The extraordinary task of naval planning for Operation Torch went to Vice Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who had been knighted for achieving the Dunkirk evacuation, Operation Dynamo, in 1940. Appointed naval Commander-in-Chief, Expeditionary Force, and given an office in Norfolk House with no tables or chairs, no charts and books, just a solitary telephone in the middle of the dusty floor, Ramsay had only two months to get together a staff to organise and co-ordinate the location of many hundreds of different sea-going vessels (sailing anywhere between Scapa Flow and Sierra Leone), then their assignment, loading, distribution, fuelling and convoying so they could safely deliver the soldiers and their supplies from the UK to the right place, at the right time, inside the Mediterranean. Training exercises and rehearsals with landing craft had to be factored in. The Fleet Air Arm, flying off aircraft carriers, would need enough men and planes and ammunition to provide air cover for the troops that were landing. Apart from ships’ crews, nearly nine thousand extra naval personnel would be needed to clear and run occupied ports and handle all the logistics of fuelling, repair and supply.

Ramsay – one of the most under-recognised heroes of the Second World War – had a genius for this kind of complex task, and after Torch would go on to plan and organise the even bigger 1943 invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky) and the enormous 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy (Operation Neptune). But in 1942, no one had ever undertaken an amphibious task of this complexity before. Ramsay created a dedicated and hard-working team that worked collegiately, not in silos. He held crisp daily meetings of up to forty officers and officials where problems could be raised, confusions cleared up. Minutes were circulated without delay so decisions could be acted on at once with everything done properly, ship-shape and Bristol-fashion.

As the giant jigsaw puzzle was assembled, Ramsay was conscious that he had never been at sea in command of such a fleet. After consultation with Admiral Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, naval command of the expeditionary force was offered to ‘A.B.C.’, Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, who flew back from Washington DC to head the team, with Ramsay becoming his deputy. Four officers and eight Wrens wrote the naval plan with operation and signal orders in eight interlocking parts, and it was printed secretly at night by Oxford University Press and proofread by Admiral John Godfrey’s formidable wife Margaret. These plans covered the sailing, routing, exact timing and arrival at landing places at Oran and Algiers of two advance convoys of forty-five ships, which would be followed by a main body of more than two hundred vessels with a hundred escorts, transporting 38,500 British and American troops. ‘Gibraltar would be the hinge-pin of the whole operation,’ wrote Cunningham in his autobiography, A Sailor’s Odyssey. Getting four hundred ships safely through a passage eight miles wide as quickly as possible meant sticking to the timetable. Cunningham himself sailed discreetly for Gibraltar on the cruiser Scylla, arriving on 1 November 1942 to set up his headquarters at the Admiralty Tower.

*

The Gibraltar airfield was crucial to the success of Torch. The decision to lengthen the nine-hundred-yard strip had been taken at the end of October 1941. The Airfield Construction Service and the Royal Engineers undertook the task of building an extension out into the western bay, using 750,000 cubic yards of rock and scree obtained by explosive blasting and hydraulic jets. Earth-and-rock movers, crushers, bulldozers, tractors, lorries, drillers, blasters, generators, pumps all laboured to make an airfield 1800 yards long and 250 yards wide, creating endless noise and dust.

RAF New Camp was a flying-boat base, so they set up RAF North Front on land, a dismal collection of Nissen huts with no proper lavatories but overflowing buckets. The showers were salt-water and all the food was tinned. So much gritty dust permeated the biscuit-coloured blankets they slept on that men developed sores and rashes, which were duly painted with gentian violet. These blotchy, semi-human creatures could be observed stark naked, swimming and sunbathing at Eastern Beach. An unhappy conscript recalled:

We were in Gibraltar. Was it baking! They took us to this place which was the North Front Aerodrome. There was nothing there. They didn’t expect us. There was nowhere for us to sleep. They had loads of petrol cans so they gave us six petrol cans, three biscuits and a couple of blankets. And that’s how we had to sleep for nearly three months. You just wasn’t used to it. You had to be very careful with water. There was so little of it. You had to wash in sea-water. And as you sat there – bleeding flies. As fast as you swatted them, they were on you again. Oh it was the most horrifying experience. Flies galore on every bleeding thing. The most unsanitary conditions. And as I say, you had to sleep out in the open. The officers? Where were they? Oh, they had quarters. Definitely. The Rock Hotel. Oh yes.

The airfield dispersal areas became packed with fighters and fighter-bombers which had arrived in crates and had to be assembled by the RAF Special Erection Parties. From October to December 1942, working in the open, in often dreadful weather, they assembled an astonishing 431 Spitfires and 134 Hurricanes at Gibraltar for use in Operation Torch.

Aeroplanes were continually landing and taking off on the airstrip. On 1 November 1942 two great British deceivers got out at Gibraltar to stretch their legs while their plane refuelled for their flight onwards to Cairo. One of the men was the ingenious Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, the head of ‘A’ Force, the deception organisation in Middle East Headquarters in Cairo, and the other was Major Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s older brother, who ran deception against the Japanese for General Wavell in India. They had been in London, ensuring that all the false information to deceive enemy intelligence was co-ordinated before being propagated worldwide. Dudley Clarke’s organisation in Egypt had just put together Operation Bertram, a huge scheme of camouflage and dummy vehicles, fake stores and railheads to mislead the Germans and Italians about the intentions of the British forces at El Alamein, the great battle now under way in the Western Desert.

