34

The Greatest Sensation

“TODAY EVERYTHING WAS ENTIRELY overshadowed by what was going on in Africa,” Secretary Stimson recorded proudly on November 8, 1942. “The whole affair seems to have gone off admirably in respect to its execution and timing. Coming as it does, and was planned to do, on top of the British victory over Rommel in Egypt, it has taken the Nazi forces both at a surprise and at a great disadvantage, and every reaction today which came from Vichy and from the Berlin radios confirmed this.”¹

It was incredible yet true: the Führer caught with his pants down, traveling by train to Munich to give his traditional annual address to Nazi Party stalwarts in the Löwenbräukeller, when “the reports of the Allied landings in North Africa” came through to him.² Hitler, for once, was astounded—and furious at the failure of the Abwehr, the German foreign intelligence department.

German as well as Italian analysts had assured the Führer the Allied troop transports that had recently been reported passing Gibraltar must be on their way to Malta, or possibly a landing in Libya, in Rommel’s rear. Dr. Goebbels had noted “the ultimate destination of the great armada” was “still unknown,” but once it got closer to Italian- and German-dominated airspace “we will descend on it, and give it all we’ve got. Among other vessels it’s reported to have three carriers and a battleship. If we can give it a real pounding, our poor position in North Africa can be made good again.”³

It was not to be, however. The armada suddenly switched course, to Oran and Algiers.

Goebbels was dumbfounded. “What will happen?” he asked himself in his diary. “The landings thought to be in Italian territory or Rommel’s rear” had unexpectedly “switched course in the night” to become a “vast attempted invasion of French Northwest Africa.” Information had only come through at three o’clock in the morning; it was the “greatest sensation in ages”—the Americans and British seeking to “seize the initiative,” and declaring “this was now the Second Front.”⁴

So that, Goebbels recognized in shock, explained the long autumn weeks of silence in the Allied camp! The Americans, not the British, were coming!

“The Americans have taken the British completely under their wing,” Goebbels noted. It was now “coalition warfare”—with the United States in command, and seizing the initiative on a grand scale. “This is their way to help Russia,” he added, wincing at the thought. As master of Nazi deceit, he sneered at Roosevelt’s proclamation that the landing of U.S. troops in French territory was merely to forestall German occupation, and that the territory would be restored to French control in due course. Yet even the Mephisto of modern propaganda had to admit “the President’s appeal to the population not to counter the invasion” would probably work, “for the Americans were coming as friends and not as enemies.”⁵

Marshal Pétain, in Vichy, had immediately declared that France would defend its colonies against such an invasion—yet Goebbels had his doubts. “The situation this morning is still utterly murky, not to speak of how it appeared in the night. When I got the first news at 3:30 in the night, I couldn’t make any sense of it. I can’t get in touch with the Führer, because he’s on his way from his military headquarters to Munich. This gives me a few hours to mull things over. . . . These sensational reports have put events in Egypt completely in the shade.”⁶

Suddenly the entire war seemed to have been turned on its head. “What will France do?” Goebbels wondered, “and how will it affect, even disrupt our work” in Europe and Russia, “for example if we have to checkmate the French?”⁷

Plans, he knew, had long been drawn up to abrogate the 1940 armistice and occupy the rest of metropolitan France and Corsica, if the Allies attempted an invasion of the French mainland. No war-gaming had been undertaken for the possibility of an invasion of French Northwest Africa by Americans, though!

“France’s hour” of destiny had come. The Gallic race stood at the threshold of true greatness, if only they would now actually fight with Hitler and the Third Reich, instead of against it—indeed, Pierre Laval, Pétain’s deputy, was soon on his way to Munich to propose an egregious new treaty with the Third Reich, in which France would be a full Nazi partner: a Quadripartite Pact.

Meantime, however, whatever Marshal Pétain might say about Frenchmen defending French territory in Northwest Africa “to the last drop of blood”—and hoping thereby to dissuade the Germans from occupying the entire mainland of France—Goebbels had little confidence such a statement by Pétain would prove to be effective on the field of battle, whether the French were facing the Allies or the Germans. The French were a rotten race; they would be conflicted down to their intestines. Was it not better now to simply go ahead and dump the terms of the 1940 armistice: to ignore Pétain and Laval, and overrun metropolitan Vichy France with German troops—to “have a bird in the hand rather than two in the bush?”⁸

 

That afternoon, November 8, 1942, the Führer finally reached the Brown House in Munich—national headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany. There the Reichsminister for propaganda met with him.

