Death and Honor

The invasion began at midnight 8 November 1942. It took the French several hours to mobilize their forces—OSS agents had some success in having various French units respond very slowly, or not at all, to their orders to do battle—but by 0600 it was apparent the French were not only not going to welcome the Americans as liberators, but had already begun to cause casualties in the landing force.

At 0617, Patton issued the shoot-back order: “Play Ball.”

At 0700, U.S. Navy aircraft from the carrier USS Ranger reached Casablanca harbor as five French submarines sailed out to battle the American fleet. There was a dogfight. Seven French aircraft went down in flames, as did five U.S. Navy Wildcats.

At 0804, as surface vessels of the French fleet prepared to leave the Casablanca harbor, the battleship USS Massachusetts opened fire with her massive sixteen-inch cannon. In ten minutes, thirteen French vessels—submarines, freighters, and passenger ships—were on the bottom of Casablanca’s harbor, and many French warships had been damaged. The commanding officer of the French cruiser Albatross was killed by U.S. Navy gunfire.

In the next thirty-six hours, with negligible damage to themselves, the USS Massachusetts, the cruisers USS Augusta, USS Brooklyn, USS Tuscaloosa, and USS Wichita, and aircraft from the carrier USS Ranger either sank or knocked out of action most of the French fleet, including the battleship Jean Bart and the cruisers Primaguet, Fougueux, Boulonnais, Brestois, and Frondeur.

At this point, French army and naval officers who were still willing—if not entirely able—to resist the invasion were convinced by French officers who had been dealing with American OSS agents that raising the white flag was really in the best interests of France.

U.S. forces, including those landed elsewhere in North Africa, began a march toward Egypt to join the British fighting Rommel’s Afrikakorps.

In Russia meanwhile—on 23 November 1942, two weeks after the American landings in North Africa—the quarter-million-man German Sixth Army, which had been trying to take Stalingrad since August, was surrounded by Soviet forces. Two weeks later, General Friedrich von Paulus informed Hitler he had received an ultimatum from the Russian commander, Marshal Rokossovsky, calling for his surrender. Von Paulus reported that his forces, ill-equipped to fight in weather thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, were exhausted, just about out of ammunition, and reduced to eating their horses.

Hitler forbade surrender.