An Army at Dawn (47 page)

Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle was the son of a French journalist father and an Italian mother. An antifascist monarchist, he had returned to his native Algiers from metropolitan France after the German invasion of 1940 and had fallen in with a royalist cabal keen to transform the pretender to the French throne, the exiled count of Paris, into Henri VIII. Precisely how the plot evolved, or why an attack on Darlan was expected to advance the cause of a French monarchy, would never be known. But shortly after three
P.M.
Bonnier heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive in the garden outside. From his coat he pulled a Rubis 7.65mm revolver, which he had test-fired that morning at a nearby golf course after receiving absolution for his sins from a priest involved in the conspiracy.

Returning from lunch, Darlan walked slowly down the narrow corridor. He had spent another difficult morning with Murphy, who had pressed him on the prickly issues of political prisoners and restoring the rights of Algerian Jews. The spa in Warm Springs sounded ever more inviting.

As he opened the door to his study, the admiral heard the snick of a cocking pistol behind him. He whirled. Bonnier fired twice at point-blank range into his victim’s face and abdomen. Darlan collapsed across the threshhold, eyes wide and unblinking, blood streaming from his mouth. An aide rushed in to seize the assassin by the throat, only to take a bullet in the thigh for his trouble. Bonnier bolted toward a window to escape through the palace grounds, but a spahi cavalryman dragged him back into the room. Another clubbed him with a chair, knocking away the pistol.

Half a mile away, at the Hôtel St. Georges, Clark was clearing his office desk before leaving for Christmas Eve dinner when he heard running feet in the hallway. The door flew open and Murphy burst into the office. “They shot the little son of a bitch!” he exclaimed. “He’s on his way to the hospital.”

A voluble mob of Frenchmen had already gathered in the waiting room when Clark and Murphy arrived at Maillot Hospital. Pushing through the crowd and into the surgical suite, the Americans found that the admiral had just been pronounced dead on the operating table. “The Little Fellow,” Clark later said, “looked calm and quiet.”

Clark handled bloodshed with his usual brisk efficiency. Affecting a turn-out-the-guard scowl, he doubled the pickets at the St. Georges and ordered all officers to arm themselves. Machine-gun posts were set up in the hotel gardens and outside other important Allied buildings. “The whole headquarters is in an uproar,” one officer reported. Trucks jammed with armed soldiers carrying gas masks rumbled back and forth through the streets. Holy Night festivities were canceled, and in camps across Algeria troops were ordered to stand to in the mud with their weapons in the event of a “native uprising.”

While Clark considered that Darlan’s death was “like the lancing of a troublesome boil,” he moved quickly to score propaganda points by implying Axis complicity in the murder. An official AFHQ statement declared, “Complete order reigns in Algiers notwithstanding general indignation caused by the event.” The suggestion that the citizenry might riot in pique at Darlan’s demise struck many as ludicrous. One correspondent observed that he had “never seen happier faces in Algiers.”

Eisenhower had insisted that no Signal Corps officers accompany him eastward on his inspection tour and for hours after the shooting he remained beyond reach at the V Corps command post in Souk el Khemis, 400 miles away. The first frantic radio message went out from Algiers at four
P.M.
, but a courier failed to find the commander-in-chief. A phone call from AFHQ to First Army headquarters at five
P.M.
obliquely reported that the “most serious thing has happened” less than an hour later, another message disclosed that Darlan had met with an accident and that the AFHQ staff was “very anxious to get in touch with C-in-C who is in forward area. Get him to ring General Clark immediately.” None of these dispatches reached Eisenhower in timely fashion.

A long afternoon of meetings stretched into a long evening. General Evelegh’s message at 7:15
P.M.
suggesting that Longstop Hill would fall by Christmas morning was the first good news Eisenhower had heard all day. At eleven
P.M.
he was just about to sit down with Anderson and Juin for a late Christmas Eve supper when a radio officer stumbled in with a message from Clark: “Have just returned from hospital. Darlan is dead.”

