Fighting on all Fronts (7 page)

Equating de Gaulle with the British enemy was a mainstay of Vichy propaganda aiming to immunise the French troops against the Free French. But how would Vichy’s officers and soldiers react if given the opportunity to defect?

The test case occurred not in North Africa but in the Middle East. On 1 April 1941 British controlled Iraq was the site of an anti-colonial uprising. Hitler reckoned this would be a golden opportunity to weaken the British enemy and was planning to support the insurgents from the air. He invited Admiral Darlan to Berchtesgaden to discuss the use of airports in French dominated Syria.

The Iraqi uprising eventually collapsed, but Churchill remained alarmed. The German Wehrmacht had been supporting their Italian allies in North Africa since January 1941 and occupied Greece in April and Crete in May. In view of Vichy’s control of the Syrian-Lebanese mandated territory, he feared the complete encirclement of the remaining British positions in Egypt and the Middle East and losing access to the oilfields of Iraq and Iran. This prompted Churchill to attack Vichy troops in Syria and Lebanon. In a short but fierce campaign the British troops, with the
support of 6,000 foot soldiers of the Free French under General Legentilhomme, managed to beat the troops of Vichy’s General Dentz.

De Gaulle now expected to be recompensed by being given control over the French mandated territory and the 30,000 soldiers of the defeated Vichy army being transferred to his National Committee. But his hopes were dashed. The Free French were kept out of the negotiations, concluded on 14 July, between the representatives of Vichy and London. François Kersaudy summarised the results:

[O]nly the immediate interests of British diplomacy and of the British High Command had been safeguarded, while the Vichy troops were being treated more than generously…they would be concentrated under the orders of their leaders, and those who did not wish to join the Allied Corps would be repatriated by units—thus rendering any free choice almost impossible; their equipment would be handed over to the British only; moreover, the Special Troops of the Levant, made up of Syrian and Lebanese volunteers, would purely and simply be placed under British command; there was no reference at all to Free France.

To make things worse the negotiators signed a secret protocol “under which it was agreed that no contact should be permitted between the Free French and the Vichy French”.
¹¹

Churchill shielded Vichy soldiers from the Free French, hoping in return to be given a footing in the French colonial territories. De Gaulle was furious. He commented in retrospect: “In fact the text of the agreement was equivalent to a transfer, lock, stock and barrel, of Syria and Lebanon into the hands of the British”.
¹²
He came to the conclusion that London was aiming at first to make the Levant into a “condominium”, and then to grab it for the British with the help of money, foodstuffs and military power.

It appeared that the alliance between de Gaulle and his host, the British government headed by Churchill, was more fragile than it at first seemed. Indeed, it had never been based on democratic principles, but on their mutual weakness in their struggle against Hitler’s troops. Their first military successes immediately generated renewed tension along the boundaries of their respective zones of influence.

The conflict between de Gaulle and Churchill over Syria and Lebanon carried on right to the end of the war.
¹³
In September 1942 relations almost came to a complete break. US consul general Gwynn informed Churchill that de Gaulle had in his presence even threatened to “declare war” on the British.
¹⁴
Churchill compared de Gaulle’s demeanour to that
of the German foreign minister Ribbentrop.
¹⁵
What in the end kept the alliance alive were developments in metropolitan France, where de Gaulle successfully sought to unite the growing resistance under his leadership. In the autumn of 1942 British foreign secretary Anthony Eden drew Churchill’s attention to the fact that invading France without de Gaulle would mean the Allies having to deal with the Communists on their own, since they were the ones who had mobilised most of the Résistance fighters.

But in North Africa de Gaulle’s services were not needed, neither in preparation for the landing nor in setting up the post-war regime. The Free French were kept out of all decisions in the run-up to Allied Operation Torch.