Dudley Clarke had been in Gibraltar exactly a year earlier in somewhat embarrassing circumstances. He had been arrested by the Spanish police in Madrid, and formally photographed by them, while dressed in women’s clothes. Alan Hillgarth got him out of custody and down to Gibraltar, but Clarke’s ship back to England was torpedoed and after he was rescued he was returned to the Rock to be grilled by Lord Gort about what exactly he had been up to in Madrid. He explained away the transvestism as a gambit to help him pass false information to a German agent, and Gort allowed him to return to Cairo for General Auchinleck to deal with.

In late 1942, ‘A’ Force’s job was spreading rumours to mask Torch with eight cover and deception operations, to keep enemy troops elsewhere, to conceal the convoys and to mislead the enemy about their destination. One deception, called Solo, was an attack on Norway. Another was that there was going to be a military move against Dakar from the Gambia, and that at the same time many ships were coming through the Strait of Gibraltar to reinforce Malta on a grand scale, prior to an attack on Sicily. Many maps of Malta arrived in Gibraltar; Mason-Mac flew to the besieged island to support the rumour. Or again, there was possibly going to be a landing in Tripolitania to support the Eighth Army in Libya. If these last stories were believed, the enemy would station U-boats too far south or too far east to interfere with Torch convoys. The Sicily deception, code-named Kennecott, seems to have worked. On 8 November, sixty German and Italian U-boats were lurking off the Azores and Madeira, and lots of German and Italian aircraft were massed in Sardinia and Sicily.

*

On 1 November, a panicky message came from Robert Murphy in Algiers. He had only recently been allowed to inform the local French commander, General Mast, that the invasion would be coming ‘early in November’. The Frenchman was surprised and upset by the short notice, thinking it was political blackmail. Then General Henri Honoré Giraud, code-named Kingpin, said he could not leave mainland France until 20 November. Foreseeing catastrophe unless French forces agreed not to resist, Murphy, a diplomat who knew nothing of military affairs, naïvely asked Roosevelt to delay Torch by two weeks. With fleets at sea and forces committed, this was of course impossible; Cunningham called the idea ‘lunatic’. So Murphy had to send Giraud ‘assurances couched in ambiguous phrases’.

Giraud had demanded that an American submarine collect him, not a British one, because the hateful British had let his country down in the Battle of France and treacherously attacked at Mers-el-Kébir. So HMS Seraph in the gulf of Lyons became, for the moment, USS Seraph, under the temporary command of Captain Jerauld Wright, US Navy. In the official handover ceremony on the boat, Wright solemnly received a scroll bearing his duties and responsibilities upon this historic transfer of power. He unrolled it to find a saucy pin-up from a French magazine.

There is no doubt that General Giraud was a brave soldier. Captured in the fall of France, two years later he escaped from Schloss Königstein in Germany, sliding down a rope he had woven from parcel string and copper wire, before reaching Switzerland and then making his way home to Lyons. There, he had defied Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, as well as Vichy premier Pierre Laval, when they both urged him to return to captivity in Germany to avoid embarrassing their respective countries. Now, at one remove, Giraud was in touch with the Americans about French North Africa. The gallant general entertained elevated notions of what his own role would be, on the grounds that the Americans were amateurs and everyone knew that France produced the finest professional soldiers in the world.

At 1.15 a.m. on 6 November, Giraud and three aides were picked up from a rowing boat off La Fossette beach, half a mile east of Le Lavandou, on the Côte d’Azur between Hyères and Saint-Tropez. Everyone on the submarine pretended to be American until the general (who fell in the water) was safely aboard USS Seraph in his wet civilian clothes and they were under way. The radio was not working at first, but the next day they managed to rendezvous with a Catalina flying boat that took General Giraud, alias Kingpin, swiftly on to Gibraltar.

*

At 8.20 a.m. on 5 November 1942, five Flying Fortress bombers carrying General Eisenhower and his HQ staff finally took off from Bournemouth, bound for Gibraltar. During their twenty-four-hour weather delay, they had tried to distract themselves with a lighthearted new movie shot in Arizona, before it went on general release: Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in Road to Morocco. Finally General Eisenhower ordered Tibbets to take off in bad weather. At Gibraltar they circled the crowded airfield for an hour before landing at 5.20 p.m. Mason-MacFarlane welcomed them to Government House and Anthony Quayle showed Harry Butcher the air-raid shelter.

