England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  When they had finished Laurin decided that the Epervier deserved a final ceremony of the lowering of the colours. Petty officers arranged a flag party which stood stiffly to attention on her bows, the only habitable part of the ship. As the fire crept towards this last parade, its smoke already wafting around them, the colours were lowered then handed to her captain who carried them ashore. ‘I made this decision because I did not want any enemy coming by land to take my flag as a trophy,’ explained Laurin. ‘I must make it clear that this ceremony was performed out of view of any enemy ship.’

  For the moment Darlan was not going to be seen striking his colours either. In Algiers the local ceasefire was holding, the harbour open, and Allied troops and their equipment pouring in. But Murphy’s hopes of swiftly enlarging this into a wider armistice that would embrace all of French North Africa had to be put on hold.

  For all of the second day of the invasion, Monday, 9 November, while ships were sunk and men died in a dozen hard-fought little battles around Oran and Casablanca, Darlan could do nothing but wait and see what came out of Laval’s meeting with Hitler in Munich. It was obvious that the politician would try to barter his permission for the Wehrmacht to move into as much of Tunisia as they needed – not just use its air bases – for a German promise that Vichy France itself remained an unoccupied zone. Darlan doubted whether it would succeed. It was hard to imagine Berlin would continue to leave the security of France’s Mediterranean coast in the hands of its unreliable natives. He was surprised Hitler had not moved immediately. Darlan’s last call to the Admiralty in Vichy before overseeing the Algiers ceasefire between Juin and Ryder was to enquire whether there was any sign of the panzer grenadiers yet.

  Since he now regarded the Wehrmacht’s arrival in the free zone as inevitable, Darlan must have been disappointed to be told there was no change. It would have left him free to negotiate a general ceasefire with the Allies because the Germans had broken the 1940 armistice. Nor would he be open to accusations that he had lost unoccupied France because he had failed to fight the Anglo-Americans hard enough. Instead he found himself in limbo and a limbo prolonged by bad weather across Europe.

  In Germany’s Black Forest Laval and Abetz were stuck in a blizzard and becoming hopelessly late for their appointment with Chancellor Hitler. General Clark was also late for a meeting with Amiral de la flotte Darlan. He was supposed to have left Gibraltar for Algiers soon after Giraud so that they would arrive there within minutes of each other and start talks with Darlan and Juin. But Giraud’s aircraft was the last to take off that morning before gale-force Atlantic winds and rain closed down the Rock’s airstrip for the next five hours.

  Clark’s second coming to North Africa was hardly any more comfortable than canoeing through the Atlantic breakers on Cherchell beach. At dusk Red Gremlin, his personal B-17 Flying Fortress, closely followed by another B-17 called Boomerang, at last touched down at Algiers’s La Maison Blanche airport. On board the aircraft were all Clark’s staff, the signallers and clerks manning his communcations centre, a defence platoon and a US Army film unit commanded by Colonel Darryl Zanuck, the Hollywood producer who for the first time in his movie career was shooting without a script. In case they were intercepted by the Luftwaffe the B-17s had been escorted by a squadron of Spitfires and crossed the Mediterranean from Gibraltar at a height that never exceeded 700 feet.

  But after an uneventful flight this aerial caravan arrived just in time for the city’s first air raid of the war. Murphy was waiting for Clark at the Hôtel Saint-Georges, a large and elegant belle époque establishment with a magnificent view of the bay. He estimated that about twenty-five German and Italian aircraft were involved and had watched as the pyrotechnics from the British fleet’s combined anti-aircraft barrage ‘threw the Arabs into a frenzy of excitement’. As an added treat a couple of Spitfires got behind a Junkers 88 and started to set it on fire.

  Shortly afterwards Clark and some of his staff turned up at the Saint-Georges which, thanks to a very recent deal Murphy had struck with the colon millionaire who owned it, was about to become Allied Forces Headquarters. They had travelled from the airport in open-topped, tracked, British Bren-gun carriers which were the only vehicles with any armour plate available to bring them down from the airport. They were a little shaken up. Shortly after they had landed and disembarked from the Red Gremlin a stick of three bombs exploded within 100 yards of the parked B-17’s tail. This was followed by a burning Junkers in a near vertical death dive which seemed bent on taking them and their Bren-gun carriers with it. ‘Our legs were over the sides and we were looking desperately for cover when the plane exploded into thousands of pieces in the air,’ recounted a thankful Clark.