The Cadillac pulled across the muddy barnyard to the farmhouse. Someone would erase the tracks before dawn. Just forty miles south, Eisenhower’s boyhood hero, Hannibal, had been smashed at Zama by Scipio Africanus to close the Second Punic War in 202
B.C.
He hoped to visit the site someday, to understand by walking the ground what had gone wrong for the Carthaginians. But not now. The trip back to Algiers would take thirty hours. Always a more subtle political thinker than Clark, Eisenhower expected that the assassination would carry unforeseen consequences. Darlan’s death ended one problem, he mused aloud in the back of the car, but no doubt created many more.

General Evelegh’s prediction proved all too accurate. Longstop Hill
did
fall on Christmas morning.

Badly reduced, with his main force driven into a vulnerable swale southeast of Djebel el Rhar, Colonel Lang chose to gamble. A small detachment would pin down the Anglo-Americans with frontal fire while a tank company looped around the hill to the north and grenadiers, led by Lang personally, swung along the south face above the Halt. The counterattack was set for first light on Friday, the twenty-fifth.

More than a hundred Algerian
tirailleurs
with horse-drawn caissons and not a syllable of English among them had reinforced the 18th Infantry’s Company B during the night. With grunts and gestures, an American lieutenant positioned the company along the col on Longstop’s northwest slope. For reasons unclear, artillery observers had left their posts on Longstop during the night and returned to the hamlet at Chassart Teffaha. An appalled officer ordered them back on the hill as the eastern sky lightened with Christmas dawn.

Too late. At seven
A.M.
the German attack opened, with shelling so intense an American officer described being simply “blasted all around.” Colored signal rockets soared over Djebel el Rhar to launch the flank assaults. Ten panzers negotiated the mud north of the hill and slammed into the French. Lacking antitank weapons, the
tirailleurs
broke. From 800 yards, panzer volleys enfiladed the left flank of the American line on Djebel el Ahmera. Without artillery, the Yank reply was a paltry spatter of light mortar and rifle fire, along with a few grenades tossed more in defiance than as a military response. Unable to reach Colonel York at the battalion command post, the B Company commander announced darkly: “We will fight to the last man.” His executive officer, Lieutenant Edward McGregor, found himself thinking obsessively of the Little Big Horn.

The right flank also crumpled under an assault from the Halt by Lang and his grenadiers. Enemy fire began falling in the rear, suggesting encirclement from both wings. American and British officers would each claim to have been left in the lurch by the unannounced withdrawal of their allies along various Longstop knobs. But without doubt, the Coldstreams holding forward positions at the crest of Djebel el Ahmera now faced annihilation.

At nine
A.M.
, after learning that the Germans had once again captured Point 290, General Allfrey authorized Evelegh to abandon Longstop. Runners darted forward with orders to retreat. Platoons leapfrogged back to Chassart Teffaha for the rest of the morning, sowing mines to discourage German pursuit. The ammunition and medical supplies so laboriously hauled forward were now loaded on carts and carriers for the return to Medjez-el-Bab.

Rain fell again as the survivors trudged back, at the last pitch of exhaustion. As Christmas night descended, officers walked ahead of the jeeps and trucks waving white handkerchiefs for drivers to follow; some were so weary they veered off the road every few hundred yards anyway. Men sheltered in Chassart or Medjez and “clung together like sick kittens on a hot brick,” in the phrase of the infantryman-turned-cartoonist Bill Mauldin. Christmas dinner consisted of British compo, supplemented with “a few scraggy chickens boiled in the muddy water of the Medjerda.”

Word soon circulated of who was missing and who was known to be dead. As always after a fight, infantrymen checked to see if their closest buddies had survived before tabulating the battle’s net worth. British casualties totaled 178 men; officers had been hit especially hard, and of a dozen Coldstream platoon sergeants on Longstop, one still stood. American losses were precisely twice as heavy: 9 officers and 347 enlisted men killed, wounded, or missing. With 40 percent of the 1st Battalion gone, the 18th Infantry levied replacements, picking random names from a regimental roster to prevent commanders from simply dumping their shirkers and misfits. Platoons voted on whether to keep Christmas packages addressed to the dead, or send them home unopened.

