Still he fought and fought hard. For fourteen months, before any Americans had fired a shot, he and the British seesawed over hundreds of miles of desert. Initially, he outmaneuvered, outfoxed, and overwhelmed the British, chasing them all the way back to Egypt; they left behind only the isolated British fortress at the Libyan port of Tobruk. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1941, Churchill did everything he could to reinforce that improvised fortress, which was hanging on for dear life against Rommel’s flank. This was Britain’s line in the sand.
Meantime, often under a bright moon, there were endless thrusts and withdrawals, but no knockout blow for either side. For the Allied soldiers there was also no rest. They had to figure out how to make their way through hundreds of miles of searing wilderness; and for them, as for the British navy, the compass and the stars became their navigators. Nighttime always entailed a gamble: huge columns of tanks would pause, not knowing whether the opposing force was fifty miles away or just around the bend. Dust, too, was an implacable foe; it was everywhere—on the men’s goggles, in their boots, in their underwear, and caked in their hair. The men looked out over miles of landscape where the only sights were ugly patches of arid earth, the tracks left by vehicles, and debris—mangled tank treads and blown-out tires from previous skirmishes. Because of the heat and wind, night and day the men were covered with layers of stench and dirt and a film of perspiration. Then there were the insects, buzzing and swarming over their rations as soon as the tins of food were opened.
It was under these conditions that Rommel had taken Tobruk in June while Churchill was meeting with Roosevelt, and then had begun advancing toward Cairo. It was up to the British to halt the Germans and then to begin the process of pushing them back. And to wait for the Americans.
On October 23, while the British launched a heavy counterattack against Rommel at the Second Battle of El Alamein, and a bloodthirsty Soviet army at Stalingrad was pushing the Nazis back, the Americans at last joined the fray and set out for North Africa. A fleet of 670 vessels—cargo ships, warships, and troop transports—bearing an assault force of over 100,000 men prepared to make its way across the Atlantic. Over 100 ships alone would be coming from the United States. Meanwhile, tension grew in Washington and London; one key to success was ironclad secrecy. To be sure, the American troops were still untested; they would learn by being bloodied by the enemy.
Eisenhower himself was so anxious and fatigued that he had shoulder spasms from hours of leaning over maps and reports; moreover, his breath smelled: he had begun chain-smoking three packs of cigarettes a day; and on some days he walked with a stoop.
The movements of the Allied and Axis troops during the North Africa campaign
The plan called for landing the army under the cover of darkness, and he was well aware that never before had a night landing on a hostile coast been undertaken so far from a home base. On the eve of the campaign, he lay on a cot in a command post deep in the tunnels under the Rock of Gibraltar. He wrote hesitantly: “We are standing . . . on the brink and must take the jump.” For his part, General George Patton was more confident. He bellowed to his men: “I’m under no illusion that the God-damn Navy will get us within 100 miles of the beach. . . . It doesn’t matter. Put us in Africa. We’ll walk!”
Meanwhile, four thousand miles away, in the rustic hills of the Catoctin Mountains, Roosevelt was trying in vain to relax at the presidential retreat, Shangri-La—today’s Camp David. The president fiddled with his stamp collection, shuffled cards for solitaire, read light novels, and parked himself comfortably on his screened porch. Yet gone were his usual wisecracks and jokes; gone was his typical ebullience. Had he been able to walk, he surely would have been pacing back and forth. He couldn’t shake his nervousness about the invasion.
Saturday night at Shangri-La was zero hour: sunrise on the North African coast.
EISENHOWER KNEW THAT OUT of the entire year, less than two weeks would be suitable for a landing at Casablanca on the Atlantic coast and Oran in western Algeria, where two legs of the three-legged assault would take place, comprising 35,000 Americans and 39,000 British respectively. The third leg, including a force of 10,000 Americans and 23,000 British, would occur at Algiers in the mid-Mediterranean.
