Clark's mission to Algeria

On the night of 21–22 October 1942 five American officers went ashore on the coast of Algeria in folding canoes from the British submarine HMS Seraph. They were led by Major General Mark Clark, deputy to Lieutenant General Dwight Eisenhower and second-in-command of the staff preparing Operation Torch. On a lonely stretch of coast some fifteen kilometres west of the small town of Cherchell a villa awaited them, and in it the American diplomat Robert Murphy and French officers ready to help the Allies. By morning General Charles Mast, commander of the division in Algiers, had arrived. Some accounts say that Clark met “Vichy officials and resistance groups”. That is a simplification: the men he talked to were conspirators acting behind the back of the government in Vichy, which would certainly have ordered Clark’s arrest.

An urgent summons from Algiers

Since the summer of 1942 the Allies had been planning a landing in French North Africa. What they feared most was not the Germans but the French. More than a hundred thousand troops of the Vichy French army were stationed in Morocco and Algeria, and ships of the French fleet lay in the ports. After Mers-el-Kébir and Dakar, French officers and sailors loathed the British, and Marshal Philippe Pétain had repeatedly declared that his forces would defend the empire against any aggressor. If they put up stubborn resistance, the landing could end in bloodshed and the Germans would have time to seize Tunisia.

Washington had an advantage in Africa that the British lacked. It maintained relations with Vichy and since 1941 had kept Robert Murphy in Algiers with a group of vice-consuls who, under cover of supervising food deliveries, gathered information and contacts. Murphy reached officers and civilians ready to rejoin the war on the Allied side. Their military leader in Algiers was General Mast, and their spiritual leader General Henri Giraud, who had escaped in April from the German fortress of Königstein and was living under surveillance in the south of France. In September Murphy returned from talks with Eisenhower in England with instructions to make contact with Giraud.

According to the American official history, it was Mast who decided that the time had come for staff talks and, through Murphy, proposed a meeting on the night of 21–22 October on the coast near Cherchell. The message reached London in the middle of the month, less than a week before the proposed date. On 16 October Eisenhower gathered a few officers at Norfolk House and decided to send his deputy to Africa.

Five officers and three canoes

Clark was accompanied by Brigadier General Lyman Lemnitzer, head of the operations division of the Allied staff; Colonel Archelaus Hamblen, a transport and supply specialist; Colonel Julius Holmes of the civil affairs division, who was to act as interpreter; and Captain Jerauld Wright of the US Navy, liaison officer with the Royal Navy, whose task was to sound out the mood of the French fleet. It was decided that Clark would speak on Eisenhower’s behalf but must reveal neither the date of the landings nor the landing sites.

The party flew to Gibraltar in two B-17 Flying Fortresses and there boarded the Seraph, commanded by Lieutenant Norman “Bill” Jewell. The submarine had only just returned from reconnoitring the Algerian coast. She carried folding canoes, sub-machine guns and walkie-talkies, and, to handle the canoes, three men of the British Special Boat Section: Captain Godfrey Courtney and Lieutenants R. P. Livingstone and J. P. Foot.

The Seraph left Gibraltar on 19 October but reached the rendezvous too late to land the party before dawn on 21 October. She spent the whole day submerged. The French waiting at the villa, convinced that something had gone wrong, drove back to Algiers at daybreak. Only a signal sent from the submarine to Gibraltar and passed on through the secret radio network of American intelligence (the OSS) brought them back. Around midnight on 21–22 October Murphy and Vice-Consul Ridgway Knight were waiting on the shore, Knight signalling with a torch from a window of the villa. The canoes forced their way through the surf, and the soaked officers carried their weapons and baggage up to the house.

Talks at the Teyssier villa

The meeting took place in a seaside villa near the village of Messelmoun, on the farm of the Teyssier family (also spelt Tessier in the sources), who were sympathetic to the conspirators. General Mast arrived with his officers shortly before five in the morning on 22 October. First Clark, Lemnitzer, Mast, Lieutenant Colonel Germain Jousse and Murphy talked in a small circle; then all the officers of both sides sat down at the table. Wright held separate talks with Captain Jean Barjot of the French navy. French sources also list among those present members of the Algerian civilian underground, including Bernard Karsenty and Henri d’Astier de La Vigerie.

Clark told Mast that the Allies would send a large American army to North Africa, supported at sea and in the air by the British. He stressed the American character of the expedition, knowing how the French would receive news of a British landing. Mast answered in practical terms. He warned that the Germans would be able to fly troops into Tunisia within thirty-six hours of the first landing and advised the quickest possible advance eastwards. He also asked for simultaneous help for French forces in unoccupied France, which the Allies, short of warships and merchant shipping, could not promise. The French handed over a wealth of precise information on the disposition of troops, coastal batteries, airfields and fuel stocks, and reported that Blida airfield near Algiers and the garrison at Bône (today Annaba) were in the hands of Giraud’s supporters. The conspirators promised to help the Allies in Algiers itself on the night of the landing.

