Supreme Commander (23 page)

On November 19 Eisenhower got out from under sole responsibility for the Darlan deal. He forced his superiors to approve it and thus commit themselves. “Protocol No. 1,” the original Clark-Darlan agreement that gave the Allies military rights and kept the Vichy French in power, had been typed up at Algiers after Eisenhower made minor changes. It was ready to be issued. Eisenhower wanted to send it back to Clark and tell him it was in effect, but his staff protested. They advised Eisenhower to send it to the CCS for approval. Eisenhower felt this would look like an attempt on his part to escape his responsibility for the deal, which was exactly what the staff had in mind. He was ready to ignore them when Cunningham, whom Eisenhower considered “as bold a man as I know of,” joined in the chorus. Eisenhower “caved in” and sent the Protocol on to the Chiefs for approval.
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The Chiefs simply turned the problem over to the heads of government and Churchill indicated he would follow Roosevelt’s lead. The President thus had one more opportunity to repudiate the deal. He knew that if
he accepted the Protocol his liberal, New Deal supporters would accuse him of trafficking with Fascists, of selling out the honor of the United States in the first campaign of the war. For many Americans, and even more British, accepting Darlan implied a basic change in the nature of the war. The Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, would be forgotten. No longer would it be a struggle against Fascism. Instead, the war would be an old-fashioned balance-of-power conflict in which the Western Allies took help wherever they could find it, no questions asked.

Roosevelt realized what the reaction would be. He may even, at this late date, have considered repudiating the deal. But Eisenhower’s explanations of its necessity, plus the pressure from Stimson, Hopkins, and Marshall, kept him from acting. He told the CCS that he accepted the terms of the agreement but wished to eliminate the word “Protocol,” as it implied recognition. The President preferred that it take the form of an “announcement” with a statement from Darlan on his “concurrence.” Roosevelt’s squeamishness over words aside, the Darlan deal had been ratified.
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The President was fairly safe, for most of the critics denounced Eisenhower and ignored Roosevelt. In public, Eisenhower made no defense of himself, aside from pointing to the advantages the deal had brought. He was deeply hurt, however, by some of the names newspapermen had called him.
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To his son John he said, “I have been called a Fascist and almost a Hitlerite.” The fact was that he had one earnest conviction about the war: “It is that no other war in history has so definitely lined up the forces of arbitrary oppression and dictatorship against those of human rights and individual liberty.” His single passion was to do his full duty in helping “to smash the disciples of Hitler.”
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Fortunately for all concerned, Darlan began to deliver. On November 24 he told Eisenhower he would conduct the affairs of North Africa on a “liberal and enlightened basis and in accordance with the principles on which the French Republic was founded.” He intended, as soon as possible, to restore property and individual rights to Jews, who under current law were not citizens, could not practice the professions of law and medicine, own property, and so on. Darlan had to go slowly, he explained, because of the anti-Semitism of the Arabs, but he promised progress. The admiral was also making arrangements to bring Dakar
over to the Allied camp.
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Eisenhower had earlier told the CCS that although French West Africa was outside his theater he would assume responsibility for dealing with Pierre Boisson, the governor general, if the Chiefs wanted him to. The Chiefs gave Eisenhower the authority, and Darlan arranged for a meeting for November 28.

The meeting threatened to break up in a shambles. Boisson held some British sailors in his prisons and British officials present shouted at him that he had to release them. Boisson, meanwhile, loudly demanded that the British make the Free French stop sending into French West Africa radio propaganda denouncing him. Darlan was simultaneously making his own suggestions.

Eisenhower quietly took Boisson off into a corner. He told the governor general that it would take weeks to straighten out details and he could not afford to waste the time. If Boisson would sign an agreement, Eisenhower promised on his honor as a soldier to do everything possible to see that general arrangements were carried out on a co-operative basis. Eisenhower added that as long as he held his post Boisson could be sure that “the spirit of our agreement will never be violated by the Allies.” Without another word Boisson walked over to Eisenhower’s desk and, while the chatter continued in various parts of the room, sat down and signed. The port and airfield of Dakar, which the Allies had long desired, were safely in hand.
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Darlan could take partial credit for the achievement, and he needed it, since his efforts to bring the French fleet over to the Allied side had failed dismally. On November 25, as the Germans prepared to board the warships, the French admirals at Toulon ordered their captains to scuttle. Three battleships, seven cruisers, and 167 other ships went to the bottom.
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The Allies had, in short, paid a high political price for a minor material gain. By the time Darlan had ordered the cease-fire in Algiers, Casablanca, and Oran the French soldiers there had satisfied their honor and were ready to quit anyway. He had been of no help where it counted, in Tunisia, and Eisenhower’s promises were more important than Darlan’s orders in bringing Dakar over to the Allied camp. The French fleet was resting on the bottom of the sea. Darlan did deliver those “proven administrators” whom Murphy felt to be essential to domestic tranquillity in North Africa, but that was all. The Darlan deal had little to recommend it, but Eisenhower could not see then, or later, what he could have done differently. The CCS had not given him enough troops to impose a military occupation, and Roosevelt would not let him work with De
Gaulle’s Free French, who provided the only alternative to the Vichy officers. Giraud was hopeless. Before the invasion Murphy had talked at length about working with Darlan and no one had cautioned Eisenhower at that time about possible political complications. The commander in chief had not been well served by his political advisers. He was beginning to learn that he would have to make his own decisions, based on his own observations. He was also learning about the complexities of foreign policy, especially in wartime.

