England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  On its 4,000-foot-high plateau Tananarive, with its convenient ridge lines and magnificent view of the surrounding plain, was a natural fortress and the British had been approaching it with some foreboding. But Annet and Guillemet had slipped away with a couple of thousand men heading for the island’s vast southern hinterland where other loyal regiments were waiting for them. Madagascar’s stunning capital was hardly defended at all and therefore spared the shells and bombs that would have been used to break into it had British troops met another Joffre line. All Macnab’s men had encountered was a small rearguard above the city’s military airfield where a Sergeant Walasi won a Military Medal when his platoon captured two gun crews before they had begun the harassing fire they had planned.

  Shortly after this Macnab met the Chef du District who informed him that the French Army had left. But there seems to have been more than one authority at work, for a more flamboyant emissary was on his way to meet the British advance. Peter Simpson-Jones, a brave if sometimes accident-prone Royal Navy lieutenant in Special Operations Executive, had delivered a transmitter to an agent in Réunion and been captured after his dinghy capsized in shark-filled waters while trying to return to an SOE launch. A companion drowned.* Kitted out by his captors in a new white summer uniform and a chauffeur-driven Renault with a flag to match his clothes, he had been released with instructions to find General Piatt and bring him back to the Tananarive Mairie where the mayor was waiting to surrender his city. Being the enterprising fellow he was this is exactly what Simpson-Jones did, finding Platt at the head of a long convoy of military vehicles and not amused to find his progress blocked by a young man in a Renault, dressed for sundowners in Shanghai and purporting to be an officer in the Royal Navy.

  The next day, the 24th, Platt took the salute at a victory parade. But the vanquished were not being buried or herded into prisoner-of-war camps. They had disappeared. Governor General Annet was now at Fianarantsoa which was about 150 miles south of the capital and the last big town in Madagascar that was still in Vichy hands. From there, knowing full well it would be picked up by British wireless intercepts, he sent a telegram to the Colonial Ministry in Vichy: ‘Although Tananarive has been occupied, our available troops are preparing to resist every enemy advance in the other sector of the island with the same spirit which inspired our soldiers at Diego Suarez, at Majunga, at Tananarive and other places, where each time the defence became a page of heroism written by “La France”.’

  While the defence of Diego Suarez’s Joffre line had undoubtedly been a spirited affair, the rest of his message, as Annet knew full well, was arrant nonsense. But by now the governor general had a very clear picture of what Laval expected of him. A few days earlier he had been firmly rapped over the knuckles for even daring to suggest that he should remain in Tananarive to negotiate its surrender with Platt while his Chef de bureau Claude Ponvienne and a team of civil servants went south with the troops to administer what they continued to hold. In a reply that, judging by its tone, had spent some time on Laval’s desk, this was arrogantly rejected for ‘reasons of general policy which may escape you but which outweigh your arguments’.

  For Laval the Madagascar campaign was a godsend, an opportunity to demonstrate to the Germans France’s willingness to fight the British however hopeless the circumstances. Unlike Syria there would be no surrender. Vichy Madagascar would fight to the finish, thereby tying up thousands of British troops that could be better employed elsewhere. Annet must be Vichy’s symbol of resistance to an English army of occupation. This indeed was collaboration.

  It was Chef de bureau Ponvienne who remained behind to greet Platt who decreed that the French flag would continue to fly over Tananarive and asked local officials to remain at their posts under temporary military government which would ‘respect local customs’. But this was not enough for Ponvienne who refused to collaborate in any way and urged others to do the same. Eventually he was interned, thereby ensuring that his credit remained high in Vichy which presumably was all that mattered.

  At this point, with the campaign almost won and Guillemet’s remnant of no more than nuisance value, the obvious solution should have been to install a Gaullist administration while Platt got on with what was left of the fighting. In London on 6 September, four days before Madagascar’s second round started at Port Majunga, this is exactly what Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had promised Maurice Dejean, de Gaulle’s Commissioner for African Affairs. But plans for major developments elsewhere had meant that the offer had to be put on hold just as Eden was hoping that Anglo-Gaullist relations were about to start running a little more smoothly.

