Supreme Commander

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Since Churchill’s return from Moscow, Eisenhower had been having dinner with him at 10 Downing Street every Tuesday evening.15 Eisenhower was also spending his weekends at Chequers, and one Friday evening the Prime Minister, along with Brooke and Pound, questioned Eisenhower about the date. They knew that November 4 was the earliest TORCH could go, but they were concerned about the latest possible date. The Allies had stopped a lend-lease convoy for Russia (PQ-19, due to leave October 4) in order to provide ships and supplies for TORCH, but Churchill felt that if TORCH was not going to begin before November 15, then PQ-19 ought to go ahead. Eisenhower repeated that his best guess was November 8.16 Churchill wanted a guarantee. Eisenhower explained that it was impossible to prepare complete loading schedules until the equipment had actually arrived and been properly sorted, and until this was done no exact date could be given.17

  A little more than a week later Eisenhower had a Monday morning staff conference with Churchill and the BCOS. Churchill again raised the question of running PQ-19. Two days earlier PQ-18 had reached Archangel, but it had suffered heavy losses. The Prime Minister was worried about the Russian situation. The Allies had already taken, to use in TORCH, some lend-lease P-39 fighters that had been scheduled for the Russians, and Stalin was displeased generally because TORCH made a second front in 1942 impossible. Churchill was so concerned that he told Eisenhower he might recommend a two-week delay in mounting TORCH in order to run PQ-19.

  The discussion about Russian reactions to TORCH brought up the subject of a second front in 1943. Eisenhower casually remarked that because of TORCH it would be impossible to mount ROUNDUP. Churchill was thunderstruck. All of Marshall’s arguments against TORCH had revolved around its cost to ROUNDUP, but they evidently had made no impression on the Prime Minister. He told Eisenhower he was “very much astonished” to learn that TORCH eliminated ROUNDUP.

  Throughout the morning Churchill kept coming back to the subject. Jutting out his chin, he glowered at Eisenhower and said it simply could not be so. After all, the Allies had been planning to employ fifty divisions in ROUNDUP, and at the most TORCH would take only thirteen. He found it amazing that this small force could have such a profound effect on ROUNDUP. Eisenhower later reported, “I again went over with him all the additional costs involved in the opening of a new theater, in establishing a second line of communications, in building up new port and base facilities and in the longer turn-around for ships,” but it made no impression.

  Churchill was terribly put out. He said the Allies “must resume at the earliest possible moment a concentration of force” for ROUNDUP. The whole thing was intolerable. The United States and United Kingdom could not possibly confess that the best they could do in an entire year was one thirteen-division attack. Turning to his own chiefs, he told them to get started on plans for an operation in Norway (JUPITER) and added that he was asking Stalin to co-operate.

  The conference lasted for more than two hours and left Eisenhower shaken. He reported to Marshall, “The serious implication is that either the original TORCH decision was made without a clear realization of all its possible adverse consequences or that these considerations were ignored in the anxiety to influence the TORCH decision. It is also very apparent that the Former Naval Person has no conception of the terrific influence the situation in the Southwest Pacific exerts on our own strategy.”18

  The questions that the conference left in Eisenhower’s mind were long-range ones about the nature of British leadership; the immediate problem of the date was soon settled. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to cancel PQ-19 and use the “trickle method” of sending supplies to Archangel—unescorted merchantmen would move out from Iceland singly or in pairs. Regular convoying began again in mid-December.19 On September 26 the CCS gave Eisenhower formal responsibility for the final choice of a D-Day date, and he settled on November 8.

  Eisenhower planned to go to Gibraltar before the attack began and he would need a deputy theater commander for ETO. The man he wanted was his old boss in WPD, Gerow, currently commanding the 29th Division in England. Eisenhower told Marshall that he was “quite well aware that you do not fully share my very high opinion of General Gerow’s abilities,” but he felt that Gerow’s “loyalty, sense of duty, and readiness to devote himself unreservedly to a task, are all outstanding.” Clark and Smith agreed with his estimate of Gerow, and he hoped Marshall would give his concurrence.

