An Army at Dawn

by Rick Atkinson

“I am.”

  “Will you assume responsibility for keeping law and order in Algiers if it is surrendered to your force?”

  “Yes,” Ryder answered, “provided I may have the services of the French gendarmes acting under my orders.”

  “When will you be ready to do this?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Would you permit French troops to retain their arms?”

  Ryder hesitated for an instant. “Yes, provided the troops are assembled in their barracks.”

  The deed was done. Allied units would enter the city at eight P.M. Prisoners were to be freed immediately, including survivors from Operation TERMINAL. French officers dispatched cars through every precinct of Algiers to herald the city’s surrender with a fugato of bugles.

  Algiers had fallen, but not the rest of French North Africa, and there was the rub. The Americans soon learned that Darlan had formally divested himself of all power outside the city. He professed, with an infuriating shrug, to have no negotiating authority for the rest of the Vichy empire. Another meeting at Fort l’Empereur, this time with Darlan present, yielded only an agreement to move Allied ships into Algiers harbor.

  At dawn on Monday, the task force flagship, H.M.S. Bulolo, steamed with imperial dignity toward the Railway Jetty, unaware that an earlier near-miss from a Luftwaffe bomb had damaged her engine room telegraphs. A routine docking order from the bridge for full steam astern went unheard. The French welcoming committee on the jetty watched with mounting alarm as the ship loomed nearer at twelve knots. Officers on the bridge debated whether Bulolo’s masts would more likely shear off forward or backward upon impact. Shrieking bystanders scattered; the captain yelled “Everyone lie down!” to his crew; and the great bow heaved up onto a fortuitous mudbank, demolishing the seawall and nicking a waterfront house before settling back into the harbor, intact. Applauding spectators recovered their wits and agreed that the Royal Navy knew how to make an entrance.

  So, too, did General Giraud. On Monday morning, November 9, he left Gibraltar for Algiers in a French plane with intentions of elbowing Darlan aside and establishing himself as the new Allied satrap in North Africa. As Eisenhower had shrewdly anticipated, Giraud had come around after sensing TORCH’s early success; with histrionic sighs he agreed to serve as commander of the French military in North Africa and chief civil administrator there. Eisenhower packed him off, then publicly proclaimed that “his presence there will bring about a cessation of scattered resistance.” (To Marshall he privately confessed, “I find myself getting absolutely furious with these stupid Frogs.”)

  The authorities in Vichy greeted Eisenhower’s proclamation by denouncing the French general as “a rebel chief and a felon.” Giraud landed at Blida airfield to be met not by the honor guard and whooping throng he had envisioned, but by a few furtive supporters who warned of assassins. Worse yet, his luggage and uniform had gone missing. Giraud could hardly stage a proper coup in rumpled gabardine. Despondent and out of costume, he climbed into a borrowed car and headed for the serpentine alleys of Algiers’s Ruisseau quarter, where a sympathetic family had offered sanctuary.

  Three hours later, Mark Clark arrived by B-17 at Maison Blanche airfield with orders from Eisenhower to help Giraud take command of French forces and secure a general armistice. Instead, he found his putative viceroy in hiding, Admiral Darlan in firm command of Vichy loyalties, and fighting continuing everywhere except Algiers proper. “This,” Clark told Murphy, “really messes things up!”

  In his retinue, Clark had included a former Rin Tin Tin screen writer and 20th Century–Fox executive named Darryl F. Zanuck; now a Signal Corps colonel, Zanuck emerged from the plane with a 16mm movie camera and ten rolls of film with which to document Clark’s triumphant entry into Algiers. The cinematic moment was disrupted, however, by the appearance of a dozen Luftwaffe raiders. As Spitfires and Junkerses tangled overhead, gabbling civilians thronged the streets to watch the dogfights. Clark and his men crammed into two British half-tracks and clanked through the city. Every wall, they noticed, seemed plastered with large posters of Marshal Pétain. The invasion of North Africa was barely twenty-four hours old but already it had descended into French farce.

  The Hôtel St. Georges was a rambling, bone-white hostel on Rue Michelet, the most fashionable avenue in Algiers’s most fashionable neighborhood. Long favored for its gorgeous sea vistas by wealthy spinsters touring the Mediterranean, the St. Georges now served as headquarters for the French navy. Marines had tracked the lobby’s intricate mosaic floor with mud. It was here that the Americans agreed to meet Darlan and his lieutenants early Tuesday morning, November 10.

