Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  For their part, the British, who had opposed the concept of a unified command from the start, were far from happy that an unknown American general with no combat experience was about to lead their men into battle. Alan Brooke was as dismissive of Eisenhower as he was of Marshall, and the relationship between the two was frosty until the end of the war. While condescendingly crediting the American with “wonderful charm” and “a greater share of luck than most of us receive in life,” Brooke had almost nothing good to say about Eisenhower’s prowess as a commander, once remarking that he “had only the vaguest conception of war.” A British admiral who served under Eisenhower described him during this period as “completely sincere, straightforward, and very modest,” but “not very sure of himself.”

  Still, while Eisenhower may have been tentative and unsure about many things, he never wavered in his demands for a complete integration of the Anglo-American war effort. According to Mark Perry, a biographer of Eisenhower and Marshall, no other officer of Eisenhower’s generation, British or American, had “a comparable understanding of the importance of forging and maintaining such a coalition.” When the British argued that their field commanders should have the right to appeal to the War Office if they disagreed with one of his orders, the commander of Torch declared that such a loophole would violate the Anglo-American agreement on unified command. He negotiated a compromise: British commanders who disputed an order must consult him first before any further action could be taken. “This was the Eisenhower formula which was to have far more important consequences than its author could have seen at the start,” Wallace Carroll observed. “Everyone who came into his theater, whether military or civilian, American or British, had to forsake old allegiances and submit to the authority of the theater commander.”

  EISENHOWER’S SEEDBED for Anglo-American unity was Norfolk House, a brick-and-stone neo-Georgian building a few doors down from Nancy Astor’s residence in elegant St. James’s Square. Designated the Allied Force Headquarters for Torch, Norfolk House was, in the minds of some, a somewhat inauspicious location for the alliance’s first joint command. A little more than two hundred years before, George III had been born in the original Norfolk House, a mansion belonging to the Duke of York, on the same site.

  Eisenhower couldn’t have cared less about George III. He insisted that the Americans and Britons on his staff put aside the generations-old divisions between their two countries and act as if they “belonged to a single nation.” It was, he acknowledged, an order that was much easier to deliver than to carry out. Having had very little contact between the two world wars, the U.S. and British military knew almost nothing about the way the other operated. When General Frederick Morgan was assigned to Eisenhower’s command in the fall of 1942, he received a document from Allied headquarters that he read in complete bewilderment. Morgan recalled that he “did not understand one single word” of what he was staring at. “Here was a vast assemblage of words which were undoubtedly English but which conveyed to me not one single thing, and I was eventually forced to call for skilled interpretation of American military language.”

  In the beginning, there also were personality clashes, misunderstandings, and feuds—so many, in fact, that Eisenhower likened the early relationship between the two nationalities on his staff to “the attitude of a bulldog meeting a tomcat.” Some American officers disliked the whole idea of Torch, “apparently regarding it,” in Eisen hower’s words, “as a British plan into which America had been dragged by the heels.” Although the commander privately shared their views, he warned his countrymen that, if they didn’t put all their energies into the operation and learn to get along with their British counterparts, he would send them home. Over time, his bulldog determination paid off: the Americans on his staff came to acknowledge, as his personal aide, Harry Butcher put it, that “the British are really not red-coated devils” and the British conceded that the Americans might occasionally have a good idea or two.

  However, many combat commanders under him, American and British alike, disagreed. Two of Eisenhower’s closest friends—Mark Clark, his deputy and the chief planner for Torch, and George Patton, leader of one of the invasion’s task forces—were both violently Anglophobic. Patton, who came to London for briefings in the summer of 1942, groused in his diary: “It is very noticeable that most of the American officers here are pro-British, even Ike…. I am not, repeat not, pro-British.”

