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previous: Chapter 8 This webpage reproduces part of Giraud and the African Scene by G. Ward Price The Macmillan Company, 1944 The text is in the public domain. This text has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 10

 p195  Chapter IX

Operations in Tunisia

What is this region of French North Africa which sprang so suddenly into world prominence on November 8, 1942?

Though geographically the nearest part of that continent to Europe, it preserved its independence of European influence until well into the nineteenth century, and, in the case of Morocco, until the beginning of the twentieth.

This was due to two causes — first, the warlike nature of its population, and secondly, the poverty of the country, which contained nothing to attract penetration by European Powers.

Long after the Dutch had established themselves at the Cape of Good Hope, and the Portuguese had set up their trading-posts on the western shores of that continent, European vessels, sailing past the northwest corner of Africa, did so in fear of the formidable pirates inhabiting these "Barbary coasts."

About the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese planted a few forts on the Atlantic shore of Morocco, but the Berbers, as the natives of that country are called, drove them out some two hundred and fifty years later. They had already recaptured Tangier, which had been seized by Portugal and afterwards ceded by her to England as part of the dowry of King Charles II.

Until about a hundred years ago the Barbary pirates continued to be the terror of the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic shores of Europe. They attacked shipping, raided the coasts of Italy, France and Spain, and even carried their kidnapping expeditions as far as Devon and Cornwall in England.

Few Europeans reached the interior of North-West Africa except as captives. Daniel Defoe, telling the story of "Robinson Crusoe," describes one of the early adventures of his hero as a prisoner of the "Sallee Rovers."

p196 The battlements of the Kasbah, or castle, at Rabat still look down, little changed, upon the winding river from which Robinson Crusoe escaped from his master in a fishing-boat.

Sali, the port adjoining Rabat, was one of the homes of the black galleys which swept down upon passing merchant vessels, looting their cargoes and carrying their crews and passengers off as slaves.

Algiers was an even greater nest of pirates. Alongside the old harbour, there is a little square, flanked by a white mosque, where their human booty was put on sale. Thousands of European men, women and children, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, were there auctioned off to the highest bidder. Most of them were never heard of again, although, in the records of old English churches, one sometimes comes across the entry of a benefaction made "for the ransom of Christian prisoners in Barbary."

Again and again, British, French, and Spanish fleets bombarded these pirate fortresses. In 1815, an American naval squadron crossed the Atlantic to shell Algiers as a reprisal for the capture of United States citizens. But it was not until 1830 that the French Government, exasperated by the fact that the Dey had struck its Consul with his fly‑whisk, decided to undertake the conquest of Algeria. On June 14, 1830, an army of nearly 40,000 men landed at Sidi Ferruch, just outside Algiers, on the same beaches where the first American forces came ashore one hundred and twelve years afterwards.

In this way began the French annexation of North-West Africa. Fifty years later, when Algeria had been thoroughly pacified and divided into three Departments as part of the metropolitan territory of France, the French established, by treaty, in 1881, a Protectorate over the adjoining territory of Tunisia, thereby anticipating Italian penetration of that country.

Morocco remained an independent empire until 1906, when, at the Algeciras Conference, the European Great Powers recognised that France was entitled to a "special position" in that country.

During the next few years, Germany nevertheless tried to secure additional political rights for herself in Morocco. This culminated in the "Agadir crisis" of 1911, when the Kaiser sent a gun‑boat to Moroccan waters for the purpose of "protecting German interests."  p197 A European war was narrowly averted, but, as a sequel, the French Government in 1912 was allowed to establish a Protectorate over Morocco, which still exists.

At the outset of the present war, France thus possessed the whole of North-West Africa — with the exception of Tangier, which was administered internationally, and a narrow strip running eastward from that city along the coast, belonging to Spain.

French North Africa was still divided into its three constituent parts. Algeria, treated as an outlying district of France, returned representatives to the French Chamber of Deputies. Tunisia and Morocco were left under the nominal ruler­ship of their respective Bey and Sultan, but were both actually administered by French Residents-General and their officials.

Map of North Africa [from the front endpaper of the book] [A much larger version, fully readable, opens here (1.6 MB), in a separate window]

The total native population of these three territories is about fifteen million, mainly Berbers and Arabs, who earn a scanty living as peasants and artisans. The French number a million and a quarter.

The farming industry of the region, its natural resources, and practically the whole of its commerce are mainly in the hands of French settlers, most of them established in Algeria, which is the richest country of the three.

In Tunisia there were almost as many Italians as French, each nationality amounting to about one hundred thousand.

From the agricultural point of view, North Africa is a fertile country. It produces large quantities of wine, cereals, olive oil, and cattle, but it has no minerals except phosphates and iron.

Most of its trade has always been with France, consisting of the exchange of agricultural products for manufactured goods.

Except for Algiers and Tunis, there are no cities. The other places are small towns, mainly on the coast. It is a country largely mountainous, of great distances and poor communications. The plains are covered with large farms and vineyards, generally belonging to French proprietors, who are often absentees, and worked by the Arabs living in squalid and insanitary villages.

By the armistice which the French Government signed with Germany on June 22, 1940, the number of French troops in North  p198 Africa was cut to 30,000 men. Then came the British bombardment of the French Fleet at Mers-el‑Kébir. This scared the Axis into the belief that, weak as Britain was in that autumn after the evacuation of Dunkirk, she might nevertheless attempt a landing in Morocco.