  Clark found General Ryder exhausted from hours of fruitless dickering. “I’ve stalled them about as long as I can,” Ryder said. A rifle company had been posted among the palm trees outside with orders to “shoot their butts off” if the French made trouble. Murphy led Clark through the hotel foyer to a small, stuffy room with blue Moorish tile and a view of the sun-dappled Mediterranean. Five French admirals and four generals awaited them. Darlan wore elevated heels and a black, double-breasted admiral’s tunic that accentuated his pasty complexion. He greeted the Americans cordially, but the French refused to shake hands with the solitary British officer in Clark’s delegation. Clark folded himself into a chair at the head of the table with Darlan on his left, Juin on his right, and Murphy translating.

  “We have work to do to meet the common enemy,” Clark said.

  “All my associates and I feel hostilities are fruitless,” Darlan replied. But beyond surrendering Algiers, he had no authority to sign an armistice. “I can simply obey the orders of Pétain.”

  “The problem is bigger than that,” Clark insisted. He gestured vaguely toward Tunisia. “Will the French troops east of Algiers resist as we pass through to meet the common enemy?”

  Darlan’s watery blue eyes avoided Clark’s stare. “I have asked Vichy to give me an answer to your terms as soon as possible.”

  Clark thumped the table with his fist. “It will be necessary to retain you in protective custody. I hope you understand. We must move east. I will go to General Giraud. He will sign the terms and issue the necessary orders.”

  Darlan mopped his pate, and the faintest trace of a smile crossed his lips. “I am not certain the troops will obey.”

  “If you think Pétain will agree with you that hostilies must cease, why can’t you issue that order now?”

  “It would result,” Darlan said slowly, “in the immediate occupation of southern France by the Germans.”

  Clark’s fist again crashed onto the table. “What you are doing now means the killing of more French and Americans. This is the time when we must lean on our inclinations and not on our orders. Here is an opportunity for all Frenchmen to rally and win the war. Here is your last chance.”

  “That is your decision,” Darlan said.

  “Tell him,” Clark said to Murphy, “that Pétain is nothing in our young lives.” He pushed back his chair to leave, but Juin held up his hand. “Give us five minutes.”

  As the Allied delegates filed from the room, Darlan murmured to Murphy, “Would you mind suggesting to Major General Clark that I am a five-star admiral? He should stop talking to me like a lieutenant junior grade.”

  The Americans retreated to a remote corridor across the foyer. The sound of raised French voices drifted from the closed door. Clark paced, muttering about “YBSOBs,” the private acronym he and Eisenhower had invented for “yellow-bellied sons of bitches.” Clark’s tacit threat to declare martial law in North Africa horrified Murphy. He could hardly imagine administering railroads, mail, water supply, and other civil functions across a million square miles with nearly 20 million people, few of whom shared a language with any American. If the Allies were to lunge toward Tunisia without fear of a stab in the back, they needed French help.

  The door swung open. Darlan’s pudgy confidant and his host in Algiers, Vice Admiral Raymond Fenard, smiled and gestured. As
Clark and the others took their seats, Darlan turned to Murphy and said, “J’accepte.”

  He laid a draft order before Clark announcing to all French troops that further battle was futile. A proposed message to Pétain suggested that continued fighting would likely cost France its African possessions. Darlan took up a pen and scratched an order “in the name of the Marshal” ordering all land, sea, and air forces in North Africa to cease fire, return to their bases, and observe a strict neutrality. Darlan again mopped his head. “This will stand,” Clark declared.

  He immediately cabled word of the agreement to Gibraltar. “I deemed it of the utmost importance,” he told Eisenhower, “to do anything to secure an order which would be obeyed to cease hostilities.” Giraud resurfaced in his kepi, jodhpurs, gold braid, and gleaming cavalry boots. “He appeared to have emerged directly from the barber’s shop,” journalist Alan Moorehead later wrote. “His small, bird-like head was beautifully groomed.” With his misplaced uniform restored and his pride swallowed, Giraud announced that for the greater glory of France he would serve under Darlan in fighting the Germans.

