England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  During the Allies’ Black Spring of 1942 this was, to put it mildly, an unusual point of view that would have found some secret doubters in London, Washington and Moscow let alone Vichy’s Hôtel du Parc. Pétain thought the younger man sadly out of touch and advised him to go under cover. Vichy intelligence had been tipped off that Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was trying to persuade Hitler to let him arrange Giraud’s assassination. Giraud could not have gone very far under cover for, not long after Roosevelt decided on Operation Torch, Murphy had no difficulty in getting in touch through one of his agents, a peanut oil king who practically commuted between Algiers and the south of France.

  It soon became clear that, though the général did indeed want to get his country back into the fight, some hard bargaining lay ahead. Two of Giraud’s demands were totally unacceptable: simultaneous American landings in France as well as North Africa and that all troops involved in the latter, American as well as French, should be under French command. Murphy accepted that this was not because Giraud, whom he came to like and respect, was a vainglorious idiot but because he was a French Arabist who knew the importance of demonstrating American acceptance of French sovereignty to the Arab and Berber population. An insistence that it should be an exclusively American operation, without any British involvement, could be finessed though it could never be more than cosmetic. Most of the ships were British. Excluding de Gaulle could be done, at least in the short term. It was just a matter of making sure the British understood how important it was not to tell him anything before the deed was done.

  Once initial contact with the Americans had been made, Giraud started to communicate through what he told Mast in notes hand-carried to Algiers by trusted army couriers. In the 1930s he and Mast had fought the Rif rebels in Morocco. Then in 1940 they had found themselves in Königstein together. Mast was released after the failed Anglo-Gaullist attack on Dakar when Vichy persuaded Berlin to allow them to increase their North African garrison.

  Now here were the lanky Clark and the stocky Mast sizing each other up over coffee and cigarettes after a breakfast at which the Americans had been surprised to discover sardines. Above them the three Commando officers, warm proof of British collusion, were decently out of sight in a bedroom where they had seized the opportunity to catch up on some sleep. This was to be a Franco-American occasion.

  One of the first things Mast asked was whether the latest Allied intelligence indicated an imminent Axis takeover of French North Africa. Clark replied that it did not. This was the right answer because neither did Vichy’s intelligence, though from time to time Murphy, in the hope of eliciting an invitation for American intervention, had hinted that, at the very least, it was under active consideration. Having established this entirely false note of candour Clark started, in his own words, ‘lying like hell’.

  In September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and the war started, the US Army was nineteenth in size in the world: a little bigger than Bulgaria’s and slightly smaller than Portugal’s. Long before Pearl Harbor Roosevelt had started to rebuild it. Among the British tanks at El Alamein were 300 brand-new Shermans removed in toto from a US armoured division and shipped out. But the US Army was still nothing like as strong as it was going to be. Mast’s main concern was to establish the strength of the forces the Americans proposed to land. German propaganda had built up Dieppe as a failed attempt to establish a bridgehead rather than a raid. Going to the assistance of anything as feeble as that would see them all hanged. Would there be enough of them to do the job?

  Clark did not hesitate. ‘I tried to keep a poker face while saying that half a million Allied troops could come in and I said we could put 2,000 planes in the air as well as plenty of United States Navy. Mast was pretty impressed.’

  Whether Mast was so easily impressed as Clark imagined is hard to say. Perhaps he merely divided by half and was impressed enough. In which case the 112,000 coming ashore was still slightly less than half of what he was expecting.

  Clark made it clear that ‘logistical problems’ made it impossible to make a simultaneous landing in the south of France, which did not quite fit with another claim he made that the shipping was available to land half a million men. Mast let this pass. But he did point out that the obvious Wehrmacht response to an Allied presence in North Africa and a threat from across the Mediterranean would be to put an end to Pétain’s unoccupied France and place it firmly behind the concrete and steel of Festung Europa.

  Mast relayed a request from Giraud that arrangements should be made for an American submarine to pick him up as soon as possible and, though Clark knew it would have to be a British boat, this was agreed. ‘What I could not tell Mast, and had to be careful not to reveal by any slip of the tongue, was that Torch had actually gotten anywhere beyond the planning stage. And this with the leading elements of our armada actually at sea.’

  Mast had to return to Algiers well before lunch which Clark describes as ‘chicken with a hot Arab sauce served with red wine and some oranges’. It was prepared by Lieutenant Jacques Teissier whose father Henri owned the house along with considerable other lands and properties. Teissier and most of the other staff officers stayed on as briefings continued well into the afternoon, their visitors filling page after page of their notebooks as almost every aspect of the landings were discussed. Clark was delighted. ‘They gave us locations of strengths of troops and naval units, told us where gasoline and ammunition were stored, supplied details about airports where resistance would be heaviest and information about where our airborne troops could land safely.’

  In return the Americans had promised the swift delivery by submarine of 2,000 British Sten guns and ammunition that had been requested so that armouries and headquarters and other key positions could be secured by small groups of picked men.

