England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  As it happened, in some places the Americans had done rather better in Morocco than Algeria. At Safi, a sardine fishing port some 130 miles south of Casablanca that the French had been dredging before the war to facilitate phosphates exports, they had seen the only successful storming of a defended harbour. The secret of their success was complete surprise and the accuracy of the ten 14-inch guns on Hewitt’s oldest battleship, the USS New York, launched in 1914. Unlike Oran and Algiers no nearby landings had taken place to alert the defenders. The first they knew about it was when two destroyers, not much younger than the battleship supporting them and each with 200 US soldiers on board, had bluffed their way into the port shortly before dawn. By mid-afternoon, having stopped a counterattack led by three circa 1918 Renault FT-17 light tanks with more contemporary armour-piercing rifle grenades, the port was theirs. This had cost the Americans four killed and twenty-five wounded. All the docks were intact and the first cargo Patton had unloaded there were fifty-four Shermans, the medium tank the British had just made good use of at El Alamein. Some of these reached Casablanca’s southern suburbs by Tuesday the 10th.

  Despite this, Patton had decided that the only way he was going to capture the town was to blast a path through the Vichy defences with Hewitt’s ships and aircraft plus as many of his own batteries as had been landed. He should have had his own air support by now. Almost fifty P-40s presently languishing on the carrier Chenango were supposed to be tearing the heart out of the enemy from the airfield at Port Lyautey, which was a good 80 miles north of Casablanca and a little above Rabat.

  Brigadier General Lucien Truscott, who had come ashore with 9,000 men at the fishing port of Mehdia on the Sebou river estuary, had been expected to secure the airfield on the first day. Two senior air force officers, one of whom had served as a US military attaché in Athens and Cairo, had gone boldly forward in a jeep flying French and American flags as well as a white one. Then they vanished. Later it transpired that the former attaché had been killed by a nervous machine gunner and the other officer taken prisoner. An apologetic French colonel had explained to him that he simply did not have the authority to implement a ceasefire. Resistance stiffened. Half a dozen Stuart light tanks Truscott had landed found themselves matched against Renault R35s that had the same cannon but thicker front armour. Honours appear to have been about even. Otherwise, Truscott was not enamoured with the fighting quality of most of his men and concluded with a candour typical of some US commanders at this early stage of America’s war that the landing would have been a disaster against ‘a well armed enemy’.

  Eventually the airfield, which was about 12 miles upstream along the bends of the oxbowing Sebou, was captured at about the same time as the Shermans were approaching Casablanca. As long planned, bombs and aviation fuel had then been delivered by the shallow-draught Caribbean banana boat Contessa, commandeered from the Standard Fruit Company along with her British skipper who had found some of his crew among seamen nursing hangovers in Norfolk county jail. (The Contessa and her explosive contents, chemical and human, had crossed the Atlantic somewhat to the rear of the rest of Hewitt’s ships that were not companionable.)

  Securing the airfield had cost Truscott almost 300 casualties, 79 of them dead. But Patton was not prepared to wait another twenty-four hours for the P-40s to become operational. Casablanca was still firmly in Vichy hands and had teeth. On Monday the 9th, a military police company sent to sort out traffic snarl-ups on the Fedala beachhead had strayed into its port when the lead coxswain of four American landing craft got lost. Some of the twenty-eight killed died convinced it was all a terrible mistake, shouting, ‘We’re Americans.’ Most of the forty-five the French pulled out of the water were wounded. Two boats got away. Next day French sailors brought two of Jean Bart’s big guns back to life, astonishing the Augusta by bracketing her with six near misses when Hewitt thought his flagship was safely out of range of all that was left intact. Shortly afterwards, she was. After the evasive action came the American response. Unlike the Augusta, the French battleship did not have anywhere to run to and this time Dauntless dive bombers off the Ranger made sure with two direct hits that the Jean Bart’s guns would never fire again.

  In the afternoon Patton went out to the Augusta to see Hewitt. He drank some medicinal bourbon with him, for senior officers tended to feel their age and need a tonic on dry USN ships, and discussed the final details of the Götterdämmerung he planned for Casablanca for Armistice Day, 11 November. Zero hour was set at 0730 hours.