The total of French forces allowed to remain under arms was consequently increased to 100,000 men, and later to 120,000, though the Italians insisted that these should consist almost entirely of native troops.

Since the Germans carried off practically all the motor-transport of the North African Army, its military value was much reduced. It could retain only 120 out-of‑date armoured cars, 102 tanks, most of them relics of the last war, 36 mountain-guns, and no artillery at all of a calibre larger than three inches.

Transport was put back on the old horse-basis of 1914‑1918, with an establishment of 40 mules and 12 light carts per battalion. In a war so mechanised that even the sight of a detachment of infantry on the march is a rarity, it seemed like a romantic glimpse of another age of conflict to meet a French column during the campaign.

Driving over the Grande Dorsale, through deep ravines and across steep, scrub-covered slopes, one would occasionally catch sight of the supply-echelon of a French battalion — le train, as they call it — made up of Spanish mules and grey, flea-bitten Moorish ponies, cat‑footing their way up or down the steep mountainside. This was the only war‑area outside Russia where horses were employed at all.

According to the regulations laid down by the Axis Disarmament Commission, the French troops were divided among the three territories in the proportion of 15,000 men in Tunisia, and 50,000 apiece in Algeria and Morocco. The officers of the French North African Army set themselves systematically to conceal a good deal of material that should have been surrendered.

Field-guns, anti‑tank guns, and even a certain amount of heavy artillery were hidden away in barns, garages, and cellars, most of them belonging to private individuals upon whose fidelity the soldiers could rely.

Such defensive preparations proved quite successful, though the  p199 Germans did stumble, by accident, upon a large dump of hidden arms at Marrakesh, and there was a scare at Algiers which made it necessary to carry out the hurried transference of a lot of war‑material into the under­ground sewers of the city.

But besides the measures of practical disarmament enforced under the terms of the armistice, the enemy officials in North Africa conducted an active campaign of anti-Ally and anti-French propaganda, not only by means of the wireless and Press, but through agents who frequented the native cafés, spreading reports of the imminence of a final victory for Germany.

Amid these difficulties, to which was added the discouragement caused by German successes in Yugoslavia and Greece, some of the officers of the French Army in North Africa awaited their chance to renew the fight.

The dispositions taken by this minority enabled them and the troops under their command to play a valuable part as cover for the Allied advance against the enemy after the landing on November 8, 1942.

Although they were subject to the terms of submission accepted by France, these African territories did not suffer seriously from her defeat. The French Government, indeed, was urged in vain at the time, by the more vigorous sections of the nation and by its British allies, to go over to North Africa and continue the struggle from there.

In French North Africa the predominant feeling, during the latter part of the year 1940, was one of relief that it had got off so lightly. Its people escaped the rigours of enemy occupation; they could still trade with France as before.

Throughout 1940 and 1941, the Germans were everywhere victorious. Britain was fully occupied with her own defence and that of Egypt. The United States had not yet entered the war.

So the men at the head of the administration in North Africa, like General Noguès in Morocco, M. Le Beau, Governor of Algeria, and M. Peyrouton, the Resident-General in Tunisia, took the easiest course, which was that of professing allegiance to Marshal Pétain's Government.

 p200  From the standpoint of the Allied Powers, this attitude of attentisme ultimately conduced to the benefit of the United Nations, and of France itself.

Had the Government officials, army and civil population of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco been openly antagonistic to the Axis, their contumacy might have resulted in German occupation of their territory. If the southern shore of the Mediterranean had thus fallen into the hands of the enemy, with German submarines and air squadrons based on Algiers, Oran and Casablanca, it would have been virtually impossible for the Allies to regain control of a vital sea route and to secure a stance for their blow at Continental Europe.

In view of the compliant behaviour of French North Africa, the Germans were content to leave that territory as a sort of political vacuum, which, later on, the Allies were able to fill, with great advantage to their military, naval and aerial strategy.

Some people in the United States and Britain were inclined to censure these French North African administrators for failing to adopt a more defiant line of conduct. Their position was, however, a difficult one.

In Morocco, for example, where resistance to the American landing was strongest, French officers and administrators had been told by their chief, General Weygand, that it was their duty to defend the integrity of the region under their charge against infringement from any quarter, whether German or Allied.

This led to a very anomalous situation.

The military authorities in Morocco knew that the German General Staff was divided on the question of the desirability of carrying out a military occupation of that territory. One section regarded this as essential; the other considered that it would be safe to rely upon the French troops in North Africa to oppose an Allied landing, should one be attempted.

Nevertheless, detailed plans had been drawn up for sending a German garrison, if the necessity arose. This was known to the French, because the members of the German Disarmament Commission were regularly spied upon. It was thus within the knowledge  p201 of the French military authorities that standing arrangements existed for the rapid dispatch of German air‑borne troops to Morocco. They knew of what regiments these troops would consist, and where they would land. Accordingly, all the exercises carried out by the French Army in Morocco during the winters of 1940 and 1941 were directed to making secret preparations for resisting any such German invasion.

In the summer, the same French troops played another role. The German authorities in France insisted that the Vichy Government should order its forces in North Africa to take up positions on the coast for the purpose of opposing an Allied landing, or series of commando raids, should either of these be attempted. The French forces were accordingly moved down from the interior to the coastal zone, and exercised in opposing an adversary arriving by sea.