  That they had recently gone through a bumpy patch was undeniable. In early May, de Gaulle, recovering from a serious bout of malaria after inspecting some of his Equatorial African possessions, had been enraged to discover that Free France had not been invited on the Madagascar expedition. But in June there was reconciliation and even tears of joy, rare for de Gaulle who unlike Churchill was not much given to lachrymose display. The occasion was the Prime Minister’s fulsome tribute to the 3,700 Free French troops under Général de brigade Marie-Pierre Koenig for the stand they had made against Rommel at Libya’s Bir Hacheim. Shortly afterwards Churchill had spoken of his vision of them both being back in France together ‘perhaps next year’.

  Then in August the Churchill-de Gaulle roller coaster had taken another dip. This time it was over Lebanon and Syria. British insistence that Général Catroux honour his pre-invasion pledge of independence for their Arabic-peaking peoples was suspected, perhaps rightly, of being an Anglo-Saxon ploy to turn the French Levant into another of its beholden client states. British diplomacy had already forged the Hashemite kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan. Now Glubb Pasha was about to ride roughshod over the ghosts of Fashoda.

  The prompt insertion of a Gaullist administration in Madagascar would have undoubtedly gone some way towards smoothing over this latest tiff. But something much bigger than this sort of political knitting was afoot, a plan that was such an ambitious contribution towards the waging of war against Nazi Germany that nothing was going to be allowed to jeopardize it. As much as Churchill and Eden would have liked to start handing over the running of Madagascar to the Free French it was no longer quite the right time to do it. The trouble was, they were not yet in a position to explain a word of it to de Gaulle.

  France’s best overseas possessions were its closest: Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia with their deserts and mountains, superb Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines and volatile peoples. The most important was Algeria. Quite apart from being by far the biggest of the three it was different from the others because it was neither a colony or a protectorate. It was an integral part of France which, in happier times, elected deputies to the French parliament. Some 9 million Arabs and Berbers had about 1 million Europeans living among them. Some were the descendants of Alsatians displaced by the result of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Others came from the kind of hardy and enterprising peasant stock that used to go to Canada before the English got hold of it. At least half were not originally French at all but of Spanish, Italian and Maltese descent.

  This was where, if Churchill’s deepest wishes had come true in 1940, Free France would have taken root with Weygand’s army and Darlan’s ships. There would have been no Afrika Korps because, long before the Germans had time to send reinforcements, the French and British armies would have attacked Mussolini’s Libya from either end and met in the middle. There would have been no siege of Malta because the Anglo-French fleets would command the Mediterranean. Another Anglo-French force under somebody like Koenig, certainly no braver but perhaps a bit brighter than Freyberg, might have won the Battle of Crete and inflicted the first land defeat on the unstoppable Wehrmacht.

  Now an Anglo-American army was going to try to do at least some of the things an Anglo-French one might have accomplished two years before. The United States was in almost its twelfth month of war against Nazi Germany and the nearest it ha
d come to a land action in Europe was allowing fifty of its Rangers, who had been training with the Commandos, to accompany their mentors on August’s disastrous Dieppe raid. President Roosevelt was only too aware of this. In order to take the pressure off the Russians, whose losses seemed increasingly insupportable, he wanted to open a second front. The most obvious place to strike was at the limit of Hitler’s westwards expansion across the English Channel. At the very least the Americans wanted to establish a bridgehead in somewhere like Brest or Cherbourg and then break out of it the following spring.

  This sort of talk frightened Churchill. He knew that they were not yet strong enough for it. Dieppe had been lesson enough. The army was of the same opinion and mass demonstrations in Trafalgar Square demanding help for Uncle Joe Stalin with chants of ‘Second Front Now’ were worrying. ‘Many of them seemed to think that the Russians had come into the war solely for our benefit,’ Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had noted in his diary. ‘A premature Western Front could only result in the most appalling shambles.’ And since any such attack would have to be launched from Britain with mainly British forces, on this the British had the last word.

