Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Americans, who had maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy, believed it would be necessary to replace the local Vichy leaders as soon as North Africa had been conquered; they pinned their faith on the heroic General Henri Giraud, who had obtained considerable publicity by his spectacular escapes from German prisons in both world wars. Unfortunately, as the invasion proceeded, it was discovered that Giraud had even less influence in North Africa than De Gaulle, especially in the French Navy, which was providing the chief combat resistance to the invasion. Accordingly, in order to stop the fighting, it became necessary to make a deal with Admiral Darlan, who was in North Africa at the time; this deal, which recognized Darlan as the chief political authority in all French North Africa, with Giraud as his commander in chief, has given rise to much controversy. It was argued that the high principles enunciated in our declared war aims, especially in the Atlantic Charter, were being unnecessarily sacrificed by making a deal with an unprincipled Nazi collaborator such as Darlan.

The deal was justified by its makers, General Mark Clark on behalf of General Eisenhower and Ambassador Robert Murphy on behalf of President Roosevelt, on grounds of military urgency. This argument is rather weak, since Darlan’s cease-fire order, made at noon on November 8th, was not obeyed in two combat areas (Morocco and Oran) and obeyed only partially in the third area (Algiers), and by the time the formal deal was made on November nth, organized fighting by the French forces had ceased everywhere. The additional justification made, to the effect that some kind of legal continuity with the Vichy regime had to be established to avoid French guerrilla resistance, involves too many unknown factors to permit any convincing judgment of its value. It seems weak, since the German reaction to the Allied invasion of North Africa took an anti-French direction which was so drastic that any French resistance to the Americans or British would have been clearly pro-German, and thus most unlikely behavior for any patriotic Frenchmen. In any case, the Darlan deal was soon swallowed up in the swift pace of events, and was personally ended when Darlan was assassinated by his French enemies on December 24th.

The Anglo-American invasion of North Africa, known as Operation Torch and under the over-all command of General Eisenhower, involved landings at three points: on the Atlantic coast of Morocco near Casablanca by a force coming from North America, and at two points on the Mediterranean coast in Algeria by forces coming from England. The Morocco attack was almost foolhardy, since it involved carrying 35,000 completely inexperienced and inadequately trained troops with 250 tanks, all in 102 vessels, a distance of 4,000 miles across the ocean to make a night landing on a hostile coast. In spite of these obstacles and tenacious French resistance at certain points, the operation was a success, and fighting ceased in three days. The other portion of Operation Torch, the landings in Algeria, were on a larger scale, since they involved 49,000 American and 23,000 British troops, and were equally successful. By November 14th the Allies were moving eastward into Tunisia to cut off Rommel’s retreat from the east, and by November 29th they were only twelve miles from Tunis. From that point they were hurled backward by the Germans.

Hitler’s reactions to Torch were vigorous. All France was occupied by Nazi forces; his efforts to capture the French fleet at Toulon were frustrated when most of the vessels were scuttled at their anchorages or were sunk trying to escape from the harbor; as early as November 10th, German airborne troops, with Laval’s blessings, were occupying Tunisia. These German forces held up the Allied advance from the west, inflicting a bitter defeat on the American forces at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943. In this way Rommel, who had been forced out of El Agheila by Montgomery on December 13th, was able to withdraw westward into Tunisia and take a stand along the Mareth Line below Gabés in southeastern Tunisia in February.

During the third week in January 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their staffs met in secret conference at Casablanca. Once again the Americans had to struggle against English reluctance to commit themselves to any “cross-Channel” invasion of Europe, to any offensive against Japan or, indeed, to any long-range planning. From the compromises of the conference emerged agreement to postpone any cross-Channel operation, to keep up pressure on Germany in Europe by air attacks, and to allow the United States to take any offensive actions against Japan which would not jeopardize the priority still given to the defeat of Germany. Two other decisions were to proceed to the military occupation of Sicily and to demand the “unconditional surrender” of the three totalitarian Powers. Naturally, the military decision on Sicily was kept secret, but the political decision on unconditional surrender was published with great fanfare, and at once initiated a controversy which still continues.

The controversy over unconditional surrender is based on the belief that the expression itself is largely meaningless and had an adverse influence by discouraging any hopes within the Axis countries that they could find a way out by slackening their efforts, by revolting against their governments, or by negotiations seeking some kind of “conditional” surrender. There seems to be little doubt that the demand for unconditional surrender was incompatible with earlier statements that we were fighting the German, Japanese, and Italian governments rather than the German, Japanese, and Italian peoples and that this demand, by destroying this distinction, to some extent solidified our enemies and prolonged their resistance, especially in Italy and Japan, where opposition to the war was widespread and active. Even in Germany the demand for unconditional surrender discouraged those more moderate and peace-loving Germans upon which our postwar policy toward Germany must be based and, in fact, has been based. But in 1943, and for most of the duration of the war, the Allied Powers had neither time nor inclination to look ahead toward any postwar policy with respect to Germany, and issued the demand for unconditional surrender without any analysis of its possible effects on the enemy peoples, either during the war or after it was over. The demand for unconditional surrender was made, rather, as a morale booster for the Allied Powers themselves, and in this function it may well have had some slight influence at the time.

As the Allied leaders were conferring in Casablanca after turning back the German assault in Africa, Soviet forces were inflicting an even greater defeat on Hitler in eastern Europe. Hitler’s Russian campaign of 1942 was very similar to that of 1941 except that his original plan was restricted to a single aim: to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. The German forces, consisting of 44 infantry, 10 armored, and 6 motorized divisions, along with 43 satellite divisions and 700 planes, were to drive along the north shore of the Black Sea, pass through a congested bottleneck at Rostov, and capture the Soviet oil fields (the chief of which, at Baku, was 700 miles beyond Rostov). To protect the long northern flank of this drive, other German attacks were ordered farther north toward Voronezh and toward Stalingrad on the Volga River. The German offensive did reach the Caucasus, advancing almost as far as Grozny (400 miles beyond Rostov), but did not capture the chief oil fields. As in the 1941 offensive, scores of Soviet divisions were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners were captured, but no vital injury was inflicted on the Soviet Union.

Suddenly, on July 18th, after seven weeks of advance, Hitler ordered the capture of Stalingrad. Since all the available armored forces had been put into the Caucasus offensive, where they uselessly clogged up Rostov, the attack on Stalingrad could not begin until September 12th. After two months of savage house-to-house fighting, the Germans had possession of almost all the city, but it had been completely demolished. In late November, Russian counteroffensives north and south of Stalingrad broke though Romanian armies on either side of the German Sixth Army and joined together on its rear. Hitler forbade any retreat or any effort by the Sixth Army to fight its way westward out of the trap. Instead he undertook to supply the Sixth Army from the air until new German forces could break in to relieve it. The surrounded Sixth Army consisted of 20 divisions, about 270,000 men, including 3 armored and 3 motorized divisions. Although a force of this size required about 1,500 tons of supplies each day, the Luftwaffe was never able to deliver as much as 200 tons a day, and lost about 300 planes in the effort. Nor could the German forces to the west, although only 40 miles away, fight their way in to the Sixth Army.