England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  It is sometimes called infantile paralysis, which is a misnomer. While it is true that it has a predisposition for children and young adults, people considered to be in the prime of life were by no means immune. Roosevelt – the world’s most famous victim – contracted it in August 1921 when he was 39 and on vacation at New Brunswick. Alain Darlan, a reserve lieutenant in the French Navy and only son of the amiral and commander of all Vichy’s military forces, was 29 when he caught it on a business trip to Algiers in October 1942. In doing so he set in train a series of ineluctable events that helped change the course of history.

  Darlan fils, often accompanied by his wife Annie, had been making regular visits to Algiers where he represented a consortium buying foodstuffs for Vichy France and perhaps for Germany and Italy. No doubt his father’s contacts were useful when it came to arranging shipping. The young couple usually stayed at Villa Sidi-Allowi. This was the bougainvillaea-covered shore quarters of Amiral Raymond Fenard, senior naval officer in Algiers and Darlan’s intermediary to the American diplomat Robert Murphy just as Général Mast had become Giraud’s.

  Then Alain also became a go-between. Murphy would be invited to dinner and afterwards, when the women had retired to admire Madame Fenard’s petit point, the men would sit around the fireplace, smoking, sipping their drinks and talking, one way or the other, about the war. Murphy thought young Darlan seemed ‘ardently pro-Allies’ and, together with Fenard, the lieutenant had been doing his best to assure him that his father had become the same. Sometimes, he explained, it had been necessary to make ‘minor concessions’ to the Germans but only in order not to have to make bigger ones.

  These overtures had been going on for the last six months, ever since Laval had returned to power. In the course of them, Fenard had informed Murphy that Darlan wished the United States to regard French North Africa as willing, when the time was right, to renew hostilities but not before America had enough strength ‘to outmatch the Germans there’.

  Murphy was cautious. He could understand that North Africa was Vichy France’s ‘last high trump’; that they were terrified of losing it through some feeble Anglo-Gaullist Dakar-style expedition that would give the Germans the chance to establish a permanent military presence. But Darlan was so vehemently anti-British it was hard for the Americans to trust him. However piqued he was at being usurped by Laval would he ever believe the moment was right for North Africa to secede from Vichy? Was he just playing for time, hoping the Allies would make a compromise peace with Hitler that would restore France’s sovereignty and leave Germany to deal with Russia?

  This was, after all, still Pétain’s official deputy speaking, the man who had not hesitated to provide the Luftwaffe with transit rights in Syria and was rightly suspected of being prepared to see Dakar become a South Atlantic U-boat base. After Laval was reinstated Ambassador Leahy had been recalled to Washington to become Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff, leaving a chargé d’affaires at Vichy’s US Embassy. But before that there had been plenty of time for Darlan to confide in Leahy the necessity for ‘minor concessions’. Over dinner at Villa Sidi-Allowi Murphy had asked his son why he had not done this.

  Alain explained that his father did not believe the Americans could keep secrets. If Darlan talked to the Germans he could be sure that nothing would leak out in Berlin. The reverse was true in Washington … While I let his remark pass without comment, I had to admit to myself that there was some truth in it. I had been embarrassed when some of my own confidential reports got into newspapers and broadcasts.

  Then on Friday 9 October, Alain Darlan was back in Algiers with a message for Murphy from his father proposing a larger-scale Franco-American operation into southern, unoccupied France but cautioning against the risk of premature and therefore ineffectual strikes elsewhere. But he could not deliver it immediately because Murphy, who had been away in Washington and London being briefed on Operation Torch, was not expected back for another forty-eight hours. Nor was Darlan getting much else done. He was beginning to suffer from some of the headache, sore throat, nausea and high fever that mark the onset of poliomyelitis and had taken to his bed. By Sunday afternoon the naval doctor attending him at Sidi-Allowi was almost certain what was wrong and Alain had been delivered by ambulance to the Maillot Hospital for a second opinion. On arrival his condition almost immediately worsened and he began to develop respiratory problems.

