CHAPTER 17
THERE is at first sight no obvious reason why a European war should be fought in Africa. The short reason why the Second World War spread from Europe to Africa was that the British and Italians were already there. The British had been the overlords of Egypt for sixty years and kept considerable military forces and military installations in Egypt. The Italians had begun to acquire an empire in East Africa at about the same time as the British occupation of Egypt in the 1880s and had extended it by taking Libya and Cyrenaica from the Turks on the eve of the First World War and by the conquest of Ethiopia in the 1930s. The campaigns of the Second World War in Africa were a consequence of these imperial positions, and the failures of the Italians in 1940–41 brought, as we have seen, the Germans into this field too. Nor was this all. France too had an empire in North Africa, exercising direct rule in Algeria which was juridically a part of France and indirect rule in the two flanking monarchies of Morocco and Tunisia which had been reduced to protectorates and where the French had steadily encroached on the authority of the native administration. This empire was preserved after the French collapse of 1940 so that the whole of North Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea was under European dominion throughout the Second World War. It was treated by Europeans as a campaign ground in their essentially European conflicts.
But these were not the only conflicts. North Africa was not a sand table. The military campaigns of 1940–43 were superimposed upon a further conflict between rulers and ruled, between imperial power and nationalist aspirations. The war provided nationalists with new opportunities in an old cause. The Americans, whom the war brought into the western end of this increasingly crowded scene in 1942, sympathized with the nationalists’ hope of turning the evils of war to some good by accelerating the liberation of their homelands from foreign domination. To Europeans therefore Africa was one of the places where they vied among themselves, but to non-Europeans – whether African or American – one European was in this context much the same as another and none of them belonged there.
The system of government in Egypt was a three-cornered game between the British, the king and the Wafd. The British had been the real rulers of Egypt since 1882 and still had the ultimate power since, in spite of conceding formal independence after the First World War, they retained by treaty the right to station considerable forces in the country. King Faruq, the last descendant of the Albanian line of Mehemet Ali, wished to rule as well as reign but was hedged in by the British on one side and the Wafd on the other. The Wafd, founded by Zaghlul Pasha and led since 1927 by Nahas Pasha, was an upper-class nationalist movement which wanted to be rid of the British and the king. On coming of age Faruq had dismissed a Wafd government but kept the apparatus of parliament in spite of the fact that there was no political party of consequence except the Wafd; every other party was no more than the clientela of notabilities, incapable of giving the king enough backing against the Wafd or the British, let alone both. The Wafd, smarting under its treatment by the king, was inclined to ally itself with the British against the king and justify this policy ex post facto by getting true independence for Egypt by agreement with the British, but it was on delicate ground since too much friendliness between it and the British caused some nationalists to defect, Egyptians being divided among themselves about whether to get independence from the British by helping them to win the war in the expectation of later reward or by siding with their enemies.
When the war began, Egypt had at once broken off diplomatic relations with Germany and taken further pro-British steps such as handing over control of Egyptian ports and imposing a censorship, but the German victories in Europe in 1940 and the entry into the war of Italy, which had a much larger army in North Africa than the British, raised the question whether a more ambiguous policy would not be wiser. Egypt severed diplomatic relations with Italy but declared that it would not go to war unless the Italians invaded Egypt or bombed towns or military targets in it; Egyptian troops were withdrawn from the western frontiers to avoid incidents; and the Egyptian government refused to act as severely against the large Italian population (60,000) as the British authorities would have liked.
But the British were still powerful on the spot and were not willing to tolerate a government which hedged in this way. It was forced to resign and was replaced by a more pro-British one. The British also obtained other changes, including the retirement of the Chief of Staff of the Egyptian army, at the price of promising to buy considerable quantities of Egyptian cotton which they did not want. When the Italian advance into Egypt was repulsed by Wavell at the end of 1940 the pro-British policy was hailed as a success, but in April of the following year the Italians, now accompanied by the Germans, re-crossed the frontier and the champions of a stricter non-belligerence raised their voices once more. There were demands for the withdrawal of British troops and stores from Cairo and Alexandria. The Egyptian government was also beset by the economic problems created by its inability to buy and sell in foreign markets, by inflation and by the refusal of parties outside the government to join in forming a national coalition. In February 1942, following popular demonstrations in Cairo and a tiff with the king, it resigned.
The British Ambassador had already tried to persuade Faruq to retain his pro-British government. When it fell the Ambassador returned to the palace to demand the appointment of Nahas – by six o’clock that evening. The king refused. Three hours later British tanks and infantry entered the palace grounds. The king gave way. Afraid of retaining a mildly pro-British government when Rommel’s star was in the ascendant, he was forced to accept Nahas, who was both more pro-British and a personal enemy, because that star was still at a distance. The drama at the palace when Faruq was forced to yield was a re-enactment of similar scenes in the past: not long after the British bombardment of Alexandria and the occupation of Egypt in 1882, Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer) initiated the full British raj in Egypt by conveying to the Khedive Tawfiq (Faruq’s uncle) the British cabinet’s decision that the Khedive’s government must either toe the British line or be evicted; and Tawfiq’s son Abbas had been forced on his accession in 1892 to dismiss his chosen Prime Minister. Faruq in his turn was obliged to keep Nahas in office until nearly the end of the war, although Nahas was then dismissed as he was preparing to present to Great Britain his account for services rendered. After the war the Wafd blocked British attempts to re-negotiate the Anglo-Egyptian alliance with a non-Wafd government along lines which would have preserved some of Great Britain’s favoured status, but its triumph was short-lived for after 1952 the more radical nationalist movement of Naguib and Nasser extinguished the Wafd as well as getting rid of both the king and the British.
