England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  ‘Very well,’ said Murphy, taking a deep breath. ‘Let us talk with Darlan.’ And so the die was cast.

  In Gibraltar Giraud was being as stubborn as ever. Well after their dinner break he was still insisting that a Frenchman must be in overall command of an Anglo-American expedition into French territory. Left unsaid were all the European colonial concerns that, French or British, so deeply irritated the Americans who could not care less if Arabs and Berbers, already emboldened by Germany’s recent colonization of their colonizers, would regard a purely US intervention as another important step towards independence.

  With so little time left for even a radio statement from Giraud to be of any use at all, Eisenhower decided to play good cop, bad cop. Clark was bad cop.

  ‘Tell him,’ bad cop said to Colonel Holmes, ‘that we would like the honourable general to know that the time of his usefulness to the Americans and the restoration of the glory that once was France is NOW.’

  ‘But what would the French people think of me? What about the prestige of Giraud? What about my family?’

  Clark repeated that they were more than happy to see him commanding all the French forces in North Africa but they were not prepared to give him anything more.

  ‘Then I shall return to France,’ said Giraud.

  ‘How are you going back?’

  ‘By the same route I came here.’

  ‘Oh no you won’t,’ said Clark. ‘That was a one-way submarine. You’re not going back to France on it.’

  The Americans then told Giraud that he must not let personal ambition come before the best interests of France but perhaps he sensed they did not really mean it, for he shrugged off the insult. Finally Clark turned to Holmes and said, ‘Tell him this. Tell him if you don’t go along with us, General, you’re going to be out in the snow on your ass.’

  Colonel Holmes, late of the US State Department, looked imploringly at Eisenhower who decided they were all exhausted and ought to try to get a couple of hours’ sleep while they still could.

  In Algiers Darlan was not mincing his words either. ‘I have known for a long time the British are stupid,’ he told Murphy. ‘But I always believed Americans were more intelligent. Apparently you have the same genius as the British for making massive blunders!’

  The American and Juin had not gone to see him at Fenard’s villa where Darlan, his bag packed for his dawn flight back to Vichy, was sleeping. When Juin had woken him with his call he had been told to stay put. He and Fenard would come there. Vichy’s senior officer, the man in charge of all the army, navy and air force the Germans had allowed France to keep, had arrived in a red-faced fury. All the joy his son’s recovery had brought had obviously evaporated.

  For the first fifteen minutes Darlan had found it impossible to keep still. Instead, he had paced up and down the marbled floor of Juin’s main reception salon, puffing so hard at his pipe that the smoke seemed to be rising from the balding head he so rarely uncovered. Dancing alongside him was the tall Murphy, doing his best to shorten his stride and keep in step with the smaller man while making various soothing noises and reminding him of the time he told Ambassador Leahy that if the Americans ever came in force he would welcome them.

  ‘That moment has now arrived!’ declared Murphy with all the fervour of a revivalist preacher. But even as he said it he found himself wondering whether by some ghastly mistake he had got the date wrong. A glance at his watch showed that it was now long after 2.30 a.m. The deadline set for American troops to reach Algiers from their landing places and take control had come and gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  At that moment the nearest United States soldiers to Murphy were the 634 officers and men of the 3rd Battalion 135th Infantry Regiment aboard the two old destroyers HMS Malcolm and HMS Broke which were about a mile off Algiers harbour and approaching fast. The 135th was a Minnesota regiment with a roll call of Scandinavian names and a few Scots with relatives in Canada. Commanding its 3rd Battalion was Lieutenant Colonel Edwin T. Svenson, recently the assistant warden of Minnesota State Penitentiary, who liked telling British officers that his top sergeant was the man who could beat him in a fist fight though behind this pugilistic exterior lurked a thoughtful soul.

