The fourth volume of Winston Churchill’s magnum opus The Second World War is called The Hinge of Fate, an apt title for a major turning point of the war, when President Roosevelt (with Churchill’s support) made the decision in late July 1942 to go for landings in North Africa rather than western Europe. Gibraltar would be a key staging post for the Allied task forces. Despite opposition from George Marshall and other senior American soldiers, this choice laid out the path that Anglo-American ground operations would follow for the next two years of the war.

Things were not going well for the British Empire in 1942: Mandalay had fallen, Singapore had fallen, Tobruk had fallen, and Churchill needed a victory to brandish against those who would censure him. The fightback of Operation Torch in November 1942 was a large undertaking with only three months’ notice, but Roosevelt was determined that US troops would get into action that year. It was also extremely risky. Ships of the Western Task Force would have to cross more than three thousand nautical miles of the U-boat-infested Atlantic Ocean before landing thirty-five thousand American GIs in Morocco, while two more task forces sailing from the UK would be carrying seventy-five thousand English-speaking men the fifteen hundred miles to French-and-Arabic-speaking Algeria, in order, as Churchill put it, ‘to drive in against the back door of Rommel’s armies’.

Although Gibraltar was a central springboard, and the planning mostly went on in London, Operation Torch was predominantly a US enterprise. It had to be presented as wholly American because, after the bitter conflicts at Mers-el-Kébir, Dakar and Syria, Vichy France, the occupying power in North Africa, loathed the British more than the Americans. George Marshall, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, had already chosen the man to take charge, the efficient staff officer Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had been made the CG of ETOUSA (Commanding General, European Theatre of Operations, United States Army) on 11 June, when the American landings were still intended to be on mainland Europe. ‘See what needs to be done, then do it,’ instructed Marshall. ‘Tell me about it when you can.’

*

‘Ike’ Eisenhower and his team arrived in London on 24 June 1942. His headquarters was in a block of flats at 20 Grosvenor Square and after a brief stay at Claridge’s and the Dorchester, he settled in Telegraph Cottage, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, with two African American servants and Kay Summersby as his driver. When he heard that President Roosevelt had decided to postpone the attack on Europe and concentrate on northwest Africa, Eisenhower initially thought that ‘Wednesday, July 22, 1942 could well go down as “the blackest day in history”, particularly if Russia is defeated in the big Boche drive now so alarmingly under way.’ But on Friday 7 August, Eisenhower was named Supreme Commander for Operation Torch and got a new Allied Force Headquarters at Norfolk House in St James’s Square.

Alliances are never easy, and the Americans and the British were not natural allies, not only ‘separated by a common language’, as is often said, but with a host of cultural, economic and historical reasons to dislike or misunderstand each other. Dwight Eisenhower, born in Denison, Texas and raised in Abilene, Kansas, was wholly American in his addiction to Western cowboy stories and Camel cigarettes, of which he smoked four packs a day. Yet this honest, broad-grinning man from the Great Plains somehow made the alliance with the devious and snobbish British work. He became, in Carlo d’Este’s phrase, ‘the architect of co-operation’. The truth was that no single nation could have done it alone: the Second World War was won by alliance. In his interesting book War by Land, Sea and Air David Jablonsky argues convincingly that Eisenhower’s whole life, from West Point to White House, can be read as a quest for unified command, doing whatever it took to overcome the parochialisms of inter-service rivalries and nationalistic squabbles in order to achieve a greater goal. Not a star, but simply the captain of a good team.

On 6 August 1942, Eisenhower’s friend, the polo-playing cavalryman Major General George S. Patton Jr, arrived in London for two weeks’ planning for Torch. ‘I am not, repeat not, pro-British,’ stated Patton. He thought all the pretty women in England must have died because the rest ‘are hideous with fat ankles’. He was suspicious of Eisenhower ‘going native’ and beginning to use Limey words like ‘petrol’ instead of ‘gasoline’. Patton was a stickler for discipline and correct dress, a macho tough guy in a shiny helmet who liked to wear two ivory-handled pistols (a .45 Single Action Army Colt and a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum) on his belt. He turned the air blue with swearing, but always in a curiously high, falsetto voice. ‘We won’t just shoot the sonsabitches. We’re going to cut out their living guts – and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.’ Patton was, surprisingly, also an intellectual, who read the Koran out of curiosity when crossing the Atlantic to invade the Maghreb, finding it mostly boring. His religion was war. He told his ship’s captain that he did not mind losing three quarters of his men as long as he was victorious. Eisenhower was shrewd enough to know that much of this was ‘the shell of showmanship’, the pose of the actor, and that Patton was actually more thin-skinned than hard-boiled.

*

Spies, diplomats and propagandists were now told to pave the way for the soldiers in North Africa, tackling enemy secret agents, doing deals with local French colonial troops, bribing auxiliaries, assuaging the neighbouring countries, and above all persuading the Vichy authorities that the American and British allies came in peace, that they were not against French interests in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, nor seeking to impose a new government on them. They were only in transit, they said: their true enemy, the Axis, was further east, the Italian and German armed forces in Libya and Egypt.

Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to keep de Gaulle’s Free French right out of the planning and execution of any operations in North Africa. Dakar had been a fiasco, and it was vital to avoid a civil war between Vichy and Free French. The diplomat Robert Murphy found his work seeking co-operation with the French trying. Although tasked by the president with bringing local Vichy officials, both civil and military, on side, he found the American soldiers were not prepared to trust any of these potentially useful partners, so no one on the French side could be told what was going on until just before it happened. Naturally, this annoyed the Frenchmen, and made some unhelpful. Murphy had to tell the Vichy French that the task force was purely American, under American command, there to forestall a planned occupation by the Axis armed forces and to preserve French sovereignty. The Americans would welcome all French assistance, but any resistance would be put down by force of arms. The US would also guarantee the salaries, allowances, death benefits and pensions of all who joined in support of their expeditionary force.

President Roosevelt had his own penchant for secrecy. He told Murphy in September not to inform the State Department about what he was up to and arranged for him to be secretly flown to England, disguised in a lieutenant colonel’s uniform – ‘Nobody ever pays any attention to a lieutenant colonel’ – to brief General Eisenhower and his staff on the political problems of French North Africa. Murphy remained a civilian, both as the ‘personal representative of the US President’ and as the ‘Operating Executive Head of the Civil Affairs Section and Adviser for Civil Affairs under General Eisenhower’. He also had a foot in the intelligence camp, and when he arrived in Algiers in October 1942, ostensibly for diplomatic negotiations with key Vichy generals, he was also bearing five secret wireless transmitter/receivers for US agents.

The head of the American undercover warriors in North Africa was the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel William A. Eddy, born to missionary parents in Syria, a decorated veteran of the US Marine Corps with a limp to testify to his war wounds, who also held a doctorate from Princeton University (his dissertation was on Gulliver’s Travels). Officially, Eddy was the new US naval attaché at the American Legation in Tangier. But he was also ‘334’, working for General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s new intelligence organisation, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), established on 13 June 1942.

On that date, Donovan’s previous Office of the Co-ordinator of Information, with its $10 million budget and six hundred staffers, had been split in two. The Foreign Information Service, which did the ‘white’ propaganda of overseas radio broadcasting, became the core of the new Office of War Information, which dealt with newsreels, newspapers, films and photographs, etc., and continued the radio service Voice of America, started in February 1942 and still broadcasting today. But all the ‘black’, clandestine, guerrilla and espionage work belonged to the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, which was the true forerunner of today’s CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. OSS was in charge of overseas operations worldwide outside the Americas and was an armed force, being under the military Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Donovan’s earlier office, COI, had already been getting information from Murphy’s dozen vice consuls in North African ports like Casablanca, Oran, Algiers and Tunis. These men now moved over, lock, stock and barrel to the Office of Strategic Services. What Murphy called his ‘twelve apostles’ in North Africa were just the type of upper-class Americans to fit right in to the OSS, dubbed ‘Oh So Social’. They maintained good relations with the top Vichy naval and military: General Weygand in Algeria, Admiral Estéva in Tunisia and General Noguès in Morocco, all of whom needed the oil and petrol that the USA supplied. The apostles’ brief widened from checking that gas and other US goods did not reach Axis hands to acquiring political, military and economic intelligence, suborning local officials, cultivating native chiefs, organising fifth columnists, setting up guerrilla networks, caching demolition materials. Subversive COI seeds sprouted and blossomed, watered by OSS.

Robert Murphy was the diplomatic head, but all the secret information went to the Arabic-speaking Colonel Eddy, who arrived in Tangier on 26 January 1942, only seven weeks after Pearl Harbor, and took up residence at the El Minzah Hotel. ‘I was to do what Murphy, the policy man, ordered or approved, and nothing else,’ Eddy said. The American ‘consular’ staff working for COI/OSS, linked by seven secret wirelesses, formed the tap roots of a spy system, but the fungal mycelium spreading wider into the soil of northwest Africa to draw up nutrients of information was mostly not American. Eddy used a disciplined group of exiled Spanish communists, who did not like the French, distrusted the British because they had let them down in the civil war, and who all detested Franco, as a ‘human post office’ for communications. Another helper was ‘Agency Africa’, a Polish intelligence network founded and run by Major General Rygor Słowikowski. Its legitimate cover was Floc-Av, North Africa’s first porridge factory, and it had agents all the way from Dakar in the west through Río de Oro and Ifni, across Morocco and Algeria to Tunis in the east. The intelligence that these Polish agents gleaned went through Colonel Eddy in Tangier, and OSS reaped the credit. The Poles in exile were not just fine soldiers, sailors and fighter pilots, they led the way in Second World War decryption, secret flotillas and espionage too.

Britain’s own sabotage and subversion organisation, the Special Operations Executive, had to play second fiddle to OSS in North Africa because the Americans were leading the invasion. On 26 July 1942, an accord between William Donovan of OSS and Charles Hambro of SOE split their responsibilities both by country and within countries. For example, in Tangier and Morocco, it was agreed that SOE handle the Christians and the Spanish, and OSS the Muslims. During Torch, however, SOE and OSS would share their radio networks.

The Harvard University physical anthropologist Carleton S. Coon (whose PhD had been on the tribes of the Rif mountains in Morocco) and his college friend Gordon H. Browne were allotted the Muslims. Coon arrived in Tangier at the end of May 1942 and told the chargé d’affaires of the American Legation, J. Rives Childs, that he was merely doing research and propaganda work for COI, finding out what the Arabs were thinking. He promptly set out to acquire informants, buy potential helpers and spy out the lie of the land. Moroccan Nationalists, he found, were men of theory rather than action. Pistol-packing Coon tried to persuade the powerful religious brotherhoods to help the Americans with intelligence, and to get remnants of Abd el-Krim’s Rifian army to do the same and prepare to become guerrillas for the Allies if the Germans invaded or Spain entered the war.* Coon code-named the religious helpers ‘Strings’ and the warriors ‘Tassels’.