  Afterwards the admiral saw Patton down to his boat for the return journey to Fedala and his suite in the resort’s Hôtel Miramar where on his bedside table rested his first trophy of the campaign: a spiked pickelhaube helmet with its gold Prussian eagle, the ceremonial headgear of General Erich von Wulisch, head of the German Armistice Commission to French North Africa. Von Wulisch had occupied the same suite in the Miramar shortly before his hurried departure for Berlin via Spanish Morocco. Not all his staff had been quick enough and several became the US Army’s first German prisoners of war since 1918. At dinner Patton had amused Charles Codman, the lieutenant colonel who was his senior aide-de-camp, by striding in with the pickelhaube on his head and announcing he would be wearing it the day they all entered Berlin. Afterwards, his staff officers had returned to their immediate plans to turn a large number of Casablanca’s mud-brick buildings into a pile of rubble.

  Shortly before 2.30 a.m. Codman was knocking insistently at the general’s door. Patton knew he would not be disturbed unless it was important and dressed quickly. Waiting for him downstairs was a French major who had just been driven through the American lines under a flag of truce. He handed Patton a short note pencilled on flimsy paper which he read by candlelight, for either by design or some accident of crossfire Fedala was without electricity. Darlan and Noguès had agreed to a general ceasefire with the Allies throughout their country’s North African possessions. Not only were there no more contested areas to fight over but, even if there had been, very soon Vichy would not have the forces to do so. In years to come the American most associated with Casablanca would not, after all, be the soldier George Patton, who might certainly have made a lasting local impression, but the Hollywood actor Humphrey Bogart. The eponymous wartime film with its opportunistic Vichy police chief (‘I blow with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy’) had just been completed. It was about to be released a little earlier than planned to exploit the publicity generated by the fighting in Morocco in which some 400 Americans died.

  Patton staged a stylish armistice ceremony at the Miramar with an Honour Guard for Noguès and Michelier, champagne toasts to gallant adversaries and another one to ‘our future victory over our common enemy’. Amirals Michelier and Hewitt agreed that they both had their orders and there were no hard feelings. It seems nobody thought to ask Michelier why he had wasted the lives of his sailors on such a futile gesture. Patton said the party was ‘worth every Goddam cent’.

  And on this convivial note all Vichy French hostilities against the Allies ceased. England’s last war with France, undeclared and unacknowledged, had briefly become America’s first one and then faded into the footnotes of history almost as if it had never been.

  Chapter Thirty

  It did not end tidily. There was no official announcement, no appointed hour for the guns to fall silent, for officially Britain and France had never been at war. Hitler, having made sure that Axis troops could land unopposed in Tunis and Bizerta, ended the existence of an unoccupied France on 11 November, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the 1918 armistice. In Munich, Ambassador Abetz woke Laval with a 4 a.m. call to tell him the news. Laval told him it was a terrible mistake. ‘It’s a decision of the Führer’s,’ said Abetz. ‘There’s nothing to be done.’ The only consolation he could offer was that Germany would continue to recognize Pétain’s administration as the legitimate government of a totally occupied France.

  In Vichy Baron Krug von Nidda presented
Pétain with a personal letter from Hitler that, after some preliminary remarks about his puzzlement that France and Britain should ever have declared war against Germany in the first place, got down to the business at hand.

  Monsieur Ie Maréchal, I have the honour, and at the same time the sorrow, to inform you that in order to avoid the danger which threatens us I have, in agreement with the Italian Government, been compelled to give the order to my troops to cross France by the most direct route in order to occupy the Mediterranean coast, and second, to take part in the protection of Corsica against the impending aggression of Anglo-American armed forces …

  It was called Operation Anton. In overall command was General Johannes Blaskowitz, a Lutheran pastor’s son, who had once incurred Hitler’s displeasure for his outspoken criticism of SS atrocities in Poland. Blaskowitz had inherited contingency plans first drawn up by the Wehrmacht only five months after the 1940 armistice and later coordinated with a project for Italy’s simultaneous seizure of Corsica. At about the same time that Patton learned of the ceasefire at Fedala’s Hôtel Miramar, Germany moved into what Vichy normally referred to as the Free Zone. In all, it involved over 200,000 men with tanks and artillery. In addition the Italian 4th Army advanced into all the territory Mussolini coveted: Nice and the rest of the French Riviera plus Corsica where they had been instructed to behave like liberators rather than conquerors. By the evening of the 11th, Blaskowitz’s panzers had reached the Mediterranean coast.

