35

Armistice Day

AMERICAN FORCES LAND IN FRENCH AFRICA;

BRITISH NAVAL, AIR UNITS ASSISTING THEM;

EFFECTIVE SECOND FRONT, ROOSEVELT SAYS.

 

SUCH WAS THE New York Times banner headline on November 8, 1942.

“SECRET CLOSELY GUARDED—Reporters Locked in Office in White House to Bar Leak Before Release Hour,” another headline ran, much to the President’s amusement.

As congratulatory messages from world leaders streamed in to the Oval Office—from Stalin, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, Mackenzie King, and dozens of others—the President had good reason to be proud.

At his office in the War Department, Secretary Stimson congratulated General Marshall, telling him that Torch “was the most difficult and complex and large expeditionary plan that the United States had ever undertaken in its history—that it had been planned for execution and carried out in a most wonderful and perfect manner, and that I thought that the chief credit belonged to him. He seemed touched by what I said,” Stimson noted—having withheld from Marshall “my very grave misgivings as to the hazards of the whole plan strategically.”

Stimson was still tormented by the many things that might yet go wrong—and which had caused him to make “my protest to the President last spring or summer and repeated it again to Marshall several times while they were getting ready until I really think he got rather tired of me. But now when we get it out on maps, the hazard of it seems to be more dangerous than ever,” the secretary confided in his diary. “It is a hazard that can be met by good luck and by the superb execution of our own men; but when I look at the map and see how easy it would be for Germany, if she makes a compromise and arrangement with Spain to come down quickly through Spain and with the aid of the 140,000 men in Spanish Morocco, to pinch off the Straits and cut our lines of communication to the eastward, I shiver. . . .”¹

 

Stimson’s concerns regarding Spain proved groundless. Given his anxiety, it seemed incredible that he had so doggedly pressed for a cross-Channel assault that year, within swift striking distance of more than twenty-six German divisions, insisting upon such an invasion even to the point of mutiny.

For his own part the President had never credited a “compromise arrangement” between Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain, let alone a German drive through the Iberian Peninsula—an armored offensive that would have added yet another enemy to Hitler’s ample roster without actually contesting the landings in Morocco or Algeria. (During the Arcadia Conference in January that year the Joint Planning Committee had, in examining prospects for operations in Northwest Africa, determined that “it would take the Germans six weeks to prepare to invade Spain” and a “further six weeks to become firmly established with land and air forces in the South of Spain after they had crossed the Pyrenees.”)² Yet the hazards of mounting, with only a few weeks to prepare, the largest amphibious undertaking in human history, had certainly been real—and remained so for several days. In the hours that followed the Torch invasion there would, the President knew, be a thousand mistakes, untold misunderstandings, and awkward negotiations with leading French officials, officers, and insurgents, who were expected to help administer the territories liberated by America’s legions.

It didn’t matter! That was the beauty of Torch. It could not fail—too far from German forces to be extinguished, as a cross-Channel attack could so easily have been by Hitler’s air, naval, and ground forces in France and northern Europe.

Above all, there was the simple, clear, and symbolic message that the Torch invasion would send across the occupied world: The Americans are coming!

As the President explained to White House correspondents, off the record, on November 10, 1942, “where hundreds of thousands of lives are involved,” it was “a pretty good rule of all wars” that you “couldn’t find a second front offensive in a department store, ready made.” What he didn’t say was that Stimson and Marshall’s “ready made” cross-Channel Second Front would have led to a catastrophe, with untold American casualties, and have helped Hitler win the war. It hadn’t been viable, not only because the British wouldn’t fight, but because the Germans would have—the lunacy of such an operation forcing the President, as commander in chief, to look for something else that was possible.³

Operation Torch had required, he was willing to tell White House reporters, “a great deal of study, a great deal of coordination, a great deal of preparation of all kinds”—in secret, while half the world was demanding a cross-Channel invasion. “And so in succeeding months both Mr. Churchill and I have had to sit quietly and take with a smile, or perhaps you might say take it on the chin,” the President said, as the reporters laughed, “as to what all the outsiders were demanding.”⁴

And insiders.

