Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  No news from Task Forces. Reports few and unsatisfactory. Defensive fighting, which seemed halfhearted this morning, has blazed up, and in many places resistance is stubborn.

  We are slowed up in eastern sector when we should be getting toward Bône-Bizerte [in Tunisia] at once.

  We don’t know whereabouts or conditions of airborne force. [The planes had been scattered by bad weather and the airborne attacks were unsuccessful.]

  We cannot find out anything.16

  Alone, and with nothing to do but wait, Ike dispatched a cable to Beetle Smith in London. Could he send a “skeletonized Wack [WAC, Women’s Army Corps] Company of fifteen or twenty secretaries and stenographers essential to the headquarters’ effective operation?”17 Eisenhower had evidently planned this beforehand, and it was his way of bringing Kay Summersby and others to North Africa.c

  Beetle immediately put the wheels in motion. “I cannot tell you how delighted I am that you have got the Wack business all buttoned up,” Ike replied on November 11. “When we get to our own headquarters and can run our own establishment according to our own likes and dislikes, a gang of friends around with whom we can have an hour’s conversation a day will be a God-send.”18

  Eisenhower missed the presence of women. Throughout his military career, Mamie (with few exceptions) had always accompanied him. And the first year in the Philippines when she had not, he had struck up an abiding friendship with Marian Huff. “I think I have learned more about the value of feminine companionship in the last month than I ever knew in my life,” Ike wrote Mamie’s sister Mike on December 4, 1942. “If a gang of men are off on an expedition of golf or hunting, their sense of loss on this score would not be so noticeable. The difficulty is that all of us live under the highest pressure of responsibility and strain and our only companionship, even at meal time, is ourselves. The result is that finally one feels a bit bewildered but there is nothing to do about it.”19 Eisenhower found the needed companionship with Kay Summersby. Beetle, who suffered from ulcers, developed a relationship with his nurse, Ethel Westermann, sometimes described as “the most beautiful nurse in the whole European theater.”20 Ike’s friend Everett Hughes found solace with Rosalind Prismal, a young British widow who worked as his secretary. Butcher had a variety of female friends but eventually was attracted to Molly Jacobs, a young Red Cross worker. George Patton traveled with his “niece.” It was not out of the ordinary for the senior commanders of World War II to move with a retinue of female support staff. In the Pacific, MacArthur’s wife, Jean, was in residence, and his senior staff became notorious for their dalliances with headquarters personnel. General Marshall kept an edgy eye on what was happening but chose not to intervene.

  While Eisenhower reflected on the problems he confronted, the battle hung in the balance. But as French resistance stiffened, fortuna intervened once again on Ike’s behalf. Admiral Jean-Louis Darlan, the deputy head of the Vichy regime and commander in chief of French armed forces, was in Algiers visiting his son Alain, who had recently contracted polio. Darlan’s presence was unexpected. Of more immediate import, General Alphonse Juin, the overall commander of the French Army in North Africa, was also in Algiers. Juin was subordinate to Darlan, but unlike the admiral, he was decidedly anti-German.d By noon on November 8, Juin concluded that it was absurd for the French Army to be fighting the Allies. On his own authority, with Darlan’s reluctant acquiescence, Juin sought out General Ryder to arrange an armistice in Algiers.21

  “Are you the senior commander?” Juin asked Ryder.

  “I am.”

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

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

  “When will you be ready to do this?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Will you permit French troops to retain their weapons?”

  “Yes, provided the troops are assembled in their barracks.”22

  At Juin’s order, the French garrison in Algiers ceased fighting and returned to its barracks. Ryder’s forces entered the city at 8 p.m. With Algiers in Allied hands, Eisenhower immediately dispatched Clark and Giraud to the city to negotiate a general cease-fire. Except for the surrender of Algiers, the military situation remained uncertain. Fredendall’s forces were stymied outside Oran (Fredendall had yet to set foot on shore), and the trickle of news from Morocco portended disaster. “Disturbing report (garbled) was to the effect that at one beach [Patton] was re-embarking under a flag of truce,” Eisenhower cabled Bedell Smith. “That I do not believe. Unless my opinion of Georgie is 100% wrong, he wouldn’t re-embark anything, including himself.”23

