My jeep crawled on by, no longer could I see through the gate. It looked to me like a brawl in there, with that French chauffeur going in four bells to take a hand and the Arab sentries decidedly puzzled as to where they came in in a gentleman’s squabble, if at all. Possibly Giraud and Darlan had at last come to blows; it seemed likely enough.
But I had troubles enough of my own without adding French politics to my headaches; I pushed that brawl out of my mind and went back to considering the Thomas Stone again as we chugged the rest of the way up the hill to the portico of the St. George. Soon, a few flights up, I was with Cunningham’s Royal Navy staff.
Our new Admiral of the Fleet had gone to his quarters. But most of the rest were there—Rear Admiral Murray, Commodore Dick, Captain Shaw, Captain Dorling, Captain King, a few other captains, and my recent shipmate in distress, Commander Stewart, lately of the Porcupine, who now that his ship was decommissioned and cut in two, had been added temporarily to the staff.
The tea proved to be rather a dismal affair, a wholly forced attempt to seem a little cheerful on the day before Christmas. A few quarts of Scotch and some water turned out to be the tea. Nobody seemed interested in taking much, and certainly it showed no signs of having cheered anybody up in the slightest. The news of the collapse of the Tunisian offensive which had cost the navy plenty to help mount, was an effective enough wet blanket.
Still even without that, I doubt there would have been any real gaiety. For every officer there, excepting myself, the war had started not a year before, but nearly three and a half years before. Most had been away from home and family practically all those terrible years. Everyone could foresee two or three years more of the same before home became again something more than a cherished but dimming memory.
None of us there were young any more—past fifty, most of us now, when every year counts for much. What was there to be merry about? The others, looking back over the Christmases at home they had missed, and all of us looking ahead to those which we were bound to miss, provided we even lived to miss them, felt decidedly down in the mouth. After a drink or two, more for form’s sake than anything else, the party soon broke up into gloomy little knots discussing technical matters, then everyone began drifting out, headed for his own billet, to dream in solitude of a Christmas at home with wife and children and peace—would any of it ever again prove more than a dream?
I started back for the Aletti. It was growing dusk, Christmas Eve had arrived. I contemplated it bitterly—Christmas Eve in Algiers, with everything completely missing that had any connection whatever with that star which had glowed over Bethlehem on the first Christmas Eve so long ago—peace on earth, goodwill towards men, home, family, friends. Roundabout me were nothing but death, destruction, and strangers, and no great hope for any change; not soon, anyway. I wanted only to crawl into my bed at the Aletti as soon as I got there, pull the bed in after me, and try to forget that it was Christmas Eve. Dinner be damned; I didn’t want any.
I reached the Aletti, went into the lobby, started for the elevator to realize my sole desire. One of the junior officers of the naval staff (he hadn’t been at that tea; not enough rank, I suppose) stopped me, drew me well aside.
“Don’t go out again tonight, Captain, if you don’t have to, and don’t go out at all alone. And if you must go out, go armed! That’s an order from the top!”
I looked at him in astonishment. I hadn’t gone armed yet in North Africa; as a matter of fact, I didn’t even have a Colt .45 automatic to wear if I wanted to. My sole protection so far had been my tin hat.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why all the sudden need for artillery?”
He considered a moment, looking at me. After all, I was one of the top members of the naval staff; including Cunningham himself, there were but three higher in rank. He decided he could risk it.
“I’m supposed only to alert the staff, not to give out why. I’ll tell you, but for heaven’s sake don’t pass it along till it’s released—it’s top secret yet while they’re taking precautions. Darlan’s just been assassinated! It may mean a French uprising against us. Don’t take any chances!”
I looked at him with widening eyes as that sank in. Darlan assassinated? It flashed across my mind that what I had seen earlier in the afternoon as I passed the Palais d’Etat, which I had taken for a brawl, must have been instead a scuffle with the assassin the moment after his attack!
