After the fall of Paris in 1940 aggressive resistance could easily have continued from France’s colonial empire, but Vichy politics were such that it had no desire to side with the Allies and jeopardise its position with Hitler. Pétain and his supporters believed their role was purely to safeguard the Free Zone in southern France and protect the integrity of France’s colonies in North and West Africa, the Middle East and Indo-China. This effectively meant that French interests in North Africa and the Near East posed a threat to Britain’s vulnerable position in Egypt. Vichy’s policy of ‘wait and see’ played straight into Hitler’s hands, for unless he could neutralise the powerful French fleet he had no real way of threatening the French Empire. Similarly the French colonies tended to be a law unto themselves, while the colonial forces and locally raised troops operated independently of the metropolitan French Army. It could have been easy to defy Hitler but this did not happen.
The defeat of France had been swift and humiliating. The French Army had exhausted all its reserves trying to stem the relentless German tide and was not in a position to defend Paris. In a desperate attempt to slice through the German spearhead on 17 May 1940 Colonel de Gaulle with about three battalions of French tanks launched an unsuccessful counter-attack at Montcornet. It was only a matter of time before the inevitable surrender.
De Gaulle’s Free French
De Gaulle fled to London and took up residence in Carlton Gardens, where he proclaimed a ‘Free France’. Ironically, and perhaps appropriately, Carlton Gardens lay between Downing Street and the Vichy Consulate in Bedford Square, symbolising the uneasy position of the Free French, caught between powerful neighbours. To the west of de Gaulle’s headquarters lay the Union des Français d’Outre Mer (UFOM), an anti-Vichy but not pro-de Gaulle organisation located in Upper Brook Street.
De Gaulle was despised by his colleagues and by virtually all the other senior French officers who had escaped from France. Churchill contemptuously dubbed him ‘Joan of Arc’ and President Roosevelt soon became concerned that de Gaulle would try to foist a dictatorship on a liberated France. The activities of de Gaulle’s secret service organisation based in Duke Street became a source of embarrassment to the British government as de Gaulle sought to enforce his writ over his fellow exiles.
The hollow sham of de Gaulle’s popularity was exposed on 21 April 1943 when there was an attempt on his life. A Wellington bomber due to fly him to Glasgow was sabotaged at Hendon airfield. Luckily for de Gaulle the pilot detected that the elevator controls had been cut just before take-off and aborted the flight. At the time the incident was hushed up and blamed on German intelligence, but de Gaulle never flew by plane in Britain again.
When the US State Department learned that anti-Gaullist politicians in France were being betrayed to the Gestapo, an exasperated Roosevelt wrote to Churchill on 17 June 1943: ‘I am absolutely convinced that he has been and is now injuring our war effort and that he is a very dangerous threat to us.’ A year later Roosevelt, annoyed at being dubbed anti-de Gaulle by the newspapers, wrote to General Marshall in a rather sarcastic tone, ‘I am perfectly willing to have de Gaulle made President, or Emperor, or King or anything else so long as the action comes in an untrammelled and unforced way from the French people themselves.’ It was clear that he regarded de Gaulle as an undemocratic threat to France; it was after all to counter such politics that he was committing the American Army to the Second Front.
Notably, de Gaulle lacked a power base and had no viable army in exile. Between 27 May and 4 June 1940 Operation Dynamo evacuated 224,320 British and another 141,842 Allied, principally French, troops from northern France and Dunkirk. Some 30,000-40,000 French soldiers were left behind to hold the bridgehead. French morale was in disarray and France had yet to surrender on the 21st, so for most evacuated French troops there seemed little point in remaining in Britain. Indeed, many were given little choice and were ferried home via Normandy or Morocco to help stabilise the situation on the Seine, in Lower Normandy and on the Marne. Not all were keen to go as it was apparent that Paris could not hold out, but by the end of June 1940 of those rescued only 45,000 remained in Britain. After Dunkirk the authorities removed 8,000 men, mostly refugees, from French vessels in British waters and they were interned at Aintree near Liverpool to await transport to Casablanca.