The Führer had aged since their last meeting in the summer. Only four months before, Hitler had been in “bester Laune”—in fine fettle, brimming with pride.⁹ The entire Western world had seemed his oyster—stretching as far as the Urals. He still had Blondi with him, the dog he’d acquired in 1941 as a gift from his loyal deputy, Martin Bormann—a German shepherd “of outstanding racial purity,” as Goebbels had recorded, glad that the Führer “has at least one being with whom he can be happy.” Successes “in every theater of the war put him in a wonderful mood,” Goebbels had noted in the summer—Hitler talking “in the most laudatory way about Rommel, who has become the Marshal of the Desert,” a good Nazi and a man to whom the Führer would ultimately entrust command of the entire German army “if things get that far.”¹⁰

But they hadn’t. Everything had now been upended—stunning Goebbels, but bearing out the Führer’s lingering suspicion that the Allies might yet come up with a surprise that would compromise Operation Blue, his drive deeper into Russia.

Goebbels had not shared the Führer’s premonition. How stupid it was of the British to talk of cross-Channel landings, he had sneered, since the idea of a Second Front in France had only served to harden German defenses in the coastal areas. “One should never alert people to what is supposed, later, to be a surprise,” Goebbels had observed with contempt, two months before the British fiasco at Dieppe. “As a consequence our troops have been reinforced as never before, and made more mobile.”¹¹ Moreover, if the British or Americans thought the local French population would rise up to help them, they had another think coming, Goebbels had noted, recording with satisfaction the Führer’s dismissal of such a possibility. “The Führer thinks the chances of French guerillas or partisans are absolutely nil,” he recorded—the Germans having shown on the Eastern Front how they dealt with such resistance, and it was not pretty. In sum, “the Führer has not a moment’s doubt that an attempted British invasion, lasting possibly eight or ten days, would be a complete catastrophe,” which “might lead to a transformation of the war, perhaps even an end to the war.”¹²

And yet . . . As Goebbels had confided in his diary, the Führer did worry. Churchill got under his skin. Goebbels had remained confident the British would not undertake something as stupid as a cross-Channel invasion, but the Führer had demurred. “As I noted earlier, the Führer is extraordinarily careful and remarks, in this connection, that no general has ever been criticized for having been too well prepared, only for being insufficiently so. The Führer adds that the British have to do something with their forty or fifty intact divisions—they can’t be expected to simply capitulate to us, given the number they have. We’ve no idea where they might invade; but given the characters and temperaments of Churchill and Roosevelt anything is possible. Thank God the Führer is so cautious!”¹³ Hitler was even having his “so-called Mountain Nest” military headquarters, situated near the Belgian border—the center from which he’d directed his 1940 invasion of the West—completely renovated, so he could move back at any sign of a major cross-Channel offensive. “He makes provision for every eventuality,” Goebbels noted, “and doesn’t depend on luck. You can really see how he’d love to renew a battle with the British in the West. Mr. Churchill would probably come off a lot worse than the Führer.”¹⁴

That prediction had been made by Dr. Goebbels on June 24, 1942—shortly after the fall of Tobruk. It had proven prophetic in terms of the disastrous British-Canadian “raid in force” on Dieppe eight weeks later. But now, on November 8, 1942, a real invasion was taking place—and not where German forces could repel them.

Such a strategic throw of the dice had actually occurred to Hitler in the summer, but the Führer had never imagined it would be an American undertaking.¹⁵ “Whether the British might attempt an invasion of Africa is always a possibility,” Goebbels had noted on June 23, but “the Führer thinks it would be pointless. What on earth would they [the British] want there? I suppose they could bring the French Vichy territories under British control; but that wouldn’t be decisive, in terms of the war’s likely course.”¹⁶

Now, on November 8, 1942, the “invasion of Africa” had started—and it filled Hitler with foreboding, since it was clearly a U.S. undertaking, which the French authorities in North Africa might welcome rather than repell. What should the Germans do? Would Mussolini insist on German help? If so, where? Would Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika be crushed between two Allied pincers, one American, one British? Should Rommel’s army be withdrawn across the Mediterranean? Or would Italy then lose heart and be tempted to sue for peace?

Already the neutral countries such as Sweden were turning hostile toward the Third Reich; Spain, equally, was refusing to cooperate, despite the help Hitler had given General Franco in the Spanish Civil War . . .