  In the course of this eventful day Feldmarschal von Runstedt, who commanded all the German forces in western Europe, called on Pétain who made the expected protest against ‘a decision incompatible with the armistice agreement’. This denunciation was repeatedly broadcast by Vichy Radio though, one maréchal to another, Pétain confided to von Runstedt that he had only done it ‘on account of public opinion in France’.

  In Algiers Amiral Darlan had declared that Pétain, the most distinguished victim of this gross violation of the armistice, must now be considered a prisoner. As his deputy, he was entitled to give orders, such as his endorsement of the ceasefire, in the maréchal’s name dismissing all attempts by Vichy to question his authority as bogus, having been made under duress. A delighted Churchill would soon be explaining to a secret session of the House of Commons: ‘In fact, if Admiral Darlan had to shoot Marshal Pétain he would no doubt do it in Marshal Pétain’s name.’

  The Allies were hoping that for his next trick Darlan would deliver them the French fleet still at anchor at Toulon, which the Germans had agreed should remain a Vichy stronghold and be defended against ‘all enemies of the maréchal.’ Arrangements were already in place for the Royal Navy to cover their dash for Gibraltar and a return to the war. Surely all that remained was for Darlan to give the word? But it was not as simple as that.

  When, in 1940, Pétain elevated Darlan to his Cabinet the command of the High Seas Fleet went to Contre-amiral Jean de Laborde, who was of aristocratic demeanour (if not exactly lineage) and an unswerving Catholic. His nickname in the navy was Comte Jean, his manner authoritative and monosyllabic, but like Darlan he was an enthusiastic modernizer. Laborde also shared all Darlan’s views about de Gaulle and the English. ‘I’m not Anglophobe,’ he liked to tell people. ‘I’m Anglophage. I eat ’em.’ Despite these enthusiasms he had little liking for his clever and conceited superior, almost three years his junior but with the unchurched background that had made him so acceptable to Léon Blum’s Popular Front. Now his turncoat behaviour had confirmed what he always suspected of the Godless parvenu: Darlan believed in Darlan and little else.

  On the 12th, pressed by Clark and Admiral Cunningham, who had now turned up in Algiers, Darlan did his best to persuade Laborde to bring the fleet over, revealing in his argument all the effortless sophistry that had enabled him to sound as convincing in his new role as he had in his old one. In his message he was careful to make no mention of British involvement.

  The Armistice is broken. We have our liberty of action. The maréchal being no longer able to make free decisions we can, whilst remaining personally loyal to him, make decisions which are most favourable to French interests. I have always declared that the Fleet would remain French or perish. The occupation makes it impossible for the naval forces to remain in metropolitan France. I invite the Commander-in-Chief to direct them towards West Africa. The American Command declares that our forces will not encounter any obstacles from Allied forces.

  ‘Merde’, replied Comte Jean, consistent in all things. Others were more sympathetic. There were signs of unrest among some of the 12,000 sailors at Toulon. Demonstrations on the Strasbourg, Laborde’s own flagship, had spread to the cruisers Foch and Colbert and the super-destroyer Kersaint. They had started after orders had been given for the boilers to be shut down. Men had assembled on the fo’c’s’le deck demanding with cries of ‘Appareillage!’ that they set sail for Algiers immediately. This was followed by chants of ‘Vive Darlan! Vive de Gaulle!’ which scarcely twenty-four hours before would have been a ludicrous combination devoid of any serious political content. Now it made a kind of sense.

