Darlan and the armistice in North Africa

At noon on 10 November 1942 in Algiers, Admiral of the Fleet François Darlan, commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Vichy France, signed the order the Allies had been waiting for for three days. All French forces in North Africa were to stop fighting the Americans and British and to remain neutral, and Darlan assumed authority over this part of the empire “in the name of the Marshal”. That same day Oran, where fierce fighting had been going on since 8 November, surrendered, and the next day the guns fell silent in Morocco. So ended the fratricidal war between the French and the Allies that had begun with the landings in North Africa.

Popular chronologies state that Darlan “signed an armistice with the Allies”. That is a shorthand. No armistice was signed on 10 November: it was a unilateral order by the French commander, issued under heavy American pressure. A formal agreement on military and political co-operation, known as the Clark–Darlan agreement, was signed only on 22 November. The same date is also often linked with the fall of Oran, the sinking of French warships in its harbour and further landings near the Tunisian border. All these matters were connected, although not all of them happened on 10 November.

An admiral in the wrong place

Darlan was in Algiers by chance. On 5 November he had flown in from Vichy to see his son, who was lying in hospital with polio. The Allies had no intention of dealing with him: their candidate for leader of French Africa was General Henri Giraud, an escapee from German captivity who had been groomed for the role for weeks. On the night of 7/8 November conspirators of the Algiers resistance seized the city’s key points for several hours and detained Darlan and the commander of the land forces, General Alphonse Juin (the Algiers putsch). Early in the morning they were freed by the Garde Mobile, which the conspirators, under orders not to shed French blood, did not resist, but the city was by then surrounded by Allied troops. On the evening of 8 November Darlan agreed to a local ceasefire covering Algiers only.

At Oran and in Morocco the fighting went on, and it was heavy. Giraud, who flew into Algiers on 9 November, proved powerless: the officers of the Vichy army did not recognise his authority, because he had no mandate from Marshal Philippe Pétain, and the oath they had sworn to the Marshal was sacred to them. An order that could stop the fighting could be given only by someone they regarded as their lawful superior. That man was Darlan, Pétain’s official successor and commander of all the Vichy armed forces.

Talks at the Hôtel Saint-Georges

On 9 November Major General Mark Clark, deputy to General Dwight Eisenhower, flew into Algiers – the same man who a few weeks earlier had met the conspirators in secret near Cherchell (Clark’s mission to Algeria). On the morning of 10 November he opened talks with Darlan and Juin at the Hôtel Saint-Georges. The admiral played for time: he claimed that he could not issue an order without Vichy’s consent and wanted to wait for Pétain’s reply. Clark, known for his fiery temper, lost patience. He threatened that if Darlan did not order a ceasefire he would be taken into custody, and the Allies would find someone who would. After several hours of haggling, at about noon, Darlan gave way and signed an order to the commanders in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

Vichy disowns him

The news reached Vichy in the afternoon. The prime minister, Pierre Laval, was then on his way to Munich, where Adolf Hitler had summoned him, and demanded by telephone that the Marshal dissociate himself from the admiral. Pétain publicly disavowed the order: he announced that he had given instructions to resist the aggressor and stood by them, and he stripped Darlan of his command in Africa and handed it to the Resident-General in Morocco, General Charles Noguès. Darlan, on learning of this, told Clark that he would have to revoke his order. The American replied that in that case he would have him arrested. The admiral did not revoke the order and placed himself under guard.

What was going on behind the scenes complicated matters. That same day Darlan received a telegram, encrypted and sent through naval channels, from Admiral Gabriel Auphan, the Vichy navy minister, which implied that the Marshal’s public statements were forced on him by the presence of the Germans and that at heart Pétain agreed with the admiral. Further telegrams of this kind, speaking of the Marshal’s “profound agreement”, arrived over the following days. Their significance is disputed. Darlan and his defenders later regarded them as proof that he had acted with Pétain’s knowledge. Some historians see them rather as an insurance policy taken out by men in the Marshal’s entourage who wanted to keep their options open in both directions, than as genuine consent to a change of sides. What is certain is that officially Vichy condemned Darlan as a traitor throughout November.

The events of the following day were decisive. On 11 November the Germans and Italians crossed the demarcation line and occupied the hitherto unoccupied part of France (Case Anton). Darlan concluded that the Marshal was no longer free and that his public orders did not bind the army; from then on he presented himself as the man governing Africa “in the name of the Marshal, who has been prevented” from doing so. That same morning Noguès, who had defended Morocco to the last, ordered a ceasefire at Casablanca, just before a planned general American assault on the city. The fighting in French North Africa was over.

The fall of Oran

Oran saw the heaviest fighting in Algeria. General Lloyd Fredendall’s American Centre Task Force landed on 8 November on beaches east and west of the city, but an attempt to break straight into the harbour ended in disaster. Two former US Coast Guard cutters sailing under the British flag as HMS Walney and HMS Hartland were to land troops in the harbour to prevent its destruction (Operation Reservist). French warships and batteries shot both vessels to pieces at close range. According to American and British figures some 300 men were killed, more than half of all those on board, and the survivors were taken prisoner. The memory of the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, a few kilometres from Oran, where in July 1940 the British had sunk French warships and killed nearly 1,300 sailors, made the French navy fight here with particular ferocity.

