Twelve Desperate Miles (7 page)

Gathered at the trapezium-shaped War Office building in Whitehall, London, home of the British department of war, Brooke and Marshall were the chief protagonists in the debate, and they quickly fulfilled a long tradition in American and British relationships. That is to say,
Marshall felt that Brooke was patronizing, and Brooke felt that Marshall was too inexperienced, someone who had never served as an officer in the field and was therefore a political general with no real sense of what war was about.

The Norway attack was rather quickly dismissed as strategically pointless to the western Allies and ineffective in terms of alleviating pressure on the eastern front. The British pushed hard for an attack against North Africa, but the problems of an assault there were many in American minds. First among these was the question of what would be the response of the neutral nations in the area: Spain and Vichy France. French North Africa had not been occupied by the Axis powers, as was France itself. But since German trust in the capabilities and loyalty of the Vichy government was limited, the question was, how long would the Nazis stay removed from the French protectorates in North Africa?

Spain’s role in the matter was likewise crucial. As Eisenhower would later put it, “
there was a lively danger” that the Germans would attack through Axis-friendly Spain, threatening the strategically crucial
British-held Gibraltar and the invasion itself. With Gibraltar in the hands of Germany the Allied forces would be sealed off within the Mediterranean, a devastating situation for the invaders.

Finally, there was the matter of what the French themselves would do. Would French colonists consider an invasion force in North Africa liberators or an enemy violating the neutrality of the region? Would the French in North Africa fight or not?

And once engaged in North Africa, the Allies would, by virtue of commitment of resources to the action, be fully engaged. Even if the French met them on the beaches of the Mediterranean and Atlantic waving banners and cheering, the Allied forces would still have to battle German Panzer divisions, which would soon be racing across the desert to halt them. The fear in American quarters was that an attack in North Africa would ultimately run from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and take the rest of 1942 and well into 1943 to carry out. It would inevitably force a delay in the assault against the strength of Germany’s European forces in France.

For American doubters of the strategy, the question was why American forces should waste manpower and treasure in an invasion against French and German forces in Africa that would be logistically difficult to pull off—given the fact that the invasion would take place on a continent distant from the United States and America’s growing base in England—and strategically questionable for a couple of reasons. First, the Germans would not have to divert as many of their resources from the war against the Soviet Union to cover North Africa as they would if the Allied attack were a cross-channel invasion of France. Second, assuming a successful invasion (a big question mark in many people’s minds), how could the capture of North Africa help in the ultimate goal of striking directly and fatally at the heart of Nazi Germany? Between a victorious Allied army in North Africa and Adolf Hitler stood the Mediterranean Sea, Italy, and the Alps—hardly a smooth path to Berlin.

Essentially, American military leaders—Marshall and Eisenhower chief among them—felt that chasing Germans “
a thousand miles south
of London … when there were plenty of Wehrmacht troops stationed less than twenty-five miles from Dover” was an absurdity. And there was more than a little grousing that the British preference for a North African invasion was grounded as much in that nation’s desire to maintain its control over Egypt, the Suez Canal, and its Middle Eastern interests as in its desire to quicken the pace of the war and ultimately achieve Allied victory.

But there were considerations beyond the strategic. This was the first great joint venture in the war for the Allies, and while by means of its wealth and production capabilities, the United States had supplanted Great Britain as the most important member of the coalition, it still had to be respectful of the political considerations involved. The truth of the matter was that at this moment, the two needed to cooperate, and the Soviet Union desperately needed some relief from the intensity of German attack. There was also a domestic political consideration for the man who would ultimately decide on the pursuit of Operation Torch, as it came to be known. Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that the American people were anxious to join the fray in Europe, knew that to wait until 1943 to attack the enemy was politically risky.

A few days after arriving in London, Marshall sent a cable back to Roosevelt telling the president that the Joint Command was at an impasse. The British could not be convinced to participate in Sledgehammer, the plan to invade France directly across the channel, and the Americans remained skeptical about an invasion of North Africa.