Germany, which had looked to be on top of the world only three months before, suddenly looked beleaguered—evil, abandoned, vulnerable. The Führer’s vaunted military caution had impressed his propaganda minister, but had not served to warn him of an American rather than British assault in Africa. Further east, Rommel’s army had been smashed at Alamein and was retreating into Libya. The Russians were refusing to surrender at Stalingrad, and there was no possibility of getting across the Urals, now that snow was falling.

Everything had gone wrong. As U.S. commander in chief, Roosevelt had ignored calls for a cross-Channel Second Front—thus avoiding the catastrophe Hitler had prepared for their arrival. Instead, by landing in Morocco and Algeria, the Americans would now have a secure base from which, with their vast industrial capacity and manpower, they could prosecute the war against the Third Reich, advancing from two possible launch pads: the British Isles and North Africa—and forcing the Germans to defend from both directions.

The Führer had been outwitted. Even the most conservative French, who might have resisted a British invasion of French Northwest Africa, could not be relied upon to offer more than token resistance, since the Americans were clearly uninterested in becoming a colonial power, and were already supplying copious amounts of food to the Vichy authorities.

Hitler’s worst nightmare—a major war on two fronts—had now come to pass, with Morocco and most of Algeria too distant for even the Luftwaffe to reach, let alone armored forces.

Hitler’s first response was to quash any possibility of panic among his staff. The foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, had, for example, joined the Führer’s train at Bamberg, in Bavaria—having received news of the American landings at his office on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin and flown down immediately. Not surprisingly, Ribbentrop had clutched at straws. It was he, after all, who had negotiated the infamous Nazi-Soviet peace pact with the Russians in 1939—allowing Hitler to invade the West with impunity, while the Russians watched; he who had been less than enthusiastic, however, about the Führer’s decision to declare war on Russia in the summer of 1941; he who had not followed the Führer’s logic about the United States being confined to fighting only in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor; he who had opposed the Führer’s decision to therefore declare, with supposed impunity, war on America—a decision Ribbentrop had argued vainly against, he later claimed. In any event, it was Ribbentrop the Nazi diplomat who once again attempted to get the Führer to be sensible—begging the Nazi leader to allow him to put out peace feelers to Stalin via Stockholm, while there was still time to negotiate an end to the war of annihilation in the East.

Hitler had brushed away such a proposition.

“From now on,” the Führer had snarled, “there will be no more offer of peace.”¹⁷

Absent a miracle, the people of the Third Reich would no longer be asked to fight for Lebensraum—living space. It would be Todesraum—room to die.

As Führer of the Third Reich, unaccountable to anyone but his own demonic agenda, Hitler was adamant. General Paulus would be denied permission to pull his almost encircled army back from Stalingrad. And though his “siegen oder sterben” order to Rommel at Alamein had been disobeyed, that did not mean he would allow the Marshal of the Desert to bring his Panzer Army back to Europe or Germany. Rather, it would be made, like Field Marshal Paulus’s army, to fight until it was destroyed or surrendered.

Torch had thus ignited a veritable funeral pyre, upon which Hitler would prefer to see his nation immolated rather than that he should seek to negotiate a way out or step down as führer—knowing he himself would be tried as a war criminal and executed.

Thus did the Nazi dream meet reality, at last—Europe’s largest nation having willingly followed his banner of anti-Semitism and ruthless conquest, yet now facing on November 8 the stark reality that, despite Germany’s triumphant victories in the summer of 1942, it was not going to work; that Winston Churchill had inspired his country to hold out, and that, far from focusing exclusively on dealing with the Japanese in the Pacific, the great United States of America, under President Roosevelt, was moving to Europe to bring the thousand-year Third Reich to an inevitable end.

At the Brown House in Munich, addressing his old Nazi Party colleagues and veterans, Hitler did not even mention the American landings, confining himself to a tirade against the Jews—the source of all Germany’s misfortunes. In the meantime, however, he had given orders via his High Command Headquarters that German units were immediately to seize and occupy all of Vichy-controlled France, the Pyrenees, and Corsica, as per Case Anton. More, that a fresh German army be assembled to go to Tunisia under General von Arnim, and deny the Americans easy eviction of Rommel’s German or Italian forces in North Africa. It was impossible now for Nazi Germany to win the war, Hitler knew—but with luck and stout German hearts, it might not lose it.

If only, he rued, he had not banked on America concentrating upon the Pacific.