Death and Honor

New York and other cities on our eastern seaboard were blacked out primarily so that cargo ships would not be silhouetted against bright lights, making them easier targets for the submarines. This had a further, unexpected result. The citizens ofthese blacked-out cities could see red glows on the horizon as American cargo ships bound for Europe were either torpedoed or shelled, set afire, and sent to the bottom.

The Americans got into combat in North Africa in November 1942. The original action—heavy combat—was not, however, against the Germans. It was against the French.

Although many Americans believed—and the Office of War Information tried to convince them—that the U.S. Army would be welcomed in French North Africa, others were far from sure about that.

They remembered that in 1940 many French had cried “Better Hitler Than Blum,” making reference to a French socialist politician. They knew there were large numbers of French who believed Germany was probably going to win the war, and that the Germans were having little trouble in finding Frenchmen to volunteer for the Charlemagne Legion of the SS.

The Germans had permitted most of the French fleet—a potentially formidable force—to sail to the then-French protectorate of Casablanca, Morocco, where it and French army and air forces in North Africa remained armed and under French command, subject only to the supervision of a small number of Germans in the Armistice Commission. The French fleet, if so inclined, or pressured by the Germans, could hamper—or even deny—British and American passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean.

Agents of the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) sent to North Africa undercover as consular officers reported that while they had had some success in establishing contact with French officers and convincing many of them that France and the United States had a common interest in defeating Nazi Germany, they had by no means convinced all of them.

The Americans, under the command of Major General George S. Patton, hoped of course to put the troops of Operation Torch ashore in Morocco without having to fight to do so. The plan called for a force of nine thousand men to land north of Port Lyautry, north of Casablanca, to take the airport. Simultaneously, an eighteen-thousand-man force with eighty tanks would land at Fedela, and a third force of six thousand men and one hundred tanks would land at Safi and march on Casablanca from the south.