I thanked the lieutenant, told him I’d observe the warning; I wasn’t going out again that night, armed or unarmed. I stepped into the waiting elevator, started up to my room, stripped hurriedly, and fell into bed, wholly exhausted physically and mentally.
Christmas Eve! Darlan’s assassination and all his death might mean was the last drop needed to make that Christmas Eve utter gall and wormwood.
CHAPTER
29
I WAS IN THE AIR EARLY CHRISTMAS Day, on my way from Maison Blanche in Algiers to Tafaraoui in Oran.
As usual, I was in a twin-motored army transport, unarmed as they all were. Whatever the reasons, there was no fighter convoy to fly with any part of the way; we were making the journey wholly unaccompanied and unguarded. The pilot, completely on his own, had no faith in anybody’s goodwill, even on Christmas Day. He elected to make the flight entirely over water, avoiding the land route, and hugging the precipitous coastline, to fly only a few feet above the surface of the sea. That way, I presume, he figured he was least likely to be spotted by any Nazi fighters out celebrating the joyous Christmas season, and safest from any trying to dive down on his tail.
We had a very light passenger list; a few army officers going back to Oran, a few officers of the Royal Navy bound for their ships at Mers-el-Kebir. The talk, of course, was centered wholly on the news of the assassination of Darlan, now officially released and both officially and unofficially spreading like wildfire all over North Africa. Already from both Rome and Berlin, the Axis radio was bellowing that the perfidious English, no longer needing Darlan as a tool, had murdered him as an obstacle to their further devilish machinations.
So far as I was concerned, I knew now I had witnessed the last scene in that swift drama; the time jibed exactly with my passing of the Palais d’Etat. What I had seen was those about Darlan closing on the assassin the moment after he had fired.
What had happened, I also knew now, was as incredible as everything else in French politics. A young French student, a Corsican, had entered the vestibule of the Palais d’Etat the morning before Christmas, demanding an audience with Darlan. With no investigation at all of the request, he had been informed simply that Darlan was out; if he cared to return about mid-afternoon, Darlan should be back by then. He had taken care to return early. Since Darlan had not yet returned, he was asked to take a seat in the vestibule and wait. He did. When Darlan’s automobile arrived and Darlan, descending from it followed by his Chief of Ordnance, le Commandant Heurcade, entered the vestibule and turned to open the door of his office, his visitor rose and without a word opened fire on him with a small-caliber pistol, hitting him twice, once in the mouth, once in the side.
Le Commandant Heurcade, who had started to enter his own office, turned, first to try to support his falling chief, then to fling himself upon his assailant, only to catch two more bullets himself, the more serious one in the thigh. But he clung on; others dashing in disarmed the assassin and made him prisoner.
Darlan had, of course, been rushed immediately to a hospital, where on the operating table an hour later without ever having regained consciousness, he died.
Those were the facts, but not the explanation. Why had Darlan been assassinated? Who really was responsible? What was going to happen now the only strong man in French Africa, the only man whose word had been law, had been rubbed out? Over the answers to those questions, with the news out, not only all North Africa but every Allied capital was pondering furiously. And as might have been expected, Goebbels, from both Axis capitals, was pouring all the poison he could into t
he wound to make sure it festered rather than healed. Everyone else was speculating, but Rome and Berlin knew—of course it was the villainous English!
One of my fellow passengers, a Royal Navy commander, was discussing that philosophically. Why get heated up over the Axis accusation? It might even be true; the British had something to gain by Darlan’s death. And so had the Americans, and the Vichy French, and the Giraudists, and the de Gaulleists, and most of all, the Axis powers themselves. In fact, Darlan had enemies in every country, including his own, in every camp, in every faction; he had succeeded thoroughly in his career at one time or another since the Fall of France in giving nearly everybody good cause for wishing to see him dead. With everybody having a motive to want him out of the way, finding the actual group behind the murderer going was to be a task which might baffle even the late lamented Sherlock Holmes.