The French fleet remained uncommitted and unscathed. In the waters of French North-West Africa, at Mers-el-Kebir and the naval base at Oran were 2 powerful French battleships, a light aircraft carrier, 4 cruisers, 6 heavy destroyers and various smaller vessels and submarines. Two other incomplete battleships had taken refuge at Casablanca and Dakar. There were 6 cruisers at Algiers, while moored at the naval base at Toulon were over 70 vessels. At British-controlled Alexandria there were also a French battleship and 4 cruisers. Churchill was anxious about the fate of these warships. In an ideal world they would have joined the Royal Navy and continued the war against Hitler in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, but it was not to be. Instead the Royal Navy struck at Mers-el-Kebir with Operation Catapult on 3 July 1940. Both sides were dismayed at what had happened, but there was no going back. The French suffered 1,299 dead and 350 wounded. At the same time all those French warships in British harbours were taken over by armed boarding parties.
The outraged Vichy government under Marshal Pétain closed ranks, determined never to cooperate with either Churchill or Charles de Gaulle. Churchill knew the Anglo-French alliance was completely in tatters when the bulk of the remaining French troops evacuated to Britain chose to be repatriated rather than join the Free French. This must have been a particular insult to the Royal Navy, whose crews had shed so much blood saving them.
No French sailors wanted to join de Gaulle’s Free French forces either and at the end of July some 1,100 of them sailed from Southampton on the French passenger ship Meknes bound for unoccupied France. A German torpedo-boat sank the Meknes with the loss of 400 lives and Churchill was widely blamed for the disaster. In total, some 30,000 sailors and soldiers had chosen repatriation by the end of the year. This mass exodus showed just how unpopular de Gaulle was.
Those who did rally to de Gaulle were pitifully few in number; by August 1940 he had at most 3,000 men gathered at Aldershot. By the following November the Free French Navy numbered just 4,126. Much to the embarrassment of de Gaulle, the Czech, Polish and Norwegian exiled forces could muster almost as many men as him. Also in Britain at this time were 2,720 French wounded, plus 7,547 men from the French Navy and merchant navy who were rounded up and placed in makeshift camps in the north and midlands. Even volunteers of foreign extraction coming to Britain to fight for the Free French were given a very cold reception by the British authorities. Chilean pilot Margot Duhalde arrived in May 1941 with twelve of her countrymen and was immediately arrested. ‘Scotland Yard was waiting for us,’ she recalled. Ironically the Free French, who had no use for women pilots, eventually handed her over to the British Air Transport Auxiliary.
Similarly, when the French colonies of Lebanon and Syria were placed under Free French command in July 1941, the bulk of the garrison forces there chose to be repatriated rather than join them. Out of the 37,736 men offered this choice, just 5,668 joined de Gaulle and of those only 1,046 were native Frenchmen, the rest being mainly Germans or Russians from the Foreign Legion, North Africans or Senegalese.
Churchill was much more supportive of the idea of reinstating France’s status, even if it meant supporting de Gaulle, and in late 1941 he wrote to Roosevelt:
Now is the time to offer to Vichy and to French North Africa a blessing or a cursing. A blessing will consist in a promise by the United States and Great Britain to re-establish France as a Great Power with her territories undiminished.
Our relations with General de Gaulle and the Free French movement will require to be reviewed. Hitherto the United States have entered into no undertakings similar to those comprised in my correspondence with him. Through no particular fault of his own movement [he] ha
s created new antagonism in French minds. Any action which the United States may now feel able to take in regard to him should have the effect, inter alia, of redefining our obligations to him and France so as to make these obligations more closely dependent upon the eventual effort by him and the French nation to rehabilitate themselves.