By its show of power at the beginning of 1942 Great Britain had secured its base for the campaigns of the coming year. The first to move was Rommel. He entered Cyrenaica from Tripolitania in the first days of the year and so opened a series of campaigns in the North African deserts which took him almost to the Nile and the Suez Canal before the German and Italian forces were thrown back all the way to Tunisia and he himself, ill and defeated, laid down his command and returned to Germany to rest, to recover, to resume great responsibilities, to rebel against Hitler’s judgement and ultimately to kill himself on Hitler’s orders.
Rommel was the dominating figure in the desert war. There were exceptional commanders on the British side too – Wavell, Auchinleck, Alexander, Montgomery – but they were many and on the Axis side there was only one such figure of fame. Rommel, unlike most German officers, had been not merely an acquiescent Nazi but a keen one and his unconcealed enthusiasm for the new régime probably played some part in furthering his career in the years immediately before the war. But it was by his talents rather than his opportunities that he became famous. He was a first-class divisional commander and he proved his worth in the campaign in France in 1940 when he led an armoured division from the Meuse to the English Channel with all the personal dash and professional skill expected of the new wave of German tank commanders. When the time came for his promotion to a different type of command he was fortunate in finding, in North Africa, the one higher command of the whole war which required many of the aptitudes of the divisional commander. On the British side Wavell, Auchinleck and Alexander all at one time or another exercised tactical control of their forces to a degree unusual in a supreme commander. Rommel did so continuously and his fame as a desert general rests not so much on his exercise of his higher army command as on the flexibility, improvisation and quickness of judgement which he displayed in battle. Later in the war he was to command army groups, but never with that outstanding success which, as commander of the German Afrika Corps and the German-Italian Panzer Army, singled him out from his brother generals and field marshals.
The distinctive character of the desert war derived from the terrain as well as the personalities involved. The distances were great, the forces small. At Alamein the opposed armies deployed between them only 1,500 tanks and 1,500 aircraft, and in that battle the full tally of men on the Axis side was no more than a fifth of the German casualties in the battles in the Kursk salient the next year. The desert war was a war of movement and supply. The men on the ground were tormented by the heat and by the sandstorms which were the mechanics’ worst enemies, while the men at sea, hazarding the passage in the Mediterranean, lived in constant expectation of a submarine or air torpedo. Each time the British advanced westward the Royal Navy was set a hard task in maintaining the supply route along the coast against Axis submarine and air attacks. The Axis armies were dependent on supplies from Europe which were intercepted in crippling quantities by British naval and air patrols acting on precise Ultra intelligence about the sailing of tankers and other vessels from Greek and Italian ports.
After Rommel re-entered the lists at the beginning of 1942 both sides were preparing for a major effort. Churchill was urging Auchinleck to attack first. Great Britain needed a victory to offset disasters in the Far East. Singapore had fallen in February; the Japanese were occupying Burma; the War Cabinet ordered preparations for the destruction of the oil refinery at Abadan in western Iran and sent an expedition to take Madagascar before the Japanese did. The position of Great Britain again seemed critical. No American divisions could be expected to reach European or African theatres of war before the end of the year, while the Russians, although they had saved Moscow in 1941, could well lose the Caucasus in 1942. If they did, the British forces in the Middle East might have to face three ways: against Rommel advancing on Egypt, against new German armies descending from the north through Iran, and against the Japanese to the east. India too might be threatened from two sides – through Burma and through Afghanistan and Iran – in which event the Middle East command would lose its Indian divisions and all further hope of reinforcement from the Indian army. Hitler, who still regarded the Russians as mincemeat in the making, was not only dreaming of conquests of this kind but planning them. A special unit under General Helmuth Felmy (an exceptionally able army officer who had risen to the command of an Air Fleet but had been sacked after the episode of the crashed aircraft which gave away Hitler’s plans for invading the Low Countries) had been formed with agreeable headquarters at Cape Sunion near Athens where it collected intelligence about the Middle East and trained Arabs for subversion. In 1942 it was moved to the Caucasus and began to take an interest in India too (although by the autumn it was back at Sunion with waning prospects).
Churchill’s anxiety for an early victory in the desert was therefore not just a piece of impetuosity but a consequence of the disquieting view of the war seen as a whole from London. In the event Rommel attacked first and scored a great victory which carried him over the Egyptian border and produced the only occasion during the war on which Churchill is known to have allowed the strains to get the better of his emotions.
General Ritchie’s Eighth Army was holding a series of positions stretching from Gazala, some thirty-five miles west of Tobruk, southward into the desert as far as Bir Hacheim which was garrisoned by a French force under General Pierre Koenig. These positions consisted of a number of strongpoints or boxes (not unlike the mile castles on a Roman wall) linked by minefields. They were meant to serve both as a shield for Tobruk and as a springboard for a British offensive. For this reason – and also because the longer the British line the farther would Rommel have to extend his supply lines if he planned to circumvent it – the British armour was dispersed, whereas Rommel’s was concentrated for the attack which he launched on 26 May. Rommel moreover attacked in the south, whereas Ritchie had stationed the bulk of his forces at the northern or coastal end of the line. While the Eighth Army had the advantage in manpower and in tanks, the Luftwaffe was more than a match for the Desert Air Force.