 

For his part, Secretary Stimson remained a bundle of nerves. During the early hours on November 10, “while I lay sleepless,” Stimson confided in his diary, “I had one of my bogy fits. This time it hitched around the situation,” he moaned, “which the American army was getting itself into in North Africa.”

What if “the Germans should force their way or make any arrangement with Spain to come through without opposition and shut the Straits of Gibraltar on us”? he queried yet again. “It was the old objection which I have always had to the plan showing itself up and it seems worse now, in the light of my examination of the maps yesterday, than ever before. I called in General Handy this morning when I got to the office and went over the matter with him. He is the Chief of the Operations Division. He didn’t feel any better than I did and the cold facts and figures showed a very serious situation in case the Germans came through.”⁵

General Handy did his best to be respectful, but to calm down the Republican secretary, who was, yet again, full of foreboding. Handy showed him the latest reports “showing the vigor and initiative and general efficiency of our troops.” These were, Stimson accepted, enough “to reconcile anybody to hazard. Those men can meet almost any danger,” he was assured.⁶ Still, Stimson could not refrain from calling the secretary of state, Cordell Hull—pouring out his fears and imploring Hull to speak to the President about his anxieties regarding Spain.

The President duly saw Hull at 3:45 P.M., and telephoned Stimson to reassure him. Spain was not going to get involved, the President maintained. The invasion was too big, too sudden, too unrelated to Spain’s own interests for General Franco to cooperate with Hitler now, when he had failed to do so for two long years since Hitler’s invasion of the West.

Overall, the President told them, Torch had gone rather well—despite some troops being landed on wrong beaches, despite French coastal battery fire, despite French submarines, destroyers, and even cruisers as well as air defense going into action, and despite myriad other problems associated with an invasion. The majority of French officers and administrators seemed worried about their pensions, he heard, if they turned against the Vichy government. It would all work out, however.

Now seventy-five, Stimson was, as he confessed, “feeling very tired. The unconscious strain has been pretty heavy on me.”⁷

 

By contrast, President Roosevelt, aged sixty, was feeling at the top of his form.

Torch—his Torch—had been lit, and the United States was established in force on the threshold of Europe, with a Vichy cease-fire order already in effect in Algiers and a general cease-fire applicable to the whole of French Northwest Africa in the works, if all went well. The United States had beaten Hitler to the punch—Torch victorious in a matter of only three days.⁸

Admiral Hewitt had shepherded his armada across the Atlantic and put the men of General Patton’s Western Task Force ashore with remarkable precision—the French clearly unaware, until the landing craft appeared, of any threat from the sea. Even the ocean had complied—the usual rough winter sea glacially calm and only the quietest surf, as if by biblical command. (The meteorological officer who predicted this was awarded the Legion of Merit by a grateful General Eisenhower.) Much handwringing had concerned the fifteen-inch guns of the latest French battleship Jean Bart, in harbor at Casablanca, but dive-bombers from the USS Ranger and shells from the sixteen-inch guns of the USS Massachusetts silenced it; when it began firing yet again on November 10, more dive-bombers from the Ranger sank it.

Aboard the USS Augusta—the heavy cruiser on which President Roosevelt had signed the Atlantic Charter the previous year—General Patton had alternately fumed, sworn, and prayed: amazed to see the shore lights, harbor lights, and even lighthouse lights still burning as the U.S. vessels approached the Moroccan coast after a two-week voyage. It was “almost too good to be true. Thank God. He Stays on our side,” he’d jotted in his diary⁹—mortified that the gun blasts from the after-turret of the Augusta had blown his thirty-two-foot plywood launch to bits, with all his communications equipment, though not his ivory-handled revolvers, which he retrieved.