The most difficult question was Giraud. Mast spoke in his name and believed that he alone could carry the army with him. It was agreed that Giraud would receive a letter from the Allies setting out their commitments and that, if he agreed to come to Africa, a submarine would bring him out of France. The draft letter provided for restoring France’s 1939 frontiers, recognising her as an ally and handing the French the supreme command in North Africa “at the appropriate time”, after the landings, the establishment of bases and the rearming of the French army. In line with his instructions, Clark made no mention of Admiral François Darlan, with whom Murphy was also holding cautious talks, and repeated that the choice of a French commander was a matter for the French themselves. Barjot warned Wright that the fleet, unlike parts of the army and air force, was opposed to an American entry.

Clark did not tell Mast when the landing would take place. Mast, like Giraud, assumed that the Allies would come in the spring of 1943 and that he would have time to prepare. In fact some of the convoys were already ready to sail, and the landing was seventeen days away.

Police, a cellar and the surf

On the evening of 22 October a telephone call interrupted the talks: the police were on their way to the villa. According to the participants, they had been tipped off by Arab servants who had been sent away from the house for the day and suspected smugglers. The French officers hurriedly changed into civilian clothes and scattered, while the five Americans and three British commandos went down through a trapdoor into an empty wine cellar. Murphy and Knight stayed upstairs and pretended to have stumbled into a drunken party that was best kept quiet. The police searched the house but did not look in the cellar. In the darkness Courtney began to choke from a suppressed cough. Clark gave him his chewing gum. Courtney later remarked that American gum had no taste at all, to which Clark replied that he had been chewing it for two hours beforehand. The anecdote comes from Clark’s memoirs.

The police left, promising to return, and the party had to get away at once. The surf was so heavy, however, that the first attempt failed. Clark’s canoe capsized in a wave. The general, who had taken off his trousers before wading in, lost them together with the belt holding his money for use in case of escape. Accounts give different sums, from two thousand dollars in gold coins to much larger amounts. Some of the soaked documents and the trousers were reportedly washed up later; the gold was never found. Wet and cold, the officers hid again near the villa, and Jewell brought the Seraph as close inshore as the depth allowed. Before dawn on 23 October the canoes finally broke through the waves. Everyone reached the submarine.

On 24 October the Seraph transferred her passengers to a flying boat, which took them to Gibraltar. On 25 October Clark and his men flew back to England in two B-17s. The press learned of the expedition only after the landings and made it one of the best-known adventures of the war. Its members later founded a light-hearted club that met to reminisce about it.

What was gained and what was not

Militarily the mission was a success. The information from the French was radioed to the commands of the assault forces, including Rear Admiral Henry K. Hewitt and Major General George Patton aboard the cruiser Augusta, already on their way to Morocco, and was used in planning the landings near Algiers. The Allies now knew which French commanders they could count on and what the port defences looked like. On the night of 7–8 November several hundred civilian conspirators in Algiers, working with Mast, seized the telephone exchange, government offices and part of the city for several hours, while Mast tried to stop his soldiers resisting on the beaches.

Politically the most important questions remained unresolved. Mast did not know that the landing was a matter of days, and could not prepare anyone outside a narrow circle of conspirators. Giraud, with whom Murphy continued to correspond, decided that he himself should become supreme commander of the Allied forces in North Africa within forty-eight hours of the landing. He set this condition on 27 October, and the Allies never accepted it. As Giraud wrote to a compatriot, the French did not want the Americans to liberate them, but to help them liberate themselves.

Place in the war

The meeting near Cherchell was the first direct conversation between a senior Allied commander and French military men in North Africa, and it convinced the Allies that part of the Vichy army would not fire on them. That conviction proved too optimistic. A few days later the Seraph, flying the American flag and formally under the command of Captain Wright, picked Giraud up from the coast of Provence, but the general reached Gibraltar only on 7 November and argued with Eisenhower for many hours over the supreme command. When the Allies landed on 8 November, the Vichy army and navy resisted in Morocco and around Oran. In Algiers the conspirators were quickly crushed, and Mast was removed from his command by his superiors.

The issue was settled not by Giraud, whose appeal almost nobody heeded, but by Darlan, who happened to be in Algiers. After three days of fighting he concluded a ceasefire agreement with Clark, and in return the Allies recognised him as head of French North Africa. This “Darlan deal” caused a storm in Britain and the United States. After the admiral’s assassination in December 1942 Giraud took over, and in 1943 began his rivalry with General Charles de Gaulle, which he lost. Mast, one of the first French generals to go over openly to the Allies, became Resident-General in Tunisia in 1943.

For Clark the expedition marked the start of his career as a field commander. In January 1943 he took command of the US Fifth Army, landed with it at Salerno in September, and led it through most of the Italian campaign. The Seraph won fame once more in April 1943 when, off the coast of Spain, she released into the sea the body of a fictitious officer carrying false Allied plans as part of Operation Mincemeat.