Fighting on all Fronts, page 5
Algeria’s fortunes during the Second World War were closely tied to those of metropolitan France, which had suffered a traumatic defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940. The government of Marshal Philippe Pétain capitulated on 17 June and signed a truce whose terms included the occupation of Northern and Western France by German troops. The South East of France retained formal independence under Pétain, who governed from his seat in Vichy. His regime remained nominally neutral during the war, but sought close cooperation with Hitler and at home installed a dictatorship in the name of a “National Revolution”, effectively establishing a military regime under which a mass fascist movement which advocated entering the war on Germany’s side rapidly developed.
When the war ended the French ruling class did its best to downplay the rampant anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime, pretending that the policies of the National Revolution had been forced on it by Nazi Germany. Yet Robert Paxton’s seminal research gives the lie to this narrative, proving conclusively that the Vichy governments under Laval and Darlan actively and unsolicitedly sought cooperation with Hitler.3 The regime was hoping to compensate for its loss of power on the European continent by expanding its colonial empire at the expense of Great Britain, which was militarily isolated between 1940 and 1941 before the US’s entry into the war and as long as the Hitler-Stalin pact remained in vigour. Vichy was speculating on a speedy military defeat of Great Britain in its war with Germany.
The first military confrontations between France and Great Britain were soon to play out. British warships attacked the French naval base in Algerian Mers el-Kebir on 3 July 1940. One thousand three hundred and eighty French sailors died in the course of the battle, generating a wave of anti-British feeling in France and Algeria which made the signing of a truce with Germany more palatable. An attempted landing by British forces in West African Dakar in September 1940 was fiercely beaten back by forces loyal to the Vichy government.
Against this background the Nazi leadership shelved its plans for a joint intervention in North Africa together with Italian forces. Addressing the Italian dictator Mussolini, who was claiming Tunisia as well as Constantine in Eastern Algeria for himself, Hitler said that “the best solution was for France to defend French Africa herself. This evolution gave some substance to the Vichy gamble that order was best maintained in the empire with Germany rather than against her”.4
Charles de Gaulle, who as junior government minister had fled to London during the chaotic days of June 1940 and urged, on the BBC, for a continuation of the war against Germany, turned the argument round. He said that French domination over its colonial empire must indeed be defended, but in alliance with Great Britain, not Germany. The colonies were to be a springboard for the fight against the German armed forces and the reconquest of metropolitan France. In his first broadcast on 18 June de Gaulle argued: “Is the defeat final? No! Because France is not alone!… It has a vast empire backing it. It can form a bloc with the British Empire, which controls the seas and is continuing the fight”.5
De Gaulle’s strategy was to attempt to win over the governor-generals and leading officers in the colonies and get them to carry on the war on Great Britain’s side. “Gaullism” was initially a spontaneous reaction of a tiny minority in the officer corps of the defeated French army who rejected collaboration with Germany.6 It wasn’t out of democratic conviction that this group rebelled against Pétain’s line. Indeed, as a group it initially had no specific politics at all. De Gaulle himself had had disagreements with his military superiors and Pétain in the 1930s because of their military-strategic conservatism, but at the same time shared their aversion towards the communist-supported Popular Front government of 1936 and towards the parliamentary system of the Third Republic in general: a system whose instability aroused fears of social revolution among the conservative middle classes and more particularly in the officer corps.
This protracted conflict, from June 1940 until November 1942, between the Vichy regime and the “Free French” forces under de Gaulle over who controlled the colonies set the scene in Algeria and other overseas territories. In 1940 the balance of forces was clear-cut. The Free French had indeed managed by the end of the year to win over the governors and colonial troops in Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon and finally Gabon, but North and West Africa and the other colonies remained firmly under Vichy’s control.
This led to a paradoxical situation as the empire carried on while metropolitan France was under foreign domination. The Vichy regime installed a new governor-general in Algiers in July 1940 who ensured Vichy laws were implemented in Algeria, intensifying the persecution of Jews, Communists, Free Masons and Algerian nationalists. Day-to-day life for the Muslim majority and the barracked troops, on the other hand, changed very little. The governor ruled on just as if France had never capitulated to the Nazis.