On 8 and 9 November French warships from Oran put to sea several times to attack the invasion fleet, and were lost one after another in clashes with the British cruisers HMS Aurora and Jamaica. Lists of losses name more than a dozen vessels in all: four destroyers (Épervier, Tornade, Tramontane and Typhon), the aviso La Surprise, seven submarines and several patrol boats. Some were sunk in action, some ran aground, and some, like Typhon and several submarines, were scuttled in the harbour by their own crews. The port commandant also had several dozen smaller craft and merchant ships scuttled to block the basins. The statement found in chronologies about “17 French warships sunk at Oran” thus gives roughly the right order of magnitude for these losses, except that they did not occur on 10 November but over the two preceding days, and a good proportion of the vessels were destroyed by the French themselves.

On land the Americans of the 1st Infantry Division and the 1st Armored Division were closing a pincer around the city, but the garrison put up a stubborn defence, especially at Saint-Cloud, where it held up the American infantry for two days. The British battleship HMS Rodney shelled the coastal batteries. On the morning of 10 November armoured columns broke into the city, and at about noon the French commander, General Robert Boissau, surrendered to Fredendall. Oran fell independently of Darlan’s order, which came at roughly the same time.

It is also written that the losses at Oran caused a “rift between the French and the Allies”. The bitterness was real: Vichy naval officers who had lost comrades made no secret of their hostility towards the British, and the British in turn did not forget the shipwrecked men of Walney and Hartland. This rift did not, however, prevent the ceasefire or the military co-operation that began in the days that followed.

The race east

The ceasefire in Algeria and Morocco allowed the Allies to turn towards Tunisia, where the real objective of the whole operation was being decided. The Germans moved faster. As early as 9 November German aircraft began landing at El Aouina airfield near Tunis, and the Resident-General in Tunisia, Admiral Jean-Pierre Esteva, obedient to Vichy, offered them no resistance. Darlan’s orders for Tunisia were unclear and changed from day to day; the French troops there under General Georges Barré withdrew into the mountains to the west, fighting neither against the Germans nor on the Allied side.

The British, who under Operation Torch were to advance eastwards, brought forward landings near the Tunisian border. On 11 November the 36th Infantry Brigade landed unopposed at the port of Béjaïa (then Bougie), but the lack of fighter cover cost dear: German and Italian aircraft from Sardinia and Sicily sank the transports Cathay and Awatea and the landing ship Karanja in the harbour. On 12 November the British 3rd Parachute Battalion seized the airfield near Annaba (Bône), and the port was taken by commandos of No. 6 Commando brought in by destroyers. Bône lay only about a hundred kilometres from the Tunisian border. A few days later the British First Army of General Kenneth Anderson set off for Tunis.

The “Darlan deal”

On 13 November Eisenhower flew to Algiers and approved the agreement negotiated by Clark. Darlan became High Commissioner of France in North Africa and head of the civil administration, Giraud took command of the French land and air forces, and Noguès and other Vichy dignitaries kept their posts. On 22 November the Clark–Darlan agreement was signed, regulating the rights of Allied forces on French territory and committing the French to co-operation. Soon afterwards French West Africa with Dakar, whose governor Pierre Boisson obeyed Darlan, also came over to the Allies.

For Eisenhower it was a purely military decision: thanks to it soldiers stopped dying, and the Allies could use the ports, railways and airfields without the risk of a guerrilla war in their rear. In Britain and the United States, however, it caused a storm. Darlan was the man who in 1941 had offered the Germans bases in Syria and military collaboration, and his administration kept Vichy’s legislation in force in North Africa, including the anti-Jewish laws and the internment camps. It was felt especially bitterly by those who had risked their lives for the Allies on the night of 7/8 November, many of them young Algerian Jews: the new authorities treated many of them with suspicion, and some were later arrested. General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French regarded the agreement as a betrayal of the ideals they were fighting for. On 17 November President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly called it a “temporary expedient”, justified solely by the stress of battle.

Place in the war

The order of 10 November ended fighting that in three days had cost the lives of, by various estimates, more than a thousand French soldiers and sailors and at least several hundred Americans and British. Without it the occupation of Morocco and Algeria might have dragged on for weeks, and the Vichy army in Africa, some 120,000–125,000 strong, would have remained a hostile force in the Allies’ rear. Thanks to the ceasefire, French units were already standing alongside the British and Americans in Tunisia by the end of November, and the Army of Africa, later re-equipped by the Americans, fought in Italy, France and Germany.

The political price was high. The agreement with Darlan showed that the Allies were prepared to deal with collaborators if it brought a military advantage, and it weighed for a long time on American relations with the Gaullists. In metropolitan France it hastened the end of the fiction of an independent Vichy: the Germans occupied the whole of France, and on 27 November the French fleet at Toulon scuttled itself so as not to fall into their hands, at the same time rejecting Darlan’s call to come over to Africa. The admiral himself did not enjoy power for long. On 24 December 1942 he was shot dead in Algiers by a young monarchist, Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle. He was succeeded by Giraud, and in 1943 de Gaulle gradually took over power in French North Africa, opening the way to the union of the Free French and the Army of Africa in the joint French Committee of National Liberation.