Rommel’s attack began with a feint in the north to distract attention from his main thrust which was made in the ensuing night by German and Italian armour in the south. Bir Hacheim held firm and Rommel fell into a dangerous trap which made his position desperate, exposed one Panzer division to air attack as it lay stranded for want of fuel, and brought a substantial part of his forces to within a few hours of surrender from thirst; but he was saved by his own resourcefulness and by the tentativeness of his opponent who failed to seize his opportunities. Bir Hacheim continued to hold out for two valuable weeks, at the end of which Koenig made good his escape with two thirds of his men. By this time the southern half of the Eighth Army’s positions had been dissolved and Ritchie and Auchinleck were faced with the alternatives of a bold total withdrawal to the Egyptian frontier or a qualified withdrawal leaving a substantial force in Tobruk which, besides its considerable strategic importance, had acquired emotional and symbolic significance.
Neither British commander had intended Tobruk to stand a second siege and its defences were in no fit state to do so. There was a severe shortage of anti-tank weapons. Nevertheless Auchinleck decided to try to hold it and left a garrison of 35,000 which, misinterpreting or disregarding Ultra intelligence, he disposed ill-advisedly. Rommel attacked on 20 June. Tobruk fell to him in a day. Practically the entire garrison was taken prisoner, including one third of all South Africans on active fighting service. Rommel captured invaluable supplies, fuel, vehicles and other provisions without which he would not have been able to remain on the offensive. Churchill, who received the news at the White House in Washington, gave way under his emotions. He called the loss of Tobruk a disgrace second only to the loss of Singapore. Less than a month after launching his attack Rommel, promoted Field Marshal, entered Egypt on the heels of the Eighth Army. Cairo and Alexandria were seized with panic. Mussolini went to Africa where a white horse was waiting to carry him into the Egyptian capital.
Auchinleck took personal command of the Eighth Army in place of its defeated and dismissed commander and in a limited but nevertheless decisive duel in the first week of July, known as the First Battle of Alamein, he defeated the German and Italian forces opposing him so severely that the Axis command had to commit parachute troops (as ground troops) in order to save Rommel from having to retreat once more. Auchinleck’s victory owed much to the picture of the enemy which he got from Y service intercepts and from Ultra.
The appearance on the borders of Egypt of these troops, which could more appropriately have been used in an attack on Malta, symbolized a strategic choice which the German and Italian staffs had to make in the first half of 1942. They lacked the resources to take Cairo and Malta at once. Voices were raised in favour of reducing Malta first in order to secure complete control of the supply routes through and across the Mediterranean. From the narrowness of their lucky victory in Crete the Germans had concluded that Malta could not be taken by airborne landing alone, but it might be battered and starved until ripe for capture by combined seaborne and airborne assaults: a force of 1,000 aircraft (mostly from the Russian front) was assembled at the beginning of the year under the supreme command of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who set up his headquarters in Rome.
Great Britain’s position in the Mediterranean had been endangered by serious naval losses inflicted at the end of the previous year by U-boats in both the western and eastern basins, by minefields and by the ‘human torpedoes’ with which the Italians penetrated the defences of Alexandria in order to fix explosives to the hulls of warships. During the short period at the turn of the year when Rommel had been driven out of Cyrenaica five supply ships reached Malta, but with Rommel’s first forward moves at the beginning of 1942 the Luftwaffe was able to reoccupy North African airfields which, together with its bases in Crete, were used to interdict the passage of east–west convoys. In February an entire convoy, attempting to make this passage, was destroyed; its last surviving ship was scuttled in desperation. In March a convoy of four vessels, attacked from the air and by the Italian surface fleet, managed to get two ships through, but in the ensuing months this attack on Malta’s lifelines was redoubled by fierce air attacks on the island itself. These occurred several times every day. In the harbour repair soon ceased to keep pace with destruction. All ships which could be removed sailed away and the rest were scuttled. Without shipping and without labour – the population took to living underground during daylight – the docks became a silent testimony to the triumph of air power. The air defences were too feeble to interrupt the work of destruction. Reinforcements of Spitfires, flown in from an American aircraft carrier in April, were destroyed on their airfields before they had had time to engage the enemy. Further reinforcements in May fared better owing to the frantic efficiency of the ground crews which serviced them and got them into the air again within a few minutes of their arrival, but by the middle of May Malta was holding out with little hope of survival against the bombing and the blockade. At this point Hitler, hesitatingly, agreed to divert the Luftwaffe and give priority to the attack on Egypt which Rommel and Mussolini were urging upon him – Rommel because he wanted to attack Ritchie before Ritchie attacked him, Mussolini because he was enticed by the prospect of entering Cairo and adding Egypt to the Italian empire.
The blockade of Malta continued while Rommel fought his battles with Ritchie and Auchinleck. In June an attempt was made to run convoys simultaneously from east and west. Of the eastern convoy no ship reached the island but from the west two out of seventeen merchantmen made port. In August a further convoy of fourteen merchantmen sailed from the west. Five of its ships reached Malta; one of them, the American tanker Ohio, torpedoed on two successive days, arrived lashed between two destroyers. In both these operations the escort fleets suffered very heavily. The losses included the British aircraft carrier Eagle which went down with a squadron of Spitfires on board. Over Malta itself the air fighting became fiercer both in intensity and in temper. The chivalry of the desert war was notably absent. With the arrival of another convoy in November the situation of the defenders was eased. The siege was raised by events in Africa.