*

On 7 May 1942, Lord Gort moved on from Gibraltar to replace exhausted Sir William Dobbie as the governor of embattled Malta. Noel Mason-MacFarlane returned from Russia and on 19 June 1942 was sworn in as the seventieth governor of Gibraltar, accompanied by, as his aide-de-camp, the actor Captain Anthony Quayle, who had re-encountered him at Brown’s Hotel in London. Mason-MacFarlane was now lamer than before, with gradual paralysis attacking his spine. Pain made his temper shorter. The socialist-minded governor wanted no more flattering of the local Spanish aristocracy so invitations to the Marquesa de Povar and her ilk were sharply curtailed.

Mason-MacFarlane was very much the soldier. When the writer Eric Linklater came out to Gibraltar with the producer Vincent Korda and the actor Ralph Richardson to research a feature film about the Rock, they thought that if a governor character were to appear in their movie, General Mason-MacFarlane had to play him.

Vincent Korda noticed how, among soldiers, Mason-Mac just disappeared: ‘When the Governor sat talking in a group of soldiers, easy and relaxed – his heavy body deep in a chair, a sergeant passing a pint of beer above his Roman head to another sergeant – he was like a foxhound in a pack of foxhounds: difficult to distinguish unless one knew his markings and his voice.’

*

The new governor had a most important secret visitor at the beginning of August 1942, on the first leg of a remarkable seventeen-thousand-mile journey. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, passing through the week before, had warned that this guest would be arriving ‘in disguise’.

An unheated Consolidated Liberator bomber called Commando touched down on the new Gibraltar airstrip early on 2 August 1942, carrying Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Flying under the pseudonym ‘Colonel Warden’, Churchill did not, in the event, wear the clip-on red beard he had brought, but stepped down in the blue uniform of an RAF air commodore, with a cigar in his mouth and carrying a cane. There was no reception committee for the prime minister, only Anthony Quayle, who opened the passenger door of ‘a filthy little pick-up truck that was used for collecting stores’.

‘Oh, yes, indeed. Is this part of the cover plan?’ Churchill asked.

‘Yes, sir, it is.’

‘Good – good. But you know that I do have to take my detective with me. Do you mind if he comes too?’

‘Not a bit, sir. He’ll have to sit in the back though, and it’s rather dirty.’

‘Oh, that won’t hurt Thompson. He can sit on those chains. He’ll be all right.’

Churchill stared up at the white cliff of North Front and started asking questions. How many men were stationed there? He was surprised by the answer, thirty thousand. Did they get sufficient entertainment? Was the mail arriving regularly from home? Then there was a pause, and a sudden question:

‘Young man – are you prepared to sell your life dearly?’

‘I hope so, sir.’

‘Because this old Fortress is soon to be the centre of historic events. I expect you know that.’

Quayle said he did, though he thought it odd that the prime minister should be confiding in a total stranger. They drove slowly over the tank traps and along the road that is now called Winston Churchill Avenue.

‘We were told, sir, that you’d be arriving in disguise. But I hadn’t expected to see you disguised as an air commodore.’

‘Disguised as an air commodore? What do you mean? I am an air commodore!’

‘Oh indeed, sir. I know that. I meant that I hadn’t expected to see you wearing the uniform.’

‘Oh yes. And what is more …’ Turning in his bucket seat, Churchill tugged at the left breast of his tunic and patted it with his right hand. ‘And what is more, I have my wings!’ His eyes were full of tears, perhaps thinking of ‘the Few’, who lost so many in the Battle of Britain.

After a visit to Government House they had a quick tour of the Upper Rock. In one narrow street on their descent a vegetable seller’s recalcitrant donkey halted their car. The Gibraltarians who peered in did not breathe a word to the Abwehr in La Línea about whom they had seen. At tea-time, the American pilot Bill Vanderkloot lifted the Liberator off the runway and, escorted by four Beaufighters, headed southeast over Melilla towards the Sahara.

Winston Churchill was in the aeroplane’s cockpit at 4.25 a.m. on 3 August when the River Nile came into view and they turned north for Cairo. The prime minister was sixty-seven years old, flying in a modern aircraft along the railway line to Aswan, built by Lord Kitchener’s engineers in the 1890s reconquest of the Sudan when they had taken the country back from the Islamist Dervishes who killed General Gordon in Khartoum. Churchill’s mind went back to more than forty years before. On 2 September 1898, on horseback, the young Winston Churchill had charged with the 21st Lancers against the Khalifa’s black flag at the battle of Omdurman. On another part of the battlefield British army Maxim guns mowed down hundreds of Sudanese warriors, but in The River War, Churchill saw horseback warfare as different: ‘The other might have been a massacre, but here the fight was fair, for we too fought with sword and spear.’

