Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  Throughout the uproar, Murrow remained unrepentant. To a listener who criticized his Darlan broadcasts as anti-American and “definitely dangerous,” he wrote: “I believe that all Governments are capable of making mistakes, just as are all broadcasters.” In a letter to a friend at home, he declared: “Developments in North Africa would be heartbreaking for anyone who had any hope of a decent post-war world.” To another friend, Murrow remarked: “The British fear that America will do what Britain did in the 19th century…. Our policy, as it has been displayed in North Africa, looks like a sort of amateur imperialism.” He confessed to feeling increasingly distant from his homeland: “Maybe I have been away from home too long, but I am day by day more convinced that the values here, whatever the motives, are different from the values of home.”

  Like Murrow, Gil Winant believed that the Roosevelt administration had made a monumental error in appointing Darlan to power. At a cocktail party in his honor one evening, he spent much of the time sequestered in a corner with Murrow and a BBC broadcaster, bemoaning what had happened. He agreed with Churchill and Anthony Eden that the administration must be made to realize just how unpopular the Darlan deal was in Britain.

  But as the chief representative of the U.S government there, Winant also felt obliged to defend the American position in public and to seek support for that stand with critical British officials, many of whom were personal friends. For two years, the ambassador had urged the British working class to press the fight against Nazism; now he was forced to back a deal with a leading Nazi collaborator. Profoundly uncomfortable, he nonetheless continued to parrot the administration’s line. At one dinner party, Harold Nicolson listened as the ambassador told his skeptical fellow guests that the military advantages of the Darlan deal outweighed its moral drawbacks. “Darlan was there almost by chance … and they realized that he could deliver the goods,” Nicolson quoted Winant as saying. “It means the saving of infinite time and 50,000 American lives…. It was worth it.” Musing about the party, Nicolson wrote in his diary: “Winant is such a splendid fellow that one is almost convinced by his advocacy of ill.”

  THOUGH THE WHITE HOUSE was heavily criticized for supporting the Darlan agreement, it was Eisenhower who received the brunt of the attacks. “No matter what victories he wins, Ike will never live this one down,” Harry Hopkins told the writer John Gunther. In Gunther’s opinion, the remark was exceedingly unfair. Eisenhower, he later wrote, “was completely unskilled in political affairs, and his only motive was to drive ahead quickly and save American lives.” The ultimate responsibility, Gunther believed, belonged to Roosevelt.

  The controversy was finally resolved on Christmas Eve 1942 when a twenty-year-old French royalist burst into Darlan’s headquarters in Algiers and shot him twice. Darlan died a few hours later, and after being found guilty during a secret military trial, his assassin was executed by firing squad on December 26. (There were—and still are—suspicions that the British and American secret services were involved in the killing, but nothing has ever been definitely proved.) Although Darlan had disappeared from the scene, Eisenhower remained embroiled in French politics and intrigues. Henri Giraud, who was named to replace Darlan, continued his predecessor’s persecution of Jews and Vichy opponents in North Africa. “Giraud was of no help,” Eisenhower later wrote. “He hated politics, not merely crookedness and chicanery in politics, but every part of the necessary task of developing an orderly, democratic system of government.”

  Caught up in his problems with the French, Eisenhower was also confronted with a host of new troubles as Allied troops, confident they would mop up North Africa in weeks if not days, headed for Tunisia. They were in for a rude surprise. While the Allies took their time ambling eastward, Hitler, having declared that “North Africa … must be held at all costs,” had dispatched tens of thousands of troops to Tunisia. Hastily trained and ill equipped, neither the Americans nor British were any match for the veteran forces and superior armor, artillery, and airpower they encountered in their initial skirmishes with the enemy.

  In those first months of fighting, disorganized Allied commanders squabbled among themselves and made repeated tactical mistakes. Their forces were spread too thin, with little cohesion between American and British troops or even between the units of each country. Cautious and tentative, officers failed to concentrate their men for massed attacks. “The German army makes war better than we are now making it,” concluded a U.S. War Department report. “The enemy is regarded as the visiting team…. Both officers and men are psychologically unprepared for war.” With their offensive stalled, Allied forces prepared for a long siege.

  In February 1943, Rommel’s troops, withdrawing to the west after their defeat at El Alamein, went on the attack. They smashed through the Kasserine Pass, a mountain gateway to Tunis, and inflicted heavy casualties on the unseasoned and undisciplined American troops of II Corps who tried to defend it. It was the first major battle in which America had taken part, and it ended in a rout, marked by poor tactics and leadership by the U.S. command. About Kasserine, Harry Butcher wrote glumly in his diary: “The proud and cocky Americans today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history.”

  Although the British Army had hardly covered itself in glory since the war began, its troops and commanders poured scorn on American forces after Kasserine. British troops sang “How Green Was My Ally,” and some referred to the Yanks as “our Italians.” About the Americans, British general John Crocker wrote his wife: “So far as soldiering is concerned, believe me, the British have nothing at all to learn from them.” Saying the same and more to U.S. and British correspondents, Crocker put the blame for a failed battle later that spring squarely on the shoulders of American troops. After Crocker’s press briefing, Time magazine reported that the battle had been “downright embarrassing” for the Americans and had “afforded a sharp comparison between British and U.S. troops.”