Underneath the surface, however, nervousness gripped ruling circles. They were worried that any sign of weakness might encourage the Arabs to revolt. They hadn’t forgotten 1871, when, following France’s defeat by Prussia, over 250 tribes, a third of the whole Algerian population of the time, revolted against colonial rule. The jumpiness of the weakened French colonial masters became obvious when the Vichy government, in the spring of 1941, agreed to German armistice inspection teams visiting neighbouring Morocco. They insisted that the Germans keep a low profile: “Once there, they were kept under surveillance and required to remain in civilian clothes. Their Arab contacts were arrested and even shot by French police. The natives must not be allowed to see the victors in uniform”.7
The De Gaulle-Churchill tug of war over colonial possessions
Gaullism wasn’t able to really take root as a political current in Algeria until after the Allied landing. US diplomat Kenneth Pendar claimed: “when our State Department asked André Philip [in 1942], the Head of de Gaulle’s underground, if he could put us in touch with Gaullist groups in North Africa, Philip was forced to answer that they did not have a single ‘cell’ there”.8 One of the reasons was the relentless pursuit of dissidents, another the prevailing anti-British sentiment. Just listening to BBC radio, over which de Gaulle’s speeches were broadcast, was made a punishable offence. The local newspapers were full of spite, the Echo d’Oran, for example, painting de Gaulle as a “miserable creature, traitor and assassin”.9
When in May 1941 the police came across an anti-German conspiracy centred around the officers Léon Faye, André Beauffre and Georges Loustaunau-Laucau, Algerian papers were quick to blame the Free French. In reality Loustaunau-Laucau emanated from an anti-communist secret society and in the 1930s entertained ties with the fascist Parti Populaire Français. In German occupied France he cooperated with the British secret service, but separately from de Gaulle. As for Beauffre and Faye they had been conspiring with the Americans for several months already. They were concerned about a possible German invasion from Spain, against which they hoped to be able to organise a revolt in the French African army with the help of the Americans. So they shared de Gaulle’s aim of entering the war on the side of the Allies, without, however, entertaining any contact with him.10
Equating de Gaulle with the British enemy was a mainstay of Vichy propaganda aiming to immunise the French troops against the Free French. But how would Vichy’s officers and soldiers react if given the opportunity to defect?
The test case occurred not in North Africa but in the Middle East. On 1 April 1941 British controlled Iraq was the site of an anti-colonial uprising. Hitler reckoned this would be a golden opportunity to weaken the British enemy and was planning to support the insurgents from the air. He invited Admiral Darlan to Berchtesgaden to discuss the use of airports in French dominated Syria.
The Iraqi uprising eventually collapsed, but Churchill remained alarmed. The German Wehrmacht had been supporting their Italian allies in North Africa since January 1941 and occupied Greece in April and Crete in May. In view of Vichy’s control of the Syrian-Lebanese mandated territory, he feared the complete encirclement of the remaining British positions in Egypt and the Middle East and losing access to the oilfields of Iraq and Iran. This prompted Churchill to attack Vichy troops in Syria and Lebanon. In a short but fierce campaign the British troops, with the support of 6,000 foot soldiers of the Free French under General Legentilhomme, managed to beat the troops of Vichy’s General Dentz.
De Gaulle now expected to be recompensed by being given control over the French mandated territory and the 30,000 soldiers of the defeated Vichy army being transferred to his National Committee. But his hopes were dashed. The Free French were kept out of the negotiations, concluded on 14 July, between the representatives of Vichy and London. François Kersaudy summarised the results:
[O]nly the immediate interests of British diplomacy and of the British High Command had been safeguarded, while the Vichy troops were being treated more than generously…they would be concentrated under the orders of their leaders, and those who did not wish to join the Allied Corps would be repatriated by units—thus rendering any free choice almost impossible; their equipment would be handed over to the British only; moreover, the Special Troops of the Levant, made up of Syrian and Lebanese volunteers, would purely and simply be placed under British command; there was no reference at all to Free France.
To make things worse the negotiators signed a secret protocol “under which it was agreed that no contact should be permitted between the Free French and the Vichy French”.11
Churchill shielded Vichy soldiers from the Free French, hoping in return to be given a footing in the French colonial territories. De Gaulle was furious. He commented in retrospect: “In fact the text of the agreement was equivalent to a transfer, lock, stock and barrel, of Syria and Lebanon into the hands of the British”.12 He came to the conclusion that London was aiming at first to make the Levant into a “condominium”, and then to grab it for the British with the help of money, foodstuffs and military power.
It appeared that the alliance between de Gaulle and his host, the British government headed by Churchill, was more fragile than it at first seemed. Indeed, it had never been based on democratic principles, but on their mutual weakness in their struggle against Hitler’s troops. Their first military successes immediately generated renewed tension along the boundaries of their respective zones of influence.
The conflict between de Gaulle and Churchill over Syria and Lebanon carried on right to the end of the war.13 In September 1942 relations almost came to a complete break. US consul general Gwynn informed Churchill that de Gaulle had in his presence even threatened to “declare war” on the British.14 Churchill compared de Gaulle’s demeanour to that of the German foreign minister Ribbentrop.15 What in the end kept the alliance alive were developments in metropolitan France, where de Gaulle successfully sought to unite the growing resistance under his leadership. In the autumn of 1942 British foreign secretary Anthony Eden drew Churchill’s attention to the fact that invading France without de Gaulle would mean the Allies having to deal with the Communists on their own, since they were the ones who had mobilised most of the Résistance fighters.
But in North Africa de Gaulle’s services were not needed, neither in preparation for the landing nor in setting up the post-war regime. The Free French were kept out of all decisions in the run-up to Allied Operation Torch.
US foreign policy bets on Vichy
The landing of the Allied troops on 8 November 1942 in Morocco and Algeria was a US-led affair. It was America’s first step towards realising its war aims in Europe. Roosevelt was hoping to use North Africa as a springboard from which to seize Italy, France and finally Germany. According to his plans France was to be treated much like other occupied territories and placed under the control of the planned Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT). The objective was to establish American influence in Europe on a permanent basis, and prevent the emergence of revolutionary movements or the establishment of left wing governments. The appointment of an Allied Military Government in France clashed head-on with de Gaulle’s politics, so the US looked to establishing good relations with Vichy, hoping that Pétain’s regime would sooner or later break with Germany and collaborate instead with the US.
