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The camp commandant, Captain Landhauser, cut the women’s rations, denied them electricity and revoked their visitors’ privileges.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Murphy Forgets a Friend

IN VICHY, THE NORTH AFRICA INVASION astounded American diplomats as much as it did the Pétain regime. Keeler Faus, a junior member of the US Embassy staff, wrote in his diary for 8 November that a colleague ‘knocked on my door at 7.45 to tell me that Mr. [Tyler] Thompson wanted me to come to the Embassy at once–for the Americans invaded North Africa–Algeria and Morocco–before dawn this morning’. Thompson told him that embassy Chargé d’Affaires S. Pinckney Tuck had just delivered a message from Roosevelt to Pétain, who declared that the French Empire would defend itself against the American aggressors. Faus was assigned to obtain as much petrol as he could, so that the diplomats could escape when Vichy severed relations with the United States. ‘The cops in the streets gave me big smiles,’ Faus wrote, ‘one or two took off their caps, several stopped me to shake hands to congratulate me.’ Thirty-two-year-old Faus, who had been western Maryland clay court champion before joining the foreign service, went to the Tennis Club after lunch and played two sets. In the evening, he went out again ‘not knowing whether we might not meet the Germans somewhere on the way. Rumor had it that they were driving south. No incidents.’

Although Pétain had ordered French forces in Africa to oppose the Allied invasion, he refused a German directive to declare war on the Allies. Pierre Laval went to Germany to see Hitler, who demanded the use of French air bases in Tunisia and at Constantine in eastern Algeria. When Laval declined, German troops in the Occupied Zone invaded Vichy France and disarmed the French troops who had been permitted under the Armistice of 1940 to retain light weapons. ‘The night before the Germans came down and occupied the southern zone,’ Françoise de Boissieu, a Jewish résistante hiding near Vichy, said, ‘Ruth Thompson, wife of one of the American diplomats [Tyler Thompson], came by bike to tell us we had to leave at once. If not, she warned us, we would be among the first arrested.’ Although due to give birth in a few weeks, Françoise and her Catholic husband fled immediately and took refuge in the house of friends in Paris.

The American Embassy’s staff did not depart, despite their elaborate preparations. The Germans rolled into Vichy on 11 November and seized the embassy. Tyler Thompson, in an interview years later with author Adam Nossiter, recalled that the Germans ransacked the Villa Ica while ‘one goon had a machine gun pointed in my stomach, which is not the way diplomats are supposed to earn their living’. When Keeler Faus tried to enter the building, he noted in his diary that evening, ‘a German stuck the point of his submachine gun in my stomach and asked me what I wanted’. The French sent Thompson, Faus, Douglas MacArthur and the rest of the diplomats with their families to be interned in the town of Lourdes. The French lodged them in a hotel of the same name as the one they inhabited in Vichy, the Ambassadeurs. They had the run of the town, provided they went out with a French inspector of police, and were able to play tennis and touch football. Interned in other hotels were American journalists and Red Cross personnel. With the rupture of diplomatic relations between Washington and Vichy, American citizens in France no longer had an embassy to represent them.

Germany’s abrupt occupation of southern France, combined with Italy’s seizure of Corsica and the Côte d’Azur around Nice and Menton, made French officers in Algeria and Morocco more hostile to Germany. Pétain was now physically, as he had been politically, a hostage of the Nazis. The French officers’ loyalty to him had become meaningless, making their conversion to the Allied cause easier. Eisenhower capitalized on French support to combat the Germans, Italians and diehard Vichyites in Tunisia.

To Charles