In Egypt in early August 1942, Churchill replaced General Auchinleck with General Montgomery as head of the Eighth Army in Africa. Then the party flew on to Moscow to meet Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin. Winston Churchill, who detested communism, was in the tiger’s lair, come to give Stalin the unwelcome news that there would not be a Second Front in Europe that year because the Allies did not have enough landing craft. But, said Churchill, there were other places for the British and the Americans to attack the Germans. The PM duly laid out their secret plan, Operation Torch, for the Russian leader.

‘Stalin became intensely interested. His first question was what would happen in Spain and Vichy France.’ Churchill drew a crude picture of a crocodile: while Stalin hit it on the hard snout, the Anglo-Americans would slit its ‘soft belly’. Using a globe, he expounded the advantages of clearing the Mediterranean. Churchill said the astute and crafty Stalin soon grasped the four advantages of Torch: ‘First, it would hit Rommel in the back; second, it would overawe Spain; third, it would produce fighting between Germans and Frenchmen in France; and, fourth, it would expose Italy to the whole brunt of the war.’

Aristocratic Churchill felt euphoric after that first meeting on 12 August: he thought he had won the ‘peasant’ over. The next night’s meeting at 11 p.m. disabused him of that most unpleasantly. Stalin always liked to disconcert: first night, honey; second night, gall. Now he presented an aide-mémoire which dismissed Torch as irrelevant to the Soviet Union. He was scathing about the broken promises of a Second Front in Europe, and insultingly brutal about all the British failures and retreats – Norway, France, Crete, Singapore, Tobruk, etc. Stalin said all this, virtually accusing a man still haunted by the 1916 defeat in the Dardanelles of cowardice in the face of the German enemy.

Furious, sulky, the prime minister wanted to fly home the next morning, but Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador, wisely advised him to swallow his pride. On the last night, Stalin did a volte-face, switching on the Georgian charm again, inviting Churchill for a private meal and drink, his daughter Svetlana Stalin in attendance, where he wooed the British premier for assurances of more military aid and a promise that Russia would smash Hitler’s Prussian military machine and disarm Germany. At one in the morning, Alec Cadogan went to Stalin’s room in the Kremlin and ‘found Winston and Stalin, and Molotov who had joined them, sitting with a heavily laden board between them, food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and innumerable bottles’. In a letter to Lord Halifax, Cadogan said that ‘everything seemed to be as merry as a marriage-bell … I think the two great men really made contact and got on terms.’

Two planes now flew Churchill’s enlarged party back the same route: two thousand miles from Moscow to Tehran, then thirteen hundred miles to Cairo, then another two and a half thousand miles, the fourteen-hour leg to Gibraltar, where they arrived on Monday 24 August and all repaired to Government House for a bath, shave and breakfast. (Mason-MacFarlane was away in London.) For security reasons Churchill was not allowed out into Main Street, but the high-spirited PM wondered if he might venture forth, swathed and swaddled, ‘disguising himself as an Egyptian demi-mondaine, or an Armenian suffering from toothache’. They were about to have lunch at 1 p.m. when word came that London had approved a flight by daylight and they were to leave at 1.30, so they had to bolt their food and dash. The sixteen-hundred-mile flight to England took eight hours.

*

When Mason-MacFarlane was told in August that Torch was going ahead, he reported to London that Gibraltar was so closely watched that all unusual activity would be known in Berlin within twenty-four hours. If Spain came into the war against the Allies, the Rock’s harbour and airfield would soon be knocked out.

This was a surprise to the Americans. Harry Butcher, Eisenhower’s confidant and diary-keeper, wrote: ‘Gibraltar, long the trademark symbolizing security† [was] actually extraordinarily vulnerable in the two particulars most important to us – i.e. airdrome and harbor.’ Mason-MacFarlane advised complete security about Torch’s objective, and urged that the Spanish government be reassured ‘convincingly and rapidly’ if their suspicions and fears were aroused.

In late August and early September 1942, both Mason-MacFarlane and Samuel Hoare came to London. The Monday that Churchill was in Gibraltar, Mason-MacFarlane attended a long conference in Eisenhower’s office, driving home the points made in his written report. Gibraltar’s airstrip, he said, with up to two hundred Spitfires assembled on it for Torch, was a prime target for Italian or German bombing, and Spanish machine guns were positioned only twenty feet from the barbed wire by the airfield. There were a million gallons of petrol stored in flimsy four-gallon tins in every corner and crevice of the Rock, and he dreaded what a few incendiary bombs could do. He suggested a petrol tanker should be moored in the commercial harbour to lighter or hose fuel ashore as required. Mason-MacFarlane also pointed out that water would be a problem: Gibraltar’s supply was insufficient for any unusual demand, so ships would need to bring their own water and oil. To confuse German surveillance of Gibraltar, all American officers should wear British or Canadian uniforms. Because Gibraltar’s airfield was so crowded, the land invasion had to succeed straight away to allow aeroplanes to move to airfields in North Africa. But if Torch failed, Hitler would try to bully Franco into war against the UK and the USA, though Mason-MacFarlane thought that with the right reassurances, Spain would stay neutral.

