History of the Second World War (55 page)

Mark Clark told Mast, in a broad way, that a large American force was being prepared for despatch to North Africa, and would be supported by British air and sea forces — a statement which was lacking in frankness. Moreover he abstained, in the interests of security, from giving Mast a clear idea of the time and places of the Allied landings. This excess of secrecy in dealing with a man whose help was of key importance was unwise, since it deprived him and his associates of the information and time necessary to plan, and take, co-operative steps. Clark authorised Murphy to inform Mast immediately before the landings of the date, hut even then not of the places. That was too late for Mast to notify his associates in Morocco.

The conference was temporarily, and dramatically, interrupted by the appearance on the scene of suspicious French police. Mark Clark and his companions were hurriedly hidden in an empty wine cellar while the police searched the villa. Danger became more acute when one of the British Commando officers who had piloted the party began coughing. Mark Clark passed him a bit of chewing gum as a remedy, but he soon asked for more, saying that it had not got much taste — to which Clark replied: ‘That is not surprising, as I have been chewing it for two hours!’ After the police at last went away, still suspicious and likely to return, Clark and his party ran into fresh trouble when they tried to re-embark at dusk, for the surf had become heavy, and he had a narrow escape from drowning when his canoe overturned. At a further attempt shortly before dawn, the others capsized, but all of the party got through the breakers in the end and reached the submarine, safe though soaked. The next day they were transferred to a flying-boat, which carried them back to Gibraltar.

An important issue which came into further discussion at this conference was the choice of the most suitable French leader to rally the French forces in North Africa to the Allied side. While Juin, their Commander-in-Chief, had privately expressed a favourable inclination, he showed a tendency to ‘sit on the fence’ as long as possible, and a reluctance to take the initiative. His chief subordinate commanders lacked sufficient prestige, and were no less reluctant to take any definite step in disregard or defiance of orders from the Vichy Government. Admiral Darlan, the Commander-in-Chief of its forces as a whole, and potential head of State if the aged Marshal Petain were to die, had hinted to Leahy in 1941 and more recently to Murphy that he might be willing to break away from the policy of collaboration with Germany and bring the French over to the Allied side if assured of American military aid on a sufficiently large scale. But he had played in with Hitler so long that his hints did not inspire confidence. Moreover he had an anti-British bias, which had naturally been increased by the British action against the French fleet at Oran and elsewhere, after the collapse of France in 1940. This made his attitude all the more doubtful in view of the difficulty of disguising the fact that the British were playing a large part in ‘Torch’.

General de Gaulle was ruled out for the opposite reason — that his defiance of Petain in 1940 and subsequent part in Churchill’s moves against Dakar, Syria, and Madagascar would make all French officers who had remained loyal to the Vichy Government unwilling to accept his leadership — even those who were most eager to throw off the German yoke. That was emphasised by Murphy and readily assumed by Roosevelt, who had developed a deep distrust of de Gaulle’s judgement and dislike of his arrogance.

Churchill, who had recently dubbed himself ‘your lieutenant’, bowed to his master’s voice, and de Gaulle was given no information of the project until the landings had taken place.

In these circumstances the Americans, from the President downward, readily accepted the view of General Mast and his associates that General Giraud was the most desirable and acceptable candidate for the leadership of the French in North Africa — as Murphy had already conveyed before the conference took place. Giraud, an army commander in May 1940, had been taken prisoner by the Germans, but had managed to escape in April 1942, and reached the unoccupied part of France, where he was allowed to stay, on promising to support Petain’s authority. He took up residence near Lyons. From there, although under surveillance, he got into communication with many officers, both in France itself and in North Africa, who shared his desire to organise a revolt against German domination with American help. Giraud’s viewpoint was expressed in a letter to one of his supporters, General Odic: ‘We don’t want the Americans to free us; we want them to help us free ourselves, which is not quite the same.’ Moreover, in his private negotiations with them he made it one of his conditions that he should be commander-in-chief of Allied troops in French territory wherever French troops were fighting. From a message he received he understood that his conditions were accepted by Roosevelt, but they came as a complete surprise to Eisenhower when Giraud arrived at Gibraltar to meet him on November 7 — the eve of the landings.