  Ike hoped that Giraud’s arrival in Algiers would signal the end of French resistance. But that did not happen. “General Giraud’s cold reception by the French in Africa was a terrible blow to our expectations,” Eisenhower wrote later. “He was completely ignored. He made a broadcast, announcing assumption of leadership of French North Africa and directing French forces to cease fighting against Allies, but his speech had no effect whatsoever.”24

  With Giraud unexpectedly out of the picture, Clark and Eisenhower recognized that Admiral Darlan, and only Admiral Darlan, could order French forces to end their resistance. But Darlan declined to do so. The situation in Algiers, precipitated by General Juin, was an anomaly. Marshal Pétain had ordered that North Africa be defended, and Darlan, as Pétain’s deputy, told Clark that he had no alternative but to do so. “All of my associates and I feel hostilities are useless,” said Darlan. “I can simply obey the orders of Pétain.”25

  Sixty-one-year-old Admiral Jean François Darlan was (along with Pierre Laval) the most formidable member of the Pétain government. His anticlericalism set him apart from most in Vichy, but he embraced Pétain’s appeal to hierarchy, order, and discipline. Short, thick, energetic, and cynical—he was reputed to have the worldly deviousness of a Renaissance cardinal—Darlan had been the principal architect of Vichy’s military cooperation with the Third Reich. Unlike Laval, Darlan was not so much pro-Nazi as he was pro-German and anti-British. As head of the French Navy since 1937, he believed that France might return to glory on Hitler’s coattails. Churchill called him “a bad man with a narrow outlook and an evil eye.”26

  At midnight on November 10, as the fighting at Oran and in Morocco continued, Hitler renounced the terms of the German armistice with Vichy and ordered troops into unoccupied France. Ten German and six Italian divisions spilled across the frontiers and by dawn had snuffed out what little autonomy Pétain enjoyed. That gave the French leadership in North Africa an excuse to renounce their oath of allegiance to the marshal. A day of tough bargaining ensued and by nightfall an armistice with the Allies had been declared. French forces in North Africa were ordered to stop fighting.

  The three-day battle cost dearly. On the French side, three thousand men had been killed or wounded; twenty-one ships, including the battleship Jean Bart and the cruiser Primauguet, were sunk; and 135 of the 168 planes based in Algeria and Morocco had been destroyed. Allied losses were similar: three thousand killed, wounded, or missing; more than a dozen ships, including the battleship Massachusetts and the cruisers Wichita and Brooklyn, sunk or heavily damaged; and seventy planes shot down.27

  The battle for Algeria and Morocco was over. But the terms and conditions of what was to follow had yet to be ironed out. For the next two days, General Clark, Ambassador Murphy, Admiral Darlan, and General Juin hammered out what came to be known as the Clark-Darlan Agreement, specifying Allied rights in North Africa and confirming the continuation of French sovereignty.e Under the terms of the agreement the Allies were granted control of all airports, harbor and port facilities, fortifications, arsenals, and military communication networks. The agreement also recognized extraterritorial status for Allied personnel and granted wide emergency powers in case of domestic disorder. In return the Allies guaranteed the preservation
of the status quo ante bellum—in effect leaving the Vichy administration of North Africa intact. French military and naval forces remained under French command, independent of the supreme commander. Nowhere in the agreement was there any requirement to remove fascist elements from the governmental structure, to repeal Vichy’s anti-Semitic regulations and restrictions, or to liquidate the North African version of the SS. Darlan became high commissioner of North Africa, Giraud assumed direction of French armed forces, and Juin was given command of the Army.28

  Eisenhower was delighted. “I approve of everything you have done,” he cabled Clark on November 12.29 The following day, Friday the thirteenth, Ike flew to Algiers to put his seal of approval on the document. He was greeted like a conquering hero. According to one observer, Eisenhower was “a living dynamo of energy, good humor, amazing memory for details, and amazing courage for the future.”30 After a celebratory lunch at the Hotel St. Georges, he pinned a third star on Mark Clark’s shoulders and flew back triumphantly to Gibraltar.