Reassuring Spain was Ambassador Samuel Hoare’s job. He did not meet with Eisenhower personally because that might well have given the game away. The ambassador advised the Americans that Franco’s reaction would depend on events. If the Torch landings went well and an Allied victory seemed likely, German pressure on Franco would not work. However, if there were Allied failures and delays, the Spanish government might be tempted to strike at Gibraltar, to pre-empt a German onslaught. He agreed with Mason-MacFarlane that establishing airfields in North Africa within range of Spanish territory was vital. He recalled that the British attack on the French navy at Mers-el-Kébir had frightened the Spaniards: ‘The power of retaliation against any hostile act on the part of the Spanish Government would be a powerful deterrent to Franco and Serrano Suñer.’ When authorised to do so, Hoare would reassure Franco that Torch posed no threat to Spain or Spanish interests in North Africa. Meanwhile, because the preparations for Torch could not be concealed, their purpose should be masked by a cover story: they would let it be known that the true target was further east in the Mediterranean: an attack on Italy, in defence of Malta.

*

Malta was on many minds in August 1942. The island’s situation was desperate, and a massive convoy – with four aircraft carriers – was sent from Gibraltar to supply the beleaguered island with more Spitfires, food, ammunition and above all the fuel needed to keep Allied aircraft and ships moving to obstruct the Axis convoys supporting Rommel’s Panzers in Africa.

Operation Pedestal (3–15 August 1942) was horrendously costly. The Germans and Italians threw more than five hundred bombers and fighters, a dozen submarines and a shoal of fast attack boats against the convoy. They managed to sink two light cruisers and a destroyer and torpedoed the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, earmarked for Operation Torch, which went down carrying with it a quarter of the convoy’s fighter planes. Hundreds of men died. Of the fourteen loaded merchant ships, just five reached Malta, and only two of them undamaged. The crippled tanker Ohio made it, hauled into the Grand Harbour of Valletta lashed to a destroyer and pulled by a set of tugs, and her vital fuel, 11,500 tons of kerosene and diesel oil, flowed safely out into two tankers before the broken vessel finally sank.

It was Saturday 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption, Santa Marija in Malta, when Roman Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary being taken up into heaven, body and soul, at the end of her earthly life. The Maltese faithful gave thanks for this sacrifice and their salvation, and continue to do so on 15 August to this day.

*

At Bilbao in the Basque country on Saturday 15 August 1942, the Spanish right-wing Carlist requetés were also celebrating the Feast of the Assumption with a Requiem Mass at the basilica of Nuestra Señora de Begoña, remembering their comrades of the Tercio de Begoña who had died fighting for the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Among the congregation was the Traditionalist General Varela, the Minister of War in Franco’s government, who was married to a wealthy Basque, Cecilia Ampuero. As some of the red-bereted Carlist veterans spilled out of the church, they shouted monarchist and anti-Franco slogans. A squad of pro-Franco Falangists objected and fierce scuffles broke out. Defending his one-legged friend Calleja as well as Franco’s name, a young right-wing Francoist fanatic called Juan José Domínguez Muñoz threw a pair of hand grenades that another friend had brought back from service with la División Azul in Russia, wounding scores of people. General Varela came out of the church and claimed this was an attempt to assassinate him.

The incident exacerbated an ugly row between the army and the Falange, which many soldiers saw as mired in the corruptions of the black market, and caused a crisis in Franco’s cobbled-together coalition government. The Interior Minister, Ministro de Gobernación Colonel Valentin Galarza, poured petrol on the flames by sending out cables to all provincial governors saying that young Domínguez Muñoz was the agent of a foreign power.

If so, from which country? According to the British ambassador Samuel Hoare, he was ‘a notorious criminal who had recently been employed in the German sabotage organisation at Algeciras’. But Spanish government sources said Domínguez Muñoz was actually an agent for the British or the North Americans.

Franco had to sort out the conflict. First, he had the young Falangist grenade-thrower shot by firing squad on 1 September. (He died singing the Falange anthem ‘Cara al Sol’.) Then, to placate the Falange for this act, he sacked both General Varela and Minister Galarza. And finally, to counter-placate the army, Franco did something most dramatic: on 2 September he dismissed Serrano Suñer as Foreign Minister. (This may have been personal as well as political: Serrano was betraying his wife Zita, sister of Franco’s wife, by having an extramarital love affair with María Sonsoles de Icaza y de León, the young wife of the old Marquis of Llanzol, and was sacked four days after she gave birth to their illegitimate daughter, Carmen Díez de Rivera.) A more compliant military man, little Count Jordana, took over the Spanish Foreign Ministry, which pleased Sir Samuel Hoare no end. ‘How often I blessed my good fortune that I was dealing with a wise friend and not an excitable enemy!’

There remains a mystery around Juan José Domínguez Muñoz. Hoare had denounced him as a saboteur working for the Germans, a fact seemingly confirmed by Adolf Hitler awarding Domínguez Muñoz, on the eve of his execution, the Cross of the German Eagle, the principal Nazi medal for foreigners. But there is another level to these events. In his April 1942 diary, Guy Liddell of MI5 wrote of a British double agent in Algeciras called ‘Sundae’ who was arrested by the Spanish ‘principally because the Germans thought he was working more for us than for them’. In his History, David Scherr also recounts the activities, from September to November 1941, of a double agent in the Algeciras area called Sundae. This ‘young reserve lieutenant in the Spanish Army’ was extremely useful, handing over to the British several German Abwehr high-tech sabotage devices that he was supposed to be employing against the Rock, including two large mines, an ingenious pen and pencil set that could be broken apart and rebuilt into a detonator, a high-explosive bomb disguised as a two-litre can of Atlantic Motor Oil, and another bomb hidden in a functioning thermos flask with a Mark II German clockwork delayed detonator concealed in the cap. Scherr added this note:

SUNDAE disappeared from the Gibraltar district and was not heard off [sic] again until on 25 July [sic] 1942 he took a prominent part in a Falange attempt at assassinating General Varela, then Minister of War, at a Carlist ceremony in Bilbao. The attempt failed, though there were a number of other people killed and wounded, and SUNDAE was arrested. In spite of the political issues involved, he was executed on 1 September 1942.