This was a curious moment in history. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Expedition, General Eisenhower outranked General Mason-MacFarlane. While remaining the civil governor, Mason-MacFarlane now yielded to the US general the military command of the Fortress and Garrison of Gibraltar.* To Eisenhower, the man from Abilene, this seemed like the symbolic handing over of imperial power from Great Britain to the United States:

In my service I’ve often thought or dreamed of commands, battle commands of various types that I might one day hold … [the one] I now have could never, under any conditions, have entered my mind even fleetingly. I have operational command of Gibraltar! The symbol of the solidity of the British Empire … An American is in charge, and I am he …

The reality was unromantic. ‘At Gibraltar our headquarters was established in the most dismal setting we occupied during the war,’ wrote Eisenhower. In the damp heart of the Rock, halfway through the dimly lit, mile-long east–west Admiralty Tunnel and three hundred feet below ‘Maida Vale’ on the north–south tunnel called ‘The Great North Road’, lay the set of stagnant rooms that acted as Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ). Clark and Eisenhower shared an office that was only about eight foot square and had two desks and a cot in it. ‘Through the arched ceilings came a constant drip, drip, drip of surface water that faithfully but drearily ticked off the seconds of the interminable, almost unendurable wait which always occurs between the completion of a military plan and the moment action begins.’

Eisenhower had three days to wait. He smoked an awful lot of Camel cigarettes, chewed up with anxiety, and stood at Europa Point at the southern end of the peninsula watching the leading ships for Torch passing eastward into the Mediterranean through the strait, maintaining wireless silence. He was grateful for no news of air or submarine attack. But then, to add to the tension, just when he wanted information, the fragile radio communications set up by the regular US Army Signals Corps on the Rock broke down. Eisenhower had no idea what was happening at Casablanca. Would Patton’s men, who had sailed directly across the Atlantic from the USA, be able to land through the Moroccan surf?

Second World War operations relied on radio. Although the Rock had reasonable wireless interception, with army, navy and air force Wireless Intelligence Unit personnel continually logging enemy radio communications in the Mediterranean and North West Africa, transmissions could be very erratic.

Now the work of a maverick signals officer from the secret world saved the day. ‘Squadron Leader Hugh Mallaby’ had arrived in Tangier a year earlier. His real name was Hugh Mallory Falconer and he had served in the French Foreign Legion before being recruited by SOE; the pseudonym was to protect his wife Susan, still in France, from reprisals. Mallaby was described by the SOE historian William Mackenzie as ‘a hustler, known in the service as the “human bombshell”’. When Hugh Quennell told him to set up a clandestine radio network linking Gibraltar with Tangier, French and Spanish Morocco, Algeria and Spain, Mallaby outmanoeuvred the rather unpopular DSO, Lieutenant Colonel Tito Medlam to gain possession of a two-hundred-yard tunnel in the Middle Gallery on the western side of the Rock. He had then scrounged enough kit to set up transmitters and receivers, including a mobile one installed in the best Packard motor-car on the Rock, and a branch station in a sweaty tunnel facing east. When SOE started collaborating with the American OSS, Mallaby worked with their man in Gibraltar, Joe Raichle, and made sure every radio operator was well trained.

When the US army signal system dramatically failed, Mallaby’s network was ready, and came into its own. All the clandestine signals preceding Torch used it, as did the key operational messages during the early days of the invasion. William Mackenzie rightly called Mallaby/Falconer’s wireless station on the Rock, now boasting two generators, three transmitters and two receivers, ‘SOE’s most important contribution to history in North Africa.’

In the event, the Atlantic crossing was undisturbed by U-boats, but at 5.35 a.m. on 7 November, USS Thomas Stone was torpedoed in the Mediterranean, 150 miles short of its destination, Algiers. Still afloat, but unable to move his ship, Captain Bennehoff decided to send his escort and the 1450 troops in their landing craft on to Algiers. It was a gallant attempt, but they soon had to be picked up by destroyers and other escort vessels, and arrived twelve hours late. Submarines were sent ahead to place infra-red beacons to guide the ships, and to drop advance parties who paddled ashore in ‘folbot’ kayaks for inshore reconnaissance. Two SBS commandos were captured at A Beach, west of Algiers, but revealed nothing.

Everybody was gathering at the Rock. Eisenhower had ordered Eddy and Coon to move their OSS operation over from Tangier three days before the invasion. And in the afternoon of Saturday 7 November, General Giraud, who had been picked up by the submarine Seraph, arrived in Gibraltar by flying boat and was taken directly to Eisenhower and Clark’s ‘dungeon’ in the hot and sweaty Admiralty Tunnel, where the chattering teleprinters were making a din. Giraud was thin, stiff, bedraggled, but proud. Anthony Quayle described him as ‘a tall old beanpole [in] a long raincoat buttoned straight down from collar to knee’. Eisenhower switched on the red light outside the tiny office so no one else would enter, and explained their plans, adding that he had a message for the French people in North Africa that he wanted Giraud to sign. This stated that the United States was intervening to stop the Axis seizing North Africa and called on the officers and men of the French Army of Africa to do their duty in assisting them. Of Giraud’s role it only said on his behalf: ‘I resume my place of combat among you.’

‘Now,’ said General Giraud, ‘let’s get it clear as to my part. As I understand it, when I land in North Africa I am to assume command of all Allied forces and become the Supreme Allied Commander in North Africa.’

Clark gasped at this bombshell. Eisenhower managed to stay poker-faced. ‘There must be some misunderstanding,’ he said, cautiously.