Giraud had been picked up, at a rendezvous on the south coast of France, by the same British submarine, H.M.S.
Seraph
,* that had carried Mark Clark on his secret mission to the Algerian coast. He was then transferred to a flying-boat, though nearly drowned in doing so, and carried on to Gibraltar. On reaching there, he was staggered at the news that the Allied landings in North Africa were taking place early next morning — as he had been told that they were planned for the following month — and also by the discovery that the command of them was in the hands of Eisenhower, instead of his own. This led to a heated argument, in which he based himself on his higher rank as well as on the assurances he had received, and constantly reiterated that to take anything less than supreme command would be a surrender of his country’s prestige and his own. But when talks were resumed in the morning (of the 8th) he reconciled himself to the situation, after explicit assurance that he would be head of the French forces and administration in North Africa — a promise that was soon to be set aside on grounds of expediency and the superior assets of Admiral Darlan.

* Giraud had stipulated that an American ship must be sent to convey him, for political reasons, so his demand was met by putting H.M.S.
Seraph
under nominal command of an American naval officer, Captain Jerauld Wright, and carrying an American flag that could be displayed if necessary. Giraud was accompanied by his son and two young staff officers — one of whom, Captain Andre Beaufre, had played an influential part in the planning of this dramatic move to swing the French Army into action against the Germans. Both Wright and Beaufre in later years rose to high places in their respective Services, and in the N.A.T.O. command structure.

In bringing the ‘Torch’ of liberty to French North Africa, the Americans had achieved surprise too fully, throwing their friends and helpers into confusion — more confusion than was caused on the enemy’s side. Their French collaborators were caught unready to aid effectively in clearing the way, and under the shock of the sudden invasion most of the French commanders reacted in the way that was natural in such circumstances, and in conformity with their loyalty to legitimate authority, embodied in Marshal Petain at Vichy. Thus the landings met resistance initially — although less at Algiers than at Oran and Casablanca.

At Casablanca, General Bethouart, the French divisional commander, received a message late in the evening of the 7th that the landing would take place at 2 a.m. on the 8th. He sent oft parties of his troops to arrest the German Armistice Commissions, and posted some of his officers to welcome the Americans on the beach at Rabat, fifty miles to the north, as he assumed that they would land there, since it had no coast defence batteries and was the seat of French Government in Morocco.

After these preliminary steps, Bethouart himself went with a battalion to occupy Army headquarters at Rabat, and sent the Army Commander off under escort. Bethouart had also despatched letters to General Nogues, the Resident-General (and overall Commander-in-Chief) in Morocco, and to Admiral Michelier, informing them that the Americans were about to land, that Giraud was coming to take over command of French North Africa as a whole, and that he himself had been appointed by Giraud to take over command of the Army in Morocco. His letter to Nogues and Michelier asked them to back the order he had issued for allowing the Americans to land unopposed, or else to keep out of the way until it was more convenient for them to accept the
fait accompli.

On receiving the letter, Nogues tried to ‘sit on the fence’ until the situation was clearer. While Nogues hesitated, Michelier took prompt action. His air and submarine patrols had not spotted the approaching armada before nightfall, so he jumped to the conclusion that Bethouart was deluded or hoaxed. Michelier’s assurance that no strong force had been sighted off the coast so impressed Nogues that even when the first reports of the landing reached him, shortly after 5 a.m., he believed that they were no more than Commando raids. He therefore jumped down off the fence, on the anti-American side, and ordered the French forces to resist the landings, while putting Bethouart under arrest on a charge of treason.