If it is true (and it would be rather astonishing) that the Spanish Falangist hero Domínguez Muñoz, so favoured by Hitler, and the anti-German, pro-British double agent Sundae were one and the same person, it might explain Franco’s curiously gnomic utterance about the daring young man: ‘I should have given him a medal, but I had to have him shot’.

*

On 18 August 1942, with Churchill out of the country, Lord Mountbatten launched Operation Jubilee, a ten-thousand-man Combined Operations attack on the French port of Dieppe, and it was a disaster: hundreds of Canadians were killed, thousands captured, tanks got stuck on the pebble beaches and many RAF planes were shot down. British propaganda puffed it as a palpable hit, but in reality the dream of a Second Front in Western Europe in 1942 or 1943 was finally over. All eyes turned back to North Africa.

Operation Torch would only work if Spain stayed neutral. The Allies feared that Spain could quench Torch by choking off the Strait of Gibraltar or letting the Germans do so. To be ready for any eventuality, Alan Brooke prepared special forces, ‘in the event of Spain turning sour’. General Patton’s Western Force, landing at Casablanca, well west of the strait, was ready to counter any Axis thrust south. So vital was it to know how much Spain knew, or whether she had hostile plans, that British Intelligence sanctioned regular burglaries of the Spanish Embassy in Washington DC, to photograph their diplomatic ciphers (which changed every month) so as to decrypt all messages to and from Madrid.

In the history of British Security Co-ordination, written at the end of the war, these provocative acts on US soil were attributed to ‘helpful’ Spanish Republicans and Basques, but after the McKellar Act was passed (requiring foreign agents to detail all their activities) British Intelligence turned to the OSS, who employed a gay American schoolmaster-turned-secret-agent called Donald Downes to do the job. In his lively autobiography The Scarlet Thread: adventures in wartime espionage, Downes describes breaking into the Washington embassy of a neutral country he calls ‘Alphonia’, having infiltrated a regular secretary into the building first. She was able to damage the safe so that Downes’s locksmith would be called to repair it, and thus obtain a copy of the key and the right combination. Downes and his agents were actually inside the embassy on their fourth night-time burglary, in October 1942, when the FBI turned up outside in two squad cars with lights flashing and sirens wailing. The burglars were arrested, and James R. Murphy, the head of the OSS counter-intelligence branch, X-2, had to spring Downes from jail. This Watergate-style moment in Washington was part of the increasingly vicious turf fight between J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and William J. Donovan of the OSS.

*

Security was a perpetual anxiety. The Dakar operation in 1940 had leaked like a sieve. What if Torch did? A Frenchman was indiscreet about it in Washington in August, and there were fears in Gibraltar too that someone might blab to enemy intelligence. SOE men there talked in theory about assassinating Albert Carbe, the Abwehr agent who ran German espionage from the Villa Leon in Algeciras, or blowing up the Italian spy base at the Villa Carmela in Campamento. Neither of these actions happened, but another alarum ended disastrously.

On the night of 14 September 1942, three Anglo-Argentine ‘Thieves’ from the Relator party, now the mainstays of the secret smuggling flotilla, SOE Captains Peter Musson, Austin Baillon and Arthur Fletcher, were in the Bar Tronio in ‘Gib Street’, La Línea, meeting Tison, the useful Spaniard who ran Venta El Cruce, when they noticed a blond man and his dark-haired accomplice taking an unnatural interest in their conversation. Alarmed that these two might be enemy agents who could connect the Spanish tobacco-smuggling network to British officers, the SOE men seized the dark-haired one (who carried papers in the name of Francisco Rodriguez and said he worked at Hassan’s tailor shop) and bundled him violently over the Spanish frontier into British Gibraltar.

They took him first to the office of the DSO, Lieutenant Colonel ‘Tito’ Medlam, but their captive would not confess, so they moved on to interrogate him at the Villa Lourdes. Rodriguez was beaten up, but still refused to talk. He was either a hardened agent or an innocent man with nothing to confess, but on the grounds that he might know too much, he was shot, dying instantly. His pockets were emptied and his body driven to the southern end of Gibraltar, to a place on the peninsula called Dead Man’s Hole near the Europa Point lighthouse. With 120 lbs of iron attached to his feet, Francisco Rodriguez slid off a ‘corpse chute’ and splashed into the sea. The SOE men returned to their billets at 2.30 a.m.

Governor Mason-MacFarlane thought the affair was characterised by ‘stupidity and amateur impulsiveness’ and was badly handled at Dead Man’s Hole. The ordinary sentry stationed there now knew the identity of one of the SOE officers; more, he had found a pool of blood, which he duly reported to Fortress Headquarters, and talked about within his artillery unit. Mason-MacFarlane went on: ‘Had I been informed of what was intended, and had I decided to agree to the elimination of this man, I could have laid on absolute security in the same way as already has been done successfully in a previous case of the same type …’

Until Torch was launched, Mason-MacFarlane ordered, no SOE officer was to leave the Rock unless his mission was personally approved by him as Gibraltar’s Commander-in-Chief. However, Colin Gubbins, the head of SOE, ‘commended the resource of the officers concerned’, although officially they were to be ‘censured’.

