The Allies landed in North Africa expecting General Henri Giraud to rally the French army. Instead they found that the one man French commanders would obey was Admiral François Darlan, commander in chief of Vichy’s armed forces. Between 10 and 13 November, Mark Clark negotiated a ceasefire and a political arrangement with him. It ended the fighting and brought French North Africa onto the Allied side, at the price of leaving Vichy’s officials and laws in place.

The general nobody followed

The Allied political plan for Torch rested on Henri Giraud. A five-star general who had been captured in May 1940 and escaped from the fortress of Königstein in April 1942, he was respected in the army and untainted by collaboration. The Americans hoped that a broadcast in his name would persuade French officers to stand aside. Giraud had other ideas. Brought to Gibraltar on 7 November, he demanded command of the entire Allied operation, and only late on 8 November did he agree to serve in a French role under Eisenhower. By then his broadcast appeal had been heard and ignored.

When Giraud flew into Algiers on 9 November, he found that no French commander would accept his authority. Officers who had sworn an oath to Marshal Pétain regarded Giraud as a general who had broken with the government; some regarded him as a deserter. Howe describes his early appeal as unavailing and concludes that he had lost the initiative. For the next four days he stayed largely out of sight while the negotiations that mattered went on between Clark and the Vichy commanders in Algiers.

Darlan in Algiers

François Darlan was the most senior figure of the Vichy state after Pétain himself. A career naval officer, he had led the French Navy as its chief from 1937, served as Pétain’s deputy and effective head of government from February 1941 to April 1942, negotiated military cooperation with Germany, and since April 1942 had been commander in chief of all French armed forces and Pétain’s designated successor. He had come to Algiers at the beginning of November because his son Alain was gravely ill with polio. His presence on the morning of 8 November was an accident that changed the course of the operation.

On 8 November Darlan authorized General Alphonse Juin to agree to a ceasefire for the city of Algiers, as described in Chapter 5. He refused at first to extend it to Oran and Morocco, saying he needed Pétain’s approval. Mark Clark arrived from Gibraltar on 9 November, and the next morning met Darlan, Juin and other French commanders at the Hôtel Saint-Georges. Clark pressed hard and threatened to arrest Darlan and impose military government if he did not act. That afternoon Darlan signed an order, in Pétain’s name, for French forces throughout North Africa to cease fire.

Orders and counter-orders

The order of 10 November produced one of the most confused days of the war. According to Howe, when news of it reached Vichy, Pierre Laval, the head of government, persuaded Pétain to disavow it. Darlan then told Clark that he was annulling his order and would consider himself a prisoner. Pétain transferred his authority in North Africa to General Charles Noguès, the Resident General in Morocco. Noguès, however, chose not to claim that authority and replied that it should remain with Darlan. Clark refused to let Darlan withdraw the order, and in practice French forces at Oran, which surrendered about noon on 10 November, and in Morocco stopped fighting.

What resolved the confusion was a German decision. On the night of 10–11 November, in response to the landings, German and Italian forces crossed the demarcation line and occupied the unoccupied zone of southern France, an operation the Germans called Case Anton. Italian troops also occupied Corsica. The armistice of 1940 had been broken by the Germans themselves. Darlan and the French commanders in Africa now argued that Pétain was no longer a free agent and that his orders could be presumed to be given under duress. The French could change sides without, in their own eyes, disobeying the Marshal.

The Moroccan ceasefire

In Morocco, Noguès had resisted the landings more determinedly than any other French commander, and the Western Task Force was preparing to storm Casablanca on the morning of 11 November when word of the ceasefire came. That afternoon Noguès came to Fedala and met Patton and Hewitt at the Hotel Miramar. Howe describes the informal understanding they reached: the Americans would occupy what they needed, prisoners would be exchanged, French troops would remain under arms in their barracks, and no one would be punished for helping the Americans without Eisenhower’s approval. Patton proposed a toast to the liberation of France.

The arrangement kept Noguès in office as Resident General and kept the French army in Morocco intact, which Patton and Eisenhower considered essential for order in the protectorate and for the security of the Allied line of communications. It also left Noguès free to act against the men who had helped the Americans. General Antoine Béthouart, arrested for his attempted coup on the night of 7–8 November, was released only after American intervention. The Sultan of Morocco, Mohammed ben Youssef, whose authority Noguès exercised under the protectorate, received assurances from the Americans and later met Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference.

The arrangement of 13 November

After almost four days of talks, Clark and Robert Murphy produced what Howe calls a working French command structure for immediate cooperation with the Allies. Under the arrangement reached on 13 November, Darlan became High Commissioner in French North Africa and commander of naval forces; Giraud became commander of French ground and air forces; Juin took command of the Eastern Sector, facing Tunisia; Noguès remained Resident General of Morocco and commander of the Western Sector; and Yves Châtel remained Governor General of Algeria. Eisenhower flew to Algiers the same day and approved it.