The meeting that followed lasted three hours and was described by Eisenhower as ‘one of my most distressing interviews of the war’. Giraud had got the wrong end of the stick completely. He had believed he was going to become Supreme Allied Commander of the Anglo-American forces, despite knowing nothing of their plans and capabilities, and then was going to lead an almost immediate invasion of mainland France. The Americans could not budge Giraud from what Eisenhower called his ‘grave misapprehension’, nor persuade him to agree to their wish that he only command French troops. General Giraud would not, could not, subordinate himself to anyone: ‘his countrymen would not understand and his honour as a soldier would be tarnished’. The French general finally emerged, says Anthony Quayle, ‘trumpeting with fury … mortally outraged’.

Admiral Cunningham, sweating in his usual submariner’s thick rollneck sweater under his ancient uniform jacket and with his trousers tucked into rubber boots,† saw Eisenhower come out ‘looking desperately tired and worried’ from his office, and took him off for dinner at the Mount. Giraud, furious, went off to dine with Mason-MacFarlane at Government House. Quayle says the meal was ‘a fiasco’.

*

Across the Mediterranean, things were not going well for the Italians. Mussolini was pale, drawn and tired. The rout of Axis forces at El Alamein and their headlong flight through Libya was cremating his African imperial dream. On Saturday 7 November, the Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano wondered:

What will the various [Allied] convoys do that have left Gibraltar and are eastward bound? There are various conjectures. According to the Germans, they are for the provisioning of Malta or an attempt at landing in Tripolitania in order to fall upon Rommel’s rear. According to our General Staff, they are for the occupation of French bases in North Africa. The Duce, too, is of this opinion: in fact he believes the landing will be accomplished by the Americans, who will meet almost no resistance from the French. I share the Duce’s opinion; in fact, I believe that North Africa is ready to hoist the de Gaullist flag. All this is exceedingly serious for us.

 

NOVEMBER 8, 1942. At five-thirty in the morning von Ribbentrop telephoned to inform me of American landings in Algerian and Moroccan ports. He was rather nervous, and wanted to know what we intended to do. I must confess that, having been caught unawares, I was too sleepy to give a very satisfactory answer.

Sunday 8 November 1942 was indeed D-Day for Operation Torch. British and American aeroplanes dropped twenty-two million leaflets in French appealing for active co-operation and stating that their object was ‘to destroy the German and Italian forces in North Africa’. The world’s largest radio transmitter, ‘Aspidistra’, broadcast from near Crowborough in southern England a recorded message by President Roosevelt, spoken in French, an appeal which could be heard overriding the usual wavelengths of Morocco and Algeria. ‘Mes amis,’ it began, ‘my friends’, and it ended: ‘Do not, I beg of you, hinder this great purpose. Render your assistance where you can and we will see the return of the glorious day when freedom and peace will again reign in the world. Vive la France éternelle! Long live eternal France!’

On the ground, however, General Patton was annoyed that this blaring message shattered any hope of surprise. Eisenhower also broadcast radio messages saying ‘We come as friends, not as enemies’, asking Frenchmen not to resist, gun batteries not to fire, ships and planes not to move, searchlights to point straight upwards. Giraud broadcast; de Gaulle broadcast; all sorts of pro-Allied voices filled the airwaves.

US ambassadors delivered President Roosevelt’s personal letters to Marshal Pétain, President Carmona of Portugal and General Franco in Spain, saying that Germany and Italy’s intended occupation of French North Africa menaced all the American republics, and therefore had to be stopped. ‘These moves are in no shape, manner or form directed against the Government or people of Spain or Spanish Morocco or Spanish territories – metropolitan or overseas. I believe the Spanish Government and the Spanish people wish to maintain neutrality and to remain outside the war. Spain has nothing to fear from the United Nations.’ Sir Samuel Hoare (who almost never spoke of ‘the United Nations’ but habitually of ‘Great Britain and its allies’) also hastened to reassure Franco that ‘the operations which have now begun in North Africa in no way threaten Spanish territory, metropolitan or overseas.’

*

The belief that the French would welcome the Americans with open arms was misguided. Two operations in Algiers and Oran set out to emulate the success of the British destroyer HMS Anthony in Operation Ironclad in May 1942. The destroyer had dashed into Diego Suarez harbour with fifty Royal Marines on board and seized the Vichy HQ of northern Madagascar. But that sort of ‘bow-and-arrow run’ had not worked at Dieppe in August and neither did it work in Algeria in November 1942.

In Operation Terminal, two ageing British destroyers of the Eastern Task Force tried to take the port of Algiers, but they were fired on, with one later sinking, and the men who got ashore were all captured. In Operation Reservist, the Americans of the Central Task Force tried to seize the Algerian port of Oran, near the naval base of Mers-el-Kébir, to prevent it being sabotaged by Vichy. A pair of Lend-Lease cutters converted into HMS Walney and HMS Hartland ran the booms and tried to capture the moles of Oran at 3 a.m. on Sunday 8 November. When the Vichy searchlight caught them, the loudhailer under the large Stars and Stripes spoke: ‘Ne tirez pas. Nous sommes vos amis. Ne tirez pas.’ ‘Don’t shoot. We are your friends. Don’t shoot.’ But the French navy ignored the plea and defended their harbour fiercely.