  Marshall said he would accept Gerow; he also gave Eisenhower a little lecture. He wanted to be dealt with on the “frankest possible basis,” the Chief said, indicating that he felt Eisenhower had tried too hard to please him in the past and had not stood up for his own ideas. “When you disagree with my point of view, say so, without an apologetic approach; when you want something that you aren’t getting, tell me and I will try to get it for you. I have complete confidence in your management of the affair, and want to support you in every way practicable.” Before Eisenhower could appoint Gerow, however, Clark made a trip to Washington. When he returned he reported that Marshall had privately expressed his doubts about Gerow. Eisenhower, unhappy, decided he would ignore Marshall’s invitation to be frank and make someone else his deputy. He noted that Gerow had never clicked with Marshall, and once an officer was on the bad side of the Chief he could never get right again.20

  The staff, meanwhile, was working fourteen hours a day on loading schedules, intelligence estimates, air cover, and the thousands of details involved. Progress seemed, at times, to be so slow that “impatience … irritation and irascibility” set in. Eisenhower confessed to Marshall that “it has been a trifle difficult to keep up, in front of everybody, a proper attitude of confidence and optimism.” Still, he was doing his best and by taking a long view was fairly well satisfied. His own estimate as of October 12 was that the plan would develop “almost perfectly up to the point of departure.” After that, of course, the unknown factors of the surf at Casablanca and the French reaction made prediction impossible. Eisenhower’s own conviction was that, with a break in the weather, “we should get on shore firmly and quickly and, at the very least, should find divided councils among the French.…” Then if the governments sent in enough follow-up troops, the campaign would proceed effectively.21

  Eisenhower kept to a tight schedule. On Sunday, September 27, he tried to take the day off—it would have been one of his first since December 14, 1941—but he had to go to 20 Grosvenor in the morning and spend four hours in the office. During ordinary days he was there from eight until seven, usually had twelve to fifteen appointments, and had AFHQ officers coming and going all day long. He did get to take the Sunday of October 4 off. He spent it at Telegraph Cottage resting and shooting his pistol.22

  Eisenhower did get to relax with idle conversation after dinner. Talking with Smith and Butcher at Telegraph Cottage one evening, Eisenhower said he had heard that MacArthur had asked again that Southwest Pacific be made the main theater of war. MacArthur had added that if he were not given all the equipment he demanded he “would refuse to accept responsibility for the consequences.” Turning to Smith, Eisenhower remarked that “come hell or high water” he would never use such phrases. When the plan was set he intended to go ahead with the equipment available and he would not whine to the War Department about his needs.

  Smith and Eisenhower then talked about how tough Marshall’s job was and how well he did it. Eisenhower said, “I wouldn’t trade one Marshall for 50 MacArthurs.” He thought a second, then blurted out, “My God! That would be a lousy deal. What would I do with 50 MacArthurs?”23

  While planning in London went forward, Murphy was busy in Algiers. On October 15 he wired Washington to say that a new possible leader for the French was available, Admiral Jean Darlan. The admiral was commander in chief of Vichy’s armed forces. He had served in Pétain’s cabinet and was an enthusiastic collaborator. But he was, next to Pétain himself, the most important French official in the hierarchy and Murphy recommended that the Allies make a deal with him, ev
en though Giraud and his Algerian contact, General Charles E. Mast, would have nothing to do with Darlan.

  Murphy was running into other difficulties. Mast was not at all happy with the idea of Giraud serving under Eisenhower and proposed instead that Eisenhower retain command of the American forces while Giraud became Supreme Commander. In this connection Mast pointed out that the French knew all the details of the terrain, and added that with Giraud in command the Allies could enter “practically without firing a shot.” Finally, Mast insisted that the Americans immediately send five officers from Eisenhower’s staff to Algeria to meet their French opposite numbers for an exchange of information.24

