England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  To achieve all this Darlan had to give Clark the ceasefire he needed to pursue the war in Tunisia. The trouble was that Pétain was already obviously none too pleased with the local truce Darlan had overseen in Algiers. His last order was to ‘resist the aggressor’ and was likely to remain so as long as he thought that a determined defence in North Africa would ensure that unoccupied France would remain unoccupied. In one of his messages to Vichy Darlan had gently pointed out that ‘it may be wondered whether the occupation of France’s Mediterranean coast will take place in any case’. But Pétain had not reacted to it.

  Which meant that Darlan was stuck. He had nothing like the maréchal’s personal following. Nobody had. He needed Pétain. He needed to speak in the name of the grandfatherly figure with the well-trimmed moustache whose portrait and wise sayings were in most public places and many private ones. For nowhere had the Pétain cult taken root more firmly than among L’Armee d’Afrique du Nord where, in the misery of France’s defeat, its officer corps had chosen to emulate the sacred chieftain worship of their Fascist conquerors. Darlan knew he had to give the Americans what they wanted but until Hitler tore up the 1940 armistice and marched into Vichy France all he could do was stall. This made Clark deeply unhappy with the ‘stubby, ingratiating little man with watery blue eyes and petulant lips’ seated on his left.

  Clark (Murphy interpreting): It is essential that we stop this waste of time and blood. Darlan: I sent a résumé of the terms to Vichy. Laval was away. There will be no reply until the Council of Ministers meet this afternoon.

  Clark: What you propose is not possible. I will end this conference in 30 minutes.

  Darlan: I understand what this means and I will tell my government of what has happened.

  Clark: This is impossible. It will be necessary to retain you in protective custody. I hope you understand.

  Darlan: I am giving my opinion that it is stupid to continue hostilities here. I urged acceptance of the terms. I am confident Pétain will agree.

  Clark: That is fine, but do you understand that we can’t sit here while governments agree and ministers debate? If the Admiral will not call for the cessation of hostilities, I will go to General Giraud.

  Darlan: I am not certain the troops will obey.

  Clark: If you think that Pétain will agree with you that hostilities will cease, why can’t you issue the order now? Darlan: I’m bound by an oath of fidelity to the maréchal. I can’t take the responsibility of giving an order to cease hostilities.

  Clark: What you are doing now means the killing of more French, British and Americans. This all boils down to one question: are you going to play with Vichy or go with us?

  While this drama was unfolding the loud, bloody and wasteful noises offstage that Clark had alluded to continued in Oran with success for the Allies. A pincer movement by the 1st US Infantry Division took Algeria’s second city by noon on Tuesday the 10th. From the west came 5,000 men who had come ashore among the cabanas of a beach resort. They were led by a man who, within hours of landing, had unseated a French cavalryman with a shot from his Winchester carbine and used a jeep stencilled Rough Rider. Brigadier General Ted Roosevelt was indeed the son of Theodore, twenty-sixth President, hero of the Rough Riders’ charge at Cuba’s San Juan Hill during the 1898 Spanish-American War and distant kinsman of the incumbent Franklin D.

  From the east came the rest of the division under its equally pugnacious and certainly harder drinking commander, Major General Terry de La Mesa Allen. (‘Even his name swaggers,’ observed one fan. His Spanish maternal grandfather had been a Union colonel under Sherman.) After two days of failing to capture St Cloud, a vintners’ market town straddling the highway some 15 miles from Oran, Allen had realized that he possessed the men and matériel to risk bypassing the town. It left a strong enemy force across that side of his lines of communication but it worked.

  During a freezing night of sleet and biting winds – American troops were shocked to find date palms with weather like this – the two prongs had converged on Oran and were ready by first light. The battleship HMS Rodney and the cruisers Aurora and Jamaica duelled with coastal batteries. But in the city itself resistance was patchy. After the massacre of the American infantry during Peters’s attempt to force the harbour Général Robert Boisseau, who commanded in the Oran sector, had concluded that the Allies would not risk another frontal assault. He had concentrated his limited resources at St Cloud and for a while it had worked well. It had never occurred to him that Allen would simply walk around it.