Reservist was a disastrous failure. The cutters were shelled, machine-gunned and set on fire, killing over three hundred British sailors, commandos and US Rangers, with another 250 wounded and captured. The skipper of the Walney, fifty-three-year-old Captain Frederick Peters, lost an eye in the action, and was awarded the British Victoria Cross and the American Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism – posthumously, because he was killed in a plane accident five days after the battle.

*

In Algiers on 8 November, there was a different kind of struggle on land. The BBC broadcast the message ‘Allo Robert. Franklin arrive’, which was the signal for General Mast’s resistance forces, supplied and armed by US Consul General Robert Murphy, to quietly take over key points in the city. The hope was that they could seize Algiers without firing a shot. Giraud had not yet arrived, but Murphy went to see General Alphonse Juin, the most senior officer in charge of Vichy ground forces in North Africa. He woke the tousle-haired, sleepy-eyed general in his pink-striped pyjamas at his villa and told him that half a million American soldiers were now landing across North Africa. (The true number was a little over one hundred thousand.)

‘You mean the convoys are not going to Malta but will land here?’

Murphy nodded, and asked for Juin’s support. The general said that normally he would be with him but the matter was out of his hands because Admiral Darlan himself was in town, visiting his sick son, Alain. Darlan, as commander-in-chief of all Vichy forces, outranked Juin, so any decision of his could be immediately overruled.

Murphy had to get Darlan on side in order to stop Vichy French troops shooting at the Anglo-American allied forces now landing; moreover, Darlan held the key to the French fleet at Toulon. Summoned by a telephone call from Juin, Darlan arrived at the villa twenty minutes later, a small man in stacked heels who went puce at the news. ‘I have known for a long time that the British are stupid, but I always believed Americans were more intelligent. Apparently you have the same genius as the British for making massive blunders.’

Tall Murphy paced up and down with the short angry Frenchman, pouring on his emollient Irish American charm, trying to persuade him that this was the first stage of the liberation of France. Murphy reminded him that in 1941 Darlan had told US Ambassador Leahy he would co-operate if the Americans landed half a million men and several thousand tanks and planes at Marseilles. Now was the moment for him to give the order to stop shooting. No more French blood should be shed in resisting the Americans.

But Darlan said he had given his oath to Pétain and could not revoke it. Would he act if Pétain gave him permission? Murphy asked. Darlan said he would co-operate if Marshal Pétain approved. Together, Murphy and Darlan drafted a message and as they went to send it found the villa surrounded by General Mast’s resistance forces, armed by Murphy. Effectively, Juin and Darlan were now under arrest. A US vice consul went to send the message to Pétain, but it never got through. Murphy, who had not slept properly for days, waited up for the American troops, who were expected at 2.30 a.m. but did not arrive. The exhausted consul confessed to Darlan what he had been up to, describing his contacts with Giraud. Darlan shook his head. ‘Giraud is not your man. Politically, he is a child.’

Then matters took another turn. At 6.30 a.m., fifty Vichy Gardes Mobiles with sub-machine guns overwhelmed the pro-American resistance force outside Juin’s villa. Now Murphy was under arrest and Juin and Darlan were free. The Frenchmen drove to military headquarters to confirm the truth of Murphy’s story, and heard there had indeed been landings all along the coast. Juin’s men started hunting down General Mast’s resistance, whom they saw as Gaullists and traitors. At three in the afternoon, Darlan came back to the house and asked Murphy to get in touch with the Americans who were landing on a beach ten miles west of Algiers. Darlan laid on a chauffeured car with a French flag and a white flag to get Murphy through the American lines to meet US Major General Charles Ryder, who was leading the Eastern Task Force.

They were about to leave when gunfire outside the villa made Murphy look down the street. A patrol of American GIs was advancing, hugging the wall, occasionally shooting ahead of them. With the white flag prominent, Murphy stepped out into the road. This was brave because jumpy US soldiers tended to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. The diplomat kept a respectful distance from the troops with his hands well up, and explained who he was and what was happening. A young lieutenant asked him to repeat the story more slowly. Then he let Murphy approach.

‘What is your name, son?’ Murphy asked.

‘Lieutenant Gieser.’

‘You’re the best-looking geezer I’ve seen in a long time.’

Gieser gave him a soldier escort and they drove down to the landing beach without incident. The first person Bob Murphy saw was the British prime minister’s son, Randolph Churchill, wearing an American Ranger’s uniform. Churchill took him to meet General Ryder, who seemed dazed. Murphy explained that Darlan was ready to negotiate a local ceasefire and that he had a car to drive Ryder to the Vichy French military headquarters at Fort L’Empereur straight away. Ryder said he first had to send a message to Gibraltar and change his uniform. He took ages to dictate a simple paragraph and kept on mumbling about his uniform. Then he said, ‘You will have to forgive me. I haven’t slept for a week.’