  Even if Alain had been in any condition to deliver his father’s message it would not have made the slightest difference: an invasion of mainland France had been ruled out and Operation Torch was far too advanced for any second thoughts now. Ever since Darlan first made contact with him in May Murphy had sent Washington detailed reports of these vague feelers; but it would be four months before any interest was shown in them. Then in September the diplomat attended an Anglo-American Torch planning conference being held under tight security at Telegraph Cottage, Eisenhower’s mock Tudor country quarters in the Kingston-upon-Thames stockbroker belt. Only then, and for the first time, had there been some discussion on what was seen as the ‘Darlan problem’: should they accept help from a man the Anglo-American press had been encouraged to vilify as a Nazi stooge?

  The answer was that Torch was a tough one and its planners would accept help from the devil himself. And both Churchill and Roosevelt had covetous eyes on the idle French warships in Toulon. ‘If I could meet Darlan, much as I hate him, I’d cheerfully crawl on my hands and knees for a mile if it would bring that fleet of his into Allied forces,’ the Prime Minister had told Eisenhower shortly before he left London for Gibraltar where the British had set up Operation Torch’s advance headquarters.

  Not that the chances of the amiral making a 180-degree turn were considered all that likely. Admiral Leahy, who had got to know him probably better than anybody else in the Allied High Command during his time as US ambassador in Vichy, had established, despite his limited French, an affable enough sailor-to-sailor relationship with him; but he could not bring himself to trust Darlan and described him as ‘ambitious and dangerous … a complete opportunist’.

  Instead, the Operation Torch planners continued to put their trust in Giraud, escapee extraordinaire and clearly as an officer and a gentleman, the man most likely to rally France’s North African garrison to their cause. Arrangements to pick him up by submarine and bring him to Gibraltar were already well advanced. In the Rock’s labyrinth of cold tunnels where Eisenhower and his team lurked it had been decided that Giraud’s code-name would be Kingpin. He was to be picked up off the Côte d’Azur by HMS Seraph, the same boat that, under Lieutenant Norman Jewell, had put Mark Clark and his party ashore at Cherchell for their meeting with Mast and brought them home again. Only this time Seraph would be nominally commanded by the US Navy’s Captain Jerauld Wright, one of the Cherchell party who had shared Clark’s canoe on the return trip. Wright was considered an essential American seasoning to make the English ingredients in Giraud’s latest escape more palatable.

  On 20 October Darlan had left Vichy on a ten-day inspection of most of its African possessions, starting in Dakar. By now he had become much more concerned about the likelihood of an Allied incursion there rather than in North Africa, probably because he thought it would be easier and of more immediate benefit. The German submarine campaign was hurting more than ever. In the South Atlantic Dakar would be an asset for either side. Flying on to Morocco, in Rabat he met General Oskar Vogl, the head of the German Armistice Commission and the man who had originally asked him if the Luftwaffe could transit through the Syrian airfields. He assured Vogl that France would defend its West African territories and to prove how seriously he was taking this put Dakar on a war footing by ordering the repatriation of all the French women and children in the garrison’s married quarters.

  By the 28th he had reached Algiers and for the first time was able to visit Alain in hospital. His wife was already at their son’s bedside. Berthe Darlan had arrived on the 17th accompanied by the family physician who want
ed their only child transferred to the Institut Pasteur in Paris, which had achieved remarkable things with some polio cases. On the same day Darlan took the opportunity to catch up with the latest clues Murphy had seen fit to drop regarding America’s local intentions.

  All he learned seemed to confirm Darlan’s hunch that the Americans were not planning to intervene in North Africa in 1942. ‘You have nothing to fear on our part,’ Murphy had assured Major André Dorange after promising massive American assistance should the Axis ever invade. ‘We will not come unless you summon us.’ Dorange was the Chief of Staff of Général Alphonse Pierre Juin. Like Mast, whom he outranked, Juin had been released from captivity the previous year to become overall commander of the French forces in North Africa.

  Before first light on Friday 30 October, Darlan had started his journey back to Vichy in the Aeronavale version of the twin-engined Glenn Martin bomber he used as his private transport. His inspection tour of North Africa was over and he did not expect to see Algiers again before New Year 1943. He had many other responsibilities, his mothballed fleet in Toulon for instance, and in any case it was probably unwise to turn his back on Laval for too long. At this point the latest news from El Alamein indicated a bloody stalemate. It seemed that Rommel had been away when the battle started and now he had returned. Darlan was mostly preoccupied with making the arrangements necessary to move Alain to Paris.