When the time fixed for the American landing came, in November, 1942, the only Frenchman in Morocco who had been informed of its imminence by the group in Algiers to which Mr. Murphy had imparted that vital knowledge was General Béthouart, now head of General Giraud's mission to Washington. He was in command of the division at Rabat and, in the early hours of the night in which the Allied forces reached the shores of North Africa, he sent a confidential message to the officers commanding units under his orders to the effect that a German landing in Morocco was due to take place at any moment; that, in consequence of this, American troops would shortly be landing to oppose it, and that the French forces must give their support to them.

As a signal to the approaching Americans that the French troops were not adopting a hostile attitude towards them, he ordered that the searchlights in every military post should be turned on and directed vertically into the sky.

These orders were generally welcomed by the officers who received them, but they were limited to general Béthouart's division.

The result was that when Colonel Petit, for instance, commanding the rifle-battalion at Port Lyautey, found that the naval batteries on the coast beside him were not making the searchlight signal, he  p202 rang up the Military Bureau of the Resident-General at Rabat to report the order he had received from General Béthouart and the action he had taken, asking whether this was correct.

The military Chief of Staff to General Noguès replied that there was no question of an imminent landing either by Germans or Americans, and that the order received by Colonel Petit must have been false. General Noguès was awakened in the middle of the night, and he in turn roused from his bed the senior naval officer in Morocco, Admiral Michelier.

The Admiral refused to believe that there could be any American landing-force within a thousand miles of the Moroccan coast. "If there were, I should have known it," he told General Noguès, adding that the scare was possibly due to information of the approach of a commando raid from Gibraltar, which had long been expected.

Noguès accordingly issued a general order to the troops to take up positions for the defence of the coast.

He also had General Béthouart arrested — he was released two days later, when Darlan signed the armistice in Algiers.

The explanation which Noguès gave later on of his conduct was that if a commando raid had taken place, and he failed to oppose it, he would have provided the Germans with a pretext to occupy Morocco themselves.

It was amid general confusion and bewilderment, in the early hours of November 8th, that French coastal batteries opened fire on the American landing-craft approaching the beaches — and the fight was on.

The French troops thus took up their attitude of opposition in a completely mystified state of mind. Their instincts were pro‑Ally; their orders were to resist. As between Allies and Germans, they preferred to fight for the Allies rather than against them. This is proved by the fact that directly the order to "cease fire" was given, they began to fraternise with the American forces, and when, a few days later, General Giraud ordered them to leave for Tunisia to oppose the German counter-landing there, the same battalions went into action on the Allied side without a murmur.

In January, 1943, while General Noguès was still Resident- p203 General at Rabat, a post which he had held for six years, I had an opportunity of hearing his own account of his much-criticised steward­ship in Morocco.

He is a man of about sixty, of slim build and distinguished, soldierly bearing, with clear‑cut features, and alert, pale-blue eyes.

In this conversation Noguès earnestly defended his own record in Morocco, claiming that he had obstructed the Germans by every possible means for a period of two years, during which the German Disarmament Commission had represented the authority of the conquerors of France in his territory.

"I never admitted a German to this house," he said, speaking in the drawing-room of his official residence. "I always found means to prevent Germans settling in Morocco. My relations with that race were limited to a number of unavoidable official contacts.

"I succeeded in concealing from them much of the more modern armaments belonging to the French Army. My 30,000 Goumiers were all the time doing maneuvers with forbidden arms, but the Germans never found out. Many tanks, guns, and automatic weapons were hidden in farms belonging to the natives, and not a single instance of betrayal occurred.

"As a result of my action, it was possible for me to provide a number of guns, tanks and armoured cars, after the Allied landing, for the use of the French troops who advanced into Tunisia to act as a screen for the Anglo-American forces. Within the first two months of the Allied occupation of North Africa, I had dispatched 15,000 men from Morocco to help the Allied campaign."

This story finds some confirmation in the fact that the Germans had persistently suspected Noguès of anti-collaborationist activities. It was alleged that immediately after the Armistice in June, 1940, he had sent some of his officers to the French Mediterranean ports to try to commandeer some ships laden with munitions, apparently with a view to continuing resistance in North Africa.

The Germans denounced him as a Jew, which is inaccurate. He had, however, been appointed Resident-General of Morocco by M. Léon Blum, the Jewish Socialist Popular Front Premier.

Noguès was married to the daughter of Paul Delcassé, the famous  p204 French Foreign Minister of the last generation. He was one of the staff of Marshal Lyautey, the virtual creator of modern Morocco, and he has the reputation of being an excellent administrator.

Some months before the landing, Noguès said to Mr. Taylor, an American oil‑salesman in Morocco: "If your people come weak, I shall resist. If you come strong, I shall not."

His handicap would appear to have been a certain lack of strength of character, though in his case, as in many others, it is difficult to form from outside a fair appreciation of his conduct when confronted by so complete a fait accompli as the collapse of France. He did not, at any rate, open wide the doors of Morocco to the Germans, as an ardent collaborationist might have done. His policy appears to have been to steer a middle course between resistance and submission.

As often happens in the case of compromisers, he ended by becoming suspect to both sides. The De Gaullists would have none of him, and their strong influence in the democratic countries led to his being regarded as a quisling who had hastily turned his coat when he at length realised the strength behind the Anglo-American enterprise in North Africa.

He thus fell between the Allied and the Axis stools, for, after a brief period of office under General Giraud, his dismissal was insisted upon by the French National Committee in London as a condition of the amalgamation of their organisation with the regime in Algiers.