  After Gettysburg the 135th had adopted the motto ‘To the Last Man’; but Svenson’s battalion liked to call themselves ‘The Singing Third’ for the soldiers’ songs they had learned by heart, some of them British compositions of a brutal bawdiness, during their last six months in Northern Ireland. Their favourite was ‘There’s a Troopship Now Leaving Bombay’ with its joyful chorus: ‘Fuck ’em all Fuck ’em all, the long and the short and the tall.’*

  The British warships they had boarded in Belfast had been built just too late for the last German war though both, particularly Malcolm which had sunk a U-boat, had more than made up for it in this one. To give them the added weight they might need in order to crash through the harbour boom, the ships’ hollow bow compartments had been given a concrete filling, and armour plate welded to their exterior. And around the upper deck, where the crouched American infantry would be packed in the final stages of their approach, there was a 3-foot-high screen of -inch-thick bulletproof steel plate.

  By 3.30 a.m. the destroyers were getting their first close look at Algiers which, to the amazement of their lookouts, was still lit up by its peacetime quota of illumination. And although, a few miles either side of the city, the flicker of gun flashes could plainly be seen there was no fire from the port’s batteries themselves. Then, apparently at the flick of a switch, came total darkness swiftly broken by searchlight beams from the Isle de Marine and Batterie des Arcades which began a teasing kind of dance around the two destroyers that was never quite consummated.

  Once the Algiers street lights went off it was difficult to find the right way into the harbour that, in the normal way, had been made more sheltered and the entrance narrower by having jetties built from either side. And when the destroyers did find it they knew they would have to work up to something approaching full speed in order to give their reinforced bows the momentum to cut through the boom – heavy chains on thick wooden floaters – intended to wrap itself around an intruder’s propellers.

  The first time they tried it they realized they had missed it altogether and were heading directly for the reinforced concrete of the Jette de Mustapha, which would certainly have held its own against the armour-plated cement implants coming its way. The second time Broke went first, missed the entrance again, and scooted off seawards under fire from two batteries, though the searchlights failed to hold the destroyer long enough for the guns to do their work. Then Malcolm had a go. Once again Commander Archibald Russell, decorated for destroyer actions at Dunkirk and in the Atlantic, was unable to find the entrance and was obliged to make another tight turn back to sea. But this time the shore batteries spotted her phosphorescent trail and scored several hits, putting three of her four boilers out of action and reducing her speed to 4 knots.

  Ten crew were killed and at least another twenty on the ship wounded, including some of the American infantry amidships where fire had broken out among the pasteboard cases of mortar ammunition. One of Svenson’s youngest officers, 2nd Lieutenant William L. Muir of L Company, started picking up the burning boxes and throwing them overboard. This encouraged others to do the same and possibly saved the ship, which limped away and took no further part in these or any other proceedings until repairs were completed in early 1943. The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty granted Muir a Mention in Despatches ‘for your bravery on passage to North Africa’, the first of several awards he would get before he died of malaria in Italy the following year.

  Aboard Broke was Lieutenant Colonel Svenson and the other 300 or so of his battalion. With his command reduced by half, the colonel rapidly rewrote his plan, reducing the area of the harbour he would hold until reinforcements reached them. On the bridge Lieutenant Arthur Layard prepared to make his third attempt to put them there. This prove
d no more successful than the last, the entrance to the harbour remaining as elusive as ever. Dawn was now coming up. All hope of a surprise attack under cover of darkness had gone. But for his fourth attempt Layard could, for the first time, just about make out where he was going. The downside was that the French gunners were also enjoying the benefit of first light and they had already proved with the hits inflicted on Malcolm that they could shoot accurately enough in the dark.

  At least Broke could now return fire with some hope of keeping her opponents’ heads down and the crews manning the fore and aft 4.7-inch open gun turrets, which on later destroyers had been replaced by fully closed ones, were firing as fast as they could. Above them fluttered the Royal Navy’s White Ensign and the Stars and Stripes flying in tandem for the first time in their history as joint battle flags. Most of the French coastal batteries were 8-inchers, almost twice as big as the ship’s guns. For a moment it seemed that the destroyer might miss the entrance again. Then Layard spotted the buoys that marked the route between the jetties and ordered a slight change in course and full speed ahead. Broke sliced through the boom as if it were a thread of cotton. According to Svenson’s report there was ‘hardly a sensation of hitting’ and for a moment it seemed as if all their troubles were over.