In turn de Gaulle felt Churchill had sold out in the name of maintaining the Anglo-American alliance, remarking:
Churchill had made for himself a rule to do nothing important except in agreement with Roosevelt. Though he felt, more than any other Englishman, the awkwardness of Washington’s methods, though he found it hard to bear the conditions of subordination in which United States aid placed the British Empire, and though he bitterly resented the tone of supremacy which the President adopted towards him, Churchill had decided, once [and] for all, to bow to the imperious necessity of the American alliance.
By 1942 the Allies hoped that General Henri Giraud, who had escaped imprisonment by the Germans, supported by Generals Charles Emmanuel Mast in Algeria and Emile Béthouart in Morocco, would rise up against Vichy. Even so, in September Eisenhower warned his military planners about the risk of the French Army resisting the proposed landings in North-West Africa. ‘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,’ he cautioned. ‘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 seizing control of the north shore of Africa before it can be substantially reinforced by the Axis.’
Punishing Pétain’s Vichy
In late October 1940 Hitler had tried to pressure Pétain into securing French North-West Africa against Britain. Still smarting from the attack on Mers-el-Kebir, he agreed that within the limits of its ability the French government would support Axis efforts to defeat Britain. In return Hitler agreed to compensate France with territory from the British Empire. When news of this meeting leaked out, President Roosevelt sent Pétain a message warning him of the dire consequences of betraying Britain.
French-administered Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia were now proving a severe problem for the British attempting to contain initially Italian and then joint Italian-German attacks on British-controlled Egypt. Once France was out of the war, Italy was able to act with impunity against British interests in North Africa, secure in the knowledge that there was no threat to Libya’s western border from French Tunisia. The Allies’ plan to trap the Axis forces fighting in North Africa required the cooperation of French North-West Africa. The problem was that Pétain, supported by Pierre Laval and Admiral Jean François Darlan, commanded far greater respect than the upstart Charles de Gaulle’s Free French.
Initially Britain had tried to get General Maxime Weygand, the French commander in the region, to break with Vichy, but to no avail. Even if he had been sympathetic to the Allies it would have been futile as he was forced out in November 1941 after Hitler’s threat to occupy the whole of France. The following April the pro-German Pierre Laval replaced Admiral Darlan as the political power behind the throne in Vichy. To further complicate matters, Algeria was administered as a province of France ruled directly by Vichy, whereas Morocco remained a protectorate and the French Resident General, General Nogues, could only ‘guide’ the Sultan.
In late October 1942, at a secret conference on the Algerian coast with General Mark Clark, the Deputy Allied Supreme Commander, General Charles Emmanuel Mast, French Commander-in-Chief in Algiers, guaranteed there would be little resistance from the French military and air force in the event of an invasion, although it was thought that the resentful French Navy, perhaps understandably, would resist the landings. To try to avoid antagonising the French any further, it was decided that Operation Torch would be a largely American affair. However, there were insufficient American forces for the attack on Algiers, so they had to be supported by British troops. General Eisenhower hoped the French would not fight but noted: ‘However, there was nothing in the political history of the years 1940-42 to indicate that this would occur; it was a hope rather than an expectation. Consequently we had to be prepared to fight against forces which in all numbered 200,000.’ There were actually some 55,000 ground troops in Morocco, 50,000 in Algeria and 15,000 in Tunisia, equipped with 250 armoured vehicles and up to 500 aircraft.
Early on 8 November 1942 Pétain was informed that Britain and America had invaded French North-West Africa. He faced a difficult choice: to fight and defend that which he had sought to preserve, or to go along with the Allies’ demands. Pétain made his decision and immediately broke off diplomatic relations with America, warning the US chargé d’affaires that his forces would resist the Anglo-American invasion.
The assault forces only had small Landing Craft Personnel (Ramp), Landing Craft Vehicle and Landing Craft Mechanised, the latter two types able to carry only a single lorry or tank respectively. The key vessel for getting tanks ashore, the Landing Ship Tank or LST, capable of carrying up to 60 tanks/vehicles or 300 troops, was not commissioned until December 1942.