  Then, as soon as Murphy had Clark to himself in his suite and stiff drinks were being poured, he started telling him about his negotiations with Darlan and Juin and dropped another kind of bombshell. ‘How ironical it was, I remarked, that while Clark was arguing with Giraud in Gibraltar, events in Algiers were already rendering obsolete his Giraud agreement.’

  Clark jumped. ‘This really messes things up,’ he said. And he proceeded to tell the diplomat about the statement Eisenhower had released that morning, saying that Giraud’s presence would ensure ‘a cessation of scattered resistance’ and the excessive expectations it would arouse. The Supreme Commander was going to be made to look ridiculous. ‘We’ve got to put Giraud back in the business right away.’

  But Murphy knew that Kingpin was in no hurry for the Americans to restore him to his crown. Giraud’s landing at Blida had been a miserable anticlimax. Instead of the conquering hero’s welcome Mast and others had promised, he was received by a few furtive conspirators who, fearing he would get shot, spirited him away to the Arab quarter home of Jacques Lemaigre-Duibreuil, the peanut oil millionaire who had been the link between him and Murphy. Had the Americans arrived in Algiers and Oran in time to link up with the partisans’ takeover of key points it might, in the initial euphoria successful revolution normally brings, have been different. But tentative contacts with senior soldiers, some of them old friends, had revealed to Giraud’s astonishment that he was regarded at best as a dupe of the Anglo-Saxons and often no better than Vichy Radio’s ‘rebel chief and felon’.

  Yet Giraud was not as bitter about this reaction as he was probably entitled to be. He empathized entirely with his brother officers’ obsession with legality and chain of command, their fears that they would lose unoccupied France to the Germans and French North Africa to the Allies. Much to Murphy’s relief, he fully understood how beneficial Darlan’s accidental presence could be. Already he had expressed the hope that the amiral would consent to become something like North Africa’s High Commissioner while he became overall commander of its French troops.

  Murphy explained all this to Clark and also pleaded with him to make a bigger show of force in Algiers. There were fears that the more ardent Pétainists, realizing that the Allies were still weak in the city and heartened by the Axis air attacks, might renege on the local ceasefire. ‘Run your tanks through the main streets. Give them a big parade.’

  Clark promised to have all three of his tanks drive around town as soon as he could find them. Then he announced he would see Darlan in the morning, was going to get a good night’s sleep and advised the diplomat, who was clearly in need of it, to do the same. Murphy later discovered that Clark’s belief in the benefits of sleeping on a problem entailed posting a sentry close to wherever he was getting it with orders that he was only to be roused if the enemy was at the gates. But Murphy was not so fortunate. He had a lot of old friends in town who wanted to know if it was true the Americans were dealing with the arch-collaborator Darlan and not the hero Giraud.

  Having no such guardian or sensible rule of life, I stayed up that night of the 9th of November, my fourth successive night with little sleep. I conferred endlessly with our assorted French helpers who were excited and worried about the unexpected turn of events. I had to soothe them while tr
ying to piece together from radio reports a coherent account of what was happening. Darlan also stayed up the whole of that night, in conferences and studying radio reports. He was hoping for some word from Pétain before his meeting with Clark, but no word came.

  Laval had got nothing out of Hitler. The Führer had kept him waiting for two hours in an antechamber, trying to keep awake on ersatz coffee and tobacco, before calling him in and when he went through the door he saw that Count Ciano was still there. The interpreter was also a familiar face. Paul Schmidt had first translated for Laval in 1935 when he had visited Berlin as Minister for Foreign Affairs.