  But as the ship slowed and approached the empty Quai du Falaise on Môle Louis Billiard, a small patrol boat moored only a few feet away from the intruder raked it with heavy machine-gun fire and caused several casualties. Broke was too close to depress her 4.7-inch guns enough to blow her tormentor out of the water with cannon fire. Instead, Layard had to use his Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns. Before it finished, this escalated into a prolonged and deafening close-quarters duel that must have sounded something like a contest between competing choirs of road drills with occasional high notes from ricochets. Eventually the patrol boat was silenced and for the first time the Americans could hear the steady crack-crack of rifle fire and occasional bursts of some kind of light automatics coming from the buildings behind the port.

  Almost to a man the Singing Third had never been shot at before. Already drained by a sleepless night of cold, seasickness and regular soakings from near misses they were, according to their own account, ‘quite shaken and a little slow in getting underway to disembark’. But by 5.20 a.m. the landing had been completed and Svenson had begun to deploy his men around a seaplane base and behind barricades of wood, sand and baled straw near a warehouse on Mole Louis Billiard.

  At about eight o’clock two civilians accompanied by a couple of gendarmes approached them and explained they wanted an American emissary to accompany them into Algiers and make arrangements for taking it over. These probably came from Général Mast’s insurgents. But while this was being discussed one of Layard’s officers from Broke, who appears to have ventured further into the city centre than anybody else, returned with some bad news. A French major with whom he had attempted to parley had politely informed him that, Americans or British, they were about to be surrounded and annihilated.

  *

  At Oran this had almost happened. Operation Terminal had at least put men ashore in Algiers. The almost identical Operation Reservist, where the former US Coast Guard cutters HMS Walney and HMS Hartland were supposed to land almost 400 American troops, had been an unmitigated disaster.

  Twenty-six months had elapsed since Somerville’s ships had killed almost 1,300 French sailors at neighbouring Mers-el-Kébir. Since then that port had not been much used and what was left of the Vichy French fleet in North African waters operated out of Casablanca or Oran itself. In the early hours of 8 November, as well as a few armed trawlers and submarines, Oran contained three decent-sized warships. These were the two super-destroyers Epervier and Typhon with their 5.7-inch guns and La Surprise, a large and well-armed minesweeper completed only four months before the armistice. They could hardly be expected to make much difference against the enormous firepower at the disposal of Commodore Troubridge’s Centre Force. But this was waiting outside the harbour while Walney and Hartland, each flying large American flags and accompanied by two wooden-hulled launches with smoke-laying equipment, tried to bluff their way in. When that bluff was called the French ships proved a deadly supplement to the port’s fixed defences.

  The Epervier, which had served alongside the British off Norway and then at Dunkirk where she had rescued an RAF pilot, was commanded by Capitaine de frégate Paul Laurin. For the last five months the destroyer had been in dock for a major refit and Laurin had been unable to do any training. His crew was thirty-three men short of what it should have been and he had just detached another twenty-seven under Enseigne de vaisseau Schillte for guard duties on the quays. At 3 a.m., almost two hours after the initial beach landings, he was ordered to put his ship into a state of readiness. Boilers were started up and the anti-aircraft guns manned but not the heavy 5.7-inchers because Laurin lacked the gunners.

  For about an hour all was quiet. Then a searchlight on Oran’s Santas Cruz bastion briefly illuminated an unknown ship. On the Epervier they heard the sound of machine-gun fire followed by the swoosh of French red alarm flares. Laurin ordered his men to action stations and mustered scratch crews for the 5.7-inch guns. On shore Enseigne de vaisseau Schillte, whose machine guns were covering the main entry channel into the port, heard the 8-inch battery on the Môle Ravin Blanc open up. Soon La Surprise and Typhon, which were berthed nearer the sea than the Epervier, had joined in. The surface of the channel began to fill with the white vapour of a smoke screen the intruders were laying which, for a while at least, did its job well. But while Schillte could not see anything through it he could distinctly hear the panting noise a ship’s engines make when somebody wants more revs out of them.