  Oran itself was thinly defended and what they had was often taken by surprise. In one instance a 75mm field gun battery was overrun by Stuart light tanks before their crews had a chance to fire them. Whites in the local branch of the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, the militia of the Paris-based French Fascist Joseph Darnand, picked off the unwary or the plain unlucky with their sniping. Then shortly before midday Boisseau decided that it had gone on long enough and sent out his emissaries for a ceasefire. Some of the Stuarts went down to the harbour in time to thwart a French plan to fill it with fuel oil and set fire to it. Others clattered around the town until they ran out of gas. One of the crews of these was approached by a gentleman in a suit, wearing a black fedora hat and carrying a large white flag who eventually managed to convey that he was the mayor of Oran and offering its surrender.

  Many of his fellow citizens had decided that they were not being conquered: they were being liberated. Bottles of wine were produced. Young women in dresses that were unseasonably thin threw flowers, blew kisses, kissed. Fort Philippe disgorged its American and British prisoners from Operation Reservist including an eye-patched Peters who was borne off in triumph on the shoulders of a laughing, cheering, singing crowd of Gaullists or at least anti-Vichyites.

  In three days Peters would be dead. He was killed on Friday, 13 November when the RAF Sunderland flying boat returning him to Britain from Gibraltar for treatment on his damaged eye crashed in bad weather while attempting to land in Plymouth Sound. In May 1943 it was announced that for ‘an enterprise of desperate hazard at Oran harbour’ he had been awarded a Victoria Cross. Although nobody denied Peters’s courage, senior US officers questioned his judgement in continuing once it was obvious that the French were ready to fight. ‘I hate to serve under the British,’ wrote Major General Orlando Ward whose division had provided Peters’s infantry. ‘They have misused my troops enough already.’

  American critics of operations Reservist and Terminal were right. They had been a disgraceful waste of lives and perhaps a clear indication of how lucky Admiral Syfret had been in Madagascar to get away with the Royal Marines’ Diego Suarez raid that inspired them. The most that can be said for them is that in Algiers the French had been so pleased with the way they had repulsed the British destroyers that they had not bothered to sabotage harbour installations. And in Oran, confident that there would not be another attempt to test his seaward defences, Boisseau decided to make his stand 15 miles down the road at St Cloud, which had ended up making things easier for Allen.

  With both ports now firmly in Anglo-American hands it was obvious that the Allies were on the verge of controlling all of Algeria. Just in case he had not heard the good news Clark told Darlan about the fall of Oran over the conference table at the Hôtel Saint-Georges. But Darlan was well aware that Général Auguste Paul Noguès was still resisting in Morocco and their wrangling over a general ceasefire continued with Murphy wincing as Clark pounded the table and repeated his latest threat: the imposition of US military government over all French North Africa. ‘I tried to imagine what would happen if Americans undertook to fight the Germans in Tunisia and simultaneously govern 20 million assorted civilians in a vast territory without knowing any Arab dialects or even, in the case of most Americans, the French language.’

  For the moment the Americans were far from done with fighting the French. In Morocco the invasion had started with a gentle coup by Major General Marie Émile Antoine Bétho
uart, Noguès’s deputy and army commander who like his immediate boss had his headquarters at Rabat, the Moroccan capital. Béthouart had been recruited by Mast and was a good catch. A lean mountain warfare expert in his early fifties who had distinguished himself in the Norway campaign with his ski-trained Chasseur light infantry, he was held in great esteem by his staff.

  Unfortunately, Béthouart lacked one talent: conspiracy. On the eve of the Moroccan landings he had made his move a few hours too soon and the wiley Noguès, officially the French protectorate’s Résident-général to the Sultan’s court, had soon turned the table on him. Béthouart was arrested as were several of his officers, one of them Noguès’s nephew. Béthouart was told he had been duped. The Americans were not coming. There was talk of firing squads.