It was Roosevelt who made the decision to accept the British plan of invading North Africa. Much to the delight of Winston Churchill and the British high command, he responded to Marshall’s cable with one of his own, announcing his decision. Operation Sledgehammer, the direct assault against France, was not to be—at least in 1942. The Allies would acquiesce to the British and attack North Africa.

Stephen Ambrose describes Eisenhower as “
darkly depressed by the decision.” In fact, his feelings ran so strong that this usually temperate general, a man who had gone so far as to ban all pessimistic talk
at his command headquarters in London, told his second in command, General Mark Clark, “July 22, 1942,”—the day the decision to invade North Africa had been agreed upon—“will go down as
the blackest day in history!”

Eisenhower was not the sort of soldier to stew a long time over a decision that belonged to the commander in chief, however. Plus, he was simply too busy and too burdened with the responsibilities of his command to continue to fight a political battle that he could not win. He immediately sat down with the British and began to outline an invasion of North Africa.

What was initially envisioned was a double-pronged assault on the French Vichy territories in North Africa. The French North African empire swept nearly eight hundred miles from Tunisia, on the Mediterranean just to the west of Libya, around the northwest corner of the continent and down the Atlantic coast, encompassing the nation of French Morocco. Spanish Morocco, a tiny wedge of land directly across from Gibraltar on the northern tip of Africa and encasing the city of Tangier, remained a protectorate of Spain.

The plan called for one arm of the assault to swing toward Algiers on the Mediterranean. This would be composed largely of British forces. The second punch of the invasion was to be a roundhouse directed at French Morocco on the Atlantic side of the continent.

To Marshall and Eisenhower, the western assault was crucial in preventing a possible German invasion of Gibraltar through Spain. By taking Morocco, the Allies would be able to maintain communication from the Mediterranean if Franco allowed Hitler to overrun Gibraltar.

It was this force, wholly American, that the man sleeping in the back of the Stratoliner had been tapped to lead. What they needed, Eisenhower and Marshall agreed, was a soldier who would take Morocco quickly and efficiently. They needed a fighting general like George Patton.

H
oused in a seven-by-nine-foot cell and fed black bread and “
a doubtful liquid with a few scraps of meat in a dirty wooden bowl,” René Malevergne passed his first couple of days in solitude at the Rabat prison, except for the periodic presence of guards opening and shutting his cell door to hand him these foul meals. On the third day, he was taken to the regional director of security and interrogated about his associations, at which time he learned that his coconspirators had been rounded up as well. He was told that if he gave the authorities the truth about the plans, he would soon see his wife and children. Malevergne was shown correspondence that had been found in the hands of the captain of the
São José
, but Malevergne knew that the letter had nothing incriminating in it and said so to his questioner.

But the ship’s captain was plotting to take Belgian pilots out of Morocco to England
, he was told.

So what?
said Malevergne.
It was my duty as port pilot to board any ship coming into the harbor
.

Malevergne was left with a handful of blank sheets of paper and told to write out his confession. The pages remained blank when the inspector returned, and as a consequence, Malevergne was subjected to four more hours of questioning.

He was asked about the secret embarkation point at Sidi Bouknadel beach, the one he and Pao had concocted to fool Rocca. “
Such an operation would be idiotic,” Malevergne told his interrogators truthfully. “It would be inconceivable at that time [of day] because it could not go unnoticed in that part of the coast.”

He was told that Germaine had burned some English pounds in the fireplace after Malevergne had been arrested, trying to hide incriminating evidence. Where had he come by English pounds?

“
If she burned the money, our savings are gone,” he told them.
They came from the Bank of England in Casablanca. I purchased them several years ago
.

It was one o’clock the next morning when he began to wilt, admitting that he might have talked with his companions about contriving a plot to aid the Belgian pilots out of Morocco, like “
probably ten million Frenchmen at this moment who speculate about such a crime, if it is a crime.” Forced to sign a statement to that effect, Malevergne was taken back to his cell with the promise that he would be able to see his wife and children the next day and allowed to accompany the authorities as they searched his home.

