“If Eisenhower ratified any agreement with Darlan, he’d be working with a man who had cultivated ties with Hitler.”

By Robert Kofman

ON NOV. 11, 1942, General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French Morocco and Algeria, entered into an agreement with Vichy French Admiral François Darlan to end the fighting.  Why did Eisenhower cut a deal with a man widely viewed as a Nazi collaborator? The answer lies in the complexity of French politics and Torch’s objectives.

In June 1940, with the French army reeling from the German blitzkrieg, France capitulated and signed the Franco-German Armistice. Under the terms of the surrender, the Nazis would control Northern France, including Paris, while the French would preside over Southern France and the French overseas empire. Eighty-four-year-old Marshall Phillipe Pétain, a hero of World War I, formed a new government in the spa town of Vichy. Pétain was given near dictatorial powers and quickly aligned his government with the Nazis believing that Hitler was certain to win the war. French General Charles de Gaulle forcibly condemned the Armistice and vowed to fight on. The Vichy government labeled de Gaulle a traitor and sentenced him to death.

De Gaulle, who fled to Britain in 1940, convinced Prime Minister Winston Churchill to back his Free French movement. Safe in London, the general used the BBC to make broadcasts into France denouncing the Nazi collaborating Vichy government and he became an inspiration and a hero to the Resistance movement.

In September 1940, de Gaulle and a small British fleet appeared off the coast of Dakar, the capital of French West Africa. De Gaulle believed the French colonial administrator, seeing the show of force, would renounce his loyalty to Vichy and join the Allies. Instead, the French chose to fight and the effort to take Dakar by force was bloodily repulsed. Churchill learned that French colonial officials who had pledged allegiance to Pétain hated de Gaulle for his efforts to undermine the Vichy government.

When Eisenhower planned Torch, Churchill chose to exclude de Gaulle. Torch’s objectives included: [1] gaining control of Morocco by capturing Casablanca, and Algeria by capturing Algiers and Oran, [2] quickly advancing into Tunisia before the Nazis, who were sure to invade that French colony from nearby garrisons in Sardinia and Sicily, [3] having the French continue to administer their colonies because the Allied army wasn’t large enough to impose a military government, and [4] convincing the French North African Army to reject the Vichy regime and join the fight against the Nazis.

Eisenhower planned on making Henri Giraud governor general of French North Africa. Giraud, a French general with no Vichy taint, was imprisoned by the Germans in 1940, but daringly escaped from a Nazi POW camp in April of 1942. After remaining in France for some months to work with the Resistance, Giraud eventually had himself smuggled out of France and onto a British submarine that delivered him to Eisenhower’s Gibraltar headquarters on the eve of the Allied North African invasion. Eisenhower hoped Giraud could convince the French colonial army not to oppose the invasion. Giraud infuriatingly refused to cooperate; he wanted to command all Allied troops fighting on French territory, including the Americans and the British.

On Nov. 8, 1942, Allied troops hit African beaches. By happenstance Darlan, who was Vichy defense minister, was in Algiers visiting his son who had been stricken with polio. Darlan personally took control of the defense of Algiers. By the end of the day, he had agreed to a ceasefire in Algiers, but refused to end the fighting in Oran and Casablanca. The following day however, Giraud changed his tune and agreed to serve under Eisenhower.

The French general and Eisenhower’s deputy commander, General Mark Clark, flew to Algiers where Vichy troops continued to oppose the Allies. Giraud who hoped to compel French forces to lay down their arms told Clark that the Americans must deal with Darlan if they hoped to end the fighting in Oran and Casablanca.

Clark met with Darlan and negotiated, first a ceasefire in Oran and Casablanca, and then an agreement that met all of Torch’s immediate objectives: to have the French African army join forces with the Allies in the fight against the Germans, to see French stevedores unload Allied cargo ships in North African ports, and to compel French trains in the region to carry Allied troops and supplies to the frontlines. In return, Darlan would be the Allies’ high commissioner of North Africa and Giraud would command the army.

This created a dilemma for Eisenhower, however. Yes, Darlan, the only man with whom the Allies could cut a deal, was prepared to satisfy the Allies’ immediate military goals. But, if Eisenhower ratified any agreement with Darlan, he’d be working with a man who had cultivated ties with Hitler. On the other hand, the American commander didn’t, Vichy resistance would flare up, and more Allied blood would be shed. And worse, the clock was ticking.

As Eisenhower weighed his options, Hitler was rushing troops into Tunisia; the chance of a quick conquest of that territory, a key Torch objective, was fading by the hour. Determining that achieving his military goals was of paramount importance, Eisenhower endorsed the Darlan agreement.

Reaction in the U.S. and England was swift and vicious. How could the great democracies do business with a man known to be a Nazi collaborator? Wartime correspondent Edward R. Murrow, whose CBS radio broadcasts were heard by millions, asked: “Were Americans waging war against the Nazis, or sleeping with them?” Newspaper editors in England were outraged that de Gaulle, the Frenchman who fired the resistance was excluded from governance of North Africa, while the Nazi sympathizing Darlan was empowered. Eisenhower’s political bosses, President Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill, both defended the decision on the narrow ground of temporary military necessity.

The furor over the Darlan deal began to fade when the admiral was assassinated on December 24, 1942, by a student who wanted to restore the French monarchy. Eisenhower managed to have Giraud replace him and thus “cleanse the Vichy taint,” although lower-level officials who served in the Vichy government remained in place.

The most lasting effect of the Darlan deal was it led to Roosevelt’s declaration, at the January 1943, Casablanca Conference, that the Axis governments had to “unconditionally surrender.” The great democracies would not negotiate peace deals with Fascist dictators Hitler and Mussolini, the Japanese, or a puppet state like Vichy.Robert Kofman is the author of Ike’s Journey: A Novel of World War II. A retired labor and employment law attorney who grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. After obtaining degrees in history and political science from Penn State University, he graduated from Duke University Law School.