  Much to his relief Hitler made no direct mention of his offer of an alliance with Germany. He started by announcing – with ‘great vigour’ according to Laval – that Germany and Italy intended to ‘chase the Anglo-Saxons out of North Africa’ and were going to do it quickly. (The Germans, and the Vichy French too, often referred to the Anglo-Americans as Anglo-Saxons, presumably inspired more by common language than genetic make-up.) This was followed by some sharp words about the apparent ease with which Général Giraud had been able to leave Vichy France and place himself at the disposal of the Allies.

  ‘You must know that France, from this day forth, will be permitted to keep only those parts of her Empire which she is able to defend,’ pronounced Hitler. So much for Laval’s hopes that Germany might be prepared to guarantee all of France’s borders, home and abroad. He had responded to this, perhaps it was lack of sleep, with a rambling discourse on his favourite theme: Europe’s New Order, an entire continent organized for peace under German hegemony which would create ‘a suitable atmosphere’ by its just treatment of France. But though Hitler was not always averse to discussing the forthcoming National Socialist nirvana this was not the right day for it and Laval was reminded ‘time was pressing’. They went on to the main business of the meeting: Tunisia.

  ‘Is it possible to provide safe ports for disembarkation of Axis troops in Tunis and Bizerta? If it was not possible collaboration was over.’

  Laval tried to exclude the Italians. The one thing that united the French regardless of their politics was that they all loathed the macaronis because in 1940 they had put the boot in after the Germans had wrestled the French to the ground. The politician in him surfaced like a cork and he carefully pointed out that a problem might arise about the inclusion of Count Ciano’s people. Since the armistice, and even before, Italian press and radio had conducted a persistent campaign for the annexation of Tunisia, Corsica and Nice. Not surprisingly, France rejected all these demands and Laval said that, before it had been discussed in Vichy, he would not want to be accused of encouraging Italy’s irredentism by allowing Mussolini’s troops to enter French territory.

  Hitler was unimpressed. In August he had told Dino Alfieri, Italy’s ambassador to Germany, that the main difference between de Gaulle and Laval was that ‘the former is simply trying to obtain by force what Laval seeks to get by cunning’. A judgement that would probably have stunned both parties. Now he was determined not to be taken in by this parliamentary hack and his crude attempts to divide the Axis. Who did he think he was? Before he left, Laval had agreed that Germany would deliver an ultimatum regarding their entry into Tunisia. The wording of Pétain’s protest would be agreed with Berlin in advance.

  Afterwards Laval, who was taking Ambassador Abetz’s advice and spending the night in Munich in case Hitler wanted to see him again, called Vichy and told the navy what had been agreed about the Tunisian ports. Orders not to resist a German takeover were relayed to Amiral Derrien, the French commander at Bizerta by Amiral Gabriel Auphan, Minister of State for the Navy. ‘Please believe me that I’m only thinking of France’s ultimate benefit,’ he told him. So now it was official. The French were resisting the Allies but not the Axis.

  Darlan had arrived at his first meeting with Clark at the Hôtel Saint-Georges with a pantalooned ceremonial guard of Zouaves and flanked by four admirals and four generals. To greet them thirty or so helmeted American infantry had been stationed around the hotel. Unshaven and gum-chewing, with white salt water stains on their unshone boots, they were certainly not as smart as the Algerian soldiers, though perhaps the grenades clipped to their webbing and the obvious modernity of the fast-firing weapons they carried made them look a bit more useful. ‘I was charged with fighting a war, or more specifically, with preventing a war against the French and getting on as rapidly as humanly possible with the war against the Axis in Tunisia,’ said Clark. ‘I wanted everybody to know that we meant business and I adopted a formal attitude.’

  Formal was the last word Murphy, who was interpreting, would have chosen to describe Clark’s negotiating technique as Eisenhower’s deputy took his place at the head of the table in a small room off the hotel foyer. Most of the participants had a good view of the hotel’s terraced garden with its flowering shrubs and palms. Inside, the atmosphere soon became anything but tranquil. Often Murphy had no need to translate.

  Clark didn’t pretend to understand French politics, so he found a simplified view of French-American relations easy and rode roughshod over delaying tactics. In his reports to Eisenhower he made frequent use of their code word YBSOB: yellow bellied sons of bitches. In his opinion, any Frenchman who did not immediately support the Anglo-American expedition deserved this appellation. In like manner, Clark punctuated his negotiations with frequent table thumpings and colourful epithets in English, a language most of the French officers knew to some extent.