How many mistakes of war are because men are stupid with tiredness? Murphy took his arm and steered him into the car. About fifty French officers were waiting in a large room at Fort L’Empereur with General Juin and Admiral Darlan at a table covered in green baize. Not far away, an American aeroplane flew over and dropped some bombs. Ryder beamed idiotically at the bangs that shook the windows.

‘How wonderful! This is the first time since World War I that I’ve been under fire!’

The French were not amused, but Murphy presented Ryder and talked fast. Soon a preliminary ceasefire in the Algiers area had been signed. Thus began ‘the Darlan deal’, in which the French admiral switched his allegiance from Vichy to the Anglo-American allies in order to stay in power. As Édouard Herriot remarked two years earlier: ‘This admiral knows how to swim.’

*

Morocco was the hardest nut for the Torch invaders to crack. The Vichy army there had about forty-seven thousand men, plus sixteen thousand Sherifian riflemen and four thousand troops transferred from the Levant, following their defeat in Syria. The French air force in Morocco had around 175 aircraft, and at their best-defended anchorage, Casablanca, the battleship Jean Bart served as a fortress, with a cruiser, eight destroyers, eleven submarines and eight sloops as well. Although CIA Director William Casey’s bullish book The Secret War against Hitler claims that all OSS’s groundwork in Morocco paid off handsomely, Vichy forces still resisted. When the US fleet appeared over the Atlantic horizon near Morocco on 8 November, a naval battle ensued, and the Vichy French were punished by fearsome American firepower. Scores of Grumman Wildcats from the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, flying nearly five hundred combat sorties, bombed and strafed the French with their six .50 calibre machine guns. The battleship USS Massachusetts fired 786 rounds of sixteen-inch ammunition and the three heavy cruisers, Augusta, Tuscaloosa and Wichita, sent thousands of eight-inch shells against the French shore batteries, ships and submarines. The blast from these weapons was enormous.

Major General Patton was on board the headquarters ship USS Augusta when the shock-wave of three naval guns firing from the rear turret blew the bottom out of his Higgins landing craft in its davits, and he lost all his kit save his pistols. The concussion also fatally damaged his tactical radios, cutting Patton off from another way of talking to Eisenhower in Gibraltar. As at Mers-el-Kébir, the French shells had marker dye in them so the gunners could mark the fall of shot. When huge shells from Jean Bart straddled Augusta, Patton’s leather jacket was splashed with yellow slime. An aide attempted to wipe it off, but Patton squeaked at him to leave it: ‘This will stay on the fucking jacket as long as I am able to wear it.’

The battle for Casablanca lasted seventy-four hours. Landings were bungled and craft tipped over, drowning men. Frightened soldiers panicked or froze in the chaos; Patton kicked the squirming bottoms of some cowering in the sand: ‘the men were poor, the officers worse’. The first American bazooka shot hit a tree, not a tank. American shells fell on American soldiers. A GI kept shouting ‘Rendezvous!’ at black Senegalese, thinking it meant ‘Surrender!’ Ships had been wrongly loaded, which made muddle and delay in supplies and stores. Bewildered paratroopers who landed miles away in Spanish Morocco were all interned. One beat on the wall of his cell, crying, ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

*

General Mark Clark and General Henri Giraud flew separately from Gibraltar to Algiers on Monday 9 November. Giraud landed first and found that he was, in Eisenhower’s later phrase, ‘completely ignored’. Out of the equation, he went into hiding, while the eagle-beaked Clark, who had touched down during a noisy and dramatic German air raid, took over a large suite at the St George Hotel, now Allied Headquarters. Clark, an ambitious soldier, knew nothing and cared less about French politics and could not immediately grasp that Giraud was a busted flush: all the French officers and officials in North Africa had sworn their oath of loyalty to Marshal Pétain and they were not going to do anything without the authorisation of the marshal or his direct representative, Commander-in-Chief Admiral Darlan.

On the morning of Tuesday 10 November, Clark met Darlan and his senior officers in a room off the foyer of the St George Hotel, which Clark had had ringed with American troops to show that he meant business. Darlan the opportunist, ‘a little man with watery blue eyes and petulant lips’ as Clark described him, was nervous, uncertain, evasive, mopping his brow with a handkerchief.

The political situation was dire. Pétain had received Roosevelt’s letter on 8 November with ‘amazement and grief’, and declared, ‘France and her honour are at stake. We are attacked. We shall defend ourselves. This is the order which I give.’ That evening, after a cabinet meeting presided over by Pétain, Vichy announced that by carrying the war into North Africa, the USA had de facto broken off relations with France, and the US ambassador was handed back his passports. This was obviously serious, though not actually a declaration of war.

But General Clark needed an immediate ceasefire across North Africa. Two days had been lost in fighting and foul-ups because of muddled talks. He decided to bang the table to get results. The whole strategic point of the North African landings was to get eastward fast and reach Tunis before the Germans: the Axis enemy had been taken completely by surprise, but were now reacting, and the first Germans flew from Sicily to Tunis on 9 November, starting a build-up of hostile forces.