Patton’s main landing was made at Fedala, fifteen miles north of Casablanca, with subsidiary ones at Mehdia, fifty-five miles farther north, and Safi, 140 miles south of Casablanca. Fedala offered the nearest suitable landing beaches to that city and its strongly defended harbour — the only large and well-equipped one on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Mehdia was chosen because it was the nearest landing place to the Port Lyautey airfield, the only one in Morocco with a concrete runway. Safi was chosen because a right-wing force operating there might ward off the strong French garrison of the inland city of Marrakesh from intervening at Casablanca, and also because it had a harbour where medium tanks could be disembarked — for the new L.S.T.s (Landing Ships Tank) then being produced were not ready in time for ‘Torch’.

As the American armada approached the coast of Morocco on November 6, after a smooth ocean passage, ‘heavy seas’ were reported there and the forecast for the 8th was that the surf would be so high as to make landings impossible. But Admiral Hewitt’s own weather expert predicted that the storm would pass away, and he decided to take the risk of pursuing the plan of landing on the Atlantic coast. On the 7th the sea began to subside, and on the 8th it was calm, with only a moderate ground swell. The surf was slighter than on any morning in the month. Even so, many mishaps and delays arose from inexperience.

But things at least went better than Patton had forecast in a characteristically bombastic ‘blood and guts’ speech at the final conference before embarkation, when he had caustically told the naval members that their elaborate landing plans would break down ‘in the first five minutes’ and gone on to declare: ‘Never in history has the Navy landed an army at the planned time and place. But if you land us anywhere within fifty miles of Fedala and within one week of D-day, I’ll go ahead and win.’

It was fortunate that the confusion and hesitation among the French were such that the landing attack waves were safely ashore before the defenders’ fire became serious, and by then the light was good enough to help the American naval gunners in subduing the coastal batteries. But fresh trouble developed in the beachhead, and in extending it, from the inexperience and muddles of the Army’s shore parties, so that Patton switched his explosive criticism to the faults of his own force and Service. Both the troops and the boats had been overloaded. Although the advance on Casablanca got going on the second day, and met no serious opposition, it was abruptly halted by the pull on its tail that was caused by lack of equipment — which was piling up on the beaches but failed to come forward to the combat troops. Little progress was made on the third day, and there was an increase of opposition, so that the outlook became gloomy.

The situation would have been more serious if the French naval threat had not been quelled on the first day. This was achieved in a battle off Casablanca that had an old-style flavour. It started just before 7 a.m., when the coast defence battery on. Cap El Hank and
Jean Bart
in the harbour — this was the newest French battleship but still uncompleted, and unable to move from her berth — opened fire on Rear-Admiral R. L. Giffen’s Covering Group, which comprised the battleship
Massachusetts
, two heavy cruisers and four destroyers. These suffered no hits, although there were several near misses, and their reply was sufficiently effective to silence temporarily both the El Hank battery and
Jean Bart.
But they became so absorbed in this lively action that they neglected their task of keeping the other French ships penned there. By 9 a.m. one light cruiser, seven destroyers and eight submarines had slipped out. The destroyers headed for Fedala, where the American transports were ‘sitting ducks’. Fortunately they were headed off and driven to withdraw by a heavy cruiser, a light cruiser and two destroyers which Admiral Hewitt had ordered to intercept them. Then, on his summons, the Covering Group came up to cut off their retreat. Thanks to able seamanship, the skilful use of smokescreens, and the disturbing effect of a relief attack by their submarines, the French managed to survive this overwhelming concentration of heavyweight fire with the loss of only one destroyer, and then made another gallant effort to reach the transport area. In this second engagement, however, another was sunk, and only one of the eight French ships returned to harbour undamaged. There two more sank and others were further crippled by bombing.

But the result was not decisive, as the El Hank batteries and
Jean Bart’s
15-inch guns had come to life again, while the American ships had used up so much of their ammunition that they might not have been able to drive off the French warships based on Dakar if these had come up, as it was feared they might.

Fortunately, the situation at Casablanca, and on the Atlantic coast as a whole, was decisively changed by favourable political developments in Algiers. In the late afternoon General Nogues heard indirectly that the French authorities there, headed by Admiral Darlan, had on the 10th issued an order to stop fighting. Nogues was prompt to act on this unconfirmed report, and ordered his own subordinate commanders to cease active resistance pending an armistice.