Once ashore at Fedala, shortly after midday on November 8, he had earned his monicker “Blood and Guts”—delighted at General Harmon’s capture of Safi, and General Truscott’s seizure of the port and airfield at Lyautey—leaving only Casablanca to be taken. However, in the confusion of the Torch battle he had seen for himself how fortunate his troops were not to have been fighting Germans, rather than the French. He had spent most of the first two days of the invasion literally “kicking ass”—“The French bombed the beach and later strafed it,” he wrote in his diary on November 9, describing operations at Fedala. “One soldier who was pushing a boat got scared and ran onto the beach and assumed the Fields [fetal] position and jiberred. I kicked him in the arse with all my might and he jumped right up and went to work. Some way to boost morale. As a whole the men were poor, the officers worse; no drive.”¹⁰

Patton certainly radiated drive, and when the French commander refused to surrender the city of Casablanca, he arranged for an all-out American naval and air blitz to begin at 7:00 A.M. on November 10—General Eisenhower having sent a chastening cable telling him the Eastern Task Force landings had meantime met almost no resistance. “Algiers has been ours for two days. Oran crumbling rapidly. The only tough nut left is in your hands. Crack it open.”¹¹

Patton did so—only calling off the devastating firepower of his naval and air support a mere ten minutes before the attack was due to go in, when the French sent word they would surrender, which their senior commanders subsequently did at Patton’s headquarters.

“People say that Army Commanders should not indulge in such practices” as “kicking ass” on invasion beaches, Patton later reflected. “My theory is that an Army commander does what is necessary to accomplish his mission and that nearly 80 per cent of his mission is to arouse morale in his men.”¹² He and his chosen field commanders had certainly earned the faith the President had vested in them. Early on November 11, Armistice Day, Admiral Leahy reported to the President he’d received a report from London that “the French Military force in Casa Blanca capitulated at 7 A.M. today and that the city of Oran was occupied by American troops last night.”¹³ Morocco and Algeria were in the Allied bag; there was nothing the Germans could now do about it.

General Giraud, unfortunately, had proven a great disappointment, despite an American team under General Mark Clark that had brought Giraud by submarine from Vichy France to Eisenhower’s advance headquarters at Gibraltar, and then to Algiers, where he was supposed to persuade Vichy forces to lay down arms in order to limit the bloodshed. He had failed abysmally to do so—indeed, whether he would have the authority to order his fellow Frenchmen to cease contesting American landings, and even inspire the 140,000 French troops in North Africa to fight the Nazis rather than the American forces, was now a very open question.

General Eisenhower—badgered day and night by Churchill, who could not resist meddling¹⁴—could only shake his head at news the Germans were landing troops by air in Tunis without a single shot being fired by the Vichy French to stop them, while the latter were continuing in many places to oppose American forces. The French resident-general, Vice Admiral Jean-Pierre Estéva, had even ordered that “German planes be given a friendly reception in eastern Algerian ports.”¹⁵

It was too awful. “If they would only see reason at this moment, we could avoid many weeks of later fighting,” Eisenhower railed in a message to his chief of staff in London from his headquarters still in Gibraltar. Unfortunately, “they are not thinking in terms of a cause, but of individual fortunes and opportunities. Consequently, Darlan, Juin, Giraud and the rest cannot combine to place their composite influence behind any particular project. Right this minute they should all be making it impossible for Admiral Estava,” the French commander in chief in Tunis, “to permit the German into Tunisia.” Instead the French had virtually welcomed the Germans. “He apparently has the equivalent of three divisions down there, and without the slightest trouble, could cut the throat of every German and Italian in the area and get away with it. . . . A situation like this creates in me so much fury that I sometimes wish I could do a little throat-cutting myself!”¹⁶

Was General Giraud, though, a better hope for getting a general cease-fire to even hold, let alone ginger French forces to fight the incoming Germans? Admiral Leahy thought not—in fact, for his own money, Leahy thought it a godsend that Admiral Darlan, the right-wing commander in chief of all Vichy French forces under Marshal Pétain, had happened to be in Algiers on the night of the Torch invasion, visiting his disabled son who had polio.