These events were the final defeat of the German-Italian Panzer Army, of which the battle of El Alamein was the centrepiece. Before that battle Churchill had drastically changed the structure of command in the Middle East.
After Auchinleck’s victory in July Churchill urged a further attack to destroy the Axis forces in North Africa once and for all, thereby eliminating the possibility of a war in the Middle East on two or three fronts and setting the Eighth Army in motion to the west before the Anglo-American invasion of North-west Africa which was in preparation for the late autumn. From the purely local point of view the better strategy was to wait and then launch an attack with far better prospects of success – which was what Auchinleck preferred to do and his successors in fact did. But Auchinleck, yielding to superior orders and wider arguments, attacked again in the summer and failed. This failure confronted Churchill at a time of peculiar stress, for he was about to go to Moscow to tell Stalin that there would be no Anglo-American invasion of Europe in 1942 since the western allies had concluded that the African campaign must be finished off first. Churchill knew that an invasion of North-west Africa would be a poor substitute for an invasion of Europe in the eyes of the hard-pressed Russians, and he knew too that however sound his strategic reasoning his political good faith was bound to be distrusted by Stalin. But he had made up his mind, and had persuaded Roosevelt, that the sensible thing to do was to concentrate force in Africa before Europe and persuade Stalin that this strategic plan was conceived in the general allied interest and not in disregard of the Russian predicament. It would help him if he were able to show that success in North Africa was assured and likely to be prompt. He therefore decided to visit the African front on his way to his difficult assignment in Moscow and he arrived there in no halcyon mood.
It was clear that Auchinleck could not remain personally in command of the Eighth Army but Churchill was not satisfied that he should merely revert to his supreme command in Cairo. He had decided that Auchinleck’s inability to pick the right commanders and the breakdown of morale in the Eighth Army after its defeats in the desert and the last failure in Egypt required dramatic changes, including the replacement of Auchinleck himself. He proposed to divide the cumbersome Middle East command, putting Auchinleck in charge of Iraq and Iran, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, in Cairo. For the Eighth Army Churchill wanted General Gott, one of its corps commanders, as opposed to General Montgomery, the choice of the CIGS. Auchinleck and Brooke both refused the proffered appointments. Churchill got his way over Gott but a few days later Gott was killed in an aircraft accident and the army command went to Montgomery after all. The higher appointments in Cairo and Baghdad went to Generals Harold Alexander and Henry Maitland Wilson. Auchinleck returned to India where he was re-appointed to his old post of Commander-in-Chief when Wavell became Viceroy in the following year. Both these men were great soldiers whose careers became tinged with sadness instead of the glory which their gifts might so easily have commanded. Many of their contemporaries felt that they were shabbily, perhaps even unjustly, treated.
At the end of August Rommel made a last and desperate bid to reach the Nile but was checked by Montgomery in two days of fighting in the battle of Alam Halfa. This was the first step in Montgomery’s rise to a fame greater than that of any other British general in the Second World War. He had inherited from Auchinleck a battle plan but he introduced crucial changes into it: the victory was his.
Rommel’s supplies were now down to 6,000 tons a month and only a quarter of the shipping attempting to reach him across the Mediterranean was getting through. In the air the Axis dominance had ended and the Luftwaffe and the Desert Air Force were now equals. On the ground the German and Italian tanks and motorized units were in constant danger of being halted by lack of fuel. After their failure at Alam Halfa the German-Italian armies had no choice but to await the attack of a stronger enemy who was able to pick his own time. Rommel himself was invalided home.
Montgomery had no intention of being hustled. When pressed to advance the date of his attack he threatened to resign. He was determined fully to repair the morale and the material of the Eighth Army before engaging the enemy and he had Alexander’s full support. He won the confidence of his subordinates by the professional rigour of his training schemes and his (less professional) public relations encounters with all units under his command. He became personally known throughout his army and he was seen to be above all a commander who neglected no necessary detail in preparation and would know no hesitations in battle. His caution was not of the depressing kind: if he delayed giving battle, it was not because he was undecided but because he knew how he meant to win and was not to be deflected from his plan. In addition to his qualities as an excellent tactical commander and leader of men he had certain advantages denied to his predecessors. British industry was now in a state to meet the material needs of the fighting services. American Sherman tanks and Flying Fortresses added weight to the attack. Roosevelt had offered Shermans to Churchill as soon as the fall of Tobruk became known; 300 were dispatched at once; their engines, shipped separately, were lost at sea but promptly replaced. Roosevelt decided also to send complete formations of fighters and heavy and medium bombers to the Middle East and so made the coming battle the first Anglo-American engagement of the war (though not by any means the first in which American airmen had flown against the Luftwaffe). Last but not least, Ultra was giving British field commanders unparalleled assistance. Montgomery was a general who knew how to use it. The general who receives better intelligence than any of his predecessors has ever had does not cease to need generalship. He is not reduced to being an automaton. He is required to be tested in new circumstances, in which he may either fail or triumph. It is one of Montgomery’s claims to fame that he was extraordinarily quick to weigh up, appreciate and act upon intelligence received, so that the campaigns which he fought provide an excellent illustration of generalship and intelligence in partnership in action.