Tunisia, the country in which the French troops were to rejoin battle with their former foes, is the most easterly part of French North Africa. It lies midway between Casablanca and Cairo, with Algeria to the west of it, and Libya to the south, the Mediterranean forming the eastern boundary.

Tunisia is •500 miles long from north to south, and •150 miles broad from east to west. Its surface consists of a confused mountainous zone in the north, an area of lower plateaus in the centre, and broad plains in the south, gradually merging into the sands of the Sahara Desert.

The mountains in the north are the eastern extremity of that  p205 chain of the Atlas which begins in southern Morocco, and runs right across French North Africa in a northeasterly direction. They are steep and rocky. The inaccessibility of their summits made them for long the refuge of unsubdued tribes that lived by brigandage. The extreme eastern spurs of these mountains lie to the south of Tunis, stretching in a southwesterly direction in the shape of a forked radish.

The head of the radish is at Pont-du‑Fahs, a town standing on the inland border of the coastal plain behind Tunis, and one branch of it runs down as far as Tebessa, 180 miles to the southwest, on the Algerian border. The eastern fork is only half that length, and terminates just above the village of Pichon.​a These parallel chains are known as the Grande Dorsale.

When the Allied campaign in French North Africa began, the forces of the enemy were divided into two large groups. One of these was Rommel's army, falling back before the pursuit of General Montgomery in Libya, and the other was General Nehring's force which had just arrived by sea and air at Tunis, and was concentrated in the coastal plain inland from that port and Bizerta. Command of this force was soon taken over by General von Arnim.

It was obvious that the ultimate enemy plan would be to amalgamate these two armies into one. It was therefore of paramount importance for them to prevent the Allies from breaking into the coastal plain along the eastern shore of Tunisia, since that plain was the only corridor by which the union of the Axis troops could be accomplished.

All the battles of Tunisia which followed were the results of attempts by the Allies to invade this Tunisian seaboard plain, and so prevent the union of retreating Rommel with stationary Arnim. In this they did not succeed, but though the Axis forces, at the end of April, 1943, coalesced in Tunisia, the combined pressure of the British Eighth Army advancing from the east and the First Army from the west, together with the action of the British Navy in cutting off their retreat by sea, rounded them up so effectively that they were all corralled and captured.

It was distance which prevented the Allies from achieving their  p206 first object of driving a wedge between the two German forces in North Africa. But for the unfortunate fact that the Mediterranean narrows to a width of just over •a hundred miles between Sicily and the northern tip of Tunisia, it might have been possible for our forces to act more boldly at their first landing by putting troops ashore in Bizerta and Tunis as well as at Oran, Algiers, and shortly afterwards, Philippeville and Bone.

There was subsequently some regret that this policy of penetrating still further into the Mediterranean had not been followed — but it is easy to "job backwards." At the time it seemed a sufficiently daring enterprise to send troop convoys into the Mediterranean at all. For some months past, enemy submarine and air action had brought about the virtual evacuation of that sea by the British Fleet, with the exception of small flotillas of light craft based on Malta.

There were fifty enemy submarines waiting on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar, yet, out of close on a thousand ships which made the double journey to North African ports and back, losses were less than 3 per cent, and those that went down were mainly empty vessels homeward-bound.

This was due to the effective escort work done by ships belonging to the Western Approaches Command of the British Navy, which had much experience in combatting submarines, and also to effective air cooperation. But with every sea‑mile that the Allied transports moved eastward into the Mediterranean, dangers increased. The closer they drew to Sicily and Sardinia, the more intense became the action of the enemy aircraft based on those islands.

The plan of pushing onward as far as Bizerta and Tunis from the beginning had been considered by the Anglo-American Staff, but was rejected on the ground of probable heavy loss. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, in charge of the naval operations, told me, soon after the landing, that he estimated that to carry troops to Bizerta would probably have entailed the sacrifice of at least one battle­ship, several cruisers, and very likely 25 per cent of the transports.

 p207  On the other hand, Allied seizure of the Tunisian ports at the outset would have eliminated the necessity of a subsequent six months' campaign. It will no doubt be a matter of postwar technical controversy as to whether it would have been more economical or not to take the bolder course. The Navy, at any rate, was prepared to risk it.

Nor were maritime and aerial dangers the only preoccupations of General Eisenhower and his staff in deciding upon the plan of campaign which they actually adopted, and on the disposition of their troops and those of the French North African army cooperating with them. Bygone dangers which did not materialise are easily forgotten, but it should be borne in mind that when the Anglo-American forces first set foot upon the African continent it was possible that one of the enemy reactions to this operation would be the invasion of Spain, for the purpose of getting down to the Strait of Gibraltar and mena­cing our communications through that •18‑mile-wide maritime defile. Part of the American Expeditionary Force — the whole of the Fifth Army, in fact, under General Mark Clark — was retained in the neighbourhood of Oran for the purpose of counteracting this possible development. Two divisions of French troops from Morocco, and the local French division stationed at Oran, were kept there for the same purpose.

When the Anglo-American landing in North Africa took place, the people of the United States and Britain were gratified, and somewhat surprised, by the rapidity with which the French troops, after resisting the arrival of the Allies, came into line on their side against the forces of the Axis.

The swift succession of events in the days immediately following the landing on November 8, 1942, made it difficult at the time to understand these developments in North Africa.

One of the terms of the armistice signed by Admiral Darlan was that French sovereignty in North and West Africa should remain in the hands of the administrators of those territories.