Despite being profoundly anti-British and an appeaser of Hitler, Darlan at least seemed to be pro-American, and have real authority over French forces in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. However, he too proved to be a broken reed—declining to break with his head of state, Marshal Pétain, who nevertheless relieved him of his post as commander in chief and made General Nogues in Morocco, an even more egregious appeaser, Darlan’s successor, with orders to continue to repel the American forces—while declining to order Frenchmen to lift a finger to resist the German and Italian forces, even as they invaded the remaining Vichy-controlled region of metropolitan France and Corsica, abrogating the 1940 armistice.

In sum, the indifference of Vichy French officers toward the Nazis, in comparison with their intransigence and hostility toward American forces, would have been comical had it not been so disgraceful for a once-great nation, both Leahy and the President reflected.

It didn’t matter, though. That was the vantage of Torch: that American force majeure would carry the day, in spite of Vichy French perfidy, Roosevelt was certain—though it now pained him to watch as the French refrained from firing a single bullet to stop the Germans from occupying Tunisia by air and then by sea, while French Vichy forces continued to kill Americans (over five hundred), even as they listened to news of the rest of their homeland being invaded and occupied by the Nazis.¹⁷

Such, however, was the darker side of war and of alliances.

By contrast the British, who had initially fought so feebly in the Far East and had shot thousands of their own colonial subjects in India rather than accept them as fellow fighters,¹⁸ seemed to have gotten a sort of second wind, once reinforced in Egypt with American armaments and air force groups. In Egypt, under Montgomery’s generalship, they had trounced Erwin Rommel’s seemingly invincible Panzerarmee Afrika. And in the Torch invasion under an American supreme commander, they had dovetailed their naval, air, and land contributions in remarkably successful fashion . . .

Coalition warfare, then, might yet work. Over time, perhaps, even the French might rediscover their native courage, and fight alongside American forces to defeat Hitler.

This, in sum, was the other subtext of Torch: the first coalition molding of Allied forces against the Axis powers, on the field of battle. It was no longer simply a political front—Roosevelt’s twenty-six free nations, speaking as the United Nations opposed to Axis tyranny—but a new, all-powerful assembly of national military forces, fighting under American supreme leadership and command.

There would doubtless be much to learn, commencing with the blooding of American troops in combat with the professional killers of the Wehrmacht, in Tunisia. But with the successful American invasion of North Africa, a start had been made. The Americans were coming.

 

Reading the messages and reports that came into the White House Map Room, the President felt humbled by the enormity of what had taken place—thankful it had, in the end, borne out his most fervent hopes. At 11:00 A.M. that day, Armistice Day 1942, he therefore went to Arlington Cemetery, Admiral Leahy accompanying him to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, across the Potomac.¹⁹

“Old General Pershing, although he wasn’t really fit to do it, he came along and went [in the car] with the President, while Knox and I followed behind,” Secretary Stimson recorded in his diary.²⁰ General Marshall, Admiral King, and the commanding officer of the Marines also attended.

Stimson was feeling a great deal better, having heard that, although the “Germans this morning invaded unoccupied France and are rushing through it towards the south coast in an attempt to get to Marseilles and the French fleet at Toulon,”²¹ there was no chance that they could now halt or throw back the American forces in Algeria and Morocco. At last Admiral Darlan, Stimson noted, “has ordered all resistance in North Africa to cease.”²²

Torch was over; the pincer campaign to defeat or evict Axis forces from the southern Mediterranean could now proceed.

In the circumstances, the President’s address was deeply moving.

“Here in Arlington we are in the presence of the honored dead,” Roosevelt, standing with the aid of his fourteen-pound steel leg braces, reminded his audience. “We are accountable to them—and accountable to the generations yet unborn for whom they gave their lives.

“Today, as on all Armistice Days since 1918, our thoughts go back to the first World War; and we remember with gratitude the bravery of the men who fought and helped to win that fight against German militarism. But this year our thoughts are also very much of the living present, and of the future which we begin to see opening before us—a picture illumined by a new light of hope.