The landing of the Allied troops on 8 November 1942 in Morocco and Algeria was a US-led affair. It was America’s first step towards realising its war aims in Europe. Roosevelt was hoping to use North Africa as a springboard from which to seize Italy, France and finally Germany. According to his plans France was to be treated much like other occupied territories and placed under the control of the planned Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT). The objective was to establish American influence in Europe on a permanent basis, and prevent the emergence of revolutionary movements or the establishment of left wing governments. The appointment of an Allied Military Government in France clashed head-on with de Gaulle’s politics, so the US looked to establishing good relations with Vichy, hoping that Pétain’s regime would sooner or later break with Germany and collaborate instead with the US.

As for the weak Vichy regime, it was eager to exploit the cracks between the hostile blocs. While its internal policies increasingly followed in the footsteps of its Italian and German models, at the international level it pursued a see-saw policy between Berlin and Washington. It opened full diplomatic relations with the US, accrediting the American ambassador Admiral Leahy in Vichy in January 1941. That was followed up in February by a trade agreement between the two countries, signed by US diplomat Robert Murphy and Maxime Weygand, Vichy’s Delegate General for French Africa, which stated that the United States would provide North Africa with materials such as coal, cotton goods, medicines and petroleum.
¹⁶

In return the US government was permitted to establish a consulate, thus enabling Washington to place a number of Office of Strategic Services (OSS) secret agents in North Africa. Hence Robert Murphy set himself up as consul general in Algiers, a whole eighteen months before the start of Operation Torch. There he functioned as Roosevelt’s personal agent, responsible for locating French forces willing to lead a putsch to install a pro-Allies government in Algeria. The putsch would prepare for a landing, which would meet the least possible resistance, in the areas under Vichy control.

Prospective US partners were conspirational anti-German groups of the Franco-Algerian youth, which included quite a few Jews with leanings towards de Gaulle.
¹⁷
These loosely organised networks defined themselves as French patriots, which precluded any common ground with Algerian nationalism. The largest of these was formed in Algiers around the medical student José Aboulker from an established Jewish family. This group did regular physical training and engaged in open fights with the youth organisation of the Legionary Security Service (SOL)—a fascist street army that hounded Communists, Jews and BBC listeners.

Aboulker’s cousin Roger Carcassonne set up another conspirational circle in Oran. Coming from a family of industrialists he had connections with members of the state apparatus, such as Henri d’Astier de la Vigerie, whose brothers had already openly sided with de Gaulle in 1940. Henri, however, had joined Vichy’s youth organisation Les Chantiers de la Jeunesse before taking a leading position in the police apparatus of the regime in Algiers.

These patriotic groups represented a dissident, pro-Allies current of the French-Algerian middle classes. Murphy kept in contact with them but never became close. According to him these groups consisted of

restless and even dangerous men and women, most of them anti-Nazi, but also many other things… What would these mixed-up people do if French Africa should become a battleground? The answer, it seemed to me, was that only French administrators already familiar with the complexities of these variegated local situations could possibly maintain the order in French Africa which an Allied Expedition Force would require.
¹⁸

US secret diplomacy instead placed its bets on those superior officers who were in control of the troops, among whom was General Alphonse Juin, commander of the French armies in North Africa. Murphy was on the look-out for influential individuals who might convince Juin not to
oppose an Allied landing in North Africa. Only people who had an interest in maintaining the Vichy system qualified for the job—businessmen, high officials, and the senior and middle ranks of the armed forces.

By the autumn of 1942 Murphy had got his conspirational group together. Its members included Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, a businessman with fascist leanings, Jacques Tarbé de Saint-Hardouin, secretary in Vichy’s General Delegation for North Africa and erstwhile member of a secret society with royalist leanings, Colonel Van Hecke, leader of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, Generals Charles Mast and Émile Béthouart, and Colonel Jean Chrétien, Chief of Army Secret Service under Commander-in-Chief Juin. Then there was police officer Henri d’Astier, who maintained contact with the activists of Aboulker’s and Carcassonne’s networks.