  Although Eisenhower maintained his relaxed manner and easy grin in public, those closest to him knew the enormous physical and emotional toll that the Torch preparations were exacting. Was it really possible, he wondered, to “invade a neutral country to create a friend,” as Roosevelt had suggested? Smoking up to four packs of Camels a day, he was snappish and depressed—”a three-star bundle of nervous tension,” said Kay Summersby. An American on his staff noted: “He had aged ten years.” Though exhausted, Eisenhower was often unable to sleep at night. When that happened, he would get out of bed and sit by a window, staring out into the darkness for hours, absorbed in anxieties and fears he revealed to no one.

  ON NOVEMBER 4, 1942, the British Eighth Army, commanded by General Bernard Law Montgomery, routed Rommel’s forces at El Alamein, clearing them out of Egypt and pushing them westward in headlong retreat. It was Britain’s first major victory over the Germans in the war, and it gave new life and vigor to Churchill and his beleaguered government, as well as to the country.

  Four days later, some thirty-three thousand American and British troops poured onto the beaches of North Africa. From the first moments of the Torch operation, the inexperience of both planners and troops was glaringly evident. At Casablanca, more than half the landing craft and light tanks sank or foundered in the pounding surf. Many soldiers had no idea what to do when they first got off their ships. General Lucian Truscott, the commander of forces landing at a site north of Casablanca, recalled that “men wandered about aimlessly, hopelessly lost … swearing at each other.”

  Nothing, including the French response to the landings, went as planned. Roosevelt’s conviction that French troops would welcome the American invaders had been based in large part on intelligence from a network of amateur U.S. spies installed in North Africa before the United States entered the war. In a secret deal with Vichy in March 1941, Roosevelt had unfrozen French funds in the United States in exchange for stationing twelve American vice consuls—i.e., intelligence agents—throughout the region. The twelve were hardly professional operatives—they included a winemaker and a Coca-Cola salesman—and German military intelligence, which knew all about them, concluded: “We can only congratulate ourselves on the selection of this group of enemy agents who will give us no trouble.”

  The vice consuls assured the White House that the French army would put up only token resistance against American troops. In turn, the troops were assured that the French would greet the invaders “with brass bands.” In fact, the French fought back fiercely at almost every landing site, with the sharpest resistance aimed at the all-American force at Casablanca. An American major later told the War Department that his “officers as well as men were absolutely dumbfounded at their first taste of battle.” Lucian Truscott noted: “As far as I could see along the beach, there was chaos.” In the view of a disgusted Patton, the Americans would never even have reached the beaches if they had been fighting Germans instead of the French.

  Making matters worse, the French military refused to accept the man handpicked by the Roosevelt administration to make peace in North Africa and become the region’s new leader. General Henri Giraud, who had been captured by the Germans in 1940 before France capitulated, had recently escaped from a prison fortress in Germany and made his way to Vichy. Viewing Giraud as an alternative to both de Gaulle and Pétain, U.S. officials persuaded him to cooperate with the invasion and smuggled him by submarine from France to Gibraltar. Once there, however, Giraud insisted on taking command of the entire operation. When an astonished Eisenhower rejected his demand,
he refused to accompany the first invasion troops. Ever hopeful, the Allies announced in a broadcast to North Africa that Giraud soon would assume leadership of French forces there. The announcement, as Eisenhower remembered, “had no effect whatsoever” on the French; indeed, it was “completely ignored.” The French rejection of Giraud, the Torch commander acknowledged, was “a terrible blow to our expectations.” In a cable to Roosevelt, he noted that the situation in North Africa did “not even remotely resemble prior calculations.”

  At that point, Eisenhower’s sole aim was to end the bloodshed and put his troops on the road to Tunisia. Anyone who helped him achieve that goal would have his support, even if it turned out—as it did—that his putative savior was one of Vichy’s most shameless Nazi collaborators. He was Admiral Jean Darlan, commander of the Vichy armed forces and Pétain’s right-hand man, who happened to be in Algiers visiting his desperately sick son at the time of the landings. Next to Pierre Laval, whom he succeeded as Pétain’s deputy, Darlan was the most reviled of all Vichy officials. He had handed over Indochina to the Japanese, allowed the persecution of French Jews, ordered the mass arrests of Vichy opponents, and supplied Rommel’s troops with food, trucks, and gas. At the time of the landings, Darlan, an ardent Anglophobe, had ordered French forces to fire on Allied troops.