  The Prime Minister was, of course, all for striking the Axis elsewhere. But his suggestion that they mount a joint expedition to seize French North Africa and attack Rommel in the rear was not at first received with much enthusiasm. The US Army agreed with the crowds in Trafalgar Square. They wanted Berlin or Bust. Less than 600 miles from the French coast to the German capital, and flattish most of the way, did not seem all that far for an American. Then Roosevelt tired of the bickering. He wanted to get on and do something before the year was out. ‘Here is your true Second Front of 1942,’ Churchill had said in a message to Washington dated 8 July, and by the end of the month the decision had been made. It was to be called Operation Torch.

  As it happened, the Americans had already done a lot of the spadework for Operation Torch. Roosevelt’s decision to maintain diplomatic relations with Vichy France, a grace-and-favour Nazi client state that Hitler could close down at the click of a switch, had been castigated by the liberal press who wanted America to back de Gaulle. But now it looked like it was going to pay dividends. The diplomat Robert Murphy, for the last eighteen months US Minister to French North Africa living mainly in Algiers and reporting directly to Roosevelt via the US Embassy in Vichy, had been building up an extensive network of Allied sympathizers. Some were serving officers, others influential civilians, and between them they had the makings of the kind of fifth column that might well make Operation Torch a bloodless affair.

  But Murphy’s conspirators, while united by a common desire to defeat Germany and liberate France, often had little else in common. Many were Pétainists who had convinced themselves they were only doing what their maréchal secretly desired. Others were royalists who dreamed of restoring their heir apparent, the Count of Paris, to the throne. A growing number were Communists who felt that the valour of the Red Army was living proof of the innate goodness of Stalin. By necessity they were almost all pro-American but few were pro-Gaullist. De Gaulle was rightly seen as Churchill’s creation. Few knew or cared about the difficulties Churchill was having putting his genie back in the bottle. And generally the British were much more disliked in North Africa than they were in metropolitan France. At Mers-el-Kébir the regiment of graves and the rusting wrecks in the harbour were hard to miss. And since then there had been Syria and Madagascar. Delicate discussions were taking place between Murphy and his contacts, assurances demanded that French North Africa remained French North Africa. This was why it was not a good time for the Americans’ British allies to be seen to be installing a Gaullist administration in Tananarive.

  So while Annet and Guillemet dragged the campaign on into the malarial mush of the island’s rainy season the Madagascan capital remained in Platt’s military limbo. South of the capital the main problem was roadblocks. Some had become almost major feats of engineering. One stretched for 2 miles. The South African armoured car crews, which were normally in the lead, had to make gaps through twenty-nine stone walls of which the widest measured 18 feet across. Another had consumed 800 felled trees in the space of half a mile. Alongside the roads the undergrowth was so thick it was usually impossible to go round these obstacles.

  Annet was almost killed when a Fleet Air Arm Fulmar strafed his car near Fianarantsoa. By then his own air force had been reduced to three biplanes and a single Morane fighter. The Morane astonished a column of King’s African Rifles, who had never known aircraft that were not their own, when it appeared to want to share the same muddy track with them then started machine-gunning. One man was wounded. Over the next week South African-crewed Beauforts and Marylands sniffed out the Vichy aircraft on their bush landing strips and destroyed them parked and unmanned on the ground. But the Morane was still at large.

  Some of the Africans followed the railway line from Tananarive southeast into the temperate climes and misty mornings of the line’s terminus at Antsirabe, a spa town with thermal springs 4,000 feet up the island’s second highest peak. In the 1920s its optimistic developers advertised it as the ‘Vichy of Madagascar’. As they approached, the King’s African Rifles had one of their white officers killed and five men wounded by a mortar bomb but the town itself was not heavily defended. One account refers to ‘a little light sniping’, though sniping light or heavy can ruin any man’s day. Defended ridge lines invited artillery and air attack but were almost invariably deserted by the time the infantry got up to them. Sometimes they discovered machine guns and mortars too heavy to carry away in a hurry.

