff or the War Cabinet. On Friday nights I would have dinner with him at his country house, Chequers, and this would sometimes be prolonged into an overnight stay, during which there would be an unending series of meetings with officials, both military and civil. Almost always the Foreign Minister, Mr. Anthony Eden, was present.
After some six weeks of intensive planning we were notified that Mr. Robert D. Murphy, the senior American State Department officer in North Africa, would pay us a secret visit to discuss with us the political implications and possibilities in that region.18 These factors remained among the great question marks of the entire operation. Vichy France was a neutral country and during the entire period of the war the United States had maintained diplomatic connection with the French Government. Never, in all its history, had the United States been a party to an unprovoked attack upon a neutral country and even though Vichy was avowedly collaborating with Hitler, there is no doubt that American political leaders regarded the projected operation, from this viewpoint, with considerable distaste.
Both the British and American governments believed that North African public opinion favored the Allies, and naturally desired to make the invasion appear as an operation undertaken in response to a popular desire for liberation from the Vichy yoke. Not only did we definitely want to avoid adding France to our already formidable list of enemies; we wanted, if possible, to make it appear that we had come into Africa on invitation rather than by force.
It was realized that, officially, some opposition would have to be made to the landing because within Europe itself the French dwelt constantly under the German heel. But if we could show that popular opinion was definitely in opposition to the Vichy rulers, any political antagonism to the invasion in Great Britain or America would be mollified.
Mr. Murphy, who had long been stationed in Africa, was early taken into the confidence of the President of the United States and informed of the possibility of military action in that region. With his staff of assistants he not only conducted a continuing survey of public opinion, but he did his best to discover among the military and political leaders those individuals who were definitely hostile to the Axis and occupying their posts merely out of a sense of duty to France. Affable, friendly, exceedingly shrewd, and speaking French capably, he was admirably suited for his task. Unquestionably his missionary work between 1940 and late 1942 had much to do with eventual success.
His trip to my headquarters in London, in the fall of 1942, was conducted in the greatest secrecy. In Washington, where he went first, he was placed in uniform, given a fictional commission as lieutenant colonel, and came to see me under the name of McGowan.19 I met him at a rendezvous outside the city and within a matter of twenty-four hours he was again on the way to Washington.
From Mr. Murphy we learned the names of those officers who had pro-Allied sympathies and those who were ready to aid us actively. We learned much about the temper of the Army itself and about feeling among the civil population. He told us very accurately that our greatest resistance would be met in French Morocco, where General August Paul Noguès was Foreign Minister to the Sultan.20 He gave us a number of details of French military strength in Africa, including information concerning equipment and training in their ground, air, and sea forces. From his calculations it was plain that if we were bitterly opposed by the French a bloody fight would ensue; if the French should promptly decide to join us we could expect to get along quickly with our main business of seizing Tunisia and attacking Rommel from the rear. It was Mr. Murphy’s belief that we would actually encounter a mean between these two extremes. Events proved him to be correct.
On another point, however, he was, through no fault of his own, completely mistaken. He had been convinced by the French Generals Charles Emmanuel Mast, chief of staff of the French XIX Corps in Algeria, Marie Emile Bethouart, commander of the Casablanca Division, and others who were risking their lives to assist us, that if General Henri Giraud could be brought into North Africa, ostensibly to aid in an uprising against the Vichy government, the response would be immediate and enthusiastic and all North Africa would flame into revolt, unified under a leader who was represented as being intensely popular throughout the region.21 Weeks later, during a crisis in our affairs, we were to learn that this hope was a futile one.
Mr. Murphy was certain that much more effective co-operation with our known friends in North Africa would be achieved if a high-ranking officer from my staff could go to Africa for a conference. Naturally the meeting had to be arranged clandestinely because, if discovered, my emissaries would certainly be interned, while any French officer found engaged in such an affair would probably be tried by Vichy as a traitor. It was immediately decided that it was worth the risk to send a small group to confer with General Mast and others. Since manifestly I could not go myself, I chose, from many volunteers, my deputy, General Clark, to make the journey. He was accompanied by a small staff.