  But for the apolitical Eisenhower, who had virtually no knowledge of internal French matters and little understanding of the national trauma afflicting the country, Darlan’s reported transgressions were not germane. He offered the admiral a deal: in exchange for his engineering a cease-fire, the Allies would appoint him high commissioner, or governor, of North Africa. At first, Darlan dragged his heels, agreeing to the plan and then reneging on it. It wasn’t until he learned that the Germans had occupied Vichy France on November 11 that he ordered an armistice. With that, the fighting in North Africa finally ended.

  For much of the rest of the world, however, Darlan’s transgressions were very much to the point. Eisenhower’s deal, which Roosevelt approved and to which Churchill reluctantly acquiesced, was greeted with a storm of protest around the globe, but particularly in the United States and Britain. “In both our nations, Darlan is a deep-dyed villain,” Eisenhower conceded to his staff.

  To its critics, the deal betrayed a cynicism that undermined the lofty moral position of Allied leaders, chiefly Roosevelt. “America had spoken such fine words, America had proclaimed such proud principles, and now, at the very first temptation, America had to all appearances cast principle aside and struck a bargain with one of the most despicable of Hitler’s foreign lackeys,” Wallace Carroll observed. As the military historian Rick Atkinson put it some sixty years later, “a callow, clumsy army had arrived in North Africa with little notion of how to act as a world power.”

  Darlan’s first actions as high commissioner only stoked his critics’ anger. He upheld anti-Semitic laws in North Africa; imprisoned de Gaulle supporters and other Vichy opponents, including many who had aided the Allied invasion; reinstated Vichy officials who had been deposed in the assault’s initial days; and ordered the jamming of BBC broadcasts. Declaring that “we did not come here to interfere in someone else’s business,” Eisenhower declined to get involved in what he regarded as domestic concerns. An incensed Charles Collingwood, the CBS correspondent covering Torch from Algiers, wrote to his parents about America’s role in Darlan’s rise to power: “We have perpetuated and tacitly supported a regime which is a reasonably accurate facsimile of what we are fighting against. Our excuse is that we must not interfere with French politics. I wonder whether we will enter Germany and say that we must not interfere with German politics.”

  In Algiers, some American critics of Darlan’s actions did more than complain. Officers working in the psychological warfare branch of Eisenhower’s headquarters found hiding places for de Gaulle supporters on the run from Vichy police and even smuggled a few aboard Allied ships bound for Britain. One or two of the more daring Americans wore the Cross of Lorraine, the Free French flag, in their lapels. His psychological warfare staff, Eisenhower later said, gave him more trouble than all the Germans in Africa.

  In London, an apprehensive Winston Churchill warned Roosevelt that recognition of Darlan had stirred up intense revulsion in Britain and on the Continent. “We must not overlook the serious political injury which may be done to our cause … by the feeling that we are ready to make terms with the local Quislings,” he said. Mollie Panter-Downes observed in The New Yorker than many Londoners equated the Darlan agreement with Neville Chamberlain’s conciliation of Hitler. Britons “are convinced,” Panter-Downes wrote, “that appeasement of a man of Vichy or a man of Munich smells just about the same, no matter what fancy name you want to call it.” From the American embassy in London, Wallace Carroll wrote to Roosevelt and his Office of War Information superiors in Washington that the “honeymoon is over” in Britain. “From now on we shall have to fight hard to retain the respect and confidence of the British people.”