What stood out was the amount of time taken up in explaining the Darlan deal. Through the first two weeks of the invasion, Eisenhower could give only cursory glances at the battlefield situation. The result was a certain lack of direction to the campaign. Now that Roosevlet had finally ratified the Darlan deal, Eisenhower could turn his attention to Tunisia.

Eisenhower had never commanded men in combat. Like the American troops and their officers, he had much to learn. The education began in Tunisia; it was long, painful, and expensive.

When Marshall selected Eisenhower to command TORCH he did so on the basis of qualities that had little or nothing to do with leading men in battle. Eisenhower’s orderly mind, his intelligence, his experience in administration, his ability to get along with others, and his penchant for making others get along with each other—these were some of the traits that impressed Marshall. The Chief knew that if unity of command were to work in an Allied theater the commander in chief had to be a man who could force a mixed staff to work together. Eisenhower was outstanding at the job.

But strengths can be weaknesses when operating in different areas. Eisenhower’s desire to be liked and his inner need to have others co-operate were essential to forming and heading a staff. Precisely because he had these virtues, however, he lacked that ruthless, driving force that would lead him to step into a tactical situation and, through the power of his personality, extract the extra measure of energy to get across the final barrier. He never forced his subordinates in the field to the supreme effort, and as a result until almost the very end of the war there would be, at critical moments, an element of drift in the operations he directed. It is entirely possible, of course, that had Eisenhower been as hard-driving as Patton he could not have held the Allied forces or the AFHQ staff together.

The tendency toward drift first showed up in Tunisia. On November 24 Eisenhower decided that the communications system in Algiers was far enough advanced to allow him to move his headquarters there. When
he arrived he found that things were not going at all the way he wanted them to. Clark had been busy at Algiers dealing with Darlan, so he had given no direction to the battle. As a result the whole operation toward Tunis was disorganized and getting nowhere. Eisenhower blamed the British, who had the bulk of the fighting forces in the area, reasoning that they had reverted to their traditional practice of fighting through “co-operation” between land, sea, and air officers. Not realizing that the trouble was the absence of over-all leadership and the hesitancy of subordinates to take risks unless the commander in chief encouraged them to do so, Eisenhower decided the thing to do was to “take the British by the horns.…”
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The British thought the difficulty lay elsewhere. Ian Jacob, Ismay’s deputy, who visited AFHQ, decided that Clark was the disturbing factor. Clark imposed himself on Eisenhower “in the most extraordinary way,” refusing to work through the staff, causing immense irritation throughout the branches. Jacob believed that the U.S. officers were terrified by Clark, who “has all along been the evil genius of the [Allied] Force [Headquarters].” Clark wanted the command of the troops in Tunisia, who were operating under Anderson, which led him to an anti-British attitude.

In Jacob’s view, the fact that Clark had been allowed to hold his position and create such havoc was a reflection on Eisenhower. “Though a man of decisive mind in immediate issues,” Jacob recorded in his diary, “General Eisenhower is far too easily swayed and diverted to be a great commander in chief.” Jacob admitted that Eisenhower had been forced to grapple with a baffling political situation and his “downright and honest character has been of great value in this task,” but his lack of experience “and his naturally exuberant temperament prevent him from preserving a steady course towards a selected goal.”
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Given the lack of progress in the campaign, it was inevitable that Jacob, and other British officers, would be critical—Eisenhower himself was deeply dissatisfied. But Jacob was exaggerating in blaming everything on Eisenhower. Circumstances were against the commander in chief. He did not have the men or equipment to do the job against the Germans, who in any case moved with great efficiency and speed.

The weather, too, was working against the Allies. It had rained so hard the past week that the American B-17s had to be propped under the wings to prevent them from sinking hopelessly into the quagmire. The Germans had good, hard-surfaced airfields on Sicily, Sardinia, Tunis, and Bizerte from which to operate, but the Allies were mainly limited to
small, muddy fields. The Anglo-American air forces had to park their planes close together because of inadequate facilities, which made them profitable targets for German bombing raids. They took a heavy toll of Spitfires. It did not help that the absence of strong central command had led to a lack of co-operation between the anti-aircraft gunners and the air forces and even to a certain confusion between the American and British air forces. Eisenhower saw an air raid soon after arriving in Algiers and thought the air defense shameful.