When the (second) battle of El Alamein began on 24 October the German and Italian forces were outnumbered by about two to one in men, guns and tanks. In the air the British advantage was narrower but the Axis unserviceability ratio was exceptionally high. Montgomery commanded an army of 195,000 men with over 1,000 tanks against a combined German-Italian army of 104,000 men with 500 tanks. The disposition of his enemies were known to Montgomery in great detail. So were their shortages of fuel and ammunition. Their supplies, particularly their supplies of petrol, were precarious and the intelligence available to Rommel (who was posted back to the front at once) about his enemy’s strengths and intentions was of a completely different and inferior order to Montgomery’s. The tide had turned against Rommel and the issue in the last week of October was not defeat or victory but the nature and extent of the defeat. Both issues were decided in little more than a week. Montgomery, using a brilliantly elaborate deception plan, took his enemy by surprise and scored a skilfully designed and executed victory. But in spite of fuel shortages and in spite of a final attempt to obey an order from Hitler to stand firm, Rommel got away with an army which remained a force in being for several months more. Montgomery has been criticized for not annihilating as well as defeating Rommel, but Montgomery’s own resources were limited and he was determined to put an end once and for all to the see-saw character of the desert war. Fresh Anglo-American armies under Eisenhower had landed in North-west Africa three days after Rommel began his retreat and Montgomery followed Rommel westward through Cyrenaica and Tripolitania in order to join up with Eisenhower and finish off Rommel by trapping him in Tunisia between his Eighth Army and Eisenhower’s First. But Hitler too put fresh forces into Africa and the first junction was not between Eighth and First Armies but between Rommel retreating from Egypt and a new German-Italian force put into Tunisia in order to hold at least a part of Africa and prevent the British and Americans from closing this theatre of war.
The Anglo-American invasion of North-west Africa (Torch) was originally proposed by Churchill to Roosevelt at their meeting in August 1941. Roosevelt at first fell in with the scheme, but he later inclined to prefer the unrealistic alternative of a landing in Europe in 1942, partly in order to succour the Russians and partly because the British retreats in the early part of 1942 had made an African venture less attractive. But Great Britain’s further defeats in the summer of 1942 caused him to revert to Torch, largely in order to succour the British. On the military side, however, neither the American nor the British service chiefs (except the British Admiralty) were enthusiastic about a second front in Africa, and the American chiefs went so far as to try to force Roosevelt and Churchill into a European landing by proposing to give priority to the Pacific theatre if a European campaign were postponed.
The strategy of the invasion of North-west Africa, which was finally accepted by all concerned in July 1942, was British and naval. The idea was to clear the Mediterranean. To the British naval staff the need to do this was self-evident. The other services were slow to respond, especially the air staff which was concentrating on how to smash Germany on its own by air bombardment. The American staffs were largely unaware of what was going on until the early summer when they woke up to it and precipitately concluded that it was all a ruse to forestall an invasion of France in the near future. This was a misinterpretation, for the British regarded an early invasion of France as impossible anyway and never intended operations in northern Africa or southern Europe to supplant that ultimately essential operation. The naval strategy of clearing the Mediterranean did not necessarily imply a campaign in Italy or even Sicily, and the naval staff in fact preferred the occupation of Sardinia, Corsica and the Dodecanese as threats to the Germans in southern Europe, threats to be posed by occupying these islands without using them as springboards for more ambitious land operations. There were no long term plans or even blueprints, no conferences to take the big decisions about the future which, if books about strategy and policies are to be believed, have to be taken by identifiable groups of decision-makers. Subsequent events – the invasion of Sicily and then the landings on the Italian mainland – followed pragmatically, each born out of the success of its predecessor, links in a chain which grew but was never preconceived.
The invasion of North-west Africa was an essay in military cooperation with political complications. The political complications were provided by the existence of rival French authorities and American misreading of their comparative values. France’s North African possessions had been made safe for Vichy by Weygand, the first High Commissioner appointed by Pétain, and by General Alphonse Juin who was made Commander-in-Chief in North Africa in 1941 after being released from German imprisonment. For both these generals and many of their colleagues the task of a patriotic Frenchman was to preserve French territory from Germany and also from any other aggressor – which, after the affairs at Mers-el-Kebir and Dakar in 1940, meant for the time being Great Britain. Gaullism, owing to de Gaulle’s links with Great Britain, was therefore not much in evidence and was thought to be even weaker than it was, especially in the United States where Roosevelt’s dislike of de Gaulle encouraged underestimates of both the man and his movement.
In April 1942 General Henri Giraud escaped from the prison in Germany where he had been kept for two years. He was sixty-three years old and his escape created a sensation which led the western allies to ascribe to him virtues which he never possessed. The Americans saw in Giraud an instrument for undoing de Gaulle. They smuggled him out of France to serve as an anti-Gaullist as much as an anti-Vichy rallying point but Giraud had neither the political sense, the intelligence nor the appeal of de Gaulle and he was a failure in the role for which the Americans cast him on the too slender grounds of being a senior general and a brave escaper. It was not long before the Americans wrote him off and reverted to their pro-Vichy stance. On the eve of the landings in Morocco and Algeria – whose precise date was not imparted to him – Giraud was taken by submarine and flying boat from France to Gibraltar and Roosevelt entered into an agreement with him placing all French forces in Morocco and Algeria under his command – apparently without properly informing Eisenhower, who believed that he had been given supreme authority over all forces, French as well as American and British. Meanwhile Eisenhower’s deputy, General Mark Clark, had already been dispatched to Algeria by submarine to persuade the French political and military chiefs to collaborate with the coming invasion. Since the French forces in North-west Africa (about 120,000) outnumbered the Anglo-American assault forces, it was important to secure at least the neutrality of the French if the landings were to be successful and promptly followed by an eastward advance along the coast into Tunisia. Roosevelt was so apprehensive about the French reaction that he asked Churchill to keep the British fighting component out of action for at least a week. His policy was to win over Vichy’s representatives in Algeria by keeping the British temporarily in the background and the Gaullists permanently out of the picture (a manoeuvre which de Gaulle never forgot).
