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By Root 2489 0

Bedaux, the replacement of Vichy administration in Africa with American occupation did not mean a change of plan. He pursued the Americans for his pipeline, as he had once charmed Franz Medicus and Pierre Laval in pursuit of the same goal. Felix Cole, US Consul General in Algiers since 1938, received Bedaux on 11 November. The efficiency engineer was as persuasive as ever, arguing that the Americans had the opportunity to prove to the French that they would ‘not retard French Africa in its development but on the contrary that they are ready to accelerate the rhythm of its progress towards complete unity by aiding in the construction of a pipeline for water and fuel [as] a link between Africa and North Africa’. Consul General Cole’s cables to Washington did not indicate that he encouraged Bedaux, but Bedaux told friends in Algiers that Cole was interested in his project. Either Cole said something to give Bedaux hope, or his salesman’s bravado made him believe Cole had. In any event, he went on planning his expedition.

During a Luftwaffe raid over liberated Algiers one evening, Bedaux spoke to a group of American reporters on the balcony adjoining his at the Hôtel Aletti. When journalist John MacVane realized the man speaking to him was the famous Charles Bedaux, he asked why the efficiency engineer was in Algeria. Bedaux answered, ‘I am carrying out an industrial mission for the Vichy government. A big communications plan in Morocco. I was caught here by the invasion of our American troops.’ In MacVane’s book, War and Diplomacy in North Africa, his publishers removed the section on Bedaux over his objections, in which MacVane wrote, ‘He did not seem happy at the arrival of “our American troops.” “All my plans are now upset,” he said. “Naturally I am going to see Admiral Darlan and the American authorities about the possibility of carrying through the scheme anyway.”’ MacVane distrusted Bedaux: ‘His voice dripped with cordiality but no one who saw those hard, shifting eyes behind the heavy spectacles would have trusted him on sight.’ The next night, during another German raid, MacVane was hosting Americans from the ‘political-warfare section’. Bedaux invited the men to watch the spectacle from his balcony. ‘I tipped off the political warriors as to who he was and we went out on the balcony,’ MacVane wrote. One of the Americans was Edmond Taylor, a former Chicago Tribune correspondent in Paris who had signed on with the Office of Strategic Services.

Bedaux needed American approval to cross US army lines with his long truck convoy. He wrote to Robert Murphy on 17 November, congratulating him on ‘work well done’ and declaring that he was ‘ready to place myself at your disposal as soon as the French Government cancels the Mission Order I have’. With French officers ignoring orders from Vichy to fight the Americans, it was unclear why Bedaux was waiting for Vichy to cancel his. When American forces requisitioned the Hôtel Aletti, Bedaux and his son found an auberge not far from Algiers at ’Ain Koussa. From there, he tried to contact Murphy. One letter to the diplomat, written the day his survey mission should have begun, 15 November, argued that the pipeline was in America’s interests: ‘Carrying through the study of the laying of a pipeline for water and fuel across the Sahara would be a fine opportunity for the United States to show to the world that French Africa far from suffering from the occupation can reasonably hope to receive from America the first practical link between its northern and central sections. At the present exchange the whole project would cost only sixteen million dollars.’ Bedaux ended on a personal note, ‘Will you remember August 1939 when we gave you Candé as an annex to the Embassy and realize that in my desire to be usefully active today I ask your help.’

Murphy came under strong criticism in the press and among the Free French for leaving Vichy officials in office, appointing former Vichy Interior Minister Marcel Peyrouton as governor general and allowing the résistants who had obeyed his orders