If there had been no reaction on the part of the Axis Powers to the arrival of the Anglo-American forces in Africa, these French Colonial authorities would have been entitled — and, at the moment,  p208 Admiral Darlan did actually intend — to maintain an attitude of neutrality towards the military operations about to begin on their soil. Two immediate steps by the Axis, however, had the effect of deciding the Admiral to order the forces under his control to cooperate with those of the Allies.

These events were the German landing in Tunisia, and the infringement of the Franco-German armistice of June, 1940, by the military invasion of the unoccupied part of France.

It was 10:30 A.M. on November 9th that the first German detachments of all arms began to arrive by air on the aerodromes of El Aouina at Tunis, and Sidi Ahmed at Bizerta.

On the other side of the Mediterranean, the German Army, two days later, crossed the line of demarcation separating the occupied and unoccupied portions of France, and began to push forward with all speed to the Mediterranean. This action on the part of Germany was met by a protest from Marshal Pétain.

As a result of these occurrences, Admiral Darlan held a council of the chief civil and military authorities in North Africa, at which it was decided that he, in the name of the Marshal, who was no longer to be regarded as a free agent, should put the resources of French North Africa at the disposal of the Allies for the purpose of resuming the war against Germany and Italy.

Accordingly, on November 14th, the command of the French military, naval and aerial forces in that area was conferred on General Giraud, who, two days later — just over a week after the Allied landing — issued his first general order defining the task which they would be called upon to fulfil.

This was the General's famous "Directive No. 1," of which the original will doubtless some day lie in the Military Museum at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, for it is the document which brought the French Army back officially into the war.​b

It is worth quoting in full, for it gives a clear and succinct account of the military problem that faced not only the French Army but the British and American, whose now ally it had become.

Dated from the Third Bureau of the General Staff, its nine paragraphs run as follows:

With the trained eye of a strategist, and with a knowledge of the terrain that twelve years of his early military service in Tunisia had given him, Giraud was able at once to plan his campaign.

The task which he set to his troops was, at first, a defensive and, as he and they well knew, a dangerous one, for the French North African Army was being sent out, like David against Goliath, with great inferiority of armament.

Yet, during the last weeks of 1942, these French troops managed to hold the Axis forces to the bridge-head which they had established round Tunis and Bizerta during the time that the Anglo-American Army was making its way up‑country from its base at Algiers, •six hundred miles away to the west.

The French detachments immediately concerned were those in Tunisia, for they were already in close contact with the enemy.

At Tunis were two high French authorities, Admiral Esteva, the Resident-General, and General Barré, in command of all French forces in Tunisia.

On November 9th, the day after the Allied landing in Algeria and Morocco, Admiral Esteva informed his military colleague that the French Government had authorised the German and Italian governments to make use of the Tunisian airfields. In consequence of this, orders were given to the anti-aircraft batteries not to fire on Axis planes landing on the airfields, but troops were posted round the main landing-grounds to prevent the forces thus brought in from advancing into the interior of the country.

One hundred and fifty German and Italian aeroplanes had landed on El Aouina airfield by midday on November 10th. In the evening of that day, General Barré was informed that Admiral Darlan had signed an armistice with the Americans, and that, if the Germans who landed at Tunis adopted a hostile attitude, he was to resist them.

 p211  Next morning the Ministry of War at Vichy cabled General Barré to avoid all contact with the Axis detachments which had landed. In view of these conflicting instructions, Barré decided to withdraw all his troops to the western side of Tunisia, and to adopt a neutral attitude toward Allies and Axis alike.

Then, at noon on November 11th, came the news of the German invasion of unoccupied France. The effect was to increase still further the conflict of loyalties already existing in Tunis. Admiral Esteva, the Resident-General, invoked the orders which he had received from Marshal Pétain not to oppose the Axis use of Tunisian aerodromes, as an excuse for going over entirely to the German side.

That he should do so with such alacrity is the more strange in view of the fact that his mother and sister are said to have died as a result of violence suffered from the Germans in the last war.

Esteva is a man of morbid temperament. He seems to have cooperated submissively with the Axis authorities during the whole time of their occupation. In the early hours of May 7, 1943, the day on which the British troops captured Tunis, he was awakened by German soldiers, to be carried off, presumably as a prisoner, to Italy. He is credited on this occasion with the bitter remark: "Turn on the lights. I want to see the faces of my 'collaborators.' " Yet he later addressed a letter to Pétain, protesting against the fact that his fidelity to Vichy and the Axis had been called in question.

Vice-Admiral Derrien, the third member of the French hierarchy in Tunisia, also took up a pro‑Axis attitude, ordering the sailors under his command to abstain from resisting the Germans.

General Barré, however, had already determined on action against them, and he among other things complied with a telephone order which he received from General Juin in Algiers on the afternoon of November 11th, to fall back with all the coastal garrisons, including that of Bizerta, and take up a position around Medjez-el‑Bab, •thirty-five miles inland, for the purpose of hindering the German advance toward Algeria. He established his own headquarters in the early hours of next day at Souk-el‑Arba, •fifty miles further west.

Tunis itself was thus evacuated by the French troops, and the same thing would have happened at Bizerta had it not been that  p212 Admiral Derrien, rejecting the orders telephoned to him from Algiers, and acting in compliance with those received from Vichy, offered no opposition to the entry of a German convoy into that port. The enemy at once began to land tanks there, and the French military detachments in Bizerta were rounded up and disarmed by them. After the German surrender in Tunisia, Admiral Derrien was arrested by order of General Giraud.