Darlan played for time, saying he had sent a resumé of terms to Pierre Laval but there would not be a meeting of ministers in Vichy until the afternoon. ‘I do not propose to wait for any word from Vichy,’ said Clark. ‘I can only obey the orders of Pétain,’ said Darlan. ‘Then I will end these negotiations and deal with someone who can act.’ Darlan claimed that if he gave the ceasefire order to his men the Germans would immediately occupy southern France as retribution. Clark said Darlan must choose between obeying the Vichy government and grasping this opportunity to help the Americans.

An American captain told a French colonel that unless the armistice was signed, his barracks would be bombed, and Clark had to send Ryder to defuse aggressive commanders on both sides. Now Darlan wrote a weaselly letter to Pétain ‘recommending the cessation of hostilities’ but Clark insisted that Darlan produce instead a clear command to all French army, navy and air forces in North Africa to stop shooting. At long last, Darlan wrote out the order to the French forces in his own hand: to cease fire, to return to base, to observe neutrality. He said he was taking responsibility for North Africa ‘in the name of Marshal Pétain’, but the present military commanders and current political and administrative authorities would all remain unchanged.

That afternoon, before Clark could get Darlan to meet with Giraud, the news came that Pétain had rejected the armistice and had sacked Darlan as head of the armed forces, appointing General Noguès of Morocco (who was still fighting the Americans) in his stead. Darlan, depressed and upset, attempted to take back the order he had given that morning.

‘You will do nothing of the kind,’ said Clark. ‘There will be no revocation of these orders; and, to make certain, I shall hold you in custody.’

Clark wanted Darlan to do two more things: to get the French fleet out of Toulon and over to Gibraltar, and to command Admiral Jean-Pierre Estéva to start resisting the Germans in Tunisia. Darlan was reluctant. But time was running out.

*

On 9 November, General Albert Kesselring, the German commander-in-chief in Rome, had sent forty Luftwaffe bombers from Sicily to El Aouina airfield outside Tunis. After Pétain denounced Darlan, Vichy’s Admiral Estéva in Tunisia, still loyal to Pétain and the idea of collaboration, offered the Germans a ‘friendly reception’, and by the next day, two hundred aeroplanes had arrived. The Axis had beaten the Allies to the jump into Tunisia.

Adolf Hitler summoned Mussolini and Laval to Munich on 9 November. Il Duce was not feeling well, so Foreign Minister Ciano went instead. He recorded in his diary:

I have my first conversation with Hitler this evening. He has not built up any illusions about the French desire to fight, and now among the rebels is General Giraud, who has brains and courage … He, Hitler, will listen to Laval. But whatever he says will not modify his already definite point of view: the total occupation of France, landing in Corsica, a bridgehead in Tunisia.

On 11 November 1942, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the end of the First World War, German and Italian armed forces crossed the delimitation line and proceeded to take over the previously Unoccupied Zone of France. Hitler apologised to Pétain but said it was a necessity to guard against further Anglo-American aggression. Pétain protested ‘solemnly against a decision incompatible with the armistice agreements’.

In Algiers, Darlan thought the German move in France changed the complexion of things. He duly telephoned Estéva in Tunis and told him to resist the Germans. This pleased Clark, who in turn removed the guards from Admiral Darlan’s villa in order to elevate the Frenchman’s status.

General George Patton was preparing to destroy Casablanca early on 11 November when the Vichy forces capitulated. In a meeting with General Noguès and Admiral Michelier at the Hotel Miramar in Fedala, Patton realised that the draft surrender document they were about to sign meant that he, an American general, would have to run French Morocco and its million inhabitants with his tiny foreign force.

Thinking on his feet, Patton flamboyantly tore up the typescript of the treaty and appealed to them as French officers and gentlemen. Speaking in French, he said: ‘If each of you … gives me his word of honour that there will be no further firing on American troops and ships, you may retain your arms and carry on as before – but under my orders. Agreed?’

‘There is one more disagreeable formality we should go through,’ said Patton after their word of honour was given. The doors opened and the champagne he had had prepared beforehand was ceremoniously served.

The short Moroccan war was over, with over three hundred Americans and twice as many Frenchmen killed.

*

But Clark woke up on the morning of 12 November to find that Darlan had rescinded the order to Estéva to resist the Germans in Tunisia. General Juin explained to the irate Clark that the order was only ‘suspended until General Noguès arrives’. Juin added, ‘I am willing to fight the Germans … but you must understand my difficulty. I am subject to the orders of Noguès and honour requires that I obey him.’

‘And while you are delaying, the German troops are moving in! I want that order reissued now!’

The reissued order did no good. Estéva had gone over completely to the Axis. German pilots were getting fuel for their aircraft and access to more landing fields in Tunisia. German General Walter Nehring arrived to expand the Tunisian bridgehead with soldiers who would hold the area for the next six months. The Allies had missed the boat, and General Eisenhower was furious.

When Noguès arrived in Algiers, Clark threw Giraud into the mix. Then he left the hubbub of French officers to work out among themselves what arrangements they would make for running North Africa, with the proviso that they must not impede the Anglo-American allies. Clark reported to Eisenhower on 12 November that Darlan was ‘the only Frenchman who could achieve co-operation for us in North Africa’. When Eisenhower flew into Algiers for a meeting on the 14th, the French had decided that Giraud would head the armed forces and Darlan would lead the civil and political government. Eisenhower for his part agreed to acknowledge Darlan as High Commissioner of French North Africa, effectively the head of state.