  Churchill himself was caught on the horns of the morality-versus-expediency dilemma. Even though his government had not been consulted beforehand about the Darlan deal, both he and Roosevelt had given permission to Eisenhower to use any means necessary to win French cooperation in North Africa. The prime minister had often referred to Darlan as a “turncoat” and “traitor,” but, shortly before the invasion began, he declared: “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 Allied forces.” But Darlan was never able to claim the fleet—it was scuttled by the French after the Germans occupied Vichy-controlled southern France—and the cease-fire he belatedly ordered did not prevent a tidal wave of German troops from flooding into Tunisia. In short, except for ending the fighting, the deal did not achieve any of the Allies’ goals in making it.

  The agreement—and Churchill’s indirect role in it—were so embarrassing to him that he refused to offer an explanation of the deal to the House of Commons unless it met in secret session. When the session took place, the prime minister played both sides, supporting Roosevelt and Eisenhower in the name of Allied unity but pointing out that the agreement had been brokered solely by the Americans. “Since 1776 we have not been in the position of being able to decide the policy of the United States,” he said. “Neither militarily nor politically are we directly controlling the course of events.”

  In the United States, meanwhile, prominent newspaper columnists and radio commentators condemned the deal, as did members of Roosevelt’s own cabinet. Henry Morgenthau, for one, denounced Darlan as a traitor who had sold thousands of his countrymen into slavery and told Roosevelt that the situation in North Africa was “something that afflicts my soul.” Together with Felix Frankfurter, Morgenthau urged the president to clarify American policy toward North Africa and Darlan. Stung by the outpouring of criticism, the president, though resentful, did what the treasury secretary asked. In a statement, he declared that the Darlan agreement had been necessary to save lives but also called it “only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle.”

  THE IMPETUS FOR Morgenthau’s angst was an incendiary broadcast made by Ed Murrow shortly after the Darlan deal became public. Appalled by his country’s leading role in the affair, the most influential broadcast journalist in the United States threw off all pretense of objectivity. “What the hell is this all about?” he stormed to a friend. “Are we fighting Nazis or sleeping with them?” In the broadcast heard by Morgenthau, Murrow ticked off a list of Darlan’s sins. When a German officer was killed in Nantes, Darlan turned over thirty Frenchmen as hostages to the Nazis, all of whom were shot. After taking power in North Africa, he sent European political refugees back to their German-occupied countries. Was this, Murrow asked, the kind of ally we wanted in our fight against the Nazis? Whether the deal was done for military expediency or not, “there is nothing in the strategic position of the Allies to indicate that we ar
e either so strong or so weak that we can afford to ignore the principles for which this war is being fought.” After listening to Murrow’s broadcast, Morgenthau gave transcripts of it to Henry Stimson and Roosevelt himself.

  As it turned out, this was far from Murrow’s only broadcast on the subject. Of all the journalistic critics of the Darlan deal, he was arguably the most outspoken, overtly challenging the administration’s policy again and again. “This is a matter of high principle in which we carry a moral burden we cannot escape,” he told his listeners. “Wherever American forces go, they will carry with them food and money and power, and the quislings will rally to our side if we permit it.”

  The Roosevelt administration was stunned and angered by the faultfinding of a man whom the president considered an ally, a broadcaster in whom FDR had confided on the night of Pearl Harbor and had once tried to hire. When Murrow returned to America for a short visit a couple of months later, he was summoned to the State Department, where an infuriated Cordell Hull gave him a tongue-lashing for allegedly undermining the war effort. “He never raised his voice … made no gesture, but every word cut and stung,” a shaken Murrow told an acquaintance.

  His vehemence over Darlan brought him more public criticism than he had ever before encountered. CBS sponsors and some in his audience complained, as did Paul White, the network’s news editor in New York. “You are endangering your good reputation by seeming to be a constant critic of America,” White cabled Murrow. “It is a fairly common thing these days to hear the crack ‘Ed Murrow is becoming more British than the British.’ ” In late November, International Silver, the sponsor of a weekly Murrow analysis program, canceled its contract, cutting his income in half. (The company, however, evidently thought better of jettisoning one of radio’s most popular news broadcasts and reinstated its sponsorship a month later.)