  Then, on 4 November, scarcely four days after his return, Darlan’s Glenn Martin was heading back to Algiers. He had just received an urgent message that his son’s condition had deteriorated and it was feared he had only a few more hours to live. For the next seventy-two hours Alain clung to life in his private room at the Maillot Hospital while his distraught parents kept a bedside vigil. His coffin had already been ordered. But some time on Friday 6 November, their most fervent prayers were answered. Their son’s fever subsided and soon, though he was still weak and had no feeling in his legs, he was breathing normally for the first time in almost a week.

  Twenty-four hours later, though the paralysis in the legs remained, Alain’s remission was in full spate and Darlan left Berthe and daughter-in-law Annie at the hospital to join Fenard and General Juin at dinner at Villa Sidi-Allowi. His pilot was put on stand-by to fly him back to Vichy next day. Juin brought him up to date with the latest news from El Alamein, which was that the British had broken through and Rommel was in full retreat. It was now the eve of the landings. As Darlan and the others dined, an Anglo-American armada of some 700 ships was converging on nine designated beachheads in French North Africa. The war had not yet seen anything quite like it.

  Approaching three places on the Moroccan coast, having come directly across the Atlantic from Norfolk, Virginia, was a fleet of 102 vessels under Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt. For the past two months most of it had been assembling at Hampton Roads, where the port’s brass band had never tired of playing the 1917 favourite ‘Over There’. Few involved knew whereabouts over there they were bound, only that the Yanks were coming with as much force as they could muster. About seventy of Hewitt’s fleet were warships including one aircraft carrier, four smaller escort carriers – usually converted oil tankers – and the new American battleship Massachusetts. The rest were transports carrying 35,000 men from parts of three US divisions: 2nd Armoured, 3rd and 9th Infantry. Their commander was a major general whose habitual foul-mouthed truculence masked a capacity to charm and a certain erudition. Visitors to George S. Patton Junior’s cabin were astonished to find, as perhaps they were meant to be, that along with the ivory-handled revolvers and the kind of thrillers most officers read, was an English translation of the Koran.

  Patton’s troops were part of Western Task Force and their job was to capture Casablanca. Centre and Eastern Task Forces, which contained the ships the Axis had noticed forming up around Gibraltar, were heading for beaches around Oran and Algiers respectively. Almost all the ships in these fleets were British, as were about a third of the troops.

  The commander of Centre Task Force was Commodore Thomas Troubridge who was flying his flag on HMS Largs, a combined operations headquarters ship crammed with wireless communications. Until November 1940 the Largs had been France’s Charles Plumie. She had been launched at St Nazaire in 1938 for the Jamaica banana run, converted on the outbreak of war to an armed cruiser then captured by British destroyers en route from Dakar to Marseilles and brought into Gibraltar: one of the ‘acts of piracy’ that so fuelled Darlan’s Anglophobia. To protect the 28 transports and 19 landing ships carrying the 39,000 American soldiers, Troubridge had 2 escort carriers, 2 cruisers, an anti-aircraft cruiser, 2 submarines (which would surface and show seaward lights as navigational marks), 13 destroyers, 6 corvettes, 8 minesweepers, 8 converted trawlers, 10 motor launches, 2 sloops and 2 cutters.

  These cutters, which were Lend-Lease former US Coast Guard boats designed with Prohibition’s rum-runners across the Great Lakes in mind, had been renamed HMS Walney and HMS Hartland. They had an important role to play and their mission had been given its own code-name: Operation Reservist. Commanded by Canadian-born Captain Frederic Thornton Peters, a daring and highly decorated 1914–18 destroyer commander, their job was to wait until troop landings either side of Oran had encircled the city and then crash through the harbour boom and land almost 400 American infantry who would secure the port for the disembarkation of tanks and artillery. Some senior American naval officers on Eisenhower’s staff had questioned the wisdom of entering a port that was both well defended by coastal batteries and whatever French warships happened to be in it. But the British, whose plan it was, had assured them that it had worked very well when the destroyer HMS Anthony did something similar with a Royal Marine landing party at an equally well-defended Vichy port in Madagascar. And the Americans, as they knew they must, had bowed to their experience.