The trip was made by airplane and submarine and was carried out exactly as planned except that local suspicion finally was aroused and the French conspirators were forced to escape very hurriedly, while General Clark and his group had to hide until they could re-embark in their submarine. Rough weather made the re-embarkation a difficult affair but, except for a ducking and the loss of a small amount of money, no great damage was done.22 This expedition was valuable in gathering more details of information. These did not compel any material change in our planned operations.
The conference with Mr. Murphy gave most of us, particularly the Americans, our first vicarious acquaintanceship with a number of Fren
ch officials. He discussed at length the characteristics and political leanings of the principal generals and the officials we were likely to encounter.23 He especially emphasized that at that time the American Government and people were held in high esteem by the French as compared to the antagonism that had developed toward the British.
The Prime Minister accepted this view and gave his personal attention to assuring that the operation should bear the appearance, so far as was humanly possible, of an exclusively American force. He even seriously considered, at one time, requiring all British units that had to participate in the initial landing to wear the uniform of the American Army. In discussions involving political possibilities Mr. Eden, as head of the Foreign Office, was almost always present, as was frequently Mr. John Winant, our wartime ambassador to Great Britain. Our concern over these affairs illustrates forcibly the old truism that political considerations can never be wholly separated from military ones and that war is a mere continuation of political policy in the field of force. The Allied invasion of Africa was a most peculiar venture of armed forces into the field of international politics; we were invading a neutral country to create a friend. Important as were these political problems, they constituted only a fraction of the difficult matters with which we daily wrestled.
We were gambling for high stakes, but this is a constant characteristic of war and in itself was not a particularly disturbing factor. But uncertainty prevailed in many directions: uncertainty as to the attitude of the Spanish and the knowledge that the enemy had of our plans; uncertainty as to the exact number of ships that would be available when the expedition should sail; and uncertainty as to the ability of the Air Force to give proper protection to our convoys as they neared the African coast.
Another hazard involved a project for dispatching from England by transport planes a parachute force to capture the airfields of Oran.24 These planes had to wing their relatively slow course over a distance of more than twelve hundred miles, through areas from which they might be attacked by enemy planes. Parachutists had to drop, or the planes had to land, on fields of which we had only sketchy information. Many experienced officers literally threw up their hands in the face of such a “harebrained” scheme. Other projects involved direct and admittedly desperate assaults by selected forces against the docks of Algiers and Oran, in an effort to prevent sabotage and destruction and so preserve port facilities for our future uses.
The whole basis of our higher organization was new. Time and again during the summer old Army friends warned me that the conception of Allied unity which we took as the foundation of our command scheme was impracticable and impossible; that any commander placed in my position was foredoomed to failure and could become nothing but a scapegoat to carry the odium of defeat for the whole operation. I was regaled with tales of allied failure starting with the Greeks, five hundred years before Christ, and coming down through the ages of allied quarrels to the bitter French-British recriminations of 1940. But more than counterbalancing such doleful prophecy was a daily and noticeable growth of co-operation, comradeship, faith, and optimism in Torch headquarters. British and Americans were unconsciously, in their absorption in common problems, shedding their shells of mutual distrust and suspicion.
In the early fall Admiral Ramsay was relieved by the British Chiefs of Staff as the naval commander of the expedition and in his place was assigned Admiral Sir Andrew B. Cunningham, whom I then met for the first time. He was the Nelsonian type of admiral. He believed that ships went to sea in order to find and destroy the enemy. He thought always in terms of attack, never of defense. He was vigorous, hardy, intelligent, and straightforward. In spite of his toughness, the degree of affection in which he was held by all grades and ranks of the British Navy and, to a large extent, the other services, both British and American, was nothing short of remarkable. He was a real sea dog. There will always live with me his answer when I asked him in the fall of 1943 to send the British battle fleet, carrying a division of soldiers, into Taranto Harbor, known to be filled with mines and treachery.
“Sir,” he said, “His Majesty’s Fleet is here to go wherever you may send it!”
The terrific pressure under which we worked is hard to appreciate now for any who have not shared in the experience of planning a great allied operation in modern war. Yet this pressure remains a persistent and vivid memory for anyone who was a part of it.
It is equally difficult to classify our time-absorbing problems. There were, above all, people to see, most of them engaged in preparing the details of Torch but many others concerned with problems ranging from Red Cross affairs to the need for shipping white cloth to the Arabs, who insist on it for burial shrouds and will kill to get it. Press conferences were almost obligatory, since the problem of morale, both at home and in England, was never far from our minds.