The fact, therefore, that there was a delay of four days, from November 10th to November 14th, before Admiral Darlan finally decided to enter the war on the side of the Allies, was enough to bring about the loss of Tunis and Bizerta. If the resolution to oppose the Axis had been taken immediately, and firm orders had been given to General Barré in Tunis to open fire on any Germans attempting to land, he could have shot down the enemy aeroplanes as they approached the Tunisian airfields, and blocked the entrances to the ports.

The Germans, however, secured without opposition the invaluable bridge-heads of Tunis and Bizerta. They lost no time in exploiting this success, and began to push forward into the interior towards the line taken up by General Barré's Tunisian division.

The position which he had occupied was a triangular one. Its apex lay at Medjez-el‑Bab, and its two base points were at Beja and Téboursouk. Meanwhile the French troops in southern Tunisia had fallen back on Tebessa, which is just inside the Algerian frontier.

One week after the Allied landing, on November 15th, the first British detachments joined up with these French troops. They were a battalion of parachutists and anti‑tank gunners. At the same time, American parachutists, under the command of Colonel Raff, reinforced the French infantry at Tebessa.

It was not until November 18th that the German invaders came up against this defensive position. At three o'clock on the afternoon of that day, a French outpost, manning a hastily erected barrier across the road which leads from Medjez to Tunis, saw a solitary armoured car approaching from the direction of the latter city. They stood at their guns ready to open fire, but the car was quite alone, and they allowed it to come up to their position.

 p213  There it stopped. A tall, middle-aged man in the uniform of a German officer got out and, walking up to the barricade, announced in good French that he had a message for General Barré. This envoy gave his name as "Embassy Councillorº Moellhausen," and insisted that he must see the General in person.

The outpost telephoned the news of his arrival to its company headquarters, which rang up General Barré at Souk-el‑Arba, receiving the reply that the General would meet this German emissary at four o'clock in the morning of the following day at Medjez.

Medjez, whose name was so soon to become familiar to scores of millions in the United States and Britain, is a straggling little town on the plain at the foot of a line of steep and rocky heights stretching northeast towards Bizerta.

Two roads run from it towards Algeria. The northern one, which is the main highway from Algiers to Tunis, undulates over bare, broad-backed hills past Beja; the other follows the river valley back to Téboursouk.

Medjez was an important trading-post during the early centuries of the Christian era, when Roman civilisation spread far into North Africa,​c and it was in the Mayor's office by the bridge crossing the yellow, muddy, winding Medjerda river that General Barré, in the early hours of November 19th, received the German envoy.

With a click of the heels, a stiff Teuton bow and a military salute, Herr Moellhausen presented a written ultimatum from General Nehring, Commander-in‑Chief of the Axis forces in Tunisia. In a few curt lines, this demanded that all French troops from that Protectorate should be withdrawn immediately to the east of the longitude line of Tabarka. This little port stands at the point where the border between Tunisia and Algeria reaches the sea, and the German demand implied the virtual evacuation of all Tunisian territory.

General Barré's reply was equally brief and emphatic. He rejected the ultimatum without further parley, whereupon Herr Moellhausen, in the rasping, nasal tone which German officials affect for communications of a mena­cing character, announced that the Axis troops would begin hostilities at seven o'clock that same morning.

 p214  The American Army was in luck that day. Hardly had the German envoy's armoured car, on its way back to Tunis, clattered over the stone bridge so soon to be destroyed by enemy bombs, when a much louder rattle of heavy trucks was heard approaching from the opposite direction.

It was an American column that had been landed at the Algerian port of Bone the day before, consisting of a battery of field-artillery, two sections of anti-aircraft guns, and a company of armoured cars.

Dawn had not yet broken when they got to Medjez, and, as it was obvious that the first attack would be by air, the A. A. gunners were ordered to lose no time in mounting their pieces, some of them by the bridge and some by the railway-station, which lies •a mile outside the town

Sure enough, at 7:20, directly it had begun to get light, a solitary German aeroplane came droning over Medjez from the east. It was flying very low and did not offer a good target, but one of the American Bofors guns loosed off several rounds at it. Those were the first shots of the Anglo-American campaign in North Africa, and they were fired by an American.

General Giraud gave one of his little satisfied grunts when the news of that burst of gunfire reached him in Algiers at breakfast-time. What he had hoped for was now an accomplished fact. France had taken up arms against her German conquerors. This time she was sure of victory, for alongside her and behind her were the inexhaustible resources and man­power of the United States and British.

Longing for this day had beguiled the dull monotony of his imprisonment at Koenigstein. Eagerness to have a share in it had strengthened the heart of this sixty-year‑old general as he clambered down •150 feet of rope that he had made himself from bits of string.

To aid in this new effort, he had faced the further risks of his escape from France, and had placed himself at the disposition of the Allies in one of the most complex, difficult, and responsible functions that a man of his age could be called upon to assume, cheerfully serving under men much junior to himself in service and experience.

 p215  Although the first shots of the campaign were fired at Medjez, the opening engagement in Tunisia occurred •one hundred and fifty miles to the south, at Gafsa, a town close to the southern border of Tunisia, standing on the fringe of the Sahara.

Between November 16th and 19th, this picturesque native city, in an oasis of rich, subtropical vegetation through which flow clear streams of warm water, was occupied by the division from Constantine under the command of General Welvert.