Clark found that the senior French commanders, with the exception of Juin, were willing to accept Giraud as Commander-in-Chief but his limited time and limited instructions prevented him from probing the relative strengths of Vichyite and Gaullist sentiment. Had he done so, he would have found that the American partiality for Vichy did not correspond with the flow of French patriotism which Roosevelt and Churchill were seeking to re-engage in hostilities. Nor could he or anybody else on the allied side foresee that Darlan would be in Algiers on the day of the landings. This chance – Darlan had flown to Algiers to see his son, who was ill – capped all the existing confusions and misconceptions, since it gave the Americans the opportunity to do a deal with a senior representative of Vichy and so to outrage anti-Vichy feeling more completely.
The American and British armadas sailed from their home countries direct to their landing places on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Morocco and in Algeria. Their most easterly landing point was fifteen miles east of Algiers. The advantages and the hazards of landing farther east in order to make sure of Tunisia as well had been debated and the hazards were held to outweigh the advantages. Roosevelt’s political representative, Robert Murphy, informed Juin of the landings on the evening before, but when they took place on 8 November the chosen date had been revealed to no other Frenchman. This precaution precluded assistance by well-disposed French commanders and occasioned some resistance, but surprise was justified in military terms and opposition was soon rendered manifestly pointless. On the 9th Darlan ordered a ceasefire. The political confusion was, however, ludicrously complete and in the course of the day almost every senior Frenchman was arrested by one or other of his compatriots. Darlan’s readiness to change sides was at first suspect to the Americans and British, the more so since the depth of his anti-British feelings was well known, but he was a more useful counter than the disappointing Giraud since, unlike Giraud, he was in a position to give orders to Vichy’s proconsuls – Juin, the Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, and Noguès and Estéva, the Residents-General in Morocco and Tunisia – who were showing regrettably little disposition to depart from their allegiance. The Americans – though not the British – had no basic objection to dealing with a Vichy Minister and were as willing to work with Darlan on this occasion as they – and the British – were willing to accept Badoglio as an ally against the Germans in the next year. Aware that they were giving serious offence to anti-Vichy feeling they tried to limit their commitment to Darlan but only succeeded in offending him as well. This tangle was only resolved on Christmas Eve when Darlan was assassinated by a fanatical Gaullist. The Americans fell back on Giraud who stepped temporarily into Darlan’s shoes, which had already been adjudged too big for him, but Giraud had meanwhile displayed a considerable ineptitude for the role thrust upon him. At Casablanca in January de Gaulle and Giraud were persuaded to cooperate in the Committee of National Liberation established in Algiers, but Giraud gradually faded out of the picture. He later resigned from the Committee, leaving de Gaulle triumphant and resentful.
The invasion of North-west Africa introduced to the general public one of the major figures of the war, Dwight D. Eisenhower. General Eisenhower has too often been written down as a man who was lucky enough to rise to an eminence beyond his talents and there to contrive to make no disastrous mistakes. This judgement is wrong on both counts, for Eisenhower did make mistakes and yet he was bigger than this grudging estimate makes out. If he is not among the great captains, he was an exceptionally well-trained, methodical and unself-centred commander with in addition a humanity, perhaps unexciting but on occasions crucial, which enabled him to get on well with other people and also to help them get on well with each other. Few in 1943 expected him to go on from his North African command to even higher things, but his military and human competence so recommended him to his superiors that he was chosen to lead the allied invasion of France in the next year.
The German reaction to the invasion of North-west Africa was to occupy southern France and Tunisia and try to seize the French fleet at Toulon. This last endeavour failed. The fleet disregarded an order from Darlan to sail for Africa but it scuttled itself rather than fall into German hands. In Tunisia the Germans seized the opportunities presented to them by Anglo-American caution in making no landing east of Algiers. German and Italian troops occupied Tunisia and when the German commander, General Jürgen von Arnim, sent Kesselring pessimistic appreciations of the situation, Kesselring told him that he was not interested in appreciations and ordered him to hang on – an outstanding contravention of the Tolstoyan norm that supreme commanders are not the masters of events in battle. American and British forces occupied Bône in Algeria, near the Tunisian border, on 12 November and crossed the border four days later, but by the end of the year the Anglo-American attempt to secure Tunis had petered out and the Germans were pouring troops in by sea and air. In the east the Eighth Army had recovered Tobruk on 13 November and reached Benghazi on the 20th, while Rommel was retreating comparatively unmolested to join Arnim. Together their forces would outnumber their American, British and French adversaries and thwart them for six months.
