In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

101 Chapter 7 North Africa algiers, for all its natural charm, was drab compared with Cairo. In Cairo, civil life went on through the war, no more than a little hemmed in; in Algiers, it was ground down until it was hardly noticeable. The military was in full control and in possession of almost every large building and countless homes, of the railroads and almost all vehicles, of shops now serving soldiers and restaurants converted into messes, of movie houses reserved for the troops and even of dental offices. The occupying armies were theoretically friendly, but never have I seen a city that looked so thoroughly occupied, or met people less enthusiastic over their visitors. The Supreme Command was established in the rambling St. George Hotel on the wide avenue that wound steeply up the hill from the waterfront . The St. George had been built sporadically, planlessly, and without much effort to get any two rooms on the same floor level. Some of its cubicles and narrow corridors seemed to have been salvaged in downtown house-razings, carted up the hill, and nailed on. Its congestion was so great that indoor traffic signals were required. The big, grimy-gray building of the Algerian Agricultural Administration had been taken over for the press. Stars and Stripes occupied one floor, Public Relations and the correspondents another. Above us, a floor was reserved for the Psychological Warfare Branch. Here General Eisenhower had a hard-boiled cavalry colonel to take charge of all the propagandists and civilian idea men sent out by Washington and London. The Americans, who usually favor directness, wanted to mount a cross-Channel invasion in the fall of 1942. The British cabinet would not 1. Stars and Stripes, founded in 1861, is an independent newspaper operated by the U.S. Department of Defense reporting on matters affecting the U.S. military. 102 ED KENNEDY’S WAR have it. Churchill never ceased talking about Fortress Europe’s “soft underbelly ,” the Mediterranean. He was even more fascinated by its Balkan tail. The Americans were thinking in terms of a single objective in Europe—defeating the Germans. The British were thinking and planning in terms of national survival and welfare, future as well as present, of the whole European political picture, and of their empire, their lifelines, their foreign interests. The Americans ruled out an offensive up the Balkan peninsula as an absurdly roundabout, costly, and difficult way of getting to Berlin. Churchill, foreseeing the postwar world, even then was dreaming of containing the Russians; we certainly were not. Despite our disillusionments after World War I, we were waging our second war in Europe with our same old naiveté: once the monster of Nazism was destroyed, democracy would flourish again and peace would have a chance. We did, however, agree to go first for the monster’s underbelly instead of directly for his heart. The result was Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, timed to coincide with Montgomery’s desert offensive. By the time I arrived in Algiers, a front had become stabilized in Tunisia . In the Mideast we had only scanty reports of what was happening on the other side of Africa; when I got there, I found a war being waged in circumstances as fantastic as anything in the Middle East. Militarily, everything was bigger and more powerful. Here the predominating influence was American. There was none of that British penny-pinching, understatement, or diffidence. The daily garbage of the Americans was enough to feed the British Eighth Army for a week. The communiqués were longer and more dramatic. Censors came not by two’s or three’s but by the dozens. At the moment of the landings, it happened that shifty-eyed Admiral Jean-François Darlan was in North Africa to visit his son, stricken by poliomyelitis. His was a voice that the French officers commanding the defense of North Africa would heed. The Allied Command acted swiftly to make use of the fine bird it had trapped. Darlan was induced to order the end of resistance; the action was effective in Algeria and Morocco but not in Tunisia, where Germans were pouring in to come to grips with the invaders. The price paid for the order and for the prospect of efficient military collaboration and civil order in North Africa under the incumbent leaders was the acceptance of a Little Vichy, turncoat but not...

Share