The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (412 page)

On the ninth, the Germans volunteered to Pétain to put men and planes into Tunisia in order to “help” Vichy defend its sovereign territory. Pétain had no choice but to agree to this “favor.” The first Germans arrived in Tunis by air that evening, followed by squadrons of Stukas and Messerschmitts. Then, by ship, came Mark IV tanks, the twenty-five-ton workhorses of the German army, armed with 75mm cannons, deadlier than any American or British tank and manned by experienced crews who had learned their trade on the Russian front. And by ship came heavy artillery, German 88s, the deadliest field guns ever built.
³⁴³

O
n the Moroccan coast, where Patton’s troops had come ashore at three points—the port of Safi, Fedala, and Mehdia—the weather and landing crafts proved as troublesome and deadly as the enemy. The seas, roiled for a week by storms, calmed somewhat in the last hours before the landings but not enough. The first lesson learned, before a boot hit the beach, was that American landing craft of the era—Higgins Boats—were obsolete. They were made of plywood and without bow ramps, and the troops on board disembarked by jumping over the sides. Dozens of Americans drowned when they jumped into the turbulent waters; Patton himself pulled at least one body from the surf. Tanks and trucks were swept off the flimsy, flat-bottomed barges that carried them. After avoiding the enemy and without the loss of a single ship across the thousands of miles of ocean, Patton’s command lost more tanks and trucks in the landings than it did during the day’s combat with the defenders.
³⁴⁴

Patton’s troops had the benefit of five hours of darkness to cover their drive to the beaches. The American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who served as an officer aboard one of the covering cruisers, described the night as quiet, with not a light to be seen, the African shore “veiled in clouds and hushed in silence.” An offshore breeze carried “the smell of charcoal fires and parched dry grass” out to the ships. An hour passed, and another. Then a beam from a French searchlight shot seaward. Within minutes a dozen French warships—destroyers, a cruiser, and submarines—sailed to
engage the Allied fleet. The American admiral Kent Hewitt issued his pre-arranged signal for a general engagement: “Play ball.” And then came the bursts of machine guns, “blinding gun flashes,” and the “crash of heavy ordnance.” For the next several hours, the new French battleship
Jean Bart,
not yet entirely fitted out and incapable of sailing but able to use its fifteen-inch guns, waged a furious gun battle with USS
Massachusetts.
By the end of the day,
Jean Bart
was a burned-out wreck, and seven French warships along with three French submarines and a thousand French sailors lay at the bottom of the Atlantic. George Patton watched the battle unfold from the deck of USS
Augusta;
the landing craft that was to have taken Patton ashore was blown into splinters by the concussion from
Augusta’
s guns. Eisenhower, meanwhile, was unaware of any of the goings-on in Morocco. He had lost all radio contact with both Patton and the navy when the shock waves from
Augusta’
s heavy guns knocked out all of his radio equipment as well.
³⁴⁵

Once ashore, Patton’s 34,000 men received a hot reception from Vichy forces, a resistance spurred in part by Roosevelt’s decision to broadcast a message of peace to the Vichy French in Morocco hours
before
Patton came ashore, thereby giving the defenders time to prepare. In Rabat, the resident governor general, Auguste Paul Noguès, his honor at stake, ordered an attack against the invaders. Noguès commanded at least 60,000 men in the protectorate, including several hundred fighter pilots. Fortunately for Patton’s men, the French pilots who arrived over the Fedala beaches were not the cream of the Vichy air force and missed the beach entirely on their strafing runs. On the other hand, the American navy had put many of Patton’s troops on the wrong beaches, where U.S. Navy planes proceeded to bomb them, as did some elements of Patton’s artillery. The scene was utter chaos. While curious Arabs wandered among the wreckage, green American troops fired at shadows or, having lost their weapons in the surf, crouched behind trees. Some of the troops carried a new weapon. Alan Brooke called it a “rocket-gun” after watching a demonstration in June; the Yanks called it a bazooka. Indicative of the confusion on the beaches, the first bazooka fired in anger at a French tank missed its target and slew a nearby tree. Patton’s tanks could not communicate; their radio batteries had drained during the sea voyage. His signal corps was in total disarray. The plan called for Patton to take Casablanca with the consent of the citizens, not to have to conquer it, for the simple reason that he might not be able to take the city should the Vichy put up enough of a fight against the untested Americans. With that in mind, Churchill had warned Roosevelt, “The first victory we have to win is to avoid a battle.” But by noon on the eighth, Patton was in the thick of a bloody battle, and it was not going his way.
³⁴⁶

The next day, Eisenhower, desperately trying to bring Darlan around to the Allied side, discovered a fact of French military life long known to Churchill: “the traditional French demand for a cloak of legality over any action they might take.” French generals, Eisenhower later wrote, had cast their surrender in 1940 as “merely the act of loyal soldiers obeying the legal orders of their civil superiors.” Honor was thus preserved. Churchill, in explaining the Darlan negotiations to the House, offered a less subtle explanation: “The almighty in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to create Frenchmen in the image of Englishmen.” The French need for legal justification—“this peculiar form of French mentality”—stemmed from a belief that “an unbroken chain of lawful command” insulates those in the chain from any recriminations, moral or legal. Pétain resided at the top of the chain. So dominant among Frenchmen was this legalistic mind-set, Churchill told the House, that “if Admiral Darlan had to shoot Marshal Pétain he would no doubt do it in Marshal Pétain’s name.”
³⁴⁷