With a bit of swagger, the American troops thought they had been thoroughly drilled for modern battle; they were not. In truth, though crafty and courageous, they were green. Moreover, not only was their training inadequate but the coordination between the services was still haphazard. They didn’t yet know the benefit of digging, or the art of camouflage. Nor had they learned to hate the enemy (Eisenhower’s words). True, the army had provided the finest equipment it could for the young GIs. They had new multiple gun mounts and amphibious tractors, improved Sherman tanks, and the very best submachine guns. They were even bringing with them the latest advance in rocket launchers: the bazooka. And they were equipped with all the comforts that the quartermasters could think of: sun goggles, stepladders, magnifying glasses, mosquito bars, rubber boats, bed socks, bicycles, extra wool blankets for the cool North African evenings, dust goggles and dust respirators for the inevitable sandstorms, inflatable dinghies for additional transport, and even black basketball shoes. And of course American flags to plant on the beaches.
Before the troops were set to arrive, Eisenhower’s deputy Major General Mark W. Clark and Robert Murphy of the State Department thought they had negotiated an arrangement with the French colonial forces to minimize resistance to the invasion. The hope was that the French would have little appetite for fighting the Americans and would also be eager to strike a blow against the Nazis. In any case, Roosevelt had instructed his advisers to let the French know that the Americans would be coming not as conquerors, but as liberators. Yet the situation in North Africa, a volatile mix of the Vichy government’s supporters and sympathizers, anticolonialists and free French, was chaotic and confusing. Roosevelt couldn’t shake the thought that if the Vichy French forces in North Africa opposed the landings with either conviction or tenacity, the mission could falter, or many thousands of men would be cut down in the fighting.
The convoy of six hundred ships was traveling under radio silence. Just before disembarkation, an uplifting note from Roosevelt was delivered to all the ships for the troops to hear. “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives: the freedom of the lives of those you love.” The president radioed a similar message for the Frenchmen of North Africa. Before the first fingers of daylight, they were surprised to hear an extended message from Roosevelt, recited in French, crackling over BBC airwaves out of London, “My friends,” he said, “who suffer day and night, under the crushing yoke of the Nazis, I speak to you as one who was with your Army and Navy in France in 1918. I’ve held all my life the deepest friendship for the French people.” He eloquently continued: “I know your farms, your villages, and your cities. I know your soldiers, professors, and workmen. I . . . reiterate my faith in liberty, equality and fraternity.” He closed with a rousing call to the French to assist the invasion: “We do not want to cause you any harm.” And finally: “Vive la France éternelle!”
Before sunrise, at 3 a.m., between the call to prayer in Rabat to the south and Algiers to the west, a fleet totaling over eight hundred warships and transports started to gather along the coast of Africa.
MEANWHILE, FOR ROOSEVELT, NEITHER his stamps nor his novels relieved his tension. Nor did the company of Harry Hopkins and a few good friends. Throughout the day and into the evening, he was unable to mask the strain on his face. Repeatedly, he locked his eyes on the telephone, awaiting news that the invasion had begun. Just before 9 p.m. on Saturday, November 7, the phone finally rang. Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, reached for it. It was the War Department.
Roosevelt prepared to pick up the phone, almost as if in slow motion. His hand was shaking.
HE LISTENED IN COMPLETE silence for a few minutes, then roared, “Thank God. Thank God. That sounds grand. Congratulations. Casualties are
comparatively light—much below your predictions.” And then he said again: “Thank God.” With a grin, he wheeled his chair around to face his guests. “We have landed in North Africa,” he told them. “Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back!”
As it happened, fortune was on the Allies’ side. Remarkably, the Atlantic was placid. Equally remarkably, they had no problem with German U-boats. Some of the landings went like clockwork, with men rapidly moving inland, confronting only minor opposition. And at Casablanca, American battleships and cruisers laid waste to the unsuspecting French flotilla in the harbor. Still, there were snags. Weighed down by almost two hundred pounds of ammunition and equipment, the troops struggled through the surf until finally many of them discarded their barracks bags; as morning broke the next day, the ground was littered with these waterlogged sacks and other equipment.