  Then Guillemet lost his last two 75mm field guns when the East Africans cut off and captured 700 of his men, among them almost 200 Europeans who probably included some sailors and marines from Diego Suarez. The British-officered troops suffered no casualties. After that, delaying actions rarely delayed very long. Malagasy morale started to crumble and they began to desert in droves. ‘The French shoot us if we run away in battle so better to desert before,’ one told K.C. Gandar Dower, The Times’s correspondent. When they had run out of bombs aircrews sometimes hurried the battle-weary along by dropping empty beer bottles which emitted a ghastly shriek followed by a puzzling silence. It was obviously close to the end. Yet on 23 October Annet remained at large and some of his men still had enough fight in them to keep their nerve and put up enough fire to kill the observer when one of the Fleet Air Arm’s Albacores put in a low-level attack. Then the last Morane was destroyed on the ground. In Vichy, Laval’s Foreign Ministry at the old Hôtel de L’Angleterre released daily bulletins to the German Armistice Commission drawing their attention to the ‘heroic resistance of the French troops’ in Madagascar.

  But the only people who noticed were the British and then only with irritation, all the grudging admiration the Joffre line had induced long since evaporated by this Quixotic defiance so irrelevant to the rest of the world conflict. In Russia two enormous armies were beginning to square up to each other at Stalingrad. In Egypt’s Western Desert Montgomery started his long awaited offensive against Rommel at El Alamein and some half a million men with thousands of tanks and artillery were locked in a 1914–18–style battle the like of which the desert war had not seen before. And aboard His Majesty’s Submarine Seraph, a mile out from the heavy surf off the Algerian coast, a trouserless American general, whose recent adventures ashore Churchill had backed with ‘the entire resources of the British Empire’, was celebrating his success with a mug of navy rum.

  Mark Clark was the London-based deputy of Dwight Eisenhower, the lieutenant general who had been made the supreme commander of the 112,000 American and British troops involved in Operation Torch. A tall man, Clark was the product of Pennsylvania and Romania. He had inherited some of the dark good looks and slightly aquiline nose of his Bucharest Jewish mother and the physique of his Episcopalian father Colonel Charles Clark, a veteran of the Spanish-American War. At 6 foot 2 inches the general was not the be
st size for small British submarines – he kept banging his head – and even less for canoes. But what he had just done was going to be a valuable contribution to Operation Torch and possibly of even more benefit to Mark Wayne Clark who was clever, brave and at times the most egotistical American commander since George Armstrong Custer. Only luckier.

  In four two-man foldboat canvas kayaks, all but one coxed by a British Commando officer, Clark and four staff officers had got ashore easily enough the night before. A strong offshore wind had made coming back a different matter. But shortly before dawn they had eventually succeeded in riding the incoming surf and returning to the Seraph after a long and fruitful meeting with Murphy’s star recruit. At a clifftop seaside house near the town of Cherchell 65 miles west of Algiers, Murphy and Clark had spent almost a day in talks with a French Army delegation headed by Général Charles Mast.

  Mast was the mouthpiece of Général Henri-Honoré Giraud. Up until 16 April 1942 Giraud, who had been captured in the third week of the Blitzkrieg when his headquarters was overrun, had been the most senior French officer in German captivity. Then in the early hours of the 17th he had lowered himself down a 150-foot rope to escape from the old Saxon fortress of Königstein on the Elbe. Ten days later, having passed through Switzerland, Giraud was lunching with Pétain in Vichy. Laval was furious and wanted the distinguished escapee to give himself up to the Germans but the maréchal would not hear of it. He had sanctuary.

  Giraud, who was 63 and slightly lamed by an old wound, was perhaps what Conan Doyle had in mind when he invented Brigadier Gerard, the Napoleonic Hussar: immensely tall, magnificently moustached and, if not always all that bright, a man of unquestionable gallantry and integrity. His departure from Königstein was his second escape from German capture, his first being in 1914 when, wounded, he got out of a military hospital to neutral Holland. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, with these considerable attributes went the same views on who was mostly to blame for the defeat in 1940 – the British – and the general decline in France that preceded it – Léon Blum and the Popular Front – as every other ardent Pétainist. De Gaulle was, at the very least, misguided and Giraud wanted nothing to do with him or his English paymasters. He differed in only one important respect from most of the senior French officers who welcomed him in Vichy: he was utterly convinced that Germany was going to lose the war and France must make a pact with the Americans and renew hostilities.