  On October 16 Marshall passed Murphy’s messages on to Eisenhower, asking for his comments and remarking that he did not trust Darlan. Eisenhower immediately arranged for a conference with Churchill and the BCOS. Before going, he gave Marshall his early reactions. He thought “a possible formula affecting the delicate command situation” could be worked out, primarily on the basis of what amounted to bribery. He would retain his position while making Giraud governor of all French North Africa, responsible for all French civil and military affairs. Eisenhower would support Giraud in this position with the British and American armies. But under the Eisenhower formula Giraud, like all puppets forced onto a people, would not have a free hand. Eisenhower would “request” him to make “proper contacts” with Darlan and to appoint Darlan commander in chief of French military or naval forces in North Africa “or in some similar position that will be attractive to Darlan.”

  Eisenhower thought the Allies would have to decide whether they wanted to make Darlan or Giraud “our chief collaborator,” but he was anxious to “secure the advantages accruing to us” if both would cooperate. In order to satisfy the French on command arrangements, Eisenhower was willing to promise that eventually the entire military command in the area would pass to them, but he would retain the right to decide himself when to make the switch. If, meanwhile, the campaign went well, and the Allies moved through French territory toward Libya, Eisenhower would organize an American army under Clark and make either Giraud or Darlan the deputy Allied commander.25 For the immediate future, Eisenhower was sending Clark and some other staff officers to meet with Mast’s representatives in Algeria.

  Churchill readily accepted Eisenhower’s proposals,26 which indicated how much importance the Prime Minister attached to TORCH. Darlan stood for everything Churchill and his friends had denounced at Munich and again when the French quit in 1940. The French admiral had accepted the armistice and was eager to join Hitler in building a New Order in Europe. He had always hated the British and his feelings were even stronger after the British sank part of the French fleet in Oran. Darlan had played a prominent role in the proclamation of Vichy’s anti-Semitic decrees and was a willing collaborationist.

  There were broader foreign policy issues involved in the selection of a North African leader. The United States had maintained its diplomatic relations with Vichy while the United Kingdom had thrown its support to De Gaulle. For Churchill, the Free French movement “was the core of French resistance and the flame of French honour.”27 Postwar France, the Prime Minister held, would have to be purged of all the Vichy scum and reconstituted under De Gaulle’s leadership. Churchill had his problems with De Gaulle throughout the war, as the two egotists often rubbed each other wrong, but the alternative of the hated Vichy, with its supine creatures who had left England in the lurch in 1940 and accepted surrender and dishonor, made Churchill gag.

  The United States State Department took the view that one could do business with Vichy. It rejected De Gaulle, in large part because he had hurt Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s and Roosevelt’s feelings, in part because he represented the unknown. De Gaulle did not help by constantly denouncing the United States for its Vichy policy. There were those who professed to see a conspiracy in America’s policy, and the leader of the conspiracy school was De Gaulle himself, who thought that arrangements with men like Pétain and Darlan were “not completely disagreeable to certain parties in the United States which are playing for a new Europe to oppose the Soviet Union and even England.”28

  That there was a split in Anglo-American relations with regard to French policy was clear enough, as was the line-up, with De Gaulle being the British nominee for postwar power while the Americans were prepared to back Giraud, Darlan, or anyone other than De Gaulle with whom they could work. But that there was a conspiracy to make France into some sort of American puppet state was simply not so. American policy toward France was shortsighted, often mistaken, ineffective, and frequently ludicrous, but it was not based on conspiracy. Roosevelt neither liked nor trusted De Gaulle and in any case wanted to be the savior of France himself, directing free elections for a government after his armies had liberated and occupied it. The President was convinced that France was a second-rate country that would never again amount to anything in world politics; De Gaulle embodied a very different image of postwar France. Hull hated De Gaulle, Murphy did too, and besides they found it easier—more convenient, really—to work with the established Vichy officials.

  Eisenhower, for his part, knew practically nothing of the political complexities and was only interested in finding a Frenchman who could deliver up Algeria and allow his armies to move on into Tunis. Murphy said Giraud or Darlan could do just that, and Eisenhower agreed to work with them. Churchill, more anxious to keep his promise to Stalin and to attack Rommel’s rear than to maintain his French policy, went along.