Other corpses caused worse security embarrassments. On 29 September 1942, General Alan Brooke recorded in his diary: ‘[A]larming information of loss of a Catalina between Lisbon and Gibraltar, and bodies washed up at Cadiz with letters in their pockets containing details of North African attack plans!’

Three days earlier, a Coastal Command Catalina flying boat heading for Gibraltar had crashed in the sea off Cádiz during a thunderstorm. All ten crew aboard were killed as well as their three passengers. One of them was Louis Daniélou Clamorgan, a Gaullist naval officer on his way to Tangier for SOE. Another was Paymaster-Lieutenant James Hadden Turner RN, who was carrying an official letter, dated 14 September, from US General Mark Clark to Mason-MacFarlane saying that his boss, General Dwight Eisenhower, would be arriving in Gibraltar just before the ‘target date’ of 4 November.

Wartime dead regularly washed ashore in Spain, so it was not unusual that a Spanish naval officer handed over Turner’s body, still wearing blue overalls, to Mason-MacFarlane’s Gibraltarian ADC Bobby Capurro, who brought it back to the Rock. The letter was in an inside pocket, and from the way the sand was still evenly packed in the fly of the overalls, which looked like the result of a body rolling, face down, in the surf while being washed up on the beach at La Barrosa, the Intelligence pundits reckoned the buttons had not been undone. Guy Liddell of MI5 recorded in his diary: ‘The letter was sealed and did not appear to have been tampered with. The Inter-Services Security Board is now in a great flap as to whether Operation TORCH has been compromised.’

Then there was journalistic chatter in Fleet Street. Forty-year-old Philip Jordan of the News Chronicle was a well-known left-wing journalist who had covered the Spanish Civil War, then been in Russia for eleven months, and was now on the list of those who would become official War Correspondents when the ‘Second Front’ started. In early October, a colleague on the paper turned to him and said, ‘I hear you are going off soon.’ This other reporter, A. J. Cumming, had been talking to the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, who told him that General Eisenhower was going to command a large military operation in northwest Africa. Jordan got the distinct impression from Cumming that this information was being imparted as propaganda for the Soviet line that the campaign in North Africa was mistaken and that the Second Front should be in Europe. Maisky was telling American journalists like Fred Kuh of UPI the same thing.

Acting responsibly, Jordan tipped off Wing Commander Pedro de Casa Maury, the Chief Intelligence Officer of Combined Operations HQ, who in turn alerted the Security Service. On 8 October, Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert Lennox of MI5, under his usual pseudonym, ‘Major Lester of the War Office’, interviewed Jordan. The reporter knew perfectly well that Lennox was an MI5 officer: ‘Fat, gay and obviously no fool at all.’ Jordan told Lennox that he had lunched with the proprietor of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, the day before, and Rothermere too seemed to know all about the North Africa campaign, though Jordan had not revealed that his own knowledge came via A. J. Cumming and the Soviet ambassador. Jordan – described by MI5 as ‘frank and helpful’ – said he thought it was quite wrong of the Russians to try and ‘sway the British government by public clamour’. Knowing Moscow and the Soviets, he said: ‘You don’t have public clamour in Russia unless you want it. If you don’t want it, you shoot the people who make it.’ The two men agreed that Lennox should inform the Foreign Office.

The Foreign Office was not at all happy with the news from MI5. The ‘incorrigible’ Maisky was ‘intriguing with the ignorant and the disgruntled’, which Alec Cadogan found ‘very disturbing’. The Russians were secretive; Maisky did not drink; therefore it was no accident. ‘Can it possibly be that the Russians are deliberately trying to scupper TORCH and prevent its happening?’ The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, said it was ‘inexcusable’ and gave Maisky a stiff dressing-down on 15 October.

*

Across French North Africa, Vichy maintained five hundred aircraft and 125,000 regular army, navy and air force personnel as well as two hundred thousand reservists. It was vital that these armed forces not turn their firepower on the Americans when they landed. The US diplomat Robert Murphy had entered into indirect talks with General Henri Giraud in mainland France, and Giraud’s designated representative in Algiers, General Charles Mast, said he would discuss possible co-operation with the Americans if they sent him a senior officer by submarine. Murphy found a discreet meeting place, a colonial villa on the coast about seventy-five miles west of Algiers.

US General Mark Wayne Clark, Eisenhower’s deputy, volunteered to go on the important mission to North Africa to talk to General Mast. Clark was ambitious, ‘seeking the bubble reputation, even in the cannon’s mouth’, and easily distracted. F. W. Winterbotham records going to Norfolk House in St James’s Square in August 1942 with ‘C’, Sir Stewart Menzies, to ‘indoctrinate’ the senior American soldiers. This meant informing them about the British Signals Intelligence breakthroughs, which meant they would be receiving ULTRA intelligence derived from German ciphers broken at Bletchley Park. Clark was restless and incredulous and left after a quarter of an hour saying that ‘he had something else to do’.