There were other problems. In some cases soldiers landed miles from their planned destinations. And to the horror of the Americans, the French sided with the Axis, struggling back. Sporadic firefights broke out, particularly at Oran and along the Atlantic beachheads, where the French mobilized for a counterattack. Some vessels got lost. Some landings were delayed or mishandled. And to Roosevelt’s dismay, the proud, irate French broke off diplomatic relations with the United States, while an outraged Hitler used the invasion as a pretext to seize the southern zones of France that had been under the control of the Vichy regime. On the night of November 11, armored German units made it official, racing across the armistice line in France; clashes were minimal and they encountered little opposition. Now the Nazis controlled all of France.
But there were bound to be mishaps, and for the most part the Americans prevailed: the operation was a stirring success. By midday on November 8, Algiers was surrounded and then overrun—Oran too. What the inexperienced American GIs lacked in training, they made up for in numbers, overwhelming the opposition. Casablanca quickly fell. So did the critical port of Rabat. And the Allies were pushing into the rocky hills of Tunisia.
Roosevelt had been right all along. Morale did matter. In America, the mood was euphoric. Capturing the country’s mood, Newsweek wrote: “This is it! Those were the words that raced through the mind of the nation at nine o’clock on the night of Saturday, November 7. . . . From one end of the country to the other there spread a feeling that now the United States was going to show the world—as it had always done before.” At sporting events, the games stopped while the landings were announced and the crowds roared. At home, people pulled out maps and traced the path of the coastal invasions. In coffee shops and at YMCAs, children did cartwheels while parents scratched their heads, wondering how to pronounce the names of exotic North African places they had never heard of before. And everyone, it seemed, smiled at the headlines in the newspapers.
Now came the second phase of the operation. On November 12, Eisenhower, hoping to forestall any further resistance as well as to establish political order, offered the former Vichy commander in chief, Admiral Jean-François Darlan, the position of high commissioner for all French North Africa; in turn, Darlan would have to persuade the French soldiers to cease fighting and lay down their arms. If all went according to plan, the French would also take part in helping to liberate Tunisia. Darlan accepted. The hostilities ended. And for the American commanders in North Africa, this seemed to be a pragmatic arrangement—a way of preventing unnecessary bloodshed. As Eisenhower had written to Marshall, he was loath to think about “every bullet we have to expend against the French” rather than against the Germans.
Yet to their consternation, virtually overnight this decision proved to be an unmitigated blunder; Roosevelt and the British confronted a storm of protest. Across the political spectrum critics asked: Didn’t Darlan represent everything the western powers despised? He was a Fascist to the core, and a collaborationist to boot—when the Nazis invaded France, he had quickly joined their side. When the Jews were being rounded up in France, he never issued a word of protest. And now Eisenhower and Roosevelt were putting their stamp of approval on what had become known as the treacherous “Darlan deal.” Wasn’t this too high a price to pay? The whole affair was clumsily handled.
To many, it appeared as though the West was prepared to deal not only with Fascists, but with the Führer himself. The fact that Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the head of the Vichy government in France, curtly refused to accept the Allied landing and the liberation compounded matters. “We are attacked,” he said. “We shall defend ourselves; this is the order I’m giving.” At a minimum, critics felt, Darlan was treacherous, and this was an unconscionable bargain—promising freedom to the people of France and then putting their enslaver in control of them.
Nor were these just the clamorings of liberal columnists and left-wing activist groups. Roosevelt’s own secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, denounced Darlan as “a man who had sold thousands of people into slavery.” Roosevelt’s former opponent in the presidential election, now his ally in the war effort, Wendell Willkie, agreed. “Shall we be quiet when we see our government’s long appeasement of Vichy finds its logical conclusion in our collaboration with Darlan, Hitler’s tool?” he asked. From London, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the free French, added his voice, saying in a terse one-sentence note that the “United States can pay traitors but not with the honor of France.”