  With Churchill’s blessing, Clark prepared to set out on October 17 for Gibraltar, then North Africa, where he would meet secretly with Murphy’s French friends. Eisenhower went to Scotland the next day to inspect a field exercise. The next few days, while Clark was off on his mission, Eisenhower fretted. Visiting troops helped him get through the waiting period—he had not been away from the desk in what seemed like months. “Sometimes I feel like a politician and at others like an errand boy,” he confessed to a friend in OPD, “but I get so little chance to go out and be with the troops that it is only infrequently that I can gain a personal sense of feeling like a soldier.”29

  While Eisenhower was watching the exercise he managed to forget about Clark and his dangerous mission. When he returned to London the worries came back with him. “I do not need to tell you,” he confessed to Marshall, “that the past weeks have been a period of strain and anxiety.” He could imagine a hundred different things that could happen to Clark, and that got him to thinking about the various aspects of the operation as a whole. “If a man permitted himself to do so, he could get absolutely frantic about questions of weather, politics, personalities in France and Morocco, and so on,” Eisenhower said. He refused to do so. “To a certain extent,” he explained, “a man must merely believe in his luck and figure that a certain amount of good fortune will bless us when the critical day arrives.”30 Throughout the war Eisenhower trusted in his luck along with his preparations, and it never failed him.

  But even those upon whom Dame Fortune smiles get tense, and Eisenhower was no exception. Two days after Clark left, Eisenhower learned that he had arrived off the Algerian coast too soon and would have to lie around in a submarine, submerged, for a full day waiting for his rendezvous. Eisenhower kept himself as busy as he could, but it did little good. Finally he shut up the office and announced he was going to drive himself out to the cottage that night. He was not sure of the way, had never driven in England before, and had no driver’s license, but he started the car and zoomed off. “When last seen,” Butcher reported, “he was going down the middle of the road, veering a little bit to the right and a bit uncertain.”31

  Around midnight Saturday, October 24, one of Eisenhower’s staff officers called to say that they had just received a message from Clark. The police had broken up his meeting with Mast, Clark reported, and he had been forced to hide in an “empty, repeat empty wine cellar.” In getting into the rubber boat for his trip out to the submarine,
Clark had lost his pants and the bribe money he had taken with him. But he was safe in Gibraltar and would be in London late Sunday.

  All Sunday morning Eisenhower fretted at the office. At 1 P.M. Butcher drove him out to Telegraph Cottage, where Clark and Smith soon joined him. Clark was jubilant. Mast had given him exact details on the location of troops, batteries, and installations at Oran and Algiers, assured him of French co-operation, and emphasized the importance of moving on Tunis before the Germans could get there.

  Clark reported that the most troublesome problem was the question of eventual command. Mast insisted upon Giraud’s assumption of over-all command, which Clark would not accept. Eventually they were able to agree on a draft letter which proposed the restoration of France to its 1939 boundaries, the acceptance of France as an ally by the U.S. and the U.K., and the assumption of the supreme command in North Africa by the French “at the appropriate time.” As Eisenhower clarified the phrase, it meant that he retained command of the area as a base of operations against the Axis, while giving the French charge of the defense as soon as the area was secure. That problem aside, Eisenhower was delighted with Clark’s report. He immediately recommended him for a Distinguished Service Medal and congratulated him on the amount of detailed military information he had gathered.32

  Clark’s brief visit with Mast was the only contact anyone at AFHQ had had with the French, and it illustrated what a chancy undertaking TORCH was. The Allies were preparing to invade a neutral country where they had only a single source of information, without a declaration of war and with the hope that the inhabitants would not resist them. If Murphy’s predictions about French reaction were wrong the whole operation might fail. The only Frenchman in any position of authority to whom the Allies had talked was Mast, who was only a division commander. Although Giraud’s name was supposed to be something to “conjure with” in North Africa, no one knew that for sure. Besides, no Allied officer had talked with Giraud, so Eisenhower did not really know what that Frenchman would do.