But who would prove capable of holding such a motley group of putschists together? Murphy needed someone who could commit a kind of regicide: a leading figure of the Vichy regime prepared to break with Pétain and at the same time capable of securing the loyalty of the rest of the colonial apparatus for collaboration with the US military. US leaders chose none other than Admiral Darlan, the former head of the Vichy government, for this role in the remaining weeks leading up to Operation Torch.

While this narrative has been disputed by a number of French historians, what is certain is that after the landing of the troops in Algiers Darlan took charge of government affairs with the express approval of the US government—the story told is that he just happened to be in the country at the time for family reasons and the US government could not simply ignore him.
¹⁹
Anthony Verrier’s research based on US documents establishes Murphy’s conspirational dealings with Darlan a full four weeks before the landing. His advice to the US government was to “encourage Darlan”, advice which was readily taken up since on 17 October Murphy was given full authorisation to enter into any arrangement with Admiral Darlan. Roosevelt ordered Murphy to offer Darlan “rewards that would entrench him in North Africa—prospectively in France—and enable anti-Vichy opposition to be eliminated”.
²⁰

But there was another highly placed person who seemed a good pick for cooperation with the US military in North Africa and who also enjoyed the trust of Vichy officials, General Henri Giraud. He had one advantage since, having spent some time in German captivity, he was less compromised than Darlan. However, this did not make him an opponent of Pétain. On the contrary, upon his return to Vichy territory in
April 1942 he signed an oath of allegiance to Pétain. Giraud was about to play a prominent role in US plans next to Darlan.

US policies in North Africa in the run-up to 8 November had two main aims: preparation for a bloodless landing of American troops, and ousting de Gaulle. A third aim was to win the French troops over to the side of the Allied forces against the Nazis. Vichy had eight barracked army divisions in North Africa, a total of 250,000 soldiers, mostly Muslims. The forces of the Free French were substantially weaker, numbering 35,000 spread over a wide operations area.
²¹

The US plan was, however, quite risky. The dynamic which the invasion of the Allied troops in North Africa would unleash could not be foreseen. There were fears that the Muslim population might harbour hopes for an improvement of their situation or even an end to colonial rule. According to Washington’s plans the French African Army’s role was to prevent the “Arab problem” from bogging down the US troops. General Patton, commander-in-chief of the US landing force in Casablanca, figured that for Morocco alone “it would take sixty thousand Allied forces to hold the tribes quiet”.
²²

A further risk was the conspirational group’s composition. Murphy sought his potential candidates for the establishment of a US-friendly putsch government not among those individuals who wanted to fight the Nazis out of conviction, but instead among those elements who were responsible for suppressing the anti-fascists in North Africa. This complicated things, inasmuch as the conspirators were only tending their own interests and could not therefore be fully relied on. The US government became aware of this only after the landing of their troops.

While Murphy’s buddies remained in the background during the night of 8 November 1942, Aboulker’s network went into action in Algiers. Aboulker was in close touch with the British secret service, which operated separately and independently of the American services in North Africa. At the agreed upon signal and expecting the immediate arrival of the Allied troops, these young people cut telephone lines, occupied post offices, police stations and government buildings and arrested Vichy officials. Three hundred and fifteen of the 377 fighters participating in these operations were Jewish.
²³

From a military point of view their operations were a success. Unlike further west near Oran and along the Atlantic coast, the French chain of
command broke down in the capital city, thus allowing the American troops to land near Algiers without meeting any resistance. However, the insurgents were left to fight it out alone in the capital itself, the American troops moving onto the scene only after a 36-hour delay. Aboulker’s group had embarked on a chaotic undertaking without knowing who was going to fill the ensuing power vacuum after the removal of the governor-general. They were completely reliant on the Allied forces, for whom they were preparing the terrain, little knowing that the American leaders were simultaneously conspiring with the very same people they were attempting to arrest—not altogether unsuccessfully by the way, since General Juin was among those temporarily taken prisoner.