  Schillte was listening to HMS Walney’s oil-fired American Babcock and Wilcox boilers bringing her up to her top speed of 16 knots. Hartland, her sister ship, was a little behind on her starboard side. In Gibraltar these neat little single-funnel craft, 250 feet in length and designed for nothing more lethal than making life miserable for Prohibition’s Lake Erie rumrunners, had embarked Lieutenant Colonel George F. Marshall and his 3rd Battalion of the 6th Infantry Regiment. Marshall, a 31-year-old West Pointer from Florida with a high forehead and a strong jaw, was travelling on the Walney with Captain Peters who, until the soldiers got ashore, was in overall command of Operation Reservist.

  ‘Fritz’ Peters DSO, DSC and bar, the Canadian-born destroyer hero who had won his Distinguished Service Order in January 1915 helping to sink the battleship Blücher during the Battle of the Dogger Bank, had just turned 53, thinning on top and thickening below. He was born, the son of a prominent lawyer and politician, on Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St Lawrence that after the American War of Independence had provided a new home for loyalist refugees. In 1905, aged 15, Peters had gone to England and joined the Royal Navy. But despite his 1914–18 successes, in 1920 he asked to be put on the Reserve list and returned to Canada where his mother wished to see more of her surviving son. Her youngest two had been killed in France in 1915 and 1916. He never married and was back on active service almost immediately after the second German war started.

  In July 1940, for his ‘good work’ commanding an anti-submarine flotilla of armed trawlers in the North Sea, Peters received a bar to the Distinguished Service Cross he had been awarded in 1918 for another destroyer action. Then came a complete change. For the next two years he was first with Naval Intelligence, then commanding officer of Brick-endonbury Hall near Hertford, a training centre for the paramilitary Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Kim Philby, the Communist traitor who was at the school at this time, held Peters in high regard.

  This was by no means uncommon. ‘The mist, like rain, darkness and secrecy followed him. And he would have one or the other, or all of them with him to the very last,’ wrote Leo S. Disher, an American news agency reporter who had been assigned to the Walney to cover the landings. Like all the journalists covering Operation Torch he was
required to wear uniform. The only thing that distinguished Disher from anybody else in an olive drab combat jacket was the brassard he wore on his left arm which bore the letter C for Correspondent.

  It was an assignment Disher, who worked for what later became United Press International, could have honourably avoided because on the way out he had slipped on a pitching deck and broken his left ankle. Once the ship got to Gibraltar the US Army, to whom he was accredited, wanted him off the ship. Disher added a broken heart to his injuries. This was the biggest story he had ever been asked to cover. And he had endeared himself to everybody on board by acquiring a pair of crutches and refusing to leave the ship.

  Long John Disher was soon hobbling about the Walney with increasing expertise, though the tall, good-looking young man with his swashbuckling Errol Flynn moustache and slicked-down hair combed straight back from his forehead found it more tiring than he made out. As the lights of Oran became visible he had somehow managed to climb the ladders up to the bridge and wedged himself into the passageway behind it, his back pressed against one bulkhead and the crutches against the other, leaning on them with his forearms. He had a life jacket on his chest and another lashed around the several pounds of plaster of Paris covering his lower left leg, the brainwave of one of Marshall’s company commanders, convinced he would sink like a stone without it. And tucked into his belt was Colonel Marshall’s personal .45 automatic. The colonel had a Tommy gun and it had bothered him that Disher was sticking so close to the action without anything to protect himself. Correspondents, like medics, were considered non-combatants and not supposed to be armed but Disher thought he did not have to use it so he took it. ‘I didn’t want to offend the colonel.’

  From his wedged-in position the reporter could look along the bridge to where Peters, Marshall, Lieutenant Commander Peter Meyrick, an admiral’s son who commanded the Walney (Peters was in charge of both ships) and the other officers were standing. He could make out the shapes of their bodies but not their faces which they had covered in black camouflage grease. Among them was Disher’s new friend – they were both in their twenties – Lieutenant Paul Duncan, a yachtsman from Cardiff with a French mother who in 1935 had joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was teaching French in London when war broke out.