The Second World War (73 page)
The submarine HMS
Seraph
, this time pretending to be American, was sent to collect Giraud from the Côte d’Azur and then convey him to Gibraltar to join Eisenhower. Axis agents and air reconnaissance reported the growing presence of shipping at Gibraltar. Fortunately for the Allies, German intelligence assumed that the vessels were intended either to reinforce Malta or to land forces in Libya to cut off Rommel’s line of retreat. German U-boats in the Mediterranean were therefore ordered to concentrate off the Libyan coast, well to the east of where the invasion forces were going to land. Another Axis theory was that the Allies intended to take Dakar on the west African coast as a naval base, to help them in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Through Murphy, the Americans had received overtures from Admiral Darlan. Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt’s former ambassador to Vichy, saw Darlan as a dangerous opportunist. The fact that Darlan loathed Laval, who had replaced him as Pétain’s deputy, was hardly a guarantee of his trustworthiness. Yet even Churchill was prepared to have dealings with this most determined anglophobe, if it might lead to the French fleet at Toulon coming over to the Allied side. Eisenhower preferred to stick with Giraud, but then Giraud, on reaching Gibraltar, again expected to be made Allied commander-in-chief. Seldom had a military operation been so complicated by politics and personal rivalries.
On 4 November, just four days before the landings, Darlan, who had been on a tour of French African colonies, flew to Algiers. He had just heard that his son, a naval lieutenant suffering from polio, had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Darlan had no idea that Allied fleets were at sea, and when his son’s condition improved he planned to fly back to Vichy. Western Task Force, containing 35,000 troops commanded by Major General George S. Patton, had already left Hampton Roads, bound for Casablanca. The other two task forces which had sailed from England were headed into the Mediterranean for Oran and Algiers. Altogether the troopships were escorted by 300 warships under the overall command of Admiral Cunningham, who was delighted to return to the Mediterranean.
On the evening of 7 November, Darlan was at dinner at the Villa des Oliviers, the residence of General Alphonse Juin, the commander-in-chief in Algiers. Juin had replaced Weygand, who was now imprisoned at Königstein in Giraud’s place because Hitler feared that he would side with
the Allies. They were interrupted towards the end by the chief naval officer at Algiers, who rushed in to tell them that the Allied ships were perhaps not heading for Malta after all. They might be coming to land troops at Algiers and Oran. Darlan dismissed such fears and went off to get some sleep before his flight early next morning. At midnight, Murphy heard the codeword over the French service of the BBC to confirm that the landings were going ahead. He sent the French irregulars that he and General Mast had recruited to seize key installations and headquarters.
In the early hours of 8 November, Murphy went to the Villa Oliviers and had Juin woken. He informed him of the landings. Juin was dumb-struck at first. He then said that he must first consult his senior officer Admiral Darlan, who was present in Algiers. Murphy felt that he had no alternative but to talk to Darlan. Murphy’s Buick was sent to fetch him.
Darlan arrived in a fury. The short, bald, barrel-chested admiral, who constantly smoked a pipe, was soon nicknamed ‘Popeye’ by the Americans, who were amused by his built-up shoes. Darlan’s hatred for the English had an illustrious pedigree since his great-grandfather had been killed at the Battle of Trafalgar. But he was also a practised turncoat. Just after the armistice in 1940, the veteran French politician Édouard Herriot had said of him, ‘
This admiral knows how to swim
,’ when Darlan, having promised the British total resistance, secretly joined the
capitulards
.
While Murphy was trying to calm Darlan and persuade him that resistance to the landings would be futile, a group of Mast’s irregulars turned up and took Darlan and Juin prisoner. Then a squad of Gendarmerie arrived to release them and take the insurgents and Murphy prisoner. Murphy had been expecting American troops to have arrived by this time, but they had landed by mistake further down the coast.
But a far greater disaster was unfolding. The British plan to take both the ports of Algiers and Oran in a coup de main was a complete failure, involving massive casualties, especially in Oran, where 189 men were killed and 157 wounded out of a force of 393 men, while the Royal Navy lost 113 dead and 86 wounded. This, not surprisingly, provoked considerable American anger. In the harbour, French shore batteries and naval vessels bombarded two Royal Navy destroyers flying the stars and stripes, as they attempted to bring in American landing parties, just as they had at Diego Suarez. An airborne operation with a single American parachute battalion to capture Oran’s airfields also proved a fiasco. Operation Torch appeared to be falling to pieces in a grotesque farce.