The ‘Darlan deal’ was a pragmatic decision, an imperfect way of achieving some kind of equilibrium in North Africa. But while it made military sense there, it was very unpopular at home in the UK and the USA. The press saw Darlan as a Nazi collaborator in an anti-Semitic regime, ‘America’s first Quisling’, a snake and a betrayer and so on. It galled people in SOE to see their French resistance, loyal to another France, being pushed around by a Nazi collaborator and turncoat.

War makes strange bed-fellows. After his volte-face, Darlan genuinely helped the Allies. He delivered Dakar into Allied hands and he tried hard to get French warships out of Toulon. Darlan had sworn that the French fleet would never fly the Nazi flag, and his naval officers kept their word. On 27 November 1942 at Toulon, the Vichy French navy scuttled seventy-seven vessels, including three battleships, seven cruisers, fifteen destroyers and twelve submarines, so the Germans, at that moment flooding unoccupied France with soldiers, could not seize them.

*

Also on 27 November 1942, US moviegoers at the premiere of a new Warner Brothers picture, Casablanca,‡ watched an American character called Rick Blaine abandoning neutrality up on the big screen with an act of violence at an airfield in North Africa. The cynical club owner who earlier in the picture claimed ‘I stick my neck out for nobody’ shoots dead a German officer in order to help a Czechoslovak freedom fighter escape. The French Prefect of Police, despite witnessing the assassination, orders his men away elsewhere to ‘Round up the usual suspects.’ This policeman, Captain Louis Renault, also changes sides and commits to the Allied cause: dropping an empty bottle of Vichy water into a waste-paper basket, he sets off to join the Free French, arm in arm with the American, who ends the movie with the line: ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’

*

By December 1942, Admiral Darlan was hoping to retire from the fray and join his wife and son in the USA. As we have seen, he had been in Algiers in November to visit his son Alain in hospital, where he lay stricken with polio – then called ‘infantile paralysis’. Wheelchair-bound President Roosevelt, sympathetic to a boy in the same plight, and grateful to Darlan for his help, had arranged Alain’s transfer to his own favoured spa at Warm Springs in Georgia.

But Admiral François Darlan never left Algiers. A young French royalist assassinated him by pistol on Christmas Eve, and was swiftly executed two days later. Giraud stepped up into Darlan’s role, but by the end of the war he had been outmanoeuvred by Charles de Gaulle. In the end, the tall soldier who was left out of Torch became the dominant figure in post-war French history.

*

In November 1942, after the great British victory at El Alamein in the Western Desert, Churchill made his famous speech, saying: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler’s Nazis will meet equally well armed, and perhaps better armed troops.’

In that month, three great hammer blows fell on the Nazis in the west and the east. Rommel’s retreat from El Alamein became a rout. The Torch landings saw the USA’s entry into the Mediterranean theatre. And Soviet forces encircled Stalingrad, trapping a quarter of a million men of the German 6th Army. Walter Warlimont at German OKW headquarters rightly called November 1942 ‘the month of doom’.

*

Eisenhower left his sweaty, troglodytic office under the Rock of Gibraltar for the last time on 28 November and moved to the white city of Algiers, where a vast staff headquarters of three thousand Allied officers was beginning to mushroom. The secret boys of SOE moved on to Algiers too, setting up the Massingham Mission to carry out clandestine operations against Italy. As the war moved east towards Tunisia, Gibraltar was once again becoming a shuttlestop, a supply base, almost a backwater.

Harold Macmillan, the future British premier, landed in Gibraltar with his private secretary and two typists on 7 January 1943, also on his way to Algiers to become the British Minister Resident in North Africa, responsible over the next two years for all British policy in the Mediterranean. The balance of world power was shifting. Macmillan would later tell the propagandist Richard Crossman, the deputy director of the Political Warfare Executive in Algiers, that the British were now subtle but secondary figures in the brash new American empire: ‘You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans – great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run [Allied Force Headquarters] as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.’

The travellers slept at Government House, a little world of imperial privilege and plenty far from English blackout and rationing, as Macmillan’s diary recorded:

There were still snakes in paradise, however.

The big battalions might have moved on, but the covert war against sabotage, subversion and espionage continued without cease.

* Churchill sent Eisenhower a cable saying that he felt ‘the Rock of Gibraltar is safe in your hands’. In his jeep on the Upper Rock, Eisenhower patted a macaque monkey on the head for good luck, and was told that while these creatures were here, Gibraltar would stay British.

† ‘This is what I always wear when I go into battle,’ Cunningham told Quayle. ‘I know damn well I’m not at sea, but I’m going into battle just the same – and I’m commanding the Fleet from under all this rock. If I don’t dress right, then I can’t think right.’

‡ Casablanca (1942), written by twin brothers Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch, directed by Michael Curtiz, produced by Hal Wallis, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, etc.