  One of the reasons Noguès had acted so promptly was that his friend Amiral François Michelier, who was also in his mid-sixties, had assured him it was ‘technically impossible’ for such a large force to sneak up on them unawares. This was a bold assertion, for the French did not, unlike the Allies and the Germans, have radar, and fuel shortages had grounded their reconnaissance planes for days. When at first light Admiral Hewitt’s armada, having crossed the Atlantic on schedule, speckled the horizon like a nasty rash Michelier had remained quite unabashed. He simply ordered the eighteen warships he had at his disposal – eight of them submarines – to action stations.

  These were all at Casablanca, 70 miles south of Rabat and a much better port than the capital’s silted-up old harbour. The Americans were well aware of this and it was exactly where Hewitt’s 122 vessels were heading. The Jean Bart, France’s newest and uncompleted battleship which had fled to Morocco in June 1940, soon got involved in a duel with the even newer but totally finished USS Massachusetts. Four 15-inch guns versus the American ship’s eight 16-inchers: silent orange flashes, express train noises, splashes taller than a lighthouse. Jean Bart should have had eight heavy guns too but there had been no time to fit her second forward four-gun turret before she made her dash from Brest in the last days before France’s surrender. Her other disability was that she was immobile, encased in a concrete berth while her engines were being worked on. The French ship got off seven shots then the Massachusetts, a splendid example of the speed of American shipbuilding, had silenced her with hits on or around her turret which was covered with concrete rubble from a neighbouring jetty. A little later photo-reconnaissance revealed Jean Bart’s guns pointing skywards at oddly splayed angles as if rigor mortis had set in.

  Coastal batteries joined in the fight and soon the sky above Casablanca’s port and docks area was raining American shells. Off Algeria, Cunningham’s fleet was divided between Oran and Algiers. All Hewitt’s ships were concentrated against a single target. Among the civilian casualties were some of the service wives and families Darlan had ordered out of Dakar a few weeks before in order to prove to the Germans how serious he was about defending West Africa against Allied aggression. The three ships that had brought them there en route for Marseilles were among ten merchant vessels and two submarines sunk at their quays.

  Seven French warships and five working submarines in the port were not seriously damaged. They had three choices: surrender, scuttle or try to fight their way out, perhaps as they did so wreaking a little extra hell among the seasick soldiery bouncing through the breakers in their flat-bottomed landing craft. Surrender was no longer an option for Michelier and Noguès who seem to have been exhilarated by the plaudits their defiance was earning them from Vichy. ‘You saved France’s honour,’ Pétain would shortly be telling the Résident-général. Scuttling smacked of defeatism (though, done properly, it might have denied the Allied ships use of Casablanca for months). So it was decided that they would fight.

  Senior sailors who make stupid decisions sometimes earn a measure of redemption by including themselves among those in peril on the sea. Not a year ago Britain’s Admiral Tom Phillips had drowned off Malaya with his battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse after refusing to break radio silence and call the RAF fighters which might have saved them. But Michelier did not sail with his ships. That honour would go to Contre-amiral Gervais de Lafond who commanded what was designated a ‘Light Squadron’. Since his flagship, the cruiser Primauguet, was in the middle of minor repairs on her engines and guns, he departed on the super-destroyer Milan, leaving the Primauguet to put herself together and catch up. She was commanded by Capitaine de vaisseau Léon Mercier, who was unusual in that he made no secret of his belief that only an Allied victory would save France. As Lafond’s ships went out the squadron’s chaplain was spotted standing on the tip of the last breakwater, the wind snatching at his soutane, making the sign of the cross and mouthing a silent blessing.

  It took the Americans a little over three hours to sink or ruin all but one of their attackers, which were mostly destroyers and submarines with scant cover in shallow waters. At first, especially when the pounding of their own guns jarred fragile radar mountings, they had found the French ships difficult targets. Lafond cleverly hugged the coast, put down smoke which mingled with blacker stuff from burning oil tanks ashore and most of Hewitt’s sailors, firing west to east, were already squinting into the sun. ‘Like trying to hit a grasshopper with a rock,’ reported Lieutenant Commander Samuel Morison aboard the cruiser USS Brooklyn.