  The Eastern Naval Task Force, the one bound for Algiers, was commanded by Rear Admiral Sir Harold Burrough. It also had two of its warships laden with American troops and earmarked for charging into the harbour before it could be blocked with scuttled ships or have all its port machinery wrecked. In this case it was called Operation Terminal and the ships involved were not cutters but the old destroyers HMS Malcolm and HMS Broke. Like Commodore Troubridge, the admiral’s flagship was another headquarters ship, a floating electronic communications centre. His was called Bulolo, Glasgow-built in 1938 for Australia’s Brisbane-based Burns Philip’s shipping company and like the Largs thickly forested with radio antennae. Also aboard was the British Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson, a taciturn Scot, who would be leading an Allied sortie into Tunisia. This was anticipated to be a race against an Axis attempt to do the same from Sicily which was only 150 miles away.

  Algiers was Operation Torch’s most important objective. Not only was Algeria’s capital the biggest city in North Africa but the landings here were nearest – about 500 miles – to the Tunisian-Libyan border and the rear echelons of the retreating Afrika Korps. Once the Anglo-Americans were there Rommel would have Allied forces to both the east and west of him and, with the Royal Navy dominating the Mediterranean coast, be practically surrounded.

  Packed onto seventeen landing ships and sixteen transports, Burrough had 33,000 troops of whom at least half were British. But the initial amphibious landings in the Algiers sector would be made by American troops under Major General Charles W. Ryder. It was expected that Ryder, the commander of the US 34th Infantry Division, would be more acceptable to the French than Anderson, though the Scot happened to speak their language well which Ryder did not. Once a bridgehead had been firmly established the British would come ashore, make a smart left turn and, with a few American reinforcements, spearhead the dash for Tunisia. By this time they would be known as First Army and be under Anderson’s command.

  At first Admiral Burrough would be putting fewer men ashore than Troubridge’s Centre Task Force was landing around Oran; but he had more firepower to cover them. Along with 2 aircraft carriers, 3 cruisers, 3
anti-aircraft ships, over 40 anti-submarine vessels, including 13 destroyers, he had been allotted the monitor HMS Roberts. This carried a single pair of the kind of huge 15-inch guns normally only found on battleships yet had a draught shallow enough to let her get as close inshore as a destroyer.

  Nor was this the end of it. Behind them, under Neville Syfret, whose ships had navigated with such precision at Madagascar, both task forces were covered by Gibraltar’s enlarged Force H with all the heavy artillery on the battleships Duke of York, Rodney and Renown. In addition there were the three carriers Formidable, Victorious and the old Furious, which once flew Sopwith Camels off her flight deck against the Kaiser, plus three cruisers, seventeen destroyers and various auxiliaries. Operation Torch was a formidable display by the world’s two greatest sea powers with the US Navy, already heavily committed in the Pacific, supplying 105 warships and the Royal Navy 196 despite the effect the missing destroyer escorts was bound to have on the safety of Atlantic and Russian convoys.

  Allied Naval Commander for Operation Torch was Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, scourge of Mussolini’s navy. In the dark days of the Stukas over Crete, when a ship’s captain complained that fighting the Luftwaffe was like banging his head against a wall, Cunningham had famously told him: ‘You might just loosen a brick.’ He had recently returned from four months in Washington DC as the Admiralty’s representative at the newly set-up Combined Chiefs of Staff, the highest Anglo-American military authority, where the inevitable politicking had got him down. Not that he had anything against Americans. In Gibraltar he got on well with Supreme Commander Eisenhower and his deputy Mark Clark and the goodwill was mutual. ‘One of the finest individuals I’ve ever met,’ was Eisenhower’s assessment. ‘Vigorous, hardy, intelligent and straightforward … He believed that ships went to sea to find and destroy the enemy. A real sea-dog.’