  For Eisenhower, the agreement with Darlan was essential to permit the Allies to shift their focus to Tunisia (where arguably it should have been from the beginning). For Clark, the admiral was a man you could do business with.31 For Murphy, Darlan was the man of the hour. His appointment as high commissioner would ensure that experienced representatives of the Vichy regime would continue to administer Algeria and Morocco—where the specter of Arab revolt was a continuing concern. In that context, Murphy saw Vichy’s anti-Semitic stance as a tactical advantage because it resonated with the indigenous Muslim population. Murphy also believed that the continuity Darlan represented would prevent the dispatch of Gaullist Free French figures from London—men such as Jean Monnet, Maurice Schumann, François Mitterrand, and Michel Debré—whom he considered dangerously radical. “We had no thought,” Murphy wrote later, “that a ‘Darlan deal’ would not be acceptable in Washington.”32

  The euphoria was short-lived. When news of the Clark-Darlan Agreement arrived in London, a firestorm erupted. The British war cabinet was appalled. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said the deal smacked of Munich. Churchill’s friends in Parliament asked, “Is this then what we have been fighting for?”33 Public opinion followed suit. Edward R. Murrow, in his daily broadcast to the United States from London, asked: “Are we fighting Nazis or sleeping with them? Why this play with traitors? Don’t we see that we could lose this war by winning it?”34

  The British did not object to the military cease-fire. What they protested was the commitment to keep the Vichy regime in place. Churchill, Eden, and British public sentiment strongly supported Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement as the rallying point for France’s liberation. Headquartered in London, the Free French embodied antifascist sentiment in France, spanned the political spectrum from left to right, was in close contact with the Resistance, and transcended the ancient division between the republic and its enemies.f At Washington’s insistence, de Gaulle had not been informed of the landings in North Africa in advance, and it appeared from the accord that had been concluded with Darlan that the future of France had been returned to Vichy’s control. That was a bitter pill for the British to swallow.

  “It is a strategic error to place oneself in a situation contradictory to the moral character of this war,” de Gaulle reminded Churchill. “We are no longer in the eighteenth century when Frederick the Great paid the courtiers of Vienna in order to take Silesia, nor in the Italian Renaissance when one hired the myrmidons of Milan or the mercenaries of Florence. If France one day discovers that because of the British and the Americans her liberation consists of Darlan, you perhaps can win the war from a military point of view but you will lose it morally.”35

  The furor in Britain spilled over into the United States, and the administration was caught with its pants down. Roosevelt had initially approved the Clark-Darlan Agreement, but in the face of the public outcry he quickly backed away. On November 17, FDR issued a public statement rapping Ike’s knuckles. “I have accepted General Eisenhower’s political arrangements made for the time being in North Africa and West Africa. [But] no permanent arrangement should be made with Admiral Darlan. The present temporary arrangement in North and West Africa is only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle. No one in our Army has any authority to discuss the future government of France or the French Empire.”36

  Privately, the president cabled Eisenhower:

  MARSHALL HAS SHOWN ME YOUR DISPATCH GIVING YOUR REASONS FOR PLACING DARLAN IN CHARGE OF CIVIL ADMINISTRATION OF NORTH AFRICA.g I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I APPRECIATE FULLY THE DIFFICULTIES OF YOUR MILITARY SITUATION. I AM THEREFORE NOT DISPOSED TO IN ANY WAY QUESTION THE ACTION YOU HAVE TAKEN.…

  HOWEVER, I THINK YOU SHOULD KNOW AND HAVE IN MIND THE FOLLOWING POLICIES OF THIS GOVERNMENT:

  THAT WE DO NOT TRUST DARLAN.

  THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP A COLLABORATOR OF HITLER AND ONE WHOM WE BELIEVE TO BE A FASCIST IN CIVIL POWER ANY LONGER THAN IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

  HIS MOVEMENTS SHOULD BE WATCHED CAREFULLY AND HIS COMMUNICATIONS SUPERVISED.37

  Eisenhower accepted responsibility for the Darlan decision, and he suffered the consequences. At any moment it was possible that Washington might cut him loose. “From what I hear of what has been appearing in the newspapers,” Ike wrote his son John, “you are learning that it is easy enough for a man to be a newspaper hero one day and a bum the next.”38