  It was not long before they got their eye in. The destroyer Fougueux was the first to go down, sinking by the bows, her stern gun firing to the last. Boulonnais tried to avenge her, circling the Massachusetts for a torpedo strike but was straddled by one of the battleship’s full eight-round 16-inch salvos and rolled over with the loss of almost all hands. Frondeur and Bestois, filling rapidly and with heavy lists, staggered back to port and even got alongside a jetty but both snapped their mooring cables and capsized before they could be pumped out. To add to the squadron’s misery Grumman Wildcats from the carriers USS Ranger and Suwanne started to strafe Lafond’s desperate sortie. The stubby Wildcats, called Martlets by the British who in 1940 had taken over a French purchase and were also flying them from their carriers off Algeria, had four heavy .50 machine guns which jammed almost as often as they worked but were awful when they did. Stuck in their mothballed neutrality, Vichy French ships had not had the chance to develop their anti-aircraft capability the way the Allies had and the Wildcat was well armoured. Almost with impunity American pilots came in low and concentrated their fire on the ships’ bridges where they knew the officers would be.

  Capitaine de frégate Martinant de Preneuf of the Albatros, his ship already badly holed, was killed. On the super-destroyer Milan, where shellfire had already removed part of her bow and put one of her guns out of action, the Wildcats hit every man on the bridge. Lafond, who was wounded in the leg, had the ship run onto the beach at the ominously named Roches Noires and the hurt hurriedly evacuated. They would come back for their dead. The Albatros did the same.

  It was about now that the light cruiser Primauguet, Lafond’s forsaken flagship, caught up with them in time to be neatly cornered by the heavy cruisers Augusta and Brooklyn in the north and the Massachusetts, Tuscalooa and Wichita and several destroyers in the north-east. Seen from a Wildcat it must have looked about as fair as the end of the Bismarck. Before long Primauguet was holed below her water line and half her engine room crew were dead. Capitaine Mercier gave the order to drop anchor near Milan but as they did so the Wildcats caught up with the cruiser. When they had finished the ship was on fire and Mercier lay dead among the wreckage of his bridge. ‘We may all be thankful if our lives have not been rent by such dire problems and conflicting loyalties,’ wrote Churchill some time afterwards, moved by the dilemma of an officer who yearned for Allied victory yet died so uselessly for Vichy.

  Almost 500 French sailors were killed at Casablanca on 8 November and another 1,000 wounded. They were the worst losses La Marine Française had suffered in a single day since Somerville attacked their ships at Mers-el-Kébir in 1940. US casualties were three killed an
d twenty-five injured. At least one of the American dead was aircrew. There had been several dogfights over Casablanca in which the Wildcats claimed to have shot down seven Dewoitines or Moranes for the loss of five of their own, several of the downed Americans being taken prisoner. Only one French destroyer, the Alcyon, managed to return to port more or less intact, having picked up some survivors. Others walked back from their beached ships. The wounded Lafond, leaning on a stick, reviewed those of his men still able to fight, thanked them for what they had done, then saw them issued with a rifle and five rounds of ammunition and sent off to join the infantry.

  Forty-eight hours later, as Operation Torch went into its third day and Clark reached new heights of exasperation with Darlan at the Saint-Georges, the Moroccan front’s guttering flame continued to symbolize Vichy’s will to oppose an Allied presence in French North Africa. Patton had landed almost 30,000 troops but he was far from satisfied with the zeal displayed by his green infantry when they came ashore at Fedala, Casablanca’s seaside playground and also its horse-racing track. ‘As a whole the men were poor, the officers worse,’ he noted. ‘No drive. It is very sad.’ Nor was the general’s temper improved by the flavescent changes to his appearance wrought by a splash from a French naval shell tinged with yellow dye which had narrowly missed the Augusta just before he left her. It would not have been the colour of his choice.