  Much of the British finger-pointing was directed at Eisenhower, who, distracted by political squabbles, had failed to assert his authority and live up to his responsibilities as field commander. “Eisenhower as a general is hopeless!” Alan Brooke raged in his diary. “He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I am afraid, because he knows little if anything about military matters.” While stung by the criticism, Eisenhower did not disagree with it. “The best way to describe our operations to date,” he wrote a friend, “is that they have violated every recognized principle of war, are in conflict with all operational and logistic methods laid down in textbooks, and will be condemned, in their entirety, by all … war college classes for the next 25 years.”

  When British and U.S. military chiefs met with Churchill and Roosevelt in Casablanca in January 1943, Brooke engineered a move to kick Eisenhower upstairs and place a British general, Harold Alexander, in direct command of the Allied campaign’s ground forces in Tunisia. Alexander had been Montgomery’s superior in the El Alamein battle and had overseen the Eighth Army as it moved west in pursuit of Rommel. With the Eighth preparing to link up with Torch forces, the time was ripe, in Brooke’s opinion, to put Alexander in charge. As he later noted, “we were pushing Eisenhower up into the stratosphere and rarefied atmosphere of a Supreme Commander … whilst we inserted under him one of our commanders to … restore the necessary drive and co-ordination which had been so seriously lacking.” Alexander, as it turned out, was as scathing about the Yanks as any of his countrymen. He wrote Brooke that the Americans were “soft, green, and quite untrained” and “lack the will to fight”—an opinion he held for much of the rest of the war, even when later battles proved him wrong.

  For their part, American combat commanders, most of whom had been anti-British before Torch began, bitterly resented what they correctly viewed as the patronizing, disdainful attitude of their British counterparts. They pointed out that Montgomery and the suave, unflappable Alexander had allowed much of the Afrika Korps to slip away from them at Ala
mein; the Eighth Army’s failure to pursue Rommel’s forces with the utmost vigor gave the Germans the opportunity to hit the Americans at Kasserine.

  “How he hates the British,” another American general said of George Patton, who took command of II Corps after the Kasserine debacle. Mark Clark, Eisenhower’s imperious, publicity-seeking deputy, meanwhile, had infuriated virtually every British officer at Allied headquarters with his “niggling and insulting” Anglophobic barbs. When Clark, who was fond of quoting the Napoleonic aphorism “It is better to fight an ally than be one,” stepped down to become a battlefield general, there was general rejoicing at Allied headquarters.

  As a result of the growing Anglo-American hostility, Eisenhower, in addition to coping with his other troubles, was forced to spend considerable time and effort trying to make peace among his commanders. “In his current efforts to improve British and American relations,” Harry Butcher wrote, “I see in Ike something akin to a fireman atop an observation tower searching a forest for smoke or flame.” Despite repeated provocations from his lieutenants, Eisenhower persisted in his belief that victory could be achieved only if Americans and Britons worked closely together. “One of the constant sources of danger to us in this war,” he wrote to a friend, “is the temptation to regard as our first enemy the partner that must work with us in defeating the real enemy.” At a meeting with Alexander and Patton, Eisenhower declared that he did not think of himself “as an American but as an ally.” He told his subordinates they must follow any order they received “without even pausing to consider whether that order emanated from a British or American source.”

  His appeals for harmony and cooperation, however, won him no plaudits from the Americans under him. Clark, Patton, and Omar Bradley, the deputy head of II Corps, attacked their chief for what they saw as his favoritism to the British. Grousing that “Ike is more British than the British,” Patton accused him of being “damned near a Benedict Arnold” and added that the British “are playing us for suckers.” Weary of the unrelieved backbiting, a U.S. officer on Eisenhower’s staff wrote in his diary: “God, I wish we could forget our egos for a while!”

  Yet, even as the carping continued, the pendulum in the North Africa campaign began to swing in favor of the Allies. Under Patton’s tough brand of discipline, the soldiers in II Corps started learning how to fight, as did those in the U.S. First Army. Of the average GI in North Africa, Ernie Pyle observed: “His blood was up. He was fighting for his life, and killing for him was a profession…. He was truly at war.” At the same time, with U.S. industrial mobilization finally gearing up, American supplies and armaments poured into the region. In one month alone, 24,000 vehicles, a million tons of cargo, and some 84,000 troop reinforcements landed in North Africa. “The American army does not solve its problems,” one British general said. “It overwhelms them.”

  In the early spring of 1943, the German troops in Tunisia found themselves increasingly boxed in between the Torch forces and the Eighth Army. Now, the quarrels between British and American commanders focused on who was going to get the credit for the approaching victory. When an enraged Patton learned that Alexander planned to make the final push largely with his own country’s troops, he warned the British general that if the U.S. Army appeared to be “acting in a minor role, the repercussions might be unfortunate.” George Marshall himself joined the fray, cautioning Eisenhower about “a marked fall in prestige of American troops” and urging him to make sure U.S. forces had a major role in sealing the victory. As it turned out, they did.