Clark finally set off for North Africa accompanied by a brigadier, two colonels and a naval captain. USAAF General Carl Spaatz laid on two Flying Fortresses to get them to Gibraltar, one piloted by Paul Tibbets, later to fly the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Meanwhile, the Admiralty alerted Captain Barney Fawkes of HMS Maidstone that His Majesty’s Submarine Seraph was ‘allocated to special political operations from this date. Utmost discretion in briefing of officers is necessary and all further orders are to be destroyed after committal to memory.’

The Americans met the British in conference at Government House in Gibraltar. Governor Mason-MacFarlane presided and Vice Admiral Commanding North Atlantic, Frederick Edward-Collins, represented the Royal Navy. Captain Fawkes was also there with Bill Jewell, Seraph’s cheerful young commander. Clark laid out the picture and asked if he could be got to the North African coast in a few days’ time. ‘Fat Fred Collins’ aka ‘The Giant Panda’ expatiated on all the difficulties and risks. Clark said they were going regardless. He turned to Fawkes, who said they could but try, and introduced him to Jewell, who knew the Algerian coast from having recently landed Special Boat Section (SBS) commandos to reconnoitre the beaches.

‘What do you think, son?’ Murphy asked Jewell. ‘Can you get us there and back, even during the full moon?’

‘Of course, sir. No trouble at all, if the enemy stays blind and deaf.’

‘When can you get me there?’

‘If we leave tonight, we can make it by the 22nd.’

Mason-MacFarlane and Edward-Collins gave their approval and the Americans filtered discreetly onto the submarine. Three officers from the SBS, led by Captain Godfrey Courtney, were already aboard, equipped to paddle them ashore in folding kayaks or ‘folbots’. During the night of 21 October, Trafalgar Day, they stopped to practise embarking and disembarking from the shaky boats.

Jewell got them to the right place on the coast and they paddled ashore at night to a wide beach that led to a bluff covered in scrub and olive trees. Bob Murphy said, ‘Welcome to North Africa,’ and led them to a scruffy farmhouse. The American officers were all in uniform. The British commandos discreetly hid their canvas boats and got themselves out of the way before Mast and five French staff officers arrived. Their discussions lasted all of 22 October, though General Mast left at lunchtime, having requested weapons for his underground resistance forces, including two thousand Bren guns. (Slocum’s new Q-ship, the 347-ton Minna, would try to deliver ten tons of small arms, ammunition, hand grenades and mines to a beach near Algiers in early November, though the rendezvous failed.) Murphy and Clark could not tell the Frenchmen that the invasion was only sixteen days away, so the French mistakenly thought they had many weeks to get ready. The exact role of General Henri Giraud was not specified; his representative was led to believe he would have overall command ‘as soon as possible’, while his immediate task was to set up his HQ in Algiers and arrange for every garrison from Casablanca to Bône to accept and assist the invaders. The French said that General Giraud, who was in mainland France, had to be picked up by an American submarine and brought to North Africa. The status of Admiral Darlan in all this was left vague and unresolved.

The local police arrived in the early evening, causing a panic. The seven Americans and British commandos had to hide in a dusty wine cellar. Murphy stayed upstairs, declaring himself to be the American consul and acting slightly drunk; he asked the police not to embarrass him because there were some women upstairs and they were having a party. The police, tipped off by a sacked servant that something fishy was going on at the remote house, were looking not for subversives but for smugglers. Down in the cellar, under the trapdoor, Courtney the SBS commando started coughing and Clark gave him some chewing gum out of his own mouth to quieten him.

After two hours, the police went away, and the party set out to get back to the submarine. The sea was rising, the surf rough. A large wave capsized six-foot-two-inch General Clark and Captain Living-stone into the water and they had to give up the attempt. The party tried again before dawn next day and, after repeated swampings, eventually succeeded. In the struggle to get off General Clark lost his uniform trousers wrapped around his heavy money-belt. They also lost one complete folbot canoe, $2000 in gold, a weighted bag of secret papers, three .45 Thompson sub-machine guns with fifteen magazines of ammunition, one Luger automatic pistol with two magazines, a Colt automatic pistol and magazine, three hundred rounds of small arms ammunition, two torches, a fighting knife, a pair of binoculars, a compass and a ‘walkie-talkie’ radio set. But the Americans were jubilant; their diplomatic mission was accomplished.

A Catalina flying boat came out to pick them up in mid-Mediterranean. Encouraged to have seen the British army, navy and air force all co-operating, General Clark declared that ‘this war is about to be won’. That same day in Egypt, on the other side of North Africa, Montgomery’s Eighth Army was starting the twelve-day battle of El Alamein, and across the Atlantic in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, George Patton was about to sail with the US First Army. The great Allied pincer movement against the Axis was starting.

* After surrender in 1926, the Berber guerrillero had been confined to the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, guarded by twenty gendarmes. In August 1940, SOE considered snatching Abd el-Krim, freeing him to lead the Rif tribes again, against the Germans or the Spanish if they joined the war. In the News Chronicle in October 1940, Philip Jordan urged that Abd el-Krim be used to lead ‘a new Arab Revolt’. In May 1942, the chiefs of staff instructed SOE ‘to win over the Moorish population to the Allied cause’, but that ‘no promise of independence after the war should be made’.

† Since 1896, an image of the Rock had formed part of the logo of a major US insurance company, together with a slogan: ‘The Prudential, with the strength of Gibraltar’. In 1965, ‘The Rock’ was registered as a trademark by the company.