Longstop belonged to the Germans, who renamed it Weihnachtshügel, Christmas Hill. There was much celebrating in the handsome house on the corner of Place de Pasteur in Tunis, where Arnim lived, with toasts of Tunisian red wine hoisted in honor of Lang’s
Kämpfer;
sentries even set up a small Christmas tree, decorated with garlands and white candles. The revels came to a rude end at 10:30
P.M.
on the twenty-sixth, when an American bomber, damaged by flak and losing altitude, jettisoned its 4,000-pound bomb before crashing on the western fringe of Tunis. The bomb detonated in the dense Arab neighborhood along Rue el Mekhtar, demolishing every house in a 16,000-square-foot area and killing eighty-four civilians.

Of the Tommies and Yanks who had held Longstop, some held it still: six months later, skeletons in moldering battle dress were found facing east on Point 290 with their kit intact, oddly unmolested by scavengers. Such constancy from the dead offered small comfort to the living; the enemy resumed his “shelling programme,” ventilating parts of Medjez so completely that one man likened the town to “a cheese-grater.” Upon hearing the bitter news about the destruction of his battalion on Longstop, Terry Allen reduced four days of fighting to four words: “Objective lost, mission unaccomplished.”

“This Is the Hand of God”

F
OR
a man who had just lost a critical battle and spent thirty hours in the rear seat of a car, Eisenhower was in buoyant spirits on Christmas night. Stiff and pallid after the long drive, he soon revived upon reaching AFHQ headquarters at six
P.M.
A quick staff meeting; a quicker, handwritten sympathy note to Madame Darlan (“You have the consolation of knowing that he died in the service of his country and that we view his passing with regret”); and then it was off to Beetle Smith’s mosaic-floored villa. Eisenhower ambled into the foyer singing in his fine deep voice:

God rest ye merry, gentlemen,

Let nothing you dismay.

With a small clique of officers, the commander-in-chief tucked into a Christmas feast of plum pudding, champagne, and roast turkey. Patton had sent from Casablanca two live birds, one of which survived the journey long enough to be stuffed, cooked, and devoured. So merry and undismayed did the gentlemen celebrate that at breakfast the next morning Harry Butcher requested only “a bowl of cold aspirin.”

The investigation by French authorities into Darlan’s murder was conducted with such brisk efficiency that a coffin was ordered for Bonnier de la Chapelle even before his trial began. A perfunctory prosecution followed by a perfunctory defense—“I have brought to justice a traitor,” Bonnier proposed—led to the foreordained sentence of death from a secret military tribunal. The defendant seemed so certain of reprieve that he discussed with police interrogators his future career in diplomacy. “They will not shoot me. I have liberated France,” he told a priest. “The bullets will be blank cartridges.” At 7:45
A.M.
on Saturday, December 26, Bonnier was trussed to a stake in the courtyard of a police barracks and executed even before he finished murmuring his prayers. “He was,” Churchill later noted, “surprised to be shot.”

As his assassin was being dispatched in squalid anonymity, Darlan was about to receive a funeral worthy of a North African potentate. On Christmas Day, 8,000 people had filed through Government House in downtown Algiers, where the admiral lay in state on a catafalque blanketed in floral wreaths, and guarded by spahis and
tirailleurs
with bared halberds. “Not a tear was shed,” one correspondent insisted. Another witness claimed that General Giraud’s eyes moistened. Perhaps it was in gratitude: he would now succeed Darlan as high commissioner. Bereaved or otherwise, the genuflecting mourners—including the assassin’s father—paid homage at the bier, which was crowned with the admiral’s little billed cap. Then sailors in snowy white puttees hoisted the coffin into a black hearse and the cortège wove through the city to the Cathédrale St. Philippe.

As the funeral service began, at nine
A.M.
on Saturday, French officials packed the right side of the vast nave; on the left sat a large delegation of Allied officers who had been instructed to forgo “all sidearms and mourning badges.”

The requiem mass droned on. At one point the principal mourners were supposed to walk to the bier, make the sign of the cross, and sprinkle the coffin with a cedar sprig dipped in holy water. Ever the Kansas Protestant, Eisenhower remained in his pew. Clearly enjoying the commander-in-chief’s discomfiture at these papist rituals, his naval chief, Admiral Andrew B. Cunningham, punched him playfully in the shoulder. “Go ahead,” Cunningham whispered.

“I can’t do it.”

Cunningham gestured with a tilt of his head. “Go ahead.”