The detailed North African Agreement, known as the Clark–Darlan Agreement, was signed in Algiers on 22 November. It provided for French cooperation in the war against the Axis, Allied use of ports, airfields and communications, and the restoration of French sovereignty over the empire after the war. Within days its practical value became clear. French West Africa under its Governor General, Pierre Boisson, followed Darlan’s lead and came over to the Allies, opening the port of Dakar. French troops in Tunisia, under Juin’s orders, began to fight the Axis.

The price of the deal

The arrangement caused an outcry in Britain and the United States. Darlan had negotiated with Hitler, approved anti-Jewish laws and commanded forces that had fought the British in Syria and at Dakar. Newspapers and members of Parliament and Congress asked what the Allies were fighting for if they would put such a man in charge of liberated territory. De Gaulle and the Free French, who had been excluded from Torch, were bitter. In North Africa, the officials who had imprisoned Gaullists and administered Vichy’s racial laws stayed in office, and the resisters of 8 November were left without protection.

Eisenhower defended the decision as military necessity. He reported to the Combined Chiefs that without Darlan the French would not cooperate, that the Allies would need large forces to hold down North Africa, and that the advance into Tunisia depended on French goodwill along hundreds of miles of road and railway. Roosevelt accepted the arrangement but, in a public statement, called it a temporary expedient, a phrase Howe also uses. Churchill, privately uneasy, defended it in a secret session of the House of Commons in December.

The criticism did not stop with Darlan’s death. In January 1943 Giraud’s administration brought in Marcel Peyrouton, who had been Vichy’s interior minister in 1940–41, as Governor General of Algeria in place of Châtel. The appointment was approved by the Allies and denounced in the British and American press as further proof that the liberation of North Africa had left Vichy’s men in power. Repeal of the racial laws came only in March 1943, under pressure from Jewish organizations and from Washington, and the restoration of Jewish citizenship took until October, after de Gaulle had joined Giraud in Algiers. Contemporary reports in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency followed the delays closely.

For the people of North Africa, the change of masters was also a change in what they were told. Within months the Allied and Free French information services were producing posters, leaflets and magazines in French and Arabic for audiences in Algeria and Morocco, of the kind collected in the site’s Art of World War II section. The Arabic-language press that had printed Noguès’s call for calm in November 1942 printed Allied communiqués in 1943. Nationalist leaders in Morocco and Algeria drew their own conclusions from the sight of France defeated and then rescued by foreign armies, and from Roosevelt’s meeting with the Sultan in January 1943.

Toulon and the fleet

The great prize the Allies hoped Darlan could deliver was the French fleet at Toulon, which included the battleships Strasbourg and Provence, the battlecruiser Dunkerque and many cruisers and destroyers. Darlan called on the fleet to sail for North Africa. Its commander, Admiral Jean de Laborde, refused. When German forces moved into Toulon on 27 November to seize the ships, the French Navy carried out its standing orders and scuttled most of the fleet in harbor. The ships did not join the Allies, but neither did they fall into German hands, a result that went some way to fulfilling the promise the French Navy had made in 1940.

The warships at Casablanca, Oran and Dakar did join the Allies. Several were damaged beyond quick repair, including Jean Bart and Primauguet, but others, among them the battleship Richelieu at Dakar and the cruisers that had escaped the fighting, were later refitted in the United States and served with the Allied navies. French ground forces in North Africa were rearmed with American equipment during 1943 and fought in Tunisia, Italy and France.

The assassination of Darlan

Darlan’s regime lasted six weeks. On the afternoon of 24 December 1942 he was shot in his offices at the Palais d’Été in Algiers by Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, a 20-year-old monarchist who had connections with members of the group around Henri d’Astier de la Vigerie. Darlan died within hours. Bonnier was tried by a French court-martial and executed by firing squad on 26 December. Questions about who, if anyone, was behind the killing have never been fully answered. Giraud was named High Commissioner in Darlan’s place, and in the following days several resisters of 8 November were arrested, as Chapter 5 describes.

The same day, at the front in Tunisia, Eisenhower and Anderson decided to postpone the offensive on Tunis, the subject of the next chapter. The political problem of French North Africa passed to the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, where Roosevelt and Churchill brought Giraud and de Gaulle together. Their uneasy partnership led to the French Committee of National Liberation, formed in Algiers in June 1943, which de Gaulle came to dominate. The air war that made the ceasefires possible is covered in Chapter 6; the background of the Vichy regime is in the collection on the Fall of France.

Gallery · 7 photographs · select to enlarge

The politics of liberation

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