On November 10, before Patton took the battle into the streets of Casablanca, Admiral Darlan ordered a cease-fire throughout the theater. As he was senior military commander on the scene, the order was within his authority. Pétain, exercising
his
authority, immediately rescinded the order and dismissed Darlan.
³⁴⁸

The next day, in violation of the armistice signed in 1940, Hitler invaded unoccupied France. This freed Darlan entirely from the restraints imposed by law and Gallic honor. With Pétain now virtually a German prisoner, Darlan’s orders carried the legal weight to deliver both North Africa and the French navy to the Allies. That morning, the commander of Vichy troops in Casablanca approached Patton’s lines carrying a white flag. It was a flag not of surrender or capitulation but only of cease-fire. But it ended the hostilities. Thanks to Darlan, Patton, who had promised Roosevelt and Marshall that he would leave the beach “either a conqueror or a corpse,” was ashore to stay. Yet, with Darlan, Eisenhower had on his hands a political poison pill. The Frenchman was universally reviled in Washington and London. Although Darlan had issued the orders that secured Casablanca and Oran, he had yet to give the most critical order of all, the order that the French fleets in Toulon and Dakar make for North Africa.

O
n the night of November 8, the high holy anniversary of his 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler made his yearly address to his brown-shirted cronies in Munich. The Führer spoke at the more elegant
Löwenbräukeller,
the old
Bügerbräukeller
having been bombed in a bungled 1939 assassination
attempt on his life. Hitler informed his audience that Stalingrad, but for a few pockets of resistance, “was firmly in German hands.” The job of erasing the city from the banks of the Volga, he promised, would soon be finished, but to avoid another Verdun, it would be done methodically. After all, he announced, time was now of no consequence. This was an exaggeration but not an outright lie. After losing twenty divisions during five weeks of murderous fighting in metropolitan Stalingrad, Paulus’s Sixth Army had reached the Volga in the northern part of the city two days earlier. The Fourth Panzer Army was just two miles away from the south bank, which, when secured, would complete the encirclement of the inner city. The first reports from North Africa, meanwhile, were positive—fierce resistance by the French on all the beaches, German reinforcements about to depart for Tunis. Hitler did not disclose that Operation Anton, the occupation of Vichy France, was set to begin in thirty-six hours. From all appearances, the tide was still rising under the Third Reich. In fact, during the very hours Hitler spoke, and while his train got up steam for the journey to his East Prussian headquarters, and while his loyal brown shirts strutted and swayed under a thick haze of cigarette smoke on the beer-drenched floors of the
Löwenbräukeller,
the Third Reich reached flood tide.
³⁴⁹

A freezing blue haze drifted low over the Volga that night and the next morning, a harbinger of the hard freezes that very soon would render the river a land bridge to Stalingrad. Fifty miles to the north and south of Stalingrad, the number two man in the Red Army after Stalin, Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, had assembled two gigantic forces made up of eight infantry and four tank armies. Now Zhukov waited. In a sense, Hitler had spoken the truth to his Munich cronies when he offered that time was of no consequence. Zhukov had it all on his side, while for the Germans in Stalingrad, it was running out.

W
hen the Germans broke into unoccupied France on November 11, they drove straight for Toulon, where French naval commanders awaited orders to scuttle the fleet—two battleships, several heavy cruisers, sixteen submarines, eighteen destroyers—and therefore deny the Nazis a naval force that might have won them the Mediterranean. Only Darlan could give the order. He had promised in 1940 that he would never allow the French fleet to fall into German hands; on that day he made good on his promise. He ordered the French fleet to bolt Toulon and make for Africa, to join the Allies. The French naval commanders in Toulon, still loyal to Pétain, chose to stay in Toulon. By then, the Germans had surrounded the port. Even
were the French captains inclined to obey Darlan, any attempt to do so would result in the Germans commandeering the fleet, which they were in fact drawing up plans to do. For almost two weeks, the French warships rode at anchor and in their slips. On November 27 Hitler struck. It took less than an hour for German tanks and troops to smash into the naval base and make for the dockyard, but that was more than enough time for the French commanders, sure now that they had been betrayed, to issue the orders to scuttle. Almost the entire fleet was sent to the bottom. Darlan, whatever his other faults, had kept his promise.

Reaction to the courtship of Darlan and the marriage of convenience came fast and furiously in Britain, and in America, where Roosevelt liberals, Churchill later wrote, were “agog… at what seemed to them a base and squalid deal with one of our most bitter enemies.” Millions of Britons, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “are convinced that appeasement of a man of Vichy or a man of Munich smells just about the same, no matter what fancy name you want to call it.” Churchill, for his part, thought the military gains achieved by Darlan’s cease-fire orders outweighed the political risk. Yet, in a cable to Roosevelt he expressed his conviction that the Darlan deal “can only be a temporary expedient.” Roosevelt issued a public defense of Eisenhower; Churchill did not. He spoke to Parliament in Secret Session, where he described Pétain—whose name he pronounced as “Peatayne”—“as an antique defeatist.” Roosevelt had not consulted HMG on the Darlan matter, Churchill told the House. Yet, from the standpoint of reaching military objectives and saving the lives of his troops, “General Eisenhower was right” to court Darlan. But in public he accorded Eisenhower no such endorsement. Since the Americans, after all, had insisted that Torch was to be an all-American affair, they could stew in their own juices. Stalin, ever pragmatic, offered his thoughts on the subject to both Churchill and Roosevelt. The value of military diplomacy justified not only the relationship with Darlan, Stalin wrote, “but with the Devil himself and his grandma.” Stalin also tossed out a phrase that was being much heard around London: the tide has turned.
³⁵⁰