History of the Second World War (57 page)

When it was reported to Vichy, Petain’s own reaction was to approve it, but when Laval heard of it en route to Munich, in response to a brusque summons from Hitler, he got on the telephone to Petain and induced him to disavow it. Early in the afternoon, Clark received the news that Vichy had rejected the armistice. When Darlan was told of this by Clark, he dejectedly said: ‘There is nothing I can do but revoke the order I signed this morning.’ Thereupon Clark retorted: ‘You will do nothing of the kind. There will be no revocation of these orders; and, to make it certain, I shall hold you in custody.’ Darlan, who had already hinted at this solution, showed himself very ready to accept it — and sent the reply to Petain: ‘I annul my orders and constitute myself a prisoner’ — the annulment being only for Vichy and German cars. Next day, under pressure from Hitler via Laval, Petain announced that all authority in North Africa had been transferred from Darlan to Nogues, but had already sent Darlan a secret message that the disavowal had been made under German pressure and was contrary to his own wishes. Such double-talk was a subterfuge compelled by the perilous situation in France, but left the situation and French commanders in North Africa, outside Algiers, still confused.

Fortunately, Hitler helped to clarify it and resolve their doubts by ordering his forces to invade the unoccupied part of France that, by the 1940 armistice agreement, had been left under the control of the Vichy Government. On November 8 and 9 Vichy had stalled on the offers of armed support which Hitler pressed on them, making reservations which inflamed his suspicions. On the 10th Laval arrived in Munich to face Hitler and Mussolini, and that afternoon Hitler insisted that the ports and air bases in Tunisia must be made available to the Axis forces. Laval still tried to hedge, saying that France could not agree to the Italians moving in, and that in any case only Petain could decide. Hitler then lost all patience, and soon after the talk ended gave orders for his forces to drive into the unoccupied part of France at midnight — a move already mounted in readiness — as well as to seize the Tunisian air and sea bases, along with the Italians.

Southern France was speedily overrun by the German mechanised forces while six Italian divisions marched in from the east. German planes had started to arrive on an airfield near Tunis in the afternoon of the 9th, together with an escort of troops to protect them on the ground, but had been confined to the airfield by a ring of French troops. Now, from the 11th onward, the airlift was multiplied, the adjacent French troops disarmed, while tanks, guns, transport vehicles and stores were brought over by sea to Bizerta. By the end of the month 15,000 German troops had arrived, with about 100 tanks, although a large proportion were administrative personnel to organise the base. Some 9,000 Italians had also arrived, largely by road from Tripoli, and were primarily used to cover the southern flank. For a hastily improvised move, at a time when the Axis forces were hard pressed everywhere, that was a fine achievement. But such a scale of force was very small compared with what the Allies had brought to French North Africa, and would have had slight chance of resisting them if the ‘Torch’ plan had provided for a larger proportion of the Allied expeditionary force to be used for the advance to Tunisia, or if the Allied Command had developed the advance more rapidly than it did.

The German invasion of southern France did more than anything else to help the Allied situation in Africa by the shock it gave to the French commanders there. On the morning of the 11th, before the news came, there had been another see-saw in Algiers. The first sign was when Clark went to see Darlan, and pressed him to take two urgent steps — to order the French fleet at Toulon to come to a North African port, and to order the Governor of Tunisia, Admiral Esteva, to resist the Germans’ entry. Darlan was at first evasive, arguing that his orders might not be obeyed in view of the broadcast announcement that he had been dismissed from command of the French forces — and, when further pressed, he refused to comply with Clark’s demands. Clark marched out of the house, slamming the door to relieve his feelings. But in the afternoon he had a telephone message asking him to see Darlan again, and Darlan now agreed to comply with Clark’s wishes, in view of developments in France — although his message to the commander of the fleet at Toulon was worded as urgent advice rather than as an order. Another favourable turn was that General Nogues, Darlan’s Vichy-nominated successor, agreed to come to Algiers for a conference next day.