As for the weak Vichy regime, it was eager to exploit the cracks between the hostile blocs. While its internal policies increasingly followed in the footsteps of its Italian and German models, at the international level it pursued a see-saw policy between Berlin and Washington. It opened full diplomatic relations with the US, accrediting the American ambassador Admiral Leahy in Vichy in January 1941. That was followed up in February by a trade agreement between the two countries, signed by US diplomat Robert Murphy and Maxime Weygand, Vichy’s Delegate General for French Africa, which stated that the United States would provide North Africa with materials such as coal, cotton goods, medicines and petroleum.16
In return the US government was permitted to establish a consulate, thus enabling Washington to place a number of Office of Strategic Services (OSS) secret agents in North Africa. Hence Robert Murphy set himself up as consul general in Algiers, a whole eighteen months before the start of Operation Torch. There he functioned as Roosevelt’s personal agent, responsible for locating French forces willing to lead a putsch to install a pro-Allies government in Algeria. The putsch would prepare for a landing, which would meet the least possible resistance, in the areas under Vichy control.
Prospective US partners were conspirational anti-German groups of the Franco-Algerian youth, which included quite a few Jews with leanings towards de Gaulle.17 These loosely organised networks defined themselves as French patriots, which precluded any common ground with Algerian nationalism. The largest of these was formed in Algiers around the medical student José Aboulker from an established Jewish family. This group did regular physical training and engaged in open fights with the youth organisation of the Legionary Security Service (SOL)—a fascist street army that hounded Communists, Jews and BBC listeners.
Aboulker’s cousin Roger Carcassonne set up another conspirational circle in Oran. Coming from a family of industrialists he had connections with members of the state apparatus, such as Henri d’Astier de la Vigerie, whose brothers had already openly sided with de Gaulle in 1940. Henri, however, had joined Vichy’s youth organisation Les Chantiers de la Jeunesse before taking a leading position in the police apparatus of the regime in Algiers.
These patriotic groups represented a dissident, pro-Allies current of the French-Algerian middle classes. Murphy kept in contact with them but never became close. According to him these groups consisted of
restless and even dangerous men and women, most of them anti-Nazi, but also many other things… What would these mixed-up people do if French Africa should become a battleground? The answer, it seemed to me, was that only French administrators already familiar with the complexities of these variegated local situations could possibly maintain the order in French Africa which an Allied Expedition Force would require.18
US secret diplomacy instead placed its bets on those superior officers who were in control of the troops, among whom was General Alphonse Juin, commander of the French armies in North Africa. Murphy was on the look-out for influential individuals who might convince Juin not to oppose an Allied landing in North Africa. Only people who had an interest in maintaining the Vichy system qualified for the job—businessmen, high officials, and the senior and middle ranks of the armed forces.
By the autumn of 1942 Murphy had got his conspirational group together. Its members included Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, a businessman with fascist leanings, Jacques Tarbé de Saint-Hardouin, secretary in Vichy’s General Delegation for North Africa and erstwhile member of a secret society with royalist leanings, Colonel Van Hecke, leader of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, Generals Charles Mast and Émile Béthouart, and Colonel Jean Chrétien, Chief of Army Secret Service under Commander-in-Chief Juin. Then there was police officer Henri d’Astier, who maintained contact with the activists of Aboulker’s and Carcassonne’s networks.
But who would prove capable of holding such a motley group of putschists together? Murphy needed someone who could commit a kind of regicide: a leading figure of the Vichy regime prepared to break with Pétain and at the same time capable of securing the loyalty of the rest of the colonial apparatus for collaboration with the US military. US leaders chose none other than Admiral Darlan, the former head of the Vichy government, for this role in the remaining weeks leading up to Operation Torch.
While this narrative has been disputed by a number of French historians, what is certain is that after the landing of the troops in Algiers Darlan took charge of government affairs with the express approval of the US government—the story told is that he just happened to be in the country at the time for family reasons and the US government could not simply ignore him.19 Anthony Verrier’s research based on US documents establishes Murphy’s conspirational dealings with Darlan a full four weeks before the landing. His advice to the US government was to “encourage Darlan”, advice which was readily taken up since on 17 October Murphy was given full authorisation to enter into any arrangement with Admiral Darlan. Roosevelt ordered Murphy to offer Darlan “rewards that would entrench him in North Africa—prospectively in France—and enable anti-Vichy opposition to be eliminated”.20
But there was another highly placed person who seemed a good pick for cooperation with the US military in North Africa and who also enjoyed the trust of Vichy officials, General Henri Giraud. He had one advantage since, having spent some time in German captivity, he was less compromised than Darlan. However, this did not make him an opponent of Pétain. On the contrary, upon his return to Vichy territory in April 1942 he signed an oath of allegiance to Pétain. Giraud was about to play a prominent role in US plans next to Darlan.