  Yet no sooner was the deal made than it collapsed. Within hours, news came from Vichy that Marshal Pétain had sacked Darlan as his military commander and repudiated any agreement with the Americans rather than risk the German occupation of Vichy France and seizure of the large Vichy fleet anchored at Toulon. “I issued the order to defend North Africa,” Pétain decreed. More diminished than ever, Darlan moped around Admiral Fenard’s villa like a disinherited heir. “I am lost,” he said. “I can only give myself up.”

  At three P.M. on Tuesday afternoon Clark and Murphy arrived at the villa, alarmed by reports that their new protégé intended to renege on the armistice he had signed six hours earlier.

  “Pétain is the mouthpiece of Hitler,” Clark insisted.

  Darlan shrugged. “There is nothing I can do but revoke the order which I signed this morning.”

  “Damned if you do!” Clark drew himself to his full, imposing height. “You are now a prisoner.”

  “Then I must be taken prisoner.”

  Furious, Clark ordered two infantry platoons to throw a cordon around Fenard’s compound. An American colonel, Benjamin A. Dickson, shoved past Darlan’s aides to confront him directly. “Mon Admiral, by order of the supreme commander you are hereby under arrest in these quarters. Guards have been posted with orders to shoot if you attempt to escape.”

  Dickson returned to the front gate. “Our prisoner in that house is Admiral Darlan,” he told the captain of the guard. “He is a short, bald-headed, pink-faced, needle-nosed, sharp-chinned little weasel. If he tries to get away in uniform or civilian clothes, he is to be shot.”

  At Gibraltar, Eisenhower thumbed through the dispatches from Africa and tried to make sense of the front. “War brings about strange, sometimes ridiculous situations,” he had written in another longhand memo to himself on Monday afternoon. With each passing hour this war seemed to get stranger and more ridiculous. In a scribbled note he titled “Inconsequential thoughts of a commander during one of the interminable waiting periods,” Eisenhower added, “I’m anxiously waiting word of: west coast operations. Oran operations. Giraud’s movements and intentions. Darlan’s proposals. Movements of Italian air. Intentions of Spain.”

  Darlan appeared to have capitulated twice and reneged twice under countervailing pressure from Vichy and Clark. Giraud’s influence in North Africa seemed to be nil. Eisenhower had greeted one of Clark’s cables by wailing, “Jeee-sus Ch-e-rist! What I need around here is a damned good assassin.” He wondered whether bribery would help. Should the Allies, he asked Clark, consider depositing a large sum “in a neutral country such as Switzerland?”

  As the seat of French authority in North Africa, Algiers was crucial to the Allied cause and the staging ground for the push toward Tunisia. British troops still waited offshore to begin that eastward drive once Clark was certain of French neutrality if not collaboration. Morocco also was vital as the conduit for supplies and reinforcements from the United States. Yet Eisenhower still had heard virtually nothing from Hewitt and Patton.

  But it was Oran that had preoccupied the commander-in-chief in a message to Marshall late on Monday. The airfields in western Algeria were critical to building up Allied power, and so were the port at Oran and the nearby naval base at Mers el-Kébir. “My biggest operational difficulty at the moment is the slowness in straightening out the Oran region,” Eisenhower wrote. “I must get it soon.”

  A Blue Flag over Oran

  EISENHOWER was about to get his wish.

  American soldiers had converged on Oran all day Sunday, November 8, driving 9,000 French defenders into a bowl twenty miles in diameter. From the west, Ted Roosevelt and the 26th Infantry marched through Algerian villages given code names drawn from soldiers’ hometowns—Brooklyn, Brockton, Syracuse—along roads named for pastimes from a former life: Baseball, Golf, Lacrosse.

  Terry Allen and a larger portion of his 1st Division descended on Oran from the sandstone hills above St. Cloud, a key crossroads east of the city, and the salt lakes farther south. Children in dirty kaftans shouted “Hi yo, Silver!” or flung stiff-arm Fascist salutes to liberators they presumed to be German. Veiled Berber women with indigo tattoos peered through casement shutters, and in cafés men wearing fezzes looked up from their tea glasses long enough to applaud the passing troops, African-style: arms extended, clapping hands hinged at the wrists, no pretense of sincerity. A war correspondent seeking adjectives to describe the locals settled on “scrofulous, unpicturesque, ophthalmic, lamentable.”