Directly General Welvert reached Gafsa, he pushed on resolutely towards the sea, hoping to cut the coastal railroad which runs from Sfax to Gabès. Though the Germans proved strong enough to hold off this thrust, which was carried out by armoured cars, they lost in that first skirmish 240 men, of whom 117 were killed.

The enemy was arriving on the ground, however, in much greater strength and with more formidable equipment than this screen of French troops in Tunisia possessed, and by November 10th not only Gafsa but the important key‑position of Medjez-el‑Bab had to be evacuated under imminent danger of being surrounded.

Nearly a fortnight had gone by since the Allied landing at Algiers, 600 miles to the west, with only a single road and a single-track railroad-line winding through the mountains as land communications with Tunisia. The 78th British Division, however, had been carried by sea to Bone, and on November 21st it took up a position across the hills between the Beja-Medjez road and the coast.

With it arrived a small armoured column to be used as an advance-guard. This consisted of two American regiments, respectively equipped with tanks of the General Grant and Honey types, and of the British 17th/21st Lancer Regiment armed with Valentine tanks.

The next fighting to take place consisted of a bold attempt by this Anglo-American armoured force to crash its way into Tunis. They soon ran into similar formations of the enemy, and confused tank-encounters took place in the welter of mountains to the north of Medjez On November 26th, one squadron of the Honeys got as far as Djedeida, •twelve miles west of Tunis. The enemy failed to  p216 recognise them, mistaking them for German tanks, so that they were able to reach the aerodrome, where they shot up a lot of planes on the ground.

After four or five days of skirmishing to and fro, "Blade force," as it was called from the name of the officer commanding it,​d was reinforced by some parachutists, and a big drive was planned to push right into Tunis, along the road via Tebourba and Djedeida, while the parachutists were to land on the aerodromes just outside the city.

This plan was frustrated by the discovery that the German tanks were working round the right flank of the Allied troops, with the result that "Blade force," after losing more than half its vehicles, retired south into the hills close to the Beja-Medjez road.

In these first engagements the American tanks fought well. Sometimes, however, they showed more courage than discretion. One day, during the fighting round Tebourba, the second-in‑command of one tank regiment, irritated, no doubt, by finding himself under constant fire from German guns which he could not see, suddenly gave the order over the radio to his squadron: "Come on, boys! We'll go get them!"

The sixteen tanks roared in close formation over the sky‑line, and within a few minutes were all knocked out.

The 78th British Division, consisting only of two brigades and one battalion of American tanks, provided a rearguard, made up of a battalion of the East Surrey Regiment and a battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, to cover the withdrawal of this armoured force, which, after the failure of the drive for Tunis, fell back to a line running north and south through Medjez.

It was now the turn of the French on the right to pass to the offensive. General Juin, second-in‑command to General Giraud, determined to make a thrust for Pont‑du-Fahs, the most important road-junction in Tunisia, thirty miles south of the city of Tunis. At the same time, all the French forces further south were ordered to push forward as far as they could. The furthest point reached in this advance was the occupation of the Faid Pass, on the road from Tebessa to the port of Sfax. It was carried by assault on December  p217 3rd, the French being supported by an American parachutist battalion under Colonel Raff, and by American artillery. One hundred German prisoners were taken.

By this time the weather had begun to break. The only good metalled roads in Tunisia are those running north and south. From west to east there are mainly dirt-tracks, which rapidly degenerated into rivers of mud.

German reinforcements, too, had been constantly arriving in the country, and it was clear that the French troops on the central sector of the Tunisian sector could not do more than hold their positions with the inadequate armament at their disposal. For even the smallest operation they had to request the support of American or British tanks or guns.

This North African campaign was the only one in which Germans have so far fought against Germans.​e

The Axis Disarmament Commission had required the release of all Germans in the French Foreign Legion who wanted to leave, and they inspected the regiments of this corps to make sure that they had been liberated. But some Germans stayed on, having become naturalised during their service. They were generally non‑commissioned officers.

The Legion thus to some extent changed in character. Instead of being predominantly German, Czech and Polish, the withdrawal of these nationalities, exacted by the enemy disarmament commission, led to its becoming about 80 per cent Spanish, for many former members of the Popular Front in Spain had joined the corps.

The naturalised Germans who stayed on fought against their former compatriots, though they knew that, if captured, their fate would be execution.

Peculiarly ill‑fated was one sergeant-major who was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. Under threat of death, he consented to help in trying to raise a native Tunisian regiment to fight against the Allies. The Nazi Government had promised deserters from the French Tunisian regiments that they would not be treated as prisoners-of‑war, but allowed to return to their homes. So few of them succumbed to this temptation that it proved possible to  p218 raise only a small detachment of Tunisians to fight for the Axis. This was employed against the French troops holding the Grande Dorsale, and, in an engagement there, the former sergeant-major of the Legion was again wounded in the leg, and, being unable to get away, came once more under French authority.

For this unfortunate man there was no escape. He had obeyed German orders by compulsion, but, by fighting for the compatriots of his birth against those of his adoption, he had committed treason, and so, after trial by court-martial, he was shot.

On the Allied front of •two hundred and twenty miles in Tunisia, stretching all the way from Medjez as far as Tozeur to the south of Gafsa, there were only between twenty and twenty-five battalions of French troops, supported by ten or a dozen artillery-groups, while on the opposing side fresh and well-equipped enemy units were constantly moving up into the line.