We had to co-ordinate our plans not only with the British but also with the United States Navy. This was by no means simple, and it required a great many conferences. Two of the Navy’s capable officers had been assigned by Admiral King to assist in planning, and they were welcomed by Brigadier General Alfred M. Gruenther, chief American planner, with the statement that there were a thousand questions the Navy could help answer. “We are here only to listen,” was their answer. I knew that if I could talk personally to Admiral King there would be no difficulty, but under the circumstances these snarls had to be worked out with care and patience.
The Navy could remind us, after all, that we were asking for what was one of the greatest fighting armadas of all times—approximately 110 troop and cargo ships and 200 warships.25 The Navy was conscious of the need for watching the German fleet, which they thought at that time included at least one aircraft carrier and possibly two. Some American officers seemed at times to feel a resentment toward the operation, apparently regarding it as a British plan into which America had been dragged by the heels. I stated and restated at conferences during this planning phase that Torch was an order from the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States, and the Prime Minister, and that I proposed to move into West and North Africa, as the order instructed me, whether we had protective warships or not.
Axis attacks on British convoys in the Mediterranean continued to bring us bad news.26 One heavily escorted convoy of fourteen cargo vessels, attempting to take supplies to Malta, arrived there with only three of the supply ships still afloat. Of these, one was sunk at the dock. The aircraft carrier Eagle, which had been earmarked for Torch, was torpedoed and sunk. The naval staff brought us such news from time to time, and each time further revision of plans became necessary.
In the middle of September I sent a message to General Marshall on how the invasion’s chances looked to us some seven weeks before it took place:
“Tentative and unofficial details of contemplated British carrier-borne air support are as follows: In the covering force east of Gibraltar, one carrier with twenty fighters and twenty torpedo planes; at Algiers in direct support sixty-six fighters and eighteen torpedo planes. In addition to above one old carrier with thirteen planes may possibly be available.
“The following are the particular factors that bear directly upon the degree of hazard inherent in this operation:
“(a) The sufficiency of carrier-borne air support during initial stages.
“The operational strength of the French Air Force in Africa is about 500 planes. Neither the bombers nor the fighters are of the most modern type, but the fighters are superior in performance to the naval types on carriers. Consequently, if the French make determined and unified resistance to the initial landing, particularly by concentrating the bulk of their air against either of the major ports, they can seriously interfere with, if not prevent, a landing at that point. The total carrier-borne fighter strength (counting on 100 U.S. fighters on Ranger and auxiliary) will apparently be about 166 planes in actual support of the landings. Only twenty to thirty will be with the naval covering forces to the eastward. These fighters will be unde
r the usual handicaps of carrier-based aircraft when operating against land-based planes.
“(b) Efficiency of Gibraltar as an erection point for fighter aircraft to be used after landing fields have been secured.
“Since Gibraltar is the only port available to Allies in that region, the rapid transfer of fighter craft to captured airdromes will be largely dependent upon our ability to set up at Gibraltar a reasonable number for immediate operations and a flow thereafter of at least thirty planes per day. The vulnerability of Gibraltar, especially to interference by Spanish forces, is obvious. If the Spaniards should take hostile action against us immediately upon the beginning of landing operations, it would be practically impossible to secure any land-based fighter craft for use in northern Africa for a period of some days.
“(c) Another critical factor affecting the air will be the state of the weather.
“It is planned to transfer by flying to captured airdromes in North Africa the American units now in Great Britain except the Spitfire groups. These last will necessarily be shipped and set up at Gibraltar or captured airdromes. A spell of bad weather would so weaken the anticipated air support in the early stages of the operation as to constitute another definite hazard to success.
“(d) The character of resistance of the French Army.
“In the region now are some fourteen French divisions rather poorly equipped but presumably with a fair degree of training and with the benefit of professional leadership. If this Army should act as a unit in contesting the invasion, it could, in view of the slowness with which Allied forces can be accumulated at the two main ports, so delay and hamper operations that the real object of the expedition could not be achieved, namely, the seizing control of the north shore of Africa before it can be substantially reinforced by the Axis.
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