But in the early hours of the 12th Clark had a fresh jolt on hearing that Darlan’s order for resistance in Tunisia had been revoked. Summoning Darlan and Juin to his hotel, it soon became apparent that the change was due to Juin, who argued that it was not a revocation but only a suspension of the previous order pending the arrival of Nogues, who was now his legitimate superior. Such scruples about legality, while characteristic of the French military code, appeared to Clark as merely legalistic quibbles. Although they bowed to his insistence that the order to Tunisia must be reissued immediately, without waiting for the arrival of Nogues, his suspicion was renewed by their reluctance to accept Giraud’s participation in the conference. Clark was so exasperated at their procrastination that he spoke of putting all the French leaders under arrest, and locking them up aboard a ship in the harbour, unless they came to a satisfactory decision within twenty-four hours.

Meanwhile, Darlan’s position in relation to the other French leaders in Africa had been strengthened by the receipt of a second clandestine message from Petain reaffirming his confidence in Darlan and emphasising that he himself was in
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with President Roosevelt, although he could not speak his mind openly because of the Germans’ presence. This helped Darlan, who had a shrewder sense of realities than many of his compatriots, to secure the agreement of Nogues and the others for a working agreement with the Allies, including the recognition of Giraud. Their discussions at a further conference on the 13th were expedited by a fresh threat by Clark that he would lock up the lot. That afternoon it was settled, and promptly endorsed by Eisenhower who had just flown over from Gibraltar. Under its terms, Darlan was to be High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of Naval Forces; Giraud to be Commander-in-Chief of Ground and Air Forces; Juin, Commander of the Eastern Sector; Nogues, Commander of the Western Sector, as well as Resident-General of French Morocco. Active co-operation with the Allies in liberating Tunisia was to begin immediately.

Eisenhower endorsed the agreement all the more readily because he had come to realise, like Clark, that Darlan was the only man who could bring the French round to the Allied side, and also because he remembered Churchill’s remark to him just before he left London: ‘If I could meet Darlan, much as I hate him, I would cheerfully crawl on my hands and knees for a mile if by doing so I could get him to bring that fleet of his into the circle of the Allied forces.’ Eisenhower’s decision was no less promptly endorsed by Roosevelt and Churchill.

But such a ‘deal with Darlan’, who had so long been presented in the press as a sinister pro-Nazi figure, aroused a storm of protest in Britain and America — a worse storm than either Churchill or Roosevelt had foreseen. In Britain it was the greater, since de Gaulle was there, and his supporters did their utmost to increase the outburst of popular indignation. Roosevelt sought to calm the tumult by a public statement of explanation in which he adopted a phrase from Churchill’s private cable to him, saying that the arrangement with Darlan ‘is only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle’. Moreover, in an off-the-record press conference, he described it as an application of an old proverb of the Orthodox Church: ‘My children, it is permitted you in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.’

Roosevelts way of explaining away the arrangement as ‘only a temporary expedient’ naturally came as a shock to Darlan, who felt that he had been tricked. In a letter of protest to Mark Clark he bitterly remarked that both public statement and private word appeared to show that he was regarded as ‘only a lemon which the Americans will drop after they have squeezed it dry’. Roosevelt’s statement was still more hotly resented by the French commanders who had supported Darlan in reaching an agreement with the Allies. Eisenhower, very perturbed, cabled to Washington emphasising that ‘existing French sentiment docs not even remotely resemble prior calculation, and it is of utmost importance that no precipitate action be taken which will upset such equilibrium as we have been able to establish’. General Smuts, who flew to Algiers on his way back from London to South Africa, cabled to Churchill: ‘As regards Darlan, statements published have had unsettling effect on local French leaders, and it would be dangerous to go further on these lines. Nogues has threatened to resign, and as he controls the Moroccan population the results of such a step may be far-reaching.’

Meanwhile, Darlan had made a definite and detailed agreement with Clark for co-operative action. He also induced the French leaders in West Africa to follow his lead, and make the key port of Dakar, together with the air bases, available to the Allies. But, on Christmas Eve, he was assassinated by a fanatical young man, Bonnier de la Chapelle, who belonged to the Royalist and Gaullist circle, which had been pressing for Darlan’s removal from power. That accelerated removal helped to solve the Allies’ awkward political problem, and to clear the way for de Gaulle’s advent, while the Allies had already reaped the benefit of their ‘deal with Darlan’. Churchill’s comments in his memoirs: ‘Darlan’s murder, however criminal, relieved the Allies of their embarrassment in working with him, and at the same time left them with all the advantages he had been able to bestow during the vital hours of the Allied landings.’ His assassin was promptly tried by court-martial on Giraud’s orders, and quickly executed. On the following day the French leaders agreed to choose Giraud as High Commissioner in succession to Darlan. He ‘filled the gap’ — for a short time.