“Today, Americans and their British brothers-in-arms are again fighting on French soil. They are again fighting against a German militarism which transcends a hundred-fold the brutality and the barbarism of 1918.

“The Nazis of today and their appropriate associates, the Japanese, have attempted to drive history into reverse, to use all the mechanics of modern civilization to drive humanity back to conditions of prehistoric savagery.

“They sought to conquer the world, and for a time they seemed to be successful in realizing their boundless ambition. They overran great territories. They enslaved—they killed.

“But, today, we know and they know that they have conquered nothing.

“Today, they face inevitable, final defeat.

“Yes, the forces of liberation are advancing.”

The President looked around. “Britain, Russia, China, and the United States grow rapidly to full strength,” he stated. “The opponents of decency and justice have passed their peak.

“And—as the result of recent events—very recent—the United States’ and the United Nations’ forces are being joined by large numbers of the fighting men of our traditional ally, France,” he declared—hopefully! “On this day, of all days, it is heartening for us to know that soldiers of France go forward with the United Nations.”

Which brought the President to the mission of the United States.

“The American Unknown Soldier who lies here did not give his life on the fields of France merely to defend his American home for the moment that was passing. He gave it that his family, his neighbors, and all his fellow Americans might live in peace in the days to come. His hope was not fulfilled,” he declared candidly.

Roosevelt was coming to the crux of his vision of the United States as a global guardian of liberty, in a world where it was too easy for the forces of violence, intolerance, and savagery to get their way unless effectively challenged. “American soldiers are giving their lives today in all the continents and on all the seas in order that the dream of the Unknown Soldier may at last come true. All the heroism, all the unconquerable devotion that free men and women are showing in this war shall make certain the survival and the advancement of civilization.”²³

 

As the spectators and participants in the little ceremony made their way back from Arlington National Cemetery to their cars in the chilling cold, they recognized that, in a sense, America’s new journey had just begun. It would not be an easy road, but it was a noble challenge Roosevelt was setting. Moreover, they could take comfort in the fact that the President, who had saved the nation at a time of the worst economic depression it had ever suffered, was now, on a global stage, proving to be perhaps the greatest commander in chief in American history.

Returning to his office at the White House, Admiral Leahy was certainly proud of his commander in chief—the man who liked to call himself “a pig-headed Dutchman.”²⁴ The President had, he noted in his diary, “made a very impressive five minute address to a large gathering of people,” with spectators “seated in an amphitheater and standing about in the clear cold morning. Except the President and myself, all of the official party wore heavy overcoats.”²⁵

Torch had set the tone and determination of the United States in prosecuting the war against the Axis powers. In overruling his generals, the President had, Admiral Leahy reflected, undoubtedly saved his nation from the military catastrophe that would have awaited them on the shores of mainland France. Instead they could now learn in comparative safety the dark arts of modern war—with every chance of ultimate victory. Vast American forces were, after all, now safely established on the threshold of Europe—and of greatness on behalf of their nation, if they could translate that triumph, step by step, into the defeat of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and finally of Emperor Hirohito’s Japan.

More difficulties would arise with the French, and with a rejuvenated Winston Churchill, now that his British Empire stood to be restored, thanks to American might. And there would be the problem of Stalin, the Russians—and the Chinese.

It would all work out, the President assured Leahy. It had been quite a journey over the past eleven months, since December 7, 1941.

Most moving of all to the widower admiral, though, had been the President’s prayer, at the end of his address. “Our thoughts,” Roosevelt had proclaimed in his unmistakable, lilting tenor voice, “turn in gratitude to those who have saved our Nation in days gone by. God, the father of all living, watches over these hallowed graves and blesses the souls of those who rest here. May He keep us strong in the courage that will win the war, and may He impart to us the wisdom and the vision that we shall need for true victory in the peace which is to come.”²⁶