The main assault went in at Oran, in addition to which three task forces landed on either side of the city. Despite stiff resistance, American armoured units had penetrated the port by 1000 hours and at noon the French garrison surrendered. Unknown to the Allies, Admiral Darlan was in Algiers at the time visiting his ill son. This completely compromised General Alphonse Juin, the French military commander in Algiers, who had planned to act for the Allies. The eastern advance on Algiers itself was brought to a temporary halt by the threat of attack by just three French tanks. Similarly, during the landings at Casablanca French tank and infantry columns approaching from Rabat had to be driven off by aircraft from the American battleship USS Texas. The French also resisted the landings at the Atlantic port of Safi in Morocco.
Darlan ordered a ceasefire two days later, only to have it overruled by Pétain. But continued resistance was futile and Darlan reached a settlement with the Allies on the 13th, under the terms of which the French colonies would be treated as friendly sovereign territory rather than occupied territory. Had the French cooperated, the Allies could have pushed into Tunisia within two days of the landings in Algeria. Instead, the Germans had time to strike eastwards from Tunis, successfully safeguarding their panzers’ passage from Libya into Tunisia. Under the Franco-Italian armistice, Mussolini had imposed a 50-mile demilitarised zone between Libya and Tunisia but this now counted for nothing as German and Italian tanks were soon crossing it to secure their exposed western flank.
The Allies’ inability to extend the landings and push eastwards into Tunisia was to prove a major failing of Operation Torch. In the port of Tunis Admiral Jean Pierre Esteva, Resident General in Tunisia, though loyal to Darlan and Vichy, was privately sympathetic to the Allies. Nevertheless, he simply did not have the resources with which to obstruct the Germans who began to arrive in force by air on 9 November. At least a quarter of the French garrison remained loyal to Vichy and did nothing to impede the German invasion. At Bizerte some Vichy French units even joined the Germans. Luckily the rest of the garrison in Tunisia chose to observe the ceasefire and support the Allies. The French ground forces commander, General George Barre, withdrew with about five battalions into the mountains west of Tunis and moved towards the Allies in Algiers, while other French troops moved into the Grande Dorsale range of mountains.
General Juin’s 30,000-strong Detachement d’Armée Française (DAF), consisting of Barre’s weak division, a division raised in the Constantine area and some Saharan units, was assigned to cover the two Dorsale ranges. Its job was to prevent the Germans penetrating the Tebessa area of Algeria and to protect the right flank of the British in the forthcoming Tunisian campaign. This effectively marked the end of the war between the Allies and France.
In th
e four days of fighting, American forces suffered 1,434 casualties, including 556 killed, 837 wounded and 41 missing. The British sustained 300 casualties, while the French lost 700 dead, 1,400 wounded and 400 missing. Privately the Americans were pleased that Vichy had chosen to fight, as it gave them the opportunity to blood their inexperienced army before it had to contend with the battle-hardened Wehrmacht. The invasion also provided a vital testing-ground for the subsequent amphibious assaults on Sicily and Normandy. It also proved to Roosevelt that the Vichy French were largely untrustworthy as they, along with the Free French, were split by so many factions they seemed unable to speak with one voice.
De Gaulle’s New Army
Churchill publicly declared his faith in de Gaulle at Mansion House in London on 10 November 1942 and tried to reassure Vichy France of Britain’s intentions towards her vanquished ally:
While there are men like General de Gaulle and all those who follow him – and they are legion throughout France – and men like General Giraud, that gallant warrior whom no prison can hold, while there are men like those to stand forward in the name and in the cause of France, my confidence in the future is clear.
For ourselves we have no wish but to see France free and strong, with her empire gathered around her and with Alsace-Lorraine restored. We covet no French possession; we have no acquisitive appetites or ambitions in North Africa or any other part of the world.
Operation Dragoon Page 4