Rommel had to strike before Eisenhower’s and Montgomery’s forces closed in on him. In mid-February he attacked the (mainly British) First Army under Eisenhower’s command. Eisenhower was deceived by the excellence of his own intelligence. He knew from Ultra decodes that Kesselring in Rome had ordered Rommel to detach some of his units to Arnim for an attack in northern Tunisia. He did not know that Rommel preferred to attack further south and was prepared to disobey Kesselring rather than abandon his plans. So when Rommel attacked at the Kasserine Pass the allied command was divided, some (relying on Ultra) regarding this attack as no more than a feint in aid of Arnim; Rommel inflicted and even humiliated the American corps holding this sector. But First Army was not driven back and Rommel was obliged to disengage from his Tunisian front in order to counter the approach of Eighth Army from the east. On 6 March he attacked south-eastwards from the Mareth Line towards Medenine. Montgomery had only one corps approaching Tunisia, his second still east of Tripoli. Rommel’s plan was to annihilate the forward corps and so send Montgomery’s whole army reeling back once more into Cyrenaica or even Egypt and his reputation out of the history books. Rommel issued his orders but a few hours later, thanks to Ultra, they were in Montgomery’s hands. Dropping all normal security precautions Montgomery drove his forces through the night with their lights full on. They arrived in time to thwart Rommel.
The battle of Medenine did not end the war in North Africa but it decided the issue. On 9 March Rommel left Africa never to return; at the end of the month Montgomery took the Mareth positions (which had been built in the thirties by the French to keep the Italians away from Tunisia); in the first days of April Eighth and First Armies joined hands; and on 12 May the Tunisian bridgehead, which the Germans and Italians had held for six months, was eliminated by a final capitulation. Almost three years after Mussolini had goaded the reluctant Graziani into action against a, British Empire lying naked in the Middle East after the fall of France the last Italian and German combatants – 150,000 of them – were prisoners of war.
The end of the fighting left a more complex pattern in North-west Africa than in the territories farther east. The former Italian colonies were under British military occupation and Egypt was for the time being under British politico-military control, but in North-west Africa there were, first, French authority; secondly, the American and British military commands and their civilian representatives; and thirdly, the Sultan of Morocco and Bey of Tunis and the nationalist movements in their countries and in Algeria as well.
French authority had been unbroken, even by the collapse of 1940. Allowed by the armistice agreements with Germany and Italy to keep 120,000 troops in North Africa, the French had no difficulty in maintaining their control, particularly since nationalist leaders still at large had been picked up and put away just before the war began (the principal Moroccan leaders had been in prison since 1937). The humiliation of France was not unequivocally welcome to Arab opinion. The French empire had been a mixed experiment. On the one hand it represented the domination of one nation over another, a degradation and a denial of political rights and human values, but on the other hand it was a relationship between two cultures, a developing association which was prized so long as its fruits counter-balanced the thorns of unequal political dualism. Between the wars this balance had swung more and more the wrong way. The cultural association needed by its very nature to be an expanding one, but in France conservative views predominated, there was little awareness that the empire might be coming to a dead end and no willingness to grant more than minimal reforms. When the Popular Front produced a plan to extend the franchise and citizenship rights in Algeria – the projet Violette, so called after the Governor-General of Algeria – it was first blocked and then destroyed by the politically dominant and economically favoured white settlers or colons who threatened to disrupt the entire administration of Algeria if the plan were brought to the floor of the National Assembly. This rigidity sharpened nationalist animosities, and French governments were trapped between two increasingly hostile forces. But the nationalist movements were still weak. It took time for people at large to conclude that the nationalists might achieve more than abortive demonstrations and neither the bulk of the population nor, in Morocco and Tunisia, the sovereigns considered that conditions were ripe for a challenge to the power of France.
The defeat of France in 1940 changed this attitude only fractionally. That defeat was a shock which pained the Arab élite in spite of their quarrels with the French state. It also had unpleasant possibilities: Tunisia, for example, was immediately exposed to Italian covetousness and feared attack by land and sea. The Tunisian nationalist leader Habib Bourguiba, imprisoned at Marseilles, insisted that Tunisian nationalism must be anti-Axis. From the Vichy régime nationalists had nothing to hope for (Vichy’s reaction was to apprehend any prominent nationalists still at large) and Bourguiba declared himself for de Gaulle and for the western allies. In Morocco, where General Noguès had established good relations with the Sultan after considerable disturbances in the early thirties, the Sultan had promised in 1939 to support the French war effort and the nationalists had promised not to impede it. The collapse of 1940 did not at first disturb these tolerances.
The year 1942 had profounder consequences, for in that year France suffered a second defeat when the Americans and the British landed in Morocco and Algeria without prior agreement with the French and opened fire on them. Moreover this second defeat was inflicted on France within the sight and hearing of the Arabs, it was followed by the quarrels between de Gaulle and Giraud which greatly harmed French prestige and it was accompanied by overt and covert American support for independence movements. In Tunisia, occupied by the Germans, there was the additional coincidence that a new Bey, more sympathetic to the nationalists than his predecessor, had just succeeded to the throne.
With the allied armies arrived thousands of copies of the Atlantic Charter which the Arabs had heard about and could now read for themselves. They concluded that the whole power of the invincible United States was now behind the independence movements. In Algeria Murphy, Roosevelt’s political representative, encouraged nationalists to make claims designed to secure American and British pledges about the post-war government of Algeria. Algerian leaders offered their cooperation during the war in return for the immediate convening of a conference at which Algerians would draw up a new constitution for Algeria. The aims were unexceptionable but the tactics were dubious, since the French authorities were incensed by what they regarded as undercover blackmail and reacted indignantly not only against American interference but also against Algerian demands which otherwise they were not far from accepting – and went some way towards accepting once de Gaulle had established his authority over Vichy’s minions and Washington’s protégés.