If the Allies had not succeeded in enlisting Darlan’s help their problem would have been much tougher than it turned out. For there were nearly 120,000 French troops in North Africa — about 55,000 in Morocco, 50,000 in Algeria, and 15,000 in Tunisia. Although widely spread, they could have provided formidable opposition if they had continued to resist the Allies.

The only important respect in which Darlan’s aid and authority failed to achieve the desired effect was over bringing the main French fleet across from Toulon to North Africa. Its commander, Admiral de Laborde, hesitated to respond to Darlan’s summons without confirming word from Petain, and a special emissary sent by Darlan to convince him was picked up by the Germans. Laborde’s hesitation was prolonged, and his anxiety lulled, by the Germans’ shrewdness in halting on the outskirts of the naval base and allowing it to remain an unoccupied zone garrisoned by French troops. Meanwhile they prepared a plan for a coup to seize the fleet intact, and launched it on November 27, after blocking the harbour exits with a minefield. But although delay had forfeited the chance of breaking out, the French managed to carry out their prepared plan for scuttling the fleet quickly enough to frustrate the German attempt to capture it — thus fulfilling the assurance that Darlan had given in his initial conference with Clark at Algiers on November 10: ‘In no circumstances will our fleet fall into German hands.’ The Allies’ disappointment that it had not come to North Africa was outweighed by their relief that the danger of it being used against them had vanished with its sinking.

Another cause of relief during this critical period, and especially the first few days, was that the Spanish had abstained from any intervention and that Hitler had not attempted to strike back through Spain against the western gateway into the Mediterranean. The Spanish Army could have made the harbour and airfield at Gibraltar unusable by artillery fire from Algeciras, and could also have cut communications between Patton’s force and the Allied forces in Algeria, as the railway from Casablanca to Oran ran close to the border of Spanish Morocco — as close as twenty miles. When ‘Torch’ was being planned, the British had said that if Franco were to intervene it would be impossible to preserve the use of Gibraltar,* while Eisenhower’s planning staff reckoned that a force of five divisions would be necessary to occupy Spanish Morocco and that the task would take three and a half months. Fortunately Franco was content to stay quiet, as a ‘non-belligerent’ ally of the Axis — and the more contentedly because the Americans were both buying Spanish products and allowing him to obtain oil from the Caribbean. Moreover, the Axis archives show that Hitler, after his earlier experience of Franco’s skill in evading his desires for a move through Spain against Gibraltar, did not really consider attempting such a counterstroke in November 1942. The idea was only revived, and then by Mussolini, the following April — when the Axis forces in Tunisia were hard pressed and an early Allied invasion of Italy was feared. Even then Hitler turned down Mussolini’s plea, both because he feared that a move through Spain would be fiercely and stubbornly resisted by his ‘non-belligerent’ ally, and because he remained confident that the Axis forces could maintain their hold on Tunisia. That confidence of his was bolstered by the remarkable success of the very slender Axis forces sent to Tunisia by the end of November in holding up the Allied advance at that time.

* It was no new conclusion. I had emphasised this point in numerous articles, lectures, and private discussions after the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, when discussing the danger that might develop if Spain came to be dominated by a Fascist regime, and if this should decide to co-operate actively with the Axis powers.

CHAPTER 22 - THE RACE FOR TUNIS

The advance on Tunis and Bizerta started with a seaborne move, but one of very short extent — to the port of Bougie, about a hundred miles east of Algiers and only a quarter of the distance to Bizerta. This was a diminution of the original plan which, assuming full and prompt French co-operation, was to use parachute troops and seaborne Commandos to seize the airfields at Bone, Bizerta, and Tunis on successive days — November 11, 12, and 13 — while a floating reserve of the force landed at Algiers was to sail for, and seize, the port of Bougie and the Djidjelli airfield forty miles beyond the forward base. But in the state of uncertainty after the landing at Algiers, this plan was considered too hazardous, and the more distant moves were dropped. Instead, it was decided on the 9th to occupy Bougie and the airfield, and then rush a force to a railhead at Souk Ahras close to the Tunisian border, while a second seaborne and airborne force occupied Bone.