  For five days Laborde had kept his boilers fired, starting the day before the Torch landings when, quite coincidentally and for the benefit of men and machinery, he took his ships out on a short constitutional cruise along the coast and back. When it was learned that the Anglo-Saxons had ‘done another Mers-el-Kébir’ at Oran and Casablanca, their continued state of readiness had fanned welcome rumours among their crews that they were about to intervene. Nor was this entirely fanciful. Laborde had indeed volunteered to take the fleet out, perhaps eat some English pirates for breakfast, only to have Amiral Auphan, Vichy’s Secretary of State for Maritime Affairs and close to Darlan, order him to stay at his moorings.

  But on the mess deck there were cigar box radios with a bit of lead ore for an oscillator and some clever wiring to a single earphone quite capable of picking up the BBC’s French language service. The gradual realization that Darlan had joined the Americans had changed the mood of the more politically aware. They were no longer all that interested in going out and tearing out the heart of the English. What they wanted to do was join Darlan and the Americans and use their excellent ships to fight the Boche. Laborde had clamped down. Ringleaders were arrested. Ashore, liberty men got into fights in their favourite bars with snoopers from the Service d’ordre légionnaire, about to be renamed the Milice, paid to drink and move in on Gaullist troublemakers inciting mutiny. Meanwhile, Laborde decided to confront the issue of Darlan’s defection head-on with an Order of the Day that left nobody in any doubt as to who he was talking about.

  At such time that those in high command lose their sense of duty, you must show that Honour is not measured by gold stripes and Admiral’s stars. Unflinching discipline and correct service behaviour are the ultimate duty of all. I myself have guaranteed your loyalty to the Maréchal who has directed me to say that he is counting on you to save the unity and honour of France …

  As far as Laborde was concerned North Africa might be lost but the fleet was still something Vichy could bargain with to maintain a measure of genuine self-government, certainly more than all the other occupied countries had, even Quisling’s Norway. To an extent the German Navy had fostered this illusion. In June 1919 the German Grand Fleet, having surrendered to the Royal Navy at Orkney’s Scapa Flow some six months before, had scuttled itself there when it looked like the talks at Versailles would deliver every one of them to the British. Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, the head of the Kriegsmarine, was in no doubt that Laborde and his officers would keep their word and do exactly the same rather than let any of the belligerents take their ships.

  In order to reassure Hitler on this point Raeder sent one of his aides, Kapitänleutnant Ruault von Frappart, to see both Laborde and Amiral Andre Marquis, the préfet maritime who commanded the 135 vessels in various states of repair and readiness that were not in Laborde’s High Seas Fleet. Frappart, an Austrian of French descent, procu
red word-of-honour promises from both of them that their ships would never be used against Axis forces and that Toulon would be defended against any Anglo-American aggression. ‘If you undertake that no German will come into our docks I will give my word,’ Laborde told him. And Frappart had agreed.

  Toulon, it seemed, was to be the last bastion of Vichy’s armed neutrality unlike the much bigger port of Marseilles where the newly appointed Gauleiter had just confiscated all those merchant ships not needed to victual Italian-occupied Corsica. But within days it became plain that Germany’s army was not as comfortable as its navy with this arrangement. It had pointed out that, with the connivance of its garrison, the Allies might use the port as their bridgehead into continental Europe. A barracks was taken over, the last of the French Army on French soil disbanded. Tanks began to turn up. Soon there was hardly a road leading to the port not jammed with a line of them, crews in black overalls sitting on their turrets smoking and listening to Lale Andersen on German forces’ radio.

  In the end Hitler, as he usually did, came down on the side of the army. If the idea of the Allies turning Toulon into a bridgehead was a bit fanciful the risk of French ships slipping out of Germany’s reach was not. After their North African success it was obvious that the Anglo-Americans would try to gather them in. Any doubts on that score would have been settled by German radio intercepts. Darlan’s invitation to Laborde was probably sent via Auphan in a code based on a key in a pocket dictionary they had been using since the landings. (Darlan had falsely claimed that Pétain, in an accord intime, had passed on approval of the ceasefire in it.) It is unlikely that the Germans had failed to crack this simple cypher with the content so easy to guess; but even if it remained unbroken any contact between the defector and Vichy would have caused alarm.