Thanks to bad weather and a fairly equal balance of forces, the military situation in Tunisia thus came to a standstill in the closing days of 1942. The Allies had proved unable to cut the flat coastwise corridor connecting the new German and Italian army in eastern Tunisia with the Italian and German army which was on the retreat in Libya. The Axis troops in Tunisia were equally unable to prevent us from constantly trying to do this.

On January 24, 1943, a council of war was held at Constantine, attended by the Commander-in‑Chief, General Eisenhower, by General Anderson, in command of the British First Army, and General Juin, who, under General Giraud, commanded the French forces in North Africa. It was there decided that there could be no prospect of carrying out any big operation during the rainy season which had now begun, and that, as regards the French troops, the best course to take would be to withdraw most of them from the line for the purpose of equipping them with modern armament, so far as the British and American forces could spare this from their own stocks.

General Juin insisted, however, in the name of General Giraud that one sector of the Allied front at least should remain under French command, and embody part of the North African Army.  p219 Now that they had got into the war against the Germans again, the French were determined to play their part.

At the same time, General Giraud accepted the proposal that the whole of the troops in Tunisia east of a line running southwards from Bone should be under the command of General Anderson.

On this basis, the Tunisian front was divided into three sectors: the northern or left wing of the front was placed under General Allfrey, commanding the British Fifth Army Corps. This consisted of the 46th Division, the 78th Division, and the 6th Armoured Division. At his orders were also four battalions of French Goumiers, a native militia whose familiarity with that country and capacity for living hard especially fitted them to operate in the densely wooded, rough country on the extreme left flank by the sea. General Allfrey's headquarters were near Souk-el‑Khemis on the main road running east toward Beja and Medjez.

Planet News, Ltd. A typical Goumier, or French North African native soldier

The centre of the Allied front was placed under a French Corps Commander, General Koeltz, with headquarters at Djerissa. He had one French division and one American division under his orders, also two British battalions, the Buffs and West Kents, and the Derbyshire Yeomanry, with their armoured cars. The southern sector of the line was held by the American 2nd Corps under General Fredendall. It consisted of two American divisions and was combined with the French division normally stationed at Constantine. The American headquarters were situated at Bekkaria, a few miles to the east of Tebessa, hidden in a wood on the slopes of the hills, where they looked exactly like an Alaskan mining-camp.

This arrangement permitted the withdrawal from the line of some seven or eight French battalions which badly needed rest and refitting. To General Barré, who had commanded the first French force which engaged the enemy during the period when the Allies were moving up‑country from Algiers, was now allotted the task of organising the lines of communication, and acting as General Juin's representative in Tunisia.

Meanwhile Rommel's forces were fast falling back from western Libya. By January 26th, the main body of the Afrika Korps had crossed the Tunisian frontier. From then on, the Germans had to  p220 fight continually to protect these retiring forces from being taken in the flank. It was Marshal Rommel's intention to make his first big stand on the Mareth Line, a chain of fortified strong points built before the war by the French, a hundred miles inside the southern frontier of Tunisia. It thus became a matter of vital importance to the enemy that no Allied thrust from the west should take this position in the rear.

German strategy, however, is seldom restricted to passive defence. To General Giraud it was obvious that we could expect a series of vigorous thrusts against our weakly held •three hundred miles of front, which ran north and south from Cape Serrat, on the Mediterranean, down to Tozeur, on the great salt lake called the Chott Djerid, beyond which the Sahara Desert begins.

On February 4th, Giraud accordingly addressed a letter to the Commander-in‑Chief, General Eisenhower, setting forth his views on the military position. It read as follows:

These were the views which General Giraud expressed to me privately at the time. I remembered his words with anxiety as I stood in Thala on that critical day of February 22nd, when the Tenth Panzer Division had broken through the Kasserine Gap, and at one moment the only Allied troops still standing between it and the open plain leading to Le Kef, which was the key‑point of our communications, were four hundred rifle­men, sixteen guns and twenty‑two tanks — all British.

If two batteries of American field-artillery and one of heavier 4.5 in. guns had not arrived that day in Thala, the Germans might have broken through into the plain beyond, where they could have rolled up our communications and forced the whole Allied line to withdraw to the frontier of Algeria.

---

Thayer's Notes:

a Now Haffouz.

b Giraud's Directive No. 1 may well be at the Musée de l'Armée in the Invalides, but not only do I find no mention of it on the museum's website, but I find no trace of it anywhere online. This is hardly surprising; by the end of the war, as we are already starting to see in this book, Giraud had been eased off to the sidelines, and after his death, no postage stamp for example was issued to commemorate him, whereas several other generals of the war got theirs — to say nothing of his rival De Gaulle, of course.

c The name of the town in Roman times was Membressa; an equally important battle was fought there between Belisarius and the rebel chief Stutza in A.D. 536: Hodgkin gives the details (Italy and Her Invaders2, IV.33 ff.). The area saw a number of other significant battles in Antiquity, for much the same reason as in World War II: strategic location. Some places are just meant to be battlegrounds.

d Nowhere online can I find the name "Blade Force" explained; and its commander is sometimes given as Lt.‑Col. John Waters, but much more usually — as on the website of the Royal Lancers Association, the Royal Lancers being the successor to the 17th/21st Lancers — as the British officer Col. (later Field Marshal) Richard Hull.

e Three days before Germany's unconditional surrender, in the battle of Schloss Itter under very different circumstances, Germans would fight each other again.

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