Despite Roosevelt’s request to keep the Free French in ignorance, Churchill had asked General Ismay to call General Pierre Billotte, de Gaulle’s chief of staff, to warn him of the invasion just before the troops began to land. But Billotte decided not to wake de Gaulle, who had gone to bed early.
When de Gaulle heard the news next morning, he was incandescent with rage. ‘
I hope the Vichy people
will throw them into the sea,’ he stormed. ‘You don’t get France by burglary!’ But by the time he had lunched with a soothing Churchill, de Gaulle had calmed down. That evening he made a broadcast fully in support of the Allied operation.
Only when American troops arrived in strength, many hours late due to the chaotic landings, did Darlan’s attitude change. He asked to meet the commander of the 34th Infantry Division to discuss a ceasefire, and one was agreed for Algiers. French troops would march back to barracks without surrendering their arms.
Hitler’s suspicions about the reliability of the Vichy regime as an ally flared up. Severing diplomatic relations with the United States was not enough, nor was Pierre Laval’s agreement to allow Axis aircraft to use French airfields in Tunisia. On 9 November, Laval was summoned to Munich and challenged to prove his loyalty to Germany by declaring war on the Allies. This was a step too far for Laval, and also for the rest of the administration in Vichy.
Darlan, meanwhile, would not extend the ceasefire to Casablanca and Oran, where fighting still continued. He needed to know what was happening in Munich and in France. Confusion mounted with the arrival in Algiers of General Giraud, followed by General Mark Clark, who indicated that they should prepare to drop Giraud and deal with Darlan instead. Giraud fortunately accepted that Darlan was his senior and did not make a fuss. But Eisenhower, back in the humid tunnels of the Rock of Gibraltar, had only a few confusing reports on which to assess progress. Nothing had been heard from General Patton on the Casablanca landings. A keyed-up Eisenhower chain-smoked his Camel cigarettes and prayed for the best.
In Munich Hitler accompanied by Count Ciano, Mussolini’s foreign secretary, received Laval and demanded that French troops should secure ports and airfields in Tunisia for the landing of Axis troops. French resentment against Italy, after Mussolini’s stab-in-the-back in June 1940, was so intense that Laval hesitated over allowing Italian forces on French territory. But he indicated that he would bow to a German ultimatum, providing Marshal Pétain could make a formal protest.
The next morning, 10 November, Darlan came to the Hôtel Saint-Georges in Algiers, which Clark had taken over as his headquarters. Clark’s undiplomatic manner did not go down well with Darlan, who emphasized that he held a much more senior rank. Clark even threatened to impose Allied military government on the whole of French North Africa. Darlan kept his temper, because he had to play for time. He could not order the ceasefire which Clark so urgently wanted until Hitler ordered troops into
the demilitarized zone of France, thus breaching the 1940 armistice agreement. Eisenhower, on hearing from Clark that negotiations had stalled, exploded: ‘
Jee-sus Christ!
What I need around here is a damned good assassin.’ At least Oran was secured that day by the US 1st Infantry Division at the cost of 300 casualties, but French forces were still resisting Patton’s troops in Morocco even after almost all their warships had been sunk off Casablanca in a furious battle.
Early the next day, Hitler announced that German troops would occupy southern and south-eastern France in Operation Anton. He would still recognize Pétain’s government, but the Marshal’s reputation was now in tatters. Many of his supporters felt that he should have fled to North Africa to join the Allies. Hitler also gave orders that the Pyrenees should be occupied by German troops. Franco’s government feared that Hitler might demand the passage of troops through Spain to attack Gibraltar, and a council of ministers in Madrid on 13 November ordered a partial mobilization.