In the morning, he was driven to his home in Mehdia, but unfortunately Germaine and the boys were not there. They’d left for Rabat to stay with friends. Malevergne watched with a sickened and violated feeling as an officer went through his papers, as well as family photos and letters. He was then taken to his workplace in Port Lyautey, where once again the authorities searched his papers. As he left, his colleagues bade him tearful good-byes. It felt like it would be a very long time before he saw them again.

On the day before Christmas Eve, 1940, Malevergne was transferred, along with his accused coconspirators, Allegre, Brunin, Brabancon, and Paolantonacci, and eight of the Belgian pilots, to the military prison in Casablanca. Circumstances here were more lenient than they’d been in Rabat. Along with the others with whom he was allowed to visit, Malevergne began to craft a strategy against the charges and to coordinate stories. His defense consisted primarily of convincing the authorities that his chief accuser, Rocca, the man he’d hired and suspected of duplicity almost from the beginning, was an unreliable witness: a well-known drunk and liar.

Malevergne’s stay in Casablanca was brief. Just after the New Year, he was taken with a dozen other inmates to a prison in Meknes, a city in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains in northern Morocco, to await trial
in front of a military tribunal. His surroundings were once again harsh: a small cell with a cement slab to sleep upon; twenty-minute walks in the morning and afternoon “
in a sort of cage, a little larger than the cell”; no communication with other prisoners; chickpeas or bean soup for dinner. He was, however, given paper and writing implements, and here, toward the end of January, Malevergne began to keep a diary.

In his second week in Meknes, Malevergne met with an attorney and learned that a hearing of his case had been set for the following week. On the appointed day, he was taken with his attorney to the judge’s chambers, where to his surprise he found the traitor Rocca. He let his rage speak through his glance until the judge was out of the room. “
Do you think that the Légion d’Honneur which you wear is well placed?” Malevergne hissed at him.

Rocca squirmed. “I was arrested before you were,” he told Malevergne sheepishly. “At the interrogation, I was not able to take it.”

A worm
, Malevergne thought. Before the judge reentered the chambers, he asked Rocca to tell the court that he’d been drinking the day he’d made his accusations against the conspirators. That they were full of exaggerations and lies. Somehow he hoped that this plea would affect Rocca, but a few minutes later, after a clerk had read aloud Rocca’s damning deposition, the court asked the witness if he affirmed the statement. Rocca simply nodded.

As he had initially, Malevergne argued that whatever was discussed between him and his fellow conspirators, it had been just that: discussions. No actions had ultimately been taken to get the Belgian pilots out of Morocco. He was guilty only of talk. Unfortunately, that was enough to send Malevergne’s case to trial.

The river pilot was whisked by rail back to Casablanca. As he passed through Port Lyautey on the ride to Casablanca, the train made a ten-minute stop. Malevergne’s heart ached at the thought that he was just a few miles from his wife and that it might be a very long time before he saw Germaine and his boys again. It might be never again. He saw
a railroad employee in the city, an old friend, and
left a message for his family:
Please tell my wife that I was in the station this morning and taking a plane from Casablanca in a short while
.

In Casablanca, Malevergne was taken by car from the train station to the airport, where he and half a dozen of his conspirators, including, again, Paolantonacci, Brunin, Brabancon, and Allegre, as well as the Portuguese captain of the
São José
, boarded an Air France plane bound first for Oran and then for Algiers, all on the way back to Vichy, France.

In Algiers they were kept overnight in a prison whose warden was a former resident of Port Lyautey and gave the group a decent reception. Unfortunately, the Portuguese captain misunderstood these kindnesses. He thought they constituted the sort of soothing gesture that a priest offers to a condemned man before a coming execution. The captain became slightly unhinged and could not be convinced by Malevergne and the others that there was no illusion here; the warden was simply being nice. The morning could not come quickly enough, and they were escorted to another plane for the last leg of the journey to France.