  Then in the late afternoon the meeting came to an abrupt end. Teissier received a telephone call from somebody he knew in the local gendarmerie warning him that they were about to receive a visit. Later it would turn out that the household’s Arab servants, told to absent themselves for a couple of days, suspected some large-scale smuggling enterprise was afoot and had informed the police in expectation of the reward money on general offer. All the French officers except Teissier fled, some of them changing into civilian clothes as they went. ‘One would have thought that 50 dead skunks had been thrown on the table,’ recalled Clark. ‘I can’t say I blamed any one of them for their lives would certainly have been in jeopardy if caught.’

  One of the Commando officers was sent into some nearby woods with the experimental walkie-talkie radio they had been issued, a tremendous leap in wireless technology, to contact the submarine and tell them they were in trouble. The rest of them disappeared into the pitch-dark of a wine cellar, its trapdoor entrance closed above them and covered with a rug. There was no time to remove the boats which were in a locked storeroom.

  They were all armed to the teeth with Colt .45 automatics, Thompsons and the neat new M1 carbine Winchester had just provided for the US Army which everybody wanted for hunting after the war though it would prove no better at killing deer than it was people. General Clark, 46, and in action for the first and last time in 1918 when a shell had removed him from that war just a few hours after he caught up with it, took command of his six men.

  I knelt at the foot of the stairs with a carbine in my hands.* It was my intention, if they came down, to try and fight our way clear without shooting; but all of us were prepared to shoot if it were necessary. I whispered that no-one was to fire unless I did. It might be hours before we were able to get through the surf to our submarine … Poor Courtney [Captain Godfrey ‘Jumbo’ Courtney, the British Commandos’ canoeing expert who had started badly by capsizing his own boat as they left the Seraph] was seized with a coughing fit. He coughed and spluttered in the darkness and whispered, ‘General, I’m afraid I’ll choke.’ I said, ‘I’m afraid you won’t.’

  Eventually Clark attempted to soothe Courtney’s co
ugh by passing on his well-worked wad of chewing gum. Courtney complained that British chewing gum was much sweeter. Above them they could hear the rattle of poker dice, the clinking of glasses and the slurred voices of Teissier and Robert Murphy who began to sing some mournful Irish dirge full of Celtic loathing for the Anglo-Saxon. Clark thought this was overdoing it a bit, though Murphy, for years a man of irreproachable public persona, obviously felt it was a talented contribution. ‘I posed as a somewhat inebriated member of a raucous social gathering,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘Fortunately the police were not looking for military conspirators but for smugglers.’

  Having failed to get much sense out of these well-connected people the gendarmes left, muttering that they would be back when they had consulted senior officers. As soon as it was dark enough Clark and his party returned to the beach. To cut down on the weight the canoes were carrying, most of the weapons were handed over to Lieutenant Tiessier who knew people who might soon have more need of them.

  Clark also divested himself of a heavy money belt packed with gold Canadian dollars that had been procured in London from the Bank of England. He had them in case they failed to make a rendezvous with the submarine and it became necessary to buy a boat and crew. Fearing that the weight of the coins might drown him in the undertow he had parcelled the belt in his trousers and stowed them well into the forward part of the boat where he could feel them with his feet. When, during his first attempt to get through the waves, the kayak capsized Clark managed to retain his paddle but not his parcel which is why the general arrived on the Seraph without his trousers.

  In Madagascar Annet finally surrendered on 5 November, forty-two days after the capture of Tananarive, having sent his aide-de-camp Capitaine Louis Fauché and a Norwegian clergyman to ask for terms. He was informed they were exactly the same as they had been six months before. The ceasefire came into force at one minute past midnight on 6 November which was exactly six months, to the day if not the hour, after the campaign started with the British air strikes on Diego Suarez. Fauché is widely reported to have done this because a minimum of six months’ hostilities were required to qualify a French soldier for a campaign medal and even certain cash rewards. If this was true, like many Vichy projects, it was doomed to disappointment.

  Total British casualties for operations Stream, Line and Jane starting with the attack on Port Majunga on 10 September are put at 142 killed or wounded. On the French side reliable figures are unavailable but allowing for the British superiority in artillery and aircraft it is reasonable to suppose it must have been at least twice that. Annet was transported to South Africa and comfortably interned in Durban where he began work on his memoir, Aux heures troublées de l’Afrique française. Later he would be handed over to the Free French.

  In London de Gaulle and Churchill were dancing one of their by now well-choreographed reconciliation minuets. The first steps were taken by the Prime Minister.

  Major Sir Desmond Morton, a pale and mysterious former artillery officer said to have survived a shot through the heart, was one of Churchill’s intimates on his personal staff at Number 10. His main duties were to liaise between the PM and the secret services, and at one point he was official deliverer of the ULTRA decrypts from Bletchley. But because he spoke good French, and in 1918 had been aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Haig, he had from the outset also had a liaison role with the Gaullists.