In Morocco Roosevelt intervened personally. He had never made any secret of his detestation of imperialism in principle and his condemnation of the niggardliness of the French, British and other European empires in relation to their dependants, and during his stay at Casablanca in January 1943 he had a meeting with Sultan Mohammed V ben Yusuf, who came away from it with the belief that the United States would provide the political pressures and the economic aid needed to restore full Moroccan independence. The Sultan was already half-way inclined to make common cause with the Moroccan nationalists and his encounters with Americans encouraged him to lean still further that way. A year later the Istiqlal or Independence Party, formed by the merger in this climate of separate existing bodies, issued a declaration of independence which sought unilaterally to abrogate the treaty upon which Franco-Moroccan relations rested. It was followed by demonstrations which showed how the populace as well as the sovereign rated the French connection and France’s ability to maintain it. Towards the end of the war the French arrested – but never charged or tried – nationalist leaders whom they accused of complicity in German plotting. There were more riots and Frenchmen were massacred. The French reacted with too much counter-violence and talk of too little reform. The war boosted nationalist hopes and activity and at the same time set an example of violence which was to be followed on both sides as the nationalists proceeded to their goals after the war was over.
In Tunisia the new ruler, Bey Moncef, was more than half a nationalist. He succeeded unexpectedly in 1942 and decided that his best policy was to take the leadership of the nationalist forces. Since the principal nationalist leaders were in French prisons this was not too difficult but it led to strained relations and ugly scenes with Vichy’s Resident-General, Admiral Jean Pierre Estéva. Before the conflict could be resolved the Germans arrived in order to stop the Anglo-Americans from seizing Tunisia as well as Algeria and Morocco. For six uneasy months the German command and the French administration coexisted (Estéva was later condemned to life imprisonment for this collaboration), while Tunisian towns and villages were bombed in a war which Tunisians could not by any stretch of the imagination regard as their own. Some Tunisians collaborated with the Germans and some with the allies; most, including the Bey, waited as equivocally as possible.
A few weeks before the final defeat of the Germans, Bourguiba was released from prison, sent to Rome to be brainwashed with Axis seducements and then forwarded to Tunis. His policy was unchanged: independence and a treaty with France. But too many Frenchmen had come to regard him as an enemy of France and in addition Giraud, whom the allies had elevated to High Commissioner in North Africa, needlessly affronted Tunisians by deposing Moncef as soon as the Germans had been ousted. This tactless and illegal action – the Franco-Tunisian treaty gave the French government no power to appoint or depose a Bey – compromised the French at the moment when they were trying to re-establish their authority. Giraud shortly afterwards disappeared from the scene and the Gaullist régime in Algeria proposed some cautious reforms which, though they might have been acceptable before the war, no longer sufficed after the French setbacks of 1940–42. In March 1945 Bourguiba, concluding that discussions in Tunis would get nowhere, left secretly for Cairo where he established a Committee for the Liberation of the Maghrib with himself as secretary-general and the veteran Moroccan rebel Abd el-Krim as president. He did not return to Tunis for over four years.
In both Morocco and Tunisia the conflict was about the distribution of power between the French and native governments. Under the protectorate treaties the French had gradually assumed more power and more responsibilities and the nationalists were seeking to reverse the process by securing elected central and local councils with native majorities, freer access for Arabs to the upper reaches of the public services, equal pay for Arab and French employees and a strict application of the treaty provisions governing the role of French officials in the administration of the protectorates. These were questions of adjustment. What transpired during the war and immediately after it was that the adjustments would not be made. Each side calculated its position in such a way as to make it refuse to go near enough to the other side’s position to effect agreement. The French calculation was a miscalculation, since in the end France had to concede complete independence and the ending of the protectorate status. The main source of this miscalculation was the blindness of pre-war and post-war French conservative governments which first failed to see the need for changes and then failed to see that changes which might have sufficed before the war did not meet the case after it. The brief Gaullist interlude of 1942–6 might have set a more generous course and so have reached the inevitable dénouement more quickly and less painfully, but it was constricted by American intervention and was impelled into an anti-Americanism which tainted its attitudes towards the nationalists, who were in turn tempted into believing that what they could not extract from France by themselves they could get by playing the American card. Gaullism, moreover, was a strange mixture of radicalism and conservatism. At Brazzaville in 1941 de Gaulle promised the Africans of France’s sub-Saharan empire a bigger share in government, a wider franchise and more decentralization of public business, and in Algeria in 1943 de Gaulle and his chosen Governor, General Georges Catroux (who had been born in Algiers), showed that they appreciated the need for a new start. Yet the changes which were then proposed turned out to be disappointingly meagre and in Algeria, as in Tunis, the opportunity for an amicable and progressive re-ordering of relations passed sourly away.
On the last day of the war in Europe the inhabitants of the Algerian town of Sétif proposed to hold a procession distinct from the official one. They were given permission to do so provided no banners were displayed. The provision was ignored. Somebody started shooting. Twenty-one Frenchmen were killed. The affair developed into a revolt involving troops, air bombing and naval gunnery. Thousands more people were killed, mostly Algerians. Violence begot bestial ferocity on the one side which begot excessive reprisals and summary executions on the other. The established authorities prevailed but a number of the malcontents fled to the hills to carry on the fight. Although one war had ended in North Africa in 1943, two years later another and longer one had grown out of it, not to be ended until de Gaulle was brought back to power in 1958 to do so.