  Exhausted soldiers who could elude their officers skulked into the underbrush; soon the thorn bushes themselves seemed to be snoring. The raspy trundle of artillery shells sometimes woke the men, and often did not. Other troops threw their shoulders behind farm carts used as caissons. Sweating like horses beneath the molten sun, they plodded toward the unseen city beyond the horizon. Abandoned cartridge belts and field jackets blazed a broad, sad trail all the way back to Arzew. Occasionally a wood-burning bus rattled past, carrying unshaven French prisoners to cages on the beach. A cook from the 18th Infantry commandeered a brown mule and a two-wheeled cart to haul his field kitchen. When the mule bolted past a column of hooting GIs toward French lines, the cook threw aside the useless reins, dropped the animal with a single rifle shot, and forced the men, hooting no longer, to haul the kitchen themselves.

  A wounded soldier lay in the tall grass, waiting for an ambulance and pleading with passersby, “Don’t kick my legs, please don’t kick my legs.” During a mortar barrage, four soldiers from Company E of the 16th Infantry took cover in an irrigation ditch. When the shelling lifted, a lieutenant across the road noticed a luminous blue glow and found that a shell fragment had severed the power line overhead. The fallen wire had electrocuted all four men.

  So this is war, soldiers told one another: misfortune at every bend in the road. Misery and murdered mules and sudden death in a ditch.

  St. Cloud was a buff-tinted farm town of 3,500, surrounded by vineyards, with sturdy stone houses and—because by November grapevines had been trimmed to mere nubs—fields of fire extending half a mile in all directions. Straddling the main road to Oran from the east, St. Cloud had been reinforced with the 16th Tunisian Infantry Regiment, the 1st Battalion of the Foreign Legion, an artillery battalion, and paramilitary troops of the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, French Fascists who modeled themselves on the German SS. American intelligence rated the defenders “second- or third-class fighting troops.” But before noon on November 8, Company C of Terry Allen’s 18th Infantry had been ambushed, driven off, then driven off again when it returned to St. Cloud with the bulk of the 1st Battalion.

  At 3:30 P.M., the battalion attacked once more down the road from Renan, joined by the 2nd Battalion trying to outflank the defenders on the south. Long, smoky ribbons of French machine-gun fire lashed the grapevines, killing the Company A first sergeant with a bul
let in the forehead and mortally wounding the commander in the throat. A clock in the stone steeple looming above St. Cloud tolled four o’clock. From the belfry a sniper’s orange muzzle flashes winked insolently. American .50-caliber bullets gnawed at the steeple and clanged off the bells. Discordant pealing carried across the tile rooftops.

  Men from both U.S. battalions crawled on their bellies through the vineyards toward the whitewashed stone wall encircling the St. Cloud cemetery 200 yards south of town. French and American riflemen flitted among the tombs and obelisks like shades in the fading gray light. Bullets pinged off gravestones and chipped the wings of marble cherubim. Gunfire roared in the crypts.

  Lieutenant Edward McGregor formed a skirmish line from Company B, blew three blasts on his whistle, then leaped the cemetery wall to lead a platoon rush on the town. Three men leaped with him; forty others cowered behind the wall. McGregor spun around and rallied the troops with a wild-eyed vow to shoot every shirker in the back. This time the platoon followed until a bullet ripped the face from the B Company commander. “Keep going, Mac,” the officer urged, and fell dead. McGregor and eight others were captured. St. Cloud was not.

  Now French artillerymen opened with their field pieces. The barrage sent American soldiers by the score into full flight. Officers pursued them bellowing, “Stop! Stop!” A wounded lieutenant beside the road pleaded, “Please, please, don’t leave me.” He was left. Medics would find him at dawn, dead white and still alive, his shattered arm too far gone to save. French guns also sniffed out a battery from the 32nd Field Artillery, which had set up behind a ridge north of town. Shells screamed down as a terrified herd of goats stampeded through the howitzer positions twice, each time knocking American gunners to the ground.

  Night slipped down on St. Cloud, transforming the farm town into a dark, sinister redoubt. Bodies lay like bloody rugs among the stubby vines. Gunfire rippled from nervous sentries, and it was worth a man’s life to move about before dawn.