  During one lull in the storm Darlan whispered to Murphy, ‘Could I ask you a favour? 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.’

  Why had Pétain’s chosen successor, by his own description the Vichy dauphin, voluntarily submitted himself to this kind of humiliation? He could have remained aloof, allowed himself to be taken prisoner or fled to Morocco whose governor, Général Auguste Noguès, had rallied his troops and was making it plain to Patton that his Atlantic crossing would not end in a walkover. And from there he could, had he chosen, have slipped across the border into Spanish Morocco and returned to Vichy through Tangiers and Madrid.

  Why now this softening towards the Allies? It was not six months since Darlan had dropped Laval a private note describing as ‘moving and courageous’ the bombshell planted in the Prime Minister’s 22 June speech declaring his desire for a German victory. Before that, during his time as Laval’s replacement, there had been his own more public toadying to Hitler, his obsessive Anglophobia, the German aircraft transiting through Vichy Syria on their way to bomb the British in Iraq. On 24 August 1942 Life magazine had listed Darlan as one of France’s leading traitors. Yet by then his son Alain was assuring Murphy that this was all a front and he was convinced that the Allies would win. Even after the Torch landings, with Britain’s church bells about to break the two-year silence imposed by their invasion warning role and ring out for El Alamein, the turn of the tide was not all that obvious to those caught up in the ebb and flow of events. Other British desert victories, admittedly not on the scale of El Alamein, had proved ephemeral. And if Russian resistance had stiffened at Stalingrad the Red Army had stiffened before only to be broken.

  How much had really changed in the five months since Darlan congratulated Laval on his courageous speech? Or was it simply that he wanted to ensure that all doors remained open, the arch-opportunist guarding his opportunities? Clark points out that the Americans were not all that surprised to find Darlan in town and it is true that two days before the invasion Murphy notified the White House that Darlan had returned to Algiers to visit his dying son. The message was passed on to Roosevelt by Admiral Leahy, the former Vichy ambassador who was now his Chief of Staff. Once he learned what was wrong with Alain, Roosevelt asked Leahy, who had probably seen more of Darlan than any other living American, if he thought a personal letter to him from the President of the United States might be useful. Leahy thought
it was a nice idea. But nothing was done immediately to exploit the Alain polio link. As far as the Americans were concerned, at that point Giraud was their man.

  ‘It is quite possible that Darlan knew enough of our plans to be in Algiers at the right time,’ Clark suggested later but this seems unlikely. Murphy, who knew the French North African scene better than anybody, certainly never seems to have thought so. As far as he was concerned it was a fluke, pure serendipity. As Darryl Zanuck was finding out, war was full of these unscripted moments Hollywood could not make up.

  Darlan himself, never a very religious man or given to great modesty either, unhesitatingly put his presence down to divine intervention. ‘My son nearly died and this is why I was in Africa on 8 November,’ he would write to Leahy. ‘Is God’s hand to be seen in that? It is my deeply held conviction that it is.’

  Undoubtedly, having his wife and his only child with him was an advantage. He was unused to the long partings of seagoing sailors. There were comfortable quarters in Toulon they would miss and a family home in Nérac. But whatever happened he and Berthe would be together to look after Alain. To that extent he had already left Vichy.

  Nonetheless, it soon became apparent that Darlan, thinking on his feet, had a firm idea of what he wanted to achieve. His priority was to discover a modus vivendi whereby he could preserve the Pétainist hierarchy in French North Africa and weed out all the dissidents Murphy had suborned. Général Mast for example. This would be a military government uncontaminated by the likes of Laval. He would probably also be able to bring over Dakar and the rest of Governor Boisson’s French West Africa. Whether he could get hold of the fleet in Toulon he did not really know, though he was trying to give the Americans the impression that he could. In any event, they would have a much bigger army and, with any luck, navy than de Gaulle who would be left to wither on the vine in London with his British paymasters. Whereas he would have the support of the Americans who, up until two days ago, still had diplomatic relations with Vichy France.