  Eisenhower had been badly served by Robert Murphy, whose assessment of the North African situation reflected his ultraconservative, pro-Vichy bias. But Ike was also culpable. He had not been catapulted over the heads of 345 generals more senior—to say nothing of their British counterparts—because he was a proven combat leader. Nor had he spent the interwar years on remote Army posts doing squads left and squads right. Eisenhower had served seven years with MacArthur at the highest command level in Washington and Manila. He had become Marshall’s alter ego at the War Department during the first six months of the war, and in London he had dealt on the most intimate terms with Churchill and the British high command. With the exception of Marshall and MacArthur, Eisenhower had more political experience than any officer in the American Army. He was chosen to be supreme commander precisely because of his political sensitivity. Yet he muffed the decision concerning Darlan—not the cease-fire but the perpetuation of the Vichy regime—because he ignored everything he had learned about the fractious nature of French politics during his year in Paris with Pershing. He concentrated exclusively on the military aspect of the situation and overlooked the political consequences. “It was a callow, clumsy army that had arrived in North Africa with little notion how to act as a world power,” wrote one recent historian.39

  Roosevelt’s emphasis on the temporary nature of the Darlan accord failed to quell the public outcry. On November 26, 1942, Churchill’s national unity government confronted a motion in the House of Commons placing the House on record that “our relations with Admiral Darlan and his kind are inconsistent with the ideals for which we are fighting this war.”40 So great was the opposition in the House that Churchill felt compelled to convene a rare secret session. “I hold no brief for Admiral Darlan,” he told the members. “I must however say that personally I consider that in the circumstances prevailing, General Eisenhower was right; and even if he was not quite right I should have been very reluctant to hamper or impede his action when so many lives hung in the balance.”41 h

  Churchill and FDR gave Eisenhower the benefit of the doubt. But their tepid endorsement was scarcely reassuring. In early December, Roosevelt sent Milton Eisenhower, now deputy director of the Office of War Information, to North Africa to assess the situation. Milton’s message from Washington was clear. “Heads must roll, Murphy! Heads must roll,” meaning that Vichyites like Darlan had to be dismissed.42 Churchill took his own remedial action. He immediately assigned Harold Macmillan, a British minister of state, to be Eisenhower’s political adviser for civil affairs, hoping to
counterbalance whatever influence Murphy might have. Eisenhower was chastened. Later he told the president, “I believe in a theatre commander doing these things without referring them back to his home Government and then waiting for approval. If a mere General makes a mistake, he can be repudiated and kicked out and disgraced. But a Government cannot repudiate and kick out and disgrace itself—not, at any rate, in wartime.”43

  Meanwhile, on November 11, British general Sir Kenneth Anderson assumed command of the eastern task force and set out for Tunis, 540 road miles away. Eisenhower (as well as military planners in Washington and London) assumed it would be a cakewalk. The distance from Algiers to Tunis was roughly that between Washington and Cincinnati, the French were coming on board, and Allied intelligence had predicted that it would take at least two weeks for Axis soldiers to reach Tunisia in strength. Even when they did, the troops would be “low category and without motor transport.”44

  Once again, preinvasion estimates proved worthless. Within hours of learning of the Allied landings, Hitler had ordered frontline German troops into Tunisia. “To give up Africa means to give up the Mediterranean,” he declared. “It would mean not only the ruin of our revolutions, but also the ruin of our people’s future.”45 On the morning of November 9, as the forces of Patton and Fredendall fought their way inland, the first Luftwaffe fighter planes touched down at airfields north of Tunis. Dive-bombers and military transports followed in their wake. By evening, almost one hundred planes were in place, the airfields ringed by paratroopers from the Hermann Göring Division. French response was ambivalent. Initially undecided, the French Navy and Air Force chose not to resist the German arrival. In Tunis, Army commander General Georges Barré, pursuant to orders from General Juin, evacuated the city and marched his division (almost ten thousand men) westward into the mountains to await the Allies. Not one French weapon was discharged to prevent the German landing. There were no casualties, no vehicles destroyed, and no planes shot down. The German takeover of the principal cities of Tunis and Bizerte was as bloodless as the 1940 capture of Copenhagen. In Tunis, the German high command established its headquarters in the abandoned American consulate.