Of course, continued that commander, the British weren’t behind the assassin; much as Darlan was hated in England, they just didn’t do things that way. It was his opinion, seeing that the assassin was a young Corsican, that when all the turmoil and all the secret investigations seeking conspiracies and conspirators were over, it would turn out to be an act of purely personal vengeance—the Corsicans were as notorious for vendettas as the Sicilians. (And it may be said here that that was exactly the ultimate outcome.)
We flew on over the sea, the discussion went on endlessly. It turned from who killed Darlan to what was going to happen now he was dead. We had left behind us Algiers, all alerted, all in arms ready to meet by force an anti-Ally uprising if that was what Darlan’s death signified. Nobody, of course, had any positive answer to that, or indeed to any part of the enigma which was Darlan.
Finally I went forward to look at the flight chart in the pilot’s cabin. My eye lighted on the fact that in about twenty minutes we should be passing the promontory off Tenès, near which lay that scuttled U-boat which Admiral Cunningham was so anxious I search with divers for the existence of radar equipment or anything similar. Since we were flying over the sea anyway, why not improve the occasion by sighting that U-boat and surveying it from the air?
I explained to the pilot what I wanted; the few other passengers, forgetting Darlan for the moment, gathered round to listen. The pilot was willing to take a little time to help me out. I sketched out to him and to the others what had happened to that U-boat.
Two days after D-day in North Africa, two British planes, patrolling the sea lanes well off the coast between Oran and Algiers, had sighted a surfaced U-boat late in the afternoon some distance away. Immediately they swooped down for it, hoping at least to be able to let go a depth bomb or two before it managed to submerge so deeply as to escape altogether.
They closed, but to the astonishment of both pilots diving down on it, that U-boat made no attempt at all to submerge. They never learned why; perhaps it had a particularly bellicose captain who was spoiling for a fight and saw no reason to run away from a few planes.
At any rate, it didn’t submerge. Instead, with fine afternoon visibility conditions to favor its gunners, its two sky-guns were manned hurriedly. The two pilots diving down on it with depth charges, found themselves flying straight into two streams of heavy incendiary tracers. There was no percentage in that; they might get close enough in to drop a depth charge before they disintegrated or went afire, but the chances were they wouldn’t.
Hurriedly both pilots pulled out of their dives and zoomed off sideways to save themselves. What was happening below was not according to Hoyle. Any proper U-boat should start submerging promptly the instant it sighted a plane and seek to escape under water while they dropped depth bombs on it; it wasn’t supposed to stay on the surface and fight back.
But if the U-boat wanted to fight it out with guns, those two British pilots were perfectly willing to oblige and to make a gun battle of it. Leveling off a little out of range, they gabbled a bit back and forth over the radio as to their tactics. Incidentally they sent out also a wild radio call for the nearest British destroyer to rush to the spot and take a hand, for the business at issue was destroying U-boats and chivalry was no part of it. Then they went to work.
From different angles to divide the enemy fire, but always simultaneously to avoid giving him a chance to concentrate on either plane, they came screaming down out of the sky, twisting and rolling, with their own guns blazing away at that U-boat superstructure from the instant they came within range until they were out of it again.
But the U-boat skipper was not so bad himself. He steered a straight enough course while the planes were circling out of range, but the instant they started to come within it, his U-boat with both her diesel engines full out, began to swerve all over the ocean in a dizzying snake dance that made him a target almost impossible to hit effectively, the while his own guns spat back fire at the twisting planes.
For nearly two hours thus the furious combat kept up—a draw. The planes were almost certain they had put some projectiles through the superstructure of the U-boat; they could see their tracers sending up spray all about it each time they dived in. But they were certain, without any almost, that they had taken as much in return from the U-boat—their wings were well ventilated where enemy tracers had gone through plentifully and their fuselages had suffered several hits, fortunately none yet in a vital spot.
But it was getting dark, their gasoline was getting low, and their ammunition was giving out. And still no destroyer on the horizon; the nearest one, hours away at the beginning, was racing full speed for them, meanwhile urging them by radio to keep the U-boat engaged till it might arrive.
The pilots did their best in the gathering dusk. Finally it was so dark, they could no longer see their target. There was nothing to be gained by staying longer. They couldn’t track the U-boat in the darkness, even if it stayed surfaced, which was unlikely; the only sure result of trying to was that they would shortly both have to ditch in the sea, out of fuel themselves. So with a farewell report to the destroyer, still an hour away, they started for their home airfield.
The destroyer finally arrived, searched all the rest of the night, both underseas with its Asdic and above water with its lookouts and radar. When day came, it continued the search over a wide area, aided again by planes, but found nothing. Both planes and destroyer had regretfully to report the U-boat had escaped.
Late that same afternoon, the day Oran surrendered, an infantry company of G.I.s from Oran, moving slowly eastward in open order to clear the outlying country of the last fragments of French resistance, met some Arabs who volunteered the amazing information that a considerable force of armed Germans was hiding out in a near by barn! The company commander swiftly encircled the barn with his troops, trained some machine guns on it, then loudly (from a safe position flat on his stomach in the stubble as were also all his men) called on the Germans to surrender or take the consequences. They surrendered.
That infantry captain was the most surprised man in all North Africa as the Nazis marched out, arms in the air, crying “Kamerad!” to find he’d captured a U-boat crew of thirty-eight sailors, complete from captain to cook! And all that nowhere near the sea, twenty miles at least inland! There they all were, all armed with rifles and in addition with the two heavy machine guns with which they’d fought off those planes. With that collection of arms they could have given their captors a terrific battle, but once ashore, they must have felt out of their element, and seeing soldiers coming at them, they had surrendered without a shot.
What did it all mean? Simply that the U-boat captain had made a terrible blunder in electing to fight it out on the surface with those planes. When night came and the planes had to depart, he found he’d thrown away his U-boat—her upper watertight hull and conning tower were so riddled by aircraft projectiles, he couldn’t possibly ever submerge again without going immediately to the bottom with all hands. And on the surface, once daylight came again, he’d be certain soon to be discovered by searching destroyers that would polish him off in no
time at all and probably also kill him and most of his crew while they were about it. So while the destroyer which first arrived spent the night scouring the combat area for him, he fled off in the darkness on the surface for the nearest land, off Tenès, thirty miles away.
There, about fifty yards offshore, after ferrying most of his men in several trips of a little rubber boat to the beach, he had scuttled his U-boat in fairly shallow water, then gone ashore himself with the last load. After that, gathering his crew, he had made a forced march of some twenty miles directly inland by the time the late dawn caught him. Then he and his men had all holed up for the day in that barn, only to be turned in by the Arabs whom his arrogant demands for food had antagonized.
The captives, the first of any branch of the Nazi armed services to be taken in North Africa, had been rushed in trucks to Oran by their elated G.I. captors, much set up over having beaten the Navy to the first such catch. There General Fredendall, just taking possession of Oran itself, had radioed to Eisenhower at Gibraltar, stating he had thirty-eight German U-boat prisoners and asking instructions as to disposition. Eisenhower instantly radioed back to put the s.o.b.s on the first convoy back to the United States, with his earnest hopes that if any vessel in that convoy got torpedoed by a U-boat, it’d be the one they were on.
So there now, somewhere off Tenès, lay a scuttled U-boat in shallow water which I had orders to search with divers when I could.
We rounded the last promontory to the eastward of Tenès. The co-pilot gave me his seat to get the best possible view all around from the nose windows for my aerial survey. Everybody else crowded up close behind, eager for a look also at the first U-boat knocked out in the Torch invasion.
As we swung left into a little bay, the co-pilot, standing behind me, pointed excitedly. Half a mile ahead in the surf off an empty beach, was something protruding. The pilot throttled down as much as he dared and headed directly for it.
No Banners, No Bugles Page 28