At the outset Roosevelt was nonchalant about the outcry; then he was flummoxed; and soon it was clear that the criticism stung. Eisenhower sought to contain the damage; he cabled to the president that if they backtracked on the deal, the French armed forces would resist “passively” and even “actively.” However, this did little to quell the tumult. Roosevelt found himself backed into a corner; the whole affair was proving to be a morass. He eventually issued a statement asserting that he would accept Eisenhower’s arrangement only for “the time being,” adding that no “permanent arrangement” should be made with Darlan. “We are,” the president went on, “opposed to Frenchmen who support Hitler and the Axis.” He repeated himself again and again: the arrangement was only “a temporary expedient,” and was justified solely “by the stress of battle.”
Meeting with the president at the White House, Morgenthau lamented that the North Africa deal was “something that afflicts my soul.” Roosevelt retorted with a Bulgarian proverb: “My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the devil until you’ve crossed the bridge.”
But the moral issue lingered. How long was it acceptable to hold hands with the devil? For a sprint? For a marathon? And what if the devil took you on a detour?
This was not to be the last time these questions would be asked.
NOW THE CONTRETEMPS APPEARED to have no end. Roosevelt was alternately chagrined, irritable, and resentful of the outcry against him. He looked haggard and tired. To those around him, he seemed haunted by his critics. In the morning he would open the newspapers and, barely containing his disgust, lash out at hostile editors, sneering as he read aloud every word of every unfavorable article and every unfavorable column. But on some days, he simply acted as though the North African campaign hadn’t happened, refusing to talk about it at all. At still other times, he sought refuge in his usual pleasures: taking relaxing drives through the countryside; writing playful notes to his aides; bantering during his beloved cocktail hour. Eventually, he escaped Washington altogether, taking the train to Hyde Park to clear his head.
As it happened, Roosevelt would be rescued, politically, by a young French royalist from an Algerian family who assassinated Darlan on Christmas Eve, shooting him twice. Feeling revived, Roosevelt reported to his former boss at the Navy Department, Josephus Daniels, “I’m happy today in the fact that for three months I’ve been taking it on the chin in regard to the Second Front and that that is now over.”
IT WAS. ROOSEVELT’S BROAD smile returned. As 1942 came to a close, the war seemed to be at a critical juncture—a mere two years after his invention of Lend-Lease to ai
d a desperate Britain, and just a year after the nightmare of Pearl Harbor. In incalculable numbers, the Germans were fighting and dying on the eastern front in the Soviet Union. At El Alamein, the British Eighth Army had gained the offensive and Rommel was in full retreat. With the success of the North Africa campaign, it was just a matter of time before the Germans were defeated south of the Mediterranean and North Africa was cleared of Axis forces. Despite setbacks—the American soldiers were later routed badly by Rommel’s panzers in the foothills of the Kasserine Pass—the overall campaign had brought numerous benefits. It boosted the confidence of the war-weary British. It helped forge a genuine military alliance between the British and the Americans that would be indispensable when they opened up the European front. And it broke in the American army: for in North Africa, the officers and men of the U.S. Army, who had been in need of seasoning, were learning fast—there they gained experience. Also, it enabled Eisenhower to quickly weed out incompetent commanders. Finally, it paved the way for the forthcoming invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaign.
A euphoric Roosevelt, leaning back in his seat, inhaling deeply on a cigarette, relished every bit of his successes. He regaled reporters with stories about the planning for Operation Torch. He explained wryly that a second front didn’t happen overnight, nor could it be simply bought “in a department store, ready-made.” More than ever, a sense of victory began to fill Washington. It was just a matter of time before Allied troops would enter France, and Roosevelt was viewed as a master of the great gameboard of international policy. At home, the economy was also improving: thanks to the war effort, millions of Americans had risen above the poverty line, and unemployment had all but come to an end. And in Britain, as the year came to a close, church bells pealed to celebrate the successes in North Africa.