With the German move into the unoccupied zone of France, Darlan was now able to argue that Pétain was a prisoner. He gave instructions that the ceasefire should extend throughout French North Africa. But Darlan did not manage to deliver the French fleet in Toulon, as Churchill had hoped. The commander there, Contre-Amiral Jean de Laborde, who resented Darlan and feared that his sailors and officers wanted to join the hated Anglo-Saxons, remained loyal to Vichy in splendid isolation. Assured by officers of the Kriegsmarine that German forces would not try to seize his ships or the port of Toulon, Laborde decided to stay put. But the arrival of SS panzer troops, and increasing dissent among his crews, forced him to make up his mind. As German forces entered the port, he gave the order to scuttle the fleet. Almost a hundred warships were sunk or blown up.
Operation Torch had cost the Allies 2,225 casualties, of whom roughly half were killed, and the French lost around 3,000. As both Patton and Clark acknowledged, the chaos of the landings had been lamentable. If they had been fighting the German army instead of badly armed French colonial troops, they would have been massacred. British officers made supercilious jokes about ‘
How Green is our Ally
’, but the disorganization and chaotic logistics made painful reading in the after-action reports. Above all it proved that General Marshall’s desire to launch an early invasion of France would have led to catastrophe. Whatever the motives of Churchill and General Brooke in forcing the Americans to invade North Africa, the result was undeniably the right one. The US Army had a great deal to learn before it could take on the Wehrmacht in northern Europe or even in Tunisia.
The morale of troops is often volatile, swinging wildly between
dejection and exultation. The easy victory in Morocco and Algeria prompted an unsustainable optimism. Their mood boosted by the cheap local wine, American soldiers believed that they had been blooded and were almost battle-hardened. Those who had seen the obsolete French Renault tanks brought to a halt with their new bazookas, yelled: ‘
Bring on the panzers!
’ Even Eisenhower told Roosevelt that he expected to take Tripoli by late January.
NOVEMBER 1942–FEBRUARY 1943
O
ut on the frozen Don steppe, word of the Soviet encirclement spread rapidly in the Sixth Army. On 21 November 1942, Paulus and his chief of staff flew from their headquarters at Golubinsky in the two remaining Fieseler Storch light aircraft to Nizhne-Chirskaya, outside the
Kessel
. There, they held a conference the next day with General Hoth of the Fourth Panzer Army to discuss the situation and to communicate over a secure line with Army Group B. But Hitler, on hearing where Paulus was, accused him of abandoning his troops and ordered him to fly back to rejoin his staff at Gumrak, fifteen kilometres west of Stalingrad. Paulus was deeply aggrieved by this slur and Hoth had to calm him down.
They discussed Hitler’s order for the Sixth Army to stand firm despite the threat of ‘
temporary encirclement
’. Assuming that Hitler would soon come to his senses, they agreed that the Sixth Army needed urgent resupply by air of fuel and ammunition in order to break out. But the commander of VIII Fliegerkorps warned them that the Luftwaffe simply did not have enough transport aircraft to supply a whole army. With his panzer formations short of fuel, and his infantry divisions deprived of their horses, Paulus knew that the Sixth Army would have to abandon all its artillery, to say nothing of its wounded, if it were to escape. His chief of staff, Generalleutnant Arthur Schmidt, ‘
a bull-necked
man, with small eyes and thin lips’, observed that ‘
that would be a Napoleonic ending
’. Paulus, who had studied the campaign of 1812 in great detail, was haunted by the prospect. Generalmajor Wolfgang Pickert, the commander of the Luftwaffe 9th Flak Division, arrived during the meeting. He said that he was pulling his division out immediately. He too knew that the Luftwaffe could never hope to supply the Sixth Army by air.
Hitler had no intention of allowing his troops to withdraw from Stalingrad. He had invested so much of his reputation in the capture of the city, especially his boasts during the Munich speech just two weeks before, that he could not bear to pull back. He ordered Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein to leave the northern front and form a new Army Group Don, to break through and relieve the Sixth Army. Göring, on hearing what Hitler intended, summoned his most senior transport officers. Although the Sixth Army needed 700 tons of supplies per day, Göring asked his
officers whether they could manage 500. They replied that 350 tons would be the absolute maximum, and then only for a short time. Göring, hoping to curry favour with Hitler, then assured Führer headquarters that the Luftwaffe could resupply the Sixth Army. This false promise sealed the fate of Paulus and his forces. On 24 November, Hitler ordered ‘Fortress Stalingrad’ with its front on the Volga to hold out ‘
whatever the circumstances
’.