  On Friday, 30 October, Morton called on de Gaulle at his headquarters in Carlton Gardens. Ostensibly, the reason for his visit was to congratulate him on the recent exploits of the Dundee-based Free French submarine Junon: a fjord penetrated and Commandos put ashore for a raid that closed down a Norwegian aluminium plant; an Oslo-bound freighter torpedoed. All such a contrast to the performance of the mammoth Surcouf, seized at the same time as the Junon though in distinctly bloodier circumstances. Never a happy or effective boat and without a single sinking to her credit, in February Surcouf had been lost with all hands in the Caribbean after a night collision with an American freighter.

  De Gaulle responded to Morton’s praise for his submarine with kind words about General Montgomery’s efforts at El Alamein, though it was still far from certain that the British were winning. Morton said that it was a terrible thing that relations had been allowed to reach such a low ebb and it was about time there was ‘a more favourable evolution’. Madagascar was coming to an end and perhaps the général might consider who he would like to appoint as its new governor. By 5 November de Gaulle had told Churchill that he wanted Général Le Gentilhomme, who had taken over Damascus after the Vichy French moved out, to do the same thing in Madagascar.

  D-Day for Operation Torch, the Anglo-Saxons’ next and biggest incursion into French territory without a Gaullist imprimatur, was only three days away on 8 November. Churchill planned to tell him just before it happened. ‘As some means of softening this slight to him and his Movement, I arranged to confide the trusteeship of Madagascar to his hands.’

  But when Churchill informed Roosevelt of his intentions the President was concerned. Any suggestion that de Gaulle had been consulted was seen as a threat to ‘our promising efforts’ to bring the Vichy French forces in North Africa over to the Allied side. ‘I consider it inadvisable for you to give de Gaulle any information subsequent to a successful landing. You would then inform him that the American commander of an American expedition with my approval insisted on complete secrecy.’ For good measure Roosevelt pointed out that de Gaulle’s announcement that he was about to send his own governor general to Madagascar ‘will not be of any assistance to Torch and it should be sufficient at the present time to maintain his prestige with his followers’.

  Churchill did what he was told and made arrangements to have lunch with de Gaulle on the first day of Operation Torch. Now he had the time bomb ticking away at Carlton Gardens to worry about as well as the success of the landings. Axis Gibraltar-watchers in Spain had already noted part of the invasion fleet gathering around the British bastion. Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica reconnaissance flights confirmed them. The Rock’s airport, with its newly extended runway created by the spoil Canadian mining engineers had tunnelled out while improving its defences, also seemed to be a bit busier than usual. But when the reports and the aerial photographs were analysed in Berlin, Rome and Vichy they got it wrong. By 7 November Hitler in particular became convinced that, after Montgomery’s indisputable victory at El Alamein, the British were planning to cut off Rommel’s retreat with a landing at Tripoli or Benghazi. U-boats moved hundreds of miles in the wrong direction – eastwards – to be ready to intercept them.

  Shortly after midnight on 8 May General Pug Ismay, Churchill’s Chief of Staff, telephoned General Pierre Billotte, his opposite number at Carlton Gardens, and told him that in about three hours’ time the Americans would be making landings along the French North African coast. De Gaulle, who had just returned from a reception at the Soviet Embassy, was asleep and Billotte needed his own. He told him at six next morning when de Gaulle’s reaction was entirely predictable. ‘I hope these Vichy people are going to throw them into sea,’ he said, and much more.

  But by the time he was taking lunch with the Prime Minister he had calmed down. Rather than rage over Free France’s exclusion, another insult to the Cross of Lorraine with the ink on the Madagascar ceasefire hardly dry, he had decided to celebrate and exploit the landings. ‘You’ll see. One day we’ll go down the Champs Elysées together,’ a much relieved Churchill told him at the end of their meal. On leaving it was noted that his guest was smiling. This was not what was expected.

  From lunch de Gaulle went directly to Portland Place and made a live broadcast on the BBC French language service. He started by praising the British for their success against Rommel, and the Russians for their stubborn defence of Stalingrad. Then he urged his countrymen in North Africa to rise up and embrace the opportunity the Allied landings offered. ‘Let us return through you to the line of battle and there it will be: the war won
– thanks to France.’

  None of his listeners had been given the slightest reason to believe that the news of this extraordinary opportunity was as much a surprise to him as it was to them. On the contrary, it might well have been his own idea.

  PART FOUR

  Operation Torch and the

  end of Fighting Vichy

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Poliomyelitis is an acutely infectious viral disease which is no respecter of diet, hygiene or generations of healthy genes. Most people make a complete recovery and may have thought they had had nothing more than a bad dose of flu. But about 20 per cent of its victims suffer varying degrees of incurable paralysis. In 1942, some twenty years before the Salk vaccine started to eradicate the worst effects of polio in the western world, it was almost as capricious as the bombs that so casually consumed streets full of non-combatant innocents. With utter impartiality and devastating suddenness, it entered the homes of rich and poor alike.