  On May 7, Tunis fell to the Allies, and, five days later, fighting ceased throughout the area. Britain and America had captured their first major prize—the Middle East and North Africa—and engineered a crucial turning point in the conflict. The momentum of the seemingly unstoppable Germans had finally been halted: just a few months before their defeat in Tunisia, they had been crushed by the Russians at Stalingrad. Thanks to the Western Allies, “one continent had been redeemed,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs. “In London, there was, for the first time in the war, a real lifting of spirits.” Hitler had lost the strategic initiative forever.

  Although the Russians never acknowledged the fact, the Anglo-American triumph helped make their victory at Stalingrad possible. More than 150,000 German soldiers and hundreds of bombers had been diverted from Russia to fight the Allies in North Africa. It might not have been the second front that Stalin had in mind, but the diversion undoubtedly aided him in his successful effort to gain the offensive against the Reich.

  The operation in North Africa also saved the United States and Britain from the disaster that almost certainly would have occurred if they had made an early landing in France, as the Americans had wanted. As historian Eric Larrabee observed, North Africa provided “a place to be lousy in, somewhere to let the gift for combat and command be discovered.” It would take several years for Marshall, Eisenhower, and other Americans to admit that British opposition to a quick assault on France had not been misguided. “Alan Brooke, for all his nose-in-the-air dramatics, was essentially right,” noted Mark Perry. “This was a cross-Channel suicide operation.”

  DESPITE HAVING LOST the first round, American military leaders remained committed to their plan for crossing the Channel. Once North Africa was mopped up, they believed, the Western Allies should start preparing for the invasion of France. The British disagreed. At the Casablanca conference, where the next Anglo-American offensive was to be decided, the battle over strategy was joined once more.

  Before the conference began, Roosevelt warned his lieutenants that “the British will have a plan and stick to it.” He was right. Having worked out their differences in London beforehand, Churchill and Britain’s military brass presented a united front at Casablanca, urging a continuation of their peripheral strategy to weaken Germany before delivering the knockout blow. After North Africa, they wanted to strike across the Mediterranean—landing at Sicily, forcing Italy out of the war, and, they hoped, persuading Turkey to enter the conflict on the Allied side.

  The fact that the British still were doing most of the fighting helped add force to their argument. Despite the American buildup in early 1943, three times as many British troops had fought in the combined campaigns in Tunisia, and the British suffered far more casualties—38,000 men killed, injured, and missing, compared to 19,000 for the Americans. But what really won the day for Churchill and his men was their superior organization and preparation in pressing their case at Casablanca. Backed by innumerable charts and graphs, they had worked everything out to the last detail. Whenever a statistic was needed, one of the many staffers brought from London would inevitably produce the right leather folder containing it. As Roosevelt had predicted, the British arguments and logic were relentless, much like “the dripping of water on a stone.” Afterward, General Tom Handy, Eisenhower’s successor as head of war plans in Washington, remarked about the British: “One thing they understood—the Prime Minister above all—was the principle of the objective. You headed them off one way and they’d come at you in another way…. Our people … were all behind the eight ball.”

  Prescient as he was about the British preparations, Roosevelt had failed to follow their example. In his only meeting with U.S. military leaders before the conference, he declined to commit himself to a new strategic objective to follow North Africa. With no clear lead from their commander in chief, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed among themselves about the future course of the war and, indeed, openly vented their differences in front of the British at Casablanca. While George Marshall advocated a cross-Channel landing, Ernest King, the chief of naval operations, wanted more supplies and troops diverted to the Pacific. For his part, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the U.S. Army Air Forces, called for a huge Britain-based bomber offensive against Germany.

  In response to Marshall’s arguments, the British took out their red leather folders once more, producing facts and figures to demonstrate why the Allies still wer
e not ready to mount an invasion of the Continent. Despite the avowed emphasis on Germany first, more than half the American troops and equipment sent overseas were involved in the fight against Japan. There simply were not enough men, supplies, ships, and landing craft to open a new front in France.

  At the conference’s end, Roosevelt concurred with the British. The decision was made to attack Sicily, an operation that laid the groundwork for the 1943–44 Allied campaign in Italy. In a nod to the Americans, there was also an agreement to build up U.S. forces in England, in preparation for an eventual assault on the Continent.

  As the conference participants headed for home, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that, once again, the Americans had been outmaneuvered by their British cousins. “They swarmed down upon us like locusts,” acknowledged General Albert Wedemeyer, a member of the Army’s war plans department. “We came, we listened, and we were conquered.” Pug Ismay’s deputy, General Ian Jacob, boasted: “Our ideas had prevailed almost throughout.”

  Such gloating, however, would not last for long. With the Americans about to emerge as the dominant power in the alliance, Casablanca would mark the final time in the war that Britain would get its way over strategic objectives—or much of anything else.

  IN PREPARING FOR the combat to come, Eisenhower was well aware that Brooke and other British generals were trying to undercut him. His relationship with them—in particular, Montgomery, the egocentric, vainglorious hero of El Alamein—would grow even more contentious as the war moved to Europe. He would